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New Realities of Israel/Palestine in the Trump Era: Settler Colonial Destinies in the 21st Century

25 Jan


[Prefatory Note: This post modifies and updates an interview with Mohammad Ali Haqshenas, a journalist with the International Quran News Agency, published under its auspices on January 22, 2025. It is affected by the assumption of the US presidency by Donald Trump and the early days of the Israel-Hamas ceasefire agreement negotiated during the Biden presidency more than seven months earlier.]  

1. How do you assess Donald Trump’s public and behind-the-scenes efforts as the U.S. President-elect to advance the ceasefire agreement and prisoner exchange?

For Trump a major incentive of achieving the ceasefire and prisoner exchange was to show America that he gets things done as contrasted with Biden who let this same ceasefire agreement sit on the shelf for more than six months.

The ceasefire is publicized as a demonstration of Trump’s and US leverage with respect to Israel when it actively seeks results rather than merely wants to make a rhetorical impression, but there is more to this ceasefire that is immediately apparent. In addition to a promise to Netanyahu of unconditional support, Trump may well have given confidential assurances of backing Israel’s high priority strategic ambitions. Number one would be to give cover if Israel chooses to annex all or most of the West Bank. Almost as important would be Trump’s promise that it would do his best to persuade the government of Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel. This would represent a continuation of the arrangements brokered by the US to induce the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morrocco at the end of first presidential term in 2020 to reach normalization agreements with Israel.

It is also significant that numerous Washington officials in the Trump entourage have unconditionally promised to support Israel if the ceasefire arrangements collapse regardless of which side is at fault. There is not even a pretension of being objective in the sense of seeking to discern where the evidence of responsibility points.

Netanyahu is rumored to have given his hardline cabinet members, Ben Gvir and Smotrich, assurances that the military campaign will resume at the end of the six-week first phase. These assurances were probably necessary to avoid the collapse of Israel’s

shaky governing coalition.

2. How do you view the relationship between Trump and Netanyahu, as well as U.S. political considerations, in light of this ceasefire?

I think the relationship of these two autocratic leaders is based on their shared transactional style, ideological agreement, and shared strategic interests. Both leaders are defenders of the West against the rest, being especially hostile to Islamic forces in the Islamic world. The Palestinian struggle is on one level the core expression of this geopolitical rivalry, with all the complicit supporters of Israel coming from the white dominant countries, that is, the European colonial powers and the breakaway British colonies in North America, Australia, and New Zealand. On the Palestinian side, except for Iran, which is indirectly supportive of the Palestinian struggle, the political actors siding with the Palestinians are Islamic non-governmental movements and militias in the Middle East, most militantly the Houthis in Yemen and Hezbollah in Lebanon, both materially and diplomatically aided by Iran. Islamic governments in the Arab world have condemned Israel for committing genocide but have refrained from acting materially or even diplomatically in ways that might exert pressure on Israel. The alignments in this ‘clash of civilizations’ correspond closely to the political vision of Trump and Netanyahu, and recall the prophetic pronouncements of Samuel Huntington shortly after the end of the Cold War.    


3. Previous ceasefire agreements between Israel and Hamas were violated due to clashes between the two sides and ultimately failed. Do you think this agreement signifies a permanent end to the war or merely a temporary halt in conflicts?

I believe that Israel will not end the conflict until it satisfies at least one of its two strategic goals, both of which are outside of Gaza—the primary goal of Israel is the annexation of the West Bank coupled with a declaration of Israel’s victory over the Palestinians, signified by the formal establishment of Greater Israel as an exclusivist Jewish state from ‘the river to the sea.’ The secondary goal is to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia as a political foundation for the formation of an aggressive coalition that adopts policies to achieve regime change in Iran. Israel seems prepared to risk a major war in the course of doing so, while Saudi Arabia appears more cautious. The Trump presidency is clearly disposed to join Israel if it makes such an effort, indirectly if possible, directly if necessary. General Keith Kellogg, appointed by Trump as his Special Envoy to Ukraine in keeping with such conjectures is publicly advocating the revival of a policy of ‘maximum pressure’ on Iran as a priority of American foreign policy under Trump.

I think the Hamas side will do its best to uphold commitments to release hostages and abide by the ceasefire while Israel will pragmatically weigh its interests as the process goes forward, but seems far more likely to break the ceasefire agreement after the first 42 days, perhaps as Netanyahu’s way of keeping his coalition from collapsing, or even before as several violent incidents provoked by Israeli military forces have already occurred.  Nothing short of a total Hamas political surrender including the willingness to give up whatever weapons the resistance movement possesses might induce Israel to give temporily up its unmet goals of annexation and Saudi normalization by way of a peace treaty. Even if the ceasefire is more or less maintained in its first phase, Israel seems unlikely to remain within the ceasefire framework once the six weeks of phase one is completed, which means that the latter two latter phases of ending the campaign and IDF withdrawal phases of the ceasefire will never happen. In this event, it is all but certain that Israel would then resume the full fury of its genocidal campaign, provoking Hamas to react. Israel would then use its influence with mainstream media and support in Washington to shift blame to Hamas to avoid any responsibility for the breakdown in the courts of public opinion while resuming its genocidal campaign in Gaza that never was truly abandoned despite the claims made on behalf of the ceasefire diplomacy..

4. The Israeli finance minister, referring to his discussions with Netanyahu, stated that Israel has not yet achieved its objectives in the war. Can it be argued that this agreement will undermine Israel’s security?

I believe the Israeli response was never primarily about security. It was main about land and demography, more specifically about gaining sovereignty over the West Bank, and giving the settler militants a green light to make life unlivable for the Palestinians so that they would die or leave. This anticipated and indulged settler rampage has gathered momentum with its undisguised agenda of dispossessing and killing enough Palestinians so as to restore a Jewish majority population. By such means, settler violence serves an undisguised prelude to the incorporation of the West Bank into Israel, likely with Trump’s endorsement.

Prior to October 7, Palestinians and Israelis were almost evenly split in the overall population of 14 or 15 million inhabiting Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza. The higher Palestinian birthrate means that it is only a matter time until a majority of Palestinians are living under Israeli apartheid control and long dubious claims made by Israel to being a democracy would become delusional.

In the background pf my response is the growing evidence that Israel allowed the October 7 attack to happen because it wanted to initiate massive violence against the Palestinians with the justification of acting in a retaliatory mode that would excuse the death and  expulsion of large number of Palestinians, a lethal process more or less repeating the expulsions of an estimated 750.000 Palestinians in 1948, what is known to Palestinians as the nakba or catastrophe.

