April 26, 2024
In partnership
with
The Gaza assault
cannot be understood separately from Israel’s divide-and-conquer strategy
against Palestinians in Jenin, Jerusalem, and Nazareth.
In an interview
about Israel’s economy with business newspaper “The Marker” in 2012, Benjamin
Netanyahu boasted, in what has since become a kind of idiomatic phrase, that
“if you leave out the Arabs and the ultra-Orthodox, [Israel is] in great
shape.” Today, the prime minister seems to be refining that tagline even
further: if you leave out all the people entirely, we’re in golden shape.
It’s not just
Netanyahu who believes this. Since the October 7 attack and the ensuing war of
annihilation waged on Gaza, the Israeli right has been euphoric. The Iranian
missile attack two weeks ago further succeeded in diverting our gaze from Gaza,
restraining international criticism of Israel’s crimes, and even earning the
state renewed sympathy.
For a moment,
Israelis could once again look into the mirror and pretend to see the
reflection of a beloved victim, instead of an unruly, vengeful, and deadly
bully. Yet the catastrophe Israel is inflicting on Gaza has not disappeared,
and an invasion of the city of Rafah, if carried out, would likely bring the
scenes of Gaza’s apocalypse back to the front pages.
And when global
attention does return, it is crucial not to fall for the false belief, like
that espoused by the prime minister a decade ago, that Gaza exists in some
parallel universe, with its destruction taking place in a vacuum. Rather, the
assault on the Strip is an integral part of the organizational logic of
Israel’s apartheid regime between the river and the sea — a regime that many
Israelis hope will continue to be in “great shape” after the war is over.
The
categorization of Palestinians into separate classes — citizens inside Israel,
permanent residents of East Jerusalem, occupied subjects in the West Bank,
prisoners in the Gaza ghetto, and refugees in exile — is at the heart of
Israel’s policy of divide and conquer. It effectively negates the existence of
the Palestinians as a single and organic people, while keeping them all under
the rule of Jewish supremacy.
While Israelis
may regard these categories as unrelated entities, this manipulation has never
taken hold among Palestinians themselves, whose national identity does not
recognize these artificial borders, even as those borders force upon them
different rights and experiences. As such, the disaster in Gaza is not seen in
Jaffa, Nablus, or Shu’afat refugee camp as an external event, but rather as a
direct and intimate injury to a limb of the Palestinian body politic. The
inverse is also true: the realities in Jenin refugee camp, East Jerusalem, and
Umm al-Fahem cannot be understood independently of what is happening in Gaza.
Since October 7,
Israel has been waging an all-out war not only against the residents of Gaza,
but against the entire Palestinian people. True, in Gaza, this war is being
waged with such unprecedented cruelty as to be called a genocide. But if we see
the Israeli regime as a hand with five fingers, each gripping a different part
of the Palestinian people, it becomes clear how this hand has clenched into a
single iron fist.
While Israel is
pummeling the Strip to dust, it has accelerated ethnic cleansing in the West
Bank to a frightening degree through the systematic violence of its uniformed
soldiers and its unofficial fighters, the settlers. Recent pogroms in villages
like Duma and Khirbet al-Tawil are not aberrations; while all eyes are on Gaza,
Palestinians in the West Bank are being subjected to blockades, checkpoints,
and severe restrictions on movement. Entire communities are being expelled
through settler terror, which, with the army’s backing, is being unleashed with
no government restraint. Indeed, Israel is jumping at the opportunity to
dramatically change the demographic reality in the West Bank. This, too, is an
integral part of the war on Gaza.
In occupied East
Jerusalem, meanwhile, Israel has advanced plans to build some 7,000 housing
units in existing or future settlements in the city, while the municipality has
in tandem accelerated the pace of demolitions of Palestinian homes.
Checkpoints, which strangled the city’s Palestinian neighborhoods beyond the
separation wall, have tightened their chokehold. So too has the violent
policing of the city’s Palestinian residents, hundreds of whom have been
arrested since October, some of them women and children. Dozens of others have
faced administrative detention, and many more have been issued restraining
orders from the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif, the Old City, or Jerusalem
entirely.
Palestinian
citizens inside Israel are also facing an extreme escalation in oppressive
policies. Israel’s hasbara (propaganda) machine often points to these citizens
as proof that there cannot possibly be an apartheid regime here, saying that
“Israeli Arabs” have equal rights and can vote for and be elected to
parliament. Aside from decades of discrimination in law and practice, since
October 7, Palestinian citizens have also enjoyed: mass arrests of anyone
expressing any solidarity with their people in Gaza; the detention of political
leaders for organizing a protest against the war; persecution of students and
faculty at universities; harassment of doctors, nurses, and other workers in
the healthcare system; and even administrative detention.
Given all this,
now, more than ever, it is crucial not to fall into the trap set by Israel’s
policy of divide and conquer. We must see this war in its entirety, and in
every territory between the river and the sea, for all of them are defined by
apartheid. If the focus continues to be on finding fragmented solutions for
each of the categories Israel has created for the Palestinians — instead of
focusing on the single regime that targets them all as enemies — a return to
bloodshed and death will only be a matter of time.
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