It's the Settlements, Stupid!

How to prevent injury to Israeli life & limb in the West Bank? It's really, really simple. Just pack your bags and go:

"What makes [the option of unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied Territories] so significant is that it is instantly available to Israel and has been, at any time, for years. It requires no negotiations, no change in Palestinian attitudes, no trust, and no improvement in the effectiveness of the Palestinian Authority. An Israeli major in the Israeli armored corps showed an appreciation of the situation when he said that:

'Make no mistake, Israel has no other reason for remaining in the Occupied Territories than to preserve the existing settlements, even when they are deep within Palestinian centers of population. Maybe the Palestinians are not interested in peace - one of the most commonly heard justifications for our recent invasions - and truly want to push us into the sea. Even then, we would be much better off defending ourselves from the 1967 borders rather than from inside the narrow alleys of Jenin, Ramallah, and Bethlehem. This is why I think that the occupation runs against the most basic interests of the state of Israel, even to the extent of threatening its very existence'.

"The political difficulties involved in getting Israelis to accept the proposal are irrelevant to its viability: they simply mean that Israel may not choose it, and that decision would remain Israel's responsibility. As for the settlers, they pose no problem at all: they can either leave or fend for themselves. Colonial history suggests, moreover, that settlers are not nearly so fierce in their resistance to displacement as they would like themselves and others to believe. This has proven to be the case throughout sub-Saharan Africa and in Algeria. There, despite a large, heavily-armed and well-organized underground movement, settler opposition collapsed when, in 1962, the French government opened fire on a settler demonstration, killing 80 and wounding 200. Presumably, overcoming settler opposition would not require such drastic measures in Israel.

"It is sometimes alleged that complete withdrawal from the Occupied Territories is 'impracticable' because the facts on the ground are too deeply entrenched: Israeli settlements are just too extensive and important to uproot. One can hardly take this seriously. If it was 'practicable' for hundreds of thousands of stateless Palestinians to leave their homes, why is this impracticable for half as many Israeli citizens in far more comfortable and peaceful circumstances? Throughout modern history, from the waves of US immigration to the peaceful post-World War II population transfers, there have been far greater shifts than this movement of a few miles. In many cases, if the settlers prefer, they can simply return to their homes in the United States. 'It's impracticable' seems here a stand-in for 'Aw, gee, these towns are too nice to let the Arabs have them'.

"The significance of the withdrawal alternative is not that it represents a just solution. Arguably, justice would require much more than that - not only the abolition of Jewish sovereignty in Israel but a full right of return, with compensation, for the Palestinians, and the eviction of Jewish inhabitants occupying Palestinian property. But the existence of the withdrawal alternative effectively completes the case against Israel. Its willful and pointless rejection of that alternative places Israel decisively in the wrong.

"In the first place, Israel has a right of self-defense, but it does not apply in the Occupied Territories. If the US invaded Jamaica and dotted it with settlements, neither the settlers nor the armed forces could invoke any right to defend themselves against the Jamaicans, any more than a robber who invaded your house. So it is with Israelis in the Occupied Territories. Their right of self-defense is their right to the least violent defensive alternative. Since withdrawal (perhaps followed by fortifying their own 1948 border) is by far their best and least violent defense, that is all they have a right to do.

"In the second place, since Israel can withdraw at will and close its border, Israel can put an end to virtually all the violence. That violence is occasioned by the settlement policy, which is Israel's sole reson for the occupation. Since that occupation has no defensive or strategic rationale, Israel has no good reason to prolong it. Since Israel is willfully pursuing an unjustifiable strategy that it can end at no cost, it is responsible for all the consequences of that strategy. It follows that all the violence, and all horrors of the occupation, are to be laid at Israel's doorstep." (The Case Against Israel, Michael Neumann, 2005, pp 138-140)

Gaza's Ellie Lintons

Watched ABC Television's Q & A last night. At one point, John Marsden, "Australia's favourite teen lit author" (according to Q & A's website), was discussing his novel Tomorrow, When the War Began, in which a band of Australian teenagers, led by heroine Ellie Linton, take on an unnamed invading force: "I wrote the book," explained Marsden, "to show that today's teenagers are not unemployable, illiterate, drunken, drug-taking layabouts but are in fact capable of great things - of nobility, of heroism, and intelligence."

