Israel's Apartheid Continues

  

  Benjamin Netanyahu is at it again. He is not content, apparently, with the continuing blockade of the Gaza Strip, with the government-sponsored construction of illegal settlements on Palestinian soil, with the occupation of the State of Palestine itself in violation of any semblance of international law, and with the periodic brutality of the Israeli armed forces in their fruitless assaults on Palestine and her people. No, none of this is enough for this genocidal warmonger - now he is to make the Palestinian people second-class citizens in their own lands.

  A bill currently going through the Israeli parliament will make Jewishness a condition of the 'national rights' of Israel. For the 25% of the population who are not, including the Palestinians who live under Israeli occupation, lesser 'civil rights' will still be available - according to Netanyahu - but they will be officially, legally second-class citizens. The bill also bans the flying of the Palestinian flag and a number of other measures dressed up as counter-terrorism but in reality targeting the oppressed Palestinians.

  This bill is so blatantly ridiculous, even Netanyahu's fellow Likud party member and President of Israel Reuven Rivlin has come out against it, calling it 'unnecessary' and 'harmful' and pointing out that it will play into the hands of Israel's critics. Damn right it will: this is further evidence of the Likud government's ultra-Zionist, far-right agenda to crush the Palestinian people out of existence - or at least, out of Israel.

  The ridiculous thing is, the quickest way to remove the Palestinians from Israel, halt the majority of the inter-community violence in the region and make the bill truly unnecessary would be to recognise Palestine's sovereignty and accept the two-state solution - but that is something Netanyahu will not do. Meanwhile, Palestinians - who  have always been treated as second-class citizens in Israel - will not take this new legal confirmation of their status lightly. One commentator, Abu Azzan Saud, went to far as to call this 'the beginning of the third intifada'. 

  So, more deaths to come, then, on the back of a law allegedly designed to reduce the killing. Welcome to Netanyahu's apartheid state.

Israel's Holocaust

  Back in March I wrote an article on Israel's heavy-handed response to what was then the most recent bout of Palestinian rocket fire into the Jewish State, and the pressing need for talks to take place for a two-state solution. It is now July, and the past three weeks have seen a resurgence of the decades-old conflict on a scale not seen since the pre-Israeli election massacres of Dec '08-Jan '09. 


How Things Stand

  Before we turn to my analysis of the situation, let's have a look at the numbers. Bear in mind, the latest bout of violence - christened Operation Protective Edge by the IDF - began on 08/07/2014.

• Palestinian Deaths: 771 (16:11, 24/07/2014) inc. 605+ civilians (08:00, 24/07/2014)
•                                                                        of which: 132+ children (21:35, 23/07/2014)
• Palestinian Injuries: 4,750 (16:11, 24/07/2014)
• Palestinians Displaced: 140,000 (16:11, 24/07/2014)

• Israeli Deaths: 35 (24/07/2014) inc. 3 civilians (24/07/2014)
• Israeli Injuries: 178 (12:00, 15/07/2014)

  I hate to have to reduce the deaths of real people to mere statistics like this, but the volume of casualties is simply too high to go into details (although the Telegraph has created a thought-provoking spread showing the names and ages of each dead Palestinian child). Each of these deaths - all 806 of them - is a tragedy. But these killings are no accident. They are a result of the policy of Benjamin Netanyahu's government towards Gaza - that it is the stronghold of Hamas, and as such its people are legitimate targets. 

  Netanyahu and his cronies don't seem to care how many civilians or even children die - as long as they pick off a few Hamas fighters. The fact that well over three-quarters of all Gazan casualties have been non-combatants does seem seem to even register - the tanks keep rolling, the missiles keep coming. The deaths keep mounting up. Seventy-six people have died today. 

