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The victory of defeat

category mashriq / arabia / iraq | imperialism / war | non-anarchist press author Sunday July 19, 2009 20:00author by Jonathan Cook - Electronic Intifada Report this post to the editors

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.

A version of this article originally appeared in The National, published in Abu Dhabi.
Israel has been moving ahead with creating two Palestinian territories in the West Bank and Gaza Strip who are sinking ever deeper into chronic dependency on Israeli goodwill. (Wissam Nassar/MaanImages)
Israel has been moving ahead with creating two Palestinian territories in the West Bank and Gaza Strip who are sinking ever deeper into chronic dependency on Israeli goodwill. (Wissam Nassar/MaanImages)

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, has been much criticized in Israel, as well as abroad, for failing to present his own diplomatic initiative on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process to forestall US intervention.

Netanyahu may have huffed and puffed before giving voice to the phrase "two states for two peoples" at Sunday's cabinet meeting, but the contours of just such a Palestinian state -- or states -- have been emerging undisturbed for some time.

In fact, Netanyahu appears every bit as committed as his predecessors to creating the facts of an Israeli-imposed two-state solution, one he and others in Israel's leadership doubtless hope will eventually be adopted by the White House as the "pragmatic" -- if far from ideal -- option.

While Israel has been buying yet more time with Washington in bickering over a paltry settlement freeze, it has been forging ahead with the process of creating two Palestinian territories, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, that, despite supposedly emerging from occupation, are in reality sinking ever deeper into chronic dependency on Israeli goodwill.

This is creating a culture of absolute Israeli control and absolute Palestinian dependency, enforced by proxy Palestinian rulers acting as mini-dictatorships.

For a growing number of Palestinians, the conditions of bare subsistence and even survival are Israeli gifts that few can afford to spurn through political activity, let alone civil disobedience or armed resistance. The Palestinian will to organize and resist as their land is seized for settlements is being inexorably sapped.

It is little mentioned but Israel all but abandoned completing its massive separation wall in the West Bank some time ago. There are significant gaps waiting to be filled, but, with things having grown so quiet and the cost of each kilometer of wall so high, the sense of political and military urgency has evaporated.

Suicide bombers, had they the determination, could still slip into Israel. But increasingly Palestinians view such attacks as futile, if not counterproductive: Israel simply wins greater international sympathy and has the pretext to turn the screw yet tighter on Palestinian life.

None of this has been lost on Israel's leaders of either the so-called Left or Right.

Rather than being an aberration in response to rocket attacks, the blockade of Gaza has become Israel's template for Palestinian statehood. The West Bank is rapidly undergoing its own version of disengagement and besiegement, with similar predictable results.

Gaza's blockade -- and the savage battering it took in December and January -- has suggested even to Netanyahu that the Israeli version of the carrot-and-stick approach works.

The stick -- a devastated Gaza unable to rise from the rubble because aid and basic goods are kept out -- has transformed most of the population into a nation dependent on handouts, borrowing where possible to buy necessities smuggled through the tunnels, and concentrating on the lonely art of survival.

As the normally restrained International Committee of the Red Cross reported last month: "Most of the very poor have exhausted their coping mechanisms. Many have no savings left. They have sold private belongings such as jewelry and furniture and started to sell productive assets including farm animals, land, fishing boats or cars used as taxis."

The carrot -- if it can be called that -- is directed towards Gaza's leaders, Hamas, rather than its ordinary inhabitants. The message is simple: keep the rocket fire in check and we won't attack again. We will allow you to rule over the remnants of Gaza.

In the West Bank, the carrot for the leadership is even more tantalizingly visible. The Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas is colluding in the creation of a series of mini-fiefdoms based on the main cities.

Trained by the US military, Palestinian security forces with light weapons are taking back control of Jenin, Nablus, Jericho, Qalqilya, Ramallah and so on, while the PA is encouraged by promises of economic charity to prop up its legitimacy.

The leader of a Palestinian non-governmental organization in Ramallah confided at the weekend that what is being created are "City Leagues" -- a mocking reference to the Palestinian regional militias known as the Village Leagues armed by Israel in the early 1980s to stamp out Palestinian nationalism by threatening and attacking local political activists. Those were a dismal failure; this time Palestinians are less sure Israel will not succeed.

Palestinian prisons are starting to fill not only with those suspected of belonging to Hamas but those who dissent from Fatah rule. The ground is being carefully tended by Israel to create a brutal client state.

The stick, as in Gaza, is directed at the ordinary population. The news headlines are of the easing of movement restrictions at the checkpoints. That may be true at a few places deep in the West Bank. But at the big checkpoints that separate Israel from what is left of the West Bank, such as the one at Qalandiya between Ramallah and Jerusalem, the monitoring of Palestinian movement is becoming fearsomely sophisticated.

These checkpoints are now more like small airport terminals, with limited numbers of "trusted" Palestinians entitled to pass through. To escape the poverty of the West Bank each day to reach manual work inside Israel, they must have a magnetic ID card storing biometric data and a special permit. Cards are denied by Israel not only to those with a record of political activity but also to those who have distant relatives deemed to be politically engaged.

