Israel's illegal settlements in occupied territory--and the
U.S. government's tolerance for them--are shining examples of the
might-makes-right principle of colonialism.
July 19, 2012
ISRAEL'S PROJECT of colonial expansion has been thrust back
onto the international stage by a report from a committee headed by a former
Israeli Supreme Court justice recommending the legalization of Jewish-only
settlements in the West Bank.
In asserting that Israel is not an occupying force in the
West Bank, the Levy report--as it's become known, after the head of the
three-member committee, Edmund Levy--flies in the face of decades of Israeli
court rulings and a substantial body of international law and United Nations
resolutions. The practical consequence of this claim is that Israel would not
face any legal hurdle to annexing the settlements to Israel or constructing
further settlements.
The Levy report's dismissal of decades of legal precedent
caused a ripple of alarm among politicians in Israel and the U.S.--not because
they oppose Israel's continuation of its colonial project, of course, but
because of the embarrassing attention it draws to the denial of basic rights to
some 2.5 million Palestinians living in the West Bank.
"We do not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli
settlement activity, and we oppose any effort to legalize settlement
outposts," said a spokesperson for the U.S. State Department, days before
a trip to Israel by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
The U.S. government has been officially opposed to Israel's
settlements throughout the so-called peace process that began nearly 20 years
ago--but Washington continued to give billions in aid annually to Israel, even
as the settlement enterprise expanded massively.
Within Israel, opposition to the Levy report is also
widespread, but it has a more explicitly racist character. "Israeli
settlements located in populated Arab areas, as a response to their attacks on
us, might bring a threatening demographic shift, meaning, jeopardize the Jewish
majority in Israel," said Israeli President Shimon Peres. "[W]ithout
a Jewish majority, there is a doubt the Jewish state will remain Jewish."
So while the consensus within both the U.S. and Israeli political
establishments is to oppose the Levy report, Israel's strategy remains the same
one that the report seeks to justify: extend its colonial grip over more and
more land, while denying basic rights to the indigenous inhabitants of that
land.
This is the crux of Israel's apartheid system and a critical
part of the motivation for the growing global campaign of boycott, divestment
and sanctions (BDS) against Israel. Despite the enthusiasm of those who hoped
his administration would herald a new era for U.S. policy in the Middle East,
Barack Obama has shown the same dedication to support for Zionism as his
predecessors. This makes the growth of the BDS movement all the more essential
to achieving a free Palestine.
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THE PROBLEM with the Levy report among supporters of Israel
is not the goal it sets--the further expansion of Jewish-only settlements in
the West Bank--but the strategy for achieving it. By jettisoning established
legal precedent, the report's recommendations enmesh Israel in a mess of
inconsistencies.
For example, if Israel is not an occupying force, then all
the land in the West Bank seized on the grounds of "military
necessity" under the Fourth Geneva Convention was seized improperly. But
according to David Kretzmer, an Israeli professor of international law and
author of The Occupation of Justice: The Supreme Court of Israel and the
Occupied Territories, this
is only one aspect of the problem [2]:
The Levy report complains about inequality between
Palestinians and Israelis. It cites Israel's Basic Law. But the real inequality
on the West Bank is that the Israeli settlers have political rights in the state
that controls their lives and the Palestinians do not. That is one of the
grounds for the claim that the system there has elements of apartheid. If it
accepts the Levy approach, the government will no longer be able to answer this
claim by arguing that the territory is subject to a temporary regime of
belligerent occupation. Either Israel's government will have to acknowledge
that apartheid is living and kicking, or it will have to extend political
rights to all Palestinian residents of the West Bank.
Extending political rights to all Palestinians is precisely
the "demographic threat" that the Zionist establishment can't
tolerate. In
a debate with pro-Israel hack Jonathan Tobin on Democracy Now! [3],
Palestinian author and activist Ali Abunimah illustrated this point:
[Shimon Peres'] statement calling Palestinian babies a
so-called demographic threat really reveals the Jim Crow-like racism at the core
of this Zionist ideology that views the mere existence of Palestinian babies in
their own native land as a threat to Israel. How can Palestinians ever possibly
recognize or give legitimacy to an entity which views their mere reproduction
as human beings as a mortal threat?
It's time for Mr. Tobin and all the fans of this apartheid,
racist, Jim Crow tyranny to make good on their claimed liberal and progressive
values and oppose Israeli apartheid and accept the inevitable, which is
that--just like in the Jim Crow South, just like in apartheid South Africa--one
day there is going to be equal rights for everyone between the river and the
sea.
