Empire and the Middle East
Confronting wartime propaganda, the false history of Israel, the suffering of the Palestinian people, the need to dismantle systems of imperialism, apartheid, and genocide, and to find a real solution for the region
Propaganda
Following the attacks by Hamas militants against Israel on October 7th, a common narrative quickly emerged from the media and politicians. They told a story about attacks of unprecedented brutality. We were presented a narrow framework of how we were permitted to think about this conflict — that an unprovoked attack on “our closest ally”, the “only democracy in the Middle East”, had occurred, that “we stand with Israel”, that “Israel has a right to defense”, and that there was only one option on the table, a full-scale invasion to “dismantle the terrorist infrastructure” of Hamas.
Many images were shown of these attacks, on the news and internet — some videos showed acts which do qualify as war crimes, such as killing of civilians. But dramatic accusations were made against the militants, beyond the evidence that was shown. A gruesome rumor about “40 beheaded babies”, that loosely stemmed from statements by an Israeli newscaster, began to circulate, and was later repeated, and then retracted, by the sitting U.S. President. Stories circulated about families being bound together and burnt alive, of mass rape, of a pregnant woman being cut open, and of a baby being cooked alive in an oven.
Two months later, none of these claims have been substantiated. The claims about “40 beheaded babies” quietly disappeared as the released names of the dead from that day turned out to only include 1 to 2 infants, apparently killed by tank shelling from Israel’s response. No concrete evidence or even formal reports were supplied to the other stories mentioned — they either continued to be repeated without justification, or just stopped being mentioned altogether. And worse yet, attempts to verify these claims not only did not occur, but were actively blocked by the Israeli government. Images of burnt bodies were displayed soon after the attacks, but the true cause of many of those deaths became apparent later, when Israel later reduced their casualty count from 1,400 to 1,200, stating that 200 bodies of Hamas militants were burnt beyond recognition and erroneously counted as Israeli deaths, and when numerous testimonies emerged that Israel had fired at its own civilians from the ground, and even ordered airstrikes and tank fire against its own civilians.
An accurate and truthful accounting of events, for attacks that serve as a justification for a military campaign, is critical. Evidence of attacks, or of atrocities associated with them, is the sole basis on which a measured and appropriate response to them can be made. But what happens when additional claims, beyond what actually happened, gain traction with the public, and are used in the context of justifying a military campaign?
Extreme risks exist when this happens. Narratives about “brutality” and “savagery” have been used countless times in the past to dehumanize an entire ethnic group, and to serve as a pretext for wide-scale atrocities against them. Stories that reinforce harmful stereotypes — such as age-old stereotypes about people of color engaging in rape or wanton violence — have justified such atrocities for centuries, notably in the Jim Crow era in the United States.
Thus, the international community, the news media, and human rights organizations, bear a dual responsibility in times like this — on one hand, to fully evaluate, and appreciate the full extent and severity of atrocities — and on the other hand, acknowledging that false claims do circulate under these circumstances, and thus, to make sure that false claims of atrocities do not go unchecked and worsen the resulting violence.
Unfortunately, the opportunity for such a measured response vanished. Before the end of the day on October 7th, an onslaught of unprecedented brutality from Israel commenced, confirming the worst fears of long-time observers of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Israel’s Defense Minister announced nearly immediately, on October 9th, that the civilian population of the Gaza Strip would have their access to food, water, medicine, and electricity cut off, an alarming violation of international humanitarian law tantamount to a declaration of genocide.
The initial death toll figure given by Israel from October 7th — to whatever degree it was accurate to attribute it to the Hamas militants in the first place — was eclipsed within a few days, with 6,000 bombs dropped within the first week of Israel’s offensive.
International law mandates strict guidelines for military assaults in order to protect civilians — attacks that don’t distinguish between military and civilian targets, with strict guidelines for the proportionality of the value of targets against civilian losses of life, are prohibited. The scale of the assault that Israel unleashed, to meet these requirements, would imply an incredible scale of intelligence, as if they had identified every single location loosely affiliated with Hamas’s operations. But there was a deep contradiction with this logic — this enormous assault planned by Hamas, which had been “planned in broad daylight” for years — about which, as we’ve learned now, Israel had been given repeated internal and external warnings, as well as the literal plans of the attack — had somehow made it through Israel’s supposedly world-class military and intelligence apparatus.
