Nodutdol . e*News
February 2009
The Occupation Will Not Be Televised: On the Latest Attacks in Gaza
By Betsy Yoon
Times Square: Nodutdol at a January 3 rally to end occupation and the attacks on Gaza
To those familiar with the history of Palestine, the latest Israeli attacks on Gaza are at once shocking and depressingly familiar. The shock comes from the consistent failure of the international community and media to cover the continued repression of Palestinians and the history of the land in an accurate way, and the familiarity comes from the fact that Israel launches these “defensive” offensives with regularity.
My involvement with Palestine began in earnest in 2006, while I was living in Korea. At that point I had not been involved with any organizations and had come to knowledge of Palestine in a purely academic way. This all changed when the 2006 Israeli attack on Lebanon prompted me to seek out local organizations that were active in opposing Israeli regional oppression, and I found my way to Palestine Peace Solidarity (팔레스타인평화연대 http://www.pal.or.kr). Weekly study sessions on one particular aspect of the occupation were conducted, and we either participated in demos as an ally organization or organized events on our own.
While my limited Korean language abilities curbed my involvement and understanding of this organization, its commitment to researching actual conditions on the ground stood out to me as a clear need: to challenge the dominant discourse that has built up around Palestine with facts. But even more so than this group of dedicated Korean nationals, United States citizens need to be aware of our government’s complicity in the occupation of Palestine and of the history leading up to today. What’s more, as progressive Koreans, we are well acquainted with the ability of the dominant discourse to warp facts and selectively tell history in order to delineate the moral victor and the immoral, vanquished, enemy. As with many parts of the Third World, parallels between one people’s conflict and occupation can be drawn to others, and serve as vehicles for solidarity.
This history and context is nowhere to be found in mainstream media such as the New York Times, which can be attributed to a number of factors. The first is simply the disproportionate number of Israelis who speak for their country on the op-ed page as compared to the number of Palestinians who are given voice. (However, literature on this topic is not difficult to find, and a good starting point is Edward Said’s Covering Islam.) The second is that while people such as Dennis Ross (who worked with Clinton in his failed bid to establish peace in the Middle East) emphasize context, such context is often selective and begins when the speaker chooses. For despite Ross’s constant exhortations to remember context, he portrays the occupation as an intractable conflict, wherein two equal parties, or even a besieged Israel, are fighting over a piece of land.
There is always a starting point when choosing to combat disinformation. For this article, I have chosen some facts about the Oslo accords. I begin here because Oslo is relatively recent in the history of the conflict and sets some dangerous precedents for all peace agreements thereafter. The full text of the first Oslo accord can be found at http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Peace/dop.html.
Legacies of the 1993 Oslo Agreement
Essentially the 1993 Oslo agreement was simply a declaration of principles upon which both parties could agree, as well as a setting of interim arrangements for redeployment (not withdrawal) from unspecified areas of the West Bank. The central issues of the occupation—namely Jerusalem, refugees, settlements, borders, sovereignty, and water—were postponed for the so-called final status negotiations that would take place in 1996 (Edward Said). During the interim phase between the two Oslo agreements, Israel and Palestine were supposed to work together in the interests of peace. However, during this period, the Palestinians saw their lives only get progressively worse, as Israel expropriated more than 70,000 acres of land, doubled its settler population (100,000 new settlers), and constructed 250 miles of bypass roads (Sara Roy). (A fuller detailing of how Israel used the interim period to establish facts on the ground in preparation for round two can be found in Sara Roy’s Failing Peace: Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict).
The second set of Oslo agreements then divided the West Bank into three zones, whose effects were outlined by Edward Said in The End of the Peace Process (all figures below are therefore 2002 figures). Zone A would be a Palestinian-only area, which constitutes 17.2% of the land area of the West Bank (remember that the West Bank is only a certain percentage of the 23% of historical Palestine). Zone B, which constitutes 28% of the West Bank, would be under the joint control of the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli military. Zones A and B combined held a population of 1.1 million Arabs. Meanwhile, Zone C, the all-Jewish settler area, has the large majority of the land area, with 59% of the West Bank, for a population of 140,000 Israeli settlers.
(source: http://www.ccmep.org/delegations/maps/palestine.html)
According to Sara Roy, by 1999, Zones A and B constituted 277 separate areas in the West Bank, 199 of which are less than 2 kilometers squared, such that all Palestinians live within 6 kilometers of Israeli-controlled, Jewish-only areas. This is only one of the many ways in which the Occupied Territories have been legally integrated with Israel by Oslo to the point that the idea of a separate Palestinian state, if all previous agreements are upheld (a condition of negotiations the United States and Israel insist on), would be impossible. For example, if the Israeli settlers and the Israeli-only areas remain, how can there be a viable Palestinian state, when the furthest you can retreat from your borders is 6 kilometers?
