Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016
Issue: 181
Posted on 13th December 2023
Joseph Choonara
The carnage wrought by Israeli forces on the Gaza Strip is a moment of unimaginable brutality.1 It is also a moment of intensification of the exclusion of and violence against Palestinians stretching back over three-quarters of a century.
At the time of writing, the start of December, one estimate put the death toll in Gaza at 20,031, of whom 8,176 were children.2 Aerial images display neighbourhoods flattened by bombardment.3 Around half of all houses have been damaged or destroyed.4 The munitions fired on Gaza have been estimated at the equivalent of 25,000 tonnes of TNT; for comparison, “Little Boy”, the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima, was rated at 15,000 tonnes.5
Some 80 percent of the population have been displaced, many fleeing after the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) told over a million Palestinians to evacuate the area north of the Wadi Gaza stream. Little good it did them: 3,676 had been killed in the “safe” south of the Gaza Strip by the 45th day of fighting. Overcrowded United Nations shelters saw outbreaks of “diarrhoea, acute respiratory infections, skin infections and hygiene-related conditions such as lice”.6 Giora Eiland, a retired IDF major-general and the former head of the Israeli National Security Council, was pleased, speculating that “severe epidemics in the southern Strip will bring victory closer and reduce fatalities among IDF soldiers”.7
Gaza had already suffered slow strangulation since the Israeli blockade of the territory began in 2007. Now, in retaliation for the Hamas attacks on Israel on 7 October, which killed around 1,200 Israelis, the IDF embarked on the collective punishment of Palestinians, seemingly aiming at ending altogether their presence in their homeland. “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba… That’s how it’ll end,” said Avi Dichter, a member of Israel’s war cabinet.8 The word Nakba (“catastrophe” in Arabic) references the enormous campaign of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that accompanied the foundation of the State of Israel in 1948. Although the original Nakba has been concealed or denied within official Israeli history, this one is being celebrated openly by Israeli political leaders.9
To the extent that Israel still engages in propaganda, it increasingly falls flat. One of its spokespeople, Eylon Levy, has given an extraordinary series of interviews to the BBC’s Today programme. In one, confronted regarding the bodies piling up in Gaza, he simply claimed the casualty figures were a lie. Anyway, he suggested, the IDF’s actions were a “proportionate” response to Hamas’s attack. He refused to answer questions about the hundreds killed in recent weeks in the West Bank, a territory governed by the Palestinian Authority, not by Hamas.10 Here, Palestinians face both the IDF and armed Israeli settlers enacting their own attempt at a Nakba:
The evening Israel declared war on Hamas in Gaza, armed Jewish settlers descended on the Palestinian village of Wadi al-Seeq in the occupied West Bank… The settlers dragged three men from their families, stripped them to their underwear, blindfolded them with their own T-shirts and took turns beating them.
When Abu Hassan, a 58 year old Bedouin goatherd, begged for mercy and pointed to a scar from recent heart surgery, one of the Israelis slammed a rifle butt into his chest. Then they urinated on him. “Leave! Go to Jordan, go wherever”, he remembered them shouting. “Or we will kill you”.11
“Proportionality”, anyway, is a strange concept here. Israel has repeatedly waged war on Gaza. A 2008-9 bombardment and invasion of the territory killed almost 1,400 Palestinians.12 A second wave of bombardment in 2012 killed 174. A third, in 2014, was deadlier still, with aerial and ground assaults killing 2,250. Do the Palestinian population not have the same right to mourn their dead, to desire justice and to retaliate—to respond through their own, necessarily asymmetric, resistance? Within the official Israeli logic of “proportionality”, only the coloniser can claim a legitimate right to revenge.
As ever in such logic, Palestinians are not simply killed but rendered less than human, unworthy of grief or pity. The racist language of the coloniser is openly expressed by Israeli politicians, celebrities and soldiers:
“I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly.”
—Yoav Gallant, Israeli defence minister.
“Total erasure of Gaza: total, and not a human life spared.”
—Eyan Golan, popular Israeli singer.
