In the June 1967 Arab Israeli War the Israelis captured the Sinai and the Golan Heights from
Egypt and Syria respectively, and evicted the Egyptians from the Gaza Strip, and the Jordanians from East Jerusalem and the West Bank territories and occupied them.
Immediately after this they began establishing Israeli settlements in the occupied territories which was illegal under International Law, and simultaneously expelled another 350000 Palestinians for the occupied territories. And fifty-six years later these territories remain occupied to this day.
After the 1967 Arab Israeli War Israel had decided that:
- It will never give up any of the Occupied Territories in Palestine and will keep expanding Israeli settlements in the West Bank in such a way that this would make the establishment of a Palestinian state an impossibility.
- Because changed times and general awareness would not allow it, the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories would not be subjected to mass expulsion, but they would be ground under a slow genocide.
- The Palestinians will never be granted full rights as citizens; therefore, they could not be called citizens. So, it was decided that they would be referred to as “inhabitants.”
- The jurisdiction of the Israeli Supreme Court would be extended to the Occupied Territories so that its judgments could give a veneer of legality and respectability to all steps taken towards the slow genocide of the Palestinians. And all acts of resistance by the Palestinians, which were allowed to them under international law, could then be declared as acts of terrorism instead.
- The U.S will not be discouraged from launching its “peace processes”, but the time inherent for such processes to unfold will be used to further entrench Israel in the whole of Palestine. To bring a formal end to the Arab Israeli War of 1967 and to resolve the new issues arising from it, the U.N passed its Resolution 242, also known as “The Land for Peace Resolution.” The gist of this was twofold: that the affected Arab states grant Israel’s right of peaceful existence among them, for which Israel would return them their land.
Israel accepted Resolution 242, but the Palestinians, under the PLO [The Palestinian Liberation Organization] declined to do so. But in the early 1970s the PLO gave indications that it was ready to accept its part in the Resolution. According to historian Norman Finkelstein, this caused alarm bells to begin ringing among the Israeli establishment because peace would mean the evacuation of occupied Palestinian territories, and this would lead to t the establishment of a Palestinian state. Thus, the coming “peace offensive” from the Palestinian side needed to be sabotaged. And so, Israel contrived an excuse to launch an attack on Palestinians based in Lebanon in 1982. Massacres of Palestinian refugees in Sabra and Shatila refugee camps followed the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and the PLO had to flee Beirut to Tunis.
The Palestinians began their first civil protest, known as the First Intifada, on Dec 7, 1987. This remained a largely peaceful affair for the first two years, but the use of overwhelming force by Israel brought blood on the streets. On Dec 8, 1988, Yasser Arafat, the Chairman of a PLO, on a visit to the US, declared that the Palestinian parliament in exile “had accepted the existence of Israel as a state in the region.” He said that this was a milestone, but his declaration was immediately dismissed in Israel and treated coldly in Washington. Peace was never the aim of Israel or of the U.S. because peace would have meant the establishment of the Palestinian state which was not acceptable to Israel from day one.
The next major step on the road to “peace” was the beginning of the Oslo Peace Process. On Sep 9, 1993, letters of mutual recognition were exchanged between Israel and the PLO. In these, while PLO recognized Israel’s right as a state to exist in peace, and also formally accepted UN Resolution 242, Israel merely accepted the PLO as the legitimate authority representing the Palestinian people and to continue negotiations with it within the Middle East Peace Process. In short, the Palestinians got nothing from the Oslo Accord, not even a promise of statehood.
After this the PLO was supplanted by the PA [Palestinian Authority] as a political party and as a subservient administrative arm of the Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, and they were given some minimal administrative functions to perform. And immediately following Oslo the Israeli settlement project in the West Bank saw a manifold increase. This chiseled up the West Bank in a manner that establishing a Palestinian state there was no longer practically possible.
Meanwhile Hamas, which did not accept Israel’s right to exist, was established as a political party in 1987, began getting Israeli support and funding so that it could mount a political challenge to the PA. The goal of this was that political opinion among the Palestinians be so divided that they would not be able to mount another peace offensive and derail Israel’s political goal of retaining the whole of Palestine.