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THE GROWTH of Israeli settlements has been incredible. In
1972, there were nearly 10,000 Jewish settlers living in the West Bank,
including East Jerusalem. In 2012, there were more than 500,000. All this is
despite the fact that the Fourth Geneva Convention explicitly forbids an
occupying power to "transfer parts of its own civilian population into the
territory it occupies."
Throughout that entire period, Israel has been the largest
recipient of U.S. foreign aid. The Obama administration continued this
trend--something to remember the next time you hear a right winger denounce
Obama as "anti-Israel."
In 2010, the Obama administration requested that Israel extend
its 2010 moratorium on settlement construction for two months [4] in
exchange for upgraded weapons systems, even more military and financial aid,
and a pledge to veto any UN Security Council resolution on the Israel-Palestine
conflict for a full year. Prime Minister Netanyahu rejected this
offer.
In other words, the U.S. offered Israel a slew of financial
and political favors to stop violating international law for two months--and
Israel said no thanks. Obama then quietly dropped all of his demands.
So it should come as no surprise that Israel has become even
more brazen in its drive to colonize the West Bank. A few of its most recent
atrocities include the confiscation
of water tanks that dozens of families depend upon for drinking and irrigation [5], the establishment
of the first Israeli university in a settlement [6] and the continuing construction
of the apartheid wall [7], despite the 2004
ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) [8] that it must be
dismantled. According to the ICJ ruling:
The Court considers that the construction of the wall and
its associate regime creates a 'fait accompli' on the ground that could well
become permanent, in which case, and notwithstanding the formal
characterization by Israel, it would be tantamount to de facto
annexation...That construction, along with measures previously taken, thus
severely impeded the exercise by the Palestinian people of its right to
self-determination.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THE ARAB uprisings that began more than a year ago upended
longstanding dictators backed by the U.S. in Tunisia and Egypt. But during
Hillary Clinton's recent trip to Egypt, she said she received a
pledge from newly elected President Mohamed Morsi to continue the siege of Gaza [9]--imposed
by Israel and the U.S., but made possible by the complicity of Egypt, which
borders Gaza to the south. If the blockade continues, so will the humanitarian
crisis that grips the densely populated strip of land.
Morsi's refusal to represent the overwhelming majority of
opinion in Egypt to end the siege shows why progress in winning equal rights
for Palestinians depends on the continued growth of the global BDS movement.
The most recent success was the Presbyterian Church's passage this month of a
resolution calling on all nations to "prohibit the import of products made
by enterprises in Israeli settlements on Palestinian land."
The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) welcomed
the development [10]:
The strongly worded resolution also calls upon all countries
to ban the import of such products until Palestinians are able to realize their
rights and achieve independence. This decision marks an important milestone in
the march of mainline churches in the U.S. towards holding Israel accountable
for its occupation, violations of international law and denial of the
Palestinian right to self-determination.
A few weeks earlier, the campaign spearheaded by
Jewish Voice for Peace [11] to encourage pension giant TIAA-CREF to
divest funds from companies profiting from Israel's illegal occupation won a
major victory when the
company sold more than $72 million of Caterpillar shares from its social choice
funds [12]. Caterpillar supplies the Israeli military with specially
equipped bulldozers used in the demolition of Palestinian homes in the West Bank.
The Arab Spring has weakened a string of authoritarian
regimes in the Middle East allied with the U.S.--making Washington even more
reliant on Israel as its chief ally in an oil-rich and strategically critical
part of the world. With the growing crisis in Syria and ongoing Israeli-U.S.
bullying of Iran, the U.S. seems poised to continue its support for Israel
whatever the cost.
But in seven years, the BDS movement has won an incredible number of
victories [13], especially when compared to the accomplishments of two
decades of the U.S.-brokered "peace process." The continuing growth
of this movement is thus essential--not only for justice for Palestinians, but
as part of the larger struggle to challenge U.S. domination of the Middle East.
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Published by the International Socialist Organization.
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Material on this Web site is licensed by SocialistWorker.org, under a Creative Commons (by-nc-nd 3.0) [14] license, except for articles that are republished with permission. Readers are welcome to share and use material belonging to this site for non-commercial purposes, as long as they are attributed to the author and SocialistWorker.org.