“We keep saying to flatten Gaza… I think that’s not enough. They should be captured and tortured one by one by pulling out their nails and skinning them alive. Save their tongues for last, so we can enjoy his screams, his ears so he can hear his own screams and his eyes so he can see us smiling.”
—Tzipi Navon, advisor to the Israeli prime minister’s wife.
“There is no population in Gaza; there are 2.5 million terrorists.”
—Eliyahu Yossian, former IDF intelligence officer.
“North Gaza is more beautiful than ever. Blowing up everything is amazing. When finished, we will hand over the lands of Gaza to soldiers and settlers who lived in Gush Katif [a group of former Israeli settlements in southern Gaza].”
—Amihai Eliyahu, Israeli heritage minister.
“We are the people of light; they are the people of darkness.”
—Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli prime minister.13
“Human animals must be treated as such. There will be no electricity and no water. There will only be destruction. You wanted hell; you will get hell.”
—Ghassan Alian, IDF officer and head of the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories.14
This dehumanisation finds support in Israeli society. A survey conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute asked if the IDF offensive should consider the suffering of Palestinian civilians. Four out of five Jewish Israelis surveyed replied in the negative.15
Settler colonialism
Israel is now widely referred to as a settler-colonial state. In contrast with “franchise colonialism”, where rule is based on “military power, colonial administrators and the collaboration of local ruling classes”, settler colonialism involves the settlement of a new population with the intent of transforming the colony into a permanent home.16 Ideologically, this binds settlers to their state through a common interest in maintaining exclusion and dispossession of the indigenous population.
There are differing varieties of settler colonialism. The creation of what became Australia and the United States, for instance, involved the near annihilation of the indigenous population. Australia was inhabited by between 770,000 and 1.1 million Aboriginal people prior to European settlement. Yet, Britain would, after 1788, claim sovereignty over the entire territory, treating it as “terra nullius” (“a land belonging to nobody”, a legal conceit used to justify dispossession of colonised people). Colonial expansion continued over centuries, often meeting with fierce resistance from Aboriginal groups. As in the Americas, diseases imported from Europe combined with violence to reduce the indigenous population.17 Those who survived (today, a little over 3 percent of the Australian population identify as indigenous) were forcibly assimilated, as a racially oppressed minority, into an Australian society conceptualised as a community of white settlers. Though far from identical, the European settlement of North America bears a broad resemblance to this process. In such cases, although at various points indigenous people might be economically exploited, indigenous labour does not play a central role in the functioning of the capitalist economy that emerges.
A second variant can be seen in cases such as South Africa. Here initially both the Dutch and British settlers fought to establish their rule, clashing with indigenous resistance and with one another. When a Union of South Africa eventually emerged in 1910, this accelerated the development of a system of racist laws designed to exclude the black population from land ownership and regulate their movement and labour. The 1913 Native Land Act, which granted just 13 percent of land to the black majority, ensured that, to survive, black people would be compelled to seek work within white-owned mines and farms. The subsequent growth of industry created a substantial black working class within urban areas. As anti-colonial movements permeated through Africa after the Second World War, South Africa’s ruling National Party formalised racist segregation into the apartheid system. Although this was imposed by a party dominated by white capitalist farmers and traders, it also had the support of the white working class, whose relative privilege rested on racist exclusion of black people. Here, in contrast to Australia and North America, the black populace remained the majority, making up about 80 percent of the total population. Black workers were also central to the economy, and the struggles of the black working class underpinned repeated waves of mass resistance to white minority rule.18
Israel is a distinctive form of settler colonialism, combining elements of both variants. On the one hand, Zionism, the ideology underlying the creation of Israel, aspired to an ethnically exclusive Jewish economy, from which Palestinians would be forcibly excluded. This has given rise to a genocidal strand within Israeli politics, which, as Rob Ferguson’s article in this issue describes, has come to the fore in recent years. On the other hand, after 1948, the fact that large numbers of Palestinians stubbornly continued to exist—and resist—not only within the borders of the State of Israel but also in far larger numbers in the refugee camps on its borders, posed a problem for Israel that has haunted it since its foundation. This contradiction intensified when, in 1967, Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Incorporating the Palestinians in these areas under Israeli control, while denying them a say in the politics of Israel, necessitated a system of apartheid. This system of racist domination now stretches across the entirety of historic Palestine, encompassing both the 4.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and the 1.9 million within the pre-1967 borders of Israel.19 For this latter group, the Nation State Law, which was enacted by the Israeli parliament in 2018, simply gave a legal form to their already unequal status as non-Jewish citizens.20
The tensions between the drive to eradicate the Palestinians and to subordinate them under a system of apartheid has implications for both Israeli politics and Palestinian resistance. The Palestinian masses do not occupy the linchpin role within Israel’s economy that black South African workers did under apartheid, and thus they lack the potential class power that comes with it.21 Even though Palestinian resistance can hurt Israel, as demonstrated by Hamas’s attack on 7 October, it cannot overcome an Israeli state with a sophisticated and extremely expensive military apparatus as well as strong support from most of its population.
