January 1, 2024
The
Israeli government argues that it is in a mortal fight for survival against
Hamas, and therefore must take every measure, including the very destruction of
Gaza, to survive. This is false.
When
Congress returns in January, President Joe Biden will push the case to deepen
American complicity in Israel’s war in Gaza through another US armaments
package for Israel. Americans should raise their voice in a resounding no.
An
arms package for Israel is not only against America’s interests but also
against Israel’s interests. The only path to real security for Israel is peace
with Palestine. The US can help bring this about by ending the supply of
munitions for Israel’s brutal war and by promoting the two-state solution as
called for by international law.
I
spelled out the diplomatic path to the two-state solution in a previous column
for Common Dreams. That path remains open. It is actively promoted by the Arab
and Islamic countries and supported by nearly the entire world.
Israel’s
brutality in Gaza is becoming a true threat to Israel’s survival. Because of
Israel’s extraordinary violence, the world is uniting against Israel, while
Israel is suffering massive military losses. Incredibly, some Israeli leaders
are now openly advocating an even wider war in the Middle East, one that could
well spell utter disaster for Israel.
The
surging global opposition to Israel’s policies is not antisemitic. It is
anti-genocide. It is also pro-peace, pro-Israel, and pro-Palestine. If Israel
ends the genocide, it will end the global opposition it now faces.
Defeating
Hamas is not Israel’s real aim in Gaza
The
Israeli government argues that it is in a mortal fight for survival against
Hamas, and therefore must take every measure, including the very destruction of
Gaza, to survive. This is false. There is no ethical, practical, legal or
geopolitical case for destroying Gaza—killing tens of thousands of civilians,
and uprooting 2 million people—to protect Israel against the kinds of
preventable and controllable threats that Hamas actually poses.
During
the years 2008-2022, Hamas and other militants killed around a dozen Israeli
civilians per year, while Israel usually killed at least ten times more
civilian Palestinians. There was a spike in 2014, when Israel invaded Gaza,
with 19 Israeli civilians killed versus 1,760 Palestinian civilians. Hamas
launches many rockets, but almost all are intercepted or cause little damage.
Israel responds with periodic massacres (as in 2014) and with more regular
airstrikes. The Israelis even have a cynical name for their periodic killing,
called “mowing the grass.” It is common knowledge inside Israel that Hamas long
served as a “low-cost” political prop used by Netanyahu to “prove” to Israelis
that a two-state solution is impossible.
In
all the years of Hamas rule in Gaza after 2007, Hamas has never captured
Israeli territory, much less remotely threatened Israel’s existence or
survival. Simply, it couldn’t do so even if it wanted. Hamas has around 30,000
fighters, compared with more than 600,000 active and reserve personnel in the
IDF. Hamas lacks an air force, armored units, a military-industrial base, and
any geographic maneuverability outside of Gaza.
On
October 7, Hamas fighters made a surprise incursion into Israel that lasted
that horrific day. This did not reflect a new super-ability of Hamas to invade
Israel but rather a shocking failure of Israeli security. Israeli leaders had
ignored extensive warnings of an upcoming Hamas attack and had inexplicably
left the Gaza-Israel border severely under-manned. Even more astoundingly, they
did so just days after Israeli extremists had stormed the al-Aqsa Mosque
complex, one of the Islam’s holiest sites. Hamas exploited Israel’s astounding
security lapse by breaching the border in an attack that led to around 1,100
Israeli civilian deaths, and Hamas’ taking of 240 hostages, with an unknown
number of the Israeli civilian deaths that day caused by Israeli aerial bombing
and crossfire in the IDF’s counterattack.
By
re-fortifying the border with Gaza, Israel has stopped further ground
incursions by Hamas. Netanyahu has ordered the destruction of Gaza not to
protect Israel from Hamas, but to make Gaza uninhabitable and thereby to
fulfill his longstanding intention to impose permanent Israeli rule over the
territory. Netanyahu gets the added bonus of clinging to power despite his
grievous other failures.
The
Israeli government’s more basic objective is to solidify its total control over
“Greater Israel,” meaning all of the land from the Jordan River to the
Mediterranean Sea. Its objective with the incursion in Gaza is to push the
population out of the territory. On October 10, Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav
Gallant stated that “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate
everything.” More recently, Netanyahu spoke of “voluntary emigration” of the
Gazan population—voluntary, that is, after Gaza has been laid to waste and
Gazans told to evacuate. Metula Mayor David Azoulai declared that "the
whole Gaza Strip needs to be empty. Flattened. Just like in Auschwitz. Let it
be a museum for all the world to see what Israel can do. Let no one reside in
the Gaza Strip for all the world to see, because October 7 was in a way a
second Holocaust.” He later clarified that he would like to see the Gaza
population “relocated,” not murdered. Most recently, Finance Minister Bezalel
Smotrich, a self-declared fascist, called for Gaza’s population to be cut to
100,000-200,000 from the current population of more than 2 million. Israel
aimed from the start of its invasion of Gaza to push the Gazans into Egypt, but
Egypt adamantly refused to be a party to ethnic cleansing.
