Khalil Nakhleh – "How Must We Explain Our Century-old Struggle to a Foreign Audience?"

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This is such a great piece -- please read it all, but below is an excerpt.

Essential Three:

The only way to ensure Palestinian emancipation from this system of occupation, colonialism and apartheid is to work towards establishing a free, democratic, secular and non-racist country in the entire land of historic Palestine, while Israeli Jews embark on self-liberation from the dominant racist Zionist ideology. The cardinal question is this: How to break this vicious cycle of colonial occupation and apartheid, and to expose the various measures of “managing the conflict” as delusionary substitutes for a just, lasting and democratic solution targeting the entire people of the historical land of Palestine? How to really seize the initiative for freedom and democracy? What should be our guiding principles?

To start with, what’s the situation today in Palestine/Israel?

• The status quo on the ground reveals the presence of 3.8 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, about 40% of whom live in, what has been described, an open air prison in Gaza; nearly half a million illegal Zionist colonists (called “settlers”)living in the West Bank; and 1.3 million Palestinians living as a subjugated minority on their land, inside Israel, among nearly 6.0 million Israeli Jews.
  
• At the end of 2008, at least 7.1 million Palestinians, representing 67 percent of the entire Palestinian population (10.6 million) worldwide were displaced persons (6.6 million refugees and 427,000 IDPs). This makes Palestinian refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) the largest and longest-standing case of displaced persons in the world today.
  
• Starting sometime un the late 1980s, “the number of settlements, and even the size of their population, became immaterial because the apparatus of Israeli rule was perfected to such a degree that the distinction between Israel proper[Areas occupied in 1948] and the occupied territories [Areas occupied in 1967]—and between settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and Jewish communities inside Israel—was totally blurred. Similarly, the takeover of land ceased to be chiefly for the purpose of settlement construction and became primarily a means of constricting the movements of the Palestinian populace and of appropriating their physical space”.
  
• “As far as Israeli citizens and their range of interests are concerned, the annexation of the territories is a fait accompli. … The continuation of the status quo creates a quasi-stable situation: the Jewish community, a loose framework of cultures and ethnic tribes in constant tension, is held together by enmity to the Palestinian “Other”, and by a determination to rule them. … Fragmentation became the major tool of Israeli control, to preserve their rule over Israel/Palestine from the river to the sea. … The ruling Jewish community will continue, even when it becomes a minority, to force this split on the Palestinians with the usual carrots and sticks, dictating the agenda, presenting threats, imposing collective punishments and bribery. … The ‘peace process’ serves as a curtain behind which divide and rule is entrenched”.
  
• “They have invented a unique concept of a ‘state’: its ‘sovereignty’ will be scattered, lacking any cohesive physical infrastructure, with no direct connection to the outside world. … The airspace and the water resources will remain under Israeli control. Helicopter patrols, the airwaves, the hands on the water pumps and the electrical switches, the registration of residents and the issue of identity cards, as well as passes to enter and leave, will all be controlled (directly or indirectly) by the Israelis.”
  
• “The status quo will endure as long as the forces wishing to preserve it are stronger than those wishing to undermine it, and that is the situation today in Israel/Palestine.”

• Several factors sustain the current status quo and ensure its survivability. These include the high level of fragmentation of Palestinian society and the ongoing incitement of the fragments against each other; the “mobilization of the Jewish community into support for the occupation regime, which is perceived as safeguarding its very existence”; the sustained funding of the status quo by the so-called “donor countries”, which “frees Israel from the burden of coping with the enormous cost of maintaining the control over the Palestinians and creates a system of corruption and vested interests” ; the ongoing delusion that “negotiations” will end the status quo, thus rendering it a temporary state; and “the silencing of all criticism as an expression of hatred and anti-Semitism”.
• The status quo is characterized by a huge gap in GDP between Palestinians under occupation and the occupying Israelis, of a magnitude of 1:20. “This gap cannot endure without the force of arms … which enforces a draconic control system. … All the economic, social and spatial systems of governance in the occupied territories are designed to maintain and safeguard Israeli privileges and prosperity on both sides of the ‘Green Line’, at the expense of millions of captive, impoverished Palestinians”.

• This status quo is labeled, by Benvenisti, as “de facto bi-national regime” , a term stressing “the total dominance of the Jewish-Israeli nation, which controls a Palestinian nation that is fragmented both territorially and socially.” (For the above quotes, see Meron Benvenisti, “The Inevitable Bi-national Regime”, January 2010).
  

To work strategically on our liberation process, we need to instill an appropriate discourse that embodies our future strategic vision. This discourse should start by purging itself from the language of “two-state solution”, “two states for two people”, “West Bank and Gaza”, “East Jerusalem”, “peacemaking”, “direct or indirect negotiations”, “state building”, “legal or illegal settlements”, etc. Our language should focus on means of resistance to achieve our liberation towards living in a free, non-racist, secular country in the entire land of historical Palestine; on emancipation from occupation and economic dependency; on individual and collective rights; on international law; on responsive and accountable leadership; on self-reliance and productivity; and on the right of all the refugees and displaced persons, who were ethnically cleansed from their homes and country by the Zionist colonial movement, to return to Palestine.