The King of the Jungle

Israeli soldiers impose curfew on the West Bank city of Hebron so Israeli settlers may worship during the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, 8 October 2006.

Rima Merriman, The Electronic Intifada, 8 October 2006

"When it comes to imposing law and order on the Palestinians, what applies is not international humanitarian law, but the law of the jungle. And, of course, it is quite clear who the king of the jungle is.

The Palestinian Israeli conflict is about survival, about the right of one strong party backed by a superpower to "exist" as a Jewish state at the expense of the indigenous non-Jewish population of historic Palestine and their descendants who are not allowed to "exist" in a separate but unequal state of their own. It is about the right of the weak party to negotiate for its own autonomous survival on bits and pieces of leftover "territories", but only if it first concedes its dispossession, if it ensures the security of the strong party and remains its "client".

The logic of the jungle is the logic of the Oslo Accords, which is basically a (mis)understanding between the strong and the weak. Palestinian laws and legal arguments issued from their putative Legislative Council have zero weight in such a context, because the international legal status of the Palestinian Authority is neither fish nor fowl.

After 58 years of Palestinian struggle and the proven bankruptcy of the Oslo Accords, what Hamas and other Palestinian factions now want to put on the table and being derided for it are two fundamental propositions:

1. The Palestinians cannot be forced to declare their acceptance of their dispossession in 1948, certainly not when millions of refugees are still waiting to return to their ancestral homes.

2. Palestinians have a right to resist their occupation by any means possible even when the occupier refuses to recognize it as such."