Israel - A culture of oppression

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/opinion/04_06_01_a.htm

A culture of oppression
Daily Star Editorial: June 04 2001

Friday night's bombing in Tel Aviv accomplished only one thing: It killed 20 people. There were other repercussions, of course, such as tying Yasser Arafat's hands and strengthening Ariel Sharon's. In the final analysis, however, all that happened is that more people died for nothing.
But that is not the same as saying they died for no reason. The would-be club-goers were blown apart by the intransigence of their own government as much as by the rage of an oppressed people.
Israel's insistence on perpetuating the myth of a battle for its very existence carries with it a string of policies that consistently trample the rights of Arabs in general and of Palestinians in particular. Its employment of collective punishment makes every Palestinian a victim of what amounts to a low-intensity war; its economic strangulation robs the Palestinian Authority of whatever ability it ever had to end the reign of poverty; its water regulations force West Bankers to subsidize the people who occupy their land; its apartheid-style residency rules pursue ethnic cleansing in East Jerusalem.
These are all violations of international law, Security Council resolutions, the Geneva Conventions, and/or innumerable human-rights agreements, not to mention affronts to anything ever described as morality. But while Washington has shielded Israel against international sanctions, nothing can assuage the anger of the people on whose backs the Jewish state has been built.
Instead of appreciating Jordan and Egypt's maturity in making peace and recognizing it, Israel has used their overtures to pursue a strategy of "divide and conquer." How can other Arab countries follow their path when the result is continued abuse?
Israel's "besieged" act has been one of the most successful advertising campaigns in history: It has managed to convince many people around the world that a wealthy nuclear power feels intimidated by backward and impoverished Third World neighbors. This preposterous myth is finally wearing thin in the West, and even among a large sector of Israel's general population, but those who cling to it have not given up. Their latest angle is that the intifada was caused by the pullout from south Lebanon, which allegedly encouraged Palestinian militants to believe that they could drive the Israeli military out of Palestine with a few car bombs.
Once again, the Israeli government ignores simple formulae of cause and effect. When people are oppressed, they can only be expected to remain docile for so long; when they are promised peace, they cannot delay their expectations forever; when they are brutally dehumanized, some of them will do inhuman things to their tormentors.
This newspaper recently printed several letters to the editor on whether or not Israel constitutes a colony. What most failed to recognize is that the deciding factor is not what went into the Jewish state, but rather what has come out of it: the subjugation of another people. By any definition, that is colonialism, and the mind-set that allows it must change.