Netanyahu’s governmental partner, the Jewish Strength Party, is willing to conduct Palestinicide in order to create a Jewish-only society in the Levant, writes Vijay Prashad. A two-state solution, is simply no longer factually possible.
Abdel Rahmen al-Mozayen, Palestine, “Jenin,” 2002.
By Vijay Prashad
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
Israel calls its latest military campaign Operation Break the Wave, a lyrical description of a brutal reality. This year, 2023, will be the 75th year after the Nakba, the catastrophe of 1948 when Israeli troops illegally removed Palestinians from their homes and tried to erase Palestine from the map. Since then, Palestinians have resisted against all odds, despite Israel’s formidable backing by the most powerful countries in the world, led by the United States.
Operation Break the Wave started in February 2022 with the assassination of three Palestinians in Nablus — Adham Mabrouka, Ashraf Mubaslat, and Mohammad Dakhil — and continued with terrible violence along the spine of the West Bank, spreading into brutalised Gaza.
On Jan. 26, Israeli forces killed 10 Palestinians — including an elderly woman — in Jenin and in al-Ram, north of Jerusalem, and then shot at an ambulance to prevent it from assisting the injured — a clear war crime. The Jenin massacre provoked rocket fire from Palestinian resistance forces in Gaza, to which the Israeli Air Force responded disproportionately, shooting at the densely populated al-Maghazi refugee camp in the centre of Gaza.
The cycle of violence continued with a lone Palestinian gunman killing seven Israelis in the illegal settlement of Neve Yaakov in East Jerusalem. In reaction to that, the Israeli government has put in place “collective punishment” systems — a violation of the Geneva Conventions — which allows the state to target the gunman’s family members. The Israeli government will also make it easier for Israelis to carry firearms.
The Israeli government launched Operation Break the Wave in response to habbat sha’biyya or “popular uprisings” that have begun again across Palestine and express the frustration generated by Israeli pressure campaigns and the near collapse of economic life.
Some of these uprisings took place not only in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza where they are more common, but amongst Palestinians living inside the 1948 Green Line of Israel.
In May 2021, these protestors gathered under The Dignity and Hope Manifesto and called for new agitations, a “united Intifada” which unites Palestinians in exile, inside Israel and in the Occupied Territories. These moves and the gains of Palestinians in the United Nations system indicate a new dynamism within Palestinian politics.
Most recently, on Dec. 31, 2022, the U.N. General Assembly voted 87 to 26 to ask the International Court of Justice to provide an opinion on Israel’s “prolonged occupation, settlement, and annexation of Palestinian territory.” The new phase of Israeli violence against Palestinians is a reaction to their achievements.
Rachid Koraïchi, Algeria, and Hassan Massoudy, Iraq, “A Nation in Exile,” 1981.
In the midst of all this, the Israeli people voted Benjamin Netanyahu into office to form his sixth government since 1996. Already, Netanyahu has been Israel’s prime minister for over 15 of the past 27 years, as he heads into another seven-year term.
His government is fiercely far-right, although from the standpoint of the Palestinians there is steady continuity in Zionist state policy, whether the government is led by the far-right or by less right-wing sections. On Dec. 28, 2022, Netanyahu defined his government’s mission with clarity:
“The Jewish people have an exclusive and unquestionable right to all areas of the Land of Israel. The government will promote and develop settlement in all parts of the Land of Israel — in the Galilee, the Negev, the Golan, Judea, and Samaria.”
Netanyahu’s maximalist standard — that the Jewish people, not just the Zionist state, have the right to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea — has not appeared precipitously. It is rooted in Israel’s Basic Law (2018), which says, “The land of Israel is the historical homeland of the Jewish people, in which the State of Israel was established.”
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This legal manoeuvre established Israel as the land of Jewish people, not a multinational or multi-ethnic territory. Furthermore, every administrative definition of the “State of Israel” asserts its control over the entire territory. For example, Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics has, since at least 1967, inaccurately counted any Israeli living to the west of the Jordan River, even in the West Bank, as Israeli, and official Israeli maps show none of the internal divisions produced by the 1993 Oslo Accords.
Mustafa al-Hallaj, Palestine, “The Battle of Al-Karameh,” 1969.
