by Gustavo Giménez
On July 1, Prime Minister Netanyahu and the Israeli government were scheduled to start with an ambitious plan to annex the territories of the occupied West Bank. This would lead, as established by the pacts made with Trump in January 2020 in the so-called “Deal of the Century”, to the incorporation of 30% of this region where three million Palestinians live, all the areas where 140 illegal settlements of Zionist Jews are located and the fertile and strategic Jordan Valley, which occupies the entire strip along the border with Jordan.
Due to different factors, such as the last minute pressure from the ally English Prime Minister Boris Johnson, the delays in agreeing the steps to follow with the US government, different positions of European imperialism and differences with some Arab governments, such as the protest of the King of Jordan due to the occupation of the lands on the border, in the midst of a strong outbreak of the Covid-19 infection in the country, Netanyahu decided to postpone the application of the annexationist plan.
These differences are only tactical disagreements of governments and bourgeoisies who have interests in the region and who fear that their businesses will be complicated, so the postponement can in no way create expectations in a long delay. On the contrary we must be prepared for the announced annexations to be carried out at any moment. This is why it is necessary to immediately launch a great campaign of solidarity with the Palestinian struggle, repudiating this plan of annexations by the Zionist gendarme. International solidarity is an essential tool to strengthen the Palestinian struggle and defeat the genocidal advance.
The final solution
The agreements drawn up with Trump abandon the Oslo pacts and two state policy and constitute a kind of “final solution” imposed by methods of state terrorism of the type used by the Nazi regime against the Jewish people.
First came the massacre of thousands of Palestinians to displace them from their lands and the forced exile of five million who are refugees in neighboring countries, as a result of the founding of the State of Israel in 1948. After years of persecution, the military occupation of the West Bank , in which thousands of Zionist settlers were illegally settled in violation of international treaties, to which one must add the transformation of the Gaza Strip into an open-air concentration camp.
Finally, the constitutional amendment that only recognizes as citizens those who profess the Jewish religion. The declaration, with Trump’s support, of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and the decision to extend Israeli sovereignty over territories inhabited mainly by Palestinians in the West Bank. These complete a bloody escalation that aims to subsume the Palestinian population to small ghettos without sovereignty, security, or their own access to the most basic rights.
This dispossession plan has already been applied in Galilee
According to Marwan Bishara, the main political analyst of Al Jazeera (1), after the failure of the plan for the partition of Palestine that the UN dictated in 1947 that contemplated that much of Galilee was to be part of a future Palestinian state, war broke out, and the Israeli military occupation of the subsequent two decades laid out a plan similar to that now being implemented in the West Bank. On that occasion, the best fertile lands were occupied with Jewish settlements, displacing the Palestinian population and preventing them from returning, and then creating a settlement system that would break the Palestinian contiguity, thus blocking their national unity and preventing any secessionist uprising.
Following the Six Day War in 1967, Bishara notes that “Israel carried out similar confiscations of Palestinian land to build Jewish settlements in the West Bank, including in and around East Jerusalem. In both regions, Israel established three main Jewish centers in the south, center, and north to break the Palestinian contiguity of the newly occupied territories: Nazareth Illit, Karmiel, and Maalot in Galilee, Gush Etzion, Ma’aleh Adumim, and Ariel on the Bank of the West.” Israel then connected these rich and expansive settlements with ring roads and left the original Palestinian population marginalized in poor populations on the periphery, thus establishing an apartheid system.
The plan that seeks to start with the annexation of the large Jewish settlements in the Jordan River Valley would later be extended to the smaller settlements scattered throughout the West Bank, guaranteeing the military presence, generating small segregated Palestinian state units that as “compensation” would be assisted by the rich Arab bourgeoisies of the region.
The complicit role of the leaderships and the mobilization of the people
Thus the deceitful “two state” policy enshrined in the Oslo agreements between the Zionist leadership and that of the Palestinian National Authority (ANP), with the blessing of the UN , all the world powers and the Stalinist currents, is abandoned. That agreement devised with the mediation of US imperialism had the objective of stopping the Palestinian struggle materialized in the heroic intifadas. It was a trap to demobilize behind small concessions and buy time to continue consolidating the genocidal state, continue to expel the Palestinian people, subjecting those who remain under its rule to an apartheid regime.
Now, this new and brutal advance of Zionism is possible not only because of the determined support of the ultra-reactionary President Trump, but because of the complicity of those who, from the UN, the spokesmen of the EU, passing through the regimes inherited from Stalinism and the Arab bourgeoisie say they repudiate this abuse, but do not take any action to stop it. In the same way they have not carried out any effective sanction against a terrorist state that has violated all international conventions on human rights and UN resolutions favorable to the rights of the Palestinian people. They are more afraid of the mobilization of the Palestinian and Arab people than of the Israeli government.
The ANP that governs the occupied West Bank has signaled that these annexations invalidate the Oslo accords and will end all collaboration with the Israeli state. These declarations on the part of the traditional leadership that has stopped the Palestinian mobilizations, are not going to stop the advances of the genocidal monster. Only the mobilization of the Palestinian people together with the Arab peoples of the region and with the solidarity of the rest of the peoples of the world can stop the imperialist beast.
In this regard, it should be noted that, despite the limitations imposed by the Covid pandemic, thousands of Israelis mobilized in Tel Aviv in early June against the annexations and there were many other protests in Ramalah and the occupied territories. And in the face of the imminent annexation, Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, stated that if the annexations took place it would be a declaration of war. 10,000 Palestinians from the Gaza Strip took to the streets and there were different protests in the West Bank in the last hours. Actions to which we must also add the resurgence in the regional context of mobilizations that, with the Lebanese people at the forefront, resume those carried out in the pre-pandemic period by the people of the Middle East against imperialist aggressions and the austerity plans of the bourgeoisie and governments of the countries of the region, in which the defense of the Palestinian cause was expressed with great force.
These struggles, which add to a long tradition of struggle by the Palestinian people and the Arab people of the region, mark a path that disqualifies those skeptics who think that the State of Israel cannot be defeated and thereby always justify unfavorable agreements and negotiations for the Palestinians. On the contrary, as a result of the economic crisis and its aggravation due to the pandemic, which has brought unemployment from 4% to 25% in mid-April, the Zionist gendarme suffers a significant social deterioration, which weakens it and creates internal contradictions.
A call for international mobilization in support of the Palestinian people
The ISL calls on the broadest unity to mobilize against this new attack on the Palestinian people by the genocidal state of Israel. At the same time that we call for the broadest unity of action to stop the gendarme, we are convinced that there will be no solution for the Palestinian people without the dismantling of that genocidal imperial enclave that is the state of Israel. A new democratic, secular and non-racist state is needed, in which Palestinians can coexist in peace with the peoples who want to inhabit those territories.
As revolutionary socialists we are convinced that this Palestinian state can only be achieved by fighting against capitalist structures, since the current Arab leaderships have renounced this struggle. The enormous mobilizations against racism and xenophobia that the “black lives matter” movement has unleashed in the United States and other nations have demonstrated how capitalism needs racism, xenophobia and apartheid, such as the one suffered by Palestinians today, as a fundamental tool for capital accumulation.
Therefore, the task of eradicating apartheid and reclaiming the democratic lands and rights that the Palestinians demand is closely linked to the fight against super-exploitation and capitalist oppression in the region. Today, more than ever, we must fight alongside the Palestinians for a Palestine without racist oppression, exploitation and misery, a Socialist Palestine.
- Article titled “Hubris: The End of Israel’s Game in Palestine” published in Al Jazeera on 06/30/2020