The Israel government received several extremely reliable warnings preceding the October 7 attack, including from US intelligence sources. In addition, Israel possessed advanced surveillance capabilities throughout Gaza to monitor Hamas resistance moves. These technical capabilities were reportedly reinforced by informers making the supposed ‘surprise’ nature of the attack hardly possible to believe. Under such circumstances it is inconceivable that Israel, at the very least, should have prepared to defend its borders and nearby Israeli communities. This is not to say that Israel was necessarily privy to the details or scope of the attack and might have been genuinely surprised by its sophistication and severity. This might explain the widespread support in Israel and indulgence throughout the world for an excessive military retaliation that lasted for several months. During this period protests were small and were hardly noticed despite the genocidal features of the Israeli attack. As the violence and denial of the necessities for Palestinian subsistence went on month after month civil society opposition grew more intense and widespread, an impression furthered by agitated by repeated Israeli lethal interferences with humanitarian aid deliveries and accompanying aid workers, including even the targeting of ambulances, rescue vehicles, and the supplies sent for the relief of desperately hungry, sick, and injured Palestinians. 

5. The release of prisoners is a critical step in the course of the war. Israel has incurred significant costs by agreeing to release Hamas members and individuals convicted of violent actions, which has sparked disputes within the Israeli cabinet. In your view, what challenges will this stage of the ceasefire face?

I think the main humiliation for Israel was not the release of so many Palestinian prisoners, but the need to negotiate as equals with Hamas to recover 33 hostages in a military campaign justified from the beginning as dedicated to the destruction and elimination of Hamas as a political actor and the reconfiguring of governance in Gaza.

Anyone following these events would also have hardly known from the one-sided media coverage that Palestinian prisoners were being released as the near exclusive media focus, especially that of the leading platforms in the West, was on the plight of the ‘hostages,’ while ignoring the far worse plight of the civilian population of Gaza or the many Palestinian women and children subjected to far worse treatment while under confinement. The release of more than 90 Palestinians prisoners on the first days of the ceasefire, many of whom had endured extremely abusive treatment and were innocent of any involvement in the October 7 attack was deemed hardly newsworthy. By the end of the six-week Phase One of the Ceasefire Arrangement nearly 2,000 Palestinians are scheduled for release. True, it is a direct violation of the law of war to hold innocent civilians or even captured enemy soldiers as hostage, but considering the disparity of weaponry and given the long history of Israel’s violence against civilians in Gaza, it becomes understandable why the Hamas resistance would seek at least the so-called

‘bargaining chip’ of hostages.

This underlying disparity in the relation between the hostage release and prisoner release reinforced the long-nurtured Israeli discourse that Israel values the life and freedom of its citizens so much than does Hamas that it is willing to make to agree to an unequal exchange with its enemy. Such state propaganda is consistent with the reverse disparity in media treatment, showing a human interest in each Israeli hostage released while viewing the Palestinian prisoner releases as a purely impersonal matter of statistics, a portrayal movingly contradicted by the crowds in the West Bank celebrating the prisoner releases, heeding their words of anguish about their detention experience (often held for long periods without charges) and their joyous embrace of ‘freedom.’

Those of us with experience of the two political cultures are struck by the closeness of Palestinian families and the absence of any sacrificial ethos comparable to Israel’s Hannibal Directive that instructs IDF soldiers to kill Israelis at risk of being captured rather than allowing them to become prisoners who will be traded for a disproportionate number of Israels. Living under conditions of an apartheid occupation or oppression allows Palestinians few satisfactions in pattens of existence most of us would regard as a life of misery other than personal intimacy of family and friendship.


6. How do you evaluate the future of Palestine, particularly the Gaza region? Some observers believe that Gaza’s current generation of children, who have lost their homes and families in this war, might take action against Israel in the future. What is your analysis?

Given the present correlation of forces, including the Trump assumption of the US presidency, I see little hope for a just resolution of Palestinian grievances soon. A further period of struggle, including a continuing process of Israeli delegitimation is underway. Israeli as a result of the Gaza genocide has been rebranded as a pariah state whose lawlessness has undermined it sovereign rights, and even drawn into question its entitlement to remain a member of the UN that its leaders regularly defame as ‘a cesspool of antisemitism.’ Israel also faces increased pressures from the impact of a rising tide of global solidarity initiatives generated by civil society activism, and taking the form of boycotts, divestment, sanctions, taxpayer revolt, and reinforce by reductions of trade with and investment in Israel. Such developments are bound to have economic and psycho-political impacts over time on the quality of life in Israel. Few doubt that such a campaign caused apartheid South African elites to experience the anguish of being excluded from international sporting events or of by having lucrative invitations refused by performing international musicians.

If the dynamics of delegitimation lead a significant number of Israelis to leave the country, choose to live elsewhere it would be a signal of the imminent collapse of Zionism as the state ideology of Israel, if not of Israel itself. Suddenly, the phantasies of veteran residents of Palestinian refugee camps are becoming real political possibilities. In other words, the Palestinians are winning the nonviolent Legitimacy War as measured by the Palestinian capture and global control of the high moral and legal ground of the conflict, and by the vitality of its national resistance under the most extreme pressures exerted by Israeli recourse to apartheid and now genocide. The dynamics of delegitimation may take decades of further suffering for Palestinians to feel vindication by the success of their prolonged resistance, above all by its translation into a political outcome that finally realizes Palestinian self-determination in a form that the Palestinians favor, and not by an arrangement pre-packaged and imposed by the UN or outside forces.

If this path to the realization of basic rights is effectively blocked by Israel’s apartheid tactics of domination, even should the genocidal jagged edges no longer are present, it will undoubtedly stimulate armed Palestinian resistance especially from survivors of the Gaza genocide who lost parents and children, and in some cases, whole families, or are living as amputees or with maimed bodies. It is impossible to imagine the depths of grief, which over time will give way to a sense of rage and resentment that will seek political expression in the form of violent anti-Israel acts and movements, as well as fuel global surges of genuine antisemitism, the opposite of the weaponized variants used so opportunistically to shield Isreal from criticism, censure, and sanctions.


7. From the international law perspective, what can be done to stop the Israeli occupation, which is basically the source of years-long conflicts in Palestine?

As should have become clear after decades of Israeli efforts to convert Palestinians into persecuted strangers in their own homeland, there is no path to a secure Israeli future even if the oppressor maintains its harsh apartheid regime. If that does not achieve political surrender or at least sullen acquiescence, then as a final effort to deal with resistance, then the settler elites are quite likely to engage in a last-ditch recourse to genocide. Israel is following the same path that the colonial West chose when compelled to deal with native peoples in the countries settled, who were dehumanized, slaughtered, and permanently marginalized. These pre-modern aggressions were most often rationalized by international law that until the last century generally legitimated colonial conquest and claims of sovereignty. In contrast, international law has since 1945 formally declared apartheid and genocide as high international crimes, but such a reclassification has proved inadequate in the face of Israeli defiance reinforced by the geopolitical complicity of the West, especially as led by the US.

