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Israel's Colonial Strategies to Destroy Palestinian Nationalism

Tikva Honig-Parnass
Race Class 2003 45: 68
DOI: 10.1177/03063968030452005
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Commentary

Israel's colonial strategies to destroy

Palestinian nationalism
By Tikva Honig-Parnass
The motivation that underlies the settlement in the '67 Occupied Territories of ninety newly converted Peruvian Indians to Judaism does
indeed reect a `demographic panic' within the Israeli establishment.1
This panic has strengthened since the cessation of the Oslo process
and the outbreak of the Palestinian uprising (intifada), two and a
half years ago. Demographic statistical forecasts which have been
repeatedly publicised in the mass media and at professional conferences
hosted by Israeli universities and security research institutions indicate
that, by the end of the current decade, there will be parity in numbers
between Jews and Arabs within the area of historic Palestine between
the river Jordan and the Mediterranean. (This area comprises the '67
Occupied Territories and the state of Israel.) Moreover, in ten to
twelve years, Palestinians will be the majority in this area, even if no
refugees from the 1948 expulsion and the '67 war return.2 However,
the major efforts to surmount the `demographic issue' which has
been accepted as such by all Israeli governments of both `Left' and
Right consist of different versions of the Oslo framework. Namely,
a Palestinian bantustan is to be established alongside the JewishZionist state a state to which camouaged apartheid is integral.

Sustaining the Zionist-colonialist system

Underlying the overt demographic discourse over the necessity for
keeping the `Jewish identity' of the state of Israel, or the necessity of
defending against the `danger of extermination' that supposedly awaits
Race & Class
Copyright & 2003 Institute of Race Relations
Vol. 45(2): 6885 [0306-3968(200310)45:2;
6885; 38491]
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69

Jews living under a Palestinian majority, is the crucial problem which

confronts the Zionist colonialist state. That problem is how to sustain
its rule over the Palestinians and force them to accept the place assigned
to them within a Zionist-colonialist system which, under US hegemony,
has long served as the gendarme of the Middle East. Israel's aim of
destroying the Palestinian national movement is in accordance with
the US's traditional policy in the Middle East, which strives to liquidate
any national project that threatens the `stability' needed for the continuing smooth exploitation of Middle East oil reserves. The military
re-occupation of the '67 Occupied Territories, which took place after
Israel's Operation Defensive Shield in April 2001, was marked by the
fact that, this time, Israel openly abrogated responsibility for enabling
the provision of any social services, while continuing its brutal oppressive measures. This was largely in response to the growing resistance to
the US-Israeli scheme, both within the '67 Occupied Territories and
inside Israel, for putting an end to Palestinian nationalism.
The idea that the mass transfer of Palestinians from Israel and from
the '67 Occupied Territories is a decisive `solution' has been looming in
Zionist discourse, explicitly or implicitly, since the inception of Zionist
colonialism. There is plentiful evidence that the danger that such a
transfer will be effected is more acute than ever, given the meagre prospect that the US `road map', even if implemented, will bring an end to
Palestinian resistance. The international conditions that, in the past,
were not ripe for such a move will, no doubt, prove more favourable
in the new Middle East that is emerging after the occupation of Iraq
and in which the US will continue its `anti-terror' war against Syria
and Lebanon, Israel's neighbours.3
The Jewish-Zionist state, however, has developed more hidden and
sophisticated means of `internal transfer' in order to dispossess Palestinians of their lands and livelihoods. The `Judaisation' of these lands
throughout Israel has resulted in 93 per cent of them being dened as
`state lands', at the disposal of Jews alone. The 3 per cent of land left
in the private ownership of Palestinians is gradually being stolen by
the state in order to complete Palestinian connement to small enclaves,
surrounded by Israeli settlements.
The pattern of escalated internal transfer in the '67 Occupied Territories demonstrates how Israel's military power makes the issue of
numerical majority somewhat marginal. The construction of a system
of separation walls destined to encircle the West Bank from both the
west and the east and to fragment it into a vast number of disconnected
towns and villages, which will be cut off from their cultivated lands,
is already well advanced. Particularly important to Israel are those
areas on the western part of the mountain groundwater basin the
large water reservoir originating in the West Bank whose water ows
underground to
the centre of Israel. The Labor governments of the
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1970s located the rst approved settlements in areas dened as `critical