In 2005 Israel decided to withdraw its settlements from Gaza where 6000 Israelis were in control of forty percent of Gaza territory, while nearly two million Palestinians had only sixty percent of Gaza’s land. The economic costs of providing adequate security to six thousand Israelis led to this step being taken. However, the withdrawal of these settlements promised Israel rich dividends in terms of political propaganda.
Under US pressure Israel scheduled elections to be held in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza in 2006, and it encouraged its protege, Hamas, to take part. Hamas won these elections and stunned both Israel and the US, but the PA was encouraged not to hand power over to Hamas. And though the PA had its way in the West Bank, Hamas overthrew its control over Gaza in a violent coup. Immediately upon this Gaza was put under a tight siege by Israel so that nothing could move in or out of it except by Israel’s leave. And since then, Gaza has been an “open-air prison” as described by the ex-British P.M David Cameron.
Through these years the Palestinians have been progressively degraded and dehumanized as a matter of policy. Without viewing them as subhuman, it was not possible for the state and the people of Israel to treat the Palestinians as such, and to subject them to the regime of slow genocide and strangulation that they are undergoing. Things could never have gone so far had Israel not received the total support of the US and the willfully imposed insensitivity of most of Europe. In a world where general awareness and education is so widespread as ours, seldom have those with such exalted claims to being the most civilized, relied on such blatant hypocrisy to impose such willful blindness upon themselves so that they cannot see an unfolding genocide in Palestine.
The Israeli Palestinian issue has been deliberately framed incorrectly as a clash between two rival nationalisms. It was always a clash between settler colonialists on the one hand, and the natives who were to be cleansed to make way for colonial settlements on the other. Ethnic cleansing was central to the Zionist project from the time it was conceived. That is why Israel is the only state that has never demarcated its borders, constant expansion being one of its goals. For the same reason it does not have a constitution. And concurrent with that, its settlement policy in occupied territories attests to the fact that a Palestinian state was NEVER acceptable to them.
It is this driving sentiment and motivation where the genesis of the Gaza genocide springs from.
The Zionist leadership was very clear about its end goal from the beginning, and therefore was leading all the initiatives with the help of the main power in the world i.e the West, specifically, the US. The Palestinian leadership was always reacting to the Zionists and was therefore always a step behind. Thus, we see that the Palestinians, seeing themselves as victims of a land grab, always rejected formulas of land sharing given to them for acceptance. They were looking for justice. Being the ones, whose land was to be taken away, they could not see any justice in these formulas. They saw them merely as tools to legalize and formalize an injustice. But along the way as they realized that there was to be no justice for them, they accepted the best that was offered to them. Each time they accepted this, things had moved on, and their acceptance of an old formula had become irrelevant to the “new facts” on ground which Israel was continually creating.
To begin with, the leadership of the Zionist project was largely composed of atheist Jews with a secular outlook. But even they were apt to proffer religious alibis in furtherance of their claims in Palestine. For example, though most of them did not believe in God, they never hesitated to quote the Bible as evidence that Palestine had been promised to them by the same God whom they did not believe in. Or they quoted history and their “expulsion” from ancient Palestine as laying the grounds of their “redemption” which, in religious language, meant their right to return to the land from which they had been expelled. Of course, as far as the historical record is concerned, they were expelled by the Romans from Jerusalem, and not from Palestine as a whole. But they presented history as suited them best.
When the Zionist project began, secular Zionists were in leadership positions, and the ultra-right-wing Jews, mainly the Mizrahis, were politically and socially at the bottom. But by 2021 the tables had turned, and no government could be formed or function without the support of the latter. And as per their belief, nothing less than the whole of Biblical Israel, in which there could dwell no other people but as subservient non-citizens, is acceptable to them. Therefore, it was their demand that the slow genocide of Palestinians be expedited to high gear, and they be driven clean out of Israel.
Gaza has thus become a wounded quarry, surrounded, and being shot from all sides, for daring to ask and fight for its freedom. The genocide of Palestinians has added a unique chapter to the enactment of this inhuman drama. This is the first time in an age of awareness that genocide is being carried out under the full glare of publicity, and is being passed on and accepted as a form of self-defense by the aggressor.