For Justice and Peace in Palestine

By Kayode Komolafe

0805 500 1974

Beyond the high principles espoused on all sides of the current Israeli-Palestinian war is the enormous human cost of the conflict. While Israel, formidably backed by America, legitimately insists on the right to defend itself against attacks by Hamas, the Palestinians battle cry is their freedom. They want an end to the 56-year old illegal occupation of their land and humiliation by Israel. Blood and tears have been flowing in the periodic eruptions of violence in over seven decades of the perennial conflict. In the more recent violence that has defined the region, thousands have been killed since the first Palestinian intifada in 1987.

The toll is rising in the current war triggered by Hamas attack on Israel on Saturday. Experts say the war might extend beyond Israel, Gaza and West Bank.

Among the hundreds of Israelis and Palestinians killed were scores of children.

This is the issue for rest of humanity that seems to have mentally normalised the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The conflict remains an open sore on the social conscience of humanity. It fundamentally questions the moral content of western civilisation.

A judicious way of looking at the conflict is that war crimes are being committed by both Israel and Hamas, as former foreign minister, Professor Bolaji Akinyemi, put it while offering profound insights into the crisis on ARISE Television yesterday morning.

Reports from Gaza and West Bank suggest that a humanitarian crisis looms in the areas as Israel has imposed a blockade on a people already under occupation in defiance of international laws.

Stopping the violence and averting the resultant humanitarian crisis is the immediate task. But the more urgent task for the United States appears to be arming Israel for the “elimination of the Hamas leadership,” as the Israeli opposition leader, Avigdor Lieberman, has demanded. The prospects of a diplomatic solution are dim as the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Hamas leadership are not embracing the option of negotiation.

Like the previous periodic bloodlettings on both sides, the fundamentals of the conflict are again being ignored.

That is the Question of Palestine. Originally, the word Palestine was geographically used to refer to the eastern Mediterranean region. In geo-political terms, it comprises of parts of modern Israel and the Palestinian territories of Gaza and West Bank. The history of Palestine in the last 3, 000 years has been that of changes in political status. Jews, Christians and Muslims have their sacred sites in Palestine. Since the last century Arabs and Jews have made conflicting claims on the land. Some claims to the land even have Biblical dimensions.

Such is the complexity of the region’s reality. To unravel this complexity, it is unhelpful to begin the story with the “terrorism” of Hamas. The provenance of the story in the modern sense was the United Nations Resolution 181 of 1947. It is also called the Partition Resolution. According to the resolution, the Britain’s former mandate of Palestine should be partitioned into Jewish and Arab states. The mandate was billed to end in May 1948. And indeed the State of Israel was created that year. However, the other state for the Arabs in Palestine (now simply called the Palestinians) have not been created 75 years after despite heaps of resolutions by the same United Nations and futile negotiations to resolve the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Instead, the Palestinians have lost a good portion of the land they owned before the 1967 war to encroachment by Jewish settlers.

This monumental failure to make the Palestinian State a reality is squarely at the root of the conflict.

Ironically, the conflict has persisted not because reasoned propositions have not been put on the table broadly from all sides of the conflict. But the generations of implacable extremists among the Jews and Arabs in Palestine have seemingly made the application of reason impossible.

Yet since the first intifada, Jewish and Arab thinkers have made critical observations pointing to the ultimate futility of the approaches currently adopted by both Israel and Hamas.

Take a sample.

An Emeritus Rabbi based in the United Kingdom, David Goldberg, has questioned the tendency of Israeli politicians and generals to “prefer to remain in ignorance of the army’s brutality” in the occupied territories in his book entitled “This is not the Way: Jews, Judaism and Israel.”

As a Jew in the Diaspora, Goldberg says criticism of Zionism is not the same thing as anti-Semitism. His point is as follows: “So what might coax Israel to accept that holding on to the Territories is counter-productive? … A start would be a mass petition from Jews worldwide to the Israeli prime minister’s office under the slogan ‘Passover for the Palestinians’. Even Eli Wiesel might have difficulty in refusing to sign it. All of Judaism’s ethical teachings are based on and derive from the concept of Freedom. It is the sine qua non of Jewish values. The exodus from Egyptian slavery is the folk memory above all others that is embedded in our collective unconscious and unites religious, secular, atheist and only-just Jews in nominating the Passover Seder as their favourite celebration. It was Heine, in many ways the epitome of the post-Enlightenment Jew adjusting to the temptations of modernity without forfeiting Jewish distinctiveness, who wrote in Germany to Luther, ‘Since the Exodus, Freedom has always spoken with a Hebrew accent.” The journey of the Hebrew slaves to freedom has been the inspiration for most liberation movements in Western history and ‘Let my people go’ the battle cry that has urged them forward. Liberty is a universal yearning, shared by all peoples everywhere.”

