It’s been a while since I featured The Electronica Intifada, with its from-the-trenches reports on battleground realities in the resistance by Hamas, Hezbollah, Ansar Allah and now Iran itself to a Zionist expansion its secular advocates believe necessitated by a doctrine of total regional dominance, its messianic wing by divine command as set out in the books of Genesis through Leviticus to Joshua – and in any case in full alignment with a US empire seeking to control the entire region through its regional gendarme.
The territorial aspirations of Israel’s religious Right, by no means confined to West Bank settlers who deem the bible a Deed of Entitlement which trumps international law, look for legitimacy to conflictual texts written between the 7th and 1st centuries BCE and collectively known as the Old Testament. Genesis 15:18-21, for instance, defines the land granted them by Jehovah (a self-avowedly “jealous God” with psychotic leanings and not above such collective punishment as visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation) as extending “from the brook of Egypt to the Euphrates“.
Numbers 34:1-15 is less generous. It speaks of land divided between the original twelve tribes of Israel after Moses, with divine assistance, escorted them out of slavery in Egypt. For their part, Exodus 23:29 and Deuteronomy 7:22 promise territory to be given piecemeal to the children of Israel over many years.
US Neocons & Israel’s far Right: Part 3
So let me turn to this thirty minute report a few days ago, by a Jon Elmer understated almost to the point of soporific – but a welcome change from excitable alt media commentators whose name is Legion, and in any case offset by Jon’s willingness to let graphic footage do the heavy lifting in the drama department – from a south Lebanon which Hezbollah drones and missiles are turning into a graveyard for the IDF invader; from Ansar Allah closure of the Red Sea at the Bab el-Mandeb choke point, and willingness to throw missiles at Israel to further degrade the latter’s overstretched ability to thwart Iran’s game changing superiority in hypersonic strikes; and from an Islamic Republic finally resolved to back with action what it had previously only insisted on verbally: that given its now dominant position on the escalation ladder in the war launched by Israel and the United States on February 28, any breach of the shaky ceasefire in Lebanon especially will be responded to as robustly as an attack on Iran itself.
Over to Jon.
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Now for something related but different. I’ve long been a follower of Canada socialist Stephen Gowans, who first caught my eye with his staunch defence – in stark contrast to most Left groupings in the West – of a Syrian government targeted by the US using Al Qaeda proxies to effect a regime change it had been seeking a full decade before the hijacked Daraa protests of 2012 gave that dirty war a spurious legitimacy which, inexcusably given the slaughter and chaos of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, fooled not only the mainstream clueless but, in large part, anti-imperialists who should have known better.
In 2019 I was asked by Steve’s publishers to review his new book, Israel: a beachhead in the Middle East: from European Colony to US Power Projection Platform. What I wrote in response has become one of those posts I’ve since referenced countless times as evidence for the thesis not only that Zionism can only be properly understood as a colonial-imperial project, but that those who say Israel drives US foreign policy are wide of the mark.
It’s true that the onset of America’s proxy war on Russia in Ukraine saw us taking opposed positions – though even here the gap is narrowing, as evidenced by a post two days ago on his What’s Left? site, on which I find myself in 95% agreement – but that did not diminish my respect for Steve. As I will keep saying, I’m tired of ideological red lines and wonder at the motives of those who draw them at the drop of a hat.
Be that as it may, the following day – yesterday – he posted a piece which steps back from the current inferno to remind us that Israel’s status as an ethnosupremacist entity was baked in at the outset: not with the land grabs in Syria’s Golan, West Bank of Jordan and less successfully in Lebanon but with its original sin, by ethnic cleansing on pain of genocide, of 1948.
Over to Steve with a three minute reminder that “Israel”, even before its later land thefts, has always been Palestine.
Whether the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, or Israel, It’s All Stolen Land
According to the Israeli daily Haaretz, “left-wing UK leaders” are “slamming” an Israeli real-estate event, alleging that it seeks to sell properties to Jews on stolen West Bank land.
