Well, tonight’s the night that the Israeli occupation of Palestine (and Golan) will finally have lasted exactly for ten times as long as the US/UK occupation of Iraq.
If both occupations carry on another 10,783 days (roughly, 29.5 years) then the occupation of Palestine will have lasted twice as long as the occupation of Iraq.
Let’s not even think about that…
I do just hope, meanwhile, that people in the US who prior to 2003 had only the vaguest idea (if any at all) of what rule over another people through foreign military occupation actually involved will now have a more vivid understanding of what is meant when people in the world community talk about “the continuing occupation of Palestine.”
Rule through military occupation is absolutely, and inevitably anti-democratic. It was never envisioned as being a status that would last for anything beyond the few months or very small number of years required to fashion a permanent peace treaty. And of course, the implantation by the occupying power of members of its own citizenry into the land temporarily held under the rules of “belligerent military occupation” is absolutely and quite rightly forbidden under international law.
This is quite understandable if you look at the terrible effects that the settler-implantation projects launched by the German occupiers in East and Central Europe and the Japanese occupiers in China and elsewhere had on the populations of those occupied lands.
At least the US in Iraq (unlike Israel in Palestine and Golan) has not sought to implant its own citizens as settlers in the occupied land. The US “merely”, in an earlier era of the occupation, sought to establish its own domination over the entire economy and political system of the country. But even that project has now been effectively abandoned as unfeasible…
Time to roll back both these military occupations, and give the indigenous peoples of these lands their right to self-determination as fast as possible.
4 thoughts on “Occupations in Palestine and Iraq”
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“Rule through military occupation is absolutely, and inevitably anti-democratic. It was never envisioned as being a status that would last for anything beyond the few months or very small number of years required to fashion a permanent peace treaty.”
And it also was never envisioned that the various representatives of the occupied territory would continue to harbor a rejectionist attitude toward the occupier.
In the case of Israel, blaming the occupation is blaming the symptom.
Yes, Joshua, rejectionist attitudes are a problem, aren’t they? Many, perhaps most, Palestinians currently reject the idea of viable Israeli nationhood; and many, perhaps most, Israelis reject the idea of viable Palestinian nationhood. However, only one of these nations is currently exerting total control over the other, and continuing to maintain an extremely oppressive form of rule over it for nearly 40 years now.
So let’s hurry to find a formulation by which that system of oppression can be ended and both sides live under a system of reciprocal obligations and commitments. And as for people’s attitudes on both sides of the line? They will surely change over time once the structures of oppression and fear have been transformed. (Analogous to what has happened, over time, regarding people’s racial attitudes in the American south, or attitudes between French and Germans once that situation of continuing hostility and repeated invasions etc was definitively brought to an end.)
If, on the other hand, you want Israelis– and Palestinians– to remain trapped in sentiments of fearfulness then I’m sure you will continue your long record of trying to find excuses to avoid talking about the need to end the occupation. JES, at least, has articulated a clear and constructive position on this issue, which gives everything he says here much more credibility and gravitas. But then he, unlike you, actually has a direct stake in the longterm welfare of Israel.
Helena
You will be as surprised as I to hear a ceasefire has been declared in Gaza.
Is this a result of something that Mr Cheney was told in Saudi Arabia over the last couple of days?
Re; Joshua, “never envisioned that the various representatives of the occupied territory would continue to harbour a rejectionist attitude toward the occupier”
This statement leaves me agog. A lot of the problem does indeed stem from representation – the lack unfettered, nurtured, legitimate empowered representation.
After many years of corrupt, but “their” leadership – the PLO, a new democratically elected government is formed. The Occupier promptly rejects it and whips up a vicious campaign of political isolation, economic and psychological warfare, vicious collective punishment for the will of the brutalized people.
I can tell you Joshua, I find it hard to conceive a people who would tolerate such representatives – let a lone find them legitimate. Do you think the peoples of occupied eastern Europe, indeed even many of the poor benighted souls who worked in those post war governments – governments manipulated, overthrown, assassinated, run from Moscow and the Lubyanka, would cotton up to the occupiers?
Do you call those types of government “representative? Some call them Quislings, and hang them in the streets first chance, even though the tanks are coming to re-install the “representatives” anyway. Some fight from the forests and mountains for years until they are slowly wiped out, the rest reduced, subjugated. When the tanks and the secret police leave, or are pushed out, do the occupied sit content with their leadership, their “government”, their old imposed “constitution” – ratified 99.8% year in year out?
And when was/is Israel going to allow democratic legitimate representatives to negotiate an unoccupied, sovereign, free, viable, legal, contiguous state anyway? Never. Also, the occupiers are legally bound to ensure the physical and civil security of the occupied. They agree to pledge to leave, not to continuously expand, expropriate, steal and pillage whatever bits are to their liking, predicated on some biblical inerrantism justified by some millenia old ontological imperative that recognizes no other, but the “other” needed to sustain such a pathology in the occupiers.