For any impartial observer, it rapidly became clear that this evidence for military targets did not exist. That what we were witnessing was not precision attacks to cripple Hamas’s military capability, but rather, retributive mass murder. To take statements from Israeli officials at face value, in their unprecedented candor, it was a genocide. The justifications and “evidence” Israel gave of Hamas militants embedding their infrastructure in civilian areas did not even begin to excuse the sheer scale of airstrikes, which included attacks against every possible target conceivable — bakeries, flour mills, hospitals, schools, UN-run refugee camps, ambulances, water tanks, roads, and, in targeted areas, virtually every single housing unit. By the most recent count, over 45% of the Gaza Strip’s housing has been “destroyed or damaged” — including the vast majority of homes in northern Gaza City, the first area that came under attack.
Nor did Israel’s explanation of “human shields” make sense even on a basic ethical level. Since when does the use of so-called “human shields” — a very strange concept, when applied to guerilla forces simply being hidden within a city — actually justify wiping out a civilian population and destroying every single building in that city?
Clearly, Israel’s military, and associated PR agencies, were engaging in a major propaganda campaign to justify their destruction. In regards to the most well-publicized of their attacks against civilian infrastructure, such as hospitals and refugee camps, sloppy propaganda videos were produced to attempt to deceive the public that they were used for military purposes. Their strategy, it seemed, since they wanted to cause as much destruction to the structure of society in the Gaza Strip itself, was to simply attack targets and then manufacture justifications for it later, by bringing weapons and other props into these buildings after gaining control of the area, planting them in various locations, shooting a film showing their “findings”, and then releasing it to the internet and international press.
But they made huge mistakes in doing so. Their main military spokesperson, Daniel Hagari, famously pointed to an Arabic calendar and stated that it contained names of terrorists who had been using it as a check-in sheet for guarding hostages, inside the basement under Rantisi Children’s Hospital. Online fact-checking from Arabic speakers revealed within the hour that it was in fact just a calendar — the “names of terrorists” were in fact just the days of the week. In Al Shifa hospital, where Israel had staged a brutal assault and siege after claiming it was the center of operations for Hamas, the military carefully arranged small caches of weapons in a few rooms of the hospital, showed it to one media outlet, rearranged one of the scenes to replace the weapons in one spot, and then showed the altered scene to a different media outlet.
This supposed “command center” was never demonstrated — rather, videos were released depicting a tunnel leading to an underground room with a bathroom and air conditioner. The former Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, had gone on American national television days before and confirmed earlier reports that, in fact, Israel itself had constructed an underground bunker beneath the hospital long ago, seemingly discrediting any notion that their footage depicted anything incriminating at all. This full-scale assault on a hospital, one of the most explicit war crimes since World War II, seemed to have been based on no evidence at all.
The fabricated claims continued to pile up. The Israeli President, Isaac Herzog, claimed publicly that a copy of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” were found in a “children’s living room”. An apparently fabricated phone call was released, in which supposed Hamas militants discussed a plan to transport rockets inside a baby’s stroller. Whoever was coming up with the Israeli propaganda seemed fixated on a narrative that the worst form of evil would be to place military infrastructure in close proximity to babies — Israeli propaganda repeatedly reused this trope in attempts to vilify Hamas, seemingly unaware of how ridiculous it would seem to the audience of the propaganda.
This deep loss of credibility raised much deeper questions. To the many who cared enough to investigate the history of this “conflict”, after witnessing Israel’s killings of civilians, and the relentless propaganda campaign, it became obvious that there was far more to the history of the region. A hint from the Secretary General of the United Nations — that the attacks “did not happen in a vacuum” — describing 56 years of military occupation that had preceded them — prompted many to begin to investigate the rarely mentioned past of this conflict.
False history
What were were told at first were “unprovoked” attacks, in reality, followed a siege of the Gaza Strip that had been underway for 17 years. This land, sea and air blockade had been constructed purportedly to prevent weapons transfers, but in actuality blocked nearly all trade to the besieged Gaza Strip, including food, water, and medicine. This situation was described by Baruch Kimmerling, an Israeli sociologist, as “the largest concentration camp to ever exist”.
And despite a political division between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank since the beginning of that period, in 2006 — which had emerged as the result of a U.S. and Israeli-backed coup, after Hamas won a majority of seats in the election that year — a similarly brutal oppression, had existed throughout that time, and for decades prior, in the West Bank as well. The Palestinian territories as a whole had long been subjected to a brutal military occupation, a military legal system being imposed against the civilian population, random acts of violence by settlers and soldiers, and a crushing apartheid system resembling a modernized, high-tech version of South African apartheid, or the American Jim Crow system. The demands that were made by Hamas, in return for the hostages they had taken, turned out to be for an exchange for thousands of Palestinians who had been taken into Israeli prisons, including thousands of child prisoners over the years subjected to cruel and unusual punishment, a practice that had long been criticized as an institutionalized violation of international law, both regarding transfers of occupied populations, and regarding the treatment of child prisoners.