Conversely, because of its limited dependence on Palestinian labour—which has been negligible in the case of those receiving permits to cross from Gaza into Israel in recent years—the possibility of completing the Nakba persists within Israeli politics. Hence, a “concept paper”, drafted in October by the Israeli Ministry of Intelligence, envisaged the “transfer” of the entire Gazan population to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, with clear genocidal implications.22
Zionism and imperialism
Placing Israel in this framework allows us to identify its role in the wider imperialist order.
Zionism emerged in the late 1880s as one of many Jewish responses to antisemitism, which was by then hardening into a racist ideology in a process that would culminate in the barbarity of the Nazi Holocaust.23 In the early 20th century, Zionism competed against other ideologies for the political loyalties of Jewish people. These included Marxism, which Jewish activists played a considerable role in developing and which offered a more expansive vision of Jewish liberation as part of a broader project of working-class emancipation.24 Zionism, by contrast, offered a pessimistic response, treating antisemitism as an inevitability and proposing that Jews should withdraw from Europe and create their own homeland.25
After some debate, central figures within Zionism, such as Theodor Herzl—an Austro-Hungarian activist widely seen as the “father” of the movement—agreed on Palestine as a potential homeland. This allowed the movement to draw on Jewish biblical myths to build support among those Zionists who were more religiously inclined than most of Zionism’s leaders. The focus on forming a colony drew Herzl and his co-thinkers to seek allies among those dominant imperialist powers who might grant them the territory. From its outset, Zionism saw its putative colony as “a portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilisation as opposed to barbarism”.26
Herzl tried to court the rulers of the Ottoman Empire and Imperial Germany, before turning to Britain.27 The fall of the Ottoman Empire, and the defeat of Britain’s rivals in the First World War, gave the British Empire the opportunity to establish its dominion over Palestine. Although British policy was contested, with some politicians favouring an alliance with sections of the Arab elite, the development of a friendly settler community in the region offered clear attractions. This view was famously expressed in 1917 by the government minister Arthur Balfour in his historic declaration: “His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”.28 Ronald Storrs, the first military governor of Jerusalem under British rule, gave blunt expression to the British Empire’s interest in Zionism. According to Storrs, the Zionist colony would form “for England ‘a little loyal Jewish Ulster’ in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism”.29
Between 1917 and 1947, the Jewish population within Palestine rose from less than 10 percent to 30 percent, with the flow accelerated by those escaping European fascism. By the 1920s, early experiments in buying land and hiring cheap Palestinian labour to produce cash crops were supplanted by a drive to create a racially exclusive Jewish economy. The institutions of “Labour Zionism”—the kibbutz movement, the Histadrut “trade union” and early militias such as the Haganah—were central to enforcing this.30 Indeed, the Histadrut was far from a conventional union; it and its associated organisations provided much of the infrastructure for the future state of Israel, with three future Israeli prime ministers emerging from its leadership.31
Palestinians resisting colonialism soon found themselves clashing not simply with their British rulers but also with Jewish settlers. This suited the British administration, who continued to support the Zionists, while also working with the most backward elements of Arab society to deflect anti-colonial sentiment towards the Jewish population.32 Then, in 1936, the Palestinian population exploded in revolt. A six-month general strike, along with a mass movement of non-cooperation with the settlers and the British, was broken by brutal repression. The techniques used would later find an echo in those of the IDF, including collective punishment, such as the demolition of villages and urban neighbourhoods, and internment without trial. Although the Palestinian leadership would surrender in autumn 1936, there was a subsequent wave of guerilla warfare, which was met with further destruction of villages, summary executions and aerial strafing.