In
the 1970s, the aim of dominating Palestine to create Greater Israel as a Jewish
state was a fringe belief. Now it rules Israeli policy, in part reflecting the
enormous political weight of hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers in the
occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.
“Greater
Israel,” defined as Israel of pre-1967-War borders, plus Gaza, the West Bank,
and East Jerusalem, is home to roughly seven million Jews and seven million
Palestinian Muslims and Palestinian Christians. Israel can rule Greater Israel
only by dominating seven million Palestinians, or by driving them out of their
homes by war, violence, and extreme discrimination. The quest for Greater
Israel in practice leads Israel to commit grave crimes against the people of
Palestine. The ongoing crime is Apartheid rule, with its severe injustices and
indignities. The graver crime is ethnic cleaning as Israel is attempting in
Gaza. The gravest of all is genocide, witnessed in the thousands of deaths of
innocent civilians occurring each week now in Gaza.
Israel’s
turn towards extremism
The
American people need to understand that Israeli politics has become dominated
by extremists who mix religious fervor with murderous violence against the
Palestinians. This ultra-violent side of Israel is readily apparent in Israel
but is still largely unknown to the American public. Israeli brutality in Gaza
comes as a surprise to many Americans, yet it has become par for the course in
Israel itself, although some Israelis are no doubt in denial of the facts on
the ground in the Occupied Territories. The Grayzone has put together a
shocking compilation of Israeli soldiers and leading personalities celebrating
Palestinian deaths.
Israel’s
genocidal violence towards the Palestinian people appeals to much of the
Israeli public for several reasons. First, always lurking in the shadows in
Israel is the memory of the Holocaust. Politicians like Netanyahu have long
stoked the terror of the Holocaust to argue crudely and falsely that all
Palestinians want to kill all the Jews, so that the violent suppression of the
Palestinians is a matter of life and death for Israel. Of course, as in any
spiral of hatred, there is a self-fulfilling prophecy to Netanyahu’s rhetoric
and actions, leading to counter-actions and hatreds from the other side. Yet
rather than trying to solve those through dialogue, interaction, diplomacy, and
peacemaking, the cycle of hatred is stoked.
Second,
orthodox rabbis have expanded upon the security narrative by insisting that
Israel has a sacred right to Palestine because God gave all the land from the
Jordan River to the Mediterranean to the Israelites.
Third,
with 700,000 Israeli settlers living in the Palestinian lands conquered in
1967, Greater Israel has become a fait accompli for a large part of the Israeli
people, with a large voice in Israeli politics. These settlers moved into
conquered territory and now fervently insist on defending their settlements.
The UN Security Council (UNSC Resolution 2334) has unequivocally declared
Israel’s settlements in occupied Palestine to be in flagrant violation of
international law, yet Smotrich himself, in the inner cabinet, is a leader of
the settler movement.
The
emergence of this violent strand of Judaism dates to the early 1970s, just
after the 1967 Six-Day War. The policy question in Israel after 1967 was what
to do with the newly occupied Palestinian land. Drawing on the proposals of
Yigal Allon, a leading Israeli politician, Israeli leaders decided to keep East
Jerusalem and to establish settlements in the occupied West Bank and Gaza to
put “facts on the ground” to protect Israel’s security. From the start, Israeli
governments defied UN Security Council Resolution 242 (1967), which rejected
Israel’s acquisition of territory by war.
What
happened next was momentous. Ultra-religious Jews took up the cause of Israeli
settlements in the occupied territories as part of a messianic calling to make
Israel the “Earthly support of the Lord’s throne,”(here p. 69). In 1974, Gush
Emunim was launched as an ultra-nationalist religious settler movement by
followers of the father-son rabbis Abraham Isaac Kook and Zvi Yehuda Kook,
whose teachings combined the land claims of the Book of Joshua, Talmudic law,
Chassidic mysticism, nationalism, and political activism.
The
religious motivation of Greater Israel is that God gave the Jews all the land
from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. In the Book of Joshua, probably
completed in the 6th century BC, God instructs the Israelites arriving from
Egypt after 40 years in the desert to annihilate the nations of Canaan in order
to take the land for themselves. God promises the land extending “from the
Negev wilderness in the south to the Lebanon mountains in the north, from the
Euphrates River in the east to the Mediterranean Sea in the west, including all
the land of the Hittites. (Joshua 1:4, New Living Translation). With God’s
backing, Joshua’s armies commit a series of genocides to capture the land.
