Can Palestinians Be Killed? Can Israelis Kill Them? Or Do They Only "Die"?
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment
15 May 18
Social media is being scathing about the diction chosen by the New York
Times, CNN and even the Guardian to speak of the some 55 peacefully
protesting Palestinians whom Israeli snipers cold-bloodedly shot dead on
Monday and the some 2700 whom they wounded, half of those with live fire.
The headlines or lead paragraphs spoke of Palestinians "dying," as though
they had mysteriously and unexpectedly contracted the unusual disease of
bullet penetration. (The NYT cleaned up its act on Tuesday in the wake of
the criticisms; people do what they think they can get away with; but this
isn't a new problem with its word manipulations when it comes to Israel).
I just heard CNN International, which is usually more adult than the
American version, say that "clashes" resulted in "deaths," "many of them"
caused by Israeli fire. So there were no clashes. All the Palestinians died
on their side of the Israeli prison fence. No Israelis were injured. And all
of the injuries were caused by Israeli fire, whether live or rubber bullets
(they can be lethal) or drones dropping teargas cannisters. "Many of them"
were children or journalists.
Why is it so hard to admit that the Israeli army, and Israeli squatter
settlers, routinely kill Palestinians? (If you follow daily news from the
West Bank, there is a low intensity conflict there with serious incidents
every day.) The current neofascist Israeli government even has adopted a
doctrine that Palestinians may be killed at will even when they pose no
danger to anyone, if they aren't doing what Israelis tell them to do.
It is because the West categorizes Palestinians as dinosaurs, not mammals.
They are the last colonial subjects, not citizens. They have no state. There
is no contemporary category for them. They are unique. People compare them
to West Saharans or Kurds but they are not actually like them. Kurds and
Saharans have passports and citizenship in a state. They are subnationalists
who want a different citizenship and a different passport, one that does not
yet exist. That aspiration is different entirely from being stateless.
Palestinians cannot easily travel. They only have a laissez-passer and
receiving governments are afraid they will stay. They are all inmates. They
often cannot own property, as in Lebanon, or their property is insecure,
under constant threat of Israeli expropriation or destruction. Their lives
are made of silly putty.
Palestine is the last colony, a relic of the early twentieth century when
Britain bestrode the globe as an imperial behemoth, ruling India, Malaya,
Nigeria- colonies that went on to become independent countries and among the
more important countries in the world. Not so the British Mandate of
Palestine.
Colonial subjects were always invisible to the metropolitan press. They were
supposed to be like Victorian children, seen but not heard, and were to
produce profits for imperial Capital. When it reported on an investigation
into the infamous Jallianwalla Bagh massacre in Amritsar of 1919 by order
of Col. Reginald Dyer, The Aberdeen Journal entitled its article "Amritsar
Riot." It was a protest and not a riot, and what was remarkable about it was
not the disturbance caused by the colonial subjects but the British massacre
of them. Crowds had gathered to protest the exile of two nationalist
leaders. Dyer had forbidden public rallies or protests, just as the Israeli
army has forbidden Palestinians to protest near the prison fence at Gaza. It
is not clear that the Indians had heard about the prohibition, but even if
they had, they were not going to be deterred from rallying. Dyer had them
shot down by live fire, for ten minutes straight, killing according to the
British 379 and wounding 1200 (Indian historians have arrived at much higher
figures).
Just as the Scottish press focused attention not on the British soldiers who
committed the massacre but on the colonial subjects who acted out and
"rioted," so today's European and American press sees the Palestinians of
Gaza as engaged in "clashes" even though they must be shadow boxing, since
they have not laid a hand on anyone.
British imperial policy thought nothing of moving people around if they were
inconvenient. When the British conquered Iraq away from the Ottoman Empire
in the course of WW I, they immediately started dreaming of settling it with
millions of Panjabis. They felt they had too many Panjabis in British India
and did not understand demography very well, and so wanted to deal with the
problem by massive population displacement. If you think Iraq has challenges
in finding a national narrative to accommodate Shiites, Sunni Arabs,
Christians, Kurds and Turkmen, imagine if it also had millions of Sikhs,
Hindus and Panjabi Muslims. As it turned out, the British found it
impossible to rule Iraq except by bombing the bejesus out of it daily, to
the point where the Royal Air Force officers who mounted these aerial
campaigns against villagers who wouldn't give up their arms worried that the
British public would find out about these unsavory proceedings. Britain gave
up and granted Iraq partial independence in 1932, though they continued to
meddle there until 1958. "Bomber Harris" of Iraq fame went on to plan out
the Dresden firebombing during WW II.
When slavery ended, the nineteenth-century British had needed agricultural
labor in tropical climates where malaria and yellow fever made it impossible
for most Europeans to survive, they tricked large numbers of Bengali and
Oudh peasant workers into signing indentured labor contracts for a nearby
island in the Bay of Bengal. Imagine the peasants' surprise to find
themselves in Fiji in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, or in Trinidad or
Guyana in the New World, from which most of them found it difficult ever to
return. The British bequeathed Fiji a long term problem of ethnic division
such that politics is now a fight between Polynesian Fijians and South
Asians. I hope the plantation profits were good for London.
The tragedy in Palestine involves complex moving parts. Instead of insisting
on Ashkenazi Jews' rightful place in post-war Europe, especially in Germany
and Poland (yes, I am breaking Polish law), the Europeans, including
Britain, were happy to dump the Holocaust survivors in the Levant, where
they could be turned into compradors against rising Afro-Asian nationalisms.
Mauled by Central European virulent racist nationalism, some Jews replied
with Betar, Likud and other Jewish supremacist organizations modeled on the
mass politics of the interwar period and accepting many of its premises
about racial hierarchies and the desirability of belligerency. The British
colonial authorities abruptly withdrew, allowing the Jews they had brought
to Palestine for imperial purposes to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians.
70% of the Palestinian families in Gaza are refugees from what is now
southern Israel, trapped in the Gaza Strip and denuded of property, dignity
and prospects.
That is why Palestinians in Gaza are rallying at the fence and insisting
that the world will not be allowed to forget two million stateless persons
trapped and under blockade in an Israeli concentration camp.
And that is why the neo-imperial powers, who find this clamor of colonial
subjects distasteful, erase them from the story, having them "die" or "be
killed" in the passive mood.
Whenever you read of someone killed in the passive mood, you may be assured
that a cover-up is being conducted by the murderers and their accomplices.
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