The establishment of the state of Israel itself had a far darker history than many in the West knew. Despite rampant public confusion and myths, in reality the foundation of Israel was that of a brutal settler-colonialist project. A mostly European population, between the late 19th century and 1948, had moved into a Middle Eastern country with aspirations of creating their own state, and executing a ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing.
Beyond even that, an even deeper problem became clear. A Western understanding of the Middle East as sort of an inherently war-like place exists, something which is inevitably associated with the largely Arab and Muslim population of the region, who, for whatever reason, had an inexplicable hatred of Israel and Western powers — in the words of George W. Bush, that “they hate us for our freedom”. But this explanation was nothing but a lie covering a dark history of imperialism in the region, where powers such as Britain, France, and the United States had long sought to establish their own power in the region for imperial control. The supposed “antisemitism” we were told was the basis of the conflict between Israel and other Middle Eastern countries, in reality, masked decades of atrocities committed by Zionist carpetbaggers, and then the Israeli government, against the indigenous population of the region, devoting huge military efforts into expanding their borders and influence throughout the region.
Early Zionism and Mandatory Palestine
Pro-Israeli individuals and groups have long pushed a vague narrative claiming ownership and indigeneity to the region of Palestine. Historically, Israel’s claims to the region are predicated on ancient history, with the Jewish inhabitants of the region — Arab Jewish people, at that time — having had the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah exist independently from roughly 900 B.C.E. to 720 B.C.E., after which point the Kingdom of Israel was destroyed, and the Kingdom of Judah came under the control of the Neo-Assyrian Empire until its collapse in 586 B.C.E., resulting in the Jewish population being exiled to Babylon. After the fall of Babylon in 538 B.C.E., much of the Jewish population returned to the region under Achaemenid Persian rule. This foreign rule continued for hundreds of years, first under Greek and then Roman rule, and then by the Byzantine Empire. The Jewish population largely vacated the area by the end of the 6th century — the beginning of the Jewish diaspora — and was inhabited predominantly by Arab Christians, and then Muslims, leaving roughly a 1400 to 1500 year gap between the period where Palestine was a majority Jewish area and the beginning of modern Zionism, a European movement, after centuries of pogroms and other atrocities suffered by Jewish people, advocating the conquest of the area of Palestine for the re-creation of a Jewish state.
The issue with that plan should be obvious. A population of 500,000 people had inhabited the region for a millennium and a half.
At the time of 1880, the truly indigenous Jewish population in Palestine — the “Old Yishuv” — were a mere 3% of the total population (see Wikipedia’s Demographic history of Palestine). Jewish “aliyahs”, or migrations to Palestine, began in the 1880s and continued until the creation of the state of Israel — largely, during this period, from Eastern Europe and Russia, with smaller numbers coming from Yemen and other Middle Eastern states.
In 1917, Arthur Balfour, the Foreign Secretary of Britain, issued the “Balfour Declaration” as a letter to Walter Rothschild, announcing the intent to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. This statement gave lip service to the current inhabitants of the land, but in private, Balfour was openly racist and explicitly disregarded their rights. Much has been written about his intentions — I recommend visiting the Balfour Project for primary source evidence and discussion — but suffice to say, they were not altruistic, with the primary motivation being strategic gain for the United Kingdom. Migration spiked dramatically following this declaration, with the British having gained control of Palestine as a result of the Sykes-Picot agreement, a secret treaty dictating how the region should be divided up following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I. The result of this migration, just before the end of the Mandate, was that the Jewish population in Palestine having reached 32%.
Tensions rose continually throughout this period. The early Jewish immigrants, particularly the European population, brought ideas and attitudes that treated the Arab population as lesser, forbidding them from working in factories or on farms owned by Jewish people. The Arab population was aware of the Balfour Declaration, the Zionist movement itself, and naturally resentful of the British occupation on its own.