When fellow panellist, Sophie Mirabella, Shadow Minister for Early Education, Women & Youth, was asked by compere Tony Jones what she thought of Ellie as "a role model for Australian girls," the polliewaffle responded: "I think it's great. Having a strong, athletic girl engaging in guerilla warfare to defend her nation, it's great stuff." And who could possibly disagree with her?

Except that Sophie has an entirely different perspective when it comes to young men and women in certain other countries engaging in guerilla warfare to defend their nation. In fact, she calls them terrorists.

She did exactly that in a speech in the House of Representatives on 17/9/07 when she spoke of "Palestinian terrorists infiltrat[ing] Israel's sovereign border from the Gaza Strip on 25 June 2006, attack[ing] an army post inside Israel's sovereign territory and kidnapp[ing] Corporal Gilad Shalit into Gaza." Conversely, she described Shalit and his fellow troops in glowing terms: "These young men - husbands, students, cherished members of a family, with their lives ahead of them - were merely serving their active duty within Israel's borders and have now been denied their basic human rights." And she went on to call on the Australian government to "exert pressure on the terrorist organisations involved in the abduction" for Shalit's release.

You see, when it comes to Israel and the Palestinians, this otherwise enthusiastic defender of those who engage in guerilla warfare to defend their nation against an invading and occupying force not only sides with the latter but is even prepared to use her position and status as a federal MP to spruik on its behalf.

Of course, this incredible volte-face on behalf of an invading and occupying power can only be achieved by ignoring the history and underlying dynamics of the Zionist colonization of Palestine. The moment the Zionist settler movement, aided and abetted by British imperialism, gained a toehold in Palestine, the indigenous population was on notice. The aim of the Zionist movement - the creation of a Jewish state, run by Jews for Jews, controling as much of Palestine as could be acquired by hook or by crook - presented the locals with the starkest of choices: defend your country from the invader or allow him to usurp your patrimony. In the words of Canadian philosopher Michael Neumann, "[t]he Palestinians faced an immediate, concrete mortal threat: the Zionists were there, among them, growing stronger daily, inviting them to submit to Jewish sovereignty or depart. Moreover, they had good reason to believe that the Zionists wanted to dispossess them entirely, over the whole of Palestine." (The Case Against Israel, 2005, p 86)

The proverbial crunch, of course, came with a vengeance in 1948, when the ancestors of those Palestinians now engaging in guerilla warfare in the Gaza Strip were ethnically cleansed from their towns and villages in southern Palestine (what Sophie lawyerly describes as "Israel's sovereign territory") and forced to flee in the direction of Gaza as the Zionist invaders occupied their homes and lands and barred forever their return. And it is their children, and their children's children, the Ellie Lintons of Gaza, who have been engaging in guerilla warfare ever since, resisting, from their tiny pocket of Palestine, the periodic assaults of the same invader and occupier, and keeping alive the belief that one day they'll return to their homes and lands in usurped Palestine.

Fast forward to the more recent past: Sharon pulled Israeli troops and settlers out of the Gaza Strip in 2005, the better to colonize the West Bank (whilst retaining control of its entry/exit points, and its airspace and territorial waters). The Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank went on, in January 2006, to democratically elect the Palestinian party most committed to guerilla warfare and the defence of their nation. Despite the new Hamas government extending the unilateral truce it had declared 10 months earlier, the Bush government, angered that the Palestinian people hadn't voted for the party of surrender and collaboration instead, insisted that Hamas recognise the invader/occupier, give up guerilla warfare in defence of their nation (or, to use their own words, 'renounce violence') and disarm - that is if it wanted the Bushies to recognise it, talk to it and feed it some peanuts.

Meanwhile, Mahmud Abbas, the leader of the party that had dutifully done those very things, did his level best to undermine the new government, while the US, Israel, and the EU (all historical and present practitioners of invasion/occupation) slapped economic sanctions on Gaza to punish its Ellie Lintons for daring to vote for Hamas.

