“We need to return to the basic truth of our rights to this country. This land is ours. All of it is ours. We did not come here to apologise for that.” Thus spoke the deputy foreign affairs minister of the Zionist settler state, a woman called Tzipi Hotovely. So let's go along with her and return to the basics, especially as the killing of two Israeli settlers near Hebron and two in Jerusalem over the past week again reminds us of them. Since 1967 the people of Hebron have lived under the most racist, brutal and illegal form of occupation in the world. Arguably, it is the worst place for a Palestinian to live in eastern Palestine, also known as the West Bank, as opposed to the East Bank of the Jordan River. The Israeli settlers there are heavily armed and live under the protection of soldiers, police and a racist two-tier, pseudo-legal system that authorises apartheid. They put their own lives and the lives of their children at risk by coming to live on someone else's land against the latter's wishes and without their consent. Their lives on this land are only made possible by the brutality and illegal actions of the settler state. The settlers stabbed in East Jerusalem included a rabbi connected with Ateret Kohanim, the most aggressive and extreme of all the Israeli settler organisations. A photograph in the Israeli media showed him in military uniform because he is also part of a military rabbinate that justifies the killing of Palestinians and other Arabs wherever and whenever the Zionist settler state decides to attack them. He and the other man who was stabbed chose to live in a city under occupation and therefore are responsible for the consequences of their own actions. There is no intrinsic difference between Palestinians killing Zionist settlers in their occupied homeland and Native Americans killing white settlers in their homeland two centuries ago. Violence is always to be deplored. Everything said about it is correct. Violence only begets more violence. However, its most destructive practitioners in modern times have been Western governments, even as they continue to tell us that violence is not the way. History tells us otherwise: while violence should not be the way, it often is. In the context of occupation there is not one occasion anywhere in the world when it has not been resisted violently by the indigenous population. Ending violence begins with ending the violence of the perpetrator, and not the retaliation of the victim. All of Jerusalem, and not just the eastern half — the site of the second recent attack on Israeli settlers — is an occupied Palestinian city that has been and continues to be subject to ethnic cleansing. Under the UN partition resolution of 1947 that divided what had been the British mandate territory of Palestine, Jerusalem was to be set aside as a corpus separatum. However, in violation of the wishes of the UN, which they never had any intention of respecting anyway, the Zionists seized the western part of the city, driving out the Palestinians and looting their property. Many of the finest houses in Jerusalem were taken over by Zionist settlers, often by high military or political officials. These buildings remain stolen property and their occupants are plain thieves. In 1967, the Zionists engaged in a second major bout of plunder, destruction and ethnic cleansing when they seized East Jerusalem, where Jewish property ownership was close to nil. In common law, the expropriation of Palestinian property across Palestine was nothing less than theft on a grand scale. The Zionists owned almost nothing. Palestine was not theirs, and their ability to take and hold it for the past seven decades has depended not on moral or legal rights but the continuing application of brute force. Jerusalem is not recognised as part of Israel or as Israel's capital, even by the government of the US that has funded and justified Israel's occupation and massacres in Palestine and neighbouring countries. The city does not have a mayor. It has a pseudo-mayor, an occupier's mayor, whose status is no different from that of any administrator put in place by an occupying army. The presence of settlers in East Jerusalem has no standing in international law except as a continuing violation of that law. The laws and regulations introduced by the occupier have no standing except as the occupier's laws and regulations. Where permanence is the goal of occupation, and that applies to every Israeli settler, every building in which they live, every field they plough and every road they build on the West Bank or in East Jerusalem, the occupier's laws and regulations stand only as violations of international law. The situation across all of Palestine is analogous. No law ever has or could have allowed the Zionists to dispossess the Palestinians and seize their property. The latter are entitled to return and to reclaim it no matter how much time passes. The occupation of Palestine has been maintained through successive generations by unrelieved and horrifying violence. Massively and overwhelmingly it has come from one side, partly because the occupied have been denied the weapons needed to defend themselves. It is completely grotesque for the international human