The way forward? National and local predictions
Once the context is established, it is still difficult for people to agree on the appropriate solution, and there are divisions among the progressive community on the way forward. Al-Awda NY: the Palestine Right To Return Coalition, profiled in this month’s newsletter, advocates the right of return for all Palestinians. This advocacy of a people’s basic right to return to their homes is today considered a radical position. As seen above, successive “peace accords” have pushed the discourse on what is acceptable for the Palestinians to demand until today Palestinian demands on the right of return, on Jerusalem, on maintaining the 23% of their land that they have left to be contiguous and Israeli settlement-free, are seen as too ambitious and unrealistic, when in fact these are concessions that many consider to be unacceptable (including Jews United Against Zionism, found at http://nkusa.org/). It is instead the Israelis who are given the right to demand, as they demand that Palestinians accept the groundwork laid by previous “peace” accords, including both Oslos I and II, as they demand that Palestinians accept colonialists—today known as settlers—on their land, as they demand that Palestinians accept less than 23% of their land, and acquiesce to the apartheid wall that makes incursions far beyond the 1967 borders in what has been commonly recognized by the international community as a land grab.
In addition to Al-Awda NY, local students have formed a coalition called the General Union of Palestine Students, which organizes on local campuses here in New York. In response to the latest attacks, several community organizations have united to form the Break the Siege on Gaza Coalition-New York (a full list of endorsers can be found at http://www.bsg-ny.org/). The coalition has held regular town hall meetings open to anyone in the community, where attendees break into several committees and strategize. Examples of committees are the Grocer’s Committee, the Mother’s Committee, and the Civil Rights Committee. The focus of the Civil Rights Committee at the moment is advocating the case of the Palestine 9, the group of nine Palestinian youth arrested at a January 11, 2009 rally for Gaza in New York City.
The new Obama administration has prompted mixed feelings in those who advocate the right of the Palestinians to self-determination. It is difficult not to be moved at seeing a person of color in the top office of the United States, but it is hard to reconcile that optimism with both the political reality of US politics today and with Obama’s actions in particular. In a panel at Columbia University, scholars on the Middle East gathered to assess Obama and the Middle East. With one exception, the general mood of the panel was “cautiously pessimistic.” Professor Richard Bulliet pointed out elements of Obama’s inauguration speech—such as his repeated invocation of war and the claim that the United States will reach out its hand if the rest of the world unclenched its fist—as extensions of the ideological problems that drove the Bush administration. He spoke skeptically of the appointment of Dennis Ross as Obama’s point person on Iran, and called him a “lawyer for Israel.” Bulliet, whose area of expertise is Iran, also speculated that the reasons for these latest attacks on Gaza, which had been planned eight months ago before the breaking of any ceasefire, was due to the US not permitting an attack on Iran.
In addition, Professor Gil Anidjar pointed out that the United States cannot expect to be seen as an honest broker of peace if it continues to send “billions of dollars [in military aid] to the Israelis,” and that it was disingenuous for US officials to wonder why the two could not get along. If the structural elements underlying these relationships do not change—from the continuation of US military aid to a genuine lack of understanding of the Middle East —then there is not much that can be expected of the Obama administration.
As allies to the Palestinian cause, it is clear that the debate on what should happen after Palestinian liberation is achieved is something that should be determined by the Palestinians themselves, and not imposed from the outside. Therefore, while the heated debate on one-state or two-state solutions or whether that state should be a democratic or socialist state is important, drawing lines at this stage only obscures the need for a united front and of the right of the Palestinians to self-determination.
Finally, let’s not allow the momentum achieved in this past month to disappear simply because the spectacle of daily bombings has left the public eye—the Palestinians still suffer daily, with or without these attacks, and the slow, internationally sanctioned strangulation of the Occupied Territories cannot be allowed to continue unnoticed. As we push for a peace treaty and an end to war on the Korean peninsula, we should not forget the continued oppression of our allies in Palestine and around the world.
Times Square: Nodutdol at a January 3 rally to end occupation and the attacks on Gaza
To those familiar with the history of Palestine, the latest Israeli attacks on Gaza are at once shocking and depressingly familiar. The shock comes from the consistent failure of the international community and media to cover the continued repression of Palestinians and the history of the land in an accurate way, and the familiarity comes from the fact that Israel launches these “defensive” offensives with regularity.
