Jeremy Salt
The Palestine Chronicle / October 8, 2024
“Israel is a democracy and not run by a terrorist organization.” Thus spoke Peter Dutton, the leader of the Australian opposition Liberal Party.
In denying any equivalence between Hezbollah and the state of Israel, Dutton is perfectly correct.
Hezbollah is a resistance movement, born in the embers of Beirut after the Israel invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and Israel is an occupier state that has terrorized the Palestinian people and many others since its foundation in 1948.
Terror, Israel’s ability to inflict pain and suffering, is intrinsic to its survival.
As we have seen in Gaza over the past year, this has now reached the stage of genocide and there still seems a long way to go.
Israel is not a democracy.
It never has been and was never planned to be one.
Structural discrimination against the Palestinians is built into its laws, regulations and system of justice, which in the case of the Palestinians is overwhelmingly the denial of justice.
The occupation of the Palestinian territories seized in 1967 has created an openly apartheid state. More than 700,000 settlers live on the West Bank and in east Jerusalem, in violation of international law by Israeli governments.
More than 25,000 settlers live on the Syrian Golan Heights, again in violation of international law, with further settlement ongoing or planned in all these territories.
‘International law means nothing’
As repeatedly demonstrated over the past eight decades, international law means nothing to Israel.
Jerusalem is a particular case in Palestinian history. It seems to be widely assumed that while the eastern part of the city is occupied, Israel has some kind of right to west Jerusalem.
This is not the case.
Israel managed to seize the western half of the city in 1948 before international intervention stopped the fighting. It has ever since, in violation of the partition plan recommendation that Jerusalem be turned into a corpus separatum under international administration.
While Jewish settlers preferring to live in Jerusalem rather than on a kibbutz changed the demographics, up till 1948 most of the land and property in and around the city was owned – and is still owned by them despite bogus property laws – by Palestinian Muslims and Christians.
The 1949 armistice placed the eastern half of the city under Jordanian administration.
‘Custodian of Absentee Property’
In the West, Palestinians were driven out and their property stolen. All stolen property across Palestine was handed out to settlers by the ‘Custodian of Absentee Property’ or was sequestered by the upper echelons of the Zionist establishment.
Even Palestinians who moved from their homes to another part of Palestine during the war had their property taken from them. They were defined as “present absentees” as if anyone could be present and absent at the same time.
In 1967, after launching an attack on Egypt and Syria, Israel seized east Jerusalem.
In 1980 the Israeli government passed the ‘Jerusalem law,’ establishing the whole city of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. This was quickly followed by the passage of UN Security Council Resolution 478 declaring the ‘Jerusalem law’ “null and void.”
On December 6, 2017, President Trump announced that the US would recognize Jerusalem – not just the western half but the entire city – as Israel’s capital.
On December 21, the UN General Assembly went into emergency session to consider resolution ES-10/19, drawn up by Turkey and Yemen, that “any decisions and actions which purport to have altered the character, status and demographic composition of the Holy City of Jerusalem have no legal effect, are null and void and must be rescinded in compliance with relevant resolutions of the Security Council.”
It called on member states to refrain from opening diplomatic missions in the city and noted that the city was a “final status” issue to be resolved through negotiation. Needless to say, Israel regards the status of Jerusalem as non-negotiable, whatever the UN or anyone else thinks.
The resolution was passed 128 for, nine against, 21 absentees and 35 abstentions, which included Australia. It is perhaps worth noting that the nine ‘no’ votes consisted of the US, Israel, Guatemala and a small number of camp followers: Honduras, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau and Togo.
In 2018 the US finally moved its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Guatemala followed the same year, Kosovo and Honduras in 2021 and Papua-New Guinea in 2023. Russia recognizes west Jerusalem as Israel’s capital but still has its embassy in Tel Aviv. It has nominated east Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state, which ‘between the river and the sea’ that Israel says it will never allow.
‘Grand larceny’
The fate of Jerusalem is only one chapter in a history of grand larceny.
From 1920 to 1948 the Zionists managed to purchase only five to six percent of Palestine.
