Israel’s bloody military assault on the Palestinian city of Jenin might satisfy the far right of Israel, and Israeli settlers in particular, but it will not prevent more explosions of Palestinian opposition at some stage in the future.
In the biggest military raid on a Palestinian city in two decades, tanks, fighter jets and attack helicopters have bombarded parts of Jenin, particularly the refugee camp, with a densely-packed population of at least 14,000 and possibly as many as 18,000. Snipers have been deployed on rooftops and military drones fill the skies.
Around a dozen Palestinians have been killed so far, although that number will almost certainly rise, and over a hundred have been injured. For the Israeli state, Palestinian families and their homes are ‘expendable’ and they have terrorised thousands into fleeing the refugee camp. Parts of the social infrastructure of Jenin, like the water supply system, are being damaged beyond repair. Israeli army bulldozers have torn up roads.
The Financial Times reports that the aid group Médecins Sans Frontières, claimed that Israeli military bulldozers had so destroyed roads around the camp, that it was “nearly impossible for ambulances to reach patients”. Palestinian paramedics, they said, “have been forced to proceed on foot, in an area with active gunfire and drone strikes”.
A government with openly anti-Arab racists in the Cabinet
This raid had been demanded for weeks by the far right of the most right-wing government in Israel’s history; it is a government with openly anti-Arab racists in the cabinet. A raid was talked about openly in the press, as the Israeli population were effectively being prepared for it.
There is a growing realisation that the resistance of Palestinian youth – some of them armed and from Jenin – is a burgeoning movement, moreover one outside the control of the Palestinian Authority. There is increasing, and justifiable, resentment about the repression of Palestinians on the West Bank, where armed Jewish settlers can conduct regular pogroms against unarmed Arab villages – torching homes and scores of vehicles – while the Israeli ‘Defence’ Force look on.
Some Palestinian youth have armed themselves with whatever is at hand and attacked Jewish settlers. In Tel Aviv yesterday, a Palestinian used a vehicle, then a knife to attack and injure pedestrians. He paid with his life. When Jewish settlers or the IDF kill Palestinians – and well over a hundred have been killed this year alone – there is never any comeback on the killers, but when Palestinians, out of blind and impotent rage happen to strike back, they are branded as ‘terrorists’ to be ‘rooted out’.
Three quarters of a million Jewish settlers on stolen land
Against the relentless daily harassment, humiliation and indignities of military occupation, the piecemeal confiscation of their land for exclusively Jewish settlers – now approaching three quarters of a million – the strangulation of their economy, the vandalism of their farms and crops, the Palestinians are supposed to meekly say nothing.
When they protest, even unarmed, they are beaten, men, women and children alike, by the brave boys of the IDF. As the Haaretz correspondent Jack Khoury, noted this week, “Israel wishes to cement a reality in which the Palestinians become accustomed to living under Israeli occupation and control, their civil affairs managed by a hobbled Palestinian Authority.”
Right wing ministers in Israel have been calling for some time for a full military incursion into Jenin, leading one Israeli newspaper correspondent to ask, “Is Israel’s Jenin Operation a Military Priority, or a Show for the Settlers?” The right wing Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich declared that this bloody military operation would “change the direction of the fight to eradicate terror”. Leaving aside the usual mantra about ‘terrorism’, Smotrich couldn’t be more wrong.
The Israeli army will wind up its Jenin operation as soon as it can, completely oblivious to the death and destruction it has caused to Palestinians, with no army losses. It will announce that it has eliminated armed militants, captured ‘terrorists’ and confiscated munitions – then all will go back to ‘normal’, in this case normality being a seething cauldron of anger and hostility, millions strong.
“Fertile ground for another generation that sees no future”
As Khoury, wrote in Haaretz (July 4), “Israel may succeed in bringing about a sort of limited calm in the West Bank, but the images from Jenin will be more fertile ground to raise another generation that sees no future”. In fact, his headline said it all: “Israelis Will Go Back to Normal, but Jenin Operation Fosters Another Generation of Hopeless Palestinians”.
The Israeli Defence Force – an army that uses snipers to kill unarmed civilians demonstrating in Gaza, which uses cannon fire to kill children playing innocently on a beach – is overwhelmingly superior, militarily, to the armed Palestinian groups. They have demonstrated time and again that they can bomb and kill Palestinians, nearly all non-combatants, including children. But what they cannot do is wipe out an entire population or its will to survive and struggle. Ironically, even some IDF leaders are beginning to realise it.
Palestinians offered no hope for the future
For decades, successive Israeli governments have presided over land confiscations in the occupied West Bank and have choked the Palestinian economy. Palestinians in the West Bank and in Gaza are offered absolutely no future and no hope. It is as inevitable as night follows day that at some point there will be an earthquake in which violence and anger will spill like hot lava into the open.