Seeing these measures only hardened the resolve of Gaza's people and their government to resist, the invading/occupying power set out to do the job itself:-

On 9/6/06, Jamal Abu Samhadana, the Hamas Interior Ministry head, was murdered in an Israeli air strike. On the same day, Israeli shells wiped out all but one of the Ghalia family who had been picnicking on a Gaza beach. Naturally, Hamas called off its 16 month truce. Then, on 24/6/06, Israeli troops raided Gaza and kidnapped 2 brothers (Mustafa and Osama Muammar) after beating their father to a pulp. This prompted a joint raid by guerillas of the Izzadin al-Qassam Brigades and the Popular Resistance Committees on Shalit's army post, in which, besides his capture, 2 Israeli soldiers were killed and 4 wounded. When Hamas demanded the release of Palestinian women and children detained in Israeli prisons in exchange for Shalit, the Israelis responded by rounding up and detaining Hamas officials in the West Bank, including ministers and legislators, shelling Gaza's borders, and bombing government buildings, bridges, roads, power plants and other infrastructure throughout the Strip.

The dispossessed Palestinian 'terrorists' who'd captured Shalit, indeed whole generations of Palestinians, would surely have no trouble whatever in relating to the thoughts of Marsden's heroine, Ellie Linton: "Overnight they'd pulled the roof off our lives. And after they'd pulled off the roof, they'd come in and torn down the curtains, ripped up the furniture, burnt the house and thrown us into the night, where we'd been forced to run and hide and live like wild animals. We had no foundations, and we had no secure walls around our lives any more. We were living in a strange, long nightmare, where we had to make our own rules, invent new values, stumble around blindly, hoping we weren't making too many mistakes. We clung to what we knew and what we thought was right, but all the time those things too were being stripped from us."

Avnery's Apology: A Critique

Taking the Canadian Prime Minister's recent parliamentary apology to the indigenous people of Canada as his cue, veteran Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery has followed his problematic essay 1948 (see my 1/6/08 post, Uri Avnery: A Critique) with an equally problematic stab at an official Israeli apology (An Apology, 14/6/08) to the Palestinian people:-

"We recognize the fact that we have committed against you an historic injustice, and we humbly ask your forgiveness. When the Zionist movement decided to establish a national home in this country... it had no intention of building our state on the ruins of another people. Indeed, almost no one in the Zionist movement had ever been in the country before the first Zionist Congress in 1897, or even had any idea about the actual situation here."

Avnery at least appears here to concede that there is no meaningful distinction between "national home" and "state." The contrary has, of course, been argued by legions of Zionist propagandists. The notion that the early Zionists were prepared to settle for anything less than a Jewish state has, however, been decisively refuted by Canadian philosopher and author of The Case Against Israel, Michael Neumann: "Could pre-Israel Zionism be understood as the quest for a homeland as opposed to a state?" he asks. "Was this to be a scattering of Jewish homes and farms, or a Jewish country with its own army, police, and government?" Neumann's evidence leaves us in no doubt. To quote just 3 of his many authoritative statements (pp 23-30):

1) "The founder of Zionism, Theodore Herzl, had already in 1896 written an essay called 'Der Judenstaat'. In it, he said, 'The Idea which I have developed in this pamphlet is a very old one: it is the restoration of the Jewish state... Let the sovereignty be granted us over a portion of the globe large enough to satisfy the rightful requirements of a nation, the rest we shall manage for ourselves'."

2) "Max Nordau, Herzl's vice-president at early Zionist congresses, wrote in 1920 that: 'I did my best to persuade the claimants of the Jewish state in Palestine that we might find a circumlocution that would say all we meant, but would say it in a way that would avoid provoking the Turkish rulers of the coveted land. I suggested 'Heimstatte [homeland] as a synonym for state... It was equivocal but we all understood what it meant... to us it signified Judenstaat and it signifies the same now'."

