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Throwing stones Palestinians’ birthright, says
Israeli writer
A newspaper op-ed piece by an Israeli
writer has revived an emotional debate surrounding Israel’s
45-year rule over the West Bank and east Jerusalem: Do
Palestinians who throw rocks at Israelis exercise a “birthright”
of resisting
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A debate rages in Israel today on
the truth of Amira Hass’s words “Throwing a stone is the
birthright and duty of anyone subject to foreign rule. Throwing
stones is an action as well as a metaphor of resistance” (Amira
Hass, Haaretz, 4/3/13).
The day after Hass’ comment, Dr. Rosenberg offered these
objections: a. throwing stones after all can result in death and
Hass does not mention that consequence, b. justifying stone
throwing “grants legitimacy to the activities of the government
she condemns; and c. stone throwing is “a natural right of every
human being is futile and invalid, certainly in ethical terms.”
Conveniently, Rosenberg does not mention that the Palestinians
have no army, no air-force, no navy, no comparable military
ordinance of any kind to throw at the fourth largest state of the
art military in the world, only stones; can the stone kill, yes,
but so can $300,000 missiles and phosphorus bombs. Do we justify
death by missiles and phosphorus but damn death by stoning? Does
the throwing of a stone justify the carnage of the Israeli IDF
against the defenseless Palestinians? Where is the argument here?
Is throwing a stone a birthright as Amira states or is that
“futile and invalid” as Rosenberg claims? Given the reality of the
Israeli military power versus the feeble efforts of the
Palestinians, children and teenagers hurling stones, the debate on
birthright avoids the obvious: not to throw a stone.
“Listen to Cain as he walks beside his brother along the path of
death: There is no judgment and no judge and no world to come! No
reward will be given to the righteous nor any account given of the
wicked. Such is the belief of those who would declare their
independence of any responsibility for their brother, accept any
blame for their deception as they accompany him to his death, or
bear any guilt for the wickedness they inflict. Without judgment
for behavior determined as good or bad, without reward for acts of
love or compassion, without retribution for evil and wickedness
against his brother, Cain is free to do what he wills to do.
Ultimate freedom, a declaration indeed of independence. Abel
responds to his brother in the only terms left to him as he walks
to his death, a plea to conscience that binds all in mutual
existence, a belief that ―There is indeed a judgment and a Judge
and a world to come … and the wicked will be called to account.
Without that understanding, those who will can, with impunity,
plunder the poor, oppress the defenseless, act to pervert justice,
and wreck violence and bloodshed on the world.”
Such is the moral dilemma Thoreau faced as he delivered his “A
Plea for Captain John Brown,” (1859) as that “traitor” to the
state faced hanging. Thoreau quotes Brown in his own defense: “No
man sent me here; it was my own prompting and that of my maker. I
acknowledge no master in human form… I think, my friends, you are
guilty of a great wrong against God and humanity , and it would be
perfectly right for anyone to interfere with you so far as to free
those you willfully and wickedly hold in bondage.”
Such is the moral dilemma Mahatma Ghandi faced as he sought
guidance from Hinduism and the importance of action in one’s life,
without concern for success; the Hindu text Bhagavad-Gita says,
“On action alone be thy interest, / Never on its fruits / Abiding
in discipline perform actions, / Abandoning attachment / Being
indifferent to success or failure” (Wolpert 71).
Such is the moral dilemma Martin Luther King faced as he sat in
the Birmingham jail, a threat to the state’s legal system that
legislated the segregated lives of the countries African
Americans:
“I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and
states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about
what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to
justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of
mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects
one directly, affects all indirectly.”
And such was the moral dilemma the Jews in Warsaw faced “Between
July 22 and September 12, 1942, (as) the German authorities
deported or murdered around 300,000 Jews in the Warsaw ghetto:
“Armed with pistols, grenades (many of them homemade), and a few
automatic weapons and rifles, the ZOB fighters (the Jewish Combat
Organization, Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa; ZOB) stunned the
Germans and their auxiliaries on the first day of fighting,
forcing the German forces to retreat outside the ghetto wall.
German commander SS General Jürgen Stroop reported losing 12 men,
killed and wounded, during the first assault on the ghetto. On the
third day of the uprising, Stroop's SS and police forces began
razing the ghetto to the ground, building by building, to force
the remaining Jews out of hiding. Jewish resistance fighters made
sporadic raids from their bunkers, but the Germans systematically
reduced the ghetto to rubble. The German forces killed Anielewicz
and those with him in an attack on the ZOB command bunker on 18
Mila Street, which they captured on May 8.” (U.S. Holocaust
Museum).
