Decolonial Solidarity in Palestine-Israel

Settler Colonialism and Resistance from Within

Teodora Todorova

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781786996435
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Colonialism & Post-Colonialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Recent years have seen the Israeli state become ever more extreme in its treatment of Palestinians, manifested both in legislation stripping Palestinians of their rights and in the escalating scale and violence of the Israeli occupation. But this hard-line stance has in turn provoked a new spirit of dissent among a growing number of Israeli scholars and civil society activists. As well as recognising Palestinian claims to justice and self determination, this new dissent is characterised by calls for genuine decolonisation and an end to partition, as opposed to the now discredited 'two state solution.' Through the analytical lens of settler colonial studies, this book examines the impact of this new 'decolonial solidarity' through case studies of three activist groups: Zochrot, Anarchists Against the Wall, and the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD). In doing so, Todorova extends the framework of settler colonial studies beyond scholarly analysis and into the realm of activist practice. She also looks at how decolonial solidarity has shaped, and been influenced by, the writings of both Palestinian and Israeli theorists. The book shows that new forms of civil society activism, bringing together Palestinian and Israeli activists, can rejuvenate the resistance to occupation and the Israeli state's growing authoritarianism.

1

Theorizing the Israeli settler colony

Since the inception of ‘the war on terror’ at the turn of the twenty-first century, the concept of ‘terrorism’ has become synonymous with the Palestinian struggle for decolonization. Simultaneously, state sponsored counter-terrorism strategies have come to legitimize Israel’s state violence. As a consequence, popular international media representations of the Israeli-Palestinian ‘conflict’ often evoke images of defensive Israeli military aerial assaults in response to aggressive acts of Palestinian terrorism (see Dor 2005; Hass 2002; Philo and Berry 2004 and 2011). International media and political focus on the violent, extraordinary and spectacular nature of Palestinian political violence has resulted in a disregard for and obscures the fact that Palestinians are more likely to engage in everyday survival or popular non-violent resistance to the Occupation. The protests against the West Bank Separation Wall which are the subject of Chapter 4, alongside the emergence of the transnational movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) discussed in this chapter, are flagship examples of the long-standing history of Palestinian-led popular resistance to Occupation and colonization.

The popular erasure and disavowal of the diverse nature of Palestinian resistance to colonization and dispossession can be partly attributed to the centrality of the colonial war-making state in sociopolitical and international legal frameworks. The Westphalian framework of sovereignty dictates that all decisions pertaining to war and peace are viewed as the prerogative of the sovereign state. In this context, political violence by non-state actors or less powerful states is often designated as ‘terrorism’, and hence illegitimate (see Phillips 2011; Topolski 2010). Edward Said (1988) further argues that the violence carried out by non-state groups seeks to imitate state sovereignty and its claim to the legitimate use of violence/terror for political purposes. As such, organized violence, whether carried out by the state or non-state groups, tends to rely on the same statist logic of doing politics. Karatzogianni and Robinson (2010) highlight that the statist logic is further evident in the state’s preference for dealing with militant organizations, whose hierarchical structures remind it of itself, rather than with more non-hierarchical and pluralistic civil society formations. This in turn traps the domain of politics in an endless cycle of violence and recrimination.

It is not inconsequential that the establishment of Europe’s colonial project of domination and dispossession of non-European peoples and territory coincides with the emergence of the doctrine of Westphalian sovereignty (see Anghie 2006; Bhambra 2016; Bhandar 2018). International law has since been and continues to be an expression of the rights of colonial war-making states to settle in indigenous land and protect their territorial acquisition with the use of legitimate force. This has rendered colonized peoples’ claims to self-determination and sovereignty and any indigenous resistance to colonization as ‘bound by the law and yet outside its protection’ (Anghie 2006: 744). International law and the state-centric decolonization projects continue to be shaped by the colonial origins of the international state system. The mandate system established by the League of Nations reinforced the notion of European colonial tutelage. The United Nations system remains embedded in this (post)colonial state-centric system of governance. The consequences for Palestine and Palestinian rights in the land has been the historic and continuing legitimation of and permissiveness towards Israel’s settler-colonial project (see also Erakat 2019).