3) "Here is Walter Laqueur's account: 'When a Zionist delegation appeared on 27 February 1919 before the Supreme Allied Council, Weizmann was asked by Lansing, the American secretary of state, what exactly was meant by the phrase 'a Jewish national home'. Weizmann replied that for the moment [my italics] an autonomous Jewish government was not wanted, but that he expected that 70 to 80 thousand Jews would emigrate to Palestine annually. Gradually a nation would emerge which would be as Jewish as the French nation was French and the British nation British. Later, when the Jews formed the large majority, they would establish such a government as would answer to the state of the development of the country and to their ideals'."

But when Avnery claims that "the Zionist movement had no intention of building our state on the ruins of another people," it is hard to take him seriously. Assuming that the early Zionists went about their business of agitating for a homeland/state in Palestine without being aware of the grave implications their project held for the majority indigenous Palestinian Arab population defies belief.

Theodore Herzl, the 'father' of political Zionism, was certainly wise to the matter, writing in his diary in 1895: "We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our country. The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly. Let the owners of immovable property believe that they are cheating us, selling us things for more than they are worth. But we are not going to sell them anything back. The voluntary expropriation will be accomplished through our secret agents. The Company would pay excessive prices. We shall then sell only to Jews, and all real estate will be traded only among Jews." (Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, I, 51)

Typically, however, as Israeli historian Benny Morris points out in his discussion of the idea of transfer (the Zionist euphemism for ethnic cleansing) in Zionist thinking, the leaders of the movement tended to be forthcoming only in private*. (The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, p 41)

That the logic of the Zionist push for a sovereign Jewish state in Palestine meant that the Palestinians, absent an effective campaign of resistance, were doomed to dispossession, must surely have exercised the minds of all concerned, colonists and colonized alike. Neumann again: "Certainly it was possible that the Zionists would settle for less than all of Palestine. It was possible they would not forcibly transfer the indigenous population; it was just barely possible that, somehow, Zionism would be abandoned altogether. But there was no basis for supposing any of these outcomes likely. Nor could it be assumed that even a territorial compromise could be obtained without catastrophe... Indeed, the Palestinians could look at all of modern European history from the 17th century religious wars to the year of the Balfour Declaration as a record of failed territorial compromises. When settlers move into an inhabited area, territorial compromises are all too often mere pauses in a savage process of dispossession. This was apparent at the time. The rise of Zionism coincided with the last bloody stages of just such a process in the American West. Significantly, the American settler's progressive and very violent displacement of the native inhabitants was not some grand scheme thought out in advance. At many points in the story, the settlers seemed to have got all they wanted. But successful settlement and increasing immigration brought new usurpations. Enough was never, it seemed, enough. Even if the Zionists had never dreamed of taking all of Palestine from the Palestinians, it would have been foolish to suppose that they would not come to do so, bit by bit. The prospect of a Jewish state, therefore, posed a mortal danger to the Palestinians, a prospect of ethnic subjugation and very likely of what is now called ethnic cleansing." (pp 45-46)

As improbable as it sounds, Herzl and others may have entertained fantasies that the Palestinian Arabs could simply be bought out, but the Zionist movement's first Likudnik, Vladimir Jabotinsky, put paid to such nonsense in 1923: "Compromisers in our midst attempt to convince us that the Arabs are some kind of fools who can be tricked by a softened formulation of our goals, or a tribe of money grubbers who will abandon their birthright to Palestine for cultural and economic gains... Colonization has its own explanation, integral and inescapable, and understood by every Jew and Arab with his wits about him. Colonization can have only one goal. For the Palestinian Arabs this goal is inadmissible... Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population." (See my 12/6/08 post, Pemulwuy in Palestine for a fuller quotation) To this end, Jabotinsky saw the necessity for a successful Zionist colonization to proceed behind an iron wall of bayonets, perhaps British, preferably Jewish. He was adamant that every Jew "with his wits about him" understood the logic of the Zionist enterprise, and that the only question was how to cleanse Palestine of its indigenous population. In fact, even Herzl admitted the need for a Jewish paramilitary corps "in preparation for the struggle against the indigenous population whose land was being systematically occupied." (Diaries, I, 88-89) It was of course Zionist militarism and force of arms, Jabotinsky's "iron wall," that prevailed in 1948. Avnery's depiction of his Zionist forbears as essentially well-intentioned blunderers, therefore, lacks all credibility.

