Opinion: Israel’s prime minister is not seeking a reset. He just wants more cover for apartheid and colonization.

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett during a meeting with Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Washington on Wednesday via AFP from Olivier Douliery/Pool Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett during a meeting with Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Washington on Wednesday via AFP from Olivier Douliery/Pool

Opinion: Israel’s prime minister is not seeking a reset. He just wants more cover for apartheid and colonization.

By : Noura Erakat

This week, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett made the rounds in Washington, meeting with officials from the Biden administration (a meeting at the White House was postponed on Thursday because of the attacks at Kabul airport). Both sides hope to reset the U.S.-Israeli relationship after four years of former president Trump boldly advancing expansionist Israeli interests without the liberal veneer of past U.S. administrations. The synergy between Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu exposed the farcical nature of the peace process and reinforced a growing partisan divide between Democrats and Republicans regarding Israel. 

However, despite their best efforts to obfuscate reality — Israel’s settler-colonization of Palestinian lands and the apartheid regime imposed to consolidate those territorial takings and reinforce Jewish supremacy — no amount of public relations or spin can change what’s happening on the ground, or the trends that are pushing Americans away from Israel and toward supporting Palestinian freedom. 

On policy, nothing has changed. In his first eight months in office, Biden has rubber-stamped most of Trump’s most problematic moves, including moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, opposing the International Criminal Court investigation into Israeli actions, and adopting a highly problematic definition of antisemitism that conflates criticism of Israel with anti-Jewish bigotry. Biden categorically opposes any conditioning of military aid to Israel on its human rights record and has ordered his officials to fight the grassroots boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights, which is inspired by the Civil Rights and South African anti-apartheid movements. During Israel’s bombardment of Gaza in May, which killed more than 250 Palestinians, including 12 families erased from the population registry, Biden resisted repeated calls from within his own party to publicly urge Israel to stop the violence.

For his part, Bennett is eager to introduce himself to Israel’s primary patron and the world. He wants to distinguish himself from Netanyahu, with whom he worked under and alongside for many years, in an effort to appease U.S. liberal Zionists desperate for a fig leaf to sustain their denial of Israeli apartheid.

If anything, however, Bennett is even more extreme than Netanyahu. Bennett used to head the Yesha Council, the main organization that represents settlers, and unequivocally opposes Palestinian statehood. According to the agreement cementing his coalition, the new government will “significantly advance construction in Jerusalem,” including Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem, and reports say he promised settler leaders there will be no settlement freeze in the rest of the West Bank either.

Perhaps most alarmingly, Bennett has begun to change the status quo in the revered Noble Sanctuary mosque complex, known as the Temple Mount to Jews, to allow Jews to pray there. Since Israel’s occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967, it has banned Jews from praying in the Noble Sanctuary because most Jewish religious authorities opposed it for theological reasons and to avoid provoking tensions with Muslims. That is now changing under Bennett, with potentially disastrous consequences for the region and beyond.

As part of his plan to present a new image, Bennett is seeking to “shrink the conflict” by making conditions more tolerable for Palestinians while maintaining Israeli domination, much like Trump’s vision for “economic peace.” This approach will also feature exalting the Abraham Accords — Israel’s recognition pacts with U.S.-backed authoritarian regimes — as models of peace. Bennett will likely support increasing U.S. aid for the Palestinian Authority, which is part of Israel’s security apparatus; just recently it arrested dozens of Palestinian human rights defenders in an effort to quash dissent.

Biden is seemingly eager to embrace Bennett and a modified version of Trump’s containment policies. Biden represents the old guard of the Democratic Party, out of touch with Democratic voters and the U.S. public in general. Polls consistently show that Americans across the political spectrum want the U.S. to be fairer and more evenhanded when it comes to Israel and the Palestinians.

This shift in U.S. public opinion was vividly illustrated this past May, when Americans took to social media and the streets in unprecedented numbers demanding an end to Israel’s assault on Gaza and a change in U.S. policy in the region. In another sign of the changing times, the popular ice cream brand Ben & Jerry’s announced it will stop selling ice cream in Israeli settlements, a decision it stood by even as the highest echelons of Israel’s government vilely accused the company of antiSemitism. 

In any case, when Biden and Bennett do meet at the White House, Palestinians will at best just figure as shadows. This is especially insulting in light of the ongoing Unity Intifada protest movement and a testament to the fact that necessary change will not come from the top down. In the near future, Israel will likely be its own worst enemy as it insists that its racial supremacist regime is a righteous form of national liberation, and the United States will likely be the last domino to fall as was the case in the struggle against apartheid South Africa. 

[This article was originally published by The Washington Post on 27 August 2021.]

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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