Israel Threatens to Annex Much of Palestinian West Bank—Accelerating U.S.-Backed Genocide of Palestinian People
| revcom.us
The storm clouds of U.S.-backed Israeli ethnic cleansing and genocide are growing ever darker over the Palestinian people.
On May 28, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he was committed to annexing Israeli settlements, connecting roads and other territories in the Palestinian West Bank by July 1—“once a joint Israeli-U.S. team completes mapping the exact vision of the future of the territory based on a conceptual map released by U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration,” according to the Times of Israel.
This could amount to up to 30 percent of the West Bank, which is located west of the Jordan River, between Israel and Jordan. The West Bank is a key part of historic Palestine and home to 2.8 million Palestinians, and ’it has long been promised to Palestinians as the core of a future state. Now Palestinians are facing the prospect of having yet more of their land stolen—including key agricultural lands and water sources—their lives and society further shattered, and being forced to live under even more draconian Israeli rule.
July 1 has passed and the exact scope and timing of Israel’s next steps remain unclear. There are reports of differences within the Israeli ruling class, including due to the COVID-19 pandemic and international opposition. There’s an outcry from right-wing Israeli settlers who don’t want any hint of any Palestinian state, although Netanyahu insists there’s no mention of a state in his plan.1 And the U.S. and Israel may still be working through the precise dimensions and timing of the land grab. But Netanyahu insists he’s going forward, perhaps in a more step-by-step way, despite the global pushback. The U.S.-Israeli threat to the Palestinian people is real—and extreme!
100 Years of Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide in Service of Imperialism
This annexation is the latest chapter in a 100-plus-year history of U.S and Western imperialist-backed Israeli ethnic cleansing and genocide against the indigenous Palestinian population. It’s like what this country has done to Native Americans—stealing their land, destroying their societies, and carrying out massive, bloody crimes through wars, land theft, forced removals, military confinement, and one broken promise and broken treaty after another.
This has been done in service of the reactionary interests of Israel, and the reactionary interests of Western capitalism-imperialism, particularly U.S. imperialism, in dominating and controlling the strategic, oil-rich region of the Middle East, exercising global power, and fending off global rivals.
What is today Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza were once all part of historic Palestine, where the Palestinian people had lived for many centuries. This all began to change during World War 1, when the British empire backed the Zionist movement’s program of Jewish colonization of Palestine.2 By 1948, the Palestinian people still owned more than 90 percent of the land, and comprised two-thirds of the population, but during the 1948 war, Zionist settlers violently drove a million Palestinians from their homes, lands, and villages, seized 77 percent of Palestine, and established the settler-colonial state of Israel—with the backing of the U.S.
In 1967, Israel launched another war of aggression, seizing the remaining 23 percent of historic Palestine—Gaza and the West Bank as well as Syria’s Golan Heights—which it has ruled ever since. And since 1967, Israel has become an ever more important cog—a nuclear-armed attack dog—in U.S. imperialism’s global empire, receiving billions in aid and military support each year.
Israel has turned Gaza into an open-air prison, confining nearly two million Palestinians in inhuman conditions.
In the West Bank, Israel has built up 132 settlements and 124 smaller “outpost” settlements, with about 640,000 Jewish settlers now living there (including in East Jerusalem)—all of it illegal under international law. These settlements, barriers, and the Jewish-settler-only roads that connect them to Israel, are instruments of ethnic cleansing—surrounding, isolating, and literally walling off what are increasingly concentration camp enclaves where Palestinians are confined. Many are essentially militarized bases from which virulent racists carry out a reign of terror on the Palestinian population.
Democrats and Republicans have both fervently backed Israel, including its crimes against the Palestinians. But as revcom.us summed up, “What is new, is that Trump is ... abandon[ing the] pretense that the U.S. is any kind of ‘neutral broker’ and instead frames the U.S.-Israel alliance in terms of a holy war between the West and Islam. This converges with an aggressive move from the U.S. policy of supporting the two state solution to an openly ethnically cleansed Israeli state.”
This shift has been expressed in the Trump/Pence fascist regime’s decision to move the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem in the West Bank in May 2018, its March 2019 declaration of support for Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights, and the announcement this January of its Middle East “peace” plan.
As revcom.us analyzed, “This plan gives the right-wing government in Israel everything it has asked for. It legalizes Israel’s seizure of the most fertile Palestinian land. It legalizes Israel’s seizure of what had been the most important Palestinian city, Jerusalem. It says that if there is to be a Palestinian state in the future, it will be on different bits of terrible land separated from each other, and that this so-called state will not be allowed to have an army. This plan does represent a major escalation in the oppression of the Palestinian people.”3 In short, it’s an escalation and leap to genocide.