Much of what they bought came from owners who did not live in Palestine and did not have the close emotional connection of Palestinian villagers, for whom land was not just the crops they grew on it but central to their identity.
Palestinians who owned land held on to it. Those living on land sold to the Zionists were forced off it.
The “democracy” of which Mr Dutton speaks was established on a land from which about 800,000 of its people were driven out by planned terror in 1948.
More than 500 of their villages or hamlets were destroyed as part of the deliberate destruction by the Zionists of what Palestine was. War was not contingent but necessary, if a Jewish state was to be established.
The first round of open ethnic cleansing was followed by a second in 1967 but even in pre-1967 Israel, Palestinian Muslims and Christians did not and do not live under the same laws and regulations as Jews.
While the right to vote is held up all the time as evidence of Israel’s democratic nature, structural discrimination is a permanent feature of Palestinian life.
In the territories occupied in 1967 the Palestinians are the victims of all the weapons available to the state, and openly used in defiance of international law, from pseudo-laws to the sanctioning of soldier-settler violence and air and land assault by the military.
‘Normative’ violence
The violence is not incidental but normative: it is not the only way Israel can exist but it is the way it has chosen.
In 1948/49 about 100,000 refugees streamed into Lebanon, settling into camps maintained by UNRWA (UN Relief and Works Agency). These camps include Bourg al Barajneh in the Dahiyya district and Sabra and Shatila, where in 1982 about 3000 Palestinians were massacred by Israel’s Falangist iron guard.
The Israeli army supervised the massacre, surrounding the camps, ushering in the killers and even lighting up the camps at night so the killers could see what they were doing. The bombing of residential towers in Beirut signalled Israel’s complete disregard for non-Jewish civilian life, now fully on display in Gaza and Lebanon.
In the four months between June 6, when the Israeli army crossed the 1949 Israel-Lebanon armistice line, and September 29, when Israel withdrew from Beirut, close to 20,000 Lebanese and Palestinian civilians were killed by Israel and its fascist allies, another signal of how far Israel was prepared to go in ‘self-defense.’
Organized Palestinian resistance from Lebanon had developed in the 1960s after the formation of the PLO.
Israel’s ground incursions and air attacks were frequent. In 1968 Israel destroyed 13 Middle Eastern Airlines passenger planes standing on the tarmac at Beirut International Airport.
After the Palestinian attack on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972, Israel retaliated by bombing refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria, killing about 200 people (precise counts are rarely available in these circumstances).
In 1973 the Israelis attacked West Beirut from the sea, killing senior PLO figures, including Kamal Nasser, a writer, and anyone else who got in their way.
In 1978, in retaliation for a resistance attack near Tel Aviv in which more than 30 Israelis were killed, including children, Israel invaded Lebanon (Operation Litani), killing close to 2000 Palestinians and Lebanese, many children among them.
The 1982 invasion of Lebanon led to the exile of the PLO and the rise of Hezbollah.
The occupation of Beirut was followed by the Israel occupation of south Lebanon for 18 years, finally brought to an end by the resistance of Hezbollah (not quite to an end because Israel still occupies the Sheba’a farms region).
From the 1950s Israel was resisted by secular movements established under the umbrella of the PLO. Islamic movements took over after the failure of the ‘peace process’.
While resistance is the point, not the ideological identity of who happens to be resisting at any given time, the rise of Hamas added Islamophobia to the weapons its enemies use to discredit it.
Invading and occupying
Hezbollah is listed as a terrorist organization by governments that support a state that has as killed an infinitely greater number of civilians than those killed by its enemies.
Needless to say, these governments, in their Middle Eastern wars, have killed infinitely more civilians themselves, showing the same complete disregard for Muslim human life as Israel. There is a club-like affinity between them.
Invading and occupying, inflicting mass terror with their bombs and missiles, they are not terrorist organizations of course but states, in their own reckoning, as if the two are mutually exclusive.
Israeli state terror might not yet have reached its apogee.
Gaza has been followed by Lebanon, with Iran and anyone else who gets in the way of the US/Israel yet to come, in days or even hours.
