Salomon Bouman 26

Op de website van het Institute of Social Studies in Den Haag kunt u de uitgeschreven toespraken en discussies lezen die op 19 mei van dit jaar plaatsvonden tussen onder andere de Palestijnse intellectueel Omar Barghouti en de Nederlandse zionist en voormalig NRC-correspondent Salomon Bouman. Ik heb hier de toespraak van Barghouti overgenomen:

'Omar Barghouti: Thank you very much for having me here. To be economic, I decided
to write and read. That is the most efficient way in my experience. The title of my paper
is “ending the Nakba, ethical decolonization of historic Palestine”. The idea is to put the
Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger, said Dov Weisglass, Sharon’s
closest advisor a few years ago. Today Israel is in fact slowly choking occupied Gaza to
death. Indeed bringing 1.5 million civilians to the brink of starvation and a humanitarian
catastrophe. Israel is slowly transforming the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, into
cages that make the term “bantustan” sound desirable in comparison. Israel is
systematically causing the slow disintegration of Palestinian society under occupation
through the wall, the colonies and so on and so forth. Israel is slowing turning the lives of
average Palestinian farmers, academics, workers, students, into a living hell designed to
force them to leave. The fundamental objective of Zionism, then, to ethnically cleanse
Palestine of its indigenous population to make room for Jewish settlers, and them alone,
has undergone only one significant change in more than 100 years of Zionist
colonization. It has simply grown slower. While the brutal en masse dispossession and
uprooting of Palestinians similar to what was done by Zionists in 1948 is no longer
practical or pragmatically possible nowadays, a Nakba by any other name is proceeding
before our eyes with deadly precision, persistence and nauseating impunity under the
radar of most of the world. To us, then, the Nakba is not merely about memory and
memorializing. It’s a current reality, lived reality by the indigenous people of Palestine.
And only by de-Zionizing Palestine, only by ending the Nakba once and for all can this
charming, retched, rich, impoverished, peaceful, bloody, inspiring, frustrating place
called Palestine be transformed into a genuinely promising land, not a false promised
land. But why this obsession with Zionism, somebody may ask? Well simply because
Zionism is not simply a racist, exclusivist ideology that has motivated and justified
Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians; it also perpetuates conflict, therefore
negating any possibility of ethical co-existence between Palestinian Arabs and Israeli
Jews. At its core, Zionism has consistently viewed and treated Palestinians as what I call
relative humans who are not entitled to the full set of rights that full humans are entitled
to. This view of the Palestinians derives from a colonial mentality that the Dutch, French,
British are, well, used to in their past colonies. But there is also another factor, a very
fundamentalist view of Jewish law or Halacha has informed this Zionism in ways that we
shall see. I will give a few examples. Rabbi Kook the Elder, the first Ashkenazi Rabbi of
mandate Palestine, wrote the following in the early 20th
century: quote “The difference
between a Jewish soul and the souls of non-Jews is greater and deeper than the difference
between a human soul and the souls of cattle”, end of quote. Analyzing the decisive and
decades-old influence such founding conceptions of gentiles have had on Zionism and on
Israel’s unique form of apartheid, one cannot escape the conclusion that the poisonous
cocktail of settler colonialism, fanatic nationalism and Jewish fundamentalism that define
Israel makes it perhaps the world’s most faithful apprentice of 20th
century European
fascist thought. A few recent examples will help elucidate this point.