From the other polar end is the view of eminent Palestinian American scholar, Edward W. Said. In one of his last essays compiled in a book entitled “From Oslo to Iraq and the Roadmap,” Said observed that the tragedy of Palestine would deepen unless the Palestinian (nay Arab) leadership changed their approach to the conflict. Said, who died 20 years ago, wrote within the context of the siege on the Palestinian territories following the crisis provoked by the visit of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, surrounded by thousands of Israeli soldiers, to Jerusalem’s Haram al-Shariff (the Noble Sanctuary), a Muslim’s holy place on September 29, 2000. Goldberg’s reasoning is as follows: “No one can deny that Palestine is an exception to nearly all the colonial issues of the past two hundred years: it is exceptional but not removed from history. Human history is full of similar, if not absolutely the same, instances, and what has surprised me, as someone living at a distance from the Middle East but close to it in all sorts of ways, is how insulated from the rest of the world we keep ourselves. Whereas, I believe, a great deal can be learned from the history of other oppressed peoples in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and even Europe. Why do we resist comparing ourselves, say, with the South African blacks, or with the American Indians, or with the Vietnamese? By comparing, I don’t mean mechanically or slavishly but rather creatively and imaginatively.

“The late Eqbal Ahmad, who was certainly one of the two or three most brilliant analysts of contemporary history and politics that I ever knew, always drew attention to the fact that successful liberation movements were successful precisely because they employed creative ideas, original ideas, imaginative ideas, whereas less successful movements (like ours, alas) had a pronounced tendency to use formulas and an uninspired repetition of past slogans and past patterns of behaviour. Take as a primary instance the idea of armed struggle. For decades we have relied in our minds on ideas about guns and killing, ideas that from the 1930s until today have brought us plentiful martyrs but have had little real effect either on Zionism or on our own ideas about what to do next. In our case, the fighting is done by a small brave number of people pitted against hopeless odds: stones against helicopter gunships, Merkava tanks, missiles. Yet a quick look at other movements- say, the Indian nationalist movement, the South African liberation movement, the American civil rights movement-tells us first of all that only a mass movement employing tactics and strategy that maximizes the popular element ever makes any difference on the occupier and or oppressor. Second, only a mass movement that has been politicised and imbued with a vision of participating directly in a future of its own making, only such a movement has a historical chance of liberating itself from oppression or military occupation. The future, like the past, is built by human beings. They, and not some distant mediator or saviours, provide the agency for change.

It is clear to me, for example, that the immediate task in Palestine is to establish the goal of ridding ourselves of the occupation, using imaginative means of struggle… “

If you synthesis the different perspectives of Goldberg, a Jew, and that of Said, a Palestinian, it would be obvious to see the irrationality in Hamas’ refusal to recognise Israel which it calls an “illegitimate state” and Israel’s illusion of resting on its military power to occupy Palestinian territories for ever. Other Palestinian factions which do not also recognise Israel are making the same mistakes as well as the right-wing extremist Jews ruling out perpetually the possibility of a Palestinian state. They are all poor students of history. The dialectic of history is that oppression cannot last for ever.

In fact, the proud national history of the Jews themselves shows that a determined people will survive the worst form oppression and persecution.

The United States and its western allies are also part of the problem. Former American president, Jimmy Carter, once described the inhuman condition of the occupied territories as that of “apartheid.” Without saying so, America and its allies are today not too worried about the settler-colonialism existing in Gaza and West Bank. The last time the United States showed real enthusiasm about resolving the crisis was on September 13, 1993 when President Bill Clinton presided over the signing of a peace agreement in White House between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) Chairman Yasser Arafat. Unlike Clinton, President Joe Biden has not put the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a “priority” of his administration. For America, the Palestinian Question is not an urgent item like the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Neither is it as urgent as America’s ill-fated democracy projects in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.

The European countries are hardly different in failing to nudge both Israel and the Palestinians towards a just resolution in the interest of peace and security of the Middle East and indeed the world.

Even the United Nations appears helpless in the situation. The lack of even -handedness on the part of the UN in the matter is reflected in the Monday statement of its secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, in which he expressed “condemnation of the abhorrent attacks of Hamas and others on Israel” while he was only “alarmed by reports of over 500 Palestinians-including women and children killed in Gaza and over 3,000 injured.”

That is not a balanced approach to resolve a conflict

Israel is legitimately entitled to its national security just as the Palestinians have fundamental human rights to their freedom and national dignity as a people. These are rights embodied in the United Nation’s Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. Israel’s national security and the existence of the Palestinian state are not be mutually exclusive.

That is the logic of the two-state solution.

Peace and security based on justice can come to Palestine.