The test of Palestinian resistance may emerge shortly and can be reduced to whether the remarkable steadfastness (samud) of the Palestinian people can withstand a final Israeli effort to transfer, eliminate, or kill the resident Arab population. There are already indications that the Trump leadership favors bizarre ethnic cleansing operations such as that mentioned by Trump’s newly appointed Middle East Envoy, Steve Witkoff. He recently proposed transferring a portion of the surviving population of Gaza to Indonesia.  Even if such a bizarre proposal is discounted as mere rhetoric it exhibited an intention to aid, abet, and facilitate Israel’s version of ‘a final solution’ that left the Jewish state in unobstructed control of historic Palestine. If we assume the Israeli willingness to implement such a plan and Indonesia agreeing in exchange for being lavishly subsidized, the very idea of such a proposal contradicts the proclaimed ethos of the 21st century. Channeling Trump, Witkoff is talking as if the world of states was a chess board on which the US could shift the pieces at will, an assert of hegemonic prerogatives.

  

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Militarism and Genocide in Gaza: The Bloody Signature of Western Decline

9 Oct

[Prefatory Note: The text of an interview with an independent Turkish journalist, Naman Bakac, published in Turkey on Sept. 26, 2024. Somewhat modified for this online publication.]

1.Almost all fundamental rights and principles are clearly being violated in the Palestinian territories: from the right of Palestinians living in occupied lands to self-determination, to the right of representation, which leads to the murder, imprisonment, and exile of their freely elected representatives; from the right to shelter as tents are deliberately bombed, to the right to food as Palestinians are deliberately left to starve; from sexual abuse of prisoners to torture, and from there to the right to housing as homes are demolished. However, international law and the community have been unable to prevent these violations to date. What legal texts are missing to stop these systematic violations? Which institutions are absent? If legal texts, legal institutions, and decision-making mechanisms cannot resolve this, what other tools and methods should be activated to prevent these systematic violations of rights?

Response: The Palestinian ordeal is not a consequence of the shortage or inadequacy of legal norms or mechanisms for their enforcement. The primarily obstacle to imposing adverse consequences in reaction to gross and transparent Israeli criminality is one of political will, especially on the part of dominant states in the Global West and to a lesser extent on the part of leading Arab neighbors, i.e. Saudi Arabia, Egypt.

It is only countries from the Global South that have been willing to have recourse to the existing international judicial procedures, the ICJ and ICC. The ICJ, the judicial organ of the UN, has a strong reputation for political independence and persuasive interpretation of international law, and its pronouncements are influential, even if they are procedurally cumbersome, often take years from start to finish., lack enforcement capabilities or mandates, and have a mixed record of compliane.

The ICC is a more recent institution, and nor part of the UN System. It does fill a serious gap in the legal coverage accorded to accountability for individuals accussed of committing serious international crimes. The ICC is further weakened by the failure of several leading states to become parrties to the Rome Statute, which is the legal framework governing ICC activities. The ICC also has never achieved legitimacy in the Global South because of its early image of being mainly preoccupied with crimes of leaders in sub-Saharan Africa, which was responsible for its West-centrric reputation. The ICC has seemed reluctant to hold accountable individuals associated with powerful states in the Global West, which include countries in Westernn Europe, North America, and currently Israel. By recommending the issuance of arrrest warrants to three top Israeli leaders (somewhat offset in political messaging by simultaneously making a reccomendation of arrrest warrants for the three top Hamas leaders, the ICC prosecutor made a gesture to challenge geopolitical impunity. So far the ICC sub-chamber that has the sole responsibility to issue arrest warrants has not yet acted. It has give to suspicion that the ICC is stalling in its treatment of these controversial recommenndations, due to reliable reports of pressure by Israel and allies to delay its decision, or better, reject the prosecutor’s recommendation on a variety of contrived grounds centering of the dual grounds of Israel not being a member of the ICC and it would be wrong to appear to criminalize a reasonable Israeli claim of self-defence.

The secondary obstacle is the degree to which World Order continues to be based on a hybrid arrangement of hybrid and contradictory relations of law to power: the majority of states are subject to international law in the area of peace and security, while a few, including the UN P5 (and their strategic friends) occupy a position that allows such governments to privilege strategic interests if these clash with legal obligations in UN settings. This hierrarchy is indirectly acknowledged by the veto power allowing the most dangerous states in 1945 to paralyze UN responses to their criminality and even to that of their friends and allies.

The Western support for Israeli genocide is itself criminal, as complicity is criminalized in the Genocide Convvention, but it is virtually exempt from critical scrutiny at the UN or elsewhere. A domestic court in the US has had been the cite of a judicial action to stop the Gaza Genocide brought by a çivil society organization, Center for Constitutional Rights, relying on a Universal Jurisdiction rationale. It has been so far been blocked in this legal pursuit by a dubious internal doctrine that views US foreign policy initiatives as not subject to adjudication due to a so-called Political Questions doctrine. This doctrine rests on an anachronistic view of the Separation of Powers that views Foreign Policy as belonging exclusively in the Executive Branch of Government, and therefore is not subject to judicial scrutiny. This overlooks the growth of international legal authority as a constraint on national behavior even if conducted as foreign policy.

2.Despite the world witnessing, in an unprecedented way, one of the most brutal massacres in history, with live footage, after Gaza can we still talk about international humanitarian law, international human rights, or the Pax Americana order established after World War II? Doesn’t the “Rule of Law in the Global Village,” the title of one of your books, come to an end after Gaza? Or should the path of reform regarding the United Nations, international law, and world order, as President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been advocating for years, be built?

Response: Although the first-order implementation of international humanitarian law, human rights law, annd Pax Americana failed at the governmental and international institutional level, their existence was important in awakening çivil society to the gross injustices and crimes that have been inflicted on the Palestinian people. Changes in the public discourse are important, as well, branding Israel, Israeli leaders, and complicit governments as perpetrators of genocide in a particularly overt and sadistic manner. By such reasoning Israel should be sanctioned for violating the Genocide Convention, its leaders be criminally proscecuted, and complcit governmentss be at least censured. This should make Israel and its supporters leading candidates for çivil society pressure to impose boycotts, to express moral and legal outrage, and to suspend Israel from participation within the framework of legitimate sovereign states until a dynamic of peace and reconciliation takes the place of war and genocide. Israel is guilty of unspeakable crimes and a defiance of respect for the norms of civilized behavior. Such an assessment is not meant to excuse Hamas, and its allies, for its alleged atrocities, although provoked and of a dramatically smaller impact than Israel’s post October 9th behavior.

Civil society is a court of last resort that becomes relevant, as here, when the established processes of law are unavailable, or worse, defied. In this regard, the established of the Gaza Tribunal Project to express opposition to what Israel and the West have done since October 7 and to give voice to the disappointment of citizens of conscience around the world that the normative structure of world order, including the UN, could not protect the vulnerable, essentially innocent and much abused Palestinian civilian population and respond to Palestinian grievances with respect to basic rights.

3.You have written more than 10 books on world order, global order, and international law. You also served for many years as the North America Director of the “World Order Models Project.” In nearly 100 years since the fall of the Ottoman Empire, as you put it, “the genocide is a continuation of the Apartheid in Palestine.” What kinds of gaps has the Palestinian genocide exposed in the world order paradigm? What truth has it revealed about the foundation upon which the world order is built? After Gaza, what kind of world order and international legal order do you foresee to prevent humanity from experiencing genocides like Srebrenica, Rwanda, and Gaza again? What is your belief and hope in this regard?