The state-centrism of the international legal and political order has meant that since 1948 Israel’s state narrative has dominated understandings of the Israeli-Palestinian impasse, while the recognition of the Palestinians and their rights have been continuously reduced to a question of pending statehood. Prior to the outbreak of the First Intifada and the signing of the Oslo Accords, the dominant Zionist position on Palestine was characterized by the twin maxims of ‘a land without people, for a people without a land’ and Golda Meir’s infamous declaration that ‘there was no such thing as Palestinians’ (interview in The Washington Post 1969). Conversely, for the Palestinians, Jewish presence in Palestine and Zionist aspirations, in particular, have been undeniable since the onset of mass Jewish immigration in the 1930s and 1940s. On the other hand, recognition of the existence of Israel has been the hardest task. The Palestinians, who had consistently rejected partition plans for Palestine from the 1930s onwards, on the basis of their majority status in Palestine,¹ found themselves dispossessed and stateless in the aftermath of the Nakba and the creation of Israel in 1948, with the overwhelming majority of Palestinians expelled outside Palestine’s historic borders.

The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) established in 1964 by Palestinian refugees espoused ‘the elimination of the Zionist entity [Israel]’ and the diaspora’s return to historic Palestine as its primary goal. By 1969 the PLO, reconciled with an established and settled Jewish population in Palestine-Israel, declared its objective ‘the establishment of a secular-democratic state in historic Palestine’ which would guarantee the rights of Muslims, Christians and Jews alike. From the 1970s onwards the PLO increasingly shifted towards a two-state paradigm, earning international recognition as ‘the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people’ in 1974 – culminating in the 1988 Declaration of Independence which accepted a two-state solution based on the June 1967 borders of Israel, the Gaza Strip and West Bank (see Khalidi 2006). The signing of the Oslo Accords signalled the first sign of Israeli recognition of the Palestinians as a nation with a claim to sovereignty. Yet, after over five decades of military occupation and illegal Jewish settlement in the West Bank and Gaza Strip the status of the Palestinians in relation to the Israeli regime remains vastly unequal.

Since the outbreak of the Second Intifada in 2000, it has been widely accepted that the Oslo Accords and US sponsored ‘peace process’ had come to a halt or even an end. In many respects the Oslo period leading up to the Second Intifada consolidated Israel’s settler-colonial project in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPTs) and exasperated the oppression and exploitation of the Palestinians. From the beginning of Israel’s Occupation of the Gaza Strip and West Bank in 1967 until the signing of the Oslo Accords, the Israeli economy had been heavily reliant on Palestinian labour. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian workers from the Occupied Territories travelled every day to work in the low-waged employment sectors in Israel. The Oslo period created and consolidated Palestinian economic dependence on Israel and witnessed the beginning of the policy of ‘closure’: partially, then permanently, blocking Palestinian entry from the OPTs to Israel, a situation exasperated by the fragmentation of the West Bank into administrative zones A (11 per cent), B (28 per cent) and C (61 per cent),² and the construction of the Separation Wall since 2002 (see Hever 2010).

Workers couldn’t work, traders couldn’t sell their goods, farmers couldn’t reach their fields. In 1993 per capita GNP in the occupied territories plummeted close to 30 percent; by the following year, poverty among Palestinians was up 33 percent. (Klein 2007: 433)

According to Klein (2007), the wholesale exclusion of thousands of Palestinian labourers from the Israeli economy since 1994 was possible due to two major political factors. The first factor was the unprecedented immigration of a million Jews and others from Russia and the former Soviet countries from 1993 onwards. The new arrivals were instrumental in boosting the policy of ‘closure’ by taking over the low-paid jobs previously done by Palestinians. Their arrival was accompanied by the migration of impressively large numbers of nuclear scientist émigrés who joined Israel’s growing arms and homeland security sectors. Many of these new immigrants were relatively ignorant of the geopolitical context in which they found themselves and they subsequently made up a substantial proportion of the Jewish settler population in the West Bank because of the relatively cheap lifestyle on offer in contrast to living in Israel-proper.