This
extraordinarily violent text and related parts of the Bible (such as the
annihilation of the Amalekites in the Book of Samuel), have become crucial
points of reference for right-wing Israelis, both religious and secular. As a
result, today’s Israel pursues a 6th century BC messianic vision of securing
all of Palestine for the Jews. Supporters of Greater Israel often label the
opponents of this ideology as anti-Semites, but this is wildly off the mark, as
the former Executive Director of the Harvard Hillel has eloquently argued. The
opponents of Greater Israel are against extremism and injustice, not against
Judaism.
The
Jewish settler movement led to a murderous disdain of the Palestinian. In his
book Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Prof. Israel Shahak draws attention to
the religious zealotry of Rabbi Eliezer Waldman, a leader of the West Bank
settlers:
“Let
us say clearly and strongly: we are not occupying foreign territories in Judea
and Samaria [the West Bank]. This is our ancient home. And thank G-d that we
have brought it back to life … Our responsibility to Jewish faith and
redemption commands us to speak up in a strong and clear voice. The Divine
Process of uniting our people and our Land must not be clouded and weakened by
seeming logical concepts of “security” and “diplomacy.” They only distort the
truth and weaken the justice of our cause, which is engraved in our exclusive
national rights to our land. We are a people of faith. This is the essence of
our eternal identity and the secret of our continued existence under all
conditions.” [2002]
In
Jewish History – Jewish Religion (2nd edition, 2008), Shahak quotes the Chief
Chaplain of the Central Regional Command of the Israeli Army in 1973: “In war,
when our forces storm the enemy, they are allowed and even enjoined by the
Halakhah (Jewish law) to kill even good [Palestinian] civilians, that is,
civilians who are ostensibly good" (p. 76).
The
tactic of using violence to provoke mass Palestinian flight has been part of
Israel’s playbook from its inception. On the eve of Israel’s independence,
during 1947-8, Jewish militant groups used terror to provoke the mass departure
of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in a sordid process called nakba by
the Palestinians (“catastrophe” in Arabic).
Netanyahu’s
government aims to repeat the nakba in the Gaza war by forcing Gazans to flee
to neighboring Egypt or other parts of the Arab Middle East. However, unlike in
1947-8, the world is watching in real-time, and is expressing outrage at
Israel’s blatant attempt at ethnic cleansing. Egypt told Israel and the US in
no uncertain terms that it would not be a party to Israel’s ethnic cleansing,
and would not accept a flood of Gazan refugees.
The
quest for Greater Israel is doomed to fail
Israel’s
attempt to violently create a “Greater Israel” will fail. The Israeli Defense
Forces are suffering massive losses in the brutal urban warfare in Gaza. While
Israel has killed more than 20,000 Gazans, mostly women and children, it has
not destroyed Hamas’s capacity to resist Israel’s invasion. IDF leaders say
that the battle against Hamas will require many more months, but well before
then, global opposition will likely become insurmountable.
In
desperation, Israeli leaders such as Defense Minister Benny Gantz want to
expand the war to Lebanon and probably to Iran. US hardliners such as
Republican US Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina have dutifully and
predictably chimed in, urging a US war with Iran. This Israeli gambit too will
likely fail. The US is in no position to fight a wider Middle East war, after
having drawn down its stockpile of munitions in Ukraine and Gaza. The American
people too strongly oppose another US war, and their opposition will be heard
in an election year, even by a Congress in the pocket of the
military-industrial complex.
Israel’s
diplomatic setbacks, unless reversed, will prove devastating. Israel has
hemorrhaged political support worldwide. In a recent UN General Assembly vote,
174 countries, with 94% of the world population, voted in favor of Palestinian
political self-determination, while just 4 countries with 4% of the world
population – Israel, the United States, Micronesia and Nauru – voted against
(another 15 countries abstained or did not vote). Israel’s hardline militarism
has united the world against it.
Israel
counts entirely now on its one remaining supporter, the United States, but US
support is also waning. By a huge margin, 59% for and 19% opposed, Americans
support a cease fire. Americans support Israel’s security but not its
extremism. Of course, America has its own Christian and Jewish zealots who base
their politics on biblical literalism/orthodoxy, but they are a minority of
public opinion. American support for Israel depends on the two-state solution.
Biden knows it and has reiterated US support for the two-state solution, even
as the US supplies munitions for Israel’s war on Gaza.
While
American Jews generally support Israel, they do not support Israel’s religious
messianism. In a 2020 Pew Survey only 30% of American Jews believed that “God
gave the land that is now Israel to the Jewish people.” 63% believed in the
feasibility of peace between Israel and Palestine through the two-state
solution. Only 33% believed as of 2020 that the Israeli government was making
sincere efforts towards peace with the Palestinians.