Such is the need to act, even metaphorically, when loss of life,
threatened by those willing and capable of inflicting
imprisonment, torture, or death on a person or persons is imminent
and obvious. The right to life, to assert that right in the face
of certain death, as is the fate of Abel, supersedes all other
action. To throw a stone at a tank, the symbol of absolute power
of another over personal freedom, to assert, yea even to glorify
that birthright to live in freedom and peace in the world,
supersedes the illegal laws of the state that occupies and
oppresses. Laws are only just when they protect the personal
rights and dignity of all. That is the ultimate meaning resident
in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and that is the
criteria Israel must abide by in its occupation of Palestine.
Otherwise, one must condemn the Jews that took their birthright to
act against their oppressors or find their action a “right” based
on some superior testament that negates such a right for the rest
of humanity. The world cannot avoid its responsibility to protect
the helpless; it must intervene in Palestine.
“Consider now the events of April 9-11, 1948, the eradication of
the citizens of the town of Deir Yassin, a month before the Agency
declared the existence of the Israeli state and the implementation
of the UN Resolution to partition. This massacre became then and
remains the signature example of the intent of the Zionist
Consultancy and its agents to ethnically cleanse Palestine of its
non-Jewish inhabitants. A plethora of documents abound that claim
insight into the events that transpired during those three days,
yet all attest to the extermination of the town’s citizens
differing only as to numbers and agents responsible. Since Benny
Morris relies on official documents released by the government and
the military, I will use his summation as an example.
'Deir Yassin is remembered… for the atrocities committed by the
IZL and LHI troops during and immediately after the drawn-out
battle: Whole families were riddled with bullets… men, women, and
children were mowed down as they emerged from houses; individuals
were taken aside and shot. Haganah intelligence reported "there
were piles of dead. Some of the prisoners moved to places of
incarceration, including women and children, were murdered
viciously by their captors… LHI members… relate that the IZL men
raped a number of Arab girls and murdered them afterward (we don't
know if this is true).' Another intelligence operative (who
visited the site hours after the event) reported the 'adult males
were taken to town Jerusalem in trucks and paraded in the city
streets, then taken back to the site and killed… Before they were
put on the trucks, the IZL and LHI men searched the women, men,
and children [and] took from them all the jewelry and stole their
money.' Finally, the 'Haganah made great efforts to hide its part
in the operation.'11
Despite Morris’ accounting, 50 years after the events at Deir
Yassin, Morton Klein, President of the Zionist Organization of
America, attempted to revise history by denying that a massacre
took place in his work, Deir Yassin, History of a Lie. Why? Why go
to such lengths to deny what is so thoroughly documented? The
answer is simple. Deir Yassin is a symbol of ethnic cleansing, of
the determination of the Jews in Israel, controlled by the Zionist
Consultancy and its armed forces, to “transfer” or kill the
indigenous people of Palestine.
The truth symbolized by Deir Yassin is the calculated Zionist
strategy “to terrorize Arabs in order to expel them on the way to
depopulating their villages in order to repopulate them with new
Jewish immigrants or to erase them from the map” (Passages adapted
from the Introduction of The Plight of the Palestinians, Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010, edited by W.A. Cook).
But let it be stated here on this 11th day of April as I pen this
piece, a day of catastrophe that should never be forgotten, that
the people of Deir Yassin did not go gently into that good night;
they, like their Jewish brothers and sisters in Warsaw, fought
valiantly against terrible odds, against a systematic brutality
that has been described above. They fought for their birthright as
Amira Hass has established was their right and duty to assert, if
they were to proclaim to all the world that no one and no nation
has the right to occupy a people’s land or to oppress them
wantonly or to humiliate and subjugate them because they have the
will and the means to imprison and enslave, to torture and
brutalize, to deprive and destroy to accomplish their ends. Such a
nation acts without rights and must be subject to international
justice that all humans of good will can live in peace and
dignity.
William A. Cook is a Professor of English at the University of La
Verne in southern California. He writes frequently for Internet
publications including The Palestine Chronicle, MWC News, Atlantic
Free Press, Pacific Free Press, Countercurrents, Counterpunch,
World Prout Assembly, Dissident Voice, and Information Clearing
House among others. His books include Tracking Deception: Bush
Mid-East policy, The Rape of Palestine, The Chronicles of Nefaria,
a novella, and the forthcoming The Plight of the Palestinians. He
can be reached at wcook@laverne.edu or www.drwilliamacook.com
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