Israel’s Land Theft
124/01/2022 by socialistfight
Israel never had any intention of giving the Westbank back to the Palestinians
by Dov Winter 22-1-22
Israel never had any intention of giving the Westbank back to the Palestinians that they had taken from them in the 1967 war. The plan was always to drive the Palestinians from their land in the Westbank, using brutal means such as killings those who resisted such plans; blowing up the houses of Palestinians who oppose Israel; and taking Palestinians lands and destroying their olive trees which have not only symbolic meaning for the Palestinians, but are important for their economic survival.
So, the plan was always to uproot the Palestinians from the homes and land and replace them with Jewish settlers. This was and is a de-facto genocide plan.
Since the 1967 war the Zionists have killed and imprisoned thousands of Palestinians who have no human rights in the occupied territories. The Zionists use the British reactionary laws from before 1947, that allows the state to imprison anybody (but never Jews) indefinitely without trial or conviction. The Zionists put Palestinians, as well as Arabs who live in Israel, in prison for just condemning the Zionist atrocities.
The Zionist assaults on the Palestinians in the West Bank has only intensified. According to UN statistics:
“there were 496 attacks by settlers or Jewish extremists against Palestinians in 2021, of which 126 resulted in physical harm. That is an increase of 39% from 2020, when there were 358 such incidents, including 84 in which Palestinians were harmed”. [1]
Over the years since the 1960s, Israeli politics moved steadily to the right. An important factor for this is the immense growth of Hassidim Jews. Unlike secular Jews who have few children, the Hassidims breed precociously. A couple can easily have ten to twelve children.
These reactionary Zionists (the Hassidims and other right-wing Zionists), who view the Palestinians only as a target to kill when possible, are the main forces that enter the Westbank to displace the Palestinians, with the complete support of the Israeli army and the Israeli state.
The Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem was settled by Palestinians for hundreds of years. But this did not prevent the Hassidims from driving the Palestinians out of their homes there. On the contrary. The Hassidim violent attacks against the Palestinians was supported by the Israeli state and Israeli army. The army drove the Palestinians out of their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, which was sanctioned by the Zionist high court.
The Hassidims did not only attack the Palestinians. They also attacked Left-wing Jews who came to the defence of the Palestinians, sending some of them to the hospitals with serious head injuries. The Zionist paper the Jerusalem Post claim that:
“Tensions in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood began in May after the Jerusalem District Court denied an appeal against a decision to evict a number of Palestinian residents of the neighborhood from their homes. The court ruled that the current residents had not paid the required rent for many years and had not been able to disprove the claims of the Jewish Israelis to the property.” [2]
This is a blatant lie and a distortion of history. But the Israeli court does not need to come up with a good excuse. It only needs the boots of the Israeli army to evict the Palestinians from their historic Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, and let the Hassidims grab the Palestinians houses.
How important is the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood for the Palestinians can be measured by the Palestinians response to the Zionist’s violence. This triggered a mini intifada that spilled into Gaza. Hamas fired rockets towards Jerusalem, sparking an 11-day conflict that the Zionists called Operation Guardian of the Walls. While the Palestinians rockets killed a few Israelis, Israel responded with a massacre against the Palestinians in Gaza. The Israeli army bombed apartment buildings in Gaza, killing many Palestinians, including children.
Wikipedia records,
“at least 256 Palestinians, including 66 children, have been killed … In Israel, at least 13 people have been killed …more than 1,900 Palestinians were injured, and as of 12 May, Israel reported at least 200 injured Israelis. As of 19 May, at least 72,000 Palestinians have been displaced. Around 4,360 rockets have been fired towards Israel from Gaza, of which 680 landed within the strip, and over 90 percent of rockets bound towards populated areas were intercepted by the Iron Dome. Israel has conducted 1,500 air, land and sea strikes on the Strip.” [3]
This is not new, but rather a regular occurrence. The Palestinians in Gaza are led by Hamas. Hamas is an Islamic organization. While its ideology is reactionary to some degree, it nevertheless should be supported by revolutionary Marxists critically when it fights Zionism and when it defends Gaza against Zionist atrocities. The number of casualties demonstrate without a doubt who is the oppressed and who is the oppressor. Every time when there is a war between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza, the Zionists kill hundreds of Palestinians while Israel suffer only few casualties.
Zionism plays a total reactionary role not only in Palestine, but in the entire Middle East. Israel is a small imperialist country that uses the West Bank as its colony. But it is also a garrison for US imperialism in the Middle East. Israel is used by the imperialism to control the Arab bourgeoisie, and stop any anti-imperialist struggles. This could be seen in the 1956 war, when Israel allied with British imperialism to crush Egypt and open the Suez channel for imperialist passage. And by 1967 Israel conducted its own colonial/imperialist war to annex the West Bank.
