A History

Zionism appeared in Palestine in 1882 when a small number of Eastern European Jews were inspired by the idea of the ‘return’ of the Jews to the old Biblical Palestine as a panacea for antisemitism in Europe. For this group, Palestine was the appropriate location for the transformation of Judaism from a traditional religion into a modern-day national identity. Early Zionists were already discussing the transfer of the Palestinians, but of course they did not have the means to implement the vision of a de-Arabised Palestine.

The Zionist community in Palestine was able to commence ethnic cleansing on a smaller scale after Britain occupied Palestine in 1918 and a few years later established, under the auspices of the League of Nations, a mandatory state in Palestine.

With the help of the British authorities the Zionist movement purchased land from absentee landlords, who lived in Beirut, in two valleys: Marj Ibn Amer (today Emek Izrael) and Wadi Hawareth (today Emek Hefer).

Under the Ottoman land regime, large swathes of land had been owned by landlords, in this case living outside of Palestine. On these lands were villages that had been there for centuries. A change of land ownership had not affected these villages until then — but once these lands were purchased by the Zionist movement, the new owners demanded the eviction of the villages, effected with the help of the British police. A dozen villages were evicted in such a way in the mid-1920s.

By the time the British decided to leave Palestine and refer its future to the UN in 1947, the Zionist movement, with the help of Britain, had developed the capacity to perpetrate expulsions of Palestinians en masse. The moment came for such an operation when the Palestinians rejected the UN partition plan — which proposed the division of Palestine between the settlers and the native people — at the end of 1947. Their objection was disregarded by the UN, and international legitimacy for establishing a Jewish state in part of historical Palestine was granted without their approval.

Even in the part of Palestine that the UN accorded to a Jewish state, there were a large number of Palestinians. Moreover, the movement was not content with the roughly 50 percent of historical Palestine accorded to it by the UN and wished to expand the future Jewish state over the areas designated a future Arab state. It was clear, then, that if its territorial ambition was going to be fulfilled, the Jews would be a minority in their new state, defeating the idea of a Jewish state altogether. The Zionist leaders therefore determined to spread over as much of Palestine as they could, and prepared a massive ethnic cleansing soon after the partition plan was adopted.

In February 1948, the Zionist forces began ethnically cleansing Palestine. Britain remained responsible for law and order until 15 May 1948, the day the mandate terminated. While the Arab world promised the Palestinians it would come to their rescue, it delayed its response until the British left Palestine. When that response came, it was too little and too late.

Contrary to the Israeli narrative, Palestinians did not become refugees because the Arab world went to war against the Jewish state on 15 May 1948. Before one Arab solider crossed the border into Israel, a quarter of a million Palestinians had become refugees, many from urban centres of Palestine that were totally destroyed.

The troops that entered from the neighbouring Arab states battled the new Israeli army until August 1948. Apart from the Jordanian army, they were ill-equipped and had no war experience. The Jordanian army limited its activity, in return for an Israeli agreement to allow it to annex the West Bank.

The Israeli army was thus able to conduct its operations on two fronts: first, it repelled the Arab armies’ entry to Palestine; and second, it continued the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. Over the following seven months, Israel completed the expulsion of half of Palestine’s population, destroyed half of its villages — more than 500 — and demolished most of its urban neighbourhoods.

The Israeli army succeeded in expelling only half of the Palestinians from historical Palestine for three main reasons. First, in the north, the army had already encountered resistance and reached that part of Palestine too overstretched to complete its operations. Second, what became known as the West Bank was allowed by Israel to be taken over by Jordan along with its original population and a large number of refugees. Finally, hundreds of thousands of refugees expelled from the south of Palestine ended up in the Gaza Strip after Egypt refused to accept them.

As part of the Israeli–Jordanian armistice agreement signed in April 1949, Israel received a small portion of the West Bank known today as Wadi Ara, or the Little Triangle, an area it regarded as a crucial land bridge between the eastern valleys and the sea. Israel sent some of the villagers living there back to West Bank proper, but found it more difficult to do so after it granted these Palestinians citizenship (and one should give credit to the UN armistice committee watching over Israel’s attempt to remove the Palestinians there). The Palestinians who remained in the north also became like those in Wadi Ara, part of the Palestinian minority in Israel. The Palestinians you might meet today in Haifa, Jaffa, al-Ramleh, and al-Lid are mostly internal refugees who made their way into these former Palestinian towns.