locations' for sinking wells. The Jewish settlement of Elkana, which will
now be located on the west side of the wall, along with lands which were
cut off from the Palestinian villages of Bidiya and Mas'ha, was one
such settlement. It was founded under a plan misleadingly entitled `preservation of the sources of the Yarkon [river in Israel]'.4 Since the 1967
occupation, Israel has prohibited Palestinians from digging new wells,
but in the lands of these two villages, as well as in lands already cut off
from Qalqiliya and TulKarem in the north of the West Bank, many
wells that were in operation before 1967 still exist. If these were to continue to be at the disposal of Palestinians, they would somewhat reduce
the volume of water that Israel can take.
Thus, throughout the years since the signing of the Oslo Accord
(1993) and the Paris Accords (1995), the present situation, which
ensures Israel's indirect rule over what has been left for a future `Palestinian state', has emerged. The full economic integration of the '67
Occupied Territories into Israel has laid the basis for completely subsuming all of historic Palestine under Israeli colonial rule.

The `Jewish-democratic' state

However, the emerging reality of unied rule over all of Palestine has
not erased the distinct boundaries of the Israeli colonial state in respect
of social institutions and most aspects of Palestinian daily life. This
includes the difference in status between Israel's Palestinian citizens
and that of their brethren in the '67 Occupied Territories. What this
implies is the need to differentiate clearly between demographic
discourse and the demographic war being carried on against the Palestinians. Within Israel, the overt use of sheer power is much more difcult than it is across the Green Line. The representatives of the
prevailing political culture, and those who manufacture consent to it,
have desperately been trying to prove that there is no essential contradiction between the two elements of the denition of the state of Israel
as `Jewish-democratic'. In addition, a large group of `progressive'
secular academicians and intellectuals who support the `Peace camp'
have been similarly involved in studies aimed at proving that there is
no contradiction in Israel being dened as `a Jewish-democratic' state.
Usually this group bases its arguments on the misleading claims that
the Jewish people have the right to `a nation state' like any other
people and that the `Jewish identity of the state' and the privileged
status of its Jewish citizens do not harm the individual liberal rights
of its Palestinian citizens.5
But Israel is not just another nation state. According to the denition of the state anchored in its law, Israel is not the state of its citizens
as is England Downloaded
or France
but the state of the Jewish nation. Jews all
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71

