Pictures That Lie

Last Tuesday, I was walking down the street with two friends in Gaza Citywhen I got a phone call from my father. His usually calm voice soundeddeeply shaken as he told me the news: two airplanes had crashed into theWorld Trade Center and another into the Pentagon. The TV was reporting thata Palestinian group had claimed responsibility. All of a sudden, the worldcame to a standstill. In shock and disbelief, we rushed to the nearesttelevision. For hours, we sat in front of CNN and Al-Jazeera. With therest of the world, we watched in horror as the buildings collapsed and feltan unexplainable combination of fear, disgust, anger, frustration, sadness,and confusion.

Outside, Gaza was eerily quiet. In one of the most densely populated placeson earth, you could hear a pin drop. For two to three days, Palestinianswere glued to their television sets - except in Jenin and Jericho where theywere under attack by Israeli forces. The only thing that anyone talkedabout was the attack in the United States: the possible perpetrators, thenumerous causes, and the likely effects. Most of all, people expressed anoverwhelming sadness and a deep sense of pain. They were outraged and angryabout the attacks on American civilians. They said that these attacks werehorrible and should never have happened.

Immediately after the attacks, the press began to claim that the DemocraticFront for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) or the Popular Front for theLiberation of Palestine (PFLP) had carried out the attacks. The absurdityof such claims seemed to escape the commentators. But Palestinians knewbetter: these groups are so small and disorganized that they could notpossibly have carried out such a large-scale operation. Besides, all oftheir efforts are directed towards resisting Israeli military aggression andchallenging the ongoing colonization of Palestine and the racist oppressionof Palestinians by Israel.

Soon reports claimed that Palestinians were celebrating in the streets andhanding out candy to children. A single clip of a few people claimingvictory in the streets of Nablus has been repeatedly broadcast on Americanand European television for the last week. I can assure you that this was arare and isolated incident. There was absolutely no celebration in the GazaStrip. I called friends throughout the West Bank to find out from them whatwas happening in their cities. They said that there had been one or tworandom shots fired into the air, but that the atmosphere was one of horrorand sorrow rather than celebration.

These attacks are not something that Palestinians can celebrate. On thecontrary, most Palestinians had a powerful and spontaneous reaction ofdisgust at the bombings and empathy with the people who suffered from theattacks. They know exactly what it feels like to be a civilian populationunder attack. For the last 34 years, the Palestinians have been livingunder a brutal Israeli military occupation that uses terror to control theoccupied population. 

For the last year, the Israeli military has escalatedthe amount of violence it uses against the Palestinian people: fighterplanes, helicopter gunships, tanks, and heavy assault weapons are regularlyused against the civilian population of Palestine. These attacks are rarelycalled terrorism because they are carried out by the Israeli governmentrather than by a secretive and mysterious organization. But they areintended to terrorize the population and to instill a sense of fear thatwill suffocate the will to resist Israeli oppression.

The Palestiniansrecognized the attacks on American civilians as a form of terrorism nodifferent than that used against them by the Israeli military. They knowvery well the fear that Americans are experiencing right now and they feel agreat deal of empathy with the American pain. On Friday night inJerusalem, Palestinians held a candlelight vigil in memory of the victims ofthe attack in the United States. Although the vigil received no presscoverage, CNN and BBC continue to broadcast the clip of Palestinianscelebrating the attacks. But the empathy is real - the Palestinians feel aconnection right now with the American people that they want to express.

There is another reason that Palestinians cannot celebrate: they are runningfor their lives. Palestine has been under siege for the last week - and theworld does not know about it because all of the media attention has been onthe United States. Israeli officials have openly stated that this is a'golden opportunity' for Israel to annihilate the Palestinian resistance.That is the word that is most often repeated by Israeli governmentofficials: opportunity. 

Now that the world has turned its attention to theUnited States and Afghanistan, Israeli military officials feel that theyhave a 'freer hand' to do as they please in the occupied Palestinianterritories. And they have definitely not wasted the opportunity. Israeliforces have besieged almost every Palestinian city over the last week:

• OnTuesday, the very same day as the attack on the United States, 15 Israelitanks, along with attack helicopters and ground troops, rolled into thePalestinian city of Jenin. Its been nearly a week and they are still there. 
• On Wednesday, 22 tanks with ground and air support besieged Jericho. Nablusremains surrounded and under fire. 
• On Saturday, Israeli tanks, helicopters,and boats launched missiles on Nuseirat, Gaza City, Beit Hanoun, Rafah, andthe beach - all in the Gaza Strip. On Saturday night, tanks pounded BeitSahour, killing an ambulance driver. 
• Ramallah has been invaded on Friday,Saturday, and Sunday nights - with the siege expected to continue. 
• As of4:00 pm on September 17, 26 Palestinians have been killed by occupationforces since the attacks in the United States. The siege shows no sign ofletting up as long as the attention of the world is directed elsewhere.

