Labour must condemn Gaza bombing and ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem
The labour movement must unequivocally condemn the bombing of Gaza by the Israeli state. It is an act of the greatest inhumanity to target civilians, including children, residential tower blocks and the social infrastructure of Gaza, on the pretext of ‘defence’ against Hamas rocket attacks.
Gaza has long been an ‘open prison’, subject to an ongoing blockade by Israel. Nothing enters or leaves that small enclave – home to over a million and a half people – without the agreement of Israel. Gaza is not permitted to develop a ‘normal’ economy or social services that are able to provide for the needs and welfare of its residents. In effect, the entire population of the Gaza enclave are being punished collectively for having the temerity – fifteen years ago – to vote for Hamas, in protest against the corruption of the PLO.
Israel is a regional super-power
The collective punishment meted out by Israel is wholly disproportionate to the Hamas rockets attacks. Hamas has apparently killed a handful of Israeli citizens, including two Israeli Arabs, but in military terms, it is a feeble organisation alongside Israel, which is a regional super-power. Its attacks are no more than acts of desperation by a paramilitary force even unpopular among its own citizens, but anxious to be seen to be ‘doing something’ against Jewish encroachment on Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem.
In the last major bombing of Gaza by Israel, thousands were killed, including hundreds of children, while thousands more were made homeless. Only a few years ago, in 2018, when there were demonstrations on the Gaza side of the dividing line, Israeli troops deployed snipers with high-powered rifles to shoot children and paramedics among the demonstrators. An official UN inquiry into the near two hundred deaths at that time unequivocally condemned the Israeli state and called the deaths ‘war crimes’.
The latest round of bombings has already left scores of dead and injured in Gaza. It is almost a sick joke to hear Israeli ‘justification’ for the demolition of multiple residential tower blocks, on the grounds that they had ‘warned’ the residents ‘in advance’ of the bombings. Israeli does indeed possess the intelligence data on Palestinian homes and the capability of issuing telephone ‘warnings’, but that doesn’t lessen in the slightest the inhumanity of destroying the homes of hundreds of people – and so what, they calculate, if a few residents are too slow getting out and get killed in the process?
The actions of Israel have to be condemned outright. For too long western governments, with the British government in the forefront, have facilitated the march of the Israeli state towards a new apartheid arrangement. Even Israeli political leaders now use the ‘A’ word to describe what is happening.
Israel encroachments and settlements on Arab land
Israel effectively rules over two nations roughly equal in terms of population, one Jewish, the other mostly Arab. But it is only the former that has full and unfettered civil and social rights in the state. The government of Netanyahu has had Israel officially declared a Jewish state. The only problem with that, is that half of the population it controls are not Jewish.
Those Palestinian Arabs who happen to live in the official state of Israeli – that is the pre-1967 borders – are a fifth of the population, and are at best second-class citizens. Those Palestinians who live in the occupied areas of the West Bank have no rights at all, subject to legal and semi-legal Jewish settlements, army road-blocks, land confiscations, the complete strangulation of all economic life, and, not least, violence and terrorism from armed Jewish settlers.
https://conquer-and-divide.btselem.org/map-en.html
Gaza is in the worst position of all, like an open sore, its population hemmed in by Israel, by land, sea and air, its economy stifled, its supply of money, electricity and water all strictly rationed. It is the largest prison camp in the world. (See these slides for excellent detail about settlement and land confiscations).
It is as a result of the continued encroachment of Jewish settlers into Arab land, and especially in Jerusalem, that the latest round of violence has been set off. East Jerusalem has long been occupied by Arab Palestinians, many of them in the same area for generations. The Israeli state, with a nod and a wink to ‘unofficial’ settlers, has been using ancient ownership deeds, or the absences of property deeds, as a pretext to hound or to expel Palestinians from East Jerusalem.
It is ethnic cleansing we see in East Jerusalem
The Association for Civil Rights in Israel has documented the systematic harassment and deprivation of utility provision for East Jerusalem Palestinians. The policy of Israel in Jerusalem has to be called by its proper name – it is ethnic cleansing, and it is ‘justified’ by the Jewish religious extremist parties, and then backed by other political parties on the right, by the ancient beliefs of their faith.
What has further exacerbated the anger of Muslim Palestinians has been the encroachment of Jewish religious fanatics into the area known to Muslims as Haram esh Sharif, the area of what was once the site of the ancient (in Roman times) Jewish Temple. Today, the Haram esh Sharif is the site of the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa Mosque, two of the holiest sites for Muslims worldwide, after Mecca.
Netanyahu and the parties that support him in the Knesset are determined to make the whole of Jerusalem an exclusively Jewish city. In the longer run, they will seek to take over the whole of the Haram esh Sharif and that is what exercises the anger of Muslims.