My involvement with Palestine began in earnest in 2006, while I was living in Korea. At that point I had not been involved with any organizations and had come to knowledge of Palestine in a purely academic way. This all changed when the 2006 Israeli attack on Lebanon prompted me to seek out local organizations that were active in opposing Israeli regional oppression, and I found my way to Palestine Peace Solidarity (팔레스타인평화연대 http://www.pal.or.kr). Weekly study sessions on one particular aspect of the occupation were conducted, and we either participated in demos as an ally organization or organized events on our own.
While my limited Korean language abilities curbed my involvement and understanding of this organization, its commitment to researching actual conditions on the ground stood out to me as a clear need: to challenge the dominant discourse that has built up around Palestine with facts. But even more so than this group of dedicated Korean nationals, United States citizens need to be aware of our government’s complicity in the occupation of Palestine and of the history leading up to today. What’s more, as progressive Koreans, we are well acquainted with the ability of the dominant discourse to warp facts and selectively tell history in order to delineate the moral victor and the immoral, vanquished, enemy. As with many parts of the Third World, parallels between one people’s conflict and occupation can be drawn to others, and serve as vehicles for solidarity.
This history and context is nowhere to be found in mainstream media such as the New York Times, which can be attributed to a number of factors. The first is simply the disproportionate number of Israelis who speak for their country on the op-ed page as compared to the number of Palestinians who are given voice. (However, literature on this topic is not difficult to find, and a good starting point is Edward Said’s Covering Islam.) The second is that while people such as Dennis Ross (who worked with Clinton in his failed bid to establish peace in the Middle East) emphasize context, such context is often selective and begins when the speaker chooses. For despite Ross’s constant exhortations to remember context, he portrays the occupation as an intractable conflict, wherein two equal parties, or even a besieged Israel, are fighting over a piece of land.
There is always a starting point when choosing to combat disinformation. For this article, I have chosen some facts about the Oslo accords. I begin here because Oslo is relatively recent in the history of the conflict and sets some dangerous precedents for all peace agreements thereafter. The full text of the first Oslo accord can be found at http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Peace/dop.html.
Legacies of the 1993 Oslo Agreement
Essentially the 1993 Oslo agreement was simply a declaration of principles upon which both parties could agree, as well as a setting of interim arrangements for redeployment (not withdrawal) from unspecified areas of the West Bank. The central issues of the occupation—namely Jerusalem, refugees, settlements, borders, sovereignty, and water—were postponed for the so-called final status negotiations that would take place in 1996 (Edward Said). During the interim phase between the two Oslo agreements, Israel and Palestine were supposed to work together in the interests of peace. However, during this period, the Palestinians saw their lives only get progressively worse, as Israel expropriated more than 70,000 acres of land, doubled its settler population (100,000 new settlers), and constructed 250 miles of bypass roads (Sara Roy). (A fuller detailing of how Israel used the interim period to establish facts on the ground in preparation for round two can be found in Sara Roy’s Failing Peace: Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict).
The second set of Oslo agreements then divided the West Bank into three zones, whose effects were outlined by Edward Said in The End of the Peace Process (all figures below are therefore 2002 figures). Zone A would be a Palestinian-only area, which constitutes 17.2% of the land area of the West Bank (remember that the West Bank is only a certain percentage of the 23% of historical Palestine). Zone B, which constitutes 28% of the West Bank, would be under the joint control of the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli military. Zones A and B combined held a population of 1.1 million Arabs. Meanwhile, Zone C, the all-Jewish settler area, has the large majority of the land area, with 59% of the West Bank, for a population of 140,000 Israeli settlers.
(source: http://www.ccmep.org/delegations/maps/palestine.html)
According to Sara Roy, by 1999, Zones A and B constituted 277 separate areas in the West Bank, 199 of which are less than 2 kilometers squared, such that all Palestinians live within 6 kilometers of Israeli-controlled, Jewish-only areas. This is only one of the many ways in which the Occupied Territories have been legally integrated with Israel by Oslo to the point that the idea of a separate Palestinian state, if all previous agreements are upheld (a condition of negotiations the United States and Israel insist on), would be impossible. For example, if the Israeli settlers and the Israeli-only areas remain, how can there be a viable Palestinian state, when the furthest you can retreat from your borders is 6 kilometers?
