Operations Brothers’ Keeper and
Protective Edge represent the imposition of a regime of warehousing, of
outright imprisonment of an entire people. The seemingly blind and
atavistic destruction and hatred unleashed on the Palestinians over the
past few weeks is not merely yet another “round of violence” in an
interminable struggle. It is the declaration of a new political reality.
The message is clear, unilateral and final: This country has been
Judaized: it is now the Land of Israel in the process of being
incorporated into the state of Israel. You Arabs (or “Palestinians” as
you call yourselves) are not a people and have no national rights,
certainly to our exclusively Jewish country. You are not a “side”
to a “conflict.” Once and for all we must disabuse you of the notion
that we are actually negotiating with you. We never have and never will.
You are nothing but inmates in prison cells, and we hereby declare
through our military and political actions that you have three options
before you: You can submit as inmates are required to you, in which case
we will allow you to remain in your enclave-cells. You can leave, as
hundreds of thousands have done before you. Or, if you choose to resist,
you will die.
Warehousing is worse than apartheid. It
does not even pretend to find a political framework for “separate
development,” it simply jails the oppressed and robs them of all their
collective and individual rights. It is the ultimate form of oppression
before actual genocide, and in that it robs a people of its identity,
its land, its culture and the ability to reproduce itself, it is a form
of cultural genocide that can lead to worse. This is what Israel has
left the Palestinians, this is the meaning of the bombing of Gaza, the
terrorizing of the West Bank – and the ongoing destruction of Bedouin
and Palestinian homes within Israel.
Assuming that apartheid and warehousing
are absolutely unacceptable “solutions” and, indeed, are ultimately
unsustainable, generating even more violence and conflict in the
volatile Middle East, Israel has in fact left us with only one workable,
just and lasting way out: a single democratic state in Palestine/Israel
that guarantees the individual and collective rights of all its
citizens. This is what we must struggle for. Israel’s military
operations mark the beginning of the collapse of the Occupation.
http://mondoweiss.net/2014/07/israels-message-palestinians.html
