Consortiumnews
Independent Investigative Journalism Since 1995
The Enduring Injustice of Palestine
July 10, 2017
As Israel joins Saudi Arabia in its anti-Iran/anti-Shiite project, the fate
of the Palestinians has been pushed down the ranks of Mideast priorities,
but the fight against this injustice will not end, says John Pilger.
By John Pilger
When I first went to Palestine as a young reporter in the 1960s, I stayed on
a kibbutz. The people I met were hard-working, spirited and called
themselves socialists. I liked them.
In 1948, some Palestinians, uprooted by Israels claims to their lands,
relocated to the Jaramana Refugee Camp in Damascus, Syria
One evening at dinner, I asked about the silhouettes of people in the far
distance, beyond our perimeter.
Arabs, they said, nomads. The words were almost spat out. Israel, they
said, meaning Palestine, had been mostly wasteland and one of the great
feats of the Zionist enterprise was to turn the desert green.
They gave as an example their crop of Jaffa oranges, which was exported to
the rest of the world. What a triumph against the odds of nature and
humanitys neglect.
It was the first lie. Most of the orange groves and vineyards belonged to
Palestinians who had been tilling the soil and exporting oranges and grapes
to Europe since the eighteenth century. The former Palestinian town of Jaffa
was known by its previous inhabitants as the place of sad oranges.
On the kibbutz, the word Palestinian was never used. Why, I asked. The
answer was a troubled silence.
All over the colonized world, the true sovereignty of indigenous people is
feared by those who can never quite cover the fact, and the crime, that they
live on stolen land.
Denying peoples humanity is the next step as the Jewish people know only
too well. Defiling peoples dignity and culture and pride follows as
logically as violence.
In Ramallah, following an invasion of the West Bank by the late Ariel Sharon
in 2002, I walked through streets of crushed cars and demolished houses, to
the Palestinian Cultural Centre. Until that morning, Israeli soldiers had
camped there.
I was met by the centres director, the novelist, Liana Badr, whose original
manuscripts lay scattered and torn across the floor. The hard drive
containing her fiction, and a library of plays and poetry had been taken by
Israeli soldiers. Almost everything was smashed, and defiled.
Not a single book survived with all its pages; not a single master tape from
one of the best collections of Palestinian cinema.
The soldiers had urinated and defecated on the floors, on desks, on
embroideries and works of art. They had smeared feces on childrens
paintings and written in shit Born to kill.
Liana Badr had tears in her eyes, but she was unbowed. She said, We will
make it right again.
What enrages those who colonize and occupy, steal and oppress, vandalize and
defile is the victims refusal to comply. And this is the tribute we all
should pay the Palestinians. They refuse to comply. They go on. They wait
until they fight again. And they do so even when those governing them
collaborate with their oppressors.
Bodies of Palestinian refugees at the Sabra camp in Lebanon, 1982. (Photo
credit: U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees)
In the midst of the 2014 Israeli bombardment of Gaza, the Palestinian
journalist Mohammed Omer never stopped reporting. He and his family were
stricken; he queued for food and water and carried it through the rubble.
When I phoned him, I could hear the bombs outside his door. He refused to
comply.
Mohammeds reports, illustrated by his graphic photographs, were a model of
professional journalism that shamed the compliant and craven reporting of
the so-called mainstream in Britain and the United States. The BBC notion of
objectivity amplifying the myths and lies of authority, a practice of
which it is proud is shamed every day by the likes of Mohamed Omer.
For more than 40 years, I have recorded the refusal of the people of
Palestine to comply with their oppressors: Israel, the United States,
Britain, the European Union.
Since 2008, Britain alone has granted licenses for export to Israel of arms
and missiles, drones and sniper rifles, worth £434 million.
Those who have stood up to this, without weapons, those who have refused to
comply, are among Palestinians I have been privileged to know:
My friend, the late Mohammed Jarella, who toiled for the United Nations
agency UNRWA, in 1967 showed me a Palestinian refugee camp for the first
time. It was a bitter winters day and schoolchildren shook with the cold.
One day
he would say. One day
Mustafa Barghouti, whose eloquence remains undimmed, who described the
tolerance that existed in Palestine among Jews, Muslims and Christians
until, as he told me, the Zionists wanted a state at the expense of the
Palestinians.
