When the truth is replaced by silence," the Soviet dissident,
Yevgeny Yevtushenko, said, "the silence is a lie." It may appear the silence is
broken on Gaza. The cocoons of murdered children, wrapped in green, together
with boxes containing their dismembered parents and the cries of grief and rage
of everyone in that death camp by the sea can be viewed on Al Jazeera and
YouTube, even glimpsed on the BBC. But Russia’s incorrigible poet was not
referring to the ephemeral we call news; he was asking why those who knew the
why never spoke it and so denied it. Among the Anglo-American intelligentsia,
this is especially striking. It is they who hold the keys to the great
storehouses of knowledge: the historiographies and archives that lead us to the
why.
They know that the horror now raining on Gaza has little to do
with Hamas or, absurdly, "Israel’s right to exist". They know the opposite to be
true: that Palestine’s right to exist was cancelled 61 years ago and the
expulsion and, if necessary, extinction of the indigenous people was planned and
executed by the founders of Israel. They know, for example, that the infamous
"Plan D" resulted in the murderous depopulation of 369 Palestinian towns and
villages by the Haganah (Jewish army) and that massacre upon massacre of
Palestinian civilians in such places as Deir Yassin, al-Dawayima, Eilaboun, Jish,
Ramle and Lydda are referred to in official records as "ethnic cleansing".
Arriving at a scene of this carnage, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s
first prime minister, was asked by a general, Yigal Allon, "What shall we do
with the Arabs?" Ben-Gurion, reported the Israeli historian, Benny Morris, "made
a dismissive energetic gesture with his hand and said, ‘Expel them’." The order
to expel an entire population "without attention to age" was signed by Yitzhak
Rabin, a future prime minister promoted by the world’s most efficient propaganda
as a peacemaker. The terrible irony of this was addressed only in passing, such
as when the Mapan party co-leader, Meir Ya’ari, noted "how easily" Israel’s
leaders spoke of how it was "possible and permissible to take women, children
and old men and to fill the roads with them because such is the imperative of
strategy… who remembers who used this means against our people during the
[Second World] war… we are appalled."
Every subsequent "war" Israel has waged has had the same
objective: the expulsion of the native people and the theft of more and more
land. The lie of David and Goliath, of perennial victim, reached its apogee in
1967 when the propaganda became a righteous fury that claimed the Arab states
had struck first. Since then mostly Jewish truth-tellers such as Avi Schlaim,
Noam Chomsky, the late Tanya Reinhart, Neve Gordon, Tom Segev, Uri Avnery, Ilan
Pappe and Norman Finklestein have dispatched this and other myths and revealed a
state shorn of the humane traditions of Judaism, whose unrelenting militarism is
the sum of an expansionist, lawless and racist ideology called Zionism.
"It seems," wrote the Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe, on January
2, "that even the most horrendous crimes, such as the genocide in Gaza, are
treated as disparate events, unconnected to anything that happened in the past
and not associated with any ideology or system… Very much as the apartheid
ideology explained the oppressive policies of the South African government, this
ideology – in its most consensual and simplistic variety – has allowed all the
Israeli governments in the past and the present to dehumanise the Palestinians
wherever they are and strive to destroy them. The means altered from period to
period, from location to location, as did the narrative covering up these
atrocities. But there is a clear pattern [of genocide]."
In Gaza, the enforced starvation and denial of humanitarian aid,
the piracy of life-giving resources such as fuel and water, the denial of
medicines and treatment, the systematic destruction of infrastructure and the
killing and maiming of the civilian population, 50 per cent of whom are
children, meet the international standard of the Genocide Convention. "Is it an
irresponsible overstatement," asked Richard Falk, the United Nations special
rapporteur for human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and
international law authority at Princeton University, "to associate the treatment
of Palestinians with this criminalised Nazi record of collective atrocity? I
think not."
