“For those who desire to keep the West Bank and Gaza, to expand the settlements without annexing the Palestinian population, and who understand that transfer is impractical, the original South African model is particularly tempting.” - Avi Primor, a former Israeli foreign ministry deputy director (Slater 2021, 87%).
Hello, friends,
I’d just like to express solidarity to the Palestinians and Arab-Israelis. First, I believe in a binational one-state solution, in which all people enjoy equal rights, in a non-ethnic-based democracy, lately best articulated by Peter Beinart over at Jewish Currents.
Israel is an apartheid state with some racist laws de jure, and other racist institutions de facto. Israel is made up of 20 percent of Arab Israelis who are, in many ways, second-class citizens. Arab-Israelis largely live in exclusively Arab towns with underfunded schools; if they have a Palestinian wife or husband, their partner is forbidded by law in becoming an Isreali citizen; and they have became more disenfranchised since a 2014 Knesset law raised the threshold for representation in the parliament, from 2 to 3.5 percent, making it harder for Arab parties to enter the parliament (Ghanem 2016). In 2016, one poll showed that nearly half of Jewish Israelis “agree” or “strongly agree” with expulsion of Arabs. Seventy-seven percent of Orthodox Jews support expulsion; while 38 percent of even secular Isreali Jews do so. And this is all just inside Israel proper, the so-called “only democracy in the Middle East.”
Israel is a settler-colonial state, born through a process of ethnic cleansing (see The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006) by Illan Pappe), which is actively violating numerous United Nations Security Council Resolutions (see: S/RES/242; S/RES/2334), and international treaties, including most importantly, the Fourth Geneva Convention. Article 49, which plainly states that an “Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies” is um not being followed, to put it lightly.
This map from B'Tselem, an Israeli non-governmental organization (NGO) illustrates the above point. The gray box off the coast is the fishing area forbidden to Gazans; the light and dark blue triangles inside West Bank are Israeli settlements. Check out the entire “conquer and divide” presentation by B’Tselem. It’s powerful.
Palestinians in the West Bank, let alone Gaza, are not allowed to freely get around. They live under military rule. They exist in a panopticon, have gone 40 days without water, water controlled by Israel, and have a week, feeble government, the Palestinian Authority, which effectively, at this point, serves as an arm of the Israeli military. Many roads in the Occupied Territories are blocked or severely restricted to Palestinians and thousands of homes have been demolished by Israel to build these illegal settlements. The list of obstacles that can be daily, weekly, monthly, or ongoing include: curfews, unfair labor laws, military checkpoints, roadblocks, a restricted ability to have due process in courts, and so forth (Hamze 2016).
In the process of forming Israel, and the ensuing Arab-Israeli War, 750,000 Palestinians became dispossessed and become refugees, locally defined as people “whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period June 1, 1946 to May, 15 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict” (UNRWA). During the Six Day War of 1967, Israel captured the Sinai peninsula, the West Bank (of the Jordan River), the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights. In other words, must of the land captured by Israel was land that was partitioned to become the future home of Palestine. Of course, Palestinian representatives did reject the 1947 UN plan - but the reasoning was because…they understood what was happening. (“Our movement is maximalist. Even all of Palestine is not our final goal.” – David Ben-Gurion, who would become first prime minister of Israel (Slater 2021, 12%).) Moreover, the partition deal was bad for them: 80 percent of the coastline and 84 percent of good agricultural land was given to Israel (Slater 2021, 13%). Besides, these Palestinians lived there for generations upon generations.
Post-1967, Israel has built hundreds of settlements with tens of thousands of homes within the West Bank and East Jerusalem; 675,000 Israelis now live on occupied land (Krauss 2021). Gaza, 25 miles long and 5-7 miles wide—the 3rd most dense polity in the world—is besieged, access controlled on all sides, and is an open-air prison. In 2014, in Gaza, during the so-called “50 Day War,” the Israel Defense Forces (DF) killed over 2,000 people, as many as 70 percent being civilians. And, according to Breaking the Silence—a website, film, and organization comprised, in their own words, “of veteran soldiers who have served in the Israeli military since the start of the Second Intifada and have taken it upon themselves to expose the Israeli public to the reality of everyday life in the Occupied Territories”—the IDF openly engaged in indiscriminate killing, considering most Gazans fair game as “enemy combatants.” And think about it: when you bomb a dense strip of land, even if you give so-called warnings, you kill civilians, disproportionately. This is a matter of policy. The amount of obfuscating and false equivalence here is grotesque.
Israel, to this day, believes that the entire area, from the River Jordan to the eastern Mediterranean sea, should be Greater Israel. And their settlement policies have effectively made a two state solution, without massive dislocation, removal—of both both Israelis and Palestinians—impossible. Isreal has chosen to be a Jewish state, but not a fully democratic one.
In the Gaza Strip, Gazans face collective punishment by a government and a military backed by the world’s only superpower, the United States, which supports Israel with nearly $4 billion annually—largely a slush fund to help build up the Israeli defense industry and bolster the American one (Green 2016). Gazans continue to live seiged on all sides, with an air, sea, and land blockade enforced on them by Egypt and Israel (and largely supported by the Palestinian Authority). During the last military assault on the Gaza Strip, so-called Operation Protective Edge, at least 550 children were killed, 16,000 homes destroyed, and it was deliberately excessive and designed to elicit a violent response from Hamas (Finkelstein 2018).
I wanted this not to be a summary of the situation; or even news based, though it is, of course, inspired by the latest developments. Plenty of great coverage on what is happening can be found at The New York Times, The Washington Post, Harretz, Jewish Currents, Vox.com, Forward.com, Democracy Now!, and others. I also am perfectly aware of Hamas, the de facto governing organization, with political and military wings (Qassam brigades) of the Gaza Strip, their original charter, and their origins (First Intifada) and impetus (Israeli post-1967 occuption) for existence. I am aware of Islamic Jihad. This is not the time for bothsidesism. Organizing to resist oppression, displacement, seige, and ethnic cleansing must be the focus.
I just want to express solidarity with a people that have been oppressed for over 70 years, betrayed by neighboring Arab countries, killed, controlled, forcible displaced and violently abused by Israel, the Palestinians. When Palestinians non-violently resist and fight for their rights and basic human dignity and equality, they get killed and ignored, incentivizing violence, by the way. When they resist using violent tactics, Israel engages in wanton collective punishment, disproportionate and with ovrwhelming force by the IDF anytime they so desire (2004: Operation “Rainbow,” 2004: Operation “Days of Penitence,” 2006: Operation “Summer Rains,” 2006: Operation “Autumn Clouds,” 2008: Operation “Hot Winter,” 2009: Operation “Cast Lead,” 2012: Operation “Pillar of Defense,” 2014: “Operation Protective Edge.” This is not complicated.
And I’ll leave with a quote from Michael Brooks, who in just two months, will have been dead for a year.
“It’s not a complex issue. That’s the big thing. It’s super simple. There is one group that has enormous power (Israel); is the most powerful country in the Middle East; is backed by the United States; acts on another population with total impunity and is never held accountable for anything.” - Michael Brooks
Free Palestine,
Patrick M. Foran