Palestinians Have a Legal Right to Armed
Struggle
It's time for Israel to accept that as an
occupied people, Palestinians have a right to
resist - in every way possible.
By Stanley L Cohen
July 21,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- Long ago, it was settled that resistance and
even armed struggle against a colonial
occupation force is not just recognised under
international law but specifically endorsed.
In accordance
with international humanitarian law, wars of
national liberation have been expressly
embraced, through the adoption of
Additional Protocol
I to the Geneva Conventions of 1949 (pdf),
as a protected and essential right of occupied
people everywhere.
inding
evolving vitality in humanitarian law, for
decades the General Assembly of the United
Nations (UNGA) - once described as the
collective conscience of the world - has noted
the right of peoples to self-determination,
independence and human rights.
Indeed, as
early as 1974,
resolution 3314 of the UNGA
prohibited
states from "any military occupation, however
temporary".
In relevant
part, the resolution not only went on to affirm
the right "to self-determination, freedom and
independence [...] of peoples forcibly deprived
of that right,[...] particularly peoples under
colonial and racist regimes or other forms of
alien domination" but noted the right of the
occupied to "struggle ... and to seek and
receive support" in that effort.
The term
"armed struggle" was implied without precise
definition in that resolution and many other
early ones that upheld the right of indigenous
persons to evict an occupier.
This
imprecision was to change on December 3, 1982.
At that time UNGA resolution
37/43
removed any doubt or debate over the lawful
entitlement of occupied people to resist
occupying forces by any and all lawful means.
The resolution reaffirmed "the legitimacy of the
struggle of peoples for independence,
territorial integrity, national unity and
liberation from colonial and foreign domination
and foreign occupation by all available means,
including armed struggle".
A palpable illusion
Though Israel has
tried, time and time again, to recast the
unambiguous intent of this precise resolution -
and thus place its now half-century-long
occupation in the
West Bank and
Gaza beyond its application - it is an effort
worn thin to the point of palpable illusion by
the exacting language of the declaration itself.
In relevant part, section 21 of the resolution
strongly condemned "the expansionist activities
of Israel in the Middle East and the continual
bombing of Palestinian civilians, which
constitute a serious obstacle to the realization
of the self-determination and independence of
the Palestinian people".
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Never ones to
hesitate in rewriting history, long before the
establishment of the
United Nations,
European Zionists
deemed themselves to be an occupied people as
they emigrated to Palestine - a land to which
any historical connection they had had long
since passed through a largely voluntary
transit.
Indeed, a full
50 years before the UN spoke of the right of
armed struggle as a vehicle of indigenous
liberation, European Zionists illegally co-opted
the concept as the
Irgun, Lehi
and other terrorist groups undertook a decade's
long reign of deadly mayhem.
During this
time, they slaughtered not only thousands of
indigenous Palestinians but targeted British
police and military personnel that had long
maintained a colonial presence there.
A history of
Zionist attacks
Perhaps,
as Israelis sit down to mourn the loss of
two of
their soldiers who
were shot dead this past week in Jerusalem - in
what many consider to be a lawful act of
resistance - a visit down memory lane might
just place the events in their proper historical
context.
Long ago,
describing the British as an occupation force in
"their homeland",
Zionists targeted British police and military
units with
ruthless abandon throughout
Palestine and
elsewhere.
On April
12, 1938, the Irgun murdered
two British police officers in a train bombing
in Haifa. On August 26, 1939,
two British officers were killed by an Irgun
landmine in
Jerusalem. On
February 14, 1944, two
British constables were shot dead when they
attempted to arrest people for pasting up wall
posters in Haifa. On September 27, 1944,
more than 100 members of the Irgun attacked four
British police stations, injuring hundreds of
officers. Two days later
a senior British police officer of the Criminal
Intelligence Department was assassinated in
Jerusalem.
On
November 1, 1945,
another police officer was killed as five trains
were bombed. On December 27, 1945,
seven British officers lost their lives in a
bombing on police headquarters in Jerusalem.
Between November 9 and 13, 1946,
Jewish "underground" members launched a series
of landmine and suitcase bomb attacks in railway
stations, trains, and streetcars, killing 11
British soldiers and policemen and eight Arab
constables.
Four more
officers were murdered in another attack on a
police headquarters on
January 12, 1947.
Nine months later,
four British police were murdered in an Irgun
bank robbery and, but three days later, on
September 26, 1947, an
additional 13 officers were killed in yet
another terrorist attack on a British police
station.
These are
but a few of many attacks directed by Zionist
terrorists at British police who were seen, by
mostly European Jews, as legitimate targets of a
campaign they described as one of liberation
against an occupation force.
Throughout
this period, Jewish terrorists also undertook
countless attacks that spared no part of the
British and Palestinian infrastructure. They
assaulted British military and police
installations, government offices, and ships,
often with bombs. They also sabotaged railways,
bridges, and oil installations. Dozens of
economic targets were attacked, including 20
trains that were damaged or derailed, and five
train stations. Numerous attacks were carried
out against the oil industry including one, in
March 1947, on a Shell oil refinery in Haifa
which destroyed some 16,000 tonnes of petroleum.
Zionist
terrorists killed British soldiers throughout
Palestine, using booby traps, ambushes, snipers,
and vehicle blasts.
