FRFI 143 June/July 1998
‘I don’t understand your optimism. Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural; we have taken their country.’
– Ben-Gurion, first Israeli Prime Minister
EDDIE ABRAHAMS examines the violent genesis of the Israeli state.
The 50-year history of Israel is the history of its development by means of the violent dispossession and attempted destruction of the Palestinian people. In this it shares much in common with the history of the apartheid regime in South Africa. Hendrik Verwoerd, that most notorious of South Africa’s prime ministers, stated in 1961 that ‘The Jews took Israel from the Arabs after the Arabs had lived there for a thousand years … Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state.’ The only significant difference is that Israel continues to enjoy the full military, economic and political support of today’s great powers, in return for its role in securing the Middle East and its oil wealth for imperialism. Indeed, throughout its 50-year history Israel has received billions of dollars in US aid, and since 1967 an average of $3bn annually.
The post-modernist contempt for historical knowledge serves only to disguise the truth that Israel and democracy, Israel and the rights of the Palestinian people, cannot co-exist. Israeli history demonstrates that the Middle East ‘peace process’ has nothing whatsoever to do with granting democratic rights to the Palestinian people. It is about how to ensure that an independent Palestinian state is rendered impossible, whilst at the same time legitimising the Zionist conquest and settlement of a vast proportion of Palestine. The Palestinian people, however, have never bent the knee to Zionist colonisation and for 50 years have fought and continue to fight against the racist settler state that is Israel.
Indeed, on 14 May, the very eve of the Zionists’ 50th anniversary celebrations, Palestinians took to the streets to protest against the denial of statehood to the Palestinian people. The Israeli response was typical. Their soldiers killed six Palestinians, including two eight-year-old children, and injured over 180. Days before, when Hillary Clinton, wife of the US President, expressed support for a Palestinian state, official Israeli protest and Zionist media uproar was so powerful it forced the White House to issue an official statement to the effect that Hillary Clinton was expressing only her personal view, not US policy. Rejecting Palestinian demands for statehood, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu commented that one of the ‘greatest dangers to the peace of the world as we enter the 21st century is the proliferation of the idea of unbridled self-determination.’
Only a gullible ignoramus could believe that Israeli opposition to Palestinian self-determination is motivated by the ideal of world peace. The reality is that the Palestinian people are denied self-determination, so that Israel’s colonialist, ethnic cleansing ‘self-determination’ can continue in an unbridled manner, as it has done for the past 50 years.
When Zionists speak the truth
The founders of Israel shared the reactionary and racist mentality of the major imperialist powers of the time. So venomous and ingrained was their racism, so dismissive and contemptuous were they of the humanity of Palestinian people, so indifferent to Palestinian and Arab opinion, that they did not bother to disguise the predatory character of their enterprise. Yeshaayahu Ben-Porat, a leading Zionist ideologist, declared:
‘There is no Zionist settlement, and there is no Jewish state, without displacing Arabs and without confiscating lands and fencing them off.’
As to how much Palestinian land was to be ‘fenced off’, Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel was equally frank and forthright:
‘Take the American Declaration of Independence for instance. It contains no mention of the territorial limits. We are not obliged to state the limits of our state.’
Some 20 years later, after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war when Israel occupied the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Sinai, Abba Ebban, at the time the Israeli Foreign Minister, declared that: ‘Increased Jewish immigration will add to the strength of our gains in the war; it is not enough to occupy the territories, we must settle them too.’
Nothing in this regard has changed. Today, during the so-called peace-process Netanyahu insists: ‘They [Palestinians] cannot expect to get 90% or 100% of the West Bank. They have no right to expect it and no reason to expect it.’ Instead he offers the Palestinians less than 10% of the area, without the right to form an independent state.
Urging the imperial powers to back the Zionist colonisation of Palestine, Theodore Herzl, the first theoretician of Zionism, said: ‘For Europe we shall create there in Palestine an outpost against Asia, we shall be the vanguard of the civilised world against barbarism.’ He added: ‘And so I believe in England that the idea of Zionism, which is a colonial idea, should easily be understood.’ This colonial idea is at the heart of Zionism. And it is a thread that links Israel’s past to its present.
The colonisation of Palestine
In 1882 there were 24,000 Jews in Palestine. The Arab population numbered 450,000. In 1917 there were 60,000 Jews compared to 700,000 Arabs. Arabs owned 91% of the land of Palestine. Jews owned 4%. Others owned the rest. In the following decades this picture was dramatically reversed. Jews constituted 11% of the population of Palestine in 1922. By 1931 they were 17%. In 1936 the figure rises to 28% and in 1943 it reaches 31% of the population. In 1945, three years before the foundation of Israel Zionists still owned only 14% of the land compared to the 80% owned by the Palestinians. But in 1948 750,000 of the 1.3m Palestinians, i.e. over half the population was forced to flee – to Jordan, Lebanon and the rest of the Arab world. In that same year the State of Israel was founded on 72% of the historic land of Palestine. Even as the UN partitioned Palestine between Arab and Zionist, the Zionists seized land allocated to the Palestinians. By 1953 the figure was 73%. And after the Six Day war, with the new conquest of the West Bank, Zionists controlled 84% to the Palestinians’ 14%.
