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Sinning by Omission: The Stop the War Coalition and Palestine
Take a look at this photo of the February 15th protests in London. It shows the quintessential image of that remarkable day. Vast swarms of people, wafting banners like the sails of a huge fleet, filling the streets of London.
There’s also something else about this photo that’s quintessential to that day. Look at the banners. “Not in My Name”, “No War on Iraq”, “Don’t Attack Iraq.” Near the back on the right hand side, one of the Daily Mirror’s “No War” placards. But also, one notices in the middle foreground a placard saying “End Israeli Occupation.” Further back, a blue Muslim Association of Britain (MAB) placard saying “Freedom for Palestine.”
In parts of the crowd, there sometimes seemed to be more placards protesting the Israeli occupation than there were opposing war in Iraq. The MAB in particular seemed to be handing out as many “Freedom for Palestine” placards to the crowd as “Don’t Attack Iraq.” Many of the Stop the War Coalition placards had Freedom for Palestine as a subheading. The Socialist Alliance was also handing out Freedom for Palestine placards. Rather tastelessly, to say the least, these had the subheading “Victory to the Intifada”, apparently unconcerned by the fact that the main weapon of the current Intifada is the use of suicide bombs against civilian targets.
This was a trend that would be seen again and again, as the Stop the War Coalition adopted the Palestinian issue as a cause celebre, which they presented as an integral part of their campaign of opposition to the war.
What on earth, apart from being in roughly the same part of the world, did Palestine have to do with Iraq? Israel, despite its government giving vocal support to the war, was a neutral country during the War in Iraq. Other than the odd conspiracy theory about US foreign policy, there was nothing to link the Palestine issue to the impending war.
The answer is that one thing that is shared by the religious reactionaries of the MAB and the revolutionaries of the hard left (especially the SWP) is a heavy fixation with Palestine, with strong support given to the Palestinians, who they regard as an oppressed people. Publications such as the Socialist Worker regularly print news and commentary on Palestine, which are almost exclusively pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli in tone.
An anecdote from my time in the Stop the War Coalition is instructive. Not long after the war started, one of the far-left groups that was involved in the organisation of my local branch invited me to a talk that they were hosting. The talk was on the subject of Palestine, and was being given by a former volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM). I agreed to attend, as I have had an interest in Palestine since spending three months in Israel at the age of eighteen, and I have strong sympathies for the Palestinian people.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the ISM, they’re a volunteer organisation of individuals who travel to the Occupied Territories to put themselves between the Israeli Army and the Palestinian civilians, armed with nothing more than a flourescent vest. They chain themselves to Palestinian homes scheduled by the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) for demolition. They travel in Palestinian ambulances to stop the IDF from shooting at the ambulances. It’s probably fair to say that there are Palestinian civilians who are alive today because of the work of the ISM, who operate not without risk to themselves. A couple of weeks before I attended this meeting, an American ISM activist called Rachel Corrie placed herself in front of the home of a Palestinian civilian that the Israeli Army planned to demolish. An Israeli Army bulldozer failed to stop, and Rachel Corrie was killed.
The talk given by the volunteer was inspiring. She told us about the daily humiliations that the ordinary civilians of Palestine have to endure under Israeli occupation, the grinding poverty that is part of everyday life in the Occupied Territories, and the harrassment that is par for the course for a Palestinian civilian. She passed around some photos that she had taken while in the Occupied Territories. One of which that struck me in particular was of a Palestinian Red Crescent ambulance riddled with bullet holes. I agreed with every part of her presentation…
...except for the fact that she was wearing a t-shirt bearing a cartoon of a man wearing an Arab keffiyeh headscarf as a facemask and holding aloft an AK47, with the caption “Victory to the Intifada!”
Nobody in the room challenged the fact that an individual invited to extol the successes of non-violent protest was wearing a t-shirt advocating violence. In fact, identical t-shirts were being sold at the meeting.
A visit to the ISM’s website makes the ISM’s position explicit:
“As enshrined in international law and UN resolutions, we recognize the Palestinian right to resist Israeli violence and occupation via legitimate armed struggle. However, we believe that nonviolence can be a powerful weapon in fighting oppression and we are committed to the principles of nonviolent resistance.”(1)
The shocking thing about this statement is that it didn’t need to be made at all. The ISM, as one of the most striking examples of how successful non-violent resistance can be, had absolutely no need to comment on the validity or not of armed struggle. It’s also a dishonest half-truth of a statement that sins by omission.
Let’s look at what international law says. Do the Palestinians have a right under international law “to resist Israeli violence and occupation via legitimate armed struggle”? The Occupied Territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip are territories captured and occupied by Israel during the Six-Day War of 1967. As the indigenous inhabitants of those territories, the Palestinian people have no obligation under international law to show allegiance towards the State of Israel. Given the repressive and often brutal nature of the Israeli occupation, with repeated violations of the Geneva Convention (illegal building of Israeli settlements on Palestinian land, collective punishments through use of roadblocks, curfews and destruction of Palestinian homes, firing upon journalists and ambulances, to name but a few of the ways in which Israel regularly breaches international law in its occupation) one could argue a legal case that the Palestinians have casus belli to raise armies and begin armed conflict.
