Islam Times - Israel determined to remove Palestinians

Islam Times - An interview with Ralph Schoenman, author of "Hidden History of Zionism", about the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) saying the Israeli regime has committed war crimes and carries out racist acts against Palestinians.

Question: Mr. Schoenman, let’s talk about these complaints that are to be, threatened to be filed against the Israelis, war crimes and racist acts against Palestinian people. How serious are they and where can they be pursued on an international level?

Schoenman: Well the issue here of course is that the Israelis deploy these nominal talks which the US imposes upon the Palestinian people through the aegis of the Palestinian Authority.

They deployed these talks under the cover which they carry out even more depredations against the people of Palestine. They expand the settlements and indeed it is instructive to note that the Secretary of State John Kerry when confronted with the fact that the Israelis were expanding these settlements and expanding the areas of East Jerusalem (al-Quds) that are now going to be under systematic control by the Israelis themselves is that there was to be expected that this process will continue.

Nothing more clear can be put forward in a cynical way in which the United States and the Secretary of State take as, given the fact that under the cover of fake talks, the expansion, the relentless expansion of the seizure of the land, the seizure of the water, the seizure of all political and economic control of the area is continued by the Israelis and the war crimes in question have to do with the relentless attack upon the youth, upon the population itself when in anyway attempts to sustain control over its trees, its housing, its land, its water.

It's a relentless occupation in which the Israelis deployed the ultimate force by the façade of talks is used to create a patina of legitimacy to this continued operation that is going on from the beginning of the Palestinian subjugation by the Israelis. The agenda has been to remove the people from their land and from history.

Q: Mr. Schoenman, about the war crimes accusations by the PLO, the crimes that the Israelis have committed over the years or serious the wars on Gaza, the constant incursions into the Gaza Strip, the settlement buildings and the rights violations in the occupied West Bank, where can the Palestinian Authority and the PLO and the Palestinians in general take these accusations to an international arena which will be heard and dealt with on a more comprehensive basis?

Schoenman: Well after all you have these continued torture of prisoners, the indiscriminate arrests and detention of people, raids of homes at night, the use of chemicals and gas on civilian populace, a panoply of measures that are intended to drive the people from the land to fill them with despair and hopelessness as the plan under the cover of next war, the further expulsion of the population.

Your question as to the arena in which this can be addressed is a very difficult one because after all the United Nations, the World Court or institutions that are largely dominated by the established order itself and by countries whose political structure is not unlike that of the United States where one percent of the population own more than the rest of population combined.

So the hard reality is that the struggle for the emancipation of the Palestinian people is the work of the people themselves to struggle on the ground through a complete break with the attempts on the part of the Palestinian Authority financed by the Israelis, policed by the CIA to claim that they can pursue talks with an occupying power and this is, as you put it, more crimes on a daily basis.

There is no other arena of struggle, mobilization of the Palestinian people, mobilization of the oppressed masses of the region for the removal of an apartheid entity makes the Bantustans of the former apartheid South Africa by comparison.

The only arena for liberation is the struggle of the population itself toward self-determination and for a Palestine that is a democratic and secular society without any discrimination based upon ethnicity or religious affiliation which is the predicate of the Israel .... which is oppression based upon exclusivity for the occupying population.