By John Pickard
As the appalling death toll in Gaza continues to mount, the latest atrocity has been an attack that killed ten members of a single extended family. Israel has now destroyed the building that housed Al Jazeera and Associated Press agencies, in a deliberate effort to cut off press reporting of the horrors in Gaza. It seems that Israel has nothing to offer the population of Gaza other than bombing it back to the Stone Age.
The one-sided war on Gaza, has now claimed over a hundred and thirty Palestinian lives, many of them children. It is a war that is in danger of spinning out of Israeli control. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, who would normally be rubbing his hands with glee at the prospect of putting himself forward, yet again, as the ‘strong-man’ saviour of the Jewish people, may yet end up isolated politically and diplomatically.
Bombardment with tanks, artillery and aircraft
Even Netanyahu looks unable to manage the explosive situation for which he and his government bear the main responsibility. Waves of protests over the ethnic cleansing in East Jerusalem and the bombardment of Gaza, now with tanks, artillery and warplanes, have erupted across the Middle East.
Faced with what they perceive as the desecration of the Haram Esh Sharif in Jerusalem and the smashing of Gaza, protests have erupted in the West Bank and in Arab districts in Israeli cities. All the pent-up anger of a West Bank population that has been denied rights for years, subject to land confiscations, daily humiliation, harassment and brutality from armed Jewish settlers and the IDF, has exploded.
These protests have been met, as is usual, with live rifle fire and deadly force. Already, a dozen West Bankers have been killed. The brave soldiers of the IDF are in their element, firing high-powered rifles at young Arabs throwing stones.
Naqba Day marks the forced expulsion of Palestinians
The irony is that today is the annual Naqba Day, the date marked by Palestinians after the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of their parents and grandparents from their homeland in 1948, when the state of Israel was forged in blood and fire. In Jordan, where half the population are Palestinians descended from those driven out, more protests over Gaza have taken place.
Mass rallies in support of Gaza have taken place in Baghdad and in many other Middle East cities, as well as in European cities. On the Israeli border with Lebanon, scuffles have taken place as Lebanese Arabs have also protested, leading to one person being killed there.
The Egyptian state, which is normally a compliant ally of Israel, and which effectively is a participant in the blockade of Gaza, has been forced by public opinion to open the Rafah crossing to allow the wounded of Gaza to be treated in Egyptian facilities and to allow medicines and supplies into Gaza.
None so blind as those who will not see
With the whole region threatening to go up in flames, special envoys from the United Nations, the European Union and the United States have flown in to negotiate ‘peace’ between the warring parties. But, as the saying goes, there is none so blind as those who will not see. All the diplomats in the world will not alter the fact that it has been US and EU compliance with Israeli policies that have led to the situation we have today.
For decades Israel has been on a single track towards its own ‘one-state solution’ of the Palestinian issue, the only problem being that it is no solution at all. The EU states and the US have supported Israel, above all militarily, making it the military super-power of the Middle East. Yet there has never been any serious challenge to the trajectory of Israel towards a neo-apartheid state, where half of its population – including the pre-1967 borders of Israel and all the occupied territories that it controls – have little or no rights. The Jewish half of the population have exclusive rights to land, and social and economic development.
Israel an exclusively and explicitly “Jewish” state
Three years ago, a new law passed the “nation-state” law in the Knesset confirmed three important elements. It stated unequivocally that the right to “national self-determination” in Israel is “unique to the Jewish people”. It established Hebrew as Israel’s official language and downgraded Arabic. And it established “Jewish settlement” as a “national value” and mandated the state to “encourage and promote its establishment and development.” That means billions in state support for land confiscation and the building of ‘legal’ Jewish settlements and a blind eye to ‘illegal’ settlements, which, in any case, are invariably made ‘legal’ at a later date.
It is no surprise that even ‘Israeli’ Arabs, who are a fifth of the population, also feel themselves to be second-class citizens in an exclusively ‘Jewish’ state. Indeed, that they are second class is now written into law. On the day the Jewish-nation law was passed one of the Arab members of the Knesset said that Israel had “passed a law of Jewish supremacy and told us that we will always be second-class citizens.”
Solidarity and support must be extended to Palestinians
While Western politicians have looked the other way for decades, Israel has followed this course towards apartheid, but the utter unsustainability of this project has been lost on them. The price of that policy is now being paid in social upheaval and communal violence, all of which was entirely predictable.
It remains to be seen how events will unfold, but socialists and the labour movement must be clear. Our solidarity and our support must be extended to the Palestinian people, in pursuit of their social and national rights. All of the peoples of the region – Jews, Christians and Muslims – are entitled to a future of peaceful development and prosperity. But that cannot happen on the basis of one group’s exclusive rights at the expense of all others. That road leads only to disaster.
On this Naqba Day, Labour party members should be expressing their solidarity with Palestine, drawing up motions and resolutions extending support for Palestinian rights and demanding the Labour leadership condemn the bombing of Gaza, the ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem and an end to Israeli apartheid.
