'Zionist enterprise' will end

Teuku Taufiqulhadi ,  Jakarta   |  Wed, 05/21/2008 10:43 AM  |  Opinion

I read an article by Richard Holbrooke, a very impressive U.S. diplomat, published Dec. 5. Holbrooke intended to show that the United States was the first country to recognize the new born state of Israel.

While this article was very interesting, it is not relevant to Indonesian readers. The point is; why the U.S. have shown such a strong commitment to defending Israel.

Last week, Israel celebrated the 60th anniversary of its declaration of independence in the presence of foreign heads of state and other dignitaries. Today, on May 15, the Palestinians commiserate Nakba -- the day they were driven from their homeland by Jewish paramilitary settlers who established the state of Israel.

Israel was showered with words of admiration, principally from the same countries which had helped to create it, and from the media all over the world. By contrast, Palestinians are still unclear of their fate in exile or living under military occupation, encircled by an Israeli wall which was probably inspired by the Nazi wall which enclosed a Jewish ghetto in Warsaw in 1940.

Victors will continue writing history, for as long as they remain powerful. Now, Zionism and its ideology are the victor in the homeland of the Palestinian people.

Zionist ideology in Palestine has been consistently based on one strategic goal and many myths. Its goal has been to occupy as much Palestinian land, and to expel as many Arabs from it, as possible.

Certain myths were necessary in reaching this goal, since the Zionist enterprise had little physical presence in Palestine, and no legal justification to be there. Creating myths, therefore, has been indispensable for the cause.

One of such myth was invented describing an imaginary place, where Palestine would be "a land without a people, for a people without a land," as Zionist mythology has it.

By force, conspiracy and political connivance, this land was taken by Jews in 1948, expelling the Arab population from it.

Now, it is claimed that Palestinian refugees left of their own free will and not as the result of an expulsion, massacres or intimidation. The refugee problem, therefore, is not Israel's responsibility, but rather the Arabs' own.

In spite of its glow of success, as Ayman El Amir, director of the United Nations Radio and Television in New York, wrote in Al Aharam Weekly, there are historical factors corroding the underpinnings of Israel as a state. In particular, that Israel was founded on a 17th century doctrine of settler colonialism -- the New World migration model of which the United States is the unique surviving example. As European settlers arrived in droves to the 'New World', which had been 'discovered' by Christopher Columbus in 1492, the land was ethnically cleansed of its indigenous population, especially the North American Indians.

In 1778, even before becoming the nation, new Americans signed a treaty with Indian Delawares -- the first of what would become a body of more than 380 treaties which were never upheld in the face of the desire to expand. Under those treaties, the nascent U.S. gained more than one billion acres of Indian land in North America, mostly by force, coercion and outright war, with some bought for as little as 10 cents an acre.

Consciously or otherwise, this was the model adopted by the Zionist movement to seize Palestine under the fallacy of "a land without a people for a people without a land". This shared model of ethnic cleansing and land expropriation is the strongest bond between Israel and the U.S.

During its so-called "war of liberation", Israel, with help from the U.S., committed 70 massacres and atrocities against the Palestinian people as part of its methodical campaign of ethnic cleansing. It terrorized and expelled 85 percent of the population from 747 Palestinian towns and villages. Most of these were either obliterated to prevent the return of Palestinian inhabitants, or given to immigrant Jewish settlers.

At the time, this created a population of 900,000 refugees who were "temporarily" relocated to neighboring Arab countries. Palestinian refugees are now estimated at 4.5 million, half of them in host Arab countries.

According to Salman Abu Setta, general coordinator of the Right of Return Congress, 80 percent of the Jewish population of Israel live in about 10 percent of the historic land of Palestine under the British mandate.

Israel rejects the Palestinians' right of return -- even to these vacant areas -- justified by what amounts to a racist policy of maintaining the "Jewish" nature of the state.

Israel's main problem, however, is that unlike the American Indians or indigenous populations in other colonized lands, the Palestinians refuse to disappear or melt away.

Despite the brutal occupation, genocide, mass detentions, numberless checkpoints, daily humiliation and starvation, economic blockade and powerful support afforded to Israel by the U.S. administration, Palestinians refuse to be amassed together in a reservation under the title of a Palestinian state. Palestinian elders keep the keys to their original houses and deeds to their property and teach their children about the horrors they had to endure at the hands of those they once embraced as neighbors in the historic land of Palestine.

Sixty years after its "independence", Israel has lost its moral compass. Aggression, occupation and expansion have become its most vaunted practices. Hence it has no sense of security. It seeks regional recognition and cooperation, but enforces a system of apartheid against the Palestinians.

It forces a stop at Yad Vashim on the schedule of every visiting dignitary, but kills Palestinian men, women and children, bulldozes their houses and orchards, confiscates their land, pumps out their water, arrests and detains thousands of them indefinitely, violates every human dignity under the sun, and denies to the nation that it has subsumed its legitimate rights.

Israel is not planning on any just or lasting settlement with the Palestinians. Like its master, the U.S., it only believes in the force of arms -- the ability to subjugate by destruction. This is what the Nazis did to the Jews and other minorities in Europe, and that is what the Jews of Israel are doing to the Palestinians.

What Israel and the Western alliance call "acts of terrorism" by fundamentalists are the same acts they cheered as heroic by the resistance to Nazi occupation in Europe.

Whatever the final outcome to the 60-year tragedy of the Palestinian Nakba may be, the Palestinian people may be sure that while Palestinian suffering continues, they will not give up their rights, and, as Ayman wrote, "the racist Zionist enterprise will not last forever".

The writer is the deputy secretary general of the United Development Party (PPP).

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