The current escalation of the siege against the Palestinians has two primaryaims. First of all, it is an attempt to crush the Palestinian resistance andinstill fear in the Palestinian people. On Saturday night, helicopters andtanks shelled every Palestinian police and security building in thesouthwest part of Ramallah. The Israeli military is attempting to finallyand brutally smash the centers of Palestinian resistance. But the buildingsthat belonged to the security forces made up roughly 5% of all the buildingsthat the Israelis shelled that night. The other 95% were civilian homes,stores and offices. These attacks were clearly meant to create terror amongthe Palestinian people and to destroy their will to resist.

But there is another, more appalling reason behind the Israeli assault thisweek. Sharon and his cabinet are once again attempting to provoke thePalestinians to respond with violence. By backing the Palestinians into acorner and assaulting them from all sides, Sharon is hoping that someonewill lash out with a vicious bombing in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. It is sickto think that Sharon would want such a thing to happen to his own people,but it is not a new policy.

For years, the Israeli military has usedassassinations and assaults on civilians to provoke a violent Palestinianreaction. This policy has been pushed to new limits during the current Intifada. In fact, the Intifada began as a response to a very purposefulprovocation by Sharon when he along with 200 soldiers and a team ofjournalists entered the Haram al-Sharif, asserting Israeli sovereignty overan extremely important and sensitive Islamic holy site in Jerusalem. 

It nowappears that Sharon is currently pushing for an immense reaction fromPalestinians. Such an attack would provide the Israeli government with theperfect symbol to condemn Palestinians as terrorists, no different than thegroup that carried out the attacks in the United States.

For the last week, Israeli officials have been doing everything possible tobrand the Palestinians as terrorists in the eyes of the world. Sharon andother officials have repeatedly referred to Arafat as 'another Bin Laden.'The public relations firms hired by Israel have circulated the images ofPalestinians celebrating in Nablus after the initial reports of an attack onthe Pentagon. Palestinian groups were even accused of committing theattacks. 

Last week, the French Ambassador to Israel declared that terrorattacks on Israel must be condemned, but that there is a difference betweenthose attacks and the attacks in the US. The Zionist press andestablishment immediately branded the Ambassador as an 'anti-Semite' inorder to de-legitimize and silence him. All of this must be seen in thecontext of a heated phone conversation between President Bush and PrimeMinister Sharon on Friday. Sharon demanded that the Palestinian Authorityand Syria be officially and publicly excluded from the American-ledcoalition to fight terrorism. He stated that these two governments supportand harbor terrorists. Instead of being encouraged to join the coalition,he said, they should be branded as enemies and destroyed by the coalition. 

But Bush faces a dilemma: he desperately wants the Arab states to join hiscoalition, but they have agreed to do so only if the coalition focuses onBin Laden and not on the Palestinians. Israel, on the other hand, wants toinclude the Palestinian Authority, along with Syria and Iraq, on the list ofstates that sponsor and harbor terrorism. A terror attack by a Palestinianfaction right now would effectively seal the link. It would provide Israelwith exactly the opportunity it is looking for to argue before the worldthat the Palestinian Authority is a terrorist state. The Palestinianresistance would be deemed terrorists by the world and could be openlycrushed by the Israelis, with the assistance of the US-led coalition. Thatis exactly what Sharon is pushing for right now with his assault on the WestBank and Gaza. He is attempting once again to provoke a response fromPalestinians - a response that will give him an opportunity to convince theworld to help him crush the Palestinians once and for all.

Over the last two weeks, the Palestinian/Israeli conflict has become asymbol in the construction of two major global struggles. Last Tuesday,Palestinian groups were fingered from the very start as responsible for theterror attacks in the United States. Ever since that time, the Israeligovernment and the Zionist media have not stopped in their efforts tocondemn Palestinian resistance as inherently terrorist. They want thePalestinian/Israeli conflict to become a central symbol in the developingglobal struggle against terrorism. By branding Palestinians as terrorists,the Israelis are attempting to align themselves with the forces of moralauthority in the 'war between civilization and terror.' Israel is doingeverything in its power to convince the US to declare the PalestinianAuthority - and along with it the Palestinian people - to be an enemy. Theyare waging a powerful campaign to associate Arafat with Bin Laden and the'forces of terror' in the world. If they manage to do so, and to isolatethe Palestinians as terrorists, Israel will have global support for itsefforts to annihilate the Palestinian resistance.

