November/December
2000
Anatomy
of Racism
By Hanan Ashrawi
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Blaming the victim has been
the common resort of the guilty in rationalizing and distorting the
horror of the crime itself. Whether battered wives, abused children,
or Palestinians long subjected to the brutality of the horrendous Israeli
military occupation, the first (and last) resort of the cowardly is
in maligning the victim, in accusing him/her/them of having brought
about the deserved cruelty of the crime. The essential prerequisite,
of course, is the total dehumanization of the victims and the elimination
of their most basic rights and attributes as well as claims to protection.
Inevitably, the resultant compound victimization is further enhanced
by increased vulnerability, distortion, and exclusion from the protection
of human consideration and moral imperatives. Hence, the latest eruption
of confrontations between the Israeli occupation army and civilian
Palestinian
protesters became the playing field for the full force of the Israeli “spin machine” in
a most deliberate, concentrated, and racist exercise of deception and
dehumanization directed against a whole people.
The most basic form of deception is in fabricating a false symmetry
between occupier and occupied, between oppressor and victim. The “violence”
of the powerful Israeli occupation army using live ammunition, tanks
and helicopter gun ships is (at best) equated with the “violence” of
Palestinian civilians protesting their victimization and continued
loss of rights, lands, and lives.
In addition, the Palestinians are called upon to be docile, to stop
the “violence,” to end the “siege” of Israel—as
though the strongest army in the region is being “threatened”
by the unarmed people’s rejection of its occupation and brutality.
The obvious and simple solution, of course, is to withdraw the army
and end the occupation.
This, ironically, is accompanied by a devaluation of Palestinian rights
and lives by translating our objective weakness into a diminution of
rights whereby the powerful determines the parameters of “justice”
for the weak. The whole presentation constantly exhibits the “white
man’s burden” syndrome. Palestinians should be “grateful”
for whatever “generous offer” Israel chooses to “grant” them,
regardless of the glaring injustice and illegality of the Israeli negotiating
stance.
Both the extreme right and extreme left in Israel (as well as the U.S.)
have adopted this condescending, patronizing approach to peace—Israeli
Prime Minister Barak has gone the “farthest” in “offering”
the Palestinians almost 90 percent of their lands with some “responsibilities”
in Jerusalem, and those “ungrateful” Palestinians are being
“intransigent” and hard line. Having compromised ourselves
down to 22 percent of historical Palestine, we are now being asked to
be party to Israel’s illegal annexation of Jerusalem and its settlement
policies—i.e. an unholy partnership for the violation of international
law and the relevant UN resolutions.
Should we be unwilling to self-negate, to refuse the role of good little
natives, and to continue rejecting the Israeli unilateral version of “peace” that “offers” us a subservient statelet
of isolated Bantustans under Israel’s apartheid system, then we
will be pounded into submission. After all, if pressure and threat and
political arm-twisting do not work, sheer naked military aggression
can produce the desired results—since “Arabs understand only
the language of violence.”
Instant scare tactics or panic politics come into play with such labels
as the “terrorist” or “dictatorial” or “violent” Palestinians,
while depicting the reality of the Palestinian human will to resist
subjugation and oppression as proof of such misrepresentations.
A catch-22 situation is clearly visible: Palestinian Leader Yasser
Arafat must “control” his people (nation of sheep?) and “order”
them to calm down and accept their enslavement and repression by the
Israelis, otherwise he is no longer a “peace partner” and
cannot be considered a “leader.” At the same time, Israel
cannot deal with Arafat or the Palestinians because they are inherently
“undemocratic” and therefore have nothing in common with such
“civilized” democracies as Israel and the U.S.
In parallel, other ready-made labels and stereotypical epithets are
easily pulled out as a convenient branding exercise to reduce the humanity
of the Palestinians. The historical and familiar slurs used by Israeli
officials and public figures (including cockroaches, two-legged vermin,
dogs) have been expanded to include “snakes” and “crocodiles.”
The reduction of our humanity to a series of abstractions is nowhere
as sinister as in the numerical game. Palestinian victims of Israeli
live fire are daily given as “x” numbers killed and “y” numbers
wounded. Their names, identities, dashed hopes, and shattered dreams
are nowhere mentioned. Absent too are the grief and anguish of
their mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, and other loved ones who
will have to live with that tragic loss.
The visual documentation of the cold-blooded murder of the child Muhammad
al-Durra shattered the complacency of those who had been comfortable
with the anonymity of the Palestinians and the invisibility of their
suffering. Even then, the Israeli propaganda machine tried to distort
the truth even in the face of irrefutable evidence. First, it was said
that he was killed by Palestinian “gun men.” Then, he was
“caught in the crossfire.” The worst version was in the cynical
depiction of the child Muhammad as a “trouble-maker” or a
“mischievous” child who brought it upon himself—as though
the proper response to a child living his childhood is deliberate death.
The last accusation involved a question: “What was he doing there?”
The real question should have been “what was the Israeli army doing
there” in the heart of Palestinian Gaza shooting at civilians including
a child and his father who had been caught red-handed attempting to
indulge in the “provocative” act of shopping together?
Note the difference, however, when two Israeli undercover agents, belonging
to the notorious Israeli death squads were killed by Palestinian protesters.
No Palestinian attempted to justify the act. Rather, orders were issued
to investigate and arrest those responsible. After all, there should
be such a thing as the rule of law and due process.
Instead, Israel moved its tanks and armies even closer to tighten the
siege and strangulation of Palestinian towns, villages and refugee camps.