Even
Orthodox US Jews are divided on the question of Greater Israel. Some orthodox
Jewish communities such as the Chabad are believers in the biblically motivated
Greater Israel, while others such as the Satmar community (also known as
Naturei Karta) are anti-Zionists and outspoken critics of Israel’s war on the
Palestinian people stating that Judaism is a religion not a nation concept. The
Satmar community believes that the revival of the Jewish homeland must follow
God’s timeline, and not a Zionist timeline.
Supporting
Israel’s extremism is not in America’s interest
The
US has been providing the munitions for Israel’s brutal war. This complicity
has led to a lawsuit by Palestinian plaintiffs charging the US Government with
violations of the Genocide Convention. As part of this legal effort, the
US-based Center for Constitutional Rights has methodically documented the
genocidal statements by Israeli leaders here and here.
The
US is also facing severe and costly diplomatic isolation as it defends Israel’s
indefensible actions. In recent votes of the US Security Council and the UN
General Assembly, the US has stood almost alone in backing Israel’s
hyper-violent and unjust actions. This is hurting the US in countless other
areas of foreign policy and global economics.
The
US federal budget is also under tremendous stress from military-related
spending, which will reach around $1.5 trillion in total in 2024. The American
people have had enough of the bulging military spending, which has been a
central factor in raising the public debt from around 35% of GDP in 2000 to
around 100% of GDP today. With soaring debts and the rise in interest rates on
mortgages and consumer loans, the public is resisting Biden’s calls for more
deficit spending to fund the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and will vociferously
oppose a wider war in the Middle East, especially one that would draw the US
into direct combat.
Of
course, US open-ended support for Israel has seemed to be unstoppable in
American politics. The Israel lobby—a powerful constellation of Israel
politicians and wealthy Americans—has played a huge role in building this
strong support. The Israel lobby gave $30 million in campaign contributions in
the 2022 Congressional election cycle, and will give vastly more in 2024. Yet
the lobby is up against the public’s growing opposition to Israel’s brutality
in Gaza.
The
two-state solution remains Israel’s true chance for peace and it’s security
Israeli
leaders and diplomats have to stop shouting that critics are all anti-Semites
and listen to what the world is actually saying: Israel and Palestine need to
live side by side based on international law and mutual security. The support
for a two-state solution is support for the peace and security of the Jewish
people in the state of Israel, just as it is support for the peace and security
of the Palestinian people in their own state. To the contrary, supporting
Israel’s genocide in Gaza and inflaming anti-Israel (and anti-US) sentiment
around the world, is antithetical to Israel’s long-term security and perhaps
even its survival. The Arab and Islamic states have repeatedly declared their
readiness to normalize relations with Israel within the context of the
two-state solution. This goes back to the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative and
includes the important Final statement of the extraordinary joint Arab Islamic
Summit in Riyadh on November 11, 2023. The US and Arab countries should quickly
agree on establishing a joint peacekeeping force to keep both sides safe in the
context of implementing the two-state solution.
Many
zealous religious settlers will strongly resist a Palestinian state, asserting
their right to do so based on ancient biblical texts. Yet the point of Judaism
is not to rule over millions of Palestinians or to ethnically cleanse them. The
real point is not to provoke global opprobrium but to use reason and goodwill
to find peace. As Hillel the Elder declared, "Whatever is hateful and
distasteful to you, do not do to your fellow man. This is the entire Torah; the
rest is commentary. Go learn." The real point is to fulfill the ethical
vision of the Prophet Isaiah (2:4), who prophesied that “nations shall beat
their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall
not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.” So may
it be.
Unmitigated
Horror: Guernica, the Warsaw Ghetto, and Now Gaza
January 1, 2024
“Hamas must be destroyed, Gaza must be
demilitarized, and Palestinian society must be deradicalized.”
– Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, The
Wall Street Journal, December 26, 2023.
“The painful commonality between the
tragedies of Gaza and the Warsaw Ghetto is the utter disregard for human lives
in a war setting by the citizens of even the most enlightened countries. Such disregard is so much more painful when
it is committed by ‘our own people,’ whether it be American soldiers in Vietnam
and Iraq or the Israeli soldiers in Gaza.”
– Alex Hershaft, A Survivor of the Warsaw
Ghetto, The Washington Post, December 22, 2023
“Yes, how many deaths will it take ’til he
knows that too many people have died?”
– Bob Dylan, “Blowing in the Wind,” 1962
The Nazi bombing
of Guernica, a Basque town in northern Spain, took place in 1937 during the
Spanish civil war. The Germans were
testing their new air force, and their bombs killed or wounded one-third of
Guernica’s five thousand residents. Guernica’s agony was captured in a painting
by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso; it is considered the most moving and powerful
anti-war painting in history. The
painting shows the suffering caused by modern war and brought the atrocities of
the Spanish civil war to an international audience.
