Newspaper
La Naciòn
Buenos Aires – Monday, March 20 of 2006
Occupation tangle (view)
By Suhail Hani Daher Akel *
For La Nacion
Deplorable personalities were part of the memory of the people who have been subdued. One of them was the leader of Nazi propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, who minted the phrase: “Lie, lie because something is going to be left”. It was the ink in the handwriting of those who built the distortion and twist altar. Some of them constantly try to change the history of these millenary people, denying their ancient tradition, humiliating and dehumanizing the Palestinian people.
With mistaken arguments, they evoke the Bible without taking into account worrying points of the life which has been developed in Palestine. Joshua, who headed Hebrews from Egypt after Moses, quotes the blade of the sword by means of which they destroyed Jerico after putting down, in 1020 b.C., the walls of the oldest Canaanite-Philistinien (Palestinian) city in the world. It counts with a 10-thousand-year history. By means of the invasion, they occupied a part of Canaan and they established the kingdom of Israel. Being confronted, the kingdom decayed, giving place to the Juda kingdom. They occupied Jerusalem, an administrative city in Canaan.
The Canaanite-Semite Jebusites from the Palestinian genealogy were the founders of Salem (Jerusalem), 3500 years before Jesus Christ. In 1850 b.C., their Canaanite king Maleq Sadec (Melchizedeck) received Abraham, who recognized him and gave him his tithes. Being the father of nations later on, Abraham was the one who received the promised land when he had his only 13-year-old child, the first-born Ismael, who was born from Hagar’s Arab womb in Canaan–Philistine (Palestine). After the promise, his son Isaac was born from his wife Sara’s Hebrew innards.
“The Israeli State created on the Palestinian land due to the United Nations and the Zionist terrorism”
Many other evocations may wreck the arguments of those writers who have obstinately continued trying to turn the Bible into a mobile writing in order to justify Israel’s present in the Palestinian land.
Before persecutions in Europe, the Jews from Palestine found a habitat where they were on an equal footing with regard to Christians and Muslims. They did not suffer religious persecutions, their holy places were respected and they became an inseparable part of the Palestinian people, withstanding together history’s sudden attacks in the various occupations. A Jew, just as a Christian and a Muslim who were born in Palestine, was Palestinian. Cohabitation began to weaken when European Zionists decided in 1897 to establish a Jewish State in Palestine.
The Israeli State established on the Palestinian land due to UN resolution 181, 1947, and due to the Zionist European terrorism, which destroyed 418 villages and cities, including Jerusalem, and expelled 60 per cent of the Palestinian people from their natal land. This Zionist terrorism was denounced by the British occupation in Palestine.
During the 51st anniversary act of his Stern group, one of those terrorists Yitzhak Shamir, who was from Poland and Israel’s Premier later on, “justified terrorism and terror for the foundation of Israel”, according to Reuters agency, on September 4, 1991. Curiously, those who imposed that terror policy accuse the Palestinian resistance of terrorism at present. Paradoxically, they tried to crush the Palestinian uprising -which is known as Intifada- in the same way that Heinrich Himmler, a SS chief, ordered his soldiers to crush the Jewish uprising in the Warsaw ghetto since he regarded it as terrorist.
A convulsive twentieth-century world, czars’ collapse, the Soviet Union advent, world wars together with their holocausts and genocides, the new Yalta order, British colonialism’s collapse, the American arising, League of Nations’ fall and the creation of the United Nations were the events which gave place to the Zionist aims of keeping Palestine. They colonized Palestine and they divided it. One of its communities, the Jewish one, was extracted from its bosom. Since 1948, Zionists have given it another identity: the Israeli one. They established unilateral borders by means of a power which was a great worry for the Jewish scientist Albert Einstein, who refused to be the first President of Israel. By means of their power, they created a nuclear Israel which “is capable of blowing up the region in seconds”, according to the Israeli scientist Mordachei Vanunu.
In 1967, they completely occupied Palestine and they tried to make its people disappear. They did not succeed so they turn them not only into victims of occupation but also into victims of occupants’ semantics. The Israeli Premier Golda Meir said: “There is no such a thing called ‘Palestinians’ ”.
In the occupation tangle, Zionists changed their fables in such a way that they tried to make people believe that their stories and accounts were true. They also tried to make people believe that the natural Palestinian people had relative rights and were uncivilized, ignorant. Without feeling ashamed, Israeli Premier Menahem Beguin said at Parliament at that time: “Palestinians are beasts which walk on two legs”. In this re-telling of stories, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz published an interview with Premier Ariel Sharon’s main advisor, Dov Weissglas, and he said: “We have educated the world in order for it to understand that we have no valid interlocutor. And we have received a ‘no-one-to-talk-with certificate’”.
