Israel’s West Bank Operation: Causes & Consequences

[Israeli Soldiers, Police, Take Positions at Entrance to Beit Ommar. Image by Palestinian Solidarity Project.] [Israeli Soldiers, Police, Take Positions at Entrance to Beit Ommar. Image by Palestinian Solidarity Project.]

Israel’s West Bank Operation: Causes & Consequences

By : Mouin Rabbani

The disappearance of three Israeli youths in mid-June 2014 while hitchhiking home from a Jewish settlement in the Israeli-occupied West Bank has brought an already volatile situation to the boiling point.

At a time of growing Palestinian agitation on account of a mass hunger strike by prisoners and amidst Israeli legislative initiatives to authorize force-feeding them, the Israeli military has launched its largest offensive in the West Bank since the end of the 2000-2005 Palestinian uprising.

The Israeli government instantaneously blamed Hamas for the alleged abduction, yet almost two weeks on has yet to provide a shred of evidence to validate its assertions. It was a transparently political claim made well before the Israeli security forces were in a position to seriously examine the matter. Similarly, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has held Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas directly responsible for the fate of the missing Israeli youths, even though their last known position was in an area of the occupied West Bank under the sole and exclusive control of the Israeli military, and there is no evidence the youths were subsequently moved to an area under Palestinian Authority control – areas where Israeli forces have in any case been operating without restriction for over a decade.

What is clear is that the search for the missing youths is at best a secondary objective of Israel’s current organized rampage throughout the West Bank. No one, for example, seriously believes that the missing youths would have been transported from Hebron to Jenin or Salfit in the far north of the West Bank. The campaign’s key aims, which Israeli leaders have hardly been coy about, are to deal a significant blow to Hamas in the West Bank, and more importantly to undermine the recent Palestinian reconciliation agreement to the point where it begins to unravel. It additionally hopes to even further weaken Mahmoud Abbas so that he becomes more pliable, dependent and responsive to its demands when bilateral negotiations are resumed or Israel implements unilateral measures in the West Bank. The prospect of a renewed Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip should also not be discounted.

Many have speculated that Israel is also seeking to provoke mass Palestinian unrest at a time when Palestinians remain fragmented and are insufficiently organized, and can be more easily beaten down. The Israeli campaign may also produce sustained protests against the Palestinian Authority (PA), which to the growing anger of its constituents has maintained unconditional security coordination with Israel – a relationship Abbas recently characterized as “sacred”.

These developments are of course not transpiring in a vacuum. Israel is facing growing diplomatic isolation, and today even its closest allies are warning it of the consequences of its blatant violations of Palestinian rights and international law, and have all, at least implicitly, recognized the new Palestinian government without much talk of the sanctions that have accompanied previous reconciliation agreements. From Israel’s perspective, changing the narrative from colonialism to terrorism – even as its soldiers have killed five Palestinians, including a 15-year-old boy – has obvious advantages.

For the Palestinian people at large, Israel’s military crackdown poses one of the most serious challenges since the Hamas-Fatah schism of 2007. Palestinians within and without the occupied territories will be challenged to find ways to respond that strengthen their position rather than complicating it further. First and foremost, they need to properly rebuild national institutions so that these develop into an inclusive, representative, and dynamic national liberation movement capable of formulating and implementing a coherent and effective strategy, both on the ground and around the world.

Secondly, Palestinians must pursue a serious strategy of internationalization that is based on attaining their inalienable rights, first and foremost the right to self-determination on the basis of the prevailing international consensus and international law. It is an approach incompatible with the Oslo process and therefore requires an irrevocable disengagement from it.

The challenges are huge but hardly insurmountable. Implemented properly, a dynamic Palestinian strategy can turn Israel’s continued depredations against the Palestinian people into an effective weapon against its extremist leaders, robbing the latter of the structural advantages they seek to derive from their colonial project and organized rampages such as we have seen in the past two weeks. As always, the key objective should be to arrest and reverse Israel’s impunity in its dealings with the Palestinian people and to replace this with effective and meaningful accountability.

[This commentary was originally published on Al-Shabaka, The Palestinian Policy Network.]

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412