For Gaza, a
Picasso would presumably use Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s hospitals to depict
the terror and horror of Israel’s use of heavy ordnance. Just as the Nazi bombing of Guernica had a
casual aspect, Israel’s use of its air force is casual in its destruction of
Gaza’s infrastructure, indeed Gaza itself.
The use of U.S.-supplied one thousand and two thousand pound bombs puts
the lie to Israel’s claim that the primary objective of the war is to destroy
Hamas. The primary objective of Israel’s war is to destroy Gaza itself; it is
the latest step in Israeli efforts over 75 years to displace Palestinian
populations from the river to the sea.
Israel’s right-wing war cabinet and Israeli Defense Forces are not
taking aim at the West Bank, where the death count is climbing.
The Warsaw
Ghetto housed 350,000 Jews who—like Gazans—were surviving hunger and disease,
when the Nazi’s began their campaign of liquidation. In the wake of the roundup of Jews, the Nazis
deployed tanks and heavy artillery to destroy the remaining 50,000 survivors
and level every building, until the Warsaw Ghetto was no more. The Israeli destruction of Gaza is designed
to ensure that Palestinians will have no place to live.
The New York
Times and the Washington Post have put the lie to Israel’s claim that Gaza’s
al-Shifa hospital was directly involved in Hamas activities and that the
buildings of the al-Shifa complex sat atop underground tunnels that were used
to direct rocket attacks and command fighters.
The Post analysis demonstrated that “the rooms connected to the tunnel
network…showed no immediate evidence of military use by Hamas;” “none of the
five hospital
buildings…appeared
to be connected to the tunnel network;” and that there was “no evidence that
the tunnels could be accessed from inside hospital wards.” The Israels lied, and the Central
Intelligence Agency corroborated the lies.
Overall, the
mainstream media continues to assist Israeli propagandists in making their case
to an international audience. U.S. media
consistently refer to last month’s killing of three Israeli hostages by Israeli
defense forces as “accidental.” There
was nothing “accidental” about the killing; it was intentional with the
hostages being shirtless, carrying a white flag of surrender, raising their
hands, speaking Hebrew, and posting SOS notices as well as scrawling “Help! 3
hostages” in Hebrew on nearby walls. The
shooting may have been “mistaken,” but it was not “accidental.” The Israeli soldiers intended to kill the
three men; they just didn’t know they were Israelis. The father of one of the
victims poignantly asked why the IDF didn’t just shoot his son in the leg.
The killing
points to an ethical failure in the IDF, according to Ron Ben-Yishal, senior
national security columnist for the Yediot Ahronot newspaper, who has reported
on all of Israel’s wars since the Six-Day War in 1967. These failures are predictable in view of
Israeli racism toward Palestinans.
Former Prime Minister Golda Meir’s dismissed Palestinians as “roaches”
prior to the October 1973 war. Defense
Minister Yoav Gallant has described Palestinians as “human animals,” and “we
are acting accordingly.” In this way,
Gallant justifies the Israeli war crime of cutting off food and water to the
residents of Gaza.
U.S. media have
supported Israel’s line that the shooting of the hostages was due to the “fear
and confusion” caused by Hamas’s “war of traps and trickery,” which meant that
Israeli “troops were spooked and too fast to fire.” (The Washington Post,
December 24, 2023, p. 1) At least, the
Israelis are investigating the killing, and will have the assistance of an IDF
combat dog with a GoPro camera that recorded the voices of the three victims. Of course, if the victims had been
Palestinian, there would have been no publicity, let alone an
investigation. We will never know how
many innocent Palestinian men have been murdered in similar fashion.
The United
States itself provides support for Israel by vetoing or abstaining from every
UN Security Council resolution that is critical of Israel. Since the October War of 1973, the United
States has vetoed more than 50 measures.
When the Obama administration abstained from a 2017 resolution that
declared Israeli settlements on the West Bank illegal, there was considerable
congressional criticism. The United
States last month even abstained from a UN resolution that merely supported
additional humanitarian aid for Gaza.
Meanwhile, the
United States has offered no criticism of Israel’s killing of more than 70
journalists and media workers, mostly Palestinian, marking the deadliest
conflict for journalists ever recorded by the Committee to Protect Journalists. The Israelis have also killed more than a
dozen Palestinian writers and poets.
More than a hundred international aid workers have also been killed—some
of the along side their extended families.
Secretary of
State Antony Blinken, one of Israel’s leading apologists, has merely stated
that “we want to make sure that that’s investigated, and that we understand
what’s happened and there’s accountability.”