While efforts to impede the ongoing Judaization of Palestine are commendable, there is a fundamental problem that lurks in the campaign’s understanding of what is and isn’t stolen Palestinian land. The reality is that all the land in historic Israel that is claimed by Jewish settlers—both within the 1967 borders and outside—is stolen.
Failing to acknowledge this reality implicitly legitimizes Israeli colonialism and all earlier thefts of Palestinian land. While it identifies land stolen in 1967 as Palestinian, it tacitly accepts land stolen in 1948 as legitimately belonging to Zionist settlers.
Of course, it can’t be true that land taken from Palestinians by Zionist violence in 1967 is Palestinian land, while land taken from Palestinians by Jewish settler violence in 1948 is not.
All the same, the illogic is concealed behind the claim that the violent transfer of Palestinian land to the new Israeli state in 1948 was legitimized by the UN partition plan.
This view, however, is wrong for a number of reasons.
1.) The plan was legally invalid, since it was based on a General Assembly resolution, and
1a.) General Assembly resolutions are non-binding, and
1b.) the General Assembly didn’t have the authority to partition Palestine. (Indeed, the UN Charter accords to neither the General Assembly or the Security Council the authority to create new states);
2.) The Palestinians rejected the plan;
3.) The Zionists also rejected it, as evidenced by the fact that:
3a.) They didn’t implement it; and
3b.) They conquered territory in excess of what the plan allocated to them.
The plan apportioned 56 percent of Palestine to one-third of the population that was Jewish (mainly settlers), and only 42 percent to the Palestinians, who comprised two-thirds of the population. (Two percent was allotted to what was to be an internationalized Jerusalem.)
By early 1949, the Zionists—keen to control as much of Palestine as they could—had conquered 78 percent of the territory (versus the 56 percent they were supposed to have under the plan.)
Still, even if the partition plan had been legally valid, it remained flagrantly colonial, since it endorsed the expropriation of the territory of the existing inhabitants by a group of settlers animated by the project of expelling as much of the Palestinian population as possible and them imposing a regime of Jewish ethnoreligious supremacy on those that remained.
The partition plan has become embedded in international law, but colonialism does not become just by virtue of its inclusion in international law. International law is the instrument of the colonial powers that formulated it. They formulated it to defend and promote their interests—not to protect weaker peoples and states.
The great powers make, and have made, international law, and when it doesn’t suit their purposes, they break it. So it is that they have read the partition plan into the global legal order, even though the plan was invalid under the very same order.
There exists today one Jewish supremacist state in all of historic Palestine. All the land, both within and beyond the 1967 borders, is stolen. The ineluctable conclusion is that home sales to Jewish settlers anywhere in historic Palestine, (not only in the West Bank), are auctions of stolen land.
The competing view that only settlements in the West Bank represent confiscated Palestinian land, endorses the colonial fiction that Jewish settlement within the 1967 borders is not colonial and has not taken place on the dispossessed land of the Palestinians. On the contrary, all the territory controlled by the US-backed colonial settler regime is colonized and stolen.
The solution to colonization is not colonization of all but 22 percent of a people’s territory—what’s proposed in the two-state “solution”—but decolonization, the creation of one democratic state, in which all people are equal, regardless of their ethnicity or religious identity.
That’s what Palestinians proposed from the very beginning. It is a multidimensional solution, one that remedies both the problems of settler colonialism (by creating its antithesis, the democratic state of all its citizens) and the problems of anti-Semitism and anti-Palestinianism (by depoliticizing ethnic and religious identity and thereby establishing the full equality of individuals, regardless of the religion they practice or the people they identify as.)
From the 22 percent of historic Palestine that the two-state proposal envisages for a Palestinian state; to Jawlan (called the Golan Heights by Israelis; conquered by the US-backed colonial settler regime in 1967; ethnically cleansed of its Syrian population; settled by Jews; and annexed by the Israeli state in 1981); to Israel itself: it is all stolen land. Failing to recognize this reality perpetuates an injustice and blocks implementation of the only fair and democratic solution to the multiple problems at the center of the Zionist colonization of historic Palestine and Jawlan.
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