over the world receive full citizenship on immigration to Israel, while

the indigenous Palestinian residents have second-rate citizenship
status. Even more signicant is the fact that the boundaries of the
collective, which dene entitlement to full citizenship who, in effect,
belongs are determined by the Jewish religion and Halacha: that is,
`a Jew is someone who was born to a Jewish mother or converted to
Judaism according to Halacha procedures'. Thus, in a society in
which Jewish identity constitutes a necessary condition for belonging
to the political community, the Palestinian minority is excluded from
the national consensus expressed in the central Zionist goals of the
state. That state was `established by the Jews for the Jews' (including
the ingathering of the exiles, the Jewish settling of the land) and by a
set of laws which are designed to guarantee the Jewish-Zionist nature
of the state, such as the law of return, the law of citizenship and the
law of Israeli lands.
From its inception, the Jewish-Zionist state was preoccupied with
camouaging its structural apartheid in order to preserve a `democratic' image for both external and internal consumption. The original
acceptance of Israel into the UN was conditional on its promise to
grant equal rights to the remaining Palestinians who survived the
Nakba and expulsion of 1948 and to implement UN Resolution 194
on the right of return. The long-standing critical examination of racist
policies towards Palestinians in Israel has strengthened recently. However, the Israeli public at large adheres to the `democratic liberal' image
of Israel, which is perceived as the victim in the Israeli-Palestinian
conict. The widely held commitment to Israel's hegemonic ideology
is imbued with the hypocritical tradition of the Zionist Labor movement which justies Zionist colonialist and racist policies by invoking
universal values of justice and equality.
Similar wide agreement exists over the `Jewish' part of the denition
of the state of Israel, which is essentially religious. Indeed the supreme
Rabbinate the institutionalised part of religious Jewry to which Israel
transferred state authority regarding personal and family affairs was
actively involved in the Peruvian project. However, it is not only the
leaders of non-Zionist orthodox groups and parties, such as the
Mizrahi Shas and Ashkenazi Yahadut Hatora, who object to a policy
of the state orchestrating mass conversions aimed at creating a majority
of `Jews' in Palestine/Israel, but wide groups of secular Zionists as well.
Zionist hegemonic ideology which is based on an essentialist perception of the Jewish nation, its `historic right' to the land of Israel and the
common lot of diasporan Jews throughout the centuries cannot allow
the `intentional creation of a nation' on a large scale.
For Zionism, even at its peak of secularity, needed Jewish religion
and its most `genuine' representatives (the ultra-orthodox stream) to
delineate the boundaries
of the national collective and grant `ultimate'
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legitimacy to colonisation in Palestine. Since its inception, Zionism has

repeatedly had to explain to itself and the international community
why it chose `the land of Israel' as its target territory for colonisation.
Kimmerling emphasises that `from the beginning, the Zionist project
was made captive [by this choice]... For then neither the nation nor
its culture could be successfully separated from the religious context.
This has been so even when its prophets, priests, builders and ghters
saw themselves as completely secular'.6

From Oslo to the `road map'

The Oslo Accords were intended to ensure the persistence of the two
strategies of control over the Palestinians on both sides of the '67
border: a bantustan Palestinian state alongside a covert apartheid
regime in Israel. But the assumptions which underscored the Oslo
Accords have been refuted by the Palestinian resistance, which takes
different forms inside Israel and the '67 Occupied Territories. No
Israeli governments, Likud or Labor, have ever demanded the annexation of the '67 Occupied Territories under direct Israeli sovereignty.
The US-Israel bantustan solution was seen by the architects of the
Oslo `market solution' and the Israeli bourgeoisie (which supported
it wholeheartedly) as an optimum solution to the Palestinian national
question which was mistakenly perceived as relevant to the '67 residents alone. The `48 refugees in the camps of the Middle East and
diasporas, along with the Palestinian citizens of Israel, were excluded
from the Oslo `solution'.
However, the persistent Palestinian adherence to the right of return
continues to be of utmost concern to Israeli policy- and decisionmakers, who demand it be renounced as a condition of each and
every suggested solution to the conict. The determined popular uprising in the Occupied Territories, of which the suicide phenomenon is
only a part, has rendered previous means of oppression inefcient.
The resistance consists of the military wings of all political factions,
secular as well as Islamic, and includes parts of Fatah itself, the political
faction headed by Arafat.7 It is directed not only against the Israeli
occupation but against the ofcial leadership which signed the Oslo
Accords, part of which now accepts the US-Israeli diktat in the form
of the `road map'. The resistance reects the geographic-class divisions
of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with its most militant expressions
concentrated in the refugee camps and among the proletarianised
villagers in the north of the West Bank and the south of the Gaza Strip.
Another assumption underlying Oslo that was refuted was the belief
that the `Israelisation' of the '48 Palestinian citizens of Israel is
complete; that their separation from their people by the '48 Nakba
resulted in the loss
of their national identity; that Israel's policies of
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73

