Nidal al Haddad
On March 24, the United Nations Human Rights Commission adopted a resolution condemning Israel's assassination of Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmad Yassin. Thirty-one countries represented on the commission, including UN Security Council members China and Russia, voted for the resolution. Only two countries (Australia and the US) voted against, while 18 (including Britain and France) abstained.
The elderly quadriplegic was killed by missiles fired from an Israeli helicopter gunship on March 22 as he was been wheeled out of a Gaza City mosque after early morning prayers. Several bystanders were killed in the attack.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who has been indicted in Belgium for war crimes over his responsibility for the deaths of thousands of Palestinian civilians during the Sabra and Chatilla massacres of 1982, personally supervised the assassination.
The day after the assassination, Israeli defence minister Shaul Mofaz declared that Israel will continue its policy of assassinations of Palestinian leaders â euphemistically termed "targeted killings" or "liquidating terrorists".
Since the current Palestinian intifada (uprising) against Israel's illegal occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza Strip began in September 2000, the Israeli military and armed Israeli settlers have killed 2490 Palestinian civilians, including 558 children. The vast majority of these victims have died in their homes, place of work or study.
Israel has confiscated Palestinian land, bulldozed Palestinian homes, razed Palestinian fields and uprooted more than 220,000 trees. It is building a concrete wall deep inside Palestinian territory, cutting villages from their fields, students from their schools and dividing towns.
The occupying Israeli army restricts Palestinians' freedom of movement, forcing Palestinians to submit to repeated searches and identity checks at numerous military checkpoints in order to travel through the West Bank. Pregnant Palestinian women being rushed to hospitals have died after being forced to give birth at these military checkpoints.
The World Bank has identified curfews and checkpoints as the primary cause of Palestinian poverty. Unemployment in the Gaza Strip is as high as 80% and at least 14% of Palestinian children suffer from malnutrition. Three-quarters of Palestinians live at or below the UN declared poverty line of US$2 per day.
Most of the mainstream media has focused on Sheikh Yassin's support for "terror", even comparing him to Osama bin Laden and Hamas to al Qaida, suggesting that they are all "terrorists" â and, by implication, justified targets for state-organised assassination.
Hamas
Hamas, however, is not a terrorist organisation but a mass-based, Palestinian resistance movement established in 1987 at the start of the first intifada, with the aim of liberating Palestine from the Israeli occupation. According to Hamas, this does not mean the expulsion of Jews from historical Palestine, but the realisation of the right of return for the Palestinians expelled from the towns and villages they lived in before 1948, in accordance with UN General Assembly Resolution 194.
In an interview with New York-based journalist Roger Gaess during May and June 2002 in Gaza City, Sheikh Yassin explained Hamas' position: "All of Palestine is occupied... [My] own best vision for Palestine is of a land for Christians, Jews, Muslims â a state where everyone has equal rights."
Hamas also provides badly needed social services to the people of the Gaza Strip, where Israeli occupation and military assault have shut down schools, hospitals and universities. By contrast, al Qaeda is a loose network of armed fighters from all over the Arab world, first set up by the CIA in the early 1980s to wage war against the Soviet-backed government of Afghanistan.
Al Qaeda lacks a political strategy and clear aims and resorts to attacks on civilians because of its weakness and lack of popular support. It is not fighting a war of national liberation and its struggle is expressed solely in religious terms.
Al Qaeda is partly a reaction to, as well as a justification for, the "clash of civilisations" theory espoused by US leaders to justify their imperialist policy for seeking global hegemony (See the Project for a New American Century at <http://www.newamericancentury.org>).
Sheikh Ahmad Yassin has praised Palestinian suicide bombers and Hamas does carry out armed attacks on Israeli civilians just as Israeli soldiers have deliberately targeted Palestinian civilians.
Suicide bombings result from the hopelessness that many young Palestinians feel confronted by the absolute wretchedness of their conditions of life caused by an intransigent and brutal Israeli occupation.
Palestinian civilians are killed almost every day by the Israeli occupation forces and the Palestinian nation has been denied independence and is forced to live in the most wretched of conditions.
