{"id":4018,"date":"2013-05-25T17:15:00","date_gmt":"2013-05-25T14:15:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2024-12-14T18:59:39","modified_gmt":"2024-12-14T16:59:39","slug":"epalestine-mondoweiss-why-palestine-is","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/epalestine.ps\/sambahour\/2013\/05\/epalestine-mondoweiss-why-palestine-is\/","title":{"rendered":"Mondoweiss: Why Palestine is different"},"content":{"rendered":"

READ ONLINE AT:  http:\/\/bit.ly\/why-palestine-different<\/a><\/p>\n

May 25, 2013<\/p>\n

Why <\/span><\/strong>Palestine<\/span><\/strong> is different<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Sam Bahour<\/p>\n

Secretary of State John Kerry is making an all-out effort to restart peace negotiations between Israel and Palestine. Many well-intentioned, highly intelligent people from around the world have engaged in some way, shape, or form in the Palestinian-Israeli issue and many of these people have had hands-on experience in resolving other longstanding, global issues, like those of Ireland, South Africa, and U.S. civil rights. While there is always a great deal to learn from other global experiences, the case of Palestine is different and unless Secretary Kerry recognizes this, all the efforts and millions of dollars being thrown at this conflict will be in vain, as will the latest U.S. negotiations blitz.<\/p>\n

Three issues related to this conflict that are crucial to understand are: historic guilt, colonial responsibility, and the U.S. \u201cspecial relationship\u201d with Israel.<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s global powers bear a tremendous amount of historic guilt, not only, as is popularly believed, for the anti-Semitism their ancestors practiced against Jews. This was very real throughout the 19th and 20th centuries \u2013 and earlier \u2013 and it was rampant in mainly white, Christian European places like Germany, Poland, France, Austria, and, yes, even in the U.S.<\/p>\n

But these countries should also understand their historic responsibility for making the Palestinians pay for European and American crimes. Their guilt vis-\u00e0-vis Jews has hobbled their objectivity and skewed their capacity to see the acts of Israel for what they have been, and continue to be: crimes against humanity.<\/p>\n

Long before the Holocaust, the political ideology of Zionism charted a path towards ethnically cleansing Palestine from its native Muslim and Christian Palestinian population, aiming to create what was dubbed a \u201cJewish State.\u201d This colossal, historic injustice of dispossessing Palestinians is no longer a point of contention: even Israeli historians have meticulously documented this fact.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, many of those same global powers, led by the U.S., were born out of a colonial history that displaced indigenous populations. As such, these powers see the Israeli enterprise as very similar to their own and find it difficult to hold Israel accountable for fear that this will then boomerang on them.<\/p>\n

Thus, instead of seeing the Palestinian-Israeli conflict for what it really is \u2013 ongoing colonialism \u2013 these powers prefer to frame the conflict as one in which the parties have equally valid, competing narratives that require a partition of the land. And meanwhile, as they remain transfixed on this outdated partition paradigm, they can offer no explanation as to why their respective governments allowed the reality on the ground to gradually render this solution unfeasible.<\/p>\n

Ever since the New York Times<\/em> headline of May 14, 1948 – \u201cZIONISTS PROCLAIM NEW STATE OF ISRAEL\u201d \u2013 the U.S. has taken sides in this conflict, arming, funding, diplomatically covering for, and politically and militarily planning with Israel in its determination (always camouflaged in euphemisms) to ethnically cleanse Palestine.<\/p>\n

Israel worked hard to cast the U.S. support in cement. Israeli leaders understood very well the inherent weaknesses of an open political system and wasted no time in creating a pro-Israel lobby that transformed what is supposed to be a foreign affairs issue into a U.S. domestic issue. Israel\u2019s domestication of the U.S. political scene \u2013 courtesy of American proxies \u2013 is alive and well today; just ask newly appointed Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel.<\/p>\n

U.S. president Barack Obama epitomizes this reality. During his recent trip to Israel, he visited the Yad Vashem (Holocaust Museum) to declare that Israel\u2019s future existence and security as a \u201cstrong Jewish state\u201d would ensure that there will never be another holocaust.<\/p>\n