[*David Ben-Gurion, who was later to to preside over the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 and become Israel's first prime minister, continued this venerable Zionist tradition of dissimulation. He is described by Benny Morris as a man who "knew what to say and what not to say in certain circumstances; what is allowed to be recorded on paper and what is preferable to convey orally or in hint." (The New History & the Old Propagandists, Haaretz 9/5/89)]

"The Zionist founders who came to this country were pioneers who carried in their hearts the most lofty ideals. They believed in national liberation, freedom, justice and equality. We are proud of them. They certainly did not dream of committing an injustice of historic proportions."

Lofty idealists? How to square this with the testimony of Zionist moderate, Ahad Ha-Am, who wrote as early as 1891: "They treat the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, deprive them of their rights, offend them without cause, and even boast of these deeds; and nobody among us opposes this despicable and dangerous inclination." Ha-Am was later compelled to ask, "Is this the dream of a return to Zion which our people have dreamt for centuries: that we now come to Zion to stain its soil with innocent blood?" He scathingly described Avnery's pioneers as "a small people of new Levantines who vie with other Levantines in shedding blood, in desire for vengeance, and in angry violence? If this be the 'Messiah', then I do not wish to see his coming." (Quoted in The Zionist Mind, Alan R Taylor, p 103)

Or take the findings of the shelved 1919 report, Recommendations of the King-Crane Commission with Regard to Syria-Palestine and Iraq. US President Woodrow Wilson, who believed that the wishes of the population concerned should be the determining element in the choice of a mandatory power, had sent Henry King and Charles Crane to take the pulse of both communities in Syria/Palestine. Finding that Lord Balfour, in his famous 1917 declaration favouring 'the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people', 'it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine', had gone too far, they called for "the extreme Zionist programme" to be "greatly modified. For a national home for the Jewish people is not equivalent to making Palestine into a Jewish State; nor can the erection of such a Jewish State be accomplished without the gravest trespass upon the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine. The fact came out repeatedly in the Commission's conferences with Jewish representatives, that the Zionists looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine, by various forms of purchase." This was for public consumption. It was left to the British interviewees to reveal the elephant in the room: given the intensity of the indigenous opposition to unlimited Jewish immigration, "No British officer, consulted by the Commissioners, believed that the Zionist program could be carried out except by force of arms."

Nor did Ha-Am's "new Levantines" improve with the advent of a leadership "obsessed"* from the 30s on with the idea of forced transfer of the Palestinians (Morris, Haaretz, 9/5/89) - a leadership who even managed to convince themselves that it was "just, moral and correct,"** who hatched and implemented (in April, 1948) Plan Dalet ["a strategic and ideological anchor and basis for expulsions"***] , and who "understood at every level of military and political decision making that a Jewish state without a large Arab minority would be stronger and more viable both militarily and politically."****

[*Morris, Haaretz, 9/5/89; **Morris, 1948 & After: Israel & the Palestinians, p 43; *** Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, p 63; **** Morris, 1948 & After, p 22]

Avnery's idea of "a solution that may not fulfill all justified aspirations nor right all wrongs, but which will allow both our peoples to live their lives in freedom, peace and prosperity" is, of course, the two-state solution: Israel as an apartheid state ("governed by laws of our own making" as he puts it, presumably including those laws which incorporate the distinction between Jews and non-Jews and deny 93% of Israeli territory to non-Jews, Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel and the Palestinian Arab refugees of 1948) on 78% of historic Palestine, and a truncated state of Palestine on the remaining 22% currently occupied by Israel, which he hypes as "... the free and sovereign State of Palestine in all the territories occupied by Israel in 1967, which will be accepted as a full member of the United Nations..." Avnery clings to the stale formula now trotted out by every friend of Israel within coee of a microphone. Meanwhile, the settlements expand, the Jews-only roads snake across the occupied West Bank, and walls and cages spring up around defenceless and impoverished Palestinians faster than than the words 'viable, contiguous and independent Palestinian state' can trip off a politician's lip.