A long list of massacres began to accrue. The conflict became significantly more heated after 1929. The “Western Wall”, known as the “Buraq Wall” in Islam and the “Wailing Wall” in Judaism, holds unique religious significance to each religion, and was depicted in contemporary Zionist literature as part of a fully built structure, symbolizing nationalist aspirations. A dispute over control of the site arose in 1928, leading to riots in 1929 leaving 133 Jews and 126 Arabs killed. After this, immigration continued to increase, prompted by the emergence of the Nazi party in Germany, as the Jewish Agency for Palestine and Nazi Germany reached the Haavara Agreement to facilitate Jewish emigration into Palestine, green-stamped by the British colonial administrator Arthur Wauchope, and as the United States halted Jewish immigration with the Emergency Quota Act.
Tensions continued to simmer until 1933, when riots broke out across cities in Palestine (Jaffa, Haifa, Nablus, and Jerusalem) following British suppression of a political demonstration in Jerusalem on October 13th against the ongoing immigration and the increasingly vocal intentions of the Zionist nationalists to claim Palestine. In 1936 again, the Jaffa Riots began and quickly spiraled into the Arab General Strike, with the Arab Higher Committee demanding that the British authorities end Jewish immigration and land transfer, as well as permit the establishment of a representative national government. The British colonial authorities reacted in a characteristically brutal way, ignoring all of the requests, imposing heavy fines, demolishing homes in Jaffa, and building a competing port in Tel Aviv to reduce dependency on the port in Jaffa that was affected by the strike.
At this point Jewish militancy reached a fever pitch. The Jewish population had established militant groups well before this point, at first ostensibly for defense, but they evolved into vigilante organizations characterized by the British authorities as “terrorists” (meeting the same criteria used today for that term). The Irgun group in particular — later to be merged, among with other militant groups, into the formal Israeli army today, the IDF — led a long series of bombings and massacres intended to gain the submission of the Arab population and to remove immigration controls and eventually to expel the British authorities. The list of these massacres is long — I point again to Wikipedia’s compilation of the attacks. Notably, these included the 1938 Haifa marketplace bombing, the 1939 Haifa Suk Quarter marketplace bombing, the 1946 King David Hotel bombing killing over a hundred in the building housing the British colonial authority, and the bombing of the SS Exodus.
By 1947, the British had come to the conclusion that their direct presence in the region was no longer in their interests. Britain requested a proposal from the UN on how to handle the two competing nationalist movements in the region. The UN formed UNSCOP, the UN Special Committee on Palestine, to issue that proposal. While the Jewish Agency for Israel sought to actively participate and influence these proceedings, Arab delegations didn’t accept its legitimacy, on the basis that it violated their right to self determination. This helped lead the committee to a highly biased conclusion. Despite that the Jewish population represented slightly under a third of the population, only held 6% of the total land (20% of the cultivatable land), the committee, in the 1947 UN Partition Plan for Palestine, proposed granting 57% of the land in Palestine to a new Jewish state.
Despite widespread claims otherwise, this was not actually a determination of law. It was a recommendation, issued via a non-binding resolution of the UN General Assembly, to the de-facto authority in the region at the time, the British Mandate for Palestine (i.e., the British Empire). Additionally, there were widespread reports of a campaign of threats and bribery by the pro-Zionist forces to influence the UN vote for that resolution.
And the British did not accept this plan. Ernest Bevin, the UK Foreign Secretary at the time, immediately rejected it, commenting:
The majority proposal is so manifestly unjust to the Arabs that it is difficult to see how, in Sir Alexander Cadogan’s words, ‘we could reconcile it with our conscience.’
Bevin, subsequently, was the target of an assassination attempt by the Irgun and the Lehi, as later declassified files revealed. The British announced the end of the Mandate on May 15th, 1948, declining to assist with the transition to a well-demarcated state, instead recommending to the two violently opposed nationalist movements that they should act peacefully and resolve their problems amongst themselves.
How, then, did the Israeli state come into existence, under the boundaries it claimed by 1949?
The Nakba
The deliberate ethnic cleansing of 700,000 Palestinians and over 500 villages began in March, 1948. This became known to Palestinians, and now much of the world, as the “Nakba”, a program known internally to the Israeli nationalists as “Plan Dalet.” This was two months before the beginning of the Arab-Israeli War, which began in May of that year. The planned campaign included the poisoning of villages with typhoid, the indiscriminate rape and murder of civilians, and numerous other atrocities. As a result, around 20,000 Palestinians were killed.
This history has been swept under the rug by a fantastical Israeli narrative that describes “a land without a people, for a people without a land”, or, “flowers blooming in the desert”. These extremely revisionist narratives present a near-mythical account of the creation of the state of Israel, omitting virtually all mentions of atrocities, and instead presenting the idea of an uninhabitable desert springing into life to welcome the presence of the Jewish people.