The main change since our last visit to Israel/Palestine over a year ago has been the intensification of racist violence by Israel bosses against Palestinians. On 12/27/08, Israel swooped down on the tiny occupied Gaza strip, killed 1,440 people, including about 430 women and children, wounded 5,000 and left 50,000 homeless. It’s been well-documented that the Israeli military used banned weapons, such as white phosphorous, and targeted civilians who had nowhere to flee.
Since then, no supplies have been allowed in through the high wall completely surrounding the territory, so there’s been no rebuilding. The water is contaminated with sewage, all industry has ceased, and the sick cannot leave for medical care. Gaza is a concentration camp for 1.5 million people.
The supposed rationale for the Israeli attack on Gaza was an unsuccessful attempt to defeat Hamas, the Islamic fundamentalist party that won the 2006 Palestinian election, but was driven out of the West Bank and took up leadership in Gaza. Ironically, it was the Israelis who began building up Hamas in the 1950s as a counterweight to the secular nationalist Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO).
Despite Hamas’s militant rhetoric, the only actual resistance emanating from Gaza were some primitive rockets which killed 13 Israelis over several years. The Israeli slaughter’s main point was to further humiliate and intimidate the Palestinians, build Israeli nationalism and impress the West with Israel’s might. Currently, Egypt, a lackey of Israel and the U.S., is building a steel wall on its side of the border with Gaza to close the tunnels which are Gaza’s only source of goods.
In 1948, when Israel became a Jewish state, over 700,000 Palestinians — 6 out of 7 — were forcibly driven from their homes in Israel into Gaza, the West Bank or to other countries. Today there are 4.5 million Palestinians who still live under Israeli military occupation. Travel from this area, and even within it, is restricted by over 700 checkpoints, which can only be crossed with a permit. Only a minority of Palestinians are eligible for these passes — the rest are prisoners in their towns and villages. Unemployment exceeds 50%, amid shortages of water and health care. Palestinians who live in Israel comprise 20% of Israel’s citizens, but are second-class citizens, with inferior housing, schools and wages.
Currently the number of Jews and Arabs in Israel/Palestine is almost equal, and Israel engages in a furious game of trying to maintain a majority of Jews in Israel proper so it can claim to be a “democracy” by winning elections. To this end Israel’s rulers are accelerating their campaign to remove as many Palestinians as possible from its territory while grabbing as much land as possible.
The apartheid Wall, which Israel has built since 2002 to surround the Palestinians, cuts through large parts of Jerusalem where Arabs live, and they are now being declared “non-Jersulamites,” thus losing their access to Israeli health care and the right to work. Thousands of homes occupied by Palestinians in East Jerusalem — where they were driven 60 years ago — have been declared illegal and are being demolished or forcibly taken over by Israelis.
Eighty-five thousand Bedouins live in “unrecognized” villages in Israel, where they receive no services and have simply been declared “not to exist.” In the desert, people are living in boxes and shipping containers, only miles from modern cities. Meanwhile, half a million Israelis have moved into settlements in the occupied territories, complete with Israeli-only roads connecting them to Israel.
Most Israelis tolerate or applaud their apartheid state because they’re raised on a diet of virulent racism. They’re taught that anti-Semitism is a special form of racism that can never be eradicated, not understanding that racism has been used by ruling classes throughout history to divide the ruled against each other. They also learn that all Arabs are “infected” with anti-Semitism and only want to destroy Israel, and that Jews can only be safe in a militarized state.
Schoolchildren are taught a completely distorted history. There’s no mention of the expulsion of Palestinians from their land, only the myth that they left “voluntarily.” In fact, the anti-Arab racism among Jews in Israel has made them reviled throughout the Muslim and much of the Western world and actually leaves them more vulnerable than ever. Israel receives $3 billion a year from the U.S. and only exists because it is, for now, strategically important to the U.S. as a military outpost which can help protect U.S. oil interests. If and when U.S. rulers decide Israel is more of a liability than an asset, the hated Israel bosses might not survive very long. This could depend on the U.S. ability to sustain enough military bases in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Middle-East and Central Asia so as to no longer need Israeli might, or if the U.S. decides that antipathy to Israel prevents desired normalization of relations with the Muslim world.
Some Comrades
(Next issue: Internal struggles within Palestine and Israel, and the potential for communist organizing.)