On the other hand, one week before the attacks on the US, thePalestinian-Israeli conflict stood out as a key symbol in the globalstruggle against racism and apartheid. The NGO forum at the WorldConference Against Racism made great strides in demonstrating to the worldthe fact that Israel is a colonial, apartheid state. Over three hundredNGOs from around the world released a strong declaration that highlightedthe racist nature of the Israeli state. They declared:

"...the Palestinian people are one such people currently enduring acolonialist, discriminatory military occupation that violates theirfundamental human right of self-determination..."

"...we declare and call for an immediate end to the Israelisystematic perpetration of racist crimes including war crimes, acts ofgenocide and ethnic cleansing (as defined in the Statute of theInternational Criminal Court), including uprooting by military attack, andthe imposition of any and all restrictions and measures on the population tomake life so difficult that the only option is to leave the area, and stateterrorism against the Palestinian people, recognizing that all of thesemethods are designed to ensure the continuation of an exclusively Jewishstate with a Jewish majority and the expansion of its borders to gain moreland, driving out the indigenous Palestinian population."

"We declare that this alien domination and subjugation with the denialofterritorial integrity amounts to colonialism, which denies the fundamentalrights of self-determination, independence and freedom of Palestinians."

"We declare Israel as a racist, apartheid state in which Israel's brandofapartheid as a crime against humanity has been characterized by separationand segregation, dispossession, restricted land access, denationalization,"bantustanization" and inhumane acts."

"Appalled by the inhumane acts perpetrated in the maintenance of thisnewform of apartheid regime through the Israeli state war on civiliansincluding military attacks, torture, arbitrary arrests and detention, theimposition of severe restrictions on movement (curfews, imprisonment andbesiegement of towns and villages), and systematic collective punishment,including economic strangulation and deliberate impoverishment, denial ofthe right to food and water, the right to an adequate standard of living,the right to housing, the right to education and the right to work."

The NGO forum turned the Palestinian/Israeli conflict into a powerful symbolin the growing movement against racism, globalization, and new forms ofcolonialism. This movement presents a powerful, progressive challenge tothe forces of exploitation and oppression centered in the Western capitalist'democracies.' The NGO forum focused world attention on the racist natureof the Israeli state. For a rare moment, the world saw the Palestiniansaligned with the forces of progress and justice. But only too briefly.

TheIsraelis have seized the opportunity presented by the attacks in the UnitedStates to silence all talk of racism and apartheid. They are attempting toreframe discussion of this conflict in terms of the struggle againstterrorism. Those efforts are extraordinarily dangerous, especiallyconsidering the current situation in the occupied Palestinian territoriesand the violence that Israel is using against Palestinians.

The Palestinians are on the brink of what seems like utter destruction atthe hands of the Israeli military. The current moment is critical. IfIsrael is able to frame public discussion of the conflict and to declare thePalestinians terrorists who must be dealt with accordingly, then the futurefor Palestine is certainly bleak. We must remain focused on demonstratingto the world the racist nature of the Israeli state. We must articulate thePalestinian struggle with the growing movement against racism, colonialism,and global capitalism. 

The only hope that Palestinians have shown over thelast few months has been in response to the NGO forum. The images of 60,000people in the streets of Durban demonstrating against Israeli apartheid gavestrength to millions of Palestinians living under occupation. In the wakeof the terrible attacks in the United States, the Palestinians cannot affordto allow Israel to control the public discourse. Palestine can eitherbecome a symbol in the struggle against terror or a symbol in the struggleagainst oppression. Now perhaps more than ever, it is absolutely imperativethat the racist, colonial nature of the Israeli state be openly and publiclydiscussed throughout the United States and Europe.

(Andy Clarno, currently a doctoral student at the University of Michigan, has been doing dissertation research in Palestine. He was arrested by the Israeli police on Aug 11 at a peaceful protest following the Israeli seizure of the Orient House; his case received some attention in the U.S. press because he is a U.S. citizen. This was, as would be apparent, written before the declaration of ceasefire today.)