The killing of journalists is an Israeli attempt to ensure that the
rough draft of Israel’s war is not recorded accurately. Even the Post referred to Blinken’s remarks
as a “nothing burger of a response.”
Netanyahu’s
legacy is secure. When Guernica, the
Warsaw Ghetto, and Gaza are discussed and analyzed in the future, the Nazis and
Benjamin Netanyahu will be similarly condemned.
Meanwhile, there
is much for all Americans to learn.
President Biden should think about Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s loss
to Richard Nixon in the 1968 presidential election because of his belated
opposition to the Vietnam War. And for a
better understanding of Israeli apartheid and the miserable life of
Palestinians on the West Bank, read Nathan Thrall’s “A Day in the Life of Abed
Salama: Autonomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy.”
War in Gaza won’t end in 2024 – Israel
January 1, 2024
West Jerusalem has refused to entertain international calls for
a ceasefire in the besieged enclave
Israel
will continue to wage war in Gaza throughout 2024, Israel Defense Forces
spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said in a statement on Sunday. Describing a
strategic shift to what he called the “smart” management of IDF troops, Hagari
revealed that five reservist brigades were being taken out of combat,
supposedly to reinvigorate the Israeli economy as the country settles in for a
prolonged conflict.
“The
goals of the war require lengthy fighting, and we are prepared accordingly,”
he said, explaining that sending the reservists back home “will result in
considerable relief for the economy, and will allow them to gain strength for
operations next year, and the fighting will continue and we will need them.”
The
IDF spokesman’s prediction followed similar comments from Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu, who warned during a press conference on Saturday that “many
more months” of fighting still lay ahead.
The
government has categorically rejected international pleas for a ceasefire amid
the mounting death toll in Gaza, where its AI-enhanced bombing campaign has
resulted in over 21,800 Palestinian deaths since Hamas’ October 7 surprise
attack, according to the enclave’s health ministry. Another 56,000 have been
seriously wounded, and 85% of the enclave’s approximately 2.3 million residents
have been displaced.
The
US has consistently stood by Israel throughout the current stage of the
conflict, including by vetoing UN Security Council resolutions demanding a
ceasefire. However, even Washington has clashed with its Middle Eastern ally
over Gaza's future. Netanyahu has said the territory will remain under Israeli
control after the war, while the US has called for it to be run by the
Palestinian Authority as a step towards a two-state solution; the organization
governs the West Bank and previously oversaw Gaza before Hamas took power
following elections in 2007.
The
Israeli government vehemently opposes Palestinian statehood, to the point that
Netanyahu has openly boasted of his role in preventing it during several rounds
of peace talks over the years.
On
Sunday, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich suggested that the government
“encourage migration” of Palestinians out of Gaza and reestablish the Jewish
settlements that were dismantled there in 2005. In an interview with Army
Radio, he observed that “the entire discussion about ‘the day after’ would be
completely different” if 90% of the enclave’s Arab inhabitants would just
ethnically cleanse themselves.
While
an official with Netanyahu’s office subsequently told the Associated Press that
“contrary to false allegations, Israel does not seek to displace the population
in Gaza,” but merely looks to “enable those individuals who wish to leave to do
so,” a government document leaked last month called for the mass relocation of
all of the territory’s residents to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula - a plan that
alarmed Palestinians and Egyptians alike.
Notes from the Editors
January 1, 2024
The
genocide being inflicted by the Israeli state on the Palestinian people has now
(as we write this in late November 2023) reached a particularly lethal stage,
giving rise to a second and perhaps final Nakba, akin to the mass expulsion of
Palestinians from their land in 1948. Under these circumstances, it is crucial
to turn to the concept of settler colonialism as it emerged over the last
century and a half from the Marxian critique of colonialism/imperialism.
In
his chapter on “The Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist” in the first volume
of Capital, Karl Marx placed special emphasis on the notion of colonialism
proper—that is, settler colonialism (from the Latin colonus, meaning settler).
In his words, “The treatment of the indigenous population [of the Americas]
was…most frightful in plantation-colonies set up exclusively for the export
trade.… But even in the colonies properly so called,” by which he meant settler
colonies, “the Christian character of primitive accumulation,” as he
sarcastically remarked, “was not [to be] belied.” As a scholar of Ancient
Greece, Marx was familiar with the history of the Athenian settler colonies, or
cleruchies, in which the entire population was forcibly removed to make way for
settlers. Settler colonies, whether ancient or modern, directly expropriate the
land and, in the process, promote the outright extermination—in the eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century sense of the term, encompassing both extinction and
expulsion—of the Indigenous population. Referring to “those sober exponents of
Protestantism, the Puritans of New England,” Marx pointed to the “extirpation”
at their hands of the original inhabitants through such means as the passage of
laws setting prices on the scalps of Indigenous people, men, women, and
children. In relation to the English “war of conquest” directed at Ireland, he
knowingly noted that the English employed the very same means as they later
used “against the Red Indians.” In the times of Elizabeth I and Oliver
Cromwell, “the plan was to exterminate the Irish at least up to the river
Shannon, to take their land and settle English colonists in their place.”
