Israel as a Colonial Entity
By Yossi Schwartz, Internationalist Socialist League (RCIT Section in Israel / Occupied Palestine), 26.06.2018, http://www.the-isleague.com
By June 18, 132 unarmed Palestinians have been murdered in cold blood and 13,000 injured by the Israeli army in Gaza, since March 30, according to AFP. This type of pathological murderous behavior isn’t out of character for regimes which represent a colonialist social strata. Examples are too numerous to count, however, two especially vicious ones come to mind - the Sharpeville Massacre committed by the South African Apartheid regime resulting in 69 Africans dead and 186 wounded, most of whom shot in the back, and the 1919 Amritsar Massacre carried out by the British army in India killing 379 Indians.
Bizarre Israeli Propaganda
Such criminal acts of violence show clear signs of a broad political strategy in action. After all, Israel’s use of lethal force is being carried out with no imminent threat to life. Nonetheless, according to Israeli propaganda: "Israel has acted in self defense protecting their border against terrorist", “Hamas is using the civilian population as a human shield.”
In reality, Palestinians are being murdered because they march toward the fence surrounding Gaza, the largest Ghetto in the world, demanding their right to return to their lands and homes stolen by Israel. To claim as Israel does, that the fence is the international border amounts to the claim' that Gaza is a state. Was the Warsaw Ghetto a state? Were the so called independent states (The Bantu states) during the apartheid regime, states or reservations? Are the Native American reserves states?
Yet with noble hearts which defy all reason, these refugees clearly express their willingness to live alongside Israeli colonists, in spite of past and present Zionist crimes against the Palestinians as a nation and humanity as a whole. This, however, is the last thing the Zionists, across the political spectrum, will agree to after this long history of forced removal of the Palestinians from their lands, aimed at maintaining an ever-expanding Zionist State with a Jewish majority.
The extent of the lies Israel is willing to tell the international community, as well as itself, seems to know no limits. To justify the killing of the 21-year-old paramedic Razan al-Najjar (as well as others) by an IDF sniper, on June 1, while trying to save the lives of injured people, the Israeli army released an edited video of her discarding a smoke/gas canister into an empty field (and in a unedited version - away from people lying on the ground)[1], with a caption along the lines of “is this the angel in white you are talking about”?
The Israeli video – named “Hamas’ use of human shields must stop” shows part of an interview Najjar gave to Lebanese al Mayeen TV, in which she said she was acting as a “human shield”. “Razan al-Najjar is not the angel of mercy that Hamas propaganda attempts to portray,” the IDF’s Arabic language spokesperson Avichay Edraee wrote on Twitter. “Her admission that she is a ‘human shield’ for the inciting rioters proves how Hamas uses the entire Gaza population as ammunition for its aims and for Iran's aims. Do medical personnel around the world throw bombs and participate in disturbances and call themselves human shields?“ [2]
In the full clip, however, the young woman goes on to say, she was present at the protests to “save the wounded at the front lines”. She does not mention Hamas at all.
According to Israeli propaganda: "The Palestinians left their homes in 1947-48 for a variety of reasons. Thousands of wealthy Arabs left in anticipation of a war, thousands more responded to Arab leaders' calls to get out of the way of the advancing armies, a handful were expelled, but most simply fled to avoid being caught in the crossfire of a battle. Had the Arabs accepted the 1947 UN resolution, not a single Palestinian would have become a refugee and an independent Arab state would now exist beside Israel." [3]
Back here on earth, where reality takes place, Palestinian refugees are the indigenous people of Palestine, the majority of whom were dispossessed, were forced to run away; following 34 massacres according to the Zionist historian Benny Morris, or were expelled when the state of Israel was created in 1948. This dispossession and expulsion has continued during the 1967 war which resulted in the occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
There are three main groups of Palestinian refugees: those who were displaced in 1948, internally displaced Palestinians who remained within the areas that became the state of Israel, and Palestinian refugees displaced in 1967 from the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Following these crimes, Israel has denied the Palestinian refugees their right to return to their towns, villages and homes. It used live bullets already in the 1950s and killed any refugee that tried to return.
Israel has sought since 1947-48 to create a state with a Jewish majority in all of Palestine, a region that already had an Arab indigenous population, with a history stretching back more than 1300 years.