The way forward? National and local predictions
Once the context is established, it is still difficult for people to agree on the appropriate solution, and there are divisions among the progressive community on the way forward. Al-Awda NY: the Palestine Right To Return Coalition, profiled in this month’s newsletter, advocates the right of return for all Palestinians. This advocacy of a people’s basic right to return to their homes is today considered a radical position. As seen above, successive “peace accords” have pushed the discourse on what is acceptable for the Palestinians to demand until today Palestinian demands on the right of return, on Jerusalem, on maintaining the 23% of their land that they have left to be contiguous and Israeli settlement-free, are seen as too ambitious and unrealistic, when in fact these are concessions that many consider to be unacceptable (including Jews United Against Zionism, found at http://nkusa.org/). It is instead the Israelis who are given the right to demand, as they demand that Palestinians accept the groundwork laid by previous “peace” accords, including both Oslos I and II, as they demand that Palestinians accept colonialists—today known as settlers—on their land, as they demand that Palestinians accept less than 23% of their land, and acquiesce to the apartheid wall that makes incursions far beyond the 1967 borders in what has been commonly recognized by the international community as a land grab.
In addition to Al-Awda NY, local students have formed a coalition called the General Union of Palestine Students, which organizes on local campuses here in New York. In response to the latest attacks, several community organizations have united to form the Break the Siege on Gaza Coalition-New York (a full list of endorsers can be found at http://www.bsg-ny.org/). The coalition has held regular town hall meetings open to anyone in the community, where attendees break into several committees and strategize. Examples of committees are the Grocer’s Committee, the Mother’s Committee, and the Civil Rights Committee. The focus of the Civil Rights Committee at the moment is advocating the case of the Palestine 9, the group of nine Palestinian youth arrested at a January 11, 2009 rally for Gaza in New York City.
The new Obama administration has prompted mixed feelings in those who advocate the right of the Palestinians to self-determination. It is difficult not to be moved at seeing a person of color in the top office of the United States, but it is hard to reconcile that optimism with both the political reality of US politics today and with Obama’s actions in particular. In a panel at Columbia University, scholars on the Middle East gathered to assess Obama and the Middle East. With one exception, the general mood of the panel was “cautiously pessimistic.” Professor Richard Bulliet pointed out elements of Obama’s inauguration speech—such as his repeated invocation of war and the claim that the United States will reach out its hand if the rest of the world unclenched its fist—as extensions of the ideological problems that drove the Bush administration. He spoke skeptically of the appointment of Dennis Ross as Obama’s point person on Iran, and called him a “lawyer for Israel.” Bulliet, whose area of expertise is Iran, also speculated that the reasons for these latest attacks on Gaza, which had been planned eight months ago before the breaking of any ceasefire, was due to the US not permitting an attack on Iran.
In addition, Professor Gil Anidjar pointed out that the United States cannot expect to be seen as an honest broker of peace if it continues to send “billions of dollars [in military aid] to the Israelis,” and that it was disingenuous for US officials to wonder why the two could not get along. If the structural elements underlying these relationships do not change—from the continuation of US military aid to a genuine lack of understanding of the Middle East —then there is not much that can be expected of the Obama administration.
As allies to the Palestinian cause, it is clear that the debate on what should happen after Palestinian liberation is achieved is something that should be determined by the Palestinians themselves, and not imposed from the outside. Therefore, while the heated debate on one-state or two-state solutions or whether that state should be a democratic or socialist state is important, drawing lines at this stage only obscures the need for a united front and of the right of the Palestinians to self-determination.
Finally, let’s not allow the momentum achieved in this past month to disappear simply because the spectacle of daily bombings has left the public eye—the Palestinians still suffer daily, with or without these attacks, and the slow, internationally sanctioned strangulation of the Occupied Territories cannot be allowed to continue unnoticed. As we push for a peace treaty and an end to war on the Korean peninsula, we should not forget the continued oppression of our allies in Palestine and around the world.
This article originally appeared in the February 2009 issue of Nodutdol eNews.
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About Nodutdol eNews
Nodutdol eNews is the monthly e-mail newsletter of Nodutdol.Through grassroots organization and community development, Nodutdol seeks to bridge divisions created by war, nation, gender, sexual orientation, language, classes and generation among Koreans and to empower our community to address the injustice we and other people of color face here and abroad. Nodutdol works in collaboration with other progressive organizations locally, nationally and internationally as part of a larger movement for peace and social change.
In this issue
Ally Profile: Al-Awda NY, the Palestine Right to Return Coalition
Let’s Talk about Peace: Discussion with Korean Reunification Experts
Candlelight Vigils Again: Yongsan Tenant Tragedy in Korea
The Occupation Will Not Be Televised: On the Latest Attacks in Gaza
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