Chatham House and the Call for the Decolonisation of Israel and Palestine

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Oct 19, 2023 Palestine
Smoke rises after an Israeli air strike that has been going on for five days in Gaza [Ali Jadallah/Anadolu Agency] Smoke rises after an Israeli air strike that has been going on for five days in Gaza [Ali Jadallah/Anadolu Agency]

Chatham House and the Call for the Decolonisation of Israel and Palestine

By : Mandy Turner

[This short opinion piece was originally commissioned by Chatham House, also known as the Royal Institute of International Affairs. Chatham House is the UK’s leading international affairs think-tank and advertises itself as an “independent voice.” It is the second most influential international affairs think-tank in the world after the Brookings Institution.   

I was asked, as an expert on the topic, to explain why the “peace” between Israel and the Palestinians had been shattered. I made the argument that the “peace” which had been shattered was one-sided and explained factually what it meant for Palestinians to live under the conditions created by Israel’s settler colonialism and apartheid. 

I was unhappy with the edits that Chatham House’s editorial team were insisting upon, so I withdrew my article. I will spare the reader from recounting the entire narrative of what happened, but my argument was altered in ways that I was not willing to accept. I have excised all contributions, however minimal, by a co-author who had to withdraw their co-authorship.]
 

The one-sided peace has been punctured in the Middle East. To ensure justice and stability for all, Israel’s apartheid system over Palestinians should be dismantled

Israel has announced it is in a state of war after dozens of Palestinian fighters from Hamas breached the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel on 7 October, killing over a thousand Israelis and abducting dozens of hostages. But a declaration of war assumes there was a peace to shatter. 

The Israeli population, currently in shock and mourning the biggest loss of life it has experienced since the 1973 Yom Kippur War, has been fed the illusion that its government can control and displace Palestinians forever with relative stability and without fear or response. This is the peace that has been shattered.

But for Palestinians, there has been no peace: they have experienced the longest military occupation in modern history administered through extreme levels of violence. 

The Gaza Strip is home to 2.3 million Palestinians, three-quarters of which are refugees from what is now Israel, crammed into 140 square miles. In September 2007, Israel defined the Gaza Strip as “hostile territory”and imposed a land and sea blockade. The United Nation has called this an act of collective punishment, which is a serious breach of international humanitarian law and constitutes a war crime. Israel controls imports and exports into Gaza through “crossings” in the perimeter fence. Cut off from the outside world, the Gaza Strip has some of the worst economic indicators globally: over half of its population falls below the poverty line, nearly 80 percent depend on food aid to survive, and nearly 80 percent of its youth are unemployed. The poor quality of water, limits on medical supplies, and restrictions on permits to access medical treatment outside Gaza further compounds the dire living conditions.  

Palestinians living in Gaza are also subjected to frequent extreme levels of Israeli military violence which has destroyed billions of dollars-worth of infrastructure, killed thousands, and displaced hundreds of thousands. Attempts to “build back” Gaza have become an all-too frequent necessity. Israel’s current bombardment is the most extreme that Gaza has ever experienced. 

Meanwhile, in the West Bank, over three million Palestinians live inside disjointed enclaves controlled by over 645 movement obstacles, including checkpoints, roadblocks, barriers, and trenches, while experiencing daily Israeli military incursions, land confiscations, and ever-increasing levels of Israeli settler violence. 

Since 1967, Israel has jailed approximately a million Palestinians and killed countless numbers. It seems unimaginable that this has been going on for over half a century. 

Ignoring all these forms of Israel’s violence against Palestinians, which constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity, has created a false sense of stability in the region. 

Some narratives define the Israel-Palestine “conflict” as one predominantly over religion – and, of course, this has come to play more of a role, particularly over control of the holy sites in East Jerusalem. However, the ongoing “conflict” is fundamentally over land and resources; Israel controls access to both and has gained ownership over more and more by confiscating land and displacing thousands of Palestinians. This is all in pursuit of a “Greater Israel” over the whole area from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Why else would Israel transfer over 700,000 of its citizens into the West Bank in contravention of international law? 

In a startling recent display of this goal, at the UN General Assembly in September 2023, Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, held up a map which showed an Israeli state that included the West Bank and Gaza inside its borders. No Western state has criticized this action. 

The Oslo Accords, the peace deal between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, now 30 years old, did not change the situation for Palestinians, it made it worse. This is because it provided a veneer of international legitimacy and respectability for Israel and facilitated a normalization of relationships with many countries in the Arab world, while Palestinians were ignored. 

The promise of a two-state solution and Palestinian statehood has long been rendered hollow. The Palestinian Authority/State of Palestine is not a sovereign state, and does not have control over its own borders, air space, or natural resources. The West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip are occupied territory, as confirmed by the International Court of Justice and the UN Security Council.  

Thousands of words have already been expended on analysing how Israel experienced an attack of such unprecedented proportions from tiny, besieged Gaza. Yet analyses that focus solely on Hamas as an organisation, labelling it and its actions as “terrorism”, and pledging “unwavering support” to Israel will only lead to continued instability and bloodshed.  

Such analyses also ignore the fact that Palestinians are living in a situation of settler colonial apartheid that began long before 1967. This understanding has been endorsed by Francesca Albanese, the current UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, and three past mandate holders, John Dugard, Richard Falk and Michael Lynk. It is also endorsed by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, B’Tselem, and Al-Haq. 

The failure by the international community, in particular the UN Security Council, to hold Israel accountable and support the Palestinians into independent statehood stands in sharp contrast to the resolution of other recent struggles for national self-determination, in particular East Timor, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, and South Sudan. 

In the case of East Timor, after a referendum on independence from Indonesia in August 1999, a UN peacekeeping mission and UN interim administration were established to assist East Timor into independent statehood. 

In the case of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo, the UN and NATO ensured their survival and route to independent statehood after the collapse of the former Yugoslavia and the Balkan’s descent into civil war in the 1990s.  

In the case of the Republic of South Sudan, a United Nations mission protected the results of a referendum for independence from potential attack from the State of Sudan in 2011. 

And in the recent case of Ukraine, Western states have provided large amounts of military and diplomatic support for Ukraine to defend its sovereignty against Russia’s invasion in 2022. 

These examples prove that international actors can support a people’s right to self-determination and defend them from violence by an occupying power. They have failed to do this in the case of the Palestinian people. It is not surprising that accusations of Western double standards and hypocrisy are increasing every day. 

Palestinians have tried every strategy in the book to gain their freedom – going to the UN, non-violent resistance, plane-hijacking, guerrilla warfare, suicide attacks, even building institutions in the hope they can somehow “prove” they deserve the right to self-determination. 

With these recent tragic events, the one-sided peace has been punctured in the Middle East. The only viable solution that remains is a process of decolonization and dismantling of Israel’s apartheid system. Decolonization is not a metaphor, it is a process for the realisation of social justice and peace for all.  

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Feb 16, 2011 Lebanon
Jadaliyya Reports By :
Jadaliyya Reports

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