On 26 January, a brutal attack by Zionist security forces on Jenin refugee camp killed nine Palestinians. The massacre, the deadliest single day on the West Bank in many years, was the latest indication that the new far-right Israeli government is stepping up its assault on the Palestinian people. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cohort of religious extremists and racist ultra-nationalists came to power on the promise to legalise illegal Israeli settlements and move to annex the West Bank. The government is introducing legislation that will allow it to override decisions made by the Supreme Court and its provisions will be retroactive. The Supreme Court has occasionally in the past acted to rein in some of the most egregious excesses of the Zionist state. The new laws will remove such fetters on Zionist expansion and brutality. The stage has been set for an escalation of the confrontation between the forces of Palestinian liberation and Zionism’s lethal military.
The past year has seen a shift in the arena for armed struggle from Gaza, which for years has shouldered the bulk of military resistance to Zionist rule, to the camps and cities of the West Bank, where 231 Palestinians were killed in 2022. The emergence of a new phase of resistance has been led by the Lion’s Den organisation in Nablus, which has developed guerrilla tactics to deal with constant violent incursions by occupation forces. Other such armed groups have emerged in Jenin, with those living in the region’s network of impoverished refugee camps flocking to join up. By January, armed resistance forces could claim responsibility for around a dozen daily counterattacks, transmitted via a jointly-organised Resistance News Network. Refugee camps and towns have become defence networks.
Most reactionary government in history
Zionism rightly sees in the Palestinian masses a threat to the very existence of the colonialist state. The new governing coalition brings together Netanyahu’s Likud party and a collection of far right-wing parties once considered as the lunatic fringe of the colonisation project even within Israel. According to the progressive Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, the warmongering, racist Netanyahu represents the ‘least extreme member of this government’ (Palestine Chronicle, 6 January 2023). On 3 January, the new National Security minister Itamar Ben Gvir, leader of the ultra-nationalist Jewish Power party, led some of his MPs into the al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem, a highly provocative move reminiscent of that carried out in 2000 by former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, the notorious Butcher of Beirut. Ben Gvir is now in charge of deploying the racist Israeli police force against Palestinians living ‘in the ‘48’ – that is, within Israel’s 1948 borders.
Since the election, more occupation troops have been sent to areas seen as hotspots of resistance on the West Bank and measures are being taken to accelerate ethnic cleansing. In one example, 1,000 Palestinian inhabitants of villages in Masafer Yatta, just south of Hebron (al-Khalil in Arabic), face expulsion after a 20-year legal battle against plans to replace them with more than 4,000 illegal colonial settlers. The new government immediately allocated more than $225m a year to expand the Judaisation of the southern Naqab, or Negev region within the ‘48, as well as areas around Hebron/al-Khalil. Repression is also being stepped up to curb growing support for the resistance by Palestinians living within the ’48 (described by Zionists as a ‘fifth column’); Ben Gvir in January announced a ban on the public flying of the Palestinian flag, describing it as ‘an act in support of terrorism’.
The difference between this and previous Zionist governments is that there is no longer any pretence that ‘Israel’ is any kind of democracy, nor is there any attempt to veil its racist commitment to Jewish supremacy. Its election is an admission that having failed to quell the resistance of the Palestinian people with the barbaric repression unleashed to date, even more brutal and murderous methods are required.
Palestinian Authority collaboration
The party leading the comprador bourgeois Palestinian Authority (PA)is Fatah, although some of its members have broken from the official line and have volunteered with the resistance. The PA has continued to collaborate with occupation repression. On 21 December, a PA official told the Jerusalem Post that Lion’s Den fighters would not be released from PA custody. Immediately after the 26 January Jenin massacre, Abbas announced a suspension of ‘security coordination’ with the Zionists. This is a known trick and within a short period the PA will revert to acting as the local enforcer of Zionist repression.
The re-emergence of a geographically broad armed struggle is a direct challenge to the PA, now thoroughly discredited among the youth.
Oslo accords in disarray
By so blatantly seeking to redraw the already narrow boundaries of Israeli ‘democracy’ and violently colonise even more of historic Palestine, this Israeli regime has created tensions with its imperialist sponsors. The US ruling class favoured the 1993 Oslo deal as a ‘negotiated solution’ that reconciled a neutralised Palestinian authority with continued Zionist colonisation. With both the PA and the Zionist state itself dependent on imperialist backing, a more openly fascist Zionist government will strain US sponsorship. In January, US ambassador to the Zionist state Tom Nides hinted that the Biden government would not engage directly with Ben Gvir or finance minister Bezalel Smotrich of the Religious Zionism party, while another US official has called for Netanyahu to ‘control his government.’ The extremist Jewish Defence League, which Ben Gvir founded in the US, is outlawed as a terrorist organisation by the FBI.
The continued solidarity and struggle of the Palestinian people is forcing the Zionist state to increasingly expose its racist, violent and unsustainable nature. The Oslo settlement is unravelling – and not before time. The Palestinian people need international solidarity in their fight for liberation, and a principled recognition of their right to conduct that fight through every means available to them, including through the armed struggle. Victory to the Intifada.
Louis Brehony
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 292 February/March 2023
