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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.]

*********************

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?

Bottom of Form

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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Greater Israel, The Maximal Zionist Imaginary, and Gaza Genocide

19 May

[Prefatory Note: The post below is an interview conducted by Daniel Falcone with me and published in Truthout on May 13, 2024. The unabridged interview will be published here after editorial changes and updating.]

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

The West Bank has posed the biggest challenge to the Zionist settler movement’s pursuit of a “Greater Israel.”

By

Daniel Falcone , 

TRUTHOUT

Published

May 13, 2024

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?

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 positive.

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 looked toward the complete withdrawal of Israel’s occupying armed forces in the near-term future with Israeli demands for “minor border adjustments.” It has always been a Palestinian demand and expectation that East Jerusalem would be the capital of any future Palestinian state, and this Palestinian position was generally treated as an integral element of the UN consensus that developed around persisting support for “a two-state solution.”

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WAR & PEACE

Israel Accelerates Violence in West Bank as It Resumes Airstrikes on Gaza

The violence unleashed by Israeli settlers and military against the West Bank makes clear Israel’s genocidal intent.

By

brian bean , 

TRUTHOUT

December 6, 2023

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 as remote from the Zionist project, being conceived as not part of “the promised land” that formed the geographic contours of the Zionist vision of a Jewish supremacy state. It also seemed at first to possess 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. The administration of Gaza was long viewed by Tel Aviv as an economic burden and security challenge for Israel.

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 consisting of some sort of federated arrangement with 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 ground forces to just across the Israeli border coupled with the maintenance of total control of Gaza’s air space and offshore water. The approach also included a tight regulation of entry and exit to and from the strip. Despite this gesture of “disengagement” 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.

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 foregoing “armed struggle,” in 2007 Israel imposed a strict and economically punitive blockade of goods and persons seeking to leave or enter Gaza, engaged in periodic major military incursions and put the population on “a diet.” Despite Israel’s repressive moves and military incursions, Hamas put forward long-term ceasefire proposals that were ignored by Tel Aviv and Washington. 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 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 involves the Israeli construction of a Ben Gurion Canaltraversing part of Gazan territory, with the goal of creating an alternative to the Suez Canal. During all the devastation, 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. The 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 involved 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 acting to protect Palestinian residents. Crimes against West Bank residents, including land seizures, 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 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.

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.

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 and 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 plan for the partition of Palestine relying on borders derived from the British mandate over Palestine. In the dark shadows cast by the Holocaust, 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 could be accommodated or needed to be modified in the one-state models.

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

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 any true two-state advocates.

American credibility as an “honest broker” in the Oslo Peace Process, and elsewhere, was greatly eroded by its acquiescence in the establishment of Israeli settlements in the West Bank despite their patent illegality and negative impacts on a meaningful political compromise on the final territorial allocation 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.”

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 overtly become Israel’s international sword and shield, exhibiting its extreme partisanship while falsely claiming 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.


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. 

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. Even peaceful forms of resistance face harsh punishment, and since Israel came under more extremist leadership, the conditions of daily life have become so unpleasant and dangerous that Palestinians may be forced to leave for neighboring countries, and accept the loss of their homeland, becoming refugees or exiles.

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 into Greater Israel.

In the West Bank, Israel was nervous about the effect of civil society activism, and even scholarly work, generating unfavorable international publicity as to the nature of such a prolonged occupation. 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. This follows years without an implementation of the withdrawal envisioned by UN Security Council Resolution 242 and numerous flagrant continuing violations of international humanitarian law.

Even prior to the present Netanyahu government, Defense Minister Benny Gantz issued decrees in 2021 banning the activities of respected West Bank NGOs and deeming 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 by a growing number of Palestinians inside and outside of the Occupied Territories.

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

The West Bank is an indispensable component of Biden’s continued 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. 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. 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 to get the job done. Extending Israeli sovereignty to the West Bank would have the consequence of making continued 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 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 and exempted from territorial regulation. Such a Palestinian state might meet 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.

Why is Palestine’s West Bank Under Assault by Settlers and Netanyahu Coalition Government?