Israeli state policy, rooted in a settler-colonial mentality, leaves no room for a Palestinian state. Gaza is throttled, the Bedouins in an-Naqab are being displaced, Palestinians in East Jerusalem are being evicted and illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank are growing like a plague of locusts.
Netanyahu’s governmental partner Otzma Yehudit or the “Jewish Strength Party” is willing to conduct Palestinicide in order to create a Jewish-only society in the Levant. The promise of Oslo, a two-state solution, is simply no longer factually possible as the Palestinian state is eroded and contained.
The idealistic possibility of a binational state — made up of Israel and Palestine with Palestinians given full citizenship rights — is foreclosed by the Zionist insistence that Israel be a Jewish state, an ethnocentric and anti-democratic option that already treats Palestinians as second-class residents in an apartheid society. Instead, Zionism is in favour of a “three-state solution,” namely expelling Palestinians to Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon.
In 2016, the United States and Israel signed their third 10-year Memorandum of Understanding on military aid, which runs from 2019 to 2028, and under which the U.S. promises to provide Israel with $38 billion for military equipment. This aid is unconditional: nothing in the agreement prevents Israel from using the equipment to violate international law, kill U.S. citizens — as it killed Shireen Abu Akleh, a reporter — or destroy humanitarian projects funded by the U.S. government.
Rather than even mildly rebuke Israel for its ethnocidal policies, U.S. President Joe Biden welcomed Netanyahu, his “friend for decades,” to assist the U.S. in confronting illusionary “threats from Iran.”
Furthermore, just after Netanyahu’s government deepened Operation Break the Wave, the U.S. military arrived in Israel in force to conduct a joint military exercise called Juniper Oak, the “largest and most significant exercise we have engaged in,” according to Pentagon Press Secretary Pat Ryder, an Air Force brigadier general. Backed to the hilt by the U.S. and nonchalant about condemnation from international bodies, the Israeli state continues its fatal project to erase Palestine.
Malak Mattar, Palestine, “You and I,” 2021.
Maya Abu al-Hayyat, a Palestinian poet living in Jerusalem, wrote a beautiful poem called “Daydream,” which settles into a rhythm of Palestinian life and geography defined by little towns in the West Bank. There are children playing, women dancing, life where life is denied by an occupation that has lasted for generations and generations, where the screams of the occupied mimic the loud alarm of the Palestine Sunbird, the national bird.
I’ll write about a joy that invades Jenin from six directions,
about children running while holding balloons in Am’ari Camp,
about a fullness that quiets breastfeeding babies all night in Askar,
about a little sea we can stroll up and down in Tulkarem,
about eyes that stare in people’s faces in Balata,
about a woman dancing
for people in line at the checkpoint in Qalandia,
about stitches in the sides of laughing men in Azzoun,
about you and me
stuffing our pockets with seashells and madness
and building a city.
Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and, with Noam Chomsky, The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of US Power.
This article is from Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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Shocking how many echoes of militant Zionism were bloviated out of Trump’s mouth in the US zeitgeist to better align US and Israeli practices, perhaps: “go after their family” , denigratory racism, “ramming cars into crowds”, executive privilege etc etc.
The neoliberals zionists pimp war and the US fights them. It has always been a mystery to me why able bodied men of the IDF never fight alongside their American counterparts. Could it be that the Israeli men are too busing killing young Palestinian boys who throw rocks and fruit at their tanks while they are dining or resting. That seems fair. I did not think.of that. It would never be because they are too scared.
3, 2, 1 or none?
‘If you ask my personal preference, I would say that I don’t believe in two states; I don’t believe in one state; I happen not to believe in any states’ (Norman Finkelstein, 2014).
I’d prefer a Zero State Solution.
First, in the meaning of John Lennon, and
“Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people living life in peace, you
You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope some day you’ll join us
And the world will be as one”
— “Imagine”, John Lennon
But, if the world has to have these things called ‘states’, then my answer on the computer form for the correct number of Zionist states would be Zero. I did not begin thinking that way, but the Zionist state by its actions has led me to believe that this would be best for all concerned. This is a rogue nuclear power that has illegally bombed neighboring countries twice in the last week as the latest of a long string of violent attacks. They lock up children, and have killed over 60 last year. They kill scientists, which I take personally. I’d prefer if they learned to live in peace. I’d prefer if we got rid of nations and nationalism all together. But, all in all, the world would be a better place with Zero Zionist States.
