As Americans were awakening to the horror of the incidents on September 11, life in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in Palestine were continued in the same way they have for about fifty some years: occupied and oppressed. As America was waiting and grieving, Israeli tanks were taking no breather, rolling through the West Bank towns of Jenin and Arriyeh, killing about 11 civilians in one night on a war drive with no sense of abating. And they have yet to abate; since the assassination of right wing Israeli Tourism Minister Rehavan Ze’evi on October 17, an act claimed by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the occupation has turned into an all out war on the Palestinian people, with Israeli tanks moving into and shelling six separate towns, a new string of extra-judicial assassinations of Palestinian leaders, and an intensification of demolition of Palestinian homes. Meanwhile, the Israeli state has forced the hand of its proxy “government,” the Palestinian Authority, and brought them to join this war by outlawing the PFLP and preventing any major Palestinian protests.
As the death toll in Palestine from the past few weeks reaches the hundred mark and the oppression is escalated, Israel is telling the United States to simply sit back and sympathize because “now we know what Israel feels like.” Within the first week, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon released statements that he was “concerned” about the United States not recognizing the Palestinian resistance as terrorism and wanted to make sure to get in on the new “war against terrorism” game Bush was playing. Sharon needed not worry, though; the U.S. media was quite quick to equate terrorism with the struggle in Palestine, accusing almost every Palestinian resistance organization of the tragedy in the first hours after September 11. Covers from magazines such as Time show Arab men wearing the Palestinian traditional kuffiyeh with titles like “Why they hate us,” and articles about “Arab rage,” and a million other images creating an angry Arab Palestinian pitted against the United States.
But as Sharon and Bush get up and wage war on “terrorism,” no one knows exactly what we are fighting and how we are fighting; we are simply told to throw up our flags, open our pocketbooks, and shut our mouths in support. No one, in the meanwhile, has even defined terrorism; no one gets to know what makes any country on the 80 Bush named to be “harboring terrorists” even qualify; no one even asks why state terrorism is conveniently left out of the game or why, for instance, the Israeli Defense’s shelling of civilian towns, shooting of Palestinian demonstrators, bulldozing Palestinian homes, or anything on the endless list of “collective punishments” is not a terrorist act. Unless these are addressed, terrorism becomes nothing more than a blank check for destroying anything not in line with United States interests, which tends to mean any resistance groups. This becomes more and more obvious as new countries jump on the terrorism bandwagon and start their own crackdowns: Russia has resumed its brutal crackdown on secessionist Chechen rebels, with the United States offering Russia the possibility of using small scale nuclear weapons against them; China has been given the green light to oppress Muslim factions to its North, and India has been given full reign to reaffirm control of Kashmir. The shadows of another Cold War become more and more obvious as the world gets drawn up along these lines of “good and evil,” with every country from the Philippines to Bolivia facing major crackdowns on popular movements. The United States speaks of a “long and drawn out war,” and there is little chance terrorism will not simply be another catch-all for a half century of intervention and neo-colonialism against any country outside of U.S. and “coalition” interests.
In the shadow of this war, which is already taking full force in Afghanistan, the issue of Palestine becomes more and more important and necessary to bring to the forefront. Palestinians are already facing the brunt of fifty years of occupation and a land that over 6 million refugees are forbidden to return to, and the past year of intifada, the climax of their resistance, threatens to be shut down by a brutal war. Palestine is not just an issue for the endless catalogue of human rights violations Israel has committed against it and it is not just an issue for the fact that the Palestinian people cannot live a normal life and are under economic, political and social subjugation. Palestine is an issue of race, where people of color were once again thrown off their land because they were not European; Palestine is an issue of neo-colonialism, where over 73% of the Palestinian population was expelled out of the 1948 borders of Israel in one fell swoop; Palestine is an issue of whether people have the right to determine the fortune of their own land and not relegate it to Western interests. The list is endless, but this merely reveals the fact that Palestine is not merely some “conflict” where Palestinians abstractly do not like Israel; if anything, Palestinians know what terrorism is because they feel it every day. It is a legitimate struggle against an occupying force, one British colonizers fought against British colonizers to create a place called the United States, a struggle that people around the world had to fight and were given the chance to fight to oust European colonialism for over 200 years, from Haiti to the Phillipines to Algeria. Supporting Palestine is standing in line with these ideals; it is not siding with Osama Bin Laden, as some may pose. Bin Laden’s speech may have appropriated Palestine as some goal of his, but the reality is that the struggle is far removed and Bin laden has simply appropriated rhetoric to gain support, much like any politician would.
The issue now is not to get the United States involved in some “peace deal;" the issue is to support Palestinians in a struggle for self determination, something snatched from their hands as many other countries were getting it in the wake of World War II and decolonization. The United States will always have to come to its own interests, as it has during every “peace” brokerage, a brokerage resulting in what we have now: Palestinians living in economic and political oppression in two small plots of land representing a miniscule amount of their original homeland. The struggle for justice and freedom for Palestine cannot occur in the framework of conflict resolution and United States power jockeying but must happen when Palestinians are allowed to stand up and create a homeland of their own. Really “dealing with terrorism” can only occur when terrorism is stamped out of state policy, and people are not left in conditions of desperation, where their dying seems to be the only option out of their life of total oppression and occupation.