Response: If world order persists in its present form it seems almost inevitable that gruesome repetitions of genocide and other severe atrocities in the future. To transform the structures of authority now entrusted with the management of global security ensures a continuation of behavioral patterns that produce genocide, apartheid, aggression, and are responsible for many economic and ecological crimes will require an unprecedented movement from below by peoples organized through çivil society activism, insisting on a framework of law that has the capacity and will to enforce compliance on the strong as well as the weak. Such a development, admittedly utopian, alone could do away with geopolitics whose defining characteristic is a manageriall approach to global security that treats law and morality as irrelevant when in conflict with strategic interests of the Great Powers, and is by practice as well as theory iss dedicated to geopolitical rivalry that reduces law and morality to the level of propaganda and a policy instrument in the foreign policy toolbox useful to denounce the behavior of adversaries yet irrelevant as a constraint..

As for alll those books. I have been around a rather long time. The world changes and so do I. It is a matter of listening to others and being attenntive to what is happening. In this period of global interactive intensity it is especially important to learn from those who speak from other cultural spaces. Listening does not means abdicating judgment, but it does require making the effort to respond knowledgeably, which does a constant effort to detect and purge the subtle biases of your educational, discursive, and personal background. This is most difficult for we Americans who are trapped between their ‘exceptionalism’ and a dysfunctional militaritst sense of history. We are now living at a time of radical new technological and ecological challlenges that are being addressed, if at all, without taking accoount of long-term thinking, risks, harns, and solutions. We have entered an historical period of unprecedented species hazard, and most national elites are continuing blandly as if ‘business as usual’ was their job description. In some cases, even worse is to acknowledge in rhetoric the dangers that are intensifying, and then acting as if these fundamental challenges do not necessitate profound changes in how we think, feel, and act both individually and collectively.

As for alll those books. I have been around a rather long time. The world changes and so do I. It is a matter of listening to others, especially those who speak from other cultural spaces, and making the effort to respond, which requires learning to address the subtle biases of your own  educational and personal background. I have found this to be most difficult for Americans who are trapped between their claims of ‘exceptionalism’ and a dysfunctional militaritst sense of history. We are now living at a time of radical new technological and ecological challlenges that are being addressed, if at all, without taking accoount of long-term thinking and solutions. This is a time of unprecedented species hazard.    

4.As you know, Palestinian territories before 1967 were occupied by Israel. Regarding the occupied territories, the United States, the European Union, Russia, China, Turkey, the United Nations, and some Islamic countries are advocating for Israel to withdraw to the 1967 borders and for a two-state solution. Does this mean that the lands that Israel seized before 1967 through terror, violence, and Nakba are being accepted? Doesn’t this imply that the forced displacement of Palestinians before 1967, and the massacres and raids carried out by Jewish militias in Palestinian villages, are either ignored or legitimized? How do you assess the period from 1917 to 1967 in terms of international legal principles, the global legal order, and the founding mission of the United Nations? Moreover, since Israel does not accept the two-state solution, how is it that international law, institutions, and countries continue to accept it?

Response: I share your overall assessment of an exceedingly llimited willingness to redress the historic wrongs initially inflicted on the Palestinian people by way of a pre-Holocaust colonialist move on the part of the UK, known to the world as the Balfour Declarration, which was the source of the two original wrongs embedded in the Zionist Project, culminating in the Holocaust and its aftermath: first, an Orientalist disregard of non-Western societal wellbeing. It took the form of solving the problems in Europe caused by antisemitism and Jewish presence by encroaching on the sovereign rights of a non-consenting Muslim majority resident population in Palestine. And secondly, a Zionist resolve based on a politically self-serving biblical interpretation that created a Jewish entitlement to make Palestinians persecuted and unwanted strangers in their existential homeland. By such a logic the surviving native peoples in almost every part of the world dispossessed of their land and sovereignty rights would have an unassailable right to their indigenous pre-modern forms of sovereignty.

Given this background, the UN played its own part in furthering the Western-centric solution in the years after World War II, by way of proposing ‘partition’ of Palestine in a period dominated by the sense of guilt of the liberal democracies and effective propaganda by the Zionnist Movemennt  as well as superior military training, weaponry, and tactics in the 1948 War. For the post-1945 period, Israel emerged as as an expansionist nuclear-armed ‘settler colonial state’ that existentially rejected the co-existence, partition, compromise solutions as put forth in a biased framework controlled by the US, a most partisan intermediary. Israel for public relations reasons pretended to go along with this global consensus while acting to undermine it by its settlements, coercion, land-grabbing, and oppressive apartheid regime of control after 1967. During this process liberal Zionism, the UN, Western countries withheld criticism of Israel’s transparently defiant behavior, and continued their stubborn ineffectual adherence to the mantle of internationalism by way of the two-state mantra dismissing Palestinian resistance and even gestures of accommodation as forms of ‘terrrorism’ to be rejected in practice, colliding with the hidden Zionist vision of later became known as ‘Greater Israel.’ In the interim Israel became useful to the West. It lent muscle and diplomacy to the Euro-American regional priorities of retaining access to Gulf energy reserves at acceptable prices and resisting the spread of Islamically oriented nationalism.

The Gaza Genocide was the latest chapter in the struggle revealing political alignments in unexpected ways: the unity of the Western liberal democracies in their complicit response to such criminality; the passive response of Israel’s most prominent Arab neighbors, prompted by fear of Israel, hostility to Iran, and the links between governing elites and non-Middle East geopolitical actors, mainly the US. Given the size and extremism of the Israeli settler movement, especially in the West Bank, it seems politically naive and irrelevant to advocate a two-state solution even if it requires a Palestinian willlingnesss to swallow pre-1967 territorial and resource injustices and land-grabbing. Overall, the story of the West in the Middle East is a shameful chapter in the long narrative of Western encroachment on the most basic rights of non-Western peoples.   

5.While reading your book on “Humane Global Governance,” which is still in the idea phase and gives you hope, I couldn’t quite distinguish whether humanity or religion is the central focus of globalization. Despite your claim that globalization and secularism are in crisis, do you believe that religion should be utilized or that a humane globalization should be grounded in religion? Since your book also includes the chapter “Why and to What Extent Religion?” let us ask: Why is religion a dynamic factor in your model?

This question poses one aspect of why prescriptive writing about the geopolitical management of global security and relations among dominant states is so contingent on historical circumstances that evolve over time. In certain times and situations religion seems to have emancipatory potential and in others its theocratic governance and exclusionary policies seems dystopian. The same extremes can be observed in the role of secularity as national and global phenomena, which has given rise to visions of peace and justice but by way of geopolitical ambition and technological innovation has caused widespread conquest, exploitation and corruption in what was widely considered a post-colonial world following a wave of successful anti-colonial struggles. I have written of ‘colonialism after colonialism’ as best capturing the excesses of Western militarism and capitalism in this period between the end of the Cold War and the Gaza Genocide. It raises a new haunting question ‘What comes next for specific nations and for humanity as ideal and reality?’