From the very beginning of the Zionist movement, its motto has been: “A land without a people for a people without a land.” It was a Zionist myth that Palestine was waiting to be populated by the Jews expelled by the Romans 2000 years ago.
The Zionist movement shares many similarities with the white settlers who killed and stole the lands from the native nations, as well as the Boers who killed and stole the lands from the Africa’s native nations.
Bloody Tradition of Zionist Colonialism
While the behavior of Zionist governments bears striking resemblance to the one of other colonial governments across the political spectrum, their ideology, ethos and mythology is almost identical to those colonialist political factions which used social-darwinist, racialist and pseudo-scientific notions to justify any and all atrocities they have or were about to commit. It should be noted that the rival colonialist faction, which appropriated ideas regarding the “march of progress” and the “white man’s burden”, can also finds some of its echoes in today’s Zionist propaganda, presenting Israel as a civilized, progressive, technological powerhouse for all nations to revel in and enjoy.
Zionists believe without a shred of a doubt that they are blood-related to the ancient Jews who resided in the “Land of Israel”, and that this blood-relation somehow should be transformed into a political right to rule over this land. Italian fascists claimed that the Italian nation is blood-related to the ancient Romans and that this blood-relation somehow should be transformed into a political right to rule over the lands once ruled by the Roman Empire. The same goes for German Nazis, who claimed to be direct descendants of the “1st Reich”, i.e. the Holy Roman Empire, as well as the South African Boers who claimed blood-relation to the biblical Children of Israel, settling in the Promised Land, fleeing Pharaoh’s army (the British one, that is).
In the war of 1948, Israeli forces killed an estimated 13,000 Palestinians and forcibly evicted 737,166 Palestinians from their homes and land. 531 Palestinian villages were entirely depopulated and destroyed. The weapons for this campaign of ethnic cleansing was provided by the Soviet Stalinists who falsely claimed to be Marxist. Authentic Marxists, on the other hand, support only the right of oppressed people for self determination, not for settler colonialists.
The UN November 1947 partition plan was an imperialist plan in favor of the Zionist colonialist settlers. It was clear to any thinking person that this plan would lead to the Palestinian ethnic cleansing. According to this plan the 650,000 Zionist colonists would get 55% of Palestine while they held only around 5% of the lands while the 1.2 million Palestinians would get only 45%. Not only this but almost 50% of the population allocated to the Zionist state was Arab. In order to create a Jewish majority race-state the Zionists would have had to remove most Palestinians.
The UNSCOP (responsible for the decision) acknowledged the problem, and it expected, using its language, that the proportion of Arabs would decline because of Jewish immigration and also through “population movements” resulting from citizenship changes.
Thus, the UN resolution was a proven recipe for the mass expulsion of the Palestinians. This was a known fact to the UNSCOP as the previous plan to divide the country into two states - The Peel Plan from 1937 - called for the removal of 250,000 Arabs from the Jewish state.
It was Lenin who labeled the UN’s predecessor organization, the League of Nations, “the den of thieves”, since, already from its inception he knew something that some Palestinian leaders chose to ignore over the years, desperately appealing to its moral conscience for salvation. The UN has never tried to force Israel to allow the refugees to return in spite of the famous 194 resolution that called for it.
The UN resolution 194 from 11 December 1948 which provided 9n Article 11 states:
“Resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.”
The Hypocrisy of the United Nations
According to the imperialist International Law, the use of force outside of active armed conflict is governed by international human rights standards, set out in the UN Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials. These standards, which apply to the Gaza demonstrations, prohibit shooting live ammunition except to prevent “the imminent threat of death or serious injury” or “the perpetration of a particularly serious crime involving grave threat to life,” and “only when less extreme means are insufficient to achieve these objectives.” [4]
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has warned that the "most serious escalation" of violence in the Gaza Strip places the besieged enclave on the "brink of war", urging Israel and Hamas to recommit to the 2014 ceasefire. The UN chief said in a report obtained by news agencies that he is "shocked" by Israel's use of live fire since border protests began in Gaza on March 30. Guterres said that the Israeli army has "a responsibility to exercise maximum restraint", except as a last resort.
