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Do you support any amendment to the Constitution as a solution to the Lebanese Presidential Vacuum? No 55.4% Yes 30.0% Not Sure 14.6% Total Votes: 130

Invisible Occupation
By Farah Salka, Staff Writer

Beirut, Lebanon − ‘I was taught as an Israeli academic that there is a very complex story there, and in fact what you find out is that this is a very simple story, a story of dispossession, a story of colonisation, of occupation, of expulsion.’
Ilan Pappe-Israeli historian1

Following the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, Israel militarily occupied the West Bank, Gaza strip and East Jerusalem (not to mention non-Palestinian Territories). Due to that, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) issued resolution 2422, requiring Israel to withdraw from all the occupied territories and to return back to the borders prior to 1967. Four decades have passed. Israel is yet to comply.3  

Chomsky explains how entering its fortieth year of occupation, Israel has earned its record of being the longest military occupation modern history has known. ‘It is a harsh and brutal military occupation and it is violent all the time; life is being made unliveable for the population.’ For Israeli ‘peace activist’, Uri Avnery, Palestinians are fighting a war of liberation against an imposed military occupation of their land. ‘We are in their territory, not they on ours. We are the occupiers, they are the victims.’ For Avnery, this is an objective situation, and no matter how much effort is put, no rector of propaganda will change that.’4 What Avnery is suggesting can be argued quite easily against. The gravity of the lack of contextualisation in reporting on the conflict is dramatic and is successful. From all the US network news reports covering the West Bank and Gaza Strip, 4 percent of them do in fact mention when reporting, that the West Bank and Gaza strip are occupied.5

A fundamental point one ought to consider when browsing reports on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is not only examining what there is in the narrative, but even much more significantly, what is being left out. In that respect, absence and presence stand on the same calibre of vitality in terms of how to make sense of what one is conceptualising.

When covering the Israeli Palestinian conflict, a typical news report on the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) would compose of presenting dramatic scenes of clashes. Palestinians would be confronting Israeli soldiers, and the soldiers would appear responding. For an audience who happen to be watching the TV at that time, and who would know little, if anything about the actual situation, this would portray a normal cause-effect situation: riots to which the soldiers would be responding. One point worth mentioning is forever omitted. These confrontations are occurring on occupied territories. Those confrontations are not endangering the security of Israeli civilians but Palestinian civilians. The Israeli military is on a land which is not theirs and has absolutely no international legitimacy for being there. In spite of this, when the native population resists the occupation imposed on them, Israel, is presented as being under attack.6 It is constantly presented as reactive, never deliberate, and always merely responding to Palestinian terrorism. ABC channel would put passive headlines such as:

‘Israel strikes back against terror.’
 ‘A day of Palestinian attacks and Israeli retaliation…’
‘Israeli troops were pelted with stones and they responded with tear gas and rubber bullets.’
‘Israel has beefed up forces following a Palestinian mortar attack.’
‘Israeli bulldozers and tanks moved into the refugee camp at 2 AM in the morning.
‘2 hours later 54 Palestinian homes had been flattened. The raid was widely seen as retaliation for the death of four Israeli soldiers yesterday.’ 7

Fifty-four houses were flattened in two hours time. If half the amount of houses, being Israeli, were flattened by Palestinians, would the ABC still label the act as Palestinian retaliation or Palestinian crude terrorism? Hussein Ibish8 focuses on the term ‘retaliation’ and explains how this word is carefully utilised because, again, it suggests a defensive stance in response to violence initiated by someone else. This word has an underlying meaning that the responsibility rests on the retaliator. American media always portrays the retaliator in their scenario as the Israelis who are reacting to Palestinian initiated violence.

When one lives in an odd and oppressive limbo, has no nation, no citizenship, and no ultimate power over the silliest detail in his/her life, s/he loses hope. Why are the Palestinians frustrated and violent? If their basic and inalienable human rights are provided under the auspices of the Israeli occupation, then what is all the anger and despair about? This question is rarely, if ever, asked by American media. Ilan Pappe9 comments on the controversy behind suicide attacks: ‘Suicide bombs are presented to the Israeli public as an insane acts by an insane people, with whom there is no chance for peace.  Instead of putting a wider analysis which would say there is a way out of the suicide bombs by providing the circumstances in which those young people will find avenues of hope instead of avenues of despair. There is, I would say, an orchestral campaign to silence such analysis inside Israel.’10 Nevertheless, it is only logical that any violence by a large population is not because these people are more violent than any other. This violence should serve as an alarm for us, as a sign. It is a signal that something is wrong with the treatment of these people.11

When an Israeli intrusion occurs in one of the villages of the occupied territories, this is an expected headline that shows on CNN: ‘The Israelis moved into the occupied territories today to root out the suicide bombers.’12 Occupation, incursions and invasions are being pardoned by the so-called cause of wanting to ‘root out the evil’. One ought to rationalise a little bit the sequence of events portrayed by international media here before swallowing all what s/he is fed on TV. Are the suicide bombings causing the occupation to remain or is the occupation causing more suicide bombers to emerge?

