Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 158, December/January 2001
(This is an edited and updated version of articles that were printed in FRFI 134 and 135 in 1997)
Despite Israel’s repeated breaches of international law, it receives unstinting support from the United States, Britain and the European Union as a whole. Israel is no ordinary state. It was artificially created and is externally sustained. It is a racist, colonial-settler state founded by Britain and the USA to safeguard their economic and military interests in a region which holds 66 per cent of the world’s known oil reserves.
The colonisation of Palestine
Long before the creation of the Israeli state on 15 May 1948, a founder of Zionism, Theodore Herzl, declared that ‘England with her possessions in Asia should be most interested in Zionism … The shortest route to India is by way of Palestine.’ And so it was to prove. In 1917 Britain had issued the Balfour Declaration endorsing the idea of a homeland for Jews. At this time there were 60,000 Jews in Palestine compared to 700,000 Arabs. Arabs owned 91% of the land of Palestine, Jews 4%; others owned the rest. In the following decades this picture was to change completely. Zionist settlement began by purchasing land from Arab feudal lords, expelling the Palestinian peasants who came with the land. In their stead Jewish immigrants were put to work on the land. A rigid apartheid system was at once instituted. Arabs were banned from working on land purchased by the Zionists. A Zionist leader Joseph Weitz was to state ‘among ourselves it must be clear that there is no place in the country for both peoples together…Transfer the Arabs from here to the neighbouring countries, transfer all of them, not one village or tribe should remain.’
British imperialism and Zionism
This ‘transfer’ was accomplished with remorseless brutality. It started with the Palestinian uprising of 1936-39. When the uprising began in April 1936 British forces responded with massive repression, dynamiting Palestinian homes, criminalising Palestinian freedom fighters and killing 1,000 people by the end of the year. A British Settlement Police was formed which was in effect a Zionist militia, armed and trained by the British. By 1939 this force numbered 21,500 Zionists and was to form the core of the Israeli army. The British also created death squads known as Special Night Squads. By the time the uprising was finally defeated in 1939, 5,000 Palestinians had been murdered and 15,000 maimed and wounded. As a Palestinian peasant put it ‘the British were the cause of our catastrophe and the catastrophe was Zionism. So we asked the people: who is your first enemy? Britain. The second enemy? Zionism. Why? Because Britain is responsible. Britain protects them and persecutes us.’ The defeat of the uprising was decisive in consolidating Zionism and the development of the nucleus of the Zionist state. This could not have happened without British support. By 1943, Jews constituted 31% of the population; in 1917 they had been less than 8%.
Zionist terror 1945-1953
Where trickery or collaboration with the Arab ruling classes didn’t succeed in driving the Palestinian peasants from their homes, fascist violence did. The Irgun and Stern Gangs specialised in terrorising Palestinians into fleeing the land. Indeed a systematic strategy of terror was devised in 1948 to drive out 750,000 Palestinians. It was known as Plan Dalet (D). It amounted to organised ‘ethnic cleansing’. On 9 April 1948, for example, 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, a Zionist witness recalls how she saw an intelligence officer beat ten wounded men ‘with a hoe until they bled to death.’ It was methods such as these that led to the Palestinians’ exodus. Of the 370 Zionist settlements built between 1948 and 1953, 350 were on land confiscated from the Palestinians to accommodate, the 684,000 settlers who arrived in the same period. The Zionist state was built on land confiscated from the Palestinians. In 1945, three years before the foundation of Israel, Zionists still owned only 14% of the land; 80% was still owned by the Palestinians. In 1948 750,000 of the 1.3m Palestinians, 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. And after the 1967 Six Day war, with the conquest of the West Bank, Zionists controlled 84% to the Palestinians’ 14%.
Zionism on the regional stage
From the moment of its foundation in 1948, Israel set about playing its assigned role in the Middle East: attacking Arab nationalist and revolutionary movements which threatened imperialist control of the region’s oil. In 1956 Israel joined the Anglo-French invasion of Egypt that failed to overthrow Nasser’s government after it nationalised the Suez Canal. The Six Day War constituted yet another orchestrated offensive against a rising tide of Arab and Palestinian nationalism. Israel occupied the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula. Despite repeated UN resolutions, it has refused to withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In 1982 Israel launched a massive invasion of Lebanon, butchering 25,000 people, to destroy an alliance between Lebanese and Palestinian revolutionary forces.
Within Israel itself, Zionism maintains a regime of discrimination and oppression against Palestinians who constitute 20% of Israel’s population. Since 1948, 80% of Arab land in Israel has been confiscated. 92% of the land of Israel is reserved for Jews only — Palestinians cannot buy, rent or lease in these areas. In the face of incontrovertible evidence, the UN in 1975 passed Resolution 3397 which ruled ‘that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.’ Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and as a result of. Zionist and US pressure, this resolution has now been withdrawn. But Israel’s character remains unchanged.