And what of the thorniest problem of all, that of the Palestinian refugees ethnically cleansed by Zionist forces under cover of war in 1948?

We must approach with open hearts, compassion and common sense, the task of finding a just, and viable solution for the terrible tragedy of the refugees and their descendants. Each refugee family must be granted a free choice between the various solutions: repatriation and resettlement in the State of Palestine, with generous assistance; staying where they are or emigration to any country of their choice, also with generous assistance; and yes - coming back to the territory of Israel in acceptable numbers, agreed by us."

Like the two-state solution, Avnery's notion of the refugees exercising a "free choice" of returning to "the territory of Israel in acceptable numbers, agreed by us" is yet another example of his "solution(s) that may not fill all justified aspirations." Despite the fact that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) enshrines the right of all refugees to return and claim their properties (Articles 13 & 17), that the Palestinian refugees have the backing of the UN Charter and international law for their right of return, and that UNGA Resolution 194 calls for precisely that, Avnery is only prepared to go so far.

Sorry, Uri, it's back to the drawing board I'm afraid.

'Confused & Confounded': David Hardaker Takes His Leave

"I think it's fair to say," intoned presenter, Elizabeth Jackson, on Radio National's Correspondents Report, "that some of the best material that has aired on this program has been written and delivered by the ABC's Middle East correspondent, David Hardaker. After nearly 3 years, David is leaving Jerusalem and returning to Sydney to await the arrival of his second child. So, what was he thinking as he packed his bags and headed home?"

On came the familiar voice of David Hardaker. What he had to say left me shaking my head:-

He began by musing on the theme of justice. A friend had "ventured the view that what happened to Hamas after it won the Palestinian elections seemed so unjust. Unjust. She was, of course, talking about the international effort to make it impossible for Hamas to govern, given that they're defined as a terrorist group, even though they won the election. But the word 'unjust', suddenly it seemed to be an alien concept. I don't think I've lost my moral compass completely - it's only that, in the ME, words like 'just', 'unjust', 'justice' seem to have no meaning. " By way of illustration, he talked about Egypt(!), "where I lived for 18 months," and asked, "What's just about studying as hard as you can and doing the best you can, but being denied a job because your family doesn't have any connections?"

Yes, quite unjust, but how, I thought, can being denied the job of your choice be up there with the nonexistent prospects of a typical resident of Gaza who has had both his country and his life stolen (or even taken), just as his father's life, and his grandfather's, right back to the Catastrophe of 1948, had been stolen, and who now finds himself under siege (and undernourished) in the world's largest open-air prison? Another irrelevant story followed, about a wealthy Cairene friend whose light-fingered chauffeur had died in police custody.

The moral? "By the time I got to Jerusalem 'justice' as a concept was on its last legs. I know they say you need moral outrage to be a good journalist. I'm not sure that's the case when it comes to covering the ME. In fact, I think you can end up being outraged all the time, and in the process miss what's going on."

Here was a man who couldn't see the wood for the trees, one who could rattle off one case of personal injustice after the other to the point where he's convinced that the Middle East is a place apart, a morality-free zone. One can see him sipping his lattes in Sydney in the coming months, and telling the old joke about the frog and the scorpion: how the scorpion persuades the frog to carry him across the Red Sea on his back after first promising him that he will not sting him to death, which would mean suicide for them both. Halfway across, the scorpion stings the frog. 'Why did you do that?' asks the frog. 'Now we're both going to die!' 'This is the Middle East', replies the scorpion, as they both descend to a watery grave. Hardaker may not "miss what's going on" on the surface, but he appears to miss an understanding of the underlying dynamics at work in Israel's unrelenting, decades long, no-holds-barred project of wresting Palestine from its indigenous Arab population.

There were cliches: "In the end there's power, and how you can use it to your advantage. There's a great phrase to capture the strange alliances that form in the Middle East, it's 'the best of enemies'. How else to explain a secular government like Syria hosting the leaders of the Islamic Hamas movement, especially when not too many years ago, then president, Hafez al-Assad ordered an operation which killed something like 20,000 members of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas' fellow travellers, just to teach them a lesson. Or how else to explain the sudden transformation of the Palestinian Fatah movement from a group of so-called 'terrorists' to best friends of the US Government? The rise of Hamas has made them the best of enemies."