Sam Husseini from the Institute for Public Accuracy tackles a vital idea here, ‘If the occupation is invisible as it has been rendered by how the USA looks at this and how it is being echoed in the media, then the reason for the frustration is just inexplicable and therefore, the Palestinians are inherently upset people.’13 If that is so, where does this daily, hourly Palestinian violence emerge from? Is it possibly drawn from their culture or is it simply and merely violence caused by something, violence caused by someone? The Israeli occupation and its derivatives is the one that is creating suicide bombers, not the opposite way around. It is a viscous circle. More occupation will not prevent more suicide attacks. More occupation will lead to dozens more of suicides in fact. To get rid of crime, one should get rid of the root causes of crime which, in a big sense are poverty. Simply condemning murderers will not in any way decrease the crime rate. So is the case with our story.

If we take a closer look at the situation, we realise that all the killings, all the soldiers, all the tanks, all the bulldozers, all the snipers and all the gunships are on the occupied Palestinian territories. If what Israel genuinely aspires is self-defence and security, then they could have started four decades ago by ending the occupation. Edward Said points out that the Palestinians have acted as any other colonised nation would. They have rebelled in remonstration against their coloniser. Such a reaction is merely one of the most elementary aspects of human behaviour and it does not need a sociology expert to understand.14

‘Israelis hold the key to their own liberation in their back pocket. It is a very simple solution. It is an immediate end to the occupation and that is something that I think is distorted in the narrative, when it is referred to as a conflict or to a war as if two equal sides or two equal partners engaged in warfare. It is myth making.’15

In the final analysis, the inalienable desire for liberation shall nevertheless keep the occupied always on the run, stones in hand, fighting for freedom in whatever means. Many people would take the risk of death wholeheartedly than live in chains. It is merely human for a nation to seek freedom. The stance of Israel always being in the victimised category does not hold up. The basic posture of this country can be deemed anything but defence. Israel sees itself as a defensive country and only that to an extent that its army itself is called the IDF standing for the Israeli Defence Forces. Palestine has no army, navy or air force. Israel, however, boasts one of the most technologically advanced military forces and the fourth largest army in the world.16 Israel has armaments of mass destruction17 and nuclear weapons18. Israel has fighter aircrafts, marines, Merkavas, attack helicopters, missile boats, cannons, self-propelled artilleries and rocket artilleries. Israel is supported economically, militarily and diplomatically by the only super-power standing in the 21st century, the USA. Israel is maintaining thousands of heavily fortified forces out of its supposed borders. Those forces are in someone else’s country, on Palestinian soil. All this is happening in infringement to the United Nations Security Council’s (UNSC) resolutions19 (Res. 162, 452, 607 and so on). All this is occurring on the ground, and still, Israel insists that it is at danger and needs to defend itself.

On the 9th of June 2006, Israeli forces fired several artillery shells at a beach in the northern part of Gaza Strip. Seven members of one family, Ghalia, were killed and thirty other civilians were wounded. Of the seven killed, five were children and the other two were the parents.20 It was just the beginning of the school holidays and the beach was packed with Palestinian families that were out for peaceful picnics. Ehud Olmert initially ‘apologised’ for the killings. However, after doing so, the military promptly recognised it was on the verge of facing another PR disaster, similar to the one of Mohammed al-Durra.21 Therefore Israel, shortly after the apology, rejected holding any responsibility for the deaths. CNN did make the effort to speak of the incident. They aired a brief scene of Palestinian chaos with no explanation for that disorder’s cause. That was it; no interviews with any Palestinian witnesses or victims were ever drawn. With such parameters of irresponsible coverage, the public is led to sympathise with one side of the conflict only, always failing to collect all parts of the puzzle.22 News coverage should ethically at least present all the facts on the ground, details of the events, causes and consequences. In the case of the Ghalia family, CNN has fallen short of its journalistic obligations.

Only some months later, on the morning of the 8th of November 2006, another Athamna family, of 18 members, was killed and dozens injured. A shower of artillery shells struck the densely populated Beit Hanoun, also in the northern part of Gaza Strip. Eight of the 18 victims were children. Some were killed while they were sleeping and others while running away from the shelling which lasted about half an hour. The Israeli authorities claimed they had unintentionally shelled the town and expressed regret for the killings. ‘The houses were incorrectly struck due to a technical failure.’ Calls for an international investigation on the massacre were refused. Calling what happened a massacre was moreover refused.23 When an Israeli soldier, who is on Palestinian land, shooting Palestinians, gets killed in the process, right away we get, ‘the fullness of his humanity’. We know his name. We watch his funeral. We see footage of his grieving mother. We see the face of his innocent child, now left an orphan. We indeed learn so much. We watch a documentary of his childhood, pictures, hopes and dreams, origin, what were his hobbies and all the details. Comparing this to when hundreds and thousands of Palestinians are killed, we find no resemblance. In the case of Palestinians, we usually only hear numbers and statistics: we never get to learn the name of any of them. Palestinians are accordingly represented for the public as nameless masses. Emotions are only saved for the Israeli sufferings. We do not even know sometimes that some of these Palestinian children were killed on their way to school.

‘It is as though this does not matter anymore. The atrocities become part of the abstraction. This strategy of normalisation of the horror and the exclusion of the human dimension has become part of the enduring policy.’ 24

To be continued…

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