The Palestinian revolt provided a colossal impetus to the exclusive Jewish settler economy. It also saw the British authorities integrate elements of the Zionist militias into the security apparatus, for instance, with the formation of “Special Night Squads”, joint Zionist-British patrols that attacked Palestinian guerillas and guarded strategic locations.33 This was essential preparation for what was to come. Planning for an assault on the Palestinians was already well under way, with a survey of villages—identifying the degree of “hostility” of each as determined by the level of participation in the 1936 revolt—was largely compete by the end of the 1930s.34 As David Ben Gurion, leader of the Zionist movement from the mid-1920s and later Israel’s first prime minister, wrote in a letter to his son in 1937, “The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war”.35
The Nakba
By the Second World War, the settlers had established through their relationship with British imperialism a largely exclusive Jewish economy, an efficient and well-armed military organisation (later to become the IDF), and the infrastructure for a future state. A British member of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry Regarding the Problems of European Jewry and Palestine, appointed in 1946 to seek a solution to the Palestine issue, described the Jewish Agency, which oversaw Zionist activities, as “really a state within a state, with its own budget, secret cabinet, army and, above all, intelligence service. It is the most efficient, dynamic and toughest organisation I have ever seen, and it is not afraid of us [the British]”.36
By then, Britain was an exhausted imperialism, increasingly unable to control its empire; the US was emerging as the major global power. The Zionists saw an opportunity to hasten the exit of the British and to create their new state through the expulsion of the Palestinian population, whose leadership had been fatally weakened by the repression of the 1936 revolt.37 When the Irgun, a radical split from the Haganah militia, blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in June 1946, killing 91 people, including members of the colonial administration headquartered there, it exposed the fragility of British rule. By the following February, the British had decided to withdraw, leaving the recently established UN to formulate a solution to the “Palestine question”. The resulting UN partition plan granted the Jewish settlers—now about a third of the population with ownership of 5.8 percent of cultivated land—a little over half of historic Palestine.38
When the proposed partition was—inevitably—rejected across the Arab world, Ben Gurion declared that Israel’s borders “will be determined by force and not by the partition resolution”.39 This would be a battle of unequal forces. The hastily mobilised Palestinian fighters, mostly poorly trained and armed, numbered a few thousand, eventually reinforced by about 15,000 troops from neighbouring Arab states. The Haganah alone outnumbered them, with most of its members well-armed and trained by the British before or during the Second World War. By December 1948, the newly formed IDF could mobilise a total of 96,441 troops.40
The most comprehensive study of the consequences of all this for the Palestinian population, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, draws on the painstaking efforts by Palestinian historians to disinter evidence of the Nakba.41 During the Zionist assault, whole Arab villages were wiped from the map. According to a plan issued by the Haganah’s intelligence unit:
These operations can be carried out in the following manner: either by destroying villages (by setting fire to them, by blowing them up and by planting mines in the rubble) and especially those population centres that are difficult to control permanently; or by mounting combing and control operations… In case of resistance, the armed forces must be wiped out and the population expelled outside the borders of the state.42
The massacre of Deir Yassin exemplifies the approach. This village had agreed a non-aggression pact with the Haganah, so instead the more extreme Irgun and Lehi militias were sent.43 As they entered, machine gun fire was directed towards the houses, killing many inhabitants. Then the Zionists gathered together the survivors. The villagers were “murdered in cold blood, their bodies abused while a number of the women were raped and then killed”. A 12 year old boy, Fahim Zaydan, recalled:
They took us out one after the other and shot an old man; when one of his daughters cried, she was shot too. Then they called my brother, Muhammad, and shot him in front of us, and when my mother yelled, bending over him—carrying my little sister Hudra in her hands, still breastfeeding her—they shot her too.