24 Jul

[Prefatory Note: The post below is a stylistically modified version of my conversation with independent journalist Daniel Falcone, which was published online in CounterPunch on July 21, 2023 under the title Collective Forgetting and the Politics of the West Bank. It tries to clarify the focus on Israel’s intensified repression concentrated on the West Bank since the Netanyahu coalition government took control. While the media focus has been focused on ‘the judiciary overhaul’ confrontation between antagonistic Jewish factions as to the ‘democratic’ character of Israel, the unifying themes in apartheid Israel remain the further marginalization of the Palestinians in their own. Homeland and matters of internal and national security. The Biden response is to act as if the only crisis worth addressing is that of Jew against Jew with regard to the contested issue of judicial reform, which if resolved consensually,  will permit the U.S. and rightest autocrats to reaffirm ‘shared values’ and ‘common strategic interests.’ A related question not directly covered in our dialogue is to ask is why the UN is so quiet about these disturbing developments, especially ignoring the obvious applicability of the legal norm of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) even as a prolonged Israeli occupation daily defies international law and the UN Charter, subjecting Palestinians to a deprivation of their basic rights in a period that has last for over a half century.

 

Why is Palestine’s West Bank Under Assault by Settlers and Netanyahu Coalition Government?

  1. With much of the Mideast in terms of current affairs, the reporting on human rights and the plight of Palestinians is usually geared towards a coverage of Gaza, Jerusalem and Israel proper. Could you provide a brief history of the West Bank and the significance of this landlocked occupied territory? In your estimation, is the region overlooked?

You raise an important, indeed a vital question, by wondering why until quite recently the media focus on human rights issues, weak as it has been with respect to Israel overall, has mainly given attention to events involving Gaza and East Jerusalem, while indirectly fostering an impression of virtual normalcy on the West Bank. I think a partial answer has to do with the relationship of these three Palestinian territories occupied since the 1967 War to the policy priorities of the Zionist agenda. In effect, East Jerusalem was extinguished as a separate international political entity shortly after a ceasefire was negotiated in 1967. Israel quickly moved to enlarge the spatial limits of Jerusalem, declared the unified, enlarged city as the eternal capital not only of Israel but of the Jewish people, and has so administered the city ever since. This unilateral move in violation of the ceasefire diplomacy was repudiated in the UN General Assembly and Security Council by large majorities of UN members but was never further challenged at the Security Council (because of the U.S. veto) or the World Court (International Court of Justice). Jerusalem as capital of Israel became the operative reality for the country, but not for most governments in the world, including surprisingly even many NATO .members who continued to believe that peace could be found if Palestinian statehood was agreed upon with East Jerusalem as capital.

When the Trump White House in 2017 broke ranks and recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and announced its intention to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem the GA reacted, condemning the proposed U.S. diplomatic departure from the UN consensus as ‘null and void’ by a. vote of 128-9 (35 abstentions; 21 absences) [GA ES-10/10/29, Dec. 21, 2017; shortly before, the Security Council supported a similar position by 14-1, but the U.S. blocked action by casting its veto]. The embassy was moved and as always, no adverse effects for Israel followed this defiance of International Law and UN authority. When Biden took over the U.S. presidency in 2021 he did nothing to modify or even moderate Trump’s extremely one-sided approach that exceeded prior forms of U.S. pro-Israeli partisanship, including that of Biden’s Democratic Party predecessor, Barack Obama. This Biden behavior is a strong confirmation that bipartisanship persists when it comes to Israel, despite the overall political mood, which is one of polarization. By so acting Biden tends to disregard even the most Trump-supported Israeli disruptive departures from the UN consensus and the requirements of international law. Yet unlike Trump Biden lamely reiterated the U.S. commitment to a two-state solution totally overlooking how much Israel’s dailly actions were making such a politically negotiated outcome almost impossible to imagine, This gave the continuing advocacy of the two-state approach an increasingly zombie-like quality, and. made Biden appear naïve or muddled, and Trump at least forthright and consistent..

The UN as an Organization, never formally accepted, nor did it meaningfully challenge, this outcome of de facto revisions of the Security Council 242 unanimous decision calling for Israeli withdrawal from all Palestinian territories occupied during the war and a just settlement of the refugee controversy, Successive UN Special Rapporteurs on Israeli violations of international law in the OPT continued to treat Israel as an Occupying State in East Jerusalem with full responsibility to uphold international humanitarian law as set forth in the 4th Geneva Convention on Belligerent Occupation. These well-evidenced charges angered Israel to the point of ending any semblance of cooperation with the UN, a move that ran counter to its treaty obligations as a UN Member to cooperate in the discharge of activity authorized by UN procedures. It needs to be recalled that the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) was understood as a temporary interlude, prefiguring the territorial boundaries of an independent Palestine state that was widely, and at first, genuinely believed to be the indispensable and realizable precondition for an Israeli/Palestine durable peace, with East Jerusalem serving as the capital of. Palestine.  