Nevertheless, the attempt to carry this out was unsuccessful due to combined
Irish resistance, and the result was the mere imposition of a land-owning
aristocracy (Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 [London: Penguin, 1976], 915–18; Karl
Marx and Frederick Engels, Ireland and the Irish Question [Moscow: Progress
Publishers, 1971], 127; John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Hannah Holleman,
“Marx and the Indigenous,” Monthly Review 71, no. 9 [February 2020]: 1–19).
By
the late nineteenth century, the main English settler colonies in what is now
the United States, Canada, and Australia had largely completed their respective
genocides directed at the Indigenous inhabitants, whom the settlers greatly
outnumbered. Despite this, the struggles of First Peoples in these lands
persist to this very day. (The experience in New Zealand was somewhat unique
since the resistance of the Māori was effective to a degree, leading to their
greater continuing presence.) Sub-Saharan African states colonized by Britain,
such as South Africa, Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia), and Kenya, were also
subjected to forms of white settler colonialism, although this could not be
effected completely due to the size of the populations the colonists confronted,
leading to institutions of apartheid. Similar conditions faced French settler
colonialism in Algeria beginning in the 1830s (and criticized by Marx), which
culminated in the mid-twentieth century French-Algerian War and subsequent
decolonization.
Israeli
apartheid in occupied Palestine, following the 1948 Nakba, was a product of
conditions resembling those experienced by British and French settler
colonialists in Africa, given the size of the Palestinian population relative
to that of the incoming settlers. Nevertheless, apartheid in the occupied
territories was always regarded as a stopgap, while the long-term objective of
Zionist settler colonialism has remained the elimination of the Palestinians.
Indeed, what mainly caused settler colonialism to re-emerge as a major
historical and theoretical concept was its growing presence in Israeli-occupied
Palestine in the twentieth century. The settler colonial project arose
historically out of the reaction (“Zionism”) of many Eastern European Jews to a
renewed virulent antisemitism in late nineteenth-century modernity, which
August Bebel famously referred to as the “socialism of fools.” This reaction
was then manipulated by the British as part of their long-term policy in the
region, beginning with the 1917 Balfour Declaration.
As
explained by Rosalind Petchesky in the introduction to A Land with a People,
“The settler colonial project to ‘de-Arabise’ Palestine and bring all of
historic Palestine under Zionist sovereignty long pre-dated both the Nakba and
worldwide knowledge of the Nazi holocaust. The 1929 constitution of the Jewish
National Fund (JNF), the parastatal agency that basically manages distribution
of land throughout all Israeli-controlled territory to this day, declared JNF
land to be ‘the inalienable property of the Jewish people’ and that ‘[the JNF]
is not obliged to act for the good of all its citizens [but] for the good of
the Jewish people only.’” Following the Holocaust, the Second World War, and
the displacement of hundreds of thousands of European Jews, those subscribing
to Zionism actively pursued the creation of a new “Jewish homeland” in
Palestine, then the home of more than a million Palestinians with very
different cultural and religious backgrounds. Zionist settler colonialism was
increasingly directed at turning all of Palestine into a Jewish state, and
found a new hegemonic backer in the United States (Esther Farmer, Rosalind
Petchesky, and Sarah Sills, A Land with a People: Palestinians and Jews
Confront Zionism [New York: Monthly Review Press, 2021]).
As
a critical concept seen as directly applicable to the Israel/Palestine
conflict, settler colonialism was highlighted as early as 1965 in a pamphlet by
Fayez A. Sayegh, titled Zionist Colonialism in Palestine. Sayegh argued that
“Zionist colonialism” had as its aim the establishment of a “settler community”
in its own right, not dependent on a metropolitan country, which was
“essentially incompatible with the continued existence of the ‘native
population’ in the coveted country.” At the same time, the historian of the
British Empire D. K. Fieldhouse published his indispensable work, The Colonial
Empires, utilizing a classification of colonies similar to that of Marx and
placing heavy emphasis on “settlement colonies” (without discussing
Israel/Palestine in that context) (Fayez A. Sayegh, Zionist Colonialism in
Palestine [Beirut: Palestine Liberation Organization, 1965], 1–5; David K.
Fieldhouse, The Colonial Empires: A Comparative Survey from the Eighteenth
Century [New York: Dell Publishing, 1966]).