The Palestinian citizens of Israel became second-rate citizens, living under strict military rule until 1966. Attempts to downsize this population also continued: several villages were ethnically cleansed in the first decade of statehood. When military rule was abolished in 1966, it was replaced by a local version of apartheid that retained the inferior citizenship of the Palestinians in Israel.

Imprisonment

As mentioned, settler colonial projects operate in two dimensions: space and population. In 1948, the Zionist movement took over about 80 percent of historical Palestine and expelled nearly 90 percent of the Palestinians living in those parts. The territorial appetite was not quenched, however, and the June 1967 War offered an opportunity to complete the geographical takeover: namely, occupying the whole of historical Palestine — Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip.

Pursuing this territorial end came at a price. After expelling nearly one million Palestinians before 1967, Israel now incorporated nearly two million more Palestinians. No wonder, then, that there were serious deliberations in the Israeli government after the war about another massive ethnic cleansing of the new territories. The government decided against it due to lack of conducive circumstances, the ministers in the cabinet citing three reasons: the war was over after six days, so such a cleansing could not be presented as one of its outcomes; there were already television crews filming; it was feared that refugees would likely show more resistance to a second attempt to displace them. The alternative was to enclave the populations of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in two mega prisons. If you cannot expel the people, it was decided, you could exclude them from the citizenship of the occupying state, restrict their movement, and confine them to their own areas. Nonetheless, during and immediately after the war, Israel also expelled 300,000 Palestinians from various parts of the West Bank and Jerusalem. In the years to come, through various means, Israel would expel more than half a million Palestinians from these areas.

The enclaves of Gaza and the West Bank were soon encircled by military bases and Jewish colonies, strangulating the population in urban and small rural pockets. Consecutive Israeli governments claimed that this prison model was a basis for a future peace, and that they might even consider turning them into a ‘state’. This was the logic behind the Oslo Peace Accord of 1993, which was unfortunately accepted by the PLO leadership, misled to believe that indeed there was a genuine Israeli commitment to a two-state solution.

Unlike the leadership, the occupied people of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip had rejected this prison model by 1987 and rebelled against the occupation in what became known as the First Intifada. The second came not long after, in 2000, and the PLO leadership joined it when it realised that the Oslo Accord was an occupation by other means. Israel responded to the Second Intifada by imposing a tougher prison model on the Palestinians. This one included massive arrests without trial, the demolition of houses, expulsions of people, and in frequent cases the wounding and killing of anyone resisting these collective punishments. Colonisation through the building and expansion of Jewish settlements continued as well. By the beginning of this century there were already 600,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank.

Israel was, however, unable to persuade its citizens to settle the Gaza Strip. Israel had created the Strip in 1948 as a receptacle for the hundreds of thousands expelled during the Nakba, and by the end of the twentieth century this huge refugee camp had only attracted a few thousand Jewish settlers (who nonetheless took control of the water resources and fertile land). Similarly, while Israel was able to re-assert direct and oppressive rule over the West Bank after the Second Intifada with the help of a more cooperative Palestinian leadership, it found it hard to rule Gaza directly, the enclave remaining a centre of resistance.

In 2005, under the guidance of Ariel Sharon, the new prime minister, Israel tested a different prison model for the Gaza Strip, removing the settlers and disconnecting the area from the world through a siege. Support had been growing among the Strip’s population for the Islamist guerrilla movements that had emerged in the 1980s, and the vacuum left by the Israeli army was filled, through democratic elections, by Hamas. In response, Israel tightened the siege and supplemented it with a maritime blockade.

Hamas reacted by launching primitive missiles into Israel. Israel, in turn, and sometimes without any apparent cause, assaulted the Strip’s densely packed population of two million with its cutting-edge weapons. This huge, crowded refugee camp was bombarded four times between 2007 and 2023 from air, land, and sea. Each attack was more brutal than the last. In 2014 hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were killed, many of them children, with many more left traumatised, wounded, and homeless.

The Western world, under American leadership, afforded Israel immunity for all these attacks, which were severe breaches of international law, as was its continued violation of Palestinians’ basic civil and human rights in the West Bank and the Greater Jerusalem area.

Intensification

These polices have reached new levels of brutality since the election of a far-right government in 2022. Under Benjamin Netanyahu, this government incorporates messianic and fanatic parties whose members grew up in the Jewish settlements in the West Bank and who aspire to annex both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip through colonisation and ethnic cleansing.