Then it brought in its Apache helicopter gun ships and shelled Palestinian
cities and towns in a most senseless and cruel form of collective punishment.
Israel’s version of events presented the Israeli agents as reservists
who had mistakenly “strayed” into Ramallah and then were “lynched”
by the mob. References to “slaughter” and “blood thirst”
and “savagery” became the prevalent verbal currency. While
no one would condone the killing of the soldiers, it is important however,
to deal with the real facts and the context: Ramallah, as a city under
total Israeli military siege, was closed off to all movement in or out
of the city. Only one entrance was open, entirely under the control
of multiple Israeli military checkpoints. Thus to “stray” into
Ramallah would require deliberate and repeated attempts requiring tenacity,
persistence, and even guile.
The two Israeli agents were clearly infiltrated and planted into the
midst of a protest march in the heart of the city. The occasion was
the funeral of a Palestinian man, Issam Joudeh Hamad, from the village
of Umm Safa, who had been abducted by Israeli settlers and tortured
to death in a most grisly manner. Gruesome footage and photographs of
the body, plus the testimony of the doctors who had examined it, were
not repeatedly displayed before the eyes of the world for the sake of
scoring points or dehumanizing the Israelis. Some Arab stations informed
me that the images were so horrific that they refrained from using them.
Most of the people participating in the march (in the besieged Palestinian
city of Ramallah) knew the victim, and some had seen the body. The
two
undercover Israeli agents that had infiltrated the march were recognized
by the Palestinians as members of the “Death Squads” that
had been responsible for assassinations and provocations. Despite the
fact that the Palestinian police tried to protect them, the two were
killed before the cameras. This immediately became an instant justification
for branding all Palestinians as murderers, and for the most systematic,
venomous hate campaign in recent history. It was also used as a justification
for the Israeli aerial attacks on Ramallah and other Palestinian cities.
In his moving appeal to his compatriots (10/13/00) not to exploit this
incident to justify existing racism and hatred, Israeli poet Yitzhak
Laor documents several lynchings of Palestinians by Israeli army and
security forces. In all cases the perpetrators were never punished,
and no moral outrage was expressed by the Israeli public, let alone
a shelling of Israeli cities!
The same applies to the Israeli settler reign of terror that targets
Palestinians in their own homes and towns, with full Israeli military
protection and collusion. Presented as helpless “Israeli civilians”
surrounded by “hostile” Palestinians, the sinister and lethal
nature of settler violence, as armed extremists on the rampage, is
often
ignored. The illegality of Israeli settlements, the fundamentalist
extremist character of the armed settlers, and the horrific acts of
abduction,
torture, killing and just random violence that are committed with impunity,
rarely get a mention. Throughout all this, the Palestinians continue
to be blamed.
The most blatantly racist slur is the Israeli theft of our humanity
as parents. In an attempt to rob us of our most basic feelings for
our
children, we are accused of “sending [our] children out to die”
for the sake of “scoring media points.” The horror is further
compounded by the total and unquestioning equanimity with which such
a grand national slur is repeated by Israelis of all parties, with
no
critical distance or even awareness of the enormity of such a racist
charge.
When Palestinian children became targets for Israeli snipers and other
army violence, the ministry of education had no option but to close
down the schools temporarily in order to minimize the students’
exposure on the way to and from school. That was immediately latched
on by the Israeli spin machine as proof that we closed down the schools
in order to “release” our children to go out and “riot” thereby
obstructing the free path of Israeli bullets.
The safety of home and parents’ attempts at protecting their children
are not even considered. Actually, the 18-month-old baby girl, Sara
Abdel-Athim Hassan, was shot in the back seat of her father’s car,
while other child victims were killed in or around their own homes.
Mu’ayyad al-Jawarish, 12 years old, was shot in the garden of
his own home. Most children were shot in the head or upper part of
the body,
mainly with high velocity bullets. The most common targets of rubber-coated
steel bullets were the eyes of children.
A shoot-to-kill (or permanently impair) policy has been in force by
the Israeli army—claiming the lives of more than 105 Palestinians
and wounding more than 3,000 (many of whom with permanent injuries).
Israeli officials claim that they had exercised “restraint.”
Of course they can do worse—they can commit genocide or complete
the ethnic cleansing begun in 1948. Still, it is Israeli “security”
that is at stake. Israel’s powerful army of occupation cowers in
fear at the Palestinian people’s cry for justice and freedom.
The Palestinian people have no need for security on their own land
or in their own homes since they have been thoroughly dehumanized by
their
oppressor as to deserve whatever happens to them. Worse than being “nonexistent”
(as in the myth of the “land without a people for a people without
a land”—which even Shimon Peres now seems to espouse), in
the minds of the official Israeli narrative, we now seem to be existent
on a lower plain as sub-human species, bereft of the most elemental
qualities and rights that guide the conscience and moral values of
humanity
as a whole.
All this is for the sake of alleviating the guilt and responsibility
of the real culprit.
Apologists for the Israeli occupation must find an alternative address
to be blamed for the horror inflicted on the Palestinians—so who
better than the victims themselves?
Hanan Ashrawi is founder and Secretary General of the Miftah
Foundation, a Palestinian Jerusalem-based NGO that works to foster the
principles of democracy and effective dialogue. Dr. Ashrawi is a Member
of the Palestinian Legislative Council and is the author of This Side
of Peace (Touchstone Books), her personal account of the Palestinian-Israeli
conflict. Visit www.miftah.org to
learn more. This article is reprinted with kind permission.