…and on the international stage
Israel plays its reactionary role beyond the boundaries of the Middle East. It functions as a substitute US military force. Whenever the US has political difficulties in supplying anti-democratic or fascist regimes with guns, bombs and torture equipment, Israel, with US financial support, fills the breach. In 1979 Israel Aircraft Industries built an electrified fence on the Angolan-Namibian, border to thwart Namibian guerrillas. In the same year Israel and apartheid South Africa jointly developed an atomic bomb. During the height of the struggle to isolate South Africa, Israel was apartheid’s main arms supplier. Between 1970 and 1979 South Africa purchased 35% of all Israel’s weapon Sales.
In the Middle East Israel remains the main mechanism for sustaining US predominance. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, US-Israeli Collaboration has grown. The US has also sponsored an alliance between Israel and Turkey as an axis to guard against upheaval in the Middle East and in order to project its influence into the resource-rich ex-Soviet central Asian states. According to The Financial Times, recently-signed agreements between Israel and Turkey, besides sharing intelligence and training to ‘combat terrorism’, also ‘opened up a route into central Asian markets for Israeli companies.’
US dollars sustain racist Israel
Israel can sustain its regional and international role only as a result of a massive infusion of US dollars. Israel is sustained almost entirely by imperialist money. Each year billions of dollars are given to Israel: between 1948 and 1995, the US pumped in $140bn. Annual aid averaged $5bn ill the 1990s with $10bn in loan guarantees. All this aid has no strings attached. Israel is also the highest per capita recipient of US aid.
Through such aid Zionism has built for imperialism one of the most powerful military machines in the world; it has also secured for imperialism a powerful and loyal social base. This financial assistance has bound the majority of Israel’s population to imperialism by giving most Jewish citizens an imperialist standard of living amidst a sea of regional poverty. It has created a privileged stratum of Zionists like the privileged whites of South Africa, who for years sustained the barbarism of apartheid. Indeed all the vicious and brutal racism of apartheid’s white minority is mirrored in Israel’s Zionist population and especially among those colonial settlers directly engaged in robbing Palestinians of their land. It is through such robbery that the Zionist population can sustain a privileged and comfortable existence.
The destruction of Palestine
Having colonised and absorbed the majority of Palestine, the Zionists are working to destroy the last hope of an independent Palestine. By means of apartheid-like legislation they have systematically undermined the possibility of an independent Palestinian agriculture and economy.
On land requiring intensive water irrigation, Palestinians have virtually no rights to dig new wells. Water from existing Palestinian wells is also siphoned off to irrigate land confiscated by colonial settlers. Today some 350,000 settlers, who account for only 13% of the population, consume 80% of the West Bank’s water. 75% of the West Bank and Jerusalem. is ‘confiscated’, earmarked for Jewish use alone.
The ‘peace process’, has further weakened the Palestinian economy. Today there is no free passage between the supposedly autonomous regions of Gaza and the West Bank. All commercial traffic between these areas is in Israeli hands. Repeated closures of the border are devastating the Palestinian economy. For example, with trucks halted for days, it is cheaper for West Bank traders to import tomatoes from Spain than from Gaza. Repeatedly, Palestinian produce is left to rot at Israeli road-blocks and prohibitions are imposed on importing raw materials into areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority.
Meanwhile the tide of Zionist colonisers keeps flowing into the West Bank. By 1998, the number of settlers in the Occupied Territories had risen by nearly 50% from 106,000 to 152,000, and now number well over 200,000. Today these fully-armed settlers occupy some 145 settlements dotted around the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Strategically placed, with state funded programmes for massive expansion, these settlements, together with Israeli army roadblocks, have ensured that the major Palestinian population centres are reduced to isolated clusters, cut off from each other and dependent entirely on Israeli authority — bantustans. A system of 58 roadblocks prevents Palestinians from travelling from the south to the north of the West Bank. Meanwhile, East Jerusalem was being ethnically cleansed of Palestinians, so that by 1994 Palestinians were in a minority.
The January 1997 accords only strengthened the hand of Israeli colonialism. As The Financial Times noted at the time, the agreement ‘will mean the Israelis will remain in control of the rural areas of the West Bank, continuing to surround Palestinian towns with Israeli troops and expanding Jewish settlements further, so that in effect they renege on the Oslo accords.’ Although imperialism held out great hopes for a final `peace’ settlement being achieved by summer 2000, Arafat could not deliver. Whilst he has capitulated at every stage of the ‘peace’ process, the Palestinian people have not. Their history is one of constant struggle, from the 1987 Intifada to today. The lesson is clear: the Palestinian people will never be subjugated. ■