Netanyahu's Purpose

  The word 'Zionist' is a loaded one. Those who decry Israel's government as Zionist extremists are often accused of being anti-Semitic, but the claim is perfectly legitimate. Zionism is, at its basic level, simply the belief that the State of Israel should exist in its present location. This, in an of itself, is not a particularly extreme view. But Netanyahu's party, Likud, and its partners in the ruling coalition represent something more. 

  Likud are Revisionist Zionists. This ideology originally called for Jewish control of the entirety of the old British Mandate of Palestine - including present-day Israel, the West Bank, Gaza and Jordan. The claim to Jordan has largely been dropped, but Likud and their fellows still desire Israeli control over the Palestinian territories. 

  Netanyahu does not want peace - that fact is self-evident. He broke off peace talks with the Palestinians in April after the last flare-up of the conflict and has repeatedly denied Palestine and Gaza in particular the justice it deserves. Hamas' rejection of the most recent ceasefire proposal last week is highly regrettable, and they must accept part responsibility for the civilian deaths since then, but it is understandable that the organisation does not trust Netanyahu when his party's ideology is built around the conclusion of Israeli conquest of the Palestinians' remaining land.

The Consequences of Fascism

  The Israeli government's persecution of the Palestinians has gone on since the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, but it is growing seemingly worse under the rule of the fascist Netanyahu. And, no, to call this man a fascist is not,as some have claimed, anti-Semitic - the comparison is exact. His government has advanced a nationalist agenda to force the Palestinian people onto smaller and smaller areas of land, provoking them to violent response and then launching overwhelmingly heavy-handed responses to attempt to crush their resistance. In the Jewish settlements in the West Bank, corporate exploitation of poor Palestinians is rife as major companies collude with the government to take advantage of this source of cheap labour. Palestinians are second-class citizens within their own homeland.

  And they are not the only victims. In France this week, a protest against the Israeli onslaught transformed into anti-Semitic rioting directed at the local Jewish population. Israel's brutal actions are playing right into the hands of groups such as the Front National and other extreme-right Europeans who are able to use them to incite violence against the blameless local Jews. It is a sad fact, but a fact nonetheless, that the actions of the 'Jewish State' are considered by many to be the fault of all Jews. Netanyahu cares as little for his own people outside Israel as he does for the Palestinians trapped within it.

Hope?

  But the tables are turning on this despot. The programme of oppression and ethnic cleansing which this vile man has made his mission is drawing more and more condemnation. Even the UK government, which - along with the USA and Australia - has shamefully backed Likud's war, has warned Netanyahu that the West is losing sympathy for his country's actions. Within Israel, and from amongst the wider Jewish community, groups like Jews for Justice for Palestinians are growing and are criticising more heavily the murder being done against their will but in their name. Netanyahu's agenda is looking more and more precarious.

  As long as the USA and the UK continue to fund the Israeli war machine, we will not see the end of this bloody struggle. Likud and its partners will continue to persecute the people of Palestine until they no longer can. It is up to the people of Israel to push for a change in their government's brutal policy, and for the rest of the world to force their own governments to withdraw their support for this fascist regime and push for a two-state solution, so that Jews and Palestinians might live side-by-side in peace. The beginnings of this shift are already being felt - let us not lose momentum, but continue onwards. For while Israel remains an apartheid state, and Netanyahu's holocaust continues, we will never live in a world where peace and freedom reign.

Blood On the Sands

  On Wednesday, a barrage of rockets was fired by Gaza-based Palestinian militants into the southern part of Israel. Later that day, the Israeli government launched retaliatory airstrikes on twenty-nine sites in the Gaza Strip in an attempt to destroy the culprits. For a wonder, no-one was killed - this time.

  But since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 countless people - soldiers and civilians; citizens of Israel, Palestine, Egypt, Syria, the Lebanon and other countries further afield - have perished in the conflict which has been a central feature of the Middle Eastern political landscape for long, painful decades. Approximately 16,000 people have lost their lives. And for what?