With respect to Gaza, although the same OPT designation as used for East Jerusalem and the West Bank was adopted at the UN after the 1967 War, its relationship to Israel and Zionism, or to the UN/US image of a peace process, was quite different than either that of East Jerusalem or the West Bank, which is explained by the fact that under most readings of the. Zionist Project Gaza is not included in standard conceptions of the permanent territorial delimitation of the Jewish supremist state. According to Jewish tradition the biblically specified Jewish entitlement in Palestine did not include Gaza, which was not part of the Jewish imaginary of ‘the promised land.’.

Israel did occupy Gaza for many years after 1967, and even established a number of unlawful settlements in the coastal region of the Strip, Nevertheless, Gaza was never a. territorial priority for Israel, which explains the adoption and relative uncontroversial implementation of Ariel Sharon’s 2005 ‘disengagement plan’ calling for the withdrawal of Israeli troops and the dismantling of the settlements. From a UN/international standpoint, Israel’s plan of disengagement had no legal effect on Israel’s continuing responsibilities of Israel as an Occupying Power regarding the administration of the Gaza Strip, In terms of the modalities of Israeli control, disengagement amounted to little more than a redeployment of IDF occupying troops on the Israeli side of the Gaza borders reinforced by a variety of miliary penetrations ranging from overflights emitting terrifying sonic booms to massive incursions with advanced weaponry.

Until very recently Gaza seemed mainly an economic and security burden for Israel, accentuated as previously mentioned that it was seldom included among Zionist territorial objectives and besides was thought of as a difficult demographic pill for Israel to swallow given its civilian population of 2.1 million, with about two-thirds living as refugees in camps, mainly families descended from those dispossessed by the Nakba in 1948. In addition, Gazans did not endure their fate passively. Gaza has long been a thorn in Israel’s side, being the site of several radical forms of Palestinian resistance, including both the intifadas of 1987 and 2000, militant forms of resistance, The Great March of Return (March 2017-December 2019), and the heartland of Hamas. In 2006 Hamas was partly enticed by Washington to abandon armed struggle and participate in the 2006 Gaza elections, being assured that this was a way of moving toward ‘peace’ or at least ‘peaceful co-existence,’ which Hamas leaders were proposing during this period. Despite this background, the Hamas electoral victory defied Washington’s expectations and came as a shock. It also produced a harsh Israeli response awkwardly supported by the U.S., leading to the imposition of a comprehensive punitive blockade that has remained in force since 2007, periodic large-scale military incursions causing much devastation and serving as a show case for new Israeli weapons and counterinsurgency tactics, the scene of frequent targeted assassinations, and a deterrent warning to Arab neighbors and Iran to avoid provoking Israel or expect punishing military attacks as directed at Syria and Lebanon over the years..

When it comes to Israel proper, the settler colonial discourse is relevant and has been more recently relied upon to explain the. history of the struggle through the optic of the Palestinian narrative, featuring an apartheid regime of ethnic control and repression. Palestinians are effectively marginalized within Israel, currently threatened by the prospect of a single Jewish supremist state that incorporates the entire OPT, plus or minus Gaza, and enjoys legal status in Israel by virtue of the Basic Law adopted in 2018.. The only internal obstacle to carrying out this maximalist version of the Zionist Project seems to be the resistance mounted in the West Bank, typified by the deep attachment of the residents to what they feel and understandably believe to be their homeland. The interplay of. oppressive rule and tragic circumstances, given meaning and dignity by Palestinian sumud or steadfastness, and expressed by the common extreme sayings popular among WB residents: “If we had the chance we would choose death over living under occupation” or “living from lack of death.” This situation is made more acute by the absence of proper Palestinian representation in international and domestic venues, exemplified

by the collaborationist Palestinian Authority and the fragmentation of Palestinian unity arising from bitter ongoing tensions between the PA and Hamas.

Given the extremist government in Israel since the beginning of 2023, this shift in attention. to the West Bank seemed inevitable. Netanyahu’s coalition government has given a green light to settler violence and extremist strivings, apparently to bring an end to the conflict through tactics of state-endorsed terror, ethnic cleansing, dispossession, settlement expansion, and total demoralization of West Bank Palestinian communities. It represents the last desperate stage of settler colonialism in which the objective is to totally subdue and marginalize the resisting native population., In some historical instances of settler colonialism the people of the land are virtually eliminated as an oppositional presence (U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand). It is also widely believed by settler communities if they do not win by such a replacement logic, they lose as in South Africa or Algeria.