There is a debate within the Left about the correct program for the liberation of the Palestinians and the defeat of Zionism. We don’t agree with the two states solution. It is not possible that a Jewish state within the two states solution will respect an independent Palestinian state, even if it will be run by the PLO, that capitulates to imperialism. As long as the Jewish state run by the Zionists, it will not respect the Palestinian state. It will subject it to a colonial rule, or it will just occupy it, the way it did in 1967.
The only solution is one country for the Jews and the Arab in Palestine, after Zionism is crushed and defeated. Such a secular state is the minimum requirement for genuine solution for the decades-long conflict. However, such a solution is extremely unlikely under capitalism. There is a small minority of Jews in Israel that are anti-Zionist. But this is not sufficient to establish solidarity with the Palestinians that will result in a secular state in which Jews and Arabs will live together in peace and solidarity.
Ultimately, such unity can only be achieved when the socialist revolution sweeps the world. As world capitalism enters a devastating crisis which combines still out of control Covid and Climate change, such a revolutionary solution for the Middle East may not be a dream for the far future.
But, of course, for the Palestinians to defeat Zionism, they need all the help they can get from the Arab masses who must confront their own bourgeoise.
Notes
[1] Jerusalem Post, Tovah Lazaroff, 21/1/22, Dozens of masked settlers attack Israelis, Palestinians in West Bank, https://www.jpost.com/breaking-news/article-694187
[2] Ibid.
[3] Wikipedia, 2021 Israel–Palestine crisis, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Israel%E2%80%93Palestine_crisisn ▲
Socialist Fight 
Just some thoughts for discussion.
Comrade Winter writes: “The only solution is one country for the Jews and the Arab in Palestine, after Zionism is crushed and defeated. Such a secular state is the minimum requirement for genuine solution for the decades-long conflict.”
^ If I remember correctly, a point raised by none other than Gilbert Achcar (in a youtube video on Palestine) is, that “we” should put on the table (perhaps as a “minimum”, ie a bourgeois minimum) a program of land (ownership) reform. This would be a “minimum” (bourgeois) task, of the Palestinians. If I recall, basically his point was that a “secular” solution (whether in two-states or one-state), that doesn’t address land reform, would just return the land only to a small section of the Palestinians, namely the (descendants of) land-owners. Further, suppose we get a peaceful “secular” (ie bourgeois) one-state, with private sale of land, then such a “solution”, I assume, entails also the lifting of the present restriction on selling land to Jews in Gaza and throughout the PA’s area, and so lands will there go to the highest bidder according to the “normal” market mechanism of dispossessing struggling peasants(/house-owners), that gets compared to gentrification in urban cities in the West. It’s perhaps needless to repeat also this ABC, as a minimum. But surely, some will say, the conflict can’t be reduced to the “mere” question of land, or at least, the prime driver in the conflict is rather the issue of national self-determination? Well, would the solution of a “secular” one-state, give the Palestinians a state “of their own” (if so, in what sense)? Would this be a mere bi-national state (with 2 flags? if we’re talking pure symbolism), or even a complete non-national state?
Comrade Winter continues: “However, such a solution is extremely unlikely under capitalism. There is a small minority of Jews in Israel that are anti-Zionist. But this is not sufficient to establish solidarity with the Palestinians that will result in a secular state in which Jews and Arabs will live together in peace and solidarity.”
^ Would advocating “(revolutionary) defeatism” (that Draper found so confusing a notion) among the Jewish population in Israel in your mind signify here advocating the end of a state that claims to defend the right to Jewish self-determination (a Jewish fatherland)? Normally I think the notion of “defeatism” still retains the existence of the oppressing state after its defeat, ie; Tsarist Russia’s defeat by Japan still retained Russia’s existence; France still exists after the Algerian independence; Indonesia still exists after withdrawing from East-Timor. So I think the goal of a one-state solution means an abandonment (on your part) of advocating the normal defeatism (in the strict sense) in the Israeli context. The goal of a secular (ie bourgeois) one-state means advocating, for the Israeli Jews, rather something that can be called “destructionism”/”disbandment” (instead of strict defeatism). That would be, I agree, a view only among a small minority of Israeli Jews (but so too a small minority among Russians, French, Indonesians). Even if it were adopted by the majority of Israeli Jews, it would not still be a *revolutionary* destructionism, in the sense of an overthrow of the ruling class in Israel. It is thus not a call for civil war among Israelis (despite the presence of the precondition, that the Israeli ruling class does not seem quite capable of ruling these last years). I don’t think the Israeli Jewish working class is incapable of attaining socialist consciousness though. I made the claim even that such a central pillar of Zionism, as Max Nordau, was a socialist, alongside others (see my final section, here: https://www.academia.edu/59352384/Comrade_Max_Nordau ). Obviously, being/becoming socialist (for Israeli Jews) isn’t impossible, but then, I would posit, we must assert that even this is not enough, or it’s not relevant, to getting a solution to the conflict.
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