  The roots of the conflict stretch back into ancient history. The expulsion of the Jewish people from their homeland of Judea after the Jewish-Roman War of 132-135 led this people to spread across Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, facing much persecution for many centuries. After the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany against the Jews during the Holocaust, the victorious Allies - particularly the UK and the USA - felt it was their responsibility to bring an end to the persecution of the Jewish people. They decided that the establishment of a Jewish state in the land of Eretz Israel, as long called for by the World Zionist Organisation, was the best way to ensure this.

  But there was one slight problem: Eretz Israel was part of the British Mandate of Palestine and home to 1.76 million people, over a million of them Palestinian Arabs with a history of conflict with the Jewish nationalists in the area dating back at least twenty years. Nonetheless, the State of Israel was created and achieved independence on the 15th of May 1948. A separate Palestinian state was also intended to be created, the two countries almost overlapping one another (see map).

  The next day, however, the fledgling nation was invaded by thousands of troops from neighbouring Arab  states, beginning the first in a series of intermittent wars which would tear the region periodically apart throughout the mid-twentieth century. During these conflicts, the land designated as Palestinian would be seized by Israel, along with other Arab territories (see above).

  Fast-forward to the modern day, and the divisions remain as deep as ever. There is religious conflict - many of the holy sites of both Islam and Judaism are the same and extremists on both sides demand that they be denied to the opposition; this on top of a deeper inter-faith conflict which has existed in the area for centuries and also includes Christian groups. There is ethnic hatred - anti-Semitism as a phrase cannot be used here, as both Jews and Arabs are Semitic peoples, but there is a definite and ingrained racial and nationalistic prejudice on the part of each group for the other. There is good old-fashioned economic self-interest - the richer Israelis make a good living out of exploiting the poor Palestinians. And there is severe political pressure on the leaders of both sides to continue the conflict - after all, the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty after the 1973 Yom Kippur War led to the assassination of Egyptian President Sadat for daring to conclude peace talks with the enemy.

  And all the while, the conflict escalates. Israel builds illegal settlements on Palestinian soil, destroys shipments of humanitarian aid and launches airstrikes at civilian targets in the hope of picking off a few Hamas fighters. Even as I write this, the Israeli Parliament has passed a law to extend military conscription. The Palestinians respond with missile launches, bombs and other terrorist tactics. And understandably so.

  Let me make this clear - I do not support the terrorism of Hamas. But I do understand it. Whilst there has been in the past clearly fault on both sides, the fact remains that the land Israel occupies is fundamentally not theirs. No Jewish state existed in Canaan for over 1,800 years. That is far too long a time to maintain any kind of legitimate hold over a territory. By that argument, a quarter of the world's surface is sovereign territory of the UK, most of Asia belongs to Mongolia and the coastline of the Mediterranean should be in Italian hands. This kind of reasoning is frankly preposterous. Added to this is the hugely heavy-handed tactics of the Israeli military in response to a relatively minor Palestinian threat - airstrikes in response to the launching of a couple of rockets is the kind of over-exaggerated response that no principle of self-defence can possibly condone. In recent years, casualties in the conflict have overwhelmingly been Palestinian fighters and - tragically - Palestinian civilians, even children.

  The fighting must end.

  Clearly it is no longer practical to remove the State of Israel from the region. The Jewish population is too entrenched and would be persecuted terribly in an Arab-dominated state. But, equally, the terrible racial, religious and socio-economic apartheid of the Israeli state must end. We have to, therefore, push for a two-state solution - one in which both sides have sovereign territory to call their own, so that both Israelis and Palestinians have the security to establish their homes and raise their families in peace. What is more, the Palestinian people must be compensated for the land that has been progressively stolen from them - involving, if not a return to the original 1947 UN plan, then at least a significant redrawing of the status quo.

  If this goal cannot be achieved, the conflict will rage on. More young men will lose their lives in pointless fighting. The lands considered holy by three major world religions will continue to be a battlefield for those same faiths to clash in fruitless war. There will forever more be blood on the sands of Canaan.