  • 2. How would you gauge and evaluate the international responses to the West Bank and the human rights abuses that take place there in terms of the following two areas: 1) political and legal institutions and 2) the press coverage around the world? 

We should not believe that the period before the recent Israeli government took over was free from systemic and severe human rights abuses by Israel in its role as Occupying Power of the West Bank. The issues of excessive force, unlawful settlements, house demolitions, internal mobility restrictions, collective punishments, de facto annexation, separation wall, apartheid were all present ever since the occupation commenced in 1967, and each represented serious violations of international law. At the same time, the extremists in the present Israeli government have scaled up the intensity, overtness, and blunt and defiant racism of preexisting Israel’s repressive policies and practices. To the extent that the Israeli government has responded to international criticism it has either claimed ‘security’ or ‘counterterrorist’ justifications, accompanied by a bright shining green light of hands-off approval to settler violence no matter how vicious and overt, as with the. genocidal burning of the Palestinian Village of Harawa on February 26, 2023. The attack on the Jenin refugee camp for several days in early July was a horror show for the people on the that was given scant international media coverage, given the magnitude and indiscriminate character of the Israeli violence. Such displays of excessive force flagrantly violates the duties of an Occupying Power under international humanitarian law, and has led recent UN Special Rapporteurs to declare Israel’s continued status as an authorized Occupying Power under the 4th Geneva Convention at an end.

In effect, political and legal institutions in Israel have given their approval to these settler

outbursts, which can only be seen as an attempt to make the West Bank unlivable for Palestinians, and thus should be interpreted as a campaign of ‘ethnic cleansing’ of a people long held captive in their own homeland. The use of the IDF to mount a major military operation, involving death and devastation, against the refugee camp in Jenin was a further indication that Israeli settlers were not lone wolf predators, but part of a public/private campaign to complete the Zionist Project by imposing Israel’s rule over the whole of Occupied Palestine except for Gaza, that is, a single supremist and exclusivist Israel state of the Jewish people, containing as few Palestinians as possible. There is also renewed talk among this new brand of Israeli leadership favoring the reoccupation and resettlement of Gaza, possibly reflecting partly the extension of expansionist goals beyond the promised land and partly the realization that being situated next to Egypt and the scene of recently discovered offshore natural gas fields gives Gaza a previously unappreciated strategic importance.

The main media coverage has focused on the violent events, and in the West given a typically misleading ‘both sides’ treatment of the issue of responsibility, blaming the Palestinians, especially Hamas and Islamic Jihad, for an upsurge of terrorist incidents while mildy criticizing Israel for over-reacting by entrusting the shaping of its security policies to such leading extremist figures as Itamar Ben-Gvir, currently the Minister of National Security. There is very little interpretative assessment to be found on the main media platforms as to why this Israeli intensification of West Bankl violence is currentlly occurring, and thus little public understanding of what underlies this new stage of Israel/Palestine confrontational politics. It requires heeding a Zionist ideologue such as Tom Friedman of the NY Times to give a cynical realist account that makes overt what had long been common knowledge among independent commentators and UN diplomats that Palestinian statehood was never intended to become a reality but was useful only because it served Israel and the U.S. as ‘a shared fiction.’ [July 11, 2023], and amazingly, despite its implausibility, still does. The two-state mantra has served all along as the cynical keynote of the beguiling charade called ‘a peace process’ in which Washington has long helped Israeli leaders manage off-stage, a demeaning story well-documented by Rashid Khalidi in his pre-Trump Brokers of Deceit (2013). In truth, Trump’s value added for Israel was to end the deceitful core of Washington’s ‘honest broker’ posture and bring U.S. policies into the bright sunlight of undisguised partisanship. In a new twist, Friedman proposes an opportunistic revival of two-statism as still the most viable path to a sustainable peace, better for Israel and the U.S. than the present Netanyahu’s push for one-statism. In Friedman’s words, “it is vital that Biden urgently take steps to re-energize the possibility of a two-state solution and give it at least some concrete diplomatic manifestation on the ground.” [NYT, May 25, 2023.]

Put differently, the media coverage gives some attention to the trees (the violence), but seems mindless about the fate of the forest (the underlying scheme). The West Bank strength of Palestinian sumud  is an extraordinary display of resolve to remain attached to land and place. It is the background of the mounting Palestinian resistance to Israel’s effort to appropriate the land, olive orchards, and traditions of a rooted people. The present Israeli government conceives of this struggle to achieve supremacy in the West Bank as the overdue last act in a suspenseful political drama that has unnecessarily lasted so long in a wasteful effort to appease world opinion and satisfy allies.

