The crimes of Western governments are sowing dragon’s teeth in the whole Arab world
February 2006
It is impertinent of Western governments and pundits to criticise the democratic decision by the people of Palestine to evict the governing party and replace it with Hamas. Those same powers who have financed and suppported Israel as it dismembered the living body of Palestine, should recall the bitter words of the great German poet Brecht, hurled at another violent and unjust regime faced with revolt, that "it would be easier / To dissolve the people / And elect another."
The West refuses to concede ' Palestine 's right to exist' in secure borders: Israel eats away at what is left of Palestine daily. For Israel and Tony Blair, Arabs do not merit the same rights as Israel.
The Hamas victory is directly related to Western governments' contempt for international law, for example in violating the ruling of the International Court that Israel's vast ghetto-building project in Occupied Palestine - known as the Wall - must be dismantled. The British government works to undermine the ruling of the Court, which ruled that every government adhering to the World Court must act to bring about the dismantling of this ghetto system, the "Wall".
The West also refuses to countenance a nuclear-free or WMD-free Middle East, insisting on Israel having massive arsenals of H-bombs and other WMDs. Hamas has not invaded any foreign countries or killed tens of thousands of civilians. Israel has. It begs the question, who has the right to call whom a terrorist!
The Palestinian popular will has emerged as a roar of defiance, even under the guns of their tormentors, and with millions scattered voteless around the world by Israel 's past ethnic cleansings. These people will not be "dissolved," as the Zionist project envisages; they are continuing to resist in the face of overwhelming odds, against the complicity of Western and Arab goverments in Israel 's ongoing ethnic cleansing. Palestinians have shown that they are not a people to be despised, nor pitied, nor to be violated. Bush and Blair and their allies are sowing dragon's teeth.
Only somone lost to all human decency can fail to be inspired by a people in mortal danger every day of their lives, who are living through yet another nakba (catastrophe,) yet who refuse to kiss the whip of their racist occupiers and discover yet again fresh reserves of ability to resist. Only one unable to remember the history of last week could forget that the Israelis have always refused to negotiate with the natives they found and despised and violated, treating them as merely another dark-skinned people, far below the level of European whites. The Zionists always refused to negotiate with Arafat, or, which is exactly the same thing, agreed to negotiate interminably as long as they could steal land and water and deepen the hold of their apartheid system during every day that the "negotiations" charade went on.
Every corrupt Arab government is weakened by such courage in the face of the local superpower: unpredictable emotions and fresh dreams of escape from their own debased conditions are even now flowing from Palestine to millions of Arabs groaning under their own police regimes. Those police who do the bidding of their pro-American princes and monarch-presidents may soon begin to be unreliable when they see the people of Palestine defy overwhelming naked power. They can see: they have Al Jazeera while we are fed state-acceptable versions of reality by the bulk of the British media.
They can see that Israeli killings of children and adults continues almost daily. A nine-year old girl, Aya-Al Astal, was shot dead by Israeli snipers yesterday, possibly friends of the same child-killing Israeli captain who killed Iman Al Hams, a terrified 13-year old the soldiers thought was ten. Captain R's words were played on Israeli TV saying that "even a three-year-old, needs to be killed".
Walled up in ghettoes, killed like dogs by an illegal 38-year old Israeli occupation, the indomitable people of Palestine have shown a brutal soldiery and ruthless generals that they are still determined to resist their dehumanisation.
Who the Palestinians choose to represent them is entirely their affair. If the violations suffered by the Palestinian people had been heaped upon us, we hope we would show a fraction of the courage shown in Gaza and Jenin. Our task remains the same; to deliver solidarity by building a movement of boycott, disinvestment and sanctions against Israel until it is forced to end the illegal occupation, and treat Arabs as full human beings.
The PSC campaigns in solidarity with the Palestinian people as a whole and does not endorse in any way any particular political faction in Palestine or the refugee diaspora. We maintain a distance from, and establish practical and informational links pragmatically with, all Palestinian political groups in or out of office.
Mick Napier
February 2006