Does Palestine Have the Right to Defend Itself?

Joe Biden has gone on the record to declare, like many US presidents before him, that Israel has the right to defend itself. And of course it does! If zombie Hitler rose from the grave to lead an undead Fourth Reich into the heart of Israel to finish the job, then yes, Israel should do its best to save humanity from the zombie Nazis. We would all be counting on them! However, now that 2020 is over and the likelihood of this event has dwindled, we have to look at the cold reality.

Hamas is firing rockets into Israel. That’s obviously a bad thing, so maybe Israel does have the right to retaliate against journalists, and the right to ensure that children are just under one third of all Palestinian deaths. Given that life expectancy in the area is so short that the median age is about 21 years old, it’s just statistically likely that there would be disproportionately younger victims. It’s simple math! But wait! Why is life expectancy so short in Palestine? Now a lot of folks don’t like talking about that because that means you’re bringing context into the conversation. Context would require us to look at what happened before Hamas started firing rockets into Israel, and if we do that, then maybe it doesn’t look so much like defense after all…

What had happened just before the rockets was a police raid on the Al-Aqsa mosque in East Jerusalem. There were a whole bunch of Muslims praying there because, you know, Islam, and it’s the third holiest site of Islam, and it’s the month of Ramadan, so some Muslims wanted to do some praying. At the same time, some Israelis wanted to do some celebrating of Jerusalem Day to commemorate their invasion and occupation of the area back in 1967. Since the mosque is technically owned by the Muslims (though the grounds are patrolled by Israeli forces), the police banned the revelers from the area. They decided to plan their parade anyway. The police opened fire on the Muslim worshippers with rubber bullets, tear gas, and stun grenades; the worshippers were, at most, throwing rocks. If you were wondering, those revelers were still able to enjoy their party as flames leapt over the mosque! It’s not a great look.

East Jerusalem wasn’t bent out of shape for no reason, either. In the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood, Israelis were doing their best to forcibly evict Palestinians from their homes in order to claim them for themselves. It’s not like the Palestinians were behind on their rent or anything; the Israeli settlers just wanted to take their homes. So they did.

We’re trying to look at context, so what’s the context of all this? What happened before? Well it started with the Nakba, or the ‘Catastrophe’, where over 700 000 Palestinians left or were kicked out of their land when Israel first became a thing in 1948. There were likely some atrocities to encourage them to leave, but these are being hidden by Israeli authorities. It’s pretty straight forward really. The British gave Jewish people a homeland thanks to the Balfour declaration, but it’s not like the land they were ‘giving away’ was empty (the British had also promised the land to the Arabs for helping them out with another thing, but you know, who gives a shit I guess?). Also, what’s the morality of a colonial empire ‘giving away’ land that it only ‘owns’ in an exploitative context? Anyway, the whole thing was a shit show, and all the Arabs in the area were kind of pissed for pretty obvious reasons.

In 1967, Israel decided to expand. To give a bit of nuance, a bunch of neighbouring countries were lining up military forces along Israel’s border, and overall tensions in the Middle East were high (the fact that there were hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees roaming around didn’t help, and Arabic countries kept trying to invade Israel to undo the crime they believe had been committed). However, Israel attacked first and attacked hard. To be clear in the context of this blog’s title, defense is not aggression. In about six days, Israel drove beyond its borders, and then annexed a bunch of the land it had invaded. Israel tripled in size at the further expense of the surrounding Arab countryside. This was (and still is) hella illegal under established international law, and the United Nations passed Resolution 242 to point out that you can’t just invade and take people’s land if you’re trying to establish peace in the Middle East. For comparison, when Russia annexed the Republic of Crimea, everybody got mad and imposed a bunch of sanctions even though Russia said that since Crimea was part of the USSR back in 1991 and had been a part of Russia since about 1783, it was entitled to have it back. Israel claims that because Jewish stories talk about a holy land, they have similar entitlement. I wonder if there’s a movement to sanction Israel, or at least boycott or divest investments…

I’m not a historian, and I don’t advise utilizing this blog as any kind of historical education. There is much more to this story, and Israel arguably became a much safer country for its citizens after the 1967 expansion. The issue isn’t really related to traditional geopolitical affairs, but much more the creation and expansion of an ethno-state. Jews have what’s called a Right of Return that allows any diasporic Jewish person to easily immigrate to Israel; the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians that were displaced during its creation do not because Israel is a democracy and they don’t want non-Jewish voices influencing their political decisions. The overwhelming desire is to maintain a Jewish ethno-state. As an example, in 2018, it was enshrined in law that only Jews have a right to self-determination in Israel; Arabs in Israel, who also lost the official recognition of their language in the same bill, apparently do not. Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip have no political voice whatsoever in Israel, despite Israel maintaining militarized checkpoints and controlling imports throughout the region.

This control manifests in many harmful ways. Checkpoints limit Palestinian ability to go to the hospital, go to a school outside of one’s ‘zone’, attend a funeral, whatever you can think of, because these checkpoints involve navigating hostile military police that can occasionally prove fatal. Israel also controls the water supply of Palestine and deprives them of this life-sustaining liquid. Israel actually illegally takes water out of Palestine to supply its own citizens. Palestinians only receive the aid that Israel allows, and with restrictions on fishing and lack of water, the food supply doesn’t do too well either. With Covid, despite Israel leading the world by having vaccinated 60% of its population, Palestinians aren’t doing nearly that well. They’re at about 5%. The conditions are so bad that the United Nations predicted that the land would be “uninhabitable” by… actually, according to their predictions, it already is.

