Finkelstein On Gaza: Israeli Assault Designed To Punish,
Humiliate And Terrorize
19 May 2010By Mustaqim Sahib Bleher
"The era of the "beautiful"
Israel
has passed, it seems irrevocably, and the disfigured
Israel that in recent years has replaced it in the
public consciousness is a growing embarrassment. It is
not so much that Israel's behavior is worse than it
was before, but rather that the record of that
behavior has, finally, caught up with it. The truth
can no longer be denied or dismissed."
"For a long while Israel's "supporters" deflected the
impact of this accumulating documentary record by
wielding the twin swords of
The
Holocaust and the "new anti-Semitism"...
if 'another flare-up in the region, similar to the
Gaza
operation, will probably lead to an even more severe
out-break of anti-Semitic activity against communities
worldwide' (quote from the Israeli Coordination Forum
for Countering Anti-Semitism), then an efficacious
method to fight anti-Semitism would appear to be for
Israel to stop committing massacres."
In his book analysing the Israeli invasion into Gaza,
Norman
Finkelstein takes a clear and
uncompromising position. It is a well researched and
referenced polemic that does not shirk from pointing
the finger at those responsible for what the UN
Goldstone report (whose author is both Jewish and a
self-declared Zionist who "worked for Israel all of my
adult life") clearly termed
war crimes,
stating that "the Israeli assault on Gaza constituted
"a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to
punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population,
radically diminish its local economic capacity both to
work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it
an ever increasing sense of dependency and
vulnerability." Anybody still in doubt about the
justification of this characterisation should read
Finkelstein's book as the testimony of a Jew who
speaks out against crimes committed in the name of
people who used to keep quiet about it, but now, he
asserts are increasingly coming off the fence whilst
Israel grows more and more distant from its alleged
support amongst the Jewish people in the diaspora.
In a brief history of the Israel-Palestine conflict
Finkelstein explains the rationale for Israel to have
broken a ceasefire with the Hamas-led Palestinian
government after first ensuring that both that
government and its people were weakened by a prolonged
economic blockade: After the blunders in the Lebanon,
where Israel also stands accused of having committed
widespread war crimes, the Israeli governing elite
felt the need to restore Israel's "deterrence
capacity", and that could only be achieved by showing
unrestrained and disproportionate force against a
defenceless civil population. Israel's two major
concerns which it hoped to deal with by its Gaza
invasion were that its enemies were less afraid of it
than they once were, and that any future peace
initiative might succeed in forcing Israel to concede
in a compromise what it never had any intention to
concede, the existence of a
Palestinian people
with sovereignty over any territory of their own.
Dealing with "Operation Cast Lead" as Israel termed
the invasion, Finkelstein takes apart any attempt of
Israeli apologists to justify the carnage it unleashed
and describes minutely the progression of the
military operation, based on testimonies
from Palestinians, independent observers and human
rights organisations as well as Israeli soldiers
themselves, leaving no doubt that the intended
humanitarian disaster was not by accident but by
design. As a fan of Mahatma Ghandi he tries to show
that Ghandi's advocacy for non-violent protest did not
extend to a call for oppressed people to take
oppression lying down but instead supported resistance
in the face of impossible odds as "a refusal to bend
before overwhelming might in the full knowledge that
it means certain death", and he quotes Ghandi's
response in 1947 to what might be the most acceptable
solution to the Palestinian problem as "The
abandonment wholly by the Jews of terrorism and other
forms of violence".
Finkelstein supports a
two-state solution of peaceful
coexistence for Palestine. He is hopeful that after
the Israeli propaganda has had to take a serious dent
when the extens of Israel's crimes became known, the
Palestinian position of only asking for what the
International Court of Justice and the
United Nations General Assembly
repeatedly stated as their inviolable right - freedom
from occupation and self-determination - might
gradually shift public opinion and, with it, policy
makers. I am not that optimistic since in my
understanding Israel is only a stepping stone on the
road to world government (as predicted by
Ben
Gurion in 1962), with Israel's designs
not being limited to controlling and subjugating
people on the territories occupied so far. Nor do I
support an artificial two-state solution: Israel
claims to be a democracy yet gives favoured status to
a set of people perceived as genetically Jewish. A
single-state solution with "one person, one vote" is
what democracy would demand instead. In spite those
differences, Palestinians do have a strong advocate in
Norman Finkelstein, and I highly recommend his
passionately written book in their support.
Norman G. Finkelstein's book "This Time We Went Too
Far. Truth & Consequences of the Gaza Invasion." is
published by
O/R Books,
New York.
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