All this has been fervently advocated and supported by the Trump-backed Christian fascist movement in this country.4
At this moment when millions are reckoning with America’s white supremacist past and present, people also need to reckon with what America has done around the world—including its support for genocide in Palestine. And those of us living in the U.S. must not only reckon with this bloody history, but actively expose and oppose the towering crimes being carried out by Israel, which should be stamped “Made in the USA” because they’d be impossible to carry out without American involvement. And we must do so as part of seriously organizing and preparing for the actual revolution that will do away with the oppression of whole peoples, wars of empire, armies of occupation, and crimes against humanity.
For more background, see:
Bob Avakian, Bringing Forward Another Way, 2006
Special Issue of Revolution: Bastion of Enlightenment... or Enforcer for Imperialism: The Case of ISRAEL, revcom.us, October 10, 2010
Take the Quiz! Israel: Perception & Reality
Part 1. The Origins of the State of Israel, the Palestinians, and the Holocaust,” revcom.us, September 26, 2010
1. Netanyahu also insisted that Palestinians living in areas annexed by Israel would not receive Israeli citizenship. He summed up, “What this plan says is that Israel and its security forces will militarily control all the territory west of the Jordan River.” Netanyahu said, “I stress: all the territory, with no exception. Tell me, when has there ever been such an American approach? They allowed us, at most, to conduct urgent pursuits of terrorists. Now there’s a profound paradigm shift.” “Netanyahu: Palestinians in Israeli-annexed Jordan Valley won’t get citizenship,” Times of Israel, May 28, 2020. [back]
Netanyahu’s need to address the settler outcry reflects the growing political strength of “fanatic Jewish fundamentalists who openly call for the violent extermination of the Palestinian people in the ruling coalition,” as revcom.us has written, and the erosion of Israel’s traditional legitimizing norms as a quasi-secular (bourgeois) democratic state. For more, see “With Trump’s “Blessing” Netanyahu calls for Israel to annex West Bank settlements,” revcom.us, April 8, 2019. [back]
2. Zionism is an openly pro-Western colonialist, imperialist ideology and political movement among Jewish people. See “Setting the Record Straight on Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism and the Important Difference Between the Two,” revcom.us, January 18, 2019. [back]
3. In the Wake of Trump’s Middle East “Peace Plan” Revolution Reprint: Bastion of Enlightenment... or Enforcer of Imperialism: The Case of ISRAEL, revcom.us, February 1, 2020. [back]
4. “And Trump’s ‘blessing’ [for Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights] was accompanied by a literal blessing by Trump’s Christian fascist, ‘end times’ lunatic secretary of state Mike Pompeo, who posed in an interview with the Christian Broadcast Network that it was possible that God raised Donald Trump to be president of the United States in order to protect Israel from Iran, and who declared ‘the Lord is at work’ in Trump’s announcement.” With Trump’s “Blessing” Netanyahu calls for Israel to annex West Bank settlements, revcom.us. [back]
The green-shaded area of the second map above is land mandated by UN resolutions and international law for the Palestinian people. The small, encircled green areas on the fourth map represent enclaves where Palestinian people now live encircled by Israeli “settlements” (often paramilitary outposts), locked down by walls and Israeli military checkpoints.
Q&A: The rise of fascism & struggle in international communist movement.
This clip, “The rise of fascism& struggle in international communist movement,” is part of a question and answer session with Bob Avakian following his speech Why We Need An Actual Revolution and How We Can Really Make Revolution. It includes insights and analysis of the crisis facing the rulers of Israel.
The following, on why Israel is such a key ally for the U.S. in the Middle East, is from Bringing Forward Another Way, a talk given by Bob Avakian in 2006. This groundbreaking analysis, made during the George W. Bush years, continues to be very relevant, especially in the context of sharpening contradictions centered in the Middle East and aggressive U.S.-led moves against Iran. This work is an illustration of applying the scientific method to approaching international conflicts and understanding social and political contradictions—and identifying where the fundamental interests of humanity lie, providing concrete leadership and guidance for the strategic repolarization for revolution and a thoroughly internationalist orientation. Given the current situation in the world, we urge our readers to study, discuss and share the entire important work.
If you look at any other regimes in the region, Saudi Arabia and Egypt are big allies of the U.S. But in Saudi Arabia and in Egypt, the situation is very unstable and potentially very volatile: there are serious tremors beneath the throne, so to speak—there is the growing danger of "social earthquakes" that could threaten to topple, or actually topple, those regimes. You don't have that in Israel. Hopefully, as things develop overall, there will not be just a "loyal opposition peace movement" among Israelis but the development of a much more powerful progressive movement with a much more radical view in Israel—and this is something that progressive people in Israel, or with ties to people in Israel, should work to foster and develop. But right now a positive and truly radical movement of that kind does not exist in Israel, and the dynamics with regard to Israel are not now such that the more that the regime in Israel is hard-core, the more it is going to run into antagonism with the bulk of its population. In the short term, the dynamic is essentially the opposite, unfortunately.
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