Communal violence on the biggest scale for seventy years
The events in Jerusalem, the Hamas attacks on Israel and the renewed Israeli bombardment of Gaza have triggered communal disturbances in those parts of Israel where previously Jewish and Arab citizens lived side by side. Many towns in Israel with mixed populations have seen communal violence for the first time ever. Mobs of Jews have beaten Arabs to death and vice-versa in other areas.
Many Jewish civilians, as off-duty or reserve military personnel are armed, whereas Arab civilians generally are not. Mob violence between Israeli Arabs and Israeli Jews, like all such episodes will chaotic, unplanned and more than likely desperately one-sided, but that will not prevent the Israeli police and army dispensing ‘justice’ in the same one-sided manner against ‘its own’ Arab population.
Netanyahu only promises more blood and fire
The only answer being offered by the Israeli Prime Minister, Netanyahu, is more blood, fire and death. For the Israeli right wing it has ever been the case that one Jewish life is worth twenty Palestinians, and Netanyahu is responding to the outrage at the deaths of Israelis from Hamas rockets. Never mind that ten or fifteen times the number of Gaza residents have been killed by Israeli bombers and tank shells.
If Netanyahu now sends soldiers and tanks into Gaza, as he is threatening to do, it will be like pouring petrol on a fire. It will lead only to more deaths and destruction, more hatred, more anger and it will not move his government one inch closer to a permanent solution of the Palestinian ‘problem’. On the basis of capitalism, the future of Israel/Palestine offers only a grim picture of chaos, destruction, conflict and death.
Nothing this corrupt and lying politician can do will make the situation any better and all those politicians in the West who have courted and flattered him over the years bear a responsibility for his actions, even though they are now, belatedly and meekly asking him to be ‘restrained’.
Trajectory towards intercommunal violence
What has to be understood is that none of this violence – whether in the West Bank, in Gaza, Jerusalem or elsewhere in Israeli towns and cities – was unexpected or unpredictable. For decades the trajectory of the Israeli state has been towards intercommunal violence and conflict. It has been a policy facilitated by all those governments and political parties that are now holding up their hands in horror, but who in the past were completely unwilling to offer even the mildest criticism of Israeli policy.
Left Horizons wrote in an editorial in March 2019,
“The greatest irony – and one that seems not to have occurred to the Labour Friends of Israel – is that the policies of the Israel state are building up a powder-keg of opposition that will inevitably explode at some point. With 70 per cent youth unemployment, how can Gaza not blow up?
“Taken together with the ongoing military occupation of the West Bank and the confiscation of Palestinian land for exclusively Jewish settlements – and the increasing number of acts of terrorism and vandalism being perpetrated against Palestinians by armed settlers – the political future for Israel is anything but ‘secure’. Far from offering a ‘safe homeland’ for Jewish people, Israel is offering only war, social upheaval, death and destruction”.
The Labour Friends of Netanyahu
We have long argued that the campaign by the right wing of the Labour Party around the issue of ‘anti-Semitism’ has been a pretext to attack the left of the party and at the same time to mute or prevent any criticism of the state of Israel. ‘No’, the right wing have replied, ‘there is no embargo on criticising the government of Israel’. This issue will be a test of whether or not that is true. We will not hold our breaths for the Labour Friends of Israel – who could more accurately be described as the Labour Friends of Netanyahu – to condemn Israel’s murderous bombing of Gaza, any more than they have been prepared to even acknowledge Israel’s slide to apartheid.
Labour Parties must pass emergency resolutions
If that part of the world is ever to be a safe homeland for its residents – Arabs and Jews alike – it cannot be based on the exclusive rights of one group or another, and the labour movement should say so, openly and clearly. For the overwhelming majority of ordinary workers, of whatever cultural or religious background, their only modest ambition is for peace and prosperity for themselves and their children after them. It is only socialist ideas and the international labour movement that can effect a change in the maelstrom of Palestine/Israel.
Labour Party and trade union branches should discuss Gaza as a matter of urgency and resolutions should be passed on these lines:
- Condemning without qualification the bombing of Gaza and demanding an end to the economic blockade of the Gaza strip.
- Demanding an end to ethnic cleansing in East Jerusalem and to land confiscation in the West Bank.
- An end to exclusively Jewish settlements
- Demanding an end to Israeli apartheid and for a political solution that acknowledges full and equal rights of all, Palestinians and Israelis, Jews, Muslims and Christians and all religious groups, with no exclusivity for any one group.
- Calling for a ban on sales of all military supplies to Israel
- Calling for support for a campaign of Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions against Israel, until such time as a real political settlement is achieved.
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