Turning us into seeming demons has always been a leitmotiv for Israel. PLO, Al Fatah, Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leadership, the Palestine National Authority, Intifada, Hamas and from the youngest Palestinian to the oldest one were called terrorists and, just as President Mahmoud Abbas, they were discredited and forced to live in a permanent failure. They took the blame.
Europe could never accept an extreme-right party in power. However, it seems that Israel is accepted. With Likud triumph, it was established the extreme-right government headed by Sharon in 2001. Sharon was convicted of crimes against humanity by the Belgian Court and he was also convicted of carrying out the Sabra and Chatila massacres by the Israeli Court itself. Five thousand Palestinian refugees died as a result of these massacres in 1082.
However, the world accepted it and it did not urge Israel and its government to recognize the Palestine State. The world did not urge them to stop using their mass-destruction weapons. They do not block the annual 30,000 thousand million dollars which Israel obtains from the United States, either. Israel uses this amount of money to increase its military equipment. No one has had the courage to rise its voice or freeze funds and relations with a country which infringes human rights and UN resolutions; a country which continues being an occupant power in Palestine.
However, the Palestinian democracy is an example. Palestine is the sole country where its people live under democratic system, as well as, under a foreign occupation. Israel tried to lessen this democracy in order to protect its colonial interests. Hamas’ absolute triumph, which rises from the Palestinian population, was turn into a devil.
Untimely, Europe and the United States became part of it, causing an illogical political shaking. Without being aware of the Palestinian anguish under the occupation, they urged Hamas to recognize the State of Israel and leave aside their weapons. The humanitarian economic aid was blocked. Can you impose pressure on the people who -as a result of the foreign occupation- need to lessen famine or can you impose pressure on these people as a result of the fact that they have democratically chosen to those people who do not please occupants?
In 2005, 45% of the Palestinian people had problems to find some food, 64% of the population from Gaza Strip realized that they had a fewer amount of food, infantile death rate exceeded 18% and unemployment reached 39%. We have to include around five thousand Palestinians who have been killed in the last five years and over eight thousand houses which have been demolished.
Israel’s economic extortion due to Hamas’ triumph is not ethical. It not ethical to ban the Palestinian currency, forcing the people to use the Israeli currency because it contains figures evoking those people who kept their land and killed their people. Jokes are part and parcel of the Israeli insensibility. Dov Weissglas said the following: “It is going to be a kind of appointment with the dietitian. Palestinians are going to become extremely thin, but they are not going to die”.
Israeli Premier Ehud Olmert’s declaration was a more serious matter: “Israel will establish its borders in a period starting from here to 2010”, designing a new border which is delimited by means of the Apartheid wall. They are keeping 58 per cent of the territories which were occupied in 1967.
The understanding of Arafat’s strategy with regard to the recognition of the State of Israel took a lot of time. He tried to do his best to make people realize about it. In 1988, he succeeded, giving place to a mutual recognition and the 1993 agreement. Our peace partner, Yitzhak Rabin, was killed by an Israeli terrorist in 1995. Later on, Sharon killed Arafat, turning both people’s hope into a fleeting dream. When they woke up, they found themselves separated by a 720-kilometer wall which destroys Palestine. But the 1967 borders just reach 356 kilometers. In a zigzag way, it separates cities and villages, it goes into Jerusalem and it activates 397 Israeli military checkpoints.
“Although these events have taken place, the Israeli people continues being the main peace partner of the Palestinian people”
By means of its myths, Israel tries to do its best to reject the Palestinian State and it does not accept the fact of being the occupant power. These two vital points move away from Fatah and Hamas’ Palestinian vision. They do not refer to the destruction of Israeli State.
President Abbas stood firm on his idea of continuing with the dialogue and the appointed Palestinian Prime Minister, Ismael Haniyeh, said: “If Israel says that it will give the Palestinian people a State in the 1967 territories and it will give the Palestinian people all their rights, we are prepared to recognize it”. However, the Israeli Minister of Defense, Shaul Mofaz, warned Premier Haniyeh about the fact that he could become the target of an extra-judicial attack.
Before the Israeli iniquity, the words pronounced in 1956 by one of the founders of Israel, David Ben Gurion, blossom out: “If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is logical: we have taken hold of their country. It is true that God promised it to us. How can they be interested in it? Our God dos not belong to them. Anti-Semitism, Nazism, Hitler and Auschwitz have existed. Are they to blame for it? They believe that we went into their country and stole it from them. Why could they accept to sign it?”
Although all these events have taken place, the Israeli people continues being the main peace partner and it will return dignity to its sons and sons of its sons together with the Palestinian people.
* The author is the Palestine Ambassador in Argentina
