Gaza’s Agony and the Anti-Zionists

As international news networks were reporting Hamas’s onslaught against Fatah, I began trawling the internet to see what, if anything, the various pro-Palestinian websites and blogs had to say about the brutal civil war raging in the Gaza Strip.

The short answer: not much.

Over at the Electronic Intifada (EI) commentators were undisturbed by the fragmentation of Gaza into a burning enclave reminiscent of Afghanistan or Somalia. Just at the moment when Hamas was blasting its way towards an intra-Palestinian version of the two-state solution, the talk at EI was of a single state between the Mediterranean and the River Jordan.

When I logged on, EI’s lead item was a speech delivered by a physician from Gaza, Dr. Mona el-Farra, at a seminar to mark “40 years of Israeli occupation”, organized at UN Headquarters by the UN’s Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People. Dr. el-Farra stated that 2007 was, in fact, the 59th year of occupation – in other words, that Israel itself is occupied territory – before listing Israel’s (and only Israel’s) countless crimes against the residents of Gaza. Her remedy? An end to the Israeli occupation and the right of return for Palestinian refugees.

A quick check of the UN’s own record of the seminar confirmed that other speakers, among them representatives of Pakistan, Egypt and South Africa, agreed with her. Only one speaker, from an Israeli NGO, mentioned the human rights abuses which accompanied the factional strife among the Palestinians.

Back on EI, Dr. el-Farra’s point was amplified by Ali Abunimah . In his article, Abunimah yet again regurgitated the “original sin” theory, which holds that the current ills of the Middle East can be blamed on Israel’s existence. An end to the occupation, Abunimah wrote, meant an end to Israel functioning as a “racist ethnocracy”.

It was a similar story at the other websites I visited. I found plentiful denunications of Israeli military operations, a stream of articles about Israel’s “apartheid” character, shrill calls for more boycotts of Israel, but almost nothing on the biggest issue facing every Palestinian resident of Gaza: how to survive the paroxysm of factional violence around them.

What these silences expose is the intellectual poverty and outright bigotry inherent in anti-Zionist ideology. On one level, anti-Zionism is frankly sinister in its insistence that what the Middle East needs most is the removal of Israel from the map. Yet, on a more mundane level, anti-Zionism shares a flaw common to most ideologies, insofar as it doesn’t allow the facts to get in the way of the argument. And the argument only works if Israel is presented as the eternal oppressor.

Consider the issue of targeted assassinations. On the occasions that Israel has struck at known Palestinian terrorists planning attacks upon Israeli civilians, the anti-Zionists have unfailingly unleashed their opprobrium. They talk of international human rights conventions and the death of innocents. They speak of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Seemingly, they apply the universal (the primacy of human rights) to the particular (the plight of the Palestinians).

Except that they don’t. In Gaza right now, targeted assassinations are up close and personal. Eyewitness reports confirm that supporters of Fatah have been executed in front of their wives and children with a bullet to the head. Other unspeakable abuses include a gun battle around a kindergarten in Khan Younis and handcuffed prisoners tossed from tall apartment buildings.

Had Israel committed atrocities on even a fraction of this scale, these websites would be rife with activity. And if the facts aren’t there, an urban myth will suffice. Remember how quickly the false claims of an IDF massacre in Jenin spread in 2002? Or the warnings that Israel would use the war in Iraq to expel the Palestinians en masse? Yet those who eagerly trafficked in such propaganda are mute, or worse, when confronted with the reality of Palestinian suffering brought on by other Palestinians.

Just as dogma dictates when the anti-Zionists should speak out, so it instructs them what they should and should not say. Nothing can be allowed to detract from the narrative which portrays the Palestinians as victims of Zionism.

So when Palestinians attack other Palestinians in contravention of every law of war, it’s either ignored outright or presented as Israel’s doing. One far-left newspaper, the spiritual home of the anti-Israel boycott campaign, actually published an article describing Fatah as a creature of Israeli policy ; when the Electronic Intifada was eventually updated this morning, this claim was echoed by Ali Abunimah . Not so long ago, the same thing was said about Hamas.

Such Orwellian twists shouldn’t surprise anyone. Nor should we be taken aback that Hamas’s bestial actions – “There is no mercy,” one Gaza resident told the New York Times – are not even recognized, let alone condemned. The evident limits for those expressing solidarity with the Palestinians betrays that their campaign is really about something else: declaring, to anyone who will listen, that Israel has no right to exist.