Any condemnation of "terrorism" is rendered meaningless for Palestinians and most other Arabs by the Western world's refusal to oppose the far greater suffering that Israel has inflicted upon the Palestinian people.
Pro-Israel reporting
The Western mainstream news media will always report the devastating effects of an Israeli bus or caf blown up by a Palestinian suicide bomber, with due condemnation by Western political leaders. But we rarely, if ever, see pictures of the young Palestinian girl shot by occupying Israeli soldiers as she walks home from school, or the Palestinian child shot dead in her home by Israeli sniper fire.
The Western mainstream media is unlikely to even report the story of the elderly Palestinian man shot dead in his olive groves for straying too close to an Israeli military checkpoint.
We rarely see pictures of the aftermath of an Israeli missile strike in the middle of the night on a crowded Palestinian apartment building. We hardly ever see reportage of Palestinian land being stolen by Israeli settlers or the Palestinian homes that are bulldozed on an almost daily basis.
We never see pictures of Palestinian children suffering from the effects of malnutrition, or the daily humiliations suffered by Palestinians at Israeli checkpoints.
The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is not war between "two sides"; it is an occupation. Since 1948, Israel has received at least $134 billion in US economic and military assistance (this figure is not adjusted for inflation and in today's US dollars the sum would be far greater). Much of this aid is for the direct transfer of weaponry from the US to Israel.
The Israeli military is one of largest in the world, in relation to the country's total population, and one of its most technologically advanced. Palestinians with rocks and light firearms have to confront the latest tanks, armoured vehicles and helicopter gunships.
Israeli military domination of the Palestinian people is so total that the Israeli army can go into any Palestinian town or city and take its time to bulldoze a home while the people stand by helplessly.
Origins of conflict
The origins of the conflict date back to European colonialism and the World Zionist Congress of 1897, which called for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Britain was the colonial power in Palestine after World War I and supported the Zionists' plan, facilitating the large-scale migration of mainly European Jews to colonise Palestine.
In 1947 Jews were still a minority in Palestine (about a third of the population), and owned only 7% of the land. Yet in the same year, the UN General Assembly voted to partition Palestine, giving 56% of the land to the future State of Israel.
In a campaign that became known to Palestinians as al Naqba ("The Catastrophe"), Zionist military and paramilitary forces expelled more than 750,000 Palestinian civilians from their homes.
The State of Israel was declared on May 15, 1948 on the land conquered by the Zionists â 77% of historic Palestine. The remaining 23% â the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem â was conquered by Israel in 1967 and has remained under occupation since then.
Sheikh Ahmed Yassin was one of the refugees expelled during al Naqba. He was born in 1936 in the village of al Jura, near Ashkelon, on the southern coast of what is now Israel. Al Jura was razed to the ground by the Zionists in 1948 along with nearly 500 other Palestinian villages. Yassin and his family fled to Gaza along with tens of thousands of other Palestinian families.
Since 1948, and particularly after the occupation of the Gaza Strip by Israel in 1967, Palestinian refugees have lived in desperate conditions. Those refugees and their descendants, now numbering more than 1.6 million, are crowded a 45km-long, 5-12km wide, strip of land.
Palestinian refugees, like Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, have been consistently denied the right to return to their homes in what is now Israel. They have been forced into a life of poverty and hopelessness, ruled over and hemmed in by Israel's occupation.
The assassination of Yassin is characteristic of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians, which has always been about making their conditions of life so unbearable that they either leave their land or consent to live in small walled-off bantustans, in a state of permanent economic dependence on Israel.
It is also symbolic of Israel's escalating reign of terror against the Palestinian intifada. Each month since the beginning of this year, the death toll of Palestinians has increased. Thirty-two Palestinians were killed in January, 52 in February, and 44 in the first two weeks of March â with 30 being killed in the Gaza Strip.
[Nidal al Haddad is a member of Sydney's Sawiyan â Palestine Solidarity group.]
From Green Left Weekly, March 31, 2004.
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