THE WRONG STORY P A L E S T I N E by Greg Shupak

Author:Greg Shupak [Shupak, Greg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: 978-1-68219-129-3
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THREE: ISRAEL DOES NOT HAVE THE RIGHT TO DEFEND ITSELF

News media outlets frequently present outbreaks of large scale violence in Palestine-Israel in terms of “Israel’s right to defend itself” This narrative says that whatever Israel may be guilty of, the state is justified in using military force to respond to Palestinian attacks. Framing Palestine-Israel in terms of Israeli security conceals how Israel initiates the vast majority of violent exchanges with the Palestinians. Media narratives about “Israel’s right to defend itself,” moreover, mislead readers by ignoring the permanent violence of Israel’s colonization of Palestine and the aggressive pursuit of ethnic supremacy that this colonization entails.

For example, a June 7, 2014 New York Times editorial on the Palestinian unity deal, the collapse of which helped precipitate that summer’s war, suggests that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had good reason to say that Israel would not negotiate with a Palestinian government that includes Hamas.1 The editors write that Hamas is “committed to Israel’s destruction. Gaza militants regularly fire rockets into Israel; in 2012, Hamas fought an eight-day war with Israel.” This sentence suggest that Hamas has no right to engage in a war with Israel, even when Israel initiates it, as was the case in the 2012 fighting. In contrast, the sentence implies that Israel does have a right to carry out a war against Hamas and the rest of the Palestinians affected by such actions. The Times goes on to describe Hamas’ “heavily armed militia” as a barrier to resolving the Palestine-Israel question but makes no similar comment about Israel’s vastly more powerful military arsenal, which includes nuclear weapons. In this editorial, the legitimacy of the colonizer’s violence is unquestioned whereas the violence of the colonized is presented as illegitimate.

Similarly, the Times’ July 19, 2014 editorial says that Israel “sent tanks and ground troops into Gaza to keep Hamas from pum-meling Israeli cities with rockets and carrying out terrorist attacks via underground tunnels.”2 In this passage, the editors unquestioningly amplify Israel’s rationale for its ground incursion into Gaza. Israel, in this conception, is merely defending itself from Hamas’ violence, even though Israel initiated that summer’s fighting and even though the UN3 would later find that “during the period under examination, the tunnels were only used to conduct attacks directed at IDF positions in Israel in the vicinity of the Green Line, which are legitimate military targets”. The editors then write:

There was no way Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was going to tolerate the Hamas bombardments,

which are indiscriminately lobbed at Israeli population centers. Nor should he. As President Obama said on Friday, “No nation should accept rockets being fired into its borders, or terrorists tunneling into its territory.” Well over 1,000 rockets have fallen on Israel since July 8, and they have reached farther than ever, threatening Tel Aviv and beyond. Only two Israelis have died (a civilian was killed by mortar shells from Gaza as he distributed food to soldiers near the border on Tuesday, and an Israeli soldier may have been

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