On July 30th, 2006 during its war of aggression against Lebanon, Israel committed its second massacre in the
little village of Qana in South Lebanon, killing dozens of children and women hiding in
shelters. The Rabbinical Council of Yesha, the highest religious authority among Jewish
settlers in the occupied Palestinian territory, defended the massacre in an official
statement, saying: quote, “According to Jewish law, during a time of battle and war, there
is no such term as innocence of the enemy; all of the discussions on Christian morality
are weakening the spirit of the army and the nation and are costing us in the blood of our
soldiers and civilians”, end of quote. Before the massacre, Israel’s then Minister of
Justice, Haim Ramon, had advocated indiscriminately bombing southern Lebanese
villages, saying: quote, “All those now in South Lebanon are terrorists”, so it’s okay to
kill them. Israel’s most popular paper, Yediot Ahronot, suggested entirely destroying any
village from which a Kaytusha is fired. Needless to say, there was no Kaytusha fired
from Qana before that massacre. In harmony, leading religious authorities in Israel
provided edicts justifying acts of genocide in Gaza. Last May for example, in a letter
addressed to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, and published in a pamphlet widely
distributed in synagogues all over Israel, former Sephardic Chief Rabbi Mordechai
Eliyahu ruled that there was absolutely no moral prohibition against the indiscriminate
killing of Palestinian civilians during a potential, massive military offensive in Gaza
aimed at stopping the Qassam launchings. According to Jewish war ethics, he explained,
an entire city holds collective responsibility for the immoral behavior of individuals.
Eliyahu’s son, who is the current Rabbi of Safad in the North of Israel, went even further,
advocating the carpet bombing of Gaza: quote, “If they don’t stop after we kill 100, then
we must kill 1000, and if they do not stop after 1000 then we must kill 10,000; if they
still don’t stop, we must kill 100,000, even a million, whatever it takes to make them
stop.” Stop resisting that is. Resonating with such genocidal sentiments, on 29th
February
2008, Israel’s deputy defense minister, Matan Vilnai, threatened Palestinians in Gaza
with a “Shoah”, holocaust. Telling the Israeli army radio: quote, “The more Qassam fire
intensifies, and the rockets reach a longer range, the Palestinians will bring upon
themselves a bigger holocaust because we will use all our might to defend ourselves.” Of
course, he was alluding to Israel’s nuclear capability. Moreover, at the height of Israel’s
reoccupation of Palestinian cities in 2002, some Israeli soldiers used their knives to
engrave the Star of David on the arms of young Palestinian detainees. In the same year, at
several refugee camps, during mass round-ups of Palestinian males of all ages, Israeli
troops inscribed identification numbers on the foreheads and forearms of Palestinian
detainees awaiting interrogation. More recently, the Knesset unanimously, recently
passed a bill prohibiting animal testing in the development of detergents and cosmetics in
Israel, to comply with EU regulations of course. Very serious in Israel. Ironically, the
Israeli army, in collaboration with research centers, universities and manufacturers of
weapons and security systems, has continued unabated its tests on humans, on
Palestinians, especially in Gaza, using this advantage in marketing. [North] American
author Naomi Klein said such field testing treated not only Palestinians as inmates in an
open air prison but also as, quote, “guinea pigs”. Israel may not be unique, certainly it is
not, in using religious fundamentalism to justify colonial greed or racist policies. White
settlers have committed far worse crimes in the Americas, Australia and so on. But, the
difference is, Israel is doing so in the 21st
Century and is being welcomed as an honorary
member of the elite club of western democracies, whatever that means. Instead of being
treated as a pariah state as it should with boycott, divestment and sanctions, as was
applied against apartheid South Africa, Israel is showered with political, diplomatic and
economic benefits from the U.S. and the EU, even in violation of these own countries’
own laws, not to mention international law and universal human rights. This makes the
EU and the U.S. generally complicit in maintaining the only regime on earth that
uniquely claims a right to have ethno-religious exclusivity and apartheid. Only by ending
this form of apartheid, Israel’s three-tiered form of oppression against Palestinian citizens
of Israel, in the occupied Territories and it’s denial of refugee rights – these are three
forms of injustice – only by ending that can a sustainable, just peace be reached. A
secular democratic state in Palestine offers a true chance for ethical decolonization of
Palestine, without turning the Palestinians into oppressors of their current oppressors.
This de-Zionized Palestine – I’m reaching the end – should allow and facilitate the return
of refugees, and their compensation, grant full, equal and unequivocal citizenship to all
its citizens – Palestinian Arabs, including refugees as well as Israeli Jews – finally,
recognize, legitimize and even nourish the cultural, religious and ethnic particularities
and traditions of each respective community. Only thus can we can end the impasse, only
thus can we have ethical decolonization of Palestine, only thus can we truly end the
Nakba. Thank you.'


Lees verder: http://www.iss.nl/HDS-portal/Projects/Israel-Palestine