Zaydan was lined up in a row with other children, who were then sprayed with bullets before the soldiers left. He managed to survive his wounds.44 At another massacre, in the Arab village of Tantura, “men”—those aged between ten and 50 years old—were herded together while an intelligence officer, accompanied by a hooded informant, identified potential trouble-makers, using a pre-prepared list. Those selected were taken “out in small groups to a spot further away where they were executed”. “Trouble-makers” often meant participants in the 1936 anti-colonial revolt.45
The “watchdog state”
Israel was formed through such atrocities—and the terror they sparked. Around 750,000 Palestinians were driven out, with some ending up in the West Bank, which came under Jordanian control, and in Gaza, under Egyptian control. The borders of Israel now extended across over three-quarters of historic Palestine.
To sustain itself, Israel soon began courting a new imperial sponsor, the US. Initially, US policy was, like Britain’s had once been, equivocal. Its central preoccupation was control over the world’s largest proven oil reserves, which lay in the region, and preventing Soviet influence from growing. When a radical regime came to power in Iran in 1951, nationalising the country’s oil, it mainly threatened the residual British influence in the region, evicting the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. However, it also demonstrated a potential danger to US interests. As Israeli newspaper Haaretz put it in a 1951 article:
The West is none too happy about its relations with states in the Middle East. The feudal regimes there have to make such concessions to the nationalist movements, which sometimes have a pronounced socialist-leftist colouring… Therefore, strengthening Israel helps the Western powers maintain equilibrium and stability in the Middle East. Israel is to become the watchdog. There is no fear that Israel will undertake any aggressive policy towards the Arab states when this would explicitly contradict the wishes of the US and Britain. Yet, if for any reason the Western powers should sometimes prefer to close their eyes, Israel could be relied upon to punish one or several neighbouring states whose discourtesy to the West went beyond the bounds of the permissible.46
When Gamal Abdel Nasser came to power in Egypt in 1952, it further underlined the threat. However, it was after the 1967 Six-Day War, when Israel humiliated neighbouring Arab states, including Egypt, that large-scale US economic and military support began to arrive. It further surged with each new perceived threat to Israel or to US interests.47 It is this coming together of imperialist interests, rather than some supposed “Jewish lobby”, that explains the continued backing for Israel from the US and its allies.
Palestinian resistance
The repression of the 1936 revolt and the Nakba in 1948 initially weakened Palestinians’ capacity to wage a struggle against Israel. The Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) was founded at the initiative of the Arab League in 1964, but it was only after the defeat of the 1967 war that a new Palestinian leadership emerged. Fatah, the Palestinian nationalist group that would come to dominate the PLO, was founded in 1959. Yasser Arafat, its best-known figure, was not atypical of its founders—a child of prosperous members of the diaspora and a university student in Cairo, who made large sums as the head of a contracting business in Kuwait.
In 1967, Fatah joined the PLO; a year later, it restored Palestinian pride by leading a series of guerilla attacks on Israel, attracting large numbers of young exiles to its ranks. The emergence of Fatah marked a shift away from the first generation of PLO leaders, who had been handpicked by Nasser and committed to Arab unity as a prerequisite for resolving the Palestinian question. Fatah nominally rejected this approach, focusing on engendering a struggle among Palestinians rather than simply relying on the Arab rulers. Nevertheless, the organisation never fully extricated itself from its reliance on these regimes. As the PLO established headquarters in Arab capitals, began to organise life within Palestinian refugee camps and achieved observer status at the UN, it had to navigate the tensions between expressing resistance and playing the role of a sort of “Arab state in waiting”. This created two interlinked problems. Ctd....
The last working-class hero in England.
Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018
Jasper the Ruffian cat ? ? ? - 4 November 2021
Responses
« Back to index | View thread »