Juan Cole 07/04/2024
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Americans are commemorating the Fourth of July today, the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Implicit in this holiday is the recognition of the right of a people to self-determination.
The grievances that the four million inhabitants of British North America had in 1776 were not felt by them to be narrow or specific but rather universal, and so too was the remedy. They laid against the government of King George III that it was not serving the interests of its North American subjects.
Thomas Jefferson wrote,
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
All human beings are created equal, the founders of the United States believed.
That means that Palestinians, as human beings, are also created equal. The text says “all.”
Moreover, the Palestinians by virtue of being “men” (i.e. human beings) have been endowed by God with the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
In today’s world, the Palestinians do not have any of these rights, whether God wants them to or not. They were successively ethnically cleansed from their homeland of Palestine by militant Jewish settlers. (There were no Jews in Palestine to speak of as recently as 1800; Bonaparte found about 3,000 when he invaded in 1799, I think; Palestine was inhabited by Muslim and Christian Palestinians and as late as 1939 the British mandatory authorities envisaged a Palestinian state run by independent Palestinians in 1949). Some 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from what became Israel by Zionist forces with no compensation and their land and property usurped in 1948. More tens of thousands were displaced in 1967. Their numbers have grown. Some 21 percent of Israel is remnants of the original Palestinian inhabitants, some 2 million persons. They are second class citizens in many ways.
But the some 5 million Palestinians who live in the West Bank and Gaza, and the several hundred thousand living in Lebanese refugee camps, are living lives the opposite of the ones Jefferson declared natural. They are stateless. In the West Bank they live under Israeli military rule; there are a few civil institutions, but all of these can be over-ruled by the whim of the Israeli army. Palestinians do not control their land, water or air.
Julia Frankel at the Associated Press reported Wednesday, “Israel turbocharges West Bank settlement expansion with largest land grab in decades.” Note that some of this newly stolen land was explicitly promised to the Palestine Authority in the Oslo Peace Accords, which Bill Clinton signed and guaranteed. But the Biden administration won’t lift a finger to stop this injustice.
According to the Gaza ministry of health, “at least 37,900 Palestinians have been reported killed in the Gaza Strip since 7 October. Another 87,060 Palestinians have been reported injured” in 2023-2024. The majority of those killed and injured have been women and children, and many of the remaining deaths were among noncombatant men. Israel has dropped some 500 two thousand pound bombs on Gaza, flattening residential complexes and destroying a majority of the housing stock, often striking in the absence of any obvious military target, according to the UN.
Before that, the Israelis had put the Palestinians under siege, including the children and non-combatants in general. They weren’t allowed to export virtually anything they produce. They had (and have) no port or airport (both bombed by Israel). They suffered from massive unemployment and even malnutrition, which the 2023-2024 total war made worse. The Israelis had placed the Palestinians of Gaza in a huge open-air concentration camp. With American and European help.
The British are estimated to have killed 1 percent of the American population 1776-1882. Israel has already killed nearly 2 percent of the Palestinian population of Gaza in roughly nine months of war.
In the phrase of former SCOTUS Chief Justice Earl Warren, the stateless have no right to have rights. They do not have the right to life, or liberty, or the pursuit of happiness. They may be killed with impunity (the Israeli army has killed 9 Palestinians, including children, in its crackdown on the West Bank over the horrific kidnapping and killing of three Israeli youth. The horrid character of the crime does not authorize Israel to engage in collective punishment nor Israelis to act as vigilantes and deprive other people of life or liberty.)
So the Palestinians do not have a right to life. They have no liberty at all as the US founding generation conceived it. And they certainly have no right to pursue happiness. Their lives are constrained and made difficult by deliberate actions of Israeli officials and officers and armed squatters on their land who torment them.
The Declaration of Independence insists that people have a right to elect their government. But Palestinians cannot elect the Israeli government, which actually rules them (and they cannot elect the Lebanese government either, where there is a significant Palestinian refugee population). The elections held after the Oslo process have been undone by deliberate Israeli intransigence. When Palestinians vote for the Palestine Authority, in any case, they are not actually getting representation that matters. The PA only polices 40% of the West Bank, and it is routinely overruled by the Israeli military. The Israeli equivalent of Red Coats, the Israeli military, still controls their land, air and sea. Increasingly, in addition, the Israeli equivalent of neo-Nazis in the cabinet of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have been given control of police and administration in the West Bank, eclipsing the occupation army.
The early Americans were angry that King George III took away land at will, which is something the Israelis routinely do to the Palestinians. They also minded that he appointed the court judges. The Palestinians have no courts in which to adjudicate their claims, being forced to litigate in front of unsympathetic Israeli judges.
Did the Americans mind that the king was “cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world?” Israelis are doing that to the Palestinians. Were they angry at him “for depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury”? The Israelis arrest and hold people for a very long time without any judicial process, a travesty they call “administrative detention.” The Israeli parliament just advanced a bill that would specify that Jewish squatters in the Palestinian West Bank cannot be held under administrative detention with no habeas corpus– that the practice is only directed at Palestinians. This kind of discrimination is why major human rights bodies accuse Israel of Apartheid.
The remedy the early Americans applied to these problems, of rising up against foreign occupying troops, is not available to Palestinians. The Israelis are too strong, too well armed, and too backed to the hilt by the US Congress, many members of which use Israel for their white nationalist purposes. Opposing the Israeli occupation is routinely equated in the US to “terrorism,” even though Palestinians are the aggrieved party. But in any case, the Declaration of Independence does not say all men are created equal except those that have some violent people among them. And King George III saw the American revolutionaries as terrorists, too.
The horrible thing is that US diplomacy and US taxpayers’ money is going toward keeping the Palestinians stateless and without rights. Americans are doing to a helpless people exactly the kinds of things they wouldn’t put up with from King George III for themselves.
Americans don’t have a responsibility to liberate everyone in the world. But they do have a responsibility not to help Israel deprive Palestinians of their inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.