However,
it was in June 1967, in the midst of the Arab-Israeli War, that Jean-Paul
Sartre’s journal Les Temps Modernes published a special one-thousand-page
edition titled “Le conflit israélo-arabe,” which included within it a
book-length essay by the great French Marxist Middle East specialist, Maxime
Rodinson, titled Israel: A Colonial-Settler State? Rodinson was the son of
Russian-Polish Jewish immigrants who were active in the French Communist Party
and died in Auschwitz. His analysis of Israeli settler colonialism made a
favorable impression on radical journalist I. F. Stone in the United States
who, in a review titled “Holy War” in the New York Review of Books, called
Rodinson’s contribution “by far the most brilliant in the whole volume.”
Rodinson’s work on Israeli settler colonialism was to be published in English
in 1973. Another landmark was the publication in 1972 in New Left Review of
“White-Settler Colonialism and the Myth of Investment Imperialism” by Arghiri
Emmanuel (most famous for his work Unequal Exchange), though Emmanuel’s
analysis was mainly concerned with settler colonialism in Africa, as opposed to
the Middle East (Maxime Rodinson, Israel: A Colonial Settler-State? [New York:
Monad Press, 1973]; I. F. Stone, “Holy War,” New York Review of Books, August
3, 1967, 15–16; Arghiri Emmanuel, “White Settler Colonialism and the Myth of
Investment Imperialism,” New Left Review 1/73 [May–June 1972]: 35–57).
In
Israel: A Colonial-Settler State?, Rodinson began by stating: “The accusation
that Israel is a colonialist phenomenon is advanced by an almost unanimous Arab
intelligentsia, whether on the right or the left. It is one case where Marxist
theorizing has come forward with the clearest response to the requirements of
the ‘implicit ideology’ of the Third World, and has been most widely adopted.”
In assessing the situation in Israel/Palestine, he emphasized, like Marx, that
the Zionist movement represented a “colonialism in the Greek sense” (as in the
Athenian cleruchy), which involved the forcible elimination or exile of the
dominated population and their replacement by settlers. In some cases, such as
New England and Tasmania, he noted, settler colonialism involved outright
exterminism, which was built into the very logic of settler colonialism.
Israel’s existence as a settler colonial state in the modern world meant the
country’s continuing dependence on the main imperial powers, Anglo and French,
that were either creators of settler colonial states, or themselves settler
colonial states. “There is no ‘revolutionary solution,’” he wrote, “to the
Israeli-Arab problem…. It is possible that war is the only way out of the
situation created by Zionism. I leave it to others to find cause for rejoicing
in this.” Referring specifically to Zionism, he wrote: “This kind of belief in
the infallibility of one’s own ‘ethnic’ group is a frequent phenomenon in the
history of human groups. It is called racism” (Rodinson, Israel: A
Colonial-Settler State?, 27, 78, 92, 95).
Not
the least of the numerous ties of the United States to Israel, as Rodinson and
others have suggested, is their common founding in settler colonialism. As
Samir Amin pointedly expressed it in The Reawakening of the Arab World in 2016,
“Like the nineteeth-century US, Israel thinks it has the right to conquer new
areas for the expansion of its colonisation and to treat the people who have
been living here for two thousand years—if not more—like ‘Redskins’ to be
hunted or exterminated” (Samir Amin, The Reawakening of the Arab World:
Challenge and Change in the Aftermath of the Arab Spring [New York: Monthly
Review Press, 2016], 182–83; see also Harry Magdoff and Paul M. Sweezy, “The
Uprising in Palestine,” Monthly Review 40, no. 5 [October 1988]: 1–17).
What
is currently happening in Gaza and the rest of occupied Palestine today is not
a war between Israel and Hamas, but a complete ethnic cleansing, accelerating
the genocidal process of Israeli settler colonialism and its Zionist project,
with the full support of the United States. Israel is in the process of
systematically extending its carpet bombing of Gaza, including hospitals,
schools, homes, and even refugee camps—everywhere people can be found—from Gaza
City to southern Gaza. On November 16, 2023, Israeli forces dropped flyers all
over southern Gaza telling the population to get out or be eliminated. As
Israeli Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter explicitly stated on November 11, “We
are now actually rolling out the Gaza Nakba.”
Washington
is the one entity, outside Israel itself, that has the power to stop the
genocide immediately, as required by international law. However, rather than
protesting like most of the world, it is providing arms for genocide, backed by
both major political parties. This marks a turning point, not just for Israel
or Palestine, but for the world as a whole (Emile Badarin, “Israel-Palestine
War: This is Not about Hamas. It’s a 75-Year Colonial War,” Middle East Eye,
November 17, 2023, middleeasteye.net; Andre Damon, “The Forced Evacuation of
Southern Gaza: The Next Stage in the Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,” Defend
Democracy Press, November 18, 2023, defenddemocracy.press).
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