{"id":263258,"date":"2024-06-03T12:00:15","date_gmt":"2024-06-03T11:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=263258"},"modified":"2024-07-02T08:49:18","modified_gmt":"2024-07-02T07:49:18","slug":"three-evils-occupation-apartheid-genocide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/06\/three-evils-occupation-apartheid-genocide\/","title":{"rendered":"Three Evils: Occupation, Apartheid, Genocide"},"content":{"rendered":"

My Heart Makes My Head Swim<\/h3>\n
\"\"<\/a>

Malak Mattar (Palestine), Hind\u2019s Hall, 2024<\/p><\/div>\n

A short primer on why these three terms are accurate and <\/em>at the heart of the situation in Gaza, despite the baseless claim that using them is tantamount to antisemitism.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

16 May 2024 <\/em>– The subtitle, My Heart Makes My Head Swim<\/em>, comes from Frantz Fanon\u2019s Black Skin, White Masks<\/i><\/a> (1952). In a chapter called \u2018The Fact of Blackness\u2019, Fanon writes about the despair that racism produces, the immense anxiety about living in a world that has decided that certain people are simply not human or not sufficiently human. The lives of these people, children of a lesser god, are assigned less worth than the lives of the powerful and the propertied. An international division of humanity tears the world into pieces, throwing masses of people into the fires of anguish and oblivion.<\/p>\n

What is happening in Rafah, Gaza\u2019s southernmost city, is ghastly. Since October 2023, Israel has ordered 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza to move southwards as the Israeli armed forces have steadily moved their gunsights across the Wadi Gaza wetlands down to the edge of Rafah. Kilometre by kilometre, as the Israeli military advances, the so-called safe zone moves further and further south. In December, the Israeli government claimed, with great cruelty, that the tent city of al-Mawasi (west of Rafah, along the Mediterranean Sea) was the new designated safe area. A mere 6.5 square kilometres (half the size of London\u2019s Heathrow airport), the supposed safe zone within al-Mawasi is nowhere near large enough to house the more than one million Palestinians who are in Rafah. Not only was it absurd for Israel to say that al-Mawasi would be a refuge, but \u2013\u00a0according to the laws of war \u2013 a safe zone must be agreed upon by all parties.<\/p>\n

\n
\"\"<\/p>\n

Ismail Shammout (Palestine), Odyssey of a People<\/i>, 1980<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\u2018How can a zone be safe in a war zone if it is only unilaterally decided by one part of the conflict?\u2019, asked<\/a> Philippe Lazzarini, the commissioner-general of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA); \u2018It can only promote the false feeling that it will be safe\u2019. Furthermore, on several occasions, Israel has bombed al-Mawasi, the area it says is safe. On 20 February, Israel attacked a shelter operated by Doctors Without Borders\/M\u00e9decins Sans Fronti\u00e8res, killing two family members of the organisation\u2019s staff. This week, on 13 May, an international UN staff member was killed<\/a> after the Israeli army opened fire on a UN vehicle, one of the nearly 200 UN workers killed<\/a> in Gaza in addition to the targeted assassination<\/a> of aid workers.<\/p>\n

Not only has Israel begun to bomb Rafah, but it hastily sent in tanks to seize the only border crossing through which aid dribbled in on the few trucks a day that were allowed to enter. After Israel seized the Rafah border, it prevented the entry of aid into Gaza altogether. Starving Palestinians has long been Israeli policy<\/a>, which is of course a war crime. Preventing aid from entering Gaza is part of the international division of humanity that has defined not only this genocide, but the occupation of Palestinian land in East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank since 1967 and the system of apartheid within the borders defined by Israel following the 1948 Nakba<\/i> (\u2018Catastrophe\u2019).<\/p>\n

Three words in this sentence are fundamentally contested by Israel: apartheid, occupation, and genocide. Israel and its Global North allies want to claim that the use of these words to describe Israeli policies, Zionism, or the oppression of Palestinians is tantamount to anti-Semitism. But, as the United Nations and numerous respected human rights groups note, these are legal descriptions of the reality on the ground and not moral judgments that are made either in haste or out of anti-Semitism. A short primer on the accuracy of these three concepts is necessary to counter this denial.<\/p>\n

Apartheid<\/b>. The Israeli government treats the Palestinian minority population within the borders defined in 1948 (21%) as second-class citizens. There are at least sixty-five<\/a> Israeli laws that discriminate<\/a> against Palestinian citizens of Israel. One of them, passed<\/a> in 2018, declares the country a \u2018nation state of the Jewish people\u2019. As the Israeli philosopher Omri Boehm wrote<\/a>, through this new law, the Israeli government \u2018formally endorses\u2019 the use of \u2018apartheid methods within Israel\u2019s recognised borders\u2019. The United Nations<\/a> and Human Rights Watch<\/a> have both said that Israel\u2019s treatment of Palestinians falls under the definition of apartheid. The use of this term is entirely factual.<\/p>\n