rights organisation Amnesty International to put Zionist and Palestinian violence in the same category and subject it to the same indictments. There is the massive violence of the occupier and the massively smaller violence of the occupied. Amnesty prefers not to make the distinction. The Zionist and Western media has reported two parents being killed in Hebron “in front of their children,” whereas in Gaza last year, and in Gaza and Lebanon in previous years, Zionist forces murdered thousands of parents along with their children, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles and grandparents. They killed not one or two, but hundreds at a time. The infant who survived in Hebron was described in the media as a “toddler.” Is there any memory of even one of the thousands of children killed by the Zionists in Gaza or the West Bank being described as a “toddler”? The man and woman killed in Hebron were Zionist settlers living on land defined as occupied under international law. That is why they were attacked and that is how they should be described. On the Occupied West Bank and in Occupied East Jerusalem the Zionists kill, seize property and humiliate with the ongoing consent and protection of the state. The law is applied according to whether the victim of the violence is a Zionist settler or a Palestinian subjected to occupation. Within 24 hours of the recent killing of the settlers in Hebron, the occupation forces had pounced on Nablus and rounded up those suspected of the attack. Yet weeks have passed without the murderers of the Palestinian Dawabshe family, killed earlier this year, being arrested. This is not an anomaly: settler murderers are rarely punished, while even stone-throwing young Palestinians are shot dead on sight. The equation is not accidental: acts of Zionist terror hasten the complete engorgement of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. This is the way it has always been: today is no different from 1948. The soldiers and border police who enforce the occupier's laws know the state will protect them whatever the heinous nature of their crimes. By moving onto land that is the private or collective property of another people the settlers put themselves and their children at risk. Their status is no different from that of the German civilians moved into Poland and France during the Second World War. It made no difference to members of the French maquis whether the Germans they killed in cafes or on the streets were soldiers or civilians. They were all part of the same occupying presence and there could be no mercy for any of them. When Palestinians retaliate in the same way and for the same reason, the occupiers of their homeland respond in the same way as the German occupiers of France did. They call them “terrorists.” But who is ultimately responsible for these acts of violence, the occupier or the occupied who retaliates? The colonisation of Algeria is a parallel case. Just as in the case of the Zionist settler state, massive violence was directed against the native population of Algeria by the occupation forces. The Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN), “terrorists” in the eyes of the occupying French state, struck back at the settlers as well as at the soldiers and the colonial administration. Behind the strength of French President Charles de Gaulle in declaring the end of the occupation of Algeria lay the weakness of the French state. It was no longer able to hold on to its colonial possessions in Africa or Indochina. Behind the strength of South African leader F W de Klerk in declaring an end to apartheid in South Africa lay the inability of the white minority regime to maintain the status quo any longer. Israel shows no signs of learning from these lessons. In Palestine, like Algeria, occupation and colonisation are directed by a member state of the UN in flagrant violation of international law. Does such a state deserve to remain a member of the UN any more than South Africa did? Some Israeli settlers may say they have come to “share” the land, but they do not extend the same right of sharing to the Palestinians driven out of their homeland in 1948 and 1967. In any case, professed good intentions (genuine or deceitful) are marginal to the ideology of settlement and displacement. The killing of Palestinians is only part of a continuing story of murder, theft, deprivation and humiliation at every level and on a massive scale. Zionism is the ideological basis for the most complete form of occupation in modern history. It is the Zionist state that is the ultimate source of violence in Palestine and the Zionist state that stands as the barrier to a rational peace. The right of resistance is sanctioned under international law, and under this law Jerusalem and the West Bank at least are legally defined as occupied territories. The occupier's foreign minister simply repeats the lies of generations. The Zionists hold Palestine by force. It is not theirs and, as her remarks indicate, they are not even willing to share it. The Palestinians have every right to resist them. The writer is an associate professor of Middle Eastern history and politics at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey.
