On March 7th, 1965 around 600 people
began to march from Selma, Alabama to Montgomery. A few weeks before during a
separate nonviolent demonstration about voting rights Jimmy Lee Jackson, a
young black man, was shot by a state trooper while defending his mother and
subsequently died. At Jackson’s funeral Martin Luther King, Jr. declared
him
“a martyred hero of a holy crusade for freedom and human dignity.” The march
from Selma to Montgomery, in-part organized by King, was as much about
remembering Jackson’s sacrifice, his martyrdom, as it was about continuing his
crusade.
Called “Bloody Sunday,” the march was blocked at the Edmund Pettus Bridge that leads out of Selma by Alabama’s State Troopers. The procession of marchers, unarmed, was assaulted by state security forces. Their throats filled with tear gas, their bones broken with batons and nightsticks, the marchers were literally beaten back into Selma.
It would be two weeks later before 3,200 protesters began the successful march from Selma, walking approximately twelve miles a day and sleeping in fields before they successfully reached Montgomery. When they arrived on March 25, their numbers had swelled to 25,000.
Yes, we are on the move and no wave of racism can stop us. We are on the move now. The burning of our churches will not deter us. The bombing of our homes will not dissuade us. We are on the move now. The beating and killing of our clergymen and young people will not divert us. We are on the move now… Like an idea whose time has come, not even the marching of mighty armies can halt us. We are moving to the land of freedom.
Let
us therefore continue our triumphant march to the realization of the American
dream. Let us march on segregated
housing until every ghetto
or social and
economic depression dissolves, and Negroes and whites live
side by side in decent, safe, and sanitary housing. Let us march on segregated
schools until every vestige of segregated and
inferior education becomes a thing of the past, and Negroes and whites study
side-by-side in the socially-healing context of the classroom.
…I
know you are asking today, "How long will it take?" Somebody’s
asking, "How long will prejudice blind the visions of men, darken their
understanding, and drive bright-eyed wisdom from her sacred throne?"…How
long will justice be crucified, and truth bear it?"
I come to say to you this afternoon, however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long, because "truth crushed to earth will rise again."
How long? Not long, because "no lie can live forever."
How long? Not long, because "you shall reap what you sow."
…How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
In August of the same year, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Over twenty years
later, on the opposite side of the earth, there was yet another uprising taking
place. Called the first intifada, in
December1987 the Palestinian people rose up to resist Israel’s military
occupation. The resistance of the first intifada,
as opposed to the second, was characterized
almost exclusively by acts of nonviolence and civil disobedience.
Israel’s Defense Minister at the time was Yitzhak Rabin, he famously told commanders of the military regime in the West Bank to crush the uprising, to “break their bones” in order to “re-instill fear” into the protesters. Rabin denied that he meant the words literally, though one wonders how bones might be broken figuratively. Israel’s Attorney General, Yosef Harish, ordered Rabin to instruct troops to use more restraint in the wake of “numerous complaints of cruel treatment to the inhabitants” of the occupied territories. By March of 1988, four months after the intifada began and twenty three years after the march from Selma to Montgomery was concluded, 111 Palestinians were dead.
By 1993, the intifada had been called off by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), now in negotiations with Israel about the creation of what they believed would be a proto-Palestinian state. Rabin, the bone-breaker, was now Israel’s Prime Minister and thus a primary character in the negotiating drama. The Oslo Accords, as the results of negotiations were called, ostensibly represented an interim period of Palestinian autonomy. For the Palestinians, this implicitly meant that statehood and self-determination, so long out of reach, was finally at hand.
For Rabin, this meant something else entirely. For Rabin, the Oslo accords and the creation of Palestinian autonomy structures represented the further consolidation—not the retreat—of Israeli power. “The Palestinians will be better at [“enforcing order”] than we were,” explained Rabin,
because they will allow no appeals to the Supreme Court and will prevent the [Israeli] Association for Civil Rights from criticizing conditions there by denying it access to the area. They will rule by their own methods, freeing, and this is most important, the Israeli army from having to do what they will do.[1]
Beyond the duties of the indigenous police service, was the structure of the Oslo itself. Rabin championed the concept of the separation of Israeli and Palestinian peoples. First, the West Bank was trifurcated into three different areas. Area A was under full Palestinian control (3% of the West Bank’s surface area); Area B was to under Palestinian administrative authority and Israel controlling security (25%); Area C was under the strict purview of Israel (72%). For Palestinians the divisions were concrete, though Israeli forces would stage numerous incursions in to Area A. Israel instituted a rigorous permit regime over these divisions; Israeli citizens with Israeli permits were (and still are) given numerous privileges (access to roads, to subsidized housing in illegal settlements, immunity from prosecution in Palestinian courts), while permits for Palestinians served to arbitrarily grant and deprive them of access to employment, education, healthcare and freedom of movement.
Palestinians and Israelis are expected to at all times be readily distinguishable. Israeli fuel tanks were meant to be one color, Palestinian fuel tanks another. Roads were constructed specially for Israelis while Palestinians were forced to use roads that wound around Israel’s illegal settlements; journeys of just a few miles could take hours navigating through checkpoints and around roadblocks and closures—if of course a Palestinian had the appropriate permission. Meanwhile, new Israeli settlements were constructed and old settlements were expanded at a previously unheard of pace. Rabin’s plan for peace through all of this was boiled down to an easily packaged slogan: “Them over there; us over here.” Those familiar with South Africa’s history will readily recognize the similarity with the system of apartheid; those familiar with the history of America’s south will immediately recognize similarities as well.
On March 21 2013—forty-eight years to the day after King’s historic march from Selma to Montgomery—President Barack Obama laid from a stone from King’s memorial on Rabin’s grave.
One can only guess at what Obama may have meant by such a gesture. What could it possibly mean to bring the memory of a man who struggled against the forces of segregation and racism, who was imprisoned by and bled under the scourge of state power, to Israel and rest it on the final resting place of Yitzhak Rabin, a champion of “separation” that fought with truncheon and tear gas to crush a nonviolent uprising, that oversaw the defense of military occupation, killing hundreds and imprisoning thousands? There is no rational answer to be gleamed. The only thing the two men had in common was that they were both gunned down by assassins before their visions could be realized.
Whatever analogy that Obama hoped to make between the two men must logically end there. The visions that they strived for were intrinsically, irreconcilably different.
No comments:
Post a Comment