‘Child could see the logic’
The attack is being designed to put Iran permanently out of action as one of Israel’s enemies. This may involve attacks on the oil industry and nuclear installations, along with the decapitation of the IRGC. It threatens to be massive. All of this is the outgrowth of Palestine 1948.
A child could see the logic here. You take what is mine and I will fight to get it back however long it takes.
It is not necessarily the case that Mr Dutton can’t also see it but he’s not going to say it out loud.
He is a politician reading off a US/Israeli script handed down through the ranks to Australia, adding a personal touch with his call for the Iranian ambassador to be thrown out of the country for expressing his opinion.
The listing of Hamas and Hezbollah as a terrorist organization is a tool now being wielded to suppress opposition to genocide.
In Australia flying a Hamas or Hezbollah flag or wearing a t-shirt with their logos or shouting your support for either in a demonstration can land you in court or prison. Flying the flag of the state committing genocide will not, because that state has the support of the Australian government.
Genocide convention
South Africa acted on the 1948 ‘Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide’ by taking Israel to the ICJ, which issued an interim ruling in January this year that the charge of genocide in Gaza was “plausible.” Evidence since then shows that the genocide is not plausible but actual, and committed with the broad support of the Jewish Israeli population.
In accordance with the 1948 convention, Hezbollah and North Yemen have tried to stop genocide, North Yemen by blocking shipping bound for the Gulf of Aqaba port of the genocidal state and Hezbollah by linking its attacks on Israeli settlements and military sites to Gaza.
It said it would halt these attacks when Israel halted its attack on Gaza, only for Israel to continue bombing and move on to the simulation of Gaza across Lebanon. Yet it is North Yemen and Hezbollah that are vilified by a media, not the governments that have enabled genocide through their inaction or active support for Israel.
Israel was founded in terror and has lived by it for almost eight decades. The terror is not incidental but central to the life of the state. Israel cannot live without it, because otherwise, it cannot be what it wants to be, which is a Jewish supremacist state with the exclusive right to all of Palestine.
Israel cannot live within the law because that would mean recognizing the rights of the Palestinians – including the right of return – and at the least withdrawing from all the territories seized in 1967.
It has no intention of doing either because that would mean abandoning a Zionist vision that has been a nightmare for the Palestinians from which there has been no awakening.
Unwilling to settle on the basis of law and justice, Israel continues to speak to the Palestinians and its allies in the only language it knows, the language of the bomb, the tank shell, the missile and the assassination.
Israel was a Western project imposed on the Middle East. The West, however, has never taken responsibility for what it has done but rather has applauded and encouraged Israel at every turn, supporting it with money and arms, falling back on the ‘right’ of self-defence to justify its heinous crimes and eternally turning the perpetrator into the victim, as Peter Dutton does.
Enough is enough
This has gone on for 76 years and the point had to be reached where enough is enough.
That is where the Middle East stands now, poised on the lip of what is shaping up as the final stage of an existential struggle that threatens to cast the entire region into the abyss and take a genocide-complicit west down with it.
From the brutal father terrorizing the family and the back-alley mugger with a knife in hand to the army imposing its will on an occupied people and the resistance movement striking back, terror is a tool used to establish control and modify behavior – a learning experience, it might be said.
Terrorized long enough, the victim will eventually have to give in. That is the logic and given enough saturation with weapons the resistance does not have it should work, but often does not because the human will to resist is stronger.
Occupying states terrorise and resistance movements terrorize in an infinitely smaller way when they strike back.
The difference between them, apart from the firepower of the state and the puny or relatively puny weapons available to a resistance movement, lies in the right of the movement to resist invasion and occupation. In such situations, the state has no rights, only responsibilities.
Between Hezbollah and Israel it should also be noted that whereas Hezbollah has minimized civilian casualties by attacking mostly military sites, Israel has maximized them through the large-scale bombing of residential districts.
What we see daily in the Middle East could have been avoided long ago with the right action taken at the right time. The momentum now seems unstoppable.
Only when the widening war is over might the West acknowledge where it went wrong but outside its ranks that has been clear for decades.
Jeremy Salt taught at the University of Melbourne, at Bosporus University in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara for many years, specializing in the modern history of the Middle East