Dr. Mona El-Farra, a physician in Gaza, whose passion was raising money for
plastic surgery for children disfigured by Israeli bullets and shrapnel. Her
hospital was flattened by Israeli bombs in 2014.
Dr. Khalid Dahlan, a psychiatrist, whose clinics for children in Gaza
children sent almost mad by Israeli violence were oases of civilization.
A Dead Infant
Fatima and Nasser are a couple whose home stood in a village near Jerusalem
designated Zone A and B, meaning that the land was declared for Jews only.
Their parents had lived there; their grandparents had lived there. Today,
the bulldozers are laying roads for Jews only, protected by laws for Jews
only.
Pope Francis praying a separation wall in Palestine on May 25, 2014. (Photo
credit: Pope Franciss Facebook page.).
It was past midnight when Fatima went into labor with their second child.
The baby was premature; and when they arrived at a checkpoint with the
hospital in view, the young Israeli soldier said they needed another
document.
Fatima was bleeding badly. The soldier laughed and imitated her moans and
told them, Go home. The baby was born there in a truck. It was blue with
cold and soon, without care, died from exposure. The babys name was Sultan.
For Palestinians, these will be familiar stories. The question is: why are
they not familiar in London and Washington, Brussels and Sydney?
In Syria, a recent liberal cause a George Clooney cause is bankrolled
handsomely in Britain and the United States, even though the beneficiaries,
the so-called rebels, are dominated by jihadist fanatics, the product of the
invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and the destruction of modern Libya.
And yet, the longest occupation and resistance in modern times is not
recognized. When the United Nations suddenly stirs and defines Israel as an
apartheid state, as it did this year, there is outrage not against a state
whose core purpose is racism but against a U.N. commission that dared
break the silence.
Palestine, said Nelson Mandela, is the greatest moral issue of our time.
Why is this truth suppressed, day after day, month after month, year after
year?
On Israel the apartheid state, guilty of a crime against humanity and of
more international law-breaking than any other the silence persists among
those who know and whose job it is to keep the record straight.
On Israel, so much journalism is intimidated and controlled by a groupthink
that demands silence on Palestine while honorable journalism has become
dissidence: a metaphoric underground.
A single word conflict enables this silence. The Arab-Israeli
conflict, intone the robots at their tele-prompters. When a veteran BBC
reporter, a man who knows the truth, refers to two narratives, the moral
contortion is complete.
There is no conflict, no two narratives, with their moral fulcrum. There is
a military occupation enforced by a nuclear-armed power backed by the
greatest military power on earth; and there is an epic injustice.
The word occupation may be banned, deleted from the dictionary. But the
memory of historical truth cannot be banned: of the systemic expulsion of
Palestinians from their homeland. Plan D the Israelis called it in 1948.
David Ben-Gurion, Israels first prime minister
The Israeli historian Benny Morris describes how David Ben-Gurion, Israels
first prime minister, was asked by one of his generals: What shall we do
with the Arabs?
The prime minister, wrote Morris, made a dismissive, energetic gesture with
his hand. Expel them! he said.
Seventy years later, this crime is suppressed in the intellectual and
political culture of the West. Or it is debatable, or merely controversial.
Highly-paid journalists and eagerly accept Israeli government trips,
hospitality and flattery, then are truculent in their protestations of
independence. The term, useful idiots, was coined for them.
Accepting Awards
In 2011, I was struck by the ease with which one of Britains most acclaimed
novelists, Ian McEwan, a man bathed in the glow of bourgeois enlightenment,
accepted the Jerusalem Prize for literature in the apartheid state.
Would McEwan have gone to Sun City in apartheid South Africa? They gave
prizes there, too, all expenses paid. McEwan justified his action with
weasel words about the independence of civil society.
Propaganda of the kind McEwan delivered, with its token slap on the wrists
for his delighted hosts is a weapon for the oppressors of Palestine. Like
sugar, it insinuates almost everything today.
Understanding and deconstructing state and cultural propaganda is our most
critical task. We are being frog-marched into a second cold war, whose
eventual aim is to subdue and balkanize Russia and intimidate China.
When Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin spoke privately for more than two hours
at the G20 meeting in Hamburg, apparently about the need not to go to war
with each other, the most vociferous objectors were those who have
commandeered liberalism, such as the Zionist political writer of the
Guardian.
No wonder Putin was smiling in Hamburg, wrote Jonathan Freedland. He
knows he has succeeded in his chief objective: he has made America weak
again. Cue the hissing for Evil Vlad.
Controversial maps showing the shrinking territory available to the
Palestinians. Hardline Israelis insist that there are no Palestinian people,
that all the land belongs to Israel and that it therefore inaccurate to show
any Palestinian lands.
These propagandists have never known war but they love the imperial game of
war. What Ian McEwan calls civil society has become a rich source of
related propaganda.
Take a term often used by the guardians of civil society human rights.
Like another noble concept, democracy, human rights has been all but
emptied of its meaning and purpose.
Like peace process and road map, human rights in Palestine have been
hijacked by Western governments and the corporate NGOs they fund and which
claim a quixotic moral authority.
So when Israel is called upon by governments and NGOs to respect human
rights in Palestine, nothing happens, because they all know there is
nothing to fear; nothing will change.
Mark the silence of the European Union, which accommodates Israel while
refusing to maintain its commitments to the people of Gaza such as keeping
the lifeline of the Rafah border crossing open: a measure it agreed to as
part of its role in the cessation of fighting in 2014. A seaport for Gaza
agreed by Brussels in 2014 has been abandoned.
The U.N. commission I have referred to its full name is the U.N. Economic
and Social Commission for Western Asia described Israel as, and I quote,
designed for the core purpose of racial discrimination.
Millions understand this. What the governments in London, Washington,
Brussels and Tel Aviv cannot control is that humanity at street level is
changing perhaps as never before.
A World Stirring
People everywhere are stirring and are more aware, in my view, than ever
before. Some are already in open revolt. The atrocity of Grenfell Tower in
London has brought communities together in a vibrant almost national
resistance.
Thanks to a peoples campaign, the judiciary is today examining the evidence
of a possible prosecution of Tony Blair for war crimes. Even if this fails,
it is a crucial development, dismantling yet another barrier between the
public and its recognition of the voracious nature of the crimes of state
power the systemic disregard for humanity perpetrated in Iraq, in Grenfell
Tower, in Palestine. Those are the dots waiting to be joined.
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
For most of the Twenty-first Century, the fraud of corporate power posing as
democracy has depended on the propaganda of distraction: largely on a cult
of me-ism designed to disorientate our sense of looking out for others, of
acting together, of social justice and internationalism.
Class, gender and race were wrenched apart. The personal became the
political and the media the message. The promotion of bourgeois privilege
was presented as progressive politics. It wasnt. It never is. It is the
promotion of privilege, and power.
Among young people, internationalism has found a vast new audience. Look at
the support for Jeremy Corbyn and the reception the G20 circus in Hamburg
received. By understanding the truth and imperatives of internationalism,
and rejecting colonialism, we understand the struggle of Palestine.
Mandela put it this way: We know only too well that our freedom is
incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.
At the heart of the Middle East is the historic injustice in Palestine.
Until that is resolved, and Palestinians have their freedom and homeland,
and Israelis are Palestinians equality before the law, there will be no
peace in the region, or perhaps anywhere.
What Mandela was saying is that freedom itself is precarious while powerful
governments can deny justice to others, terrorize others, imprison and kill
others, in our name. Israel certainly understands the threat that one day it
might have to be normal.
That is why its ambassador to Britain is Mark Regev, well known to
journalists as a professional propagandist, and why the huge bluff of
charges of anti-Semitism, as Ilan Pappe called it, was allowed to contort
the Labour Party and undermine Jeremy Corbyn as leader. The point is, it did
not succeed.
Events are moving quickly now. The remarkable Boycott, Disinvestment and
Sanctions campaign (BDS) is succeeding, day by day; cities and towns, trade
unions and student bodies are endorsing it. The British governments attempt
to restrict local councils from enforcing BDS has failed in the courts.
These are not straws in the wind. When the Palestinians rise again, as they
will, they may not succeed at first but they will eventually if we
understand that they are us, and we are them.
This is an abridged version of journalist John Pilgers address to the
Palestinian Expo in London on July 8, 2017.
