Israel’s Annexation of Palestinian Land Will Be the Result of U.S. Policy, Not a Betrayal of It

Israel’s Annexation of Palestinian Land Will Be the Result of U.S. Policy, Not a Betrayal of It

Israel’s Annexation of Palestinian Land Will Be the Result of U.S. Policy, Not a Betrayal of It

By : Noura Erakat

new unity government has been installed in Israel, set to govern for thirty-six months with the premiership shifting hands between Benjamin Netanyahu of the Likud Party and Benny Gantz of Blue and White. The agreement stipulates the operation of an emergency government in order to focus specifically on the coronavirus pandemic—with the singular exception of a possible vote on annexation of West Bank territory as early 1 July.

The urgency surrounding annexation reflects a desire to capitalize on the Trump administration’s “Deal of the Century,” which unilaterally consolidates all of Israel’s territorial takings over the past five decades. The plan cements the containment of Palestinians within a series of 115 bantustans and signals the irreversible death of a viable Palestinian state. And while the acquisition of territory by force is a war crime, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo referred to it as a matter of Israeli prerogative.

News of the impending annexation has unnerved the liberal Zionist political establishment. Americans for Peace Now admits that the move would make clear Israel’s intention to oversee an "apartheid-like reality.” J Street, which has historically opposed any meaningful censure of Israel—including economic pressure to achieve Palestinian rights through boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS)—responded to the plan by endorsing the conditioning of US funding to Israel. Their anxiety suggests that the threat to Palestinian self-determination, and mostly to Israel’s Jewish demographic majority, is an aberration of current Israeli and US governments. That ahistorical perspective is precisely the problem.

The reality on the ground already reflects de facto annexation of Palestinian lands. Trump and Netanyahu’s plan for de jure annexation is based on decades of harmful US policy in the region, including the bilateral peace process, constructed by political centrists.

Since 1967, successive US administrations have insisted that settlements are contrary to international law and counterproductive to peace. In practice, each has provided Israel with unequivocal financial, diplomatic, and military support, enabling it to expand and entrench its sprawling settler-colonial enterprise. Even the Carter administration, responsible for the 1978 State Department legal opinion that civilian settlements in occupied territories are “inconsistent with international law,” only slapped Israel on the wrist when Menachem Begin accelerated settlement expansion in 1977.

Continued unequivocal US support includes diplomatic immunity for Israel in the international community. In accordance with the land-for-peace arrangement enshrined in United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, the United States framed international law as an impediment to negotiations and used its Security Council veto forty-three times between 1967 and 2017 to shield Israel from international accountability. Even when the United States withholds its veto, as the Obama administration did when it abstained on UNSC Resolution 2334 condemning the settlements, it ensures the immutability of Israeli settlements. Just three months before the Security Council vote, President Barack Obama increased military funding to Israel from thirty billion dollars to thirty-eight billion dollars over a ten-year period.

As the self-appointed sole broker for peace, the United States only furthers Israel’s expansionist interests. As put by Aaron David Miller, who served six US secretaries of state on Arab-Israeli negotiations, the United States has operated more like “Israel’s attorney … at the expense of peace negotiations.”

Contrary to what political centrists would like to believe, the “Deal of the Century” is a culmination of US policy. Similarly, Israel’s annexation scheme reflects a territorial reality ushered by the peace process.

The sixty percent of the West Bank territory that Israel seeks to annex is known as Area C, a jurisdictional category invented by “Oslo II,” the 1995 Interim Agreement. According to the World Bank, Area C contains “the majority of the West Bank’s natural resources” and could generate up to 3.4 billion dollars for the Palestinian economy. Since 1995, under the cover of peacemaking, Israel has steadily removed Palestinians from Area C and concentrated them into Areas A and B, expanding its settlement enterprise in their place. According to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Palestinians now have access to less than one percent of Area C lands.

Concern about Israel’s impending annexation of the West Bank is rightly placed, but we should be honest about how we got here. Formal annexation is the predictable outcome of decades of unequivocal support for Israeli policies and is simply a rubber stamp for Israel’s de facto annexation of Palestinian lands, as well as its current administration of a separate-and-unequal apartheid regime.

The calls for accountability from liberal quarters are inexcusably late but should not now be contingent on Israel’s next move. Palestinians can tell you that the worst-case scenario already exists: As non-sovereigns of their own state and non-citizens of Israel, they are subjected to perpetual Israeli domination. It is past time to censure Israel, by conditioning US funding at a minimum, and to reckon with US responsibility for this outcome by abandoning the bilateral framework in favor of an internationalist approach.

[This article was originally published by the Washington Post on 19 May  2020.]

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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