That is why it is not only the left, not only Marxists, but even ‘middle of the road’ commentators in Israel who have pointed out that there will be an eruption of anger at some point in the future. It is not a question of ‘if’ but of ‘when’.
As the Haaretz correspondent noted, “The wave of protests by soldiers in the IDF reserves is currently being fuelled, more than ever, by the events unfolding in the West Bank. The anger among reservists who are part of the protesters was intensified following the pogrom carried out by settlers in the Palestinian village of Hawara”.
As we argued in a previous article, “the state of Israel is facing the greatest peace-time crisis in its 75-year history”. It is a crisis that will see the struggle of Palestinians interacting with profound splits in Israeli society and it will test the current state of Israel to destruction.
The responsibility for this sombre perspective lies primarily with Israeli politicians who have followed policies entirely in the interests of that state’s Jewish population at the expense of the Arabs within Israel and the occupied areas. Zionism, the idea that the problems of Jewish people worldwide can be resolved by a ‘safe homeland’ in the Middle East, and on another people’s territory at that, has always been an illusion and a trap.
Labour leaders greet Israeli atrocities with a thunderous silence
But part of the responsibility for the upheavals to come must lie with British and international politicians who have turned a blind eye to all the crimes of the Israeli state. Worse, in the Labour Party today, it is tantamount to an expulsion offence even to criticise the state of Israel. Labour branches are not allowed to discuss the issue.
The current Labour leadership are dumb in the face of Israeli atrocities and war crimes. Frequent bombings of Gaza and this latest attack on Jenin – all of which create scores of civilian casualties, including children – are answered with a thundering silence by Labour leaders. Keir Starmer might as well work in the press office of the Israeli government, for all the ‘outrage’ he expresses.
Labour’s right wing are heavily influenced by the Labour Friends of Israel, and are fond of boasting that Israel is a ‘democracy’. Comparison to dictatorial military states and reactionary kingdoms in the Arab world is no comparison at all for a socialist, but they rarely point out the second-class status, economically and politically, of Arabs who live in Israel.
They never point to the complete absences of any democratic rights for Palestinians, like those in Jenin, in the occupied West Bank. The Israeli state controls politically or militarily around twelve million people, but only half of them have full citizenship rights and the other half are offered nothing and the prospect of less. If that is not a modern version of apartheid, then nothing is.
What is shameful is that there is more foreboding and doubt expressed from within the Israeli political establishment than there is from the leadership of the Labour Party.
In the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, for example, there are regular articles that underline the growing opposition in Israel to government policy. On June 30, one correspondent wrote of the coming storm in the West Bank, “Settlers’ pogroms against Palestinians, their support in the government and Netanyahu’s latest right-wing pivot have driven some officers to warn of a West Bank ‘sinkhole’ that will require ever more resources”
Israel is a highly militarised society, a ‘Spartan’ state, where all young people – except Arabs – are expected to do military service, followed by years in the reserves. But the feeling that an explosion is due has led to many in the IDF reservists to protest against government policy.
This year is already the bloodiest on the West Bank for a decade. According to the UN, Israeli forces have killed 114 Palestinians so far this year – not counting the current operation in Jenin – while sixteen Israelis have been killed. And all the signs are that the upsurge of opposition among Palestinians will not abate any time soon.
Second Intifada led to thousands of deaths
Among some sections of Israeli society there is a feeling of great foreboding. Twenty three years ago, the second intifada was ignited; it was a blind, aimless and ultimately disastrous, uprising which led to a thousand Israeli deaths and three times that number of Palestinians killed.
If such a movement is repeated, perhaps on an even greater scale, it will have a profound effect on the consciousness of at least a part of the Israeli working class, as well as on the labour movement internationally. The Palestinian people as a whole cannot be wiped off the planet, even though that might be the intentions of some of the lunatics on the far right in Jerusalem.
It may require the intervention and influence of the labour movement internationally to make a significant difference to events in Israel/Palestine. That influence, including the growing support for the BDS movement, may put its stamp on events to forestall a bloody national conflict between two peoples.
The depth of the political and national crisis in Israel cannot be over-stated. There can be no resolution of the national conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, between Jews and Arabs, on the basis of an apartheid state ruling indefinitely over an unwilling and oppressed nation. That road leads to disaster.
The ruling classes of the authoritarian Arab regimes, equally, offer no way forward. Like the Israeli state itself they prop up the corrupt and ineffectual Palestinian Authority which is utterly discredited in the eyes of most Palestinian youth.
Solidarity with Palestinian resistance is a duty for all socialists. But ultimately there can be no future for Palestinians or Israeli workers on the basis of capitalism. However difficult it may seem at the present time, it will only be by links between the better elements of the Israeli working class and Palestinian workers that there can be way forward that avoids a bloody internecine war.
Linking the fight against national oppression with a fight against capitalism and imperialism as a whole, can offer a future for the workers of the region. Any other course leads to disaster.