The problem is that with rights come responsibilities that apply to all armies, including guerrilla armies. Particularly, combatants in war have a Geneva Convention responsibility to wear readily identifiable uniforms and insignia, to carry their weapons openly, and to obey the rules of war. None of these are adhered to by a suicide bomber who walks into a crowd of civilians with an explosive belt hidden under his or her jacket and then detonates. (2) Under any definition of international law you want to go by, the suicide bombings carried out by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade constitute a war crime. The ISM’s statement doesn’t say whether or not they regard suicide bombing as within the boundaries of legitimate armed struggle, but if it’s merely an omission, it’s a pretty glaring one given the repeated use of a particularly grisly form of war crime by Palestinian guerrillas.
This kind of sinning by omission over Palestine is fairly typical of the hard left. The SWP in particular are regularly guilty of it. An edition of the Socialist Worker is rarely complete without a report of the latest brutalities of the Israeli Army in the Occupied Territories, with the requisite condemnations of the Israeli government. These are usually accompanied by a conspicuous absence of any condemnation of the suicide bombers, or of any criticism whatsoever of Arafat or the Palestinian Authority. If suicide bombings are mentioned at all, they are usually referred to in the context of being the “excuse” for the latest round of Israeli repression.
I’m not suggesting that for every condemnation of the Israeli government, there has to be an equal and opposite condemnation of suicide bombings, but to say virtually nothing about the regular slaughter of civilians by Palestinian terrorists? The Israel/Palestine conflict is one where neither side has a monopoly on virtue or vice, and to condemn the sins of one side while ignoring the crimes of the other is intellectually dishonest.
The pro-Israel lobby, for their part, often engage in a similar exercise in sin by omission that more or less mirrors the pro-Palestinians of the extreme left. They will tell you that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East; that the Palestinian terrorists have launched a brutal and vicious campaign with no regard for loss of civilian life; that of the neighbouring Arab countries, only Egypt and Jordan so much as even recognise Israel’s right to exist; that anti-Semitism is rife in the Arab world; that in 2002 Egyptian television broadcast a 30-part TV series based on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the famous 19th Century anti-semitic forgery, and so on. None of this is actually untrue (except possibly the part about Israel being the only democracy in the Middle East - whenever they say this, Turkey doesn’t appear to be in the Middle East), it’s just that, as with the extreme left’s unflappable pro-Palestinian stance, it only tells half the story.
Is it possible to condemn both the oppression of the Israeli occupation and the indiscriminate violence of the Palestinian terrorists? Of course it is. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty both do it all the time. Naturally, they don’t get thanked for it. In November 2002, Human Rights Watch released a report condemning the suicide bombing campaigns as a crime against humanity. Islamic Jihad and Hamas both castigated the report as Zionist and pro-Israel, despite HRW’s repeated criticisms in the past of Israel’s conduct in the Occupied Territories. Almost simultaneously, Amnesty released a report of their own detailing Israeli human rights violations, including torture, extra-judicial killing and use of human shields. The Israeli Foreign Ministry and Israeli intellectuals protested, accusing Amnesty of anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian bias, despite the fact that Amnesty issues regular condemnations of Palestinian terrorism.(3) I’ll say this for even-handedness and intellectual honesty; it certainly doesn’t win you any friends.
But it’s vital that we become even-handed and intellectually honest. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the most pro-Palestinian thing you can do is loudly and repeatedly condemn the Palestinian suicide bombers. Why? Because every time one of these holy halfwits blows themselves and a dozen Israeli shoppers to Allah, it provokes a fresh round of Israeli oppression, and as always, the people who are caught up in the middle of it are the long-suffering civilians of both Israel and Palestine. The current Intifada is not freeing the people of Palestine. It is hastening their destruction.
The Israeli/Palestinian crisis has become hopelessly polarised, with tragic consequences for people living on both sides. All too often, any attempt at debate on the issue degenerates quickly into a cheap, tit-for-tat round of accusations and counter-accusations. The crisis will only be solved when the debate becomes sufficiently de-polarised to create a climate where the Israeli occupation can be peacefully ended and a two-state solution, with a Palestinian state and an Israeli state coexisting alongside each other with assurances of mutual security, can be developed. By adopting the hard left’s vociferous, uncritical pro-Palestinian stance, the Stop the War Coalition are merely exacerbating the polarisation of the Israel/Palestine debate. Make no mistake, the Stop the War Coalition are not part of the solution to the Palestine issue. They are part of the problem.
Go to Part Four
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Notes
1. What is the ISM? http://www.palsolidarity.org/about/aboutISM.php
2. For a useful primer on many of the legal issues on war, I recommend a visit to the Crimes of War Project website at http://www.crimesofwar.org/
3. Cassel D. (6th November 2002) Israelis and Palestinians: Unpunished Crimes. http://www.law.northwestern.edu/depts/clinic/ihr/display_details.cfm?ID=341&document_type=commentary 1 |