Ironic that this was exactly the position of the Nazis with respect to the Jewish people living in Europe prior to the Nazis follow-up-step when World War II made expulsion impractical, the Final Solution. It’s as though the evil spirit that possessed the Nazis (not the Germans) has moved on to the Zionists (not the Jews).
Well, Maggie H.,
Jeremy Corbyn would have done the right thing, being the first politician to speak up for Palestinians. His was viciously attacked for that and called (that old standby) antisemitic, which he wasn’t. So now the Labour party is shot to hell. You think that assss Keir Starmer is going to do anything except lick the boots of the Israeli racists?
More than over 600,000 Americans dead from COVID. American police execute over 1000 Americans a year, that they officially report to us. Prisons kill gawd knows how many. Workplace ‘accidents’ (after cuts to safety) kill many workers. We know exactly how much, or how little, Joe Biden cares about American lives. The Bidens only care about making the balance in the Biden Family Hedge Fund keep going up, as long as other people do the dying.
Never forget Jericho!
Canaan for the Canaanites!
Israel makes me sad. I read that Herzl didn’t care where Israel would be, as it was the people and not the land that made the difference. BUT, I guess not. I recently read about the USS Liberty and how Israel bombed that US ship, but no one could speak of the deaths of the Americans. Why America?
Israel attacked ships in international waters—and no one seemed to care. Rachel Corrie was run over and murdered by an Israeli ln a construction piece aiming to tear down a Palestinian house. He ran over her, and sat there, and then rolled slowly back. Though there was a trial, Israel saw nothing wrong here of an Israeli murdering an American right before our eyes. .
Shireen was an Palestinian America who was an excellent reporter. She was assassinated when standing with other reporters—murdered by Israel.
So Joe Biden and Blinken—– why don’t you, and Israel too—why don’t you care about American lives? No matter what horrors you do, America keeps sending you money. WHY?
Why? According to Jewish Israeli scholar Israel Shahak, Israel is governed by Talmud teachings that (1) Jews are chosen by God to rule the world, and (2) non-Jews are disposable sub-humans. His excellent book is on-line here.
Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years
hXXps://ifamericansknew.org/cur_sit/shahak.html
this is precisely what makes religion so toxic: at some point religions go from worshipping God, to worshipping the tribe that is gathered. It happens ever so subtly but it happens. This type of self / group worship creeping in, is also evident in Sikhism (very prominently as of late), Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, protestantism too.
Both your (1) and (2) are age-old lies promulgated by european antisemites. Israel Shahak did not endorse these lies, but you are doing so. I guess you didn’t bother to read the source you cited!
You speak of the USS Liberty. Don’t forget the 260+ marines who died in the attack in Lebanon during the Reagan Administration. The Israelis didn’t do this but they failed, on purpose, to notify the authorities before the attack. A high ranking member of the Mossad wrote a book containing this information.
A jewish state has always been a problem and will continue to be so until those (other than jews) realize that a land set aside by an ethnic group (religion) is anathema to the modern way of life. What next– a land set aside for Presbyterians that non presbyterians are second class citizens, etc, etc, etc?
The U.S. doesn’t give a hoot about Palestinians or Palestine. Why don’t we all just recognize this fact. Remember the USS Liberty!
When is the American Funded, United Nations going to Sanction the Fascist State of Israel for Ethnic Cleansing, Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity ? The Eastern Mediterranean Holocaust in Gaza and the Illegally Occupied West Bank.
The problem here is who controls who. See the article on banking at
War Profiteer Story
hXXps://war##profiteer##story.blogspot.com
[To use link, please delete hash symbols and replace XX with TT.]
Thank you, Vijay. Why isn’t this horror show known to most Americans?
How can the world look on, at this huge injustice, that Palestinians are subject to! Sadly, the Labour Leader
Keir Starmer is proIsrael and has his second home in Israel…weirdly! Where are the Labour MPs while Israel
is plotting its theft of Palestine?