Dari Dr Azam Tamimi kepada saya

Artikel ini dihantar oleh Dr Azzam Tamimi kepada saya semasa September 24,2005 untuk respons kepada persoalan saya semasa itu mengenai gaza.Semoga manfaat

Please find attached a recent article about this topic. I hope that it answers your questions.

Dr. Azzam Tamimi
Institute of Islamic Political Thought (IIPT)
Unit Three
Grove House
320 Kensal Road
London W10 5BZ
UK
Tel/Fax: 020 89691422
Mob: 07768298219
www.ii-pt.com

The withdrawal of Jewish settlers in prelude to ending Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip proves right the vision of those who kept asserting with unwavering optimism that the Zionist project in Palestine was heading toward an end.

Since the Ramadan (October) 1973 war the Zionist entity in the heart of the Middle East has only been shrinking. Sinai was given up first, though not without a heavy price the Egyptians had to pay in terms of opening up the country to the Israelis and compromising both Egyptian economy and security to Israel's benefit.

Twenty years later, in 1999, Hezbollah's resistance in the South of Lebanon forced the Israelis to withdraw unconditionally after years of insisting that they had been in Lebanon to remain. Most Palestinians now believe that the liberation of Gaza will, at some point, be followed by the West Bank. At the current rate of Zionist decline that eventuality may not be so far away.

Despite unprecedented military supremacy and almost unconditional support from the United States of America and some of its allies in Western Europe, Israel seems weaker than at any time since its creation in 1948. No matter what justifications the Sharon establishment may provide for the withdrawal from Gaza to assure the Israeli public it was none other than the steadfastness and resistance the Palestinians have put up in defiance of Israeli brutality that forced the change of policy. Had the Israelis been comfortable in Gaza and had their Jewish settlers therein been cheep to maintain they would never have contemplated an end to their occupation.

The West Bank Palestinians, who have since 1967 seen their lands confiscated so as for Jewish immigrant-settlers to be housed in intensely militarized apartheid-style colonies or carved and fragmented by Israeli bulldozers in order to allow for the construction of highways exclusively enjoyed by those settlers, will undoubtedly learn lessons from the Gaza experience. The parallels will become more apparent as many of the evacuated settlers are 'dumped' in the West Bank with the consequence of augmenting the hardships already endured by the Palestinians. For it was not solely a sense of patriotism or urge for martyrdom that provoked the Gazans to fight occupation and force an end to it. The people of Gaza acted not differently from the manner in which any human community oppressed and persecuted by a foreign occupier would have acted; not at all differently from the way the French resisted Nazi occupation or the Vietnamese repelled American invasion.

Foreign occupation is parasitic in nature and therefore wittingly or otherwise provokes the immune system of its victims into resistance. Wherever and whenever foreign occupation succeeded in the past in establishing deep roots it was only by virtue of the complete destruction of the victim community's immune system; by utterly annihilating the victims. Had the natives of America and the aborigines of Australia not been almost completely exterminated the white man of Europe would never have been able to establish himself on their relics. In those two cases, and soon after the start of colonization, the immigrant-settlers arriving from Europe outnumbered the original inhabitants and became the dominant race and culture.

In the case of Palestine the Israelis have been rather unlucky, some may contend even foolish. The Zionist founders of Israel did try to do something of course; they threw close to a million Palestinians out of their homes in 1948 and massacred several hundreds of civilians in a few villages in order to instil horror in the hearts and minds of the entire population. Close to sixty years after the 'nakbah' (catastrophe), the Palestinians living within 'mandatory Palestine' are close to outnumbering the Israelis. Unlike the case of earlier and much luckier white European settlers of the Americas and Australia, the Zionists could only persuade a very limited number of Jews to join them in their adventure. Had it not been for the catastrophe of the holocaust and, more than four decades later, the decision by the Soviet Union to release its Jews and the United States to deny them entry very few of the Jews would have been attracted to Zionism. Today, no less than two thirds of the world's Jewish population live happily far away from Palestine, which has proven to be a land of sweat and blood rather than the promised land of milk and honey.             

The decision to end the occupation of Gaza will inevitably have raised questions in the minds of many Israelis about the very legitimacy of their state. For how could a land that was said to have been God's exclusive offer to a 'chosen nation' of His be so easily given up for purely mundane reasons. While the withdrawal confirms the secular non-religious nature of the State of Israel, whose leaders used, or abused, religion at various stages and turns of the history of their movement in order to justify the colonization and usurpation of another people's homeland, it does at the same time belie the myths that have so far underpinned the Zionist project. It does at the same time cast light on the dilemma the Israelis created for themselves by rearing a generation of religious Zionists who, as far as Israeli secular society is concerned, have become the enemy within. During the years of feverish expansion and colonization these myth-obsessed Torah-abusing fanatics were of great use to the irreligious Zionist administrations of both the left and the right. Increasingly, they are becoming litterally a pain in Is (….).

Genuinely religious, anti-Zionist orthodox Jews would undoubtedly feel vindicated; in contrast to the Christian Zionists, they have always maintained that Jews should never have contemplated a return to the 'promised land' prior to the coming of the Messiah toward the end of time. Like the Palestinians they will be celebrating the dismantlement of a state they have from day one judged as blasphemous.  

One cannot help but observe the irony in the attitude of the Israeli troops toward the Jewish settlers whom they are ordered to remove from Gaza. Had these abuse-showering acid-pouring hardliners been Palestinian what would have been the attitude of the embattled troops? In response to forms of protest much less violent than what the Jewish settlers have been engaged in, the Palestinians have been killed, detained for indefinite periods, deported from their homeland and tortured to death. The Israelis simply do not recognize that the Palestinians have human rights, or perhaps do not see them as humans. The withdrawal from Gaza illustrates among many things the apartheid nature of the Zionist regime, which is inevitably heading toward the same fate as its predecessor in South Africa.