Within the borders of Israel itself, of the 370 Zionist settlements built between 1948 and 1953, 350 were built on land confiscated from the Palestinians and used to accommodate the 684,000 settlers who arrived in the same period. Meanwhile, since 1948, 385 Palestinian villages have been destroyed.
This transformation of Palestine into ‘Israel’ was achieved by means of brute force, by means of war, population expulsion, repression and terror. Palestinian resistance to Zionist colonisation was suppressed and defeated only by the British army and police forces who collaborated with and built up the Zionist military and economic machine during the Palestinian general strike and uprising from 1936-39.
The methods of conquest
Zionist settlement had begun with the purchase of land from reactionary Arab feudal lords and the expulsion of the Palestinian peasants who lived on that land. In their stead Jewish immigrants were put to work on the land. A rigid apartheid regime was at once installed. Arabs were banned from working on land purchased by the Zionists. There was to be no place in the Israeli state for any Palestinian. Zionist leader Joseph Weitz remarked:
‘Among ourselves it must be clear that there is no place in the country for both peoples together. With the Arabs we shall not achieve our aim of being an independent people in this country. Transfer the Arabs from here to the neighbouring countries, transfer all of them, not one village or tribe should remain.’
Where trickery or collaboration with the Arab ruling classes didn’t work, fascist violence did. The Irgun and Stern Gangs specialised in terrorising Palestinians into fleeing the land. A systematic strategy of terror was devised in 1948 to drive the 750,000 Palestinians from their homes. Known as Plan Dalet, it was organised genocide. On 9 April 1948, terrorist killers from Irgun led by Menachem Begin (a future Prime Minister) attacked the village of Deir Yassin and massacred 250 defenceless men, women and children. A witness, Red Cross Doctor de Reynier said: ‘All I could think of was the SS troops I had seen in Athens.’ Begin sent his troops a message: ‘Accept congratulations on this splendid act of conquest.’
Deir Yassin was no isolated act. In the village of Safsaf, 70 men were blindfolded and shot dead. In Elabun, Zionist commanders lined the inhabitants up in the village square, shouting ‘You want to make war, here you have it!’ and gunned down 13 people. In Safed, while there were no massacres, captured prisoners were tortured to death. A Zionist witness recalls how she saw an intelligence officer ‘beat these [ten] wounded men with a hoe until they bled to death.’
It was methods such as these that led to 750,000 Palestinians fleeing their homeland leaving behind wealth and property which were then stolen by Zionist settlers. ‘Population transfer expert’ Schechtman wrote: ‘It is difficult to overestimate the tremendous role this list of abandoned property has played in the settlement of hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants who have reached Israel since 1948.’
The ‘peace process’ and the West Bank
These same processes have been at work ever since. In the 30 years since the 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, some 300,000 Zionists settlers have seized control of 70% of the land. According to Nekuda, a Zionist settler publication, by 1997 the number of settlers had increased by about 50% since the signing of the ‘peace accords’. These fully-armed settlers occupy 130 settlements dotted around the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Strategically placed, with state-funded programmes for massive expansion, together with Israeli army roadblocks, they ensure that the major Palestinian population centres are reduced to isolated clusters, dependent entirely on Israeli authority. A system of 58 roadblocks prevents Palestinians from travelling from the south to the north of the West Bank.
Fifty years of unbridled Israeli self-determination have brought the Palestinian people to the edge of destruction. The ‘peace process’ has further weakened the Palestinian economy. Today there is no free passage between the supposedly autonomous Gaza and the autonomous regions of the West Bank. All commercial traffic between these areas is in Israeli hands. In the most recent stages of the ‘peace process’ negotiations Israel has refused to allow Palestinians an airport in the Gaza lest this enable them to create independent links with the outside world, ones which would enable them to break the vice-like Israeli grip on their economy.
Israel has also used the tactic of repeated closures of all West Bank and Gaza borders to severely damage Palestinian trade. It is, for example, frequently much cheaper for West Bank traders to import tomatoes from Spain than from Gaza. Palestinian produce is regularly left to rot at Israeli roadblocks and prohibitions are imposed on importing raw materials into areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority. On land requiring intensive water irrigation, Palestinians have virtually no rights to dig new wells, even as water from Palestinian areas is siphoned off to irrigate land confiscated and cultivated by the colonial population. Today the settlers who account for only 13% of the population consume 80% of the West Bank’s water.
Zionism, yesterday and today
Whilst the Palestinian people have remained uncompromising, the tiny Palestinian ruling elite along with the regional Arab ruling classes have paid no heed to Ben-Gurion’s advice never to make terms with Israel. Yassar Arafat and the Palestinian Authority have sold the Palestinian birthright for a mess of potage. In return for some minor privileges for a tiny stratum of wealthy Palestinians or Palestinian Authority officials, Arafat is making terms with Israel, which will lead to the further dispossession and impoverishment of ordinary Palestinians. The Palestinian people, whatever Yassar Arafat agrees with the Zionists, are not acquiescing. The Intifada uprising in the mid-1980s and the uprising of September 1996 were the most recent manifestations of their anger and their determination to resist. They are fighting a life and death battle for their future. In this battle we know which side we are on.