One attack, in
particular, sums up the terrorism of those who,
without any force of international law at the
time, saw no limitation to their efforts to
"liberate" a land that they had, largely, only
recently emigrated to.
In 1947, the
Irgun kidnapped two
British Army Intelligence Corps
non-commissioned officers and
threathened to hang them if death sentences of
three of their own members were carried out.
When these three Irgun members were executed by
hanging, the two British sergeants were hanged
in retaliation and their booby-trapped bodies
were left in an eucalyptus grove.
In announcing their
execution, the Irgun said that the two British
soldiers were hanged following their conviction
for "criminal anti-Hebrew activities" which
included: illegal entry into the Hebrew homeland
and membership in a British criminal terrorist
organisation - known as the Army of Occupation -
which was "responsible for the torture, murder,
deportation, and denying the Hebrew people the
right to live". The soldiers were also charged
with illegal possession of arms, anti-Jewish
spying in civilian clothes, and premeditated
hostile designs against the underground (pdf).
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Well beyond the
territorial confines of Palestine, in late
1946-47 a continuing campaign of terrorism was
directed at the British. Acts of sabotage were
carried out on British military transportation
routes in
Germany. The
Lehi also tried, unsuccessfully, to
drop a bomb on the
House of Commons
from a chartered plane flown from
France and, in
October 1946,
bombed the British
Embassy in Rome.
A number of other explosive devices were
detonated in and around strategic targets in
London. Some 21 letter bombs were addressed, at
various times, to senior British political
figures. Many were intercepted, while others
reached their targets but were discovered before
they could go off.
The steep price of
self-determination
Self-determination is a difficult, costly march
for the occupied. In Palestine, no matter what
the weapon of choice - whether voice, pen or gun
- there is a steep price to be paid for its use.
Today,
"speaking truth to power" has become very much a
popular mantra of resistance in
neoliberal
circles and societies. In Palestine, however,
for the occupied and oppressed, it is an
all-but-certain path to prison or death. Yet,
for generations of Palestinians stripped of the
very breath that resonates with the feeling of
freedom, history teaches there is simply no
other choice.
Silence is
surrender. To be silent is to betray all those
who have come before and all those yet to
follow.
For those who
have never felt the constant yoke of oppression,
or seen it up close, it is a vision beyond
comprehension. Occupation sits heavy on the
occupied, every day in every way, limiting who
you are and what you may dare to become.
The
constant rub of barricades, guns, orders, prison
and death are fellow travellers for the
occupied, whether infants, teens in the spring
of life, the elderly, or those trapped by the
artificial confines of borders over which they
have no control.
To the
families of the two
Israeli Druze
policemen who lost their lives while trying to
control a place that was not theirs to command,
I extend my condolences. These young men were,
however, not lost to the ring of resistance, but
willingly sacrificed by an evil occupation that
bears no legitimacy whatsoever.
Ultimately, if there is grieving to be done, it
must be for the 11 million occupied, whether in
Palestine or outside, as so much stateless
refugees, stripped of a meaningful voice and
opportunity, as the world makes excuses built
largely of a political and economic gift box
that bears the Star of David.
Not a
day goes by now without the chilling wail of a
nation watching over a Palestinian infant
wrapped in a burial shroud, stripped of life
because electricity or transit have become a
perverse privilege which holds millions hostage
to the political whims of the few. Be they
Israeli, Egyptian or those who claim to carry
the mantle of Palestinian political leadership,
the responsibility of infanticide in Gaza is
theirs and theirs alone.
'If there is no
struggle, there is no progress'
The three
young men, cousins, who willingly sacrificed
their lives in the attack on the two Israeli
officers in Jerusalem, did so not as an empty
gesture born of desperation, but rather a
personal statement of national pride that
follows a long line of others who well
understood that the price of freedom can, at
times, mean all.
For 70
years, not a day has passed without the loss of
young Palestinian women and men who, tragically,
found greater dignity and freedom in martyrdom
than they did in obedient, passive living
controlled by those who dared to dictate the
parameters of their lives.
Millions
of us worldwide dream of a better time and place
for Palestinians ... free to spread their wings,
to soar, to discover who they are and what they
wish to become. Until then, I mourn not for the
loss of those who stop their flight. Instead, I
applaud those who dare to struggle, dare to win
- by any means necessary.
There is no
magic to resistance and struggle. They transcend
time and place and derive their very meaning and
ardour in the natural inclination, indeed,
drive, of us all to be free - to be free to
determine the role of our own lives.
In Palestine,
no such freedom exists. In Palestine,
international law recognises the fundamental
rights to self-determination, freedom and
independence for the occupied. In Palestine,
that includes the right to armed struggle, if
necessary.
Long ago, the
famed abolitionist Frederick
Douglass, himself a former
slave, wrote of struggle. These words resonate
no less so today, in Palestine, than they did
some one 150 years ago in the heart of the
Antebellum South in
the United States:
"If there
is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who
profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate
agitation, are men who want crops without
plowing up the ground. They want rain without
thunder and lightning. They want the ocean
without the awful roar of its many waters. This
struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a
physical one; or it may be both moral and
physical; but it must be a struggle. Power
concedes nothing without a demand. It never did
and it never will."
Stanley L
Cohen is a lawyer and human rights activist who
has done extensive work in the Middle East and
Africa
This article was first published by
Al-Jazeera
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