The same non-governmental leader concluded, again with bitter irony: "Our leaders are declaring victory: the victory of defeat."

Should Abbas and his PA functionaries sign up to this Israeli vision of statehood, the defeat for the Palestinians will be greater still.

Verwandter Link: http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10653.shtml
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kurdistan1_3.png imageDefend Kurdistan : statement for the international delegation 04:38 Fri 18 Jun by International Delegation for Peace and Freedom 0 comments

The UCL participated in the European delegation to observe the Turkish war crimes in Iraqi Kurdistan.
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His pretext: to eradicate the PKK, a "terrorist organization" according to the Council of Europe's blacklist.
His strategy: to intimidate European nations, to maintain bombings, military pressure and destruction of crops in Iraqi Kurdistan, to force Mahmoud Barzani's KDP to collaborate openly with him, against its brothers and sisters in Kurdistan.
At the time of publishing this information, the conference of the delegation has been prevented by the KDP, the hotel where it is held is surrounded by the military, and our comrades have been sent back to France after interrogation by the police of the KDP, traitor to the Kurdish cause.

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freedom_for_palestine.jpg imageFreedom for Palestine! 20:02 Fri 14 May by Anarchist-Communist Groups in Oceania 0 comments

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The announcement of Trump that the US would immediately stop aerial bombardments and withdraw their diplomatic personnel, while their troops would all withdraw within 3 months, officially signalled the end of the Syrian war, a war which has been portrayed as a “civil war” but one in which all of the world participated. While major powers, such as Russia, France, the UK, and the US, and regional powers such as Iran, Israel and Turkey participated directly, they had their Syrian proxies to fight against one another. The conflict, in the first place, wouldn’t have erupted without the decisive funding and support given by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Turkey and Jordan to a frightful collection of armed jihadist lunatics.

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imageThe Rojava Revolution defended the world, now the world will defend the Rojava Revolution! Jan 05 8 comments

Embargo, cutting off water sources and air strikes against civilians have been some of the war crimes committed by the fascist Turkish state throughout this year against the revolution in Rojava.

While facing the internal political and economic crisis, the Erdogan government has to accept the failure of the military operations in the mountains of Kurdistan, appealing to the use of chemical weapons, in the face of the resistance of the Kurdish warriors of the revolution.

The intensification of the attacks last October, the flyers launched from the aeroplanes and the recent troop movements threaten a new invasion of the autonomous territories in the North and East of Syria.

At this delicate moment, we want to reaffirm our solidarity with our revolutionary comrades and all the peoples of Rojava and condemn once more the occupation of Rojava, the multiple aggressions and war crimes of the Turkish neo-fascist state and its jihadist allies, as well as their preparations for war.

imageDefend Kurdistan : statement for the international delegation Jun 18 0 comments

The UCL participated in the European delegation to observe the Turkish war crimes in Iraqi Kurdistan.
This delegation is taking place at a time when Erdogan is received at the NATO summit. His formal meeting with Macron does not hide his objective, which is obviously to legitimize his illegal invasion of Iraq, and to obtain from NATO a blank check to continue his military campaign.
His pretext: to eradicate the PKK, a "terrorist organization" according to the Council of Europe's blacklist.
His strategy: to intimidate European nations, to maintain bombings, military pressure and destruction of crops in Iraqi Kurdistan, to force Mahmoud Barzani's KDP to collaborate openly with him, against its brothers and sisters in Kurdistan.
At the time of publishing this information, the conference of the delegation has been prevented by the KDP, the hotel where it is held is surrounded by the military, and our comrades have been sent back to France after interrogation by the police of the KDP, traitor to the Kurdish cause.

textDEFEND KURDISTAN Against Turkish Occupation Jun 18 0 comments

We – nearly 150 politicians, human rights advocates, journalists, academics, members of parliaments, political activists, ecologists, and feminists from all over Europe – have been closely following the dangerous developments resulting from Turkey’s attacks on South Kurdistan (North Iraq) since the 23rd of April 2021. As a result, we have gathered in Erbil today and decided that we must speak out.

imageFreedom for Palestine! May 14 0 comments

Only solidarity between the oppressed people of Palestine and the working classes of the world can end the occupation. We call on the international anarchist movement and all working-class rebels to join us in denouncing the Israeli occupation of Palestine and supporting resistance to it.

imageWe condemn the Turkish state attack and invasion of the Iraqi Kurdistan Jun 25 0 comments

The support and solidarity with innocent people can be done in different ways. It can be through launching complaints, expressing anger and frustration, protests, and demonstrations. The best kind of support and solidarity is boycotting all the goods that are made in Turkey and by Turkish companies wherever they are. Boycotting its media, universities, language colleges and stopping holiday bookings to Turkey. While Turkey has got so many interests in Iraqi Kurdistan the boycott is very effective. Turkey has hundreds of companies plus colleges, shops, factories there, and it is the main country for Kurdish holiday makers. In short Iraqi Kurdistan is one of the main market for the Turkish capitalists and the others. Boycotting Turkey and the Turkish goods can also put pressure on the Kurdistan Reginal Government, KRG, Iraq and the foreign companies to meet people’s demand.

more >>
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