The second aspect to closure, which in essence sealed the deal, for a want of a better phrase, has been the War on Terror waged by Western states post 11 September 2001. Israel’s experience in fighting a long-term conflict and defusing the Second Intifada placed it in a prime position to turn its experience to profit, making it a world leader in homeland security and the fourth largest arms dealer, bigger than the UK in 2006 (see Klein 2007). Nevertheless, war profiteering, which Naomi Klein terms ‘disaster capitalism’, has not benefited all Israelis equally. Since 2000, the gap between the rich and poor has been steadily growing with 25 per cent of Israelis living below the poverty line and child poverty standing at 36 per cent in 2007 (Klein 2007: 436). However, this picture is complicated by the fact that Palestinian-Israelis who constitute around a quarter of Israel’s citizens, despite their minority status in the polity, are disproportionately represented in the poverty statistics. By 2010 a closer examination of the above statistics shows that around half of those living in poverty in Israel were Palestinians and two-thirds of Israeli children living in poverty are Palestinian (Pappé 2011: 6).

In contrast, the Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank and annexed East Jerusalem, whose presence in the OPTs is considered illegal under international law, enjoy a lifestyle of luxury and prosperity not just in relation to the oppressed Palestinians but also in comparison to the average Israeli who became poorer during the same period. The Israeli economist Shir Hever (2010) argues that the incentives necessary to sustain the settlements, including lucrative tax breaks, generous government subsidies and a flourishing welfare state which has been dismantled in Israel-proper, coupled with huge security and infrastructural spending, have had a heavy financial toll on the Israeli economy, the impoverishment of which is only masked by the continuous functioning of Israel’s war economy (see also Hever 2019). As a consequence of these developments the ascendancy and primacy of the settlement project within Israeli politics and society has normalized the ultra-Zionist aspiration for ‘Greater Israel’ (territory encompassing all of historic Palestine).

Whereas occupied Palestinians were barred from entering Israel, by 2009 the number of illegal Jewish settlers in the West Bank and annexed East Jerusalem stood at over 500,000 (Central Bureau of Statistics 2009). The immediate effect of Israel’s policy of closure was a sharp rise in unemployment in the West Bank, with conditions markedly worse in the blockaded Gaza Strip. In contrast, the settlements are highly subsidized by the Israeli state and can afford to pay higher wages than can be found within the rest of the West Bank and which are considerably lower than the minimum wage in Israel. By the early 2000s the more than two hundred settlements in the West Bank boasted several hundred businesses, seventeen large industrial zones and generous tax incentives, with 30,000 Palestinian workers from the Occupied Territories employed in these industrial zones.³ Israeli labour laws which include minimum wage requirements and advanced health and safety regulations do not apply to Palestinian workers; neither does Palestinian labour law. Palestinian Trade Unions have no access to the industrial zones, and collective organization is almost impossible because the workers rely on hard to obtain security clearance permits. Furthermore, the Israeli army has been used to suppress protests over conditions. Despite the illegal and oppressive status of the settlements, and the exploitative conditions faced by Palestinian workers in the industrial zones, occupied Palestinians have almost no choice whether to work there or not (see Who Profits from the Occupation; Winstanley and Barat 2011).

Klein (2007) describes the consequences of the policy of closure as a process which rendered the Palestinians as ‘surplus humanity’. Andy Clarno attributes this phenomenon to the advent of ‘neoliberal apartheid’ which he defines as ‘a combination of extreme inequality, racialised marginalization, extensive securitization, and constant crisis’ (2017: 201, original emphasis). He further warns that by making Palestinian labour redundant since the 1990s, the neoliberalization of racial capitalism has removed the few structural barriers in place against settler-colonial elimination. The rapidly deteriorating humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip since Israel’s territorial disengagement in 2005, and the departure of the Israeli settler population, is a stark manifestation of this logic (also see Puar 2017). As a consequence, in the OPTs ‘there are Israeli citizens with full rights, and there are non-Israeli, non-citizens with non-rights’ (Amnon Rubinstein quoted in Eldar and Zertal 2007: xx). The above combination of continuing occupation, ever-expanding Jewish settlement in the Occupied Territories, the denial of the rights of occupied Palestinians and increasing threats against Palestinian-Israelis that they will be denationalized or ‘transferred’ if they do not demonstrate sufficient loyalty to Israel as a ‘Jewish state’ (see Lentin 2018; Ravid 2010; Tatour 2019) have resulted in the charge of ‘Apartheid’ (see Clarno 2017; Davis [1987] 1990, 2003; Pappé ...