On Planet Middle East, politics is all about Power, while here in the Real World it's all about Principle, right? And Religion is sooo important that an alliance between Syria and Hamas is inexplicable, even though Israel is breathing down both their necks, right? And that, "not too many years ago" - if Hardaker had done his homework, he'd have known that while Assad was tangling with the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas had yet to be born. As for the Fatah-US alliance, what's so "sudden" about that? Arafat and Fatah had been pinning his hopes on the Dishonest Broker for well over a decade. What did I say about the wood and the trees?

There was homey wisdom: "A Canadian colleague of mine believes 3 years is enough to cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He knows a guy who snapped at the start of his fourth year, he says, because of the lies. An American newspaper couple...is heading out of town after 5 years, feeling tired from it all. Why? 'The lies, the lies, the lies', Craig says. Personally, I don't find all the lying, coming from both sides, to be the problem. For me the difficulty is grappling with the various truths, the multitude of various Palestinian and Israeli groups who are certain that their vision of this land - its past and its future - is the right vision. The big picture of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and indeed the whole Middle East, can be confusing and confounding."

It's all just too hard, isn't it? But is it? Only if your premise, like Hardaker's, is a false equivalence between the two sides. Only if you can't see who's doing the hammering and who's being hammered. Only if you can't see the wood for the trees.

There were platitudes: "There was the time Israeli border guards killed a 10 year-old Palestinian girl who happened to be near a demonstration...Her father just happened to be a former militant, a man who once carried a gun, but gave it up to work for peace with a joint Israeli-Palestinian group. It was, as the cliche has it, a cruel irony. But here's what's wonderful: despite what happened, that man swore that the death of his little girl would only make him work harder for peace."

The assumptions, the assumptions! As a "former militant," the Palestinian was once ipso facto a warmongering fanatic, and so, an enemy of peace. Only by giving up the gun could he become a peacemaker. Israelis, of course, are never warmongering militants, they're border guards or soldiers or armed settlers, peacekeepers in fact, and hence peacemakers. What's more, these trigger-happy (but peacekeeping) folk not only get to keep their guns, but can even shoot the children of reformed Palestinian militants without running the risk of being seen as warmongering militarist bullies by the 'confused and confounded' Hardakers of the international media.

That the Palestinians have little option but recourse to violence seems far from obvious to Hardaker. Given that they are up against a ruthless enemy who will only get off their case if they give up their rights and pack their bags, they will, as Canadian philosopher, Michael Neumann, correctly points out, "continue to choose, sometimes violence, sometimes nonviolence, most often a mixture of the two. They will presumably base their choices, as they have always done, on their assessment of the political realities. It is a sort of insolent naivete to suppose that, in their weakness, they should defy the lessons of history and cut off half their options. The notion that a people (in any sense of the word) can free itself literally by allowing their captors to walk all over them is in historical terms a fantasy. In short, the Palestinians had to use violence of some sort: it might not work, but there was at least some historical precedent for it working." [The Case Against Israel, p 135]

When one listens to hacks such as Hardaker, it is well to recall the words of veteran BBC correspondent, Tim Llewellyn: "Since the Palestinians began their armed uprising against Israel's military occupation three years and eight months ago, British television and radio's reporting of it has been, in the main, dishonest - in concept, approach and execution. In my judgement as a journalist and Middle East specialist, the broadcasters' language favours the occupying soldiers over the occupied Arabs, depicting the latter, essentially, as alien tribes threatening the survival of Israel, rather than vice versa. The struggle between Israel and the Palestinians is shown, most especially on mainstream bulletins, as a battle between two 'forces', possessed equally of right and wrong and responsibility. It is the tyranny of spurious equivalence." [The Observer, 20/6/04]

For what it's worth (not very much in my opinion, obviously), Hardaker's farewell to this can of worms may be found at: http://www.abc.net.au/correspondents/content/2008/s2152829.htm