6.In your book “Globalization and Religion,” you briefly address a very intriguing question as a chapter title. I would like to ask you to elaborate on it. The question in the book, if I may quote directly, is: “Does the Western secular state have a future?” If so, why? If not, why not?

Response: This kind of fundamental question requires a book if I were to attempt a comprehensive assessment. A brief response refers to the anti-democratic and regressive trends toward autocratic governance at home and anti-internationalism in foreign policy. Whereas ecological threats and technological developmentss are posing increasing threats of catastrophic futures, political agendas of leading governmennts are preoccupied with the short-term satisfactions and frustrations of the citizenry in the face of growing inequality and of governing elites in terms of geopoliticall rivalry and a stagnancy or worse for Western middle class life styles and expectations. It amounts to shifting ecological and technological problem-solving to future generations that will only survive if new political agendas are enacted under the influence of strengthened structures of global governance that are neither secular nor theocratic, but normative in a radical values-driven format of global-democacy-to-come. Such a benevolent future would depend on governmental elites renouncing narrow militarized forms of security.    

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Israel Exposes Its Political Agenda: ‘land’ not ‘security’; Gaza as Prelude, West Bank as Prize

31 Aug

[Prefatory Note: Modified responses to questions posed by Rodrigo Craveiro, a journalist with the Brazilian newspaper, CORREIO BRAZILIENSE, on 8/29/24, addressing the concerted Israeli military operation, extending the tactics and devastation of its attack on the Gaza Strip since last October, to the occupied West Bank. Again, Washington’s silence is almost as dismaying as Israel blatant disregard of law and standards of decency.] 

  1. I would like to quote you on this military operation in West Bank. How do you see that? What was the purpose?

From the outset of Israel’s response to the October 7 attack, I believed that it was being used as a pretext for ‘ethnic cleansing’ to induce massive departures of the resident Palestinian populations from the three Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), with a long undisclosed priority being systemic expulsion coupled with massive devastation of the West Bank. It should not be forgotten that when the Netanyahu coalition at the start of 2023, that is, months before the Hamas attack, took over occupation and administration of the OPT it was viewed even in Western circles as the ‘most extreme’ in Israel’s history. What made it extreme from Day One were two characteristics: the appointment of Itmar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, leaders of the far right religious Zionist parties in the Netanyahu coalition insistent on an ethnic cleansing agenda, as the chief administrators of Occupied Palestine, and the closely associated greenlighting of West Bank widespread settler violence in West Bank villages while the political leadership in Israel smiled obligingly.

What could be clearer than that the Zionist Religious Right was persuaded to join the Netanyahu coalition because it was given unconditional assurances that a Jewish supremist state would be pursued to complete the Zionist Project of establishing Greater Israel in all of the Promised Land. The prominence given Ben Gvir and Smotrich and the intensity of settler violence could not have been a clearer signal that two-staters were pursuing a Zombie solution, and yet the somewhat sullen silence of Diaspora liberal Zionism in the face of these developments exposed both liberal delusions and its self-righteous superficiality. The liberal approach was always more about us in the Diaspora than about ‘them’ (including even Israeli Jews but certainly the Palestinians long recruited against their will to make the major sacrifices to allay the guilt feelings of the Western democracies for hardly lifting a finger in opposition to the grotesque excesses of European antisemitism).

The Israeli response in Gaza over the last 11 months has horrified most peoples of the world, especially of the Global South, while enjoying the active complicity of the liberal democracies of most elites in the Global West. It has now reached a stage where it has undermined Israel’s reputation as a legitimate political actor, creating a vital decision point, signaled by these lethal attacks on the West Bank cities of Jenin, Tulkarm, and Juber. The IDF commander of this latest military operation, Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, was quick to point out to the media that this was not an isolated incident to discourage Palestinian militancy but the beginning of a sustained military operation in the West Bank. This represents both a military and political escalation motivated by a commitment ‘to finish the job’ while regional and global anti-Israeli sentiments are already at fever pitch, but now ‘the job’ is revealed to the more attentive public to be what it has always secretly been, a campaign to achieve the coercive incorporation of the West Bank into Israel. This enlarged view of ‘the job’ that American pro-Israelis were earlier tricked into believing they were supporting, which was supposedly limited to the destruction of Hamas as a terrorist political actor and the elimination of its leaders, effectively propagandized as dehumanized  ‘terrorists.’

The Israeli leadership as ever master of shaping the public discourse, still seeks to pull wool over eyes by describing this escalation of the scope of their post-October 7 rampage, insist on justifying their West Bank behavior as directed at West Bank Palestinian militancy. Any fool knows that the most effective way to achieve such a result would be to rein West Bank settler violence, but that is not even part of the conversation. It should not be forgotten that from the perspective of international law the West Bank remains an Occupied Territory subject the 4th Geneva Convention that prohibits Jewish settlements, collective punishment, and imposes legal duties on the Occupier to uphold the safety, security, and material health and wellbeing of an Occupied People. This reading of international law as it pertains to the West Bank was given an authoritative confirmation in the July 19th Advisory Opinion of a nearly unanimous International Court of Justice, which was met in Tel Aviv with a show of condescending scorn and in Washington by looking away altogether.

Even the brave, knowledgeable, and perceptive current UN Special Rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, who rarely takes a false step bought into the core of the Israeli public narrative when she described this surge of official Israeli violence as “a serious pattern parallel with what is happening in the Gaza Strip” in the course of an interview with Drop Site News. I believe it is not parallel but integral to the politics underlying Israel’s response to October 7, which from the outset set up its campaign to induce a new nakba in the West Bank, preceded by this genocidal sideshow in Gaza. In effect, Gaza was Act 1 in a political theater piece of at least two acts.

From this follows my judgment that virtually the entire Israeli response since October 7 has been about land and only incidentally, if at all, about security, except in the secondary sense of warning (or deterring) regional enemy attacks, which means mainly Iran . If security had been the primary concern there were much less bloody and more effective and legally acceptable ways to go about a response: tightening border security, using sophisticated intelligence/surveillance skills to control opposition and resistance in Gaza, and even seeking a normalization of relations based on mutual respect for international law. Relevant here is the near unanimous July 19 Advisory Opinion of the International Court that clearly set forth multiple reasons for regarding Israel’s continued occupation of Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank as unlawful, calling on the UN and UN member states to implement its rulings, and on Israel to comply.

If my conjectures are even only partly a corrective of the official version of the Hamas attack, it makes essential an official, trustworthy international investigation of what  really happened on October 7 and how it was decontextualized to serve Israel’s need for a self-serving rationale of the violence that was unleashed for reasons other than the attack. In retrospect, it seems clears that the events themselves were hyped in ways that invalidated criticism of Israel’s behavior and did not contextualize the attack in relation to pre-October 7 recent and structural provocations, the validity of resistance against settler colonialism, and the prolonged nature and severity of Israeli collective punishment of Gazans, the denial not only of rights of self-determination but of rights of return. 

