Diarmuid Breatnach
(Reading time: 4 mins.)
Israel is justifying its bombardment of Gaza as the right to defend the state, effectively in the right to take revenge, with which the western states are in agreement.
Leaving aside the question of whether bombing homes, bakeries, markets and hospitals constitutes ‘defence’, what should we think about the right of a state to defend itself as a principle?
It seems natural that every state should have the right to defend itself; perhaps that right is extrapolated from the generally-agreed right of the individual to self-defence. In bourgeois law, the need to defend oneself can be a valid legal defence even against a murder charge.
The individual is generally understood to have the right of self-defence particularly in their home but also in public places. However, it is important to note that this right, even in bourgeois law, is not considered valid in every conceivable case.
For example, the right of one individual to use violence in their defence can be cancelled by the right of their victim to self-defence if the latter is being seriously harmed by the former, so that violence by the victim might be considered a reasonable response in their own self-defence.
People carrying out a robbery or kidnapping, to take another instance, are not considered to have the right to use violence if attacked in the course of the robbery by the victim or by security forces or even a passer-by.
Proceeding to the question of the rights of states to defence, we might say that the UK had the right to defend itself from Nazi attack during WWII and certainly so did the USSR, so too later with the rights of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia from the USA’s invasions and bombings in the 1970s.
But did the Cambodian state have the right to defend itself from Vietnamese invasion when the Pol Pot regime was carrying out mass exterminations of sections of its population? Or the did the states of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy have the right to defence against the Allied forces?
Continuing in consideration of the right of a state to defence, how does that go when the attack comes from within the territory of the state itself?
Most Irish and democratic people outside would probably deny that the English Crown had the right to defend itself against the Irish rebellions of the clans (1167-1690s) or of the United Irish republicans, or against the Fenian insurrections, the 1916 Rising and the War of Independence (1919-1921).
Similarly, most would deny the right of the English or French monarchies to defend themselves against the internal republican uprisings of 1649 and 1789, respectively.
When the “internal” force attacking is a nation, then national rights of self-determination counter and supersede the rights of the state to self-defence. The case of the United Irishmen has already been noted but slave colony Haiti and colonial Algeria against France could be listed there too.
ISRAEL
The Israeli State is a colonial regime sitting on the Palestinian people’s land. It is in addition a state which is deeply religiously sectarian on the basis of Judaeism, in a sense which is far more racial than it is religious and, in many cases, may have no religious aspect at all.
Being able to claim Jewish descent is the qualification for Israeli citizenship, not religious practice or even belief. As for the Palestinians, whether Muslim or Christian, Arab or Berber, they are ‘other’, second-class or even third-class at best.
Third-class because the Ashkenazi Jewish colonists discriminate against other Jews too, for example the Ethiopian (because many are black), the Sephardic and Mizrahi (because they are not Ashkenazi). They will all speak Hebrew now but many additional languages are spoken too.
The Zionist trend in the Jewish world insisting that Jews had a right to a state of their own on a land of their own, even if some other people already lived there, was a minority trend among Jews until fairly recently, though it gained dominance in the West over years after the establishment of Israel.
Indeed there are sections of Jewish society that consider the creation of a Jewish state to be contrary to the teachings of the Torah. But as observed earlier, Zionism is not really about religion.
The establishment of the Zionist state was achieved at the price of the expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians, the imposition of racist and sectarian laws, apartheid, massacres,1 oppression of the Palestinians and repression of their resistance.
The story of the state of Israel in the land of Palestine until now can be characterised by two images: the murder of Palestinian people along with the expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians in 1948 as the Zionist state came into being – and the genocidal bombing of Gaza these three weeks.
As of some hours ago, over 7,000 Palestinians have been killed in the past three weeks – including nearly 3,000 children.
There are many ways to kill, including despair, lack of or obstruction to medical treatment or access to good water and food. But from 1948 to 2021 (i.e excluding the killings since then and this year’s), well over 20,000 Palestinian civilians have been directly killed by the Israeli state’s military and settlers.
To claim that “Israel has the right to defence” is to say that all those things are justified and must be defended, must be perpetuated, that we must be complicit in it and that the best we can do is to ask Israel to practice its racism, colonialism, oppression and repression somewhat more gently.
Israel – which is to say the Zionist project — has absolutely no right to defence.
End.
FOOTNOTES
1When hostilities erupted in 1948, the villagers of Deir Yassin and those of the nearby Jewish village of Giv’at Shaul signed a pact, later approved at Haganah headquarters, to maintain their good relations, exchange information on movement of outsiders through village territory, and ensure the safety of vehicles from the village. The inhabitants of Deir Yassin upheld the agreement scrupulously, resisting infiltration by Arab irregulars. Though this was known to the Irgun and Lehi forces, they attacked the village on April 9, 1948. The assault was beaten off initially, with the attackers suffering 40 wounded. Only the intervention of a Palmach unit, using mortars,[20] allowed them to occupy the village. Houses were blown up with people inside and people shot: 107 villagers, including women and children, were killed. The survivors were loaded on trucks that were driven through Jerusalem in a victory parade,[19][21] with some sources describing further violence by Lehi soldiers.[22] Four Irgun or Lehi men were killed.[23] The incident became known as the Deir Yassin massacre.
On April 10, 1948, one day after the Deir Yassin massacre, Albert Einstein wrote a critical letter to the American Friends of Fighters for the Freedom of Israel (the U.S chapter of Lehi) refusing to assist them with aid or support to raise money for their cause in Palestine.[24][25] On December 2, 1948, many prominent American Jews signed and published an op-ed article in The New York Times critical of Menachem Begin and the massacre at Deir Yassin. (Wikipedia)
SOURCES
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