marginalisation have created an atomised, disintegrated community

which accepts both second-class citizenship and the de-development
policies of all Israeli governments committed to the aims of the Jewish
state.
However, alongside the deepening of national identication and
solidarity among Palestinian citizens of Israel with their brothers' and
sisters' uprising (reected in the unprecedented militant protests in
October 2000 in which thirteen Palestinians were killed), we are
witnessing an ever-widening demand for collective national rights.
This is particularly so among the younger generation who are not satised any longer with demanding `individual citizen's rights'.8 The rejection of the demand for individual rights and its replacement with
the demand that Palestinians in Israel be recognised as the national
minority of a `homeland' and granted `collective rights' is rightly perceived by the Israeli establishment as a challenge to the Jewish-Zionist
state. The concern which this demand has raised among the whole of
Jewish society Right, centre and Left has been followed recently
by government-initiated legislation and policy aimed at delegitimising
the genuine national leaders of Palestinian society and destroying
political and social self-organisation within it. This has also included
attempts at redening Palestinian citizenship in ways which further
empty it of its already limited political content.
The understanding that the resistance of all sections of the Palestinian people will not die away has underscored the total war declared
by the Likud-Labor government established a few months after the
intifada broke out.9 This war is now led in full force by Sharon's
right-wing government, which Labor is waiting for an opportunity to
join so as to implement the `road map'. Indeed, most of the Israeli
`Peace Camp' (including its supposedly radical elements) that supported
Oslo supports, in principle, this road map to disaster.
Many misleadingly dene the Israeli political parties of Labor and
Meretz as `Left' that is, they are seen as holding non-racist political
and economic positions and adhering to a just political settlement
with the Palestinians. However, the entire concept of what is `Left'
and what `Right' is totally distorted in the Israeli political scene because
of the central role that the Labor Zionist movement played in developing Israel's capitalism and Zionist colonialism. This includes the settlement of the '67 Occupied Territories.
The nationalist-ethnic-class system that Mapai (forerunner of the
Labor Party) began building soon after 1948 is comprised of a capitalist
class which consists mainly of European (Ashkenazi) Jews and a Jewish
working class, the majority of whom are Mizrahim (Jews who came
from Arab countries in the Middle East and North Africa), plus the
Palestinian citizens of Israel. The latter are part and parcel of the Israeli
class system: they
were forced to pass through a proletarianisation
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process even harsher than that experienced by the Mizrahim. Their

lands were conscated by the state and oppressive policies marginalised
them economically, socially and politically. They occupy the lowest
echelons of the working class and form the most impoverished communities with the highest unemployment rates below the Mizrahim. The
Labor Party was also the guiding force in effecting the transition to a
neo-liberal economy, beginning in the mid-1980s, which led to the
Oslo Accords signed by the late Labor prime minister Itzhak Rabin.
Today, there is no difference between the economic policies of Labor
and Likud, both of which have wholeheartedly embraced neo-liberalism. Both agree in principle on the existential need for the `war against
terror' in the Occupied Territories and see it as part of the global US
war, which they support. They agree, in essence, on the `solution' to
the `conict'.
Similarly misleading is the self-claimed `enlightenment' of the
Ashkenazi middle-class `Left' of Israel, for its orientalist discourse
emphasises its capacity to express solidarity with the Palestinians, in
opposition to the assumed racism of the `backward' Mizrahim. The
wide-ranging consent over the semi-fascist political culture of Israel,
in which commitment to the `security' of the state has supremacy
over any human values, has been produced and sustained by the
Ashkenazi bourgeoisie. It is they who have based the social and economic oppression of the Mizrahim on a racist conception of their
Arab culture. And it is they who have rendered the acceptance of `Israeliness' by their Mizrahi underdogs conditional on the most blatant
hatred of Palestinians.10 Just as it succeeds in preserving its victimised
identity in respect of the Israeli-Palestinian conict, the Zionist state
preserves its Jewish `democratic' image as well.
The colonialist Zionist state has indeed developed a most complex
and intricate system of control, combining brutal force with an ideology which recruits the single-minded commitment of a united settler
society to the cause of destroying Palestinian nationalism.
May 2003
Tikva Honig-Parnass was editor of News from Within for over ten years and has been coeditor of Between the Lines since September 2000. She has long been active in anti-Zionist,
socialist frameworks and in the struggle against the occupation.