A final observation in the form of a conjecture. US diplomacy used its leverage to discourage further Israeli provocations of Iran to lessen risks of being drawn into a regional war. In exchange, Israel was quietly assured that if it extended the Gaza military operation to the West Bank it would not meet with significant governmental resistance from the US or Europe. In other words, it could get away with completing its master plan of extinguishing the territorial existence of Palestine as well burying the prospect of Palestinian statehood in any viable form once and for all.

  • Do you see the risk of a third intifada after what is happening in Gaza and West Bank?

I believe the greater threat as of now is of a second nakba (catastrophe) involving confronting Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank with a choice between enduring genocide or fleeing across borders to neighboring Arab countries; so far, Gazan have withstood the pressure to leave, and enduring the unspeakable alternatives of genocide or a permanent refugee status. Such an outcome would be a further stage in a process that goes back to pre-Israel Zionism, which is to make Palestinians so persecuted in their own country that many are compelled to flee for safety across international borders as happened in 1948, and under international law unlawfully denied any right of return.

Such an exclusionary second nakba is not necessarily inconsistent with a third intifada, which would be more like the second than the first, that is it would include armed resistance. What probably prevents a new intifada, which would undoubtedly enjoy more sympathy and gain greater support than the earlier two, is the absence of Palestinian political will to expose themselves to an even more extensive genocidal response.

Beyond this, the resolution of East Jerusalem still awaits further action. Almost off camera have been exhortations and symbolic encroachment on the Al Aqsa compound by settler extremists. Even a wider religious war cannot be ruled out if the Netanyahu coalition continues to call the shots when it comes to the Palestinian future.

  • The Israeli leader, Benny Gantz claimed it´s necessary to repeat in West Bank the military strategy for Gaza. How do you see that?

As with other Israeli leaders, Gantz is using a security rationale for what is better understood as a land-grabbing and people-emptying undertaking. As argued above the overriding purpose of Israel’s behavior since October 7 is to take advantage of the attack (as its propaganda specialists have portrayed it) to address the primary Zionist agenda item of establishing Greater Israel as a Jewish supremist state stretching from at least the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, a pre-Netanyahu image of Israeli sovereign territory explicitly embedded in a 2018 Basic Law adopted by the Knesset.

The difference between the Israeli mainstream and the Netanyahu-led extremists is best interpreted as one of style and patience, not substance. The dominant expectations of opposed Israeli establishment groupings raise questions of religion and Jewish tradition, but more fundamentally about power in controlling state/society and international relations of Israel’s government.

Rodrigo Craveiro

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‘Occupied’ Palestine: Jerusalem Annexed, Gaza Genocide, West Bank Apartheid

20 Jun

[Prefatory Note: RAF interview conducted by Daniel Falcone, published in Truthout, May 13, 2024, and republished here with modifications of my responses to reflect intervening developments. In the month since the initial publication, the situation as described below has become even more severely abusive toward the civilian population of Gaza, with the Israeli Government making no effort to uphold its legal or moral responsibilities as Occupying Power to protect the Occupied Palestinian People under its administrative control as requi red in the 4th Geneva Convention governing Belligerent Occupation. The Israeli Government has exhibited a total absence of empathy, in policies and practices that exemplify the worst features of the international crime of apartheid. Even if life in Gaza quiets down, housing restored, Israel security forces withdrawn and some gestures of normalization have been made, the situation in the West Bank, unless modified, will continue to exhibit apartheid characteristics generating a different kind of humanitarian catastrophe. Overall, the Palestinian future can only be redeemed by terminating the Israeli role at the earliest possible time and internationally enforcing the dismantling of Israeli settlements, removal of settlers, and the termination of Israel’s administrative presence and repression. The UN although reporting and documenting human rights violations committed by Israel has so far lacked, in the face of P5 strategic support of Israel, the ability or relevant political will to implement its own recommendations relating to compliance with international humanitarian law. That which is humanly necessary seems politically impossible; the result is a moral scandal of global significance, and a human tragedy brought on my unspeakable and persistent criminality.]

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Israel Continues Unfettered Colonization of the West Bank Amid Genocide in Gaza

Daniel Falcone: The West Bank has posed the biggest challenge to the Zionist settler movement’s pursuit of a “Greater Israel.” Amid the genocidal campaign in Gaza, Israel has expanded its settlement project and markedly increased colonial violence and human rights abuses against Palestinians. “Killings are taking place at a level without recent precedent” in the occupied West Bank, according to a report by Human Rights Watch.

In this exclusive interview for Truthout, international relations scholar Richard Falk reminds us of the reality and aims of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. Falk details the degradation, starvation, human rights abuses, unchecked political power and resource control in the occupied Palestinian territories. He also explains the U.S.’s aims in the West Bank and how they differ from those in Gaza.

Daniel Falcone: With a lot of the attention on Gaza due to the extremity of Israel’s bombing in Rafah, the West Bank is sometimes overlooked in media reports and political discussions about the ongoing Palestinian struggle for survival. How can we understand the differences between Israel’s strategic aims in Gaza and the West Bank?

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Richard Falk: The three territories of East Jerusalem, West Bank and the Gaza Strip have experienced rather different conditions of occupation and governance during the 57 years of Israeli control, none of them with remotely positive results.

The whole of Jerusalem was officially declared by the Knesset in 2019 to be “the eternal capital of the Jewish state of Israel.” Such a unilateral action on Israel’s part was incompatible with international humanitarian law. It also violated the letter and spirit of unanimous UN Security Council Resolution 242, which immediately after the 1967 War looked toward the complete withdrawal of Israel’s occupying armed forces in the near-term future with an unspecified consideration give Israeli demands for “minor border adjustments.” It has always been a Palestinian demand and expectation of most international advocates of a two-state solution that East Jerusalem would be the capital of any future Palestinian state. This Palestinian position has been generally regarded as an integral element of the UN consensus that developed around the widespread support for “a two-state solution” that persists today despite many reasons to believe it would not be sustainable.

In 1967 Gaza was deemed the third and least important element in the administration of the occupied territories that came under Israel’s control during the war. Its status was viewed ambivalently at first, mainly because it was deemed outside the Zionist project. The Zionist commitment to return to “the promised land” that formed the geographic contours of the Zionist vision of a Jewish supremacy state was not included in most versions of Zionist thought and political vision. It also seemed overcrowded and imporverished at first, possessing little economic promise from Israel’s point of view. Nevertheless, in the period of 1967 to 2005 Gaza was treated by Israel as part of Occupied Palestine, with an intrusive and abusive IDF [Israel Defense Forces] military presence, and the unlawful establishment of Jewish settlements along the Gaza coast that became home for 8,000 Jewish settlers. The administration of Gaza was long viewed by Tel Aviv as an economic burden and security challenge for Israel, and a center of Palestinian resistance radicalism.