The narrative in the Western media is that the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 came out of the blue and was orchestrated by Iran. This narrative purposely ignores the intensification of Israel’s policies of oppression against the Palestinians, driven by the ideology of the new government, including massive arrests without trial, a shoot-to-kill policy targeting mainly teenagers, the tightening of the siege on the Strip, and encouraging settlers and the police to invade the al-Aqsa mosque, the third holiest place in Islam, with the aim of rebuilding, in its stead, a Jewish temple.

The Hamas assault was partly a response to these new policies, as well as an effort to dramatically change the balance of power and redirect the world’s attention to the Palestine issue, which had been marginalised since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine.

The initial Israeli reaction to the attack — in which 1,200 Israelis soldiers and citizens were killed and 240 abducted — was vengeful. But this desire for revenge was soon usurped by the extreme right-wing government as a pretext to implement its vision of a Greater Israel from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea with as few Palestinians as possible inside it. Its hope is that Egypt and other countries will receive the refugees from Gaza, and that Jordan will absorb those expelled later from the West Bank.

There also remains a more pragmatic section of the government surrounding the prime minister’s party, Likud, and the Orthodox parties. Like the Zionist opposition parties, this section would like to introduce the prison model of the West Bank to the occupied Gaza strip. It is a vision fully supported by the USA, Britain, and the EU — and euphemistically called the ‘two-state solution’.

The Only Option

Patrick Wolfe described settler colonialism not as an event but as a structure. What he meant was that as long as the principal ideological motive of the settler colonial project is the displacement of the local population and its replacement with settlers, actions such as ethnic cleansing and genocide will continue. In 1948, Israel managed to take huge swathes of historical Palestine and expel nearly half of the Arab population, but the project of turning Palestine into a Jewish state remained only partly successful. As long as less than all of historical Palestine was under Israeli rule and Palestinians remained in historical Palestine, the ethnic cleansing and the genocide would — and will — continue.

The goal of absorbing the whole of historical Palestine was achieved in 1967. This ideological impulse for land without its indigenous people on it is the main cause for the violent cycles in Israel and Palestine. It is the impulse that informs the genocide currently occurring in the Gaza Strip, the daily killings of Palestinians in the West Bank, and the massive arrests without trial there, just as it motivates the continued violation of the basic rights of the Palestinian citizens of Israel. Worse, it ensures that these actions will continue until the ‘successful’ completion of the settler colonial project.

The main reason this project of colonisation is incomplete is the strength of Palestinian resistance and resilience. Half of the population in historical Palestine is Palestinian, and many of its refugees dwell in camps and communities not far from its borders. This is despite the powerful international alliance that provides immunity to Israel, which includes the Global North, evangelical Christian denominations, some Jewish communities, right and extreme right parties, and multinational corporations, in particular those trading in arms and security.

There is still a way out of this endless cycle of violence, but it demands a paradigm shift from those who have the power in the region and the world to impact the reality on the ground. The hegemonic discourse that focuses on ‘peace’ between the coloniser and the colonised is irrelevant to that reality. The appropriate term to use is decolonisation, which will include the substitution of the apartheid regime that exists all over historical Palestine.

The cessation of the efforts to dispossess the Palestinians, the rectification of past evils in the form of the repatriation of Palestinian refugees, and the institutionalisation of a political regime based on equality in all aspects of life between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is the only hope for genuine peace in the future. The Palestinians do not have the power to obtain that future without the help of that part of the world that allowed a settler movement to dispossess them in 1948 and ever since. Britain and the USA are particularly complicit in the cartography of disaster that has enveloped historical Palestine since the arrival of the Zionist movement. They have a historical responsibility to stop the genocide in Gaza and the destruction of the West Bank, and to then enable the Palestinian liberation movement to build a new Palestine akin to that of the past, where Muslims, Christians, and Jews coexisted as one nation.

If this does not happen, Israel will not survive for long. Like the Crusaders many years before them, Israeli Jews will find out that you cannot impose a European state on the native people of an Arab Palestine against their will. To prevent the violent destruction of this colonialist project — one that also brought blessings to the country in many areas of life — and produce an authentic Hebrew culture, a non-violent decolonisation leading to one democratic state is the only viable option.