In describing a "holocaust in the making", Falk was alluding to
the Nazis’ establishment of Jewish ghettos in Poland. For one month in 1943 the
captive Polish Jews led by Mordechaj Anielewicz fought off the German
army and the SS but their resistance was finally crushed and the Nazis exacted
their final revenge. Falk is also a Jew. Today’s holocaust in the making, which
began with Ben-Gurion’s Plan D, is in its final stages. The difference today is
that it is a joint US-Israeli project. The F-16 jet fighters, the 250-pound
"smart" GBU-39 bombs supplied on the eve of the attack on Gaza, having been
approved by a Congress dominated by the Democratic party, plus the annual $2.4
billion in war-making "aid", give Washington de facto control. It beggars belief
that President-elect Obama was not informed.
Outspoken on Russia’s war in Georgia and the terrorism in
Mumbai, Obama’s silence on Palestine marks his approval, which is to be
expected, given his obsequiousness to the Tel Aviv regime and its lobbyists
during the presidential campaign and his appointment of Zionists as his
secretary of state, chief of staff and principal Middle East advisers. When
Aretha Franklin sings "Think", her wonderful 1960s anthem to freedom, at Obama’s
inauguration on January 20, I trust someone with the brave heart of Muntazer al-Zaidi,
the shoe-thrower, will shout: "Gaza!"
The asymmetry of conquest and terror is clear. Plan D is now
"Operation Cast Lead" which is the unfinished "Operation Justified Vengeance".
The latter was launched by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2001 when, with Bush’s
approval, he used F-16s against Palestinian towns and villages for the first
time. In the same year, the authoritative Jane’s Foreign Report disclosed
that the Blair government had given Israel the "green light" to attack the West
Bank after it was shown Israel’s secret designs for a bloodbath. It was typical
of New Labour party’s enduring, cringing complicity in Palestine’s agony.
However, the 2001 Israeli plan, reported Jane’s, needed the "trigger" of
a suicide bombing which would cause "numerous deaths and injuries [because] the
‘revenge’ factor is crucial". This would "motivate Israeli soldiers to demolish
the Palestinians".
What alarmed Sharon and the author of the plan, General Shaul
Mofaz, the Israeli chief of staff, was a secret agreement between Yasser Arafat
and Hamas to ban suicide attacks. On November 23, 2001 Israeli agents
assassinated the Hamas leader, Mahmud Abu Hunud, and got their "trigger"; the
suicide attacks resumed in response to his killing.
Something uncannily similar happened on November 5 last, when
Israeli special forces attacked Gaza, killing six people. Once again they got
their propaganda "trigger". A ceasefire initiated and sustained by the Hamas
government – which had imprisoned its violators – was shattered by the Israeli
attack and home-made rockets were fired into what used to be Palestine before
its Arab occupants were "cleansed". Then on December 23, Hamas offered to renew
the ceasefire but Israel’s charade was such that its all out assault on Gaza had
been planned six months earlier, according to the Israeli daily, Haaretz.
Behind this sordid game is the "Dagan Plan", named after General
Meir Dagan who served with Sharon in his bloody invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Now
head of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence organisation, Dagan is the author of a
"solution" that has seen the imprisonment of Palestinians behind a ghetto wall
snaking across the West Bank and in Gaza, effectively a concentration camp. The
establishment of a quisling government in Ramallah under Mahmoud Abbas is
Dagan’s achievement together with a hasbara (propaganda) campaign relayed
through a mostly supine if intimidated western media, notably in America, that
says Hamas is a terrorist organisation devoted to Israel’s destruction and to
"blame" for the massacres and siege of its own people over two generations, long
before its creation.