The major resistance initiative directed at Israeli occupation known as the First Intifada originated in Gaza in 1987, challenging both Israel and the Palestinian leadership of Yasser Arafat and the coalition of secular Palestinian groups known under the rubric of the PLO [Palestinian Liberation Organization]. In 2005, Israel formally “disengaged” from Gaza, contending that the withdrawal of its armed forces and the dismantling of its settlements relieved Israel of further responsibilities as Occupier in Gaza, with possible future peace solutions for the Gaza Strip as involving of some sort of federated arrangement whereby Gaza would become subject to the sovereign control of Jordan and/or Egypt. This Israeli interpretation of disengagement was rejected by the UN and both Arab states. They considered Israel’s revised approach to Gaza as nothing more substantive than a redeployment of IDF ground forces to just across the Israeli border coupled with the maintenance of total control of Gaza’s air space and offshore waters. The approach also included a tight regulation of the entry and exit of persons and goods to and from the Strip. Despite announcing “disengagement” as a step toward peace Israel never overcame the perception of Gaza as “the largest open-air prison” in the world, which for many in Gaza, including secular Palestinians, meant growing sympathy with and support for Hamas as dedicated to active struggle to obtain Palestinian sovereign territory.

The complex Gaza narrative after disengagement included the unexpected 2006 electoral victory of Hamas, previously listed as a terrorist organization by the U.S. and EU, as well as Israel. Despite Hamas agreeing to forego “armed struggle,” in 2007 Israel imposed a strict and economically punitive blockade of goods and persons seeking to leave or enter Gaza, engaging in periodic major military operations, described by Israeli security advisors as ‘mowing the lawn’ and putting the population on what was unfeelingly described as “a diet” by restricting the import of food.  Despite Israel’s repressive moves and military incursions, Hamas put forward long-term ceasefire and co-existence proposals that were ignored by Tel Aviv and Washington. When such an effort to suspend the violent aspects of the conflict failed, Hamas revived it resistance struggle. A creative nonviolent campaign of resistance known as “the Great March of Return” attributed to Palestinian refugees and their descendants, as well as Hamas, was met with deadly Israeli sniper violence in 2018 at the border, including the apparenr lethal targeting of well-marked journalists.

Finally, Israel’s provocations and the Hamas-led attack of October 7 set the stage for the latest genocidal phase of Israel’s presence, combining the wrongs of occupation with many crimes of oppression, dehumanization, devastation, starvation, ethnic cleansing and apartheid, culminating in genocide. It seemed that as of 2024, Gaza is strategically and economically far more important to the right-wing Benjamin Netanyahu government and its settler temperament than it was earlier. This is due to the discovery of extensive offshore oil and gas deposits, and a reported interest in a major engineering undertaking that has blueprinted the Israeli construction of a Ben Gurion Canal traversing part of Gazan territory, with the goal of creating an alternative to the Suez Canal. While the devastation Gaza was still a daily reality, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, obscenely proposed luxury waterfront homes for settlers in a Gaza emptied of Palestinians.

It is against this background that the West Bank has posed the biggest challenge to the pursuit of “Greater Israel,” which was the animating ideal of the settler movement. Maany settlers were closely allied with the extreme right Religious Zionism coalition partner of the Netanyahu-led government that took over the governance of Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories in January 2023. From its first days of governance, it became clear that Israel was preparing to push to completion a maximal version of the Zionist Project. Israeli radicalism along these lines was exhibited by the greenlighting of settler violence on the West Bank that included a series of inflammatory incidents intended to make the Palestinians feel unsafe and unwelcome in their own homeland. The occupying government in Tel Aviv revealed its orientation through tacitly approving settler violence rather than responsibly fulfilling their legal duties to protect Palestinian residents. Crimes against West Bank Palestinian residents, including land seizures and gratuitous vigilante violence, were not only tolerated but applauded by rightist members of Netanyahu’s inner circle.

Of supplemental relevance was the official endorsement of increasing the settlement population in the West Bank by expanding building permits and territorial extensions to settlers and their settlements — already estimated to number 700,000 (500,000 in the West Bank, 200,000 in East Jerusalem). This move to ensure Israeli permanence on the West Bank was combined with the acceleration of diplomacy that focused on forming a de facto alliance with Sunni-dominated Arab countries, especially Saudi Arabia, and the containment and destabilization of Shiite-dominated Iran. Further, Netanyahu’s September 2023 performance at the UN General Assembly in which he arrogantly displayed a map of “the new Middle East” on which Palestine was erased — treated as nonexistent — must have made a show of Palestinian resistance imperative.

These elements are the background context preceding the Hamas-led attack of October 7. The true character of the attack itself needs to be internationally investigated, given the extensive and credible warnings given to the Israeli government, Israel’s ultra-sophisticated surveillance capabilities, and the inflated initial accounts that blamed Hamas for all the most barbaric crimes allegedly committed during the attack. Some of the initial macabre claims of October 7 were later discredited and even modified by Israel. The most suspicious element of the Israeli response was its readiness to embark upon a genocidal campaign, which, while concentrated on Hamas and Gaza, seems also intended to induce a second Nakba with major secondary impacts on the West Bank residential security of Palestinians.

In the months preceding the Hamas-led attack, the West Bank had been the scene of increased settler violence and a heightening of the IDF’s repressive tactics. In the years before October 7, Israel was found guilty of the international crime of apartheid in a series of well-documented reports compiled by objective, expert sources (Special Rapporteurs of the UN Human Rights Council and the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and B’tselem). Liberal democracies and the mainstream media refused to acknowledge this damaging consensus bearing on the legitimacy of Israeli occupation of the West Bank, and instead smeared and blacklisted Israel’s critics. The US Government deflected questions from the media, refusing to respond substantively and opting for institutional silence despite the mounting evidence and legal analysis of objective sources.

In addition to the settlements, Palestinian property rights, mobility and security of residence were undermined and threatened in various ways in the West Bank. Palestinian land was further encroached upon at the end of the 20th century by the construction of a separation wall between pre-1967 Israel and the West Bank that expropriated additional Palestine-owned land and divided villages such as Bil’in. Although this mode of constructing the wall on occupied Palestinian territory was found to be illegal by a near unanimous majority of the judges of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 2003, Israel defied the findings of the Advisory Opinion, as requested by the UN General Assembly over the objections of the US and Israel. In the end Israel continued its wall project without deference to international law or international procedures of accountability.

Israel’s rejection of attempts to establish Palestinian statehood with sovereign rights within delimited borders have long concentrated upon the West Bank. This pattern goes back as long ago as 1947, when the UN approved a controversial plan for the partition of Palestine relying on internal and international borders derived from the British mandate over Palestine. In the dark shadows being cast by the Holocaust and given influence by Zionist pressures, there emerged a UN consensus that the only viable solution for the struggle of the two peoples claiming Palestine as their homeland was to split sovereign rights between two equal states, assumed to be named Israel and Palestine.

Distinguished commentators from both peoples opposed such a territorial division for a variety of reasons, well summarized from a Jewish perspective in Shaul Magid’s The Necessity of Exile and from a Palestinian perspective in the later writings of Edward Said.