While most of the. world, including the NATO West, is distracted by Ukraine and the challenges of climate change, this Netanyahu government apparently is seizing an opportunity to achieve two hard-right victories (away from constitutional democracy, and crushing Palestinian resistance). In this unfolding situation, the Palestinians rally to stay engaged in a struggle that they remained determined to win eventually, having the flow of anti-colonial history, as well as law and morality on their side. Israel, in contrast, seems caught between a final fulfillment of the Zionist dream and a fear that its house of cards may collapse as happened elsewhere, especially in South Africa. In these circumstances Netanyahu’s Israel is trying to impose an anti-democratic judicial overhaul of the Israel state to remove obstructions to institutionalizing autocratic populism that is pitting Jew against Jew in Israel in a deep struggle of marginal significance to Palestinian aspirations. Yet it keeps American leaders awake because the Jewish veneer of democracy is vanishing before their eyes and with it the credibility of the claim of ‘shared values’ and ‘shared interests,’ used to validate the continued large annual appropriations of U.S. taxpayer funds as well as the official posture of seeing no evil. Although the U.S. Congress seems undaunted and as blindfolded as ever backing a resolution of continuing unconditional support for Israel by a vote of 412-9 on July 18th, that is after weeks of the judiciary overhaul protests and the brutal attack with drones and hundreds of troops on the densely inhabited Jenin refugee camp, cutting electricity and water, and ripping up many of the camp’s roads with bulldozers.

  • 3. The US-backed recent attack on the Jenin refugee camp on July 4, 2023 saw thousands fleeing for safety for those lucky enough to survive. One feature of the violence is the profound effect it’s having on women and children in the region and the society. Can you describe how the Israeli policies exist within a framework of sexism and childism as well as classism and racism?

You pose very deep questions about this reality, climaxing recently, at Jenin. From the Israeli point of view, the most vulnerable among the Palestinians have been victimized throughout the prolonged occupation. Partly this reflects the fact that children often were the most visible and innocent of resistors, imprudently throwing their symbolic stones at their high tech Israeli military oppressors, and thus encountering the security apparatus most directly and disturbingly, with a recent World Bank survey finding that as many as 58% of Palestinian children living under occupation are suffering from mental disorders of depression and PYSD.[Haaretz, July 16, 2023] This all takes place in the context of a pervasive repressive social structure that encompasses class, race, religion, and gender hierarchical distinctions, and what amounts to the Orientalist erasure of the Palestinian people. It is notable that in the principal rendition of Friedman’s recalibration of support for Israel, in effect, letting Israel be Israel without liberal softeners, there is not a word of empathy for the Palestinian ordeal or even the now acknowledged fiction of seeking a political compromise that turns out to have been all along a cruel, prolonged instance of ‘fake diplomacy.’ [See Philip Weiss, “’Apartheid’ Says Tom Friedman, Mondoweiss, July 15, 2023]

4) With the reemergence of Elliott Abrams, can you comment on the path forward for the Biden Administration and talk about how the recent attacks move us further away from roadmaps to achieving peace in the West Bank?

It has become clear that when it comes to human rights the Biden presidency is tone deaf, self-righteously condemning rivals for their violations while using its diplomatic leverage to. shield Israel and others from justified criticism, double standards writ large equates with moral hypocrisy. The appointment of Elliott Abrams to the U.S Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy should appall what’s left of the liberal conscience. [See Sarah Jones, Why is the Biden Administration Rewarding Elliott Abrams? Foreign Policy, July 6, 2023] It is well known that Abrams, as Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, knowingly fashioning a partial coverup of the El Mazote 1981 massacre of over 1,000 left civilian opponents of the repressive government, by a U.S. trained death squad in El Salvador. In subsequent roles, Abrams has been unconditional supporter of Israel over the years backing its most controversial behavior and castigating critics. [Detailed critiques of Abrams’ career see Eric Alterman, “Confirmed: Elliott Abrams Defense of Murder Was Based on Lies,” The Nation,June 30, 2020} To select someone with Abrams’ record relative to human rights as a high-profile consultant on diplomatic policy is to drop the veil of liberal innocence altogether. It is, perhaps, a further indication that Friedman’s shift to ‘fake diplomacy’ is part of a broader revisioning of American political identity, although it makes even emptier Biden’s already vapid championship of an alliance of democracies.

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