Jean Shaoul
The Greater Israel policy
The 1967 war was a turning point in the development of a Greater Israel policy of permanently annexing the land seized.
The war extended Israel’s de facto boundaries and created new waves of refugees and internally displaced people. The national unity government, headed by Labour Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, established colonial-style settlements in the newly conquered territories in defiance of international conventions. The settlements in turn created a social layer that had a vested interest in Israel’s expansionary policy, providing a pole of attraction for some of the most reactionary forces, whose fascist heirs are in government today, dictating policy. These forces moved Israeli politics rapidly to the right in the 1970s, increasing social instability and ending Labour’s grip on government.
Repression to enforce the occupation of Palestinian land in the West Bank and Gaza was ramped up through the imposition of military rule, collective punishment, house demolitions, forced deportations and detentions without trial, while the Palestinians became a pool of cheap labour to be brutally exploited by Israeli employers. The Palestinian leadership moved first to Jordan, until it was driven out in a savage war by Jordan in 1970, and then to Lebanon.
Following the 1977 election victory of Likud leader Menachem Begin, Israel launched a murderous expansionist policy in Lebanon, with a series of raids, incursions and covert operations in alliance with Lebanese fascist forces against the Palestinians and their allies during the country’s 15-year-long civil war. These wars and covert activities were to continue for 30 years.
An estimated 32,000 Palestinians and an untold number of Lebanese were killed at a cost of around 1,500 Israeli lives during operations that included the massacre of 3,000 Palestinians in Sabra and Shatila, the Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut, by Israel’s Phalangist allies under the protection of the IDF in September 1982.
The Fraud of Oslo
Israel’s attacks on Palestinians in Lebanon and its growing violation of human rights in the Occupied Territories gave rise to the first Intifada, the spontaneous Palestinian uprising of 1987-93 that erupted outside the control of the PLO. It was brutally suppressed by Israel at a cost of more 1,000 Palestinian lives, more than 6 times the number of Jewish Israelis killed.
This led to the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 by Israel’s Labor Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Arafat on the lawns of the White House, with Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) agreeing to recognise Israel and renounce terrorism.
The Accords were supposed to usher in a Palestinian statelet with its capital in Abu Dis, a suburb in East Jerusalem the so-called two-state solution. Arafat and the Palestinian Authority would take over Israel’s role in controlling the Palestinian masses in a bifurcated state, composed of non-contiguous Bantustans, that would be separate from but contained by Israel. This precluded any possibility of democracy for the Palestinians.
Israel’s ultranationalists and their political representatives in Likud and other far-right and religious parties rejected even this mockery of a Palestinian state on land they coveted. Just two years later, in October 1995, right-wing religious nationalists, egged on by war-mongering opposition leaders Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu, denounced Rabin as a traitor at an angry demonstration in Jerusalem. One month later, a religious zealot assassinated Rabin.
Israel used the Oslo Accords to expand the settlements in the West Bank faster than ever, take control of water and other resources, build roads and install more than 600 checkpoints, disrupting movement throughout the region and wrecking its economy. The settlements, now home to at least 500,000 Israelis, or nearly 20 percent of the population, control a far greater percentage of the land, including the most fertile and productive.
Israel annexed East Jerusalem, part of the West Bank, in breach of international law, with its Palestinian residents now only a bare majority following the building of some 200,000 settler homes. In recent years, there have been repeated clashes between the Palestinians and the police over the threatened eviction of Palestinian families from the Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan neighbourhoods at the behest of far-right and religious groups led by Ben-Gvir.
These conditions gave rise to the second Intifada in September 2000, after Ariel Sharon’s provocative march through the Al Aqsa mosque compound under military escort to assert Israel’s control over Islam’s third most holy site. The Intifada was as much an uprising against the PLO leadership that had sanctioned the disastrous Oslo Accords. Between 2000 and 2008, Israeli security forces killed nearly 5,000 Palestinians, around five times the number of Israelis killed by the Palestinians.
The Separation Wall and the Gaza blockade
Sharon then ordered the building of the infamous Separation Barrier that stole a further 10 percent of Palestinian land to wall off Israel from the Palestinians and cut off thousands of Palestinians from their families and workplaces. Targeted assassinations of Palestinian leaders became routine, amid far-right demands for “population transfers” and measures aimed at effecting ethnic cleansing to counter the “demographic timebomb.” The number of Palestinians now exceeds the number of Jews within Israel’s internationally recognised borders and the Occupied Territories.
In 2005, Sharon closed 14 Israeli settlements and withdrew the army from the Gaza Strip, while maintaining control of entry by land, sea and air. This masked a far more significant land grab in the West Bank that was given the green light by the Bush administration.
Two years later, following Hamas’ defeat of an attempted coup by Fatah forces, Israel imposed a suffocating blockade that has turned Gaza into an impoverished ghetto, devastating the lives of its residents. It denies Gaza any independence, providing only the bare minimum of essential services such as water and electricity—after destroying much of its public infrastructure and residential buildings, hospitals, schools and mosques following murderous assaults on the enclave, which it characterises as “mowing the grass”. These include Operation Cast Lead (2008-09), Operation Pillar of Defence (November 2012) and Operation Protective Edge (2014). The combined toll of Palestinian deaths in more than seven major assaults on Gaza by the mightiest air force in the Middle East was at least 4,164—with a loss of just 102 Israeli lives.
Unable to carry out any reconstruction, Gaza’s economic situation was dire well before the present assault. About three quarters of Gazan households are dependent upon some form of aid from the United Nations and other agencies, that the European Union has said is now “under review.” In 2012, the UN predicted that the besieged enclave would be uninhabitable by 2020, only to revise it in 2017 to warn that “de-development” was happening even faster than predicted.
The situation within Israel for Palestinian citizens, who form 20 percent of the population, is precarious. Home to some of the poorest people in the country, their communities face official neglect and budgetary discrimination. Such are the levels of poverty and unemployment that rival criminal gangs have taken control of the Arab towns and villages, leading to more than 180 killings since the start of the year.
In May 2021, Israel’s Palestinian citizens took to the streets in strikes, protests and riots that were triggered by the violent police storming of the Al Aqsa Mosque and brutal acts of ethnic cleansing in East Jerusalem. This was the first time they had joined in a general strike with Palestinians in the occupied territories to protest the assault on Gaza and against Israel’s apartheid-style constitution. Netanyahu’s far-right coalition plans to disqualify Palestinian Knesset members from serving in the Israeli parliament and to ban their parties from standing in elections.
A revolt of the oppressed
It is this immense suffering that led to the Palestinians’ action of October 7-9. Tantamount to a mass suicide mission, it was the revolt of an oppressed people determined to escape the concentration camp in which Israel, with the support of all the major powers, has confined them.
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