Always the central question, even if often left implicit, was the destiny of the West Bank and its residents, as well as whether Palestinian “security” would be restricted by demilitarization and dependence on Israeli forbearance in the two-state models, and whether the Zionist commitment to a Jewish supremacist state, as projected in Israel’s 2018 Basic Laww, could be accommodated or needed to be modified in the one-state models.

Falcone: What are the U.S. goals in the West Bank and how do they differ from its Gaza policy?

Falk: The U.S. has a strong reputational interest in retaining the identity of the West Bank as Occupied Palestinian Territory. If Israel extends its sovereignty over the West Bank, which it has long claimed should be classified as “disputed territory” rather than “occupied territory,” it would bring to a screeching halt any further pretense by the U.S. government to be serious about the advocacy of a “two-state solution.”

Trump’s proposed “deal of the century” contained a nominal Palestinian mini state to sustain the illusion that the interests of both peoples were being considered, but it failed to fool almost no one, including two-state advocates that naively envisioned two states with equal sovereign rights and sovereign control over national security policy. .

American credibility as an “honest broker” in the Oslo Peace Process, and elsewhere, was greatly eroded by its gradual acquiescence in the establishment of Israeli settlements in the West Bank despite their patent illegality and their negative impacts on a meaningful political compromise embedded in the final territorial allocation  of Palestine between the two peoples. The U.S.’s mild reaction to settlement expansion was limited to the muffled whisper that such behavior “was not helpful.” In actuality it was essential to the validation of the Israeli network of settlements.

By now, given the bipartisan U.S. endorsement of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its repeated use of the veto to block a meaningful ceasefire directive and a widely supported initiative to treat Palestine as a full member of the UN, I believe that the U.S. could not any longer put itself forward as a trustworthy intermediary in any future bilateral negotiating process. It would covertly and overtly become Israel’s international sword and shield, exhibiting the extreme partisanship of the US while its leaders and media falsely claiming that the American posture supports adherence to international law and diplomatic balance.

With regard to the differing interests of the U.S. in the West Bank and Gaza, it comes down to two issues: first, supporting Israel’s right to defend itself in Gaza, while maintaining Israel’s legitimacy as an occupying power in the West Bank and insulating its violations of international humanitarian law from UN censure, boycotts and sanctions; and secondly, recognizing that the West Bank is the integral core of a Palestinian state.


Falcone: How does Israel complicate the work on the ground by scholars, activists and elected officials? The fact that the two regions are separate seems to make the problem even more insurmountable. 

Falk: The differing character of Israel’s approaches to the two areas creates many complications for those who seek normal operating conditions. Gaza is considered by Tel Aviv to be administered by Hamas, a terrorist entity in its view, whereas the West Bank is co-administered with the quasi-collaborationist Palestinian Authority to ensure that resistance activities are minimized, or when occurring, treated punitively by Palestinian security forces. Even peaceful forms of resistance face harsh punishment in the form of Palestinian enforcement , and since Israel came under more extremist leadership, the conditions of daily life have become so unpleasant and dangerous that some Palestinians are being forced to leave for neighboring countries, and accept the loss of their homeland, becoming refugees or exiles, harboring resentment and hatred resulting from their mistreatment in what was their homeland.

Until recently the balance of opinion in Israel was wary about any Israeli state that purported to include Gaza. This wariness was associated with Israeli concerns about an emergent “demographic bomb” accompanying any attempt to absorb an additional 2.3 or 2.4 million Palestinians with high fertility rates into Greater Israel. As Israel has replaced its liberal democratic façade with a hardening apartheid regime the issue of democratic legitimacy has receded.

In the West Bank, Israel was nervous about the effect of civil society activism, and even scholarly work and cultural expressiveness, generating unfavorable international publicity as to the nature of such a prolonged occupation. As mentioned, the Israeli occupation is currently being challenged at the ICJ following a General Assembly request to legally assess the continued validity of Israel’s administrative role, given the passage of time, unlawful practices, and frequent recourse to severe forms of collective punishment. This UN effort to challenge Israel’s occupation comes after 57 years without the slightest sign of willingness to implement the withdrawal of Israeli forces envisioned by UN Security Council Resolution 242 and in the face of numerous flagrant continuing violations of international humanitarian law. Quite the contrary, as Israel seems more dug into a permanent domineering presence in the West Bank.

Even prior to the present Netanyahu government, Defense Minister Benny Gantz issued decrees in 2021 banning the activities of respected West Bank NGOs by classifying them “terrorist organizations.” Elected Palestinian leaders have been harassed and imprisoned despite Israel’s collaboration on security and administrative funding over the years with the Palestinian Authority, which is distrusted and disapproved by a growing number of Palestinians inside and outside of the Occupied Territories.

Falcone: What is the role of the West Bank in President Joe Biden’s foreign policy? 

Falk: The West Bank is an indispensable component of Biden’s persistent, although half-hearted advocacy of a two-state solution. This advocacy was always half-hearted and never a persuasive expression of genuine U.S. policy intentions. The two-state mantra seems more and more like a public relations posture to satisfy world public opinion as time passes without the slightest expectation that it will ever be realized except possibly in some nominal form. If it had been a genuine goal, Biden would have challenged Israeli moves of recent years, which became more pronounced since the Netanyahu coalition took over in 2023. Even if Biden is regard as lacking high intelligence, few regard him as so stupid that he remains oblivious to Israel’s quest for a Greater Israel.

 It was an open secret that this extremist coalition was committed to the unilateral completion of the Zionist Project by establishing Greater Israel in the shortest possible time even if it required brute force and massive ethnic cleansing to get the job done. Extending Israeli sovereignty to the West Bank would have the consequence of making even formalistic adherence to two-state advocacy a sign of geopolitical ignorance, so out of touch with the geographic contours of Palestinian statehood as to be in the category of a bad joke.

A viable Palestinian state presupposes full sovereign rights over the West Bank, which must include territorial governance and the substantial dismantlement of the settlements. Neither seems likely to happen if Zionist ideology continues to shape the policy of the Israeli state. It would be awkward for Biden to be asked what kind of Palestinian state does the U.S. favor. He likely would be inclined to answer evasively by saying that “it is up to the parties.” But if he was forthright, it would probably look like a permanently demilitarized Palestinian state with settlements governed according to Israeli law, exempted from territorial regulation, and traveling on roads for Jews only to and from Israel proper. Such a Palestinian state might could possibly the formal requirements of statehood, but it would be a nonstarter for many Palestinians, who continue to insist on their inalienable right of self-determination. The long Palestinian ordeal, stretching over the course of more than a century, would not be ended by the willingness of Israel to allow the formation of a puppet state. After its complicity in the Gaza genocide, the US, as well as any other NATO and G7 should be ruled out of any future part in a genuine peace diplomacy. It is a dangerous sign that the US geopolitical weight is still great enough to allow it to put forward a post-Gaza peace initiative that even Israel is willing to endorse, and so is Hamas. The days of American leadership in global diplomacy should have ended during its months of being a facilitator of the crudest and most transparent genocide of all history, transmitted by images and on site commentary in real time to the peoples of the world.

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