Rewarding Aggression

I’ve been thinking a lot over the last couple of days about the new Israel-Palestine “peace” plan endorsed by King Bush and Il Duce Sharon. I wanted to roll it around in my head for a while and see if my gut instinct was wrong and I was somehow missing some important or laudible non-obvious points. But after a lot of thought I have to go with my first instinct: it’s obscene.

Coming out of the chaos of the 1930s and 1040s and seeing how dangerous the principle of rewarding aggressive conquest could be, one thing that distinguishes the United Nations from its predecessor the League of Nations is the notion that occupied territories remain just that: occupied. They do not and cannot transfer sovereignty to the invader without a plebiscite of the native peoples of that land. And the use of genocide or population displacement or transfer to effect a “change on the ground” is in direct contravention of international law.

Simply put, no matter how hard the occupier tries, they can never permanently seize the territory. All member countries of the UN are bound (in theory) to embargo recognition of the transfer of sovereignty of seized lands. Aggressors should not be rewarded.

Of course, this principle has been cast aside again and again in favour of expediency and trade – ask a Tibetan or an East Timorian sometime about how the UN helped them. I expect if and when China finally seizes Taiwan and “reunites” its “renegade province” with the motherland there will be much squealing, but after a while things will proceed as before.

With this in mind, a slow strategy of trailer park sprawl and suburban aggression is what fascists in Israel have been practicing since 1968 with their program of progressive colonization/settlement of the occcupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank. This stealthy colonization continued all through the 1990s, even as the US professed to be an “honest broker” negotiating between the Palestinians and the Israelis.

Now, finally, after many decades of creeping conquest, they see and important milestone in sight. In return for withdrawing from the occupied territory of Gaza, they are confident that the US will sponsor their annexation of significant territory within the occupied West Bank. This will render an effective Palestinian State there impossible and reduce it to a set of several small, enclosed, economically dependent bantustans wherein many local Arab warlords or bosses can be promoted and proxied into servile domination over their captive populations.

And of course, as a bonus, the “right of return” is nullified. Israel gets to permanently and legally abrogate all claims for lands and properties and citizenship appropriated from Palestinian families during the ethnic cleansing of Arabs that accompanied the birth of Israel in the late 1940s. Quite a coup.

Should they succeed in this land grab, I expect them to recommence their quest for theologically mandated lebensraum, beginning again within the remaining West Bank and Gaza to promote the same pattern of stealthy colonization, deployment of settlements, annexation of roads and valleys, and general sprawl.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before!

The boundaries of the Bantustans were drawn to exclude economically valuable land.

The large number of reassigned citizens combined with the small area allocated to the Bantustans meant that the citizen to land ratio was severely disproportionate to that of South Africa.

Becoming citizens of the new territories meant losing citizenship of South Africa, where the majority of candidates for reassignment of citizenship lived and worked. This would cause them to lose what few rights and privileges they had as citizens of South Africa.