The report was sent to the council last week in advance of a meeting on Tuesday over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "The killing of children, as well as of clearly identified journalists and medical staffers by security forces during a demonstration are particularly unacceptable," Guterres said. He also said that the solution is the two state solution. [5]
This is nothing short of sheer hypocrisy, Israel is the only one who is doing the killing. No Israeli soldier or civilian was killed by Hamas since March 30. The people of Gaza were unarmed. To put Hamas and Israel on the same plain is to serve Israel. If the UN was not a den of thieves, the Israeli leaders, as well as other imperialist war criminals, would have faced criminal court justice a long time ago. However, the only leaders who have been brought to trial in the International Court of Justice have been leaders of semi colonies (a.k.a. 3rd world countries).
The Zionist are well aware of the fact that they can kill as many Palestinians as they want. This cruel human experimentation of a strategy aims at finding out how much pounding can an oppressed nation take before it gives up its right of self determination and accept its fate as indefinitely subordinate to a self-proclaimed superior race-state. In exchange, the Palestinians, as non-citizen residents, would be “fortunate” to enjoy a meager rise in living conditions and economic growth of nominal proportions.
It is only a question of time until Israel annexes the West Bank. Since US President Donald Trump came to office, Israel has approved construction of more than 14,000 settlement units. [6]
The last bump in this road, the Israeli judicial authority, is being slowly but surely smoothened out of existence. The new composition of the Supreme Court of Israel already has proven to be a tool, rather than an obstacle of the Israeli government’s criminality. Last month, it approved the killing of the unarmed Palestinians stating that the protesters constituted a real danger to Israeli soldiers and citizens. It also said that Hamas, which controls Gaza, labeled a terrorist organization by Israel, intentionally mixed its members with civilians.
The panel of the Central District Court in Lod on Tuesday ruled against the admissibility of confessions made by the Jewish suspects in the 2015 Duma terror attack that murdered three members of the Dawabsha family. Eighteen-month-old Ali Dawabsha was burnt to death when the family home in the West Bank was firebombed in July 2015. His parents later died of their injuries. His brother Ahmed, now six, was the sole survivor from the immediate family, but was left with severe burns.
The aforementioned confessions were rejected on the grounds of them being pounded out of the suspect using (prepare for immediate irony) torture, court-approved for use against participants in the Palestinian resistance: “These measures severely violated the defendants’ fundamental right to maintain the integrity of body and soul. In addition, the dignity of the accused was damaged,” the court ruled.
At the same time the judges legitimized the use of the same methods against Palestinians, saying: “It should be emphasized that this is not a sweeping determination on the products of ‘necessary investigations’ (where enhanced interrogation is authorized). This decision is relevant to our case only.” [7]
Socialist Perspective
The Palestinian Authority’s initial role that betrayed the Fatah charter (that rejected the legality of the Israeli state) and has served Israel against the Palestinian people in what is called the Oslo agreement, now faces the consequences of crisis and despair. Fearing that Israel is ready to dispose of it, it now tries to prove to Israel that it still needs the PA. On June 15, the Palestinian Authority launched a vicious crackdown on peaceful demonstrators, including the arbitrary detention and torture of an Amnesty International staff member. The demonstrators demanded that the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, ease punitive economic measures on Gaza.
Proponents of human rights, peace, social justice and democracy are beginning to wake up from the pipe dream that the “Two State Solution” is and always has been. They are increasingly looking for alternatives that would embody the aforementioned values. In the context of present reality the struggle for territorial partition is soon to be abandoned in favor of a mass popular struggle for the democratic rights (equality, national liberation, right of return, etc.) of the native Palestinian-Arab population. Such a movement must take steps to remove any and all obstacles to the full inclusion and fair representation of all oppressed, dispossessed and excluded minorities, including social-justice oriented Israeli-Jews who will break from Zionism (and will not have the right to form their own state).
However, such Israelis are expected to be very few. Israelis will break from Zionism only on two conditions - one, is a major military defeat for Israel, the second, a socialist revolution in Arab or other countries. The ISL participates in such a movement centered around the idea of the One Democratic State solution. As Marxist revolutionaries, members of the Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT), we see it as our duty to convey the notion that the only road leading to such a state is to make sure that this movement is led by working class and Fellahin revolutionaries, and connect this movement to the struggle of the working and oppressed classes around the world.
References
[1] https://tinyurl.com/ycmsq42l
[2] ibid.
[3] https://tinyurl.com/ycmmvyj8
[4] https://tinyurl.com/yas7yjp9
[5] https://tinyurl.com/y867otct
[6] https://tinyurl.com/y76xe3mf
[7] https://tinyurl.com/ydfg56df