Occupation<\/b>. In 1967, Israel occupied<\/a> the three Palestinian territories of East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank. From 1967 to 1999, these three areas were referred to as part of the Occupied Arab Territories (which at different times also included Egypt\u2019s Sinai Peninsula, Syria\u2019s Golan region, and southern Lebanon). Since 1999, they have been termed the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT). In UN documents<\/a> and at the International Court of Justice<\/a>, Israel is referred to as the \u2018occupying power\u2019, which is a term of art that requires certain obligations from Israel toward those whom it occupies. Although the 1993 Oslo Accords set up the Palestinian Authority, Israel remains the occupying power of the OPT, a designation that has not been revised. An occupation is identical to colonial rule: it is when a foreign power dominates a people in their homeland and denies them sovereignty and rights. Despite Israel\u2019s military withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 (which included the dismantling of twenty-one illegal settlements), Israel continues to occupy Gaza by building a perimeter fence around the Gaza Strip and by policing the Mediterranean waters of Gaza. Annexation of parts of East Jerusalem and the West Bank as well as the punctual bombing of Gaza are violations of Israel\u2019s obligation as the occupying power.<\/p>\n

An occupation imposes a structural condition of violence upon the occupied. That is why international law recognises that those who are occupied have the right to resist. In 1965, in the midst of Guinea Bissau\u2019s struggle against Portuguese colonialism, the United Nations General Assembly passed<\/a> Resolution 2105 (\u2018Implementation of the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples\u2019). Paragraph 10 of this resolution is worth reading carefully: \u2018The General Assembly\u2026 [r]ecognises<\/i> the legitimacy of the struggle by the peoples under colonial rule to exercise their right to self-determination and independence and invites all States to provide material and moral assistance to the national liberation movements in colonial Territories\u2019. There is no ambiguity here. Those who are occupied have the right to resist, and, in fact, all member states of the United Nations are bound by this treaty to assist them. Rather than sell arms to the occupying power, who is the aggressor in the ongoing genocide, the members states of the United Nations \u2013 particularly from the Global North \u2013 should aid the Palestinians.<\/p>\n

Genocide<\/b>. In its order<\/a> published on 26 January, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) found that there was \u2018plausible\u2019 evidence of Israel committing genocide against Palestinians. In March, the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Francesca Albanese, published a monumental report<\/a> called Anatomy of a Genocide<\/i>. In this report, Albanese wrote that \u2018there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel\u2019s commission of genocide is met\u2019. \u2018More broadly\u2019, she wrote, \u2018they also indicate that Israel\u2019s actions have been driven by a genocidal logic integral to its settler-colonial project in Palestine, signalling a tragedy foretold\u2019.<\/p>\n

Intent to commit genocide is easily proved in the context of Israel\u2019s bombardment. In October 2023, Israel\u2019s President Isaac Herzog said<\/a> that \u2018an entire nation out there is responsible\u2019 for the attacks on 7 October, and it was not true that \u2018civilians [were] not\u2026 aware, not involved\u2019. The ICJ pointed to this statement, among others, since it expresses Israel\u2019s intent and use of \u2018collective punishment\u2019, a genocidal war crime<\/a>. The following month, Israel\u2019s Jerusalem Affairs and Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu said<\/a> that dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza was \u2018an option\u2019 since \u2018there are no non-combatants in Gaza\u2019. Before the ICJ ruling was published, Moshe Saada, a member of the Israeli parliament from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu\u2019s Likud party, said<\/a> that \u2018all Gazans must be destroyed\u2019. These sentiments, by any international standard, demonstrate an intent to commit genocide. As with \u2018apartheid\u2019 and \u2018occupation\u2019, the use of the term \u2018genocide\u2019 is entirely accurate.<\/p>\n

\n
\"\"<\/p>\n

Vijay Prashad presents Frantz Fanon\u2019s daughter, Mireille Fanon Mend\u00e8s-France, with a poster of the cover of the new isiZulu edition of her father\u2019s classic, The Wretched of the Earth<\/i>, in Paris, France, 2024.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Earlier this year, Inkani Books, a Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research project based in South Africa, published the isiZulu translation of Fanon\u2019s Wretched of the Earth<\/i>, Izimpabanga Zomhlaba<\/i><\/a>, translated by Makhosazana Xaba. We are so proud of this accomplishment, bringing the work of Fanon into another African language (it has already been translated into Arabic and Swahili).<\/p>\n

When I was last in Palestine, I spoke with young children about their aspirations. What they told me reminded me of a section from The Wretched of the Earth<\/i><\/a>: \u2018At twelve or thirteen years of age the village children know the names of the old men who were in the last rising, and the dreams they dream in the douars<\/i> [camps] or in the villages are not those of money or of getting through their exams like the children of the towns, but dreams of identification with some rebel or another, the story of whose heroic death still today moves them to tears\u2019.<\/p>\n

Children in Gaza will remember this genocide with at least the same intensity as their ancestors remembered 1948 and as their parents remembered the occupation that has loomed over this narrow piece of land since their own childhood. Children in South Africa will read these lines from Fanon in isiZulu and remember those who fell to inaugurate a new South Africa thirty years ago.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at<\/em> Globetrotter. He is the director of <\/em>Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research<\/em><\/a> and a senior non-resident fellow at <\/em>Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies<\/em><\/a>, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including <\/em>The Darker Nations<\/a> and <\/em>The Poorer Nations<\/a>. His latest book is <\/em>Washington Bullets<\/a>, with an introduction by Evo Morales Ayma.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 thetricontinental.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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