Palestine Is Still The Issue
By John Pilger
July 11,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- 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.
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
humanity’s 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
people’s humanity is the next step – as the
Jewish people know only too well. Defiling
people’s 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 centre’s 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 children’s
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.
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.
Mohammed’s 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 winter’s 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.
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 baby’s 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.
The
Israeli historian Benny Morris describes how
David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s 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
Britain’s 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.
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 people’s 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.
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
wasn’t. 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 government’s 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 John Pilger's address to the
Palestinian Expo 2017 in London. John Pilger's
film, 'Palestine Is Still the Issue',
can be viewed on this website.
Follow John Pilger on twitter @johnpilger
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http://johnpilger.com/
The
views expressed in this article are solely those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of Information Clearing House.