What did he mean? Was the idea to imply that if Israel, as a \u201cJewish state,\u201d ceased to exist (like other states with a racially-based raison d\u2019etre, such as the U.S. prior to the Civil War or South Africa during its Apartheid era), then Jews in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, would be slaughtered?!<\/p>\n

Adding insult to injury, Obama then did a huge favor to Israel\u2019s right wing by going outside official protocol to lay a wreath on the tomb of Theodor Herzl, the founder of the political ideology of Zionism.<\/p>\n

Through his actions, intentionally or otherwise, Obama gave credence to the \u2018right\u2019 of a Jewish state in Palestine, while ignoring the indigenous people of Palestine \u2013 including Christians, Muslims and even some Jews \u2013 upon whose ruins the Israeli state was built. Palestinians are still struggling for survival in the face of an ethnic cleansing campaign that began more than 65 years ago and is still going on.<\/p>\n

Indeed, Palestine is different, really different. A more basic and more relevant issue than artificial partition is still waiting to be seriously addressed: Is Israel to be a state of all its citizens\u2014Jewish and non-Jewish\u2014or not? The answer to this question goes to the heart of Zionism\u2019s racially-based enterprise and opens the way to a historic reconciliation and a homecoming of Palestinian refugees to what is today called Israel.<\/p>\n

Sam Bahour is a policy advisor of <\/em>Al-Shabaka, The Palestinian Policy Network.<\/em><\/p>\n

Note: First published on Mondoweiss at: http:\/\/bit.ly\/why-palestine-different<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

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READ ONLINE AT:  http:\/\/bit.ly\/why-palestine-different May 25, 2013 Why Palestine is different Sam Bahour Secretary of State John Kerry is making an all-out effort to restart peace negotiations between Israel and Palestine. Many well-intentioned, highly intelligent people from around the world have engaged in some way, shape, or form in the Palestinian-Israeli issue and many of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","iawp_total_views":1,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[642,422,40,1387,421,179,1275],"ppma_author":[936],"class_list":["post-4018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-anti-semitism","tag-barack-obama","tag-israeli-occupation","tag-jews-and-judaism","tag-john-kerry","tag-palestinian-refugees","tag-zionism-zionists"],"authors":[{"term_id":936,"user_id":4,"is_guest":0,"slug":"sambahour","display_name":"Sam Bahour","avatar_url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/bca109c333bf6d8ae807746dd512adde46265d37c923f6cd0fc4aab437f8e9aa?s=96&d=mm&r=g","author_category":"1","first_name":"Sam","last_name":"Bahour","user_url":"https:\/\/epalestine.ps\/sambahour","job_title":"","description":"Sam Bahour (\u0633\u0627\u0645 \u0628\u062d\u0648\u0631) resides in Al-Bireh\/Ramallah, Palestine. He does business consulting as Applied Information Management<\/a> (AIM), specializing in business development with a niche focus on the information technology sector and start-ups.\r\n\r\nBahour was instrumental in the establishment of two publicly traded firms: the Palestine Telecommunications Company (PALTEL) and the Arab Palestinian Shopping Centers (APSC). He is Co-founder & Emeritus Member of Americans for a Vibrant Palestinian Economy<\/a> (A4VPE) and until recently served as an independent Director at the Arab Islamic Bank P.L.C. and a board member at Just Vision<\/a>.\r\n\r\nHe writes frequently on Palestinian affairs and has been widely published in leading outlets. He is co-editor of HOMELAND: Oral History of Palestine and Palestinians<\/a><\/em> (Olive Branch Press, 1993), tweets at @SamBahour<\/a>, and blogs at epalestine.ps.<\/a>"}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/epalestine.ps\/sambahour\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/epalestine.ps\/sambahour\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/epalestine.ps\/sambahour\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epalestine.ps\/sambahour\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epalestine.ps\/sambahour\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4018"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/epalestine.ps\/sambahour\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4018\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/epalestine.ps\/sambahour\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epalestine.ps\/sambahour\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epalestine.ps\/sambahour\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4018"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epalestine.ps\/sambahour\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=4018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}