Palestinians quite frequently rise up against Israel. They’re doing it right now, even, as I write this. Israel’s policy usually involves what is called “mowing the lawn“: when Palestinians get a little too uppity, the Israeli military will just come in and kill a whole bunch of them until they quiet down again. Even when Palestinians are protesting peacefully and unarmed, Israeli soldiers have been documented cheering on a sniper using them for target practice (the unit was reprimanded for taking a video, not for shooting unarmed protesters, if you were wondering). This ‘self-defense’ results in really disproportionate harms.

Palestinians aren’t too keen on all that stuff I mentioned above (and more – remember this isn’t an exhaustive blog), and Israel doesn’t want to give up its ethno-state. Really, it wants to keep expanding its illegal settlements into Palestinian territory to manifest the shit out of its destiny. Options are often framed as a binary between one and two-state solutions, but another, less discussed option is the perpetuation of a status quo that involves the gradual annexation of the surrounding territory and expulsion/extermination of the Palestinians living there.

The world is trying to establish a degree of accountability. The International Criminal Court (ICC) is seeking to investigate potential war crimes committed by Israel when they were “mowing the lawn” back in 2014 (see statistics above). Hamas will also be investigated, but again, the statistics point to fairly disproportionate moral responsibility. The UN routinely attempts to condemn and interrupt Israel’s more pernicious behaviour, but the United States keeps stepping in to veto them. They’re even doing it again for the current crisis – 53 vetoes and counting! The Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) movement calls for non-violent intervention against Israel in a manner comparable to the successful international intervention that ended South African apartheid. However, in the United States, they’ve legislated against this kind of protest across the country, some places requiring professionals to sign an oath to never support the BDS movement lest they lose their job. In Canada, we’ve used our hate speech laws to stifle the BDS movement here at home as well. Elected Israeli officials offer no support either, and ‘alternate Prime Minister‘ Benny Gantz zealously seeks to develop illegal settlements with equal vigor to Benjamin Netanyahu. Israeli settlements in occupied territory are illegal under the 4th Geneva Convention. According to Human Rights Watch, what Israel is doing amounts to apartheid, but nobody ever seems able to do anything about it! Is firing rockets into Tel Aviv the best solution? Probably not, but the options available are quite limited.

Israeli violence against Palestinians cannot be considered defensive because it is an occupying colonial state – any violence is inherently an enforcement of its own hegemony. Even if Palestinians, or Hamas, or whomever, were to attack without ‘provocation’ which might necessitate ‘defense’, it’s hard to truly condemn insurrection based on the context of its evolution. We don’t cheer the explosion of Alderaan just because rebel forces might have attacked imperial storm troopers at a check point. Typical watchings result in rooting for the rebels.

To finish off, I’d like to quickly go over some of the counter arguments that I’ve seen in defense of Israel:

“Don’t you get it? Israel needs to bomb schools, hospitals, residential apartment buildings, media offices, and critical infrastructure because that’s where Hamas is hiding all their weapons and terrorists!!” The evidence that’s provided by the Israeli military about where Hamas might be holding its WMDs is often quite dubious. But let’s say for the sake of argument that the average, non-combatant citizen is so sympathetic to the Palestinian cause that they’re willing to let Hamas store weapons in the schools where children go to learn their ABCs (or the Arabic equivalent). Hamas is accused of using civilians as human shields, that’s part of the ICC investigation described above. Are people consenting to this? What does it say about the occupation that there are so many collaborators hidden among the Palestinian population? Maybe the depths that people are willing to go to resist Israel’s apartheid isn’t the slam dunk argument you think it is.

“Why does the left support Palestine?! Muslims hate gays, and the left LOVES the gays!! They’re all terrorists and Israel is doing what it can to keep order in a land filled with terrorists!!” Ah, I see you have chosen… racism. Demonizing a group of people as bogeymen to justify violent oppression against them is bad. No group is a monolith, and it’s quite dehumanizing to categorize them as such: hence, racism. Funny thing about racism, though: Israel is actually used as a template by some far right white supremacists for the ‘handling’ of minorities. The idea of an ethno-state is quite palatable to racists everywhere, and Israel certainly fits that bill. You can just ask Richard Spencer.

“Palestine wasn’t even a place when Israel was created! It was Syria and Jordan! It’s not their land!!” It was a territory of the British called Mandatory Palestine. Palestine has a long history of being associated with the region even if it was never established as an independent nation. It’s essentially irrelevant though: are you suggesting that they moved there from these other countries? Pretty sure the whole ordeal arises from the fact that these people were already there when was Israel was created, completely irrespective of what they were called. The problem doesn’t change! Let’s say they were truly stateless, does that mean they deserve the treatment they’re getting now? This one boggles my mind because like, this group doesn’t deserve dignity because the name doesn’t align with your understanding of history?

“You’re just being anti-Semitic! Why do you hate Jews so much!?” This is an obscenely common refrain when criticism of Israel arises, regardless of context. It’s offensive because it equates Judaism with the modern state of Israel (remember from earlier that no group is a monolith?). Plenty of Jewish organizations and individuals reject Israeli oppression. Hell, I would even go so far to say that criticism of Israel doesn’t even need to be considered anti-Zionist. Some Zionists need their Messiah to arrive before Israel can be founded, and see the secular institution of the nation as outside of their religious beliefs. Some Zionists don’t even recognize the current incarnation as a state!

Israel is in the midst of more lawn maintenance. What Palestinians are doing is fighting for their lives. This isn’t a ‘conflict’, or whatever milquetoast term some news organizations will use to try to be ‘neutral’ in their headlines, because that implies equitable forces on both sides. It’s a violent enforcement of apartheid being resisted by a group that doesn’t have many good options. Questions of ‘defense’ and ‘rights’ are often heavily loaded. When we look at all the context, the question shouldn’t involve such abstractions at all. What we should really be asking is: do Palestinians have the right to be alive?