"We have never had it so good," said the Israeli foreign
ministry spokesman, Gideon Meir, in 2006. "The hasbara effort is a
well-oiled machine." In fact, Hamas’s real threat is its example as the Arab
world’s only democratically elected government, drawing its popularity from its
resistance to the Palestinians’ oppressor and tormentor. This was demonstrated
when Hamas foiled a CIA coup in 2007, an event ordained in the western media as
"Hamas’s seizure of power". Likewise, Hamas is never described as a government,
let alone democratic. Neither is its proposal of a ten-year truce as a historic
recognition of the "reality" of Israel and support for a two-state solution with
just one condition: that the Israelis obey international law and end their
illegal occupation beyond the 1967 borders. As every annual vote in the UN
General Assembly demonstrates, 99 per cent of humanity concurs. On January 4,
the president of the General Assembly, Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, described the
Israeli attack on Gaza as a "monstrosity".
When the monstrosity is done and the people of Gaza are even
more stricken, the Dagan Plan foresees what Sharon called a "1948-style
solution" – the destruction of all Palestinian leadership and authority followed
by mass expulsions into smaller and smaller "cantonments" and perhaps finally
into Jordan. This demolition of institutional and educational life in Gaza is
designed to produce, wrote Karma Nabulsi, a Palestinian exile in Britain, "a
Hobbesian vision of an anarchic society: truncated, violent, powerless,
destroyed, cowed… Look to the Iraq of today: that is what [Sharon] had in store
for us and he has nearly achieved it."
Dr Dahlia Wasfi is an American writer on Palestine. She has a
Jewish mother and an Iraqi Muslim father. "Holocaust denial is anti-Semitic,"
she wrote on December 31. "But I’m not talking about World War II, Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad (the president of Iran) or Ashkenazi Jews. What I’m referring to is
the holocaust we are all witnessing and responsible for in Gaza today and in
Palestine over the past 60 years… Since Arabs are Semites, US-Israeli policy
doesn’t get more anti-Semitic than this." She quoted Rachel Corrie, the young
American who went to Palestine to defend Palestinians and was crushed by an
Israeli bulldozer. "I am in the midst of a genocide," wrote Corrie, "which I am
also indirectly supporting and for which my government is largely responsible."
Reading the words of both, I am struck by the use of
"responsibility". Breaking the lie of silence is not an esoteric abstraction but
an urgent responsibility that falls to those with the privilege of a platform.
With the BBC cowed, so too is much of journalism, merely allowing vigorous
debate within unmovable invisible boundaries, ever fearful of the smear of
anti-Semitism. The unreported news meanwhile is that the death toll in Gaza is
the equivalent of 18,000 dead in Britain. Imagine, if you can.
Then there are the academics, the deans and teachers and
researchers. Why are they silent as they watch a university bombed and hear the
Association of University Teachers in Gaza plea for help? Are British
universities now, as Terry Eagleton believes, no more than "intellectual Tescos,
churning out a commodity known as graduates rather than greengroceries"?
Then there are the writers. In the dark year of 1939 the Third
Writers’ Congress was held at Carnegie Hall in New York and the likes of Thomas
Mann and Albert Einstein sent messages and spoke up to ensure the lie of silence
was broken. By one account, 3,500 jammed the auditorium and a thousand were
turned away. Today this mighty voice of realism and morality is said to be
obsolete; the literary review pages affect an ironic hauteur of irrelevance;
false symbolism is all. As for the readers, their moral and political
imagination is to be pacified, not primed. The anti-Muslim Martin Amis expressed
this well in Visiting Mrs Nabokov: "The dominance of the self is not a
flaw, it is an evolutionary characteristic; it is just how things are."
If that is how things are, we are diminished as a civilised
society. For what happens in Gaza is the defining moment of our time, which
either grants the impunity of war criminals the immunity of our silence while we
contort our own intellect and morality or gives us the power to speak out.
For the moment I prefer my own memory of Gaza: of the people’s
courage and resistance and their "luminous humanity", as Karma Nabulsi put it.
On my last trip there I was rewarded with a spectacle of Palestinian flags
fluttering in unlikely places. It was dusk and children had done this. No one
told them to do it. They made flagpoles out of sticks tied together and a few of
them climbed onto a wall and held the flag between them, some silently, others
crying out. They do this every day when they know foreigners are leaving,
believing the world will not forget them.