References
1 David Landy, `90 Inca Israeli-Jews: recruiting for Israel's demographic war', Race &
Class (Vol. 44, no. 4, 2003).
2 Tanya Reinhart, `Sophisticated transfer', Yediot Aharonot (10 March 2003); these
are the pre-Oslo gures for 1993, as quoted in Haim Gvirzman `Two in the same
basin', Ha'aretz (16 May 1993). According to the Palestinian Hydrology Group,
at present, out of the annual recharge of the western part of the mountain groundDownloaded from rac.sagepub.com by Sotiris Roussos on October 8, 2012

Commentary

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5

6
7
8
9
10

75

water basin which is 362 million CM/year, the total Palestinian withdrawal is only
22 million CM/year <www.pengon.org, Report #1>.
Anthony H. Cordsman, `Peace and war: Israel versus the Palestinians' (Washington,
Center for Strategic and International Studies, 9 November 2000). Also see Shraga
Elam `Peace with violence or transfer', Between the Lines (Vol. 1, no. 2, December
2000) and `Sharon's plan is to drive Palestinians across the Jordan: an interview
with Martin Van Creveld', Daily Telegraph (28 April 2002).
Tanya Reinhart, op. cit.
Ruth Gavison, `The Jewish state: principle, justication and aspired image', Tchelet
(Autumn, 2002, Hebrew); Sami Samooha, `Ethnic democracy: Israel as the JewishArab prototype', in Ruth Gavison and Dafna Hacker (eds), The Jewish-Arab
Rift in Israel: a reader (Israel Democracy Institute, 2000, Hebrew); Sami Samooha,
`Minority status in an ethnic democracy: the status of the Arab minority in Israel',
Ethnic and Racial Studies (Vol. 13, no. 3); and Binyamin Noiberger, `Democracy
with four stains', in Yossi David (ed.), The State of Israel: between Judaism and
democracy (Israel Democracy Institute, 2000, Hebrew).
Baruch Kimmerling, `Neither democratic nor Jewish', Ha'aretz (27 December 1996).
Touc Haddad, `After two years of Intifada: chronicles from the polity of the periphery', Between the Lines (Vol. III, no. 19, December 2002).
Dan Rabiniwitz and Khawla Abu Bakr, The Stand Tall Generation: the Palestinian citizens of Israel today (Keter, 2002).
Tikva Honig-Parnass, `Zionism's xation: war without end', Between the Lines (Vol. II,
no. 18, October 2002).
Sami Shalom Chetrit, Between the Lines (Vol. III, no. 20, February 2003).

Examining the success of the

British National Party, 19992003
By David Renton
The local council elections held across most of the UK in May 2003
were a breakthrough for the far-Right British National Party (BNP).
Yet the BNP's successes passed largely unexamined in the mainstream
media. Thirteen new BNP councillors were elected, seven in Burnley,
two in Sandwell, one in each of Dudley, Calderdale, Stoke and Broxbourne. These areas, apart from Broxbourne (home counties), are
in the midlands or the Yorkshire-Lancashire belt.1 BNP leader Nick
Grifn secured 993 votes in Oldham Chadderton North, although
without winning the seat. Around ten thousand people voted for the
BNP in Sunderland, in the north-east. Another BNP splinter, the Freedom Party, won a seat on South Staffordshire District Council, with
641 votes. The results were a consolidation of BNP gains going back
to the 2002 elections; between May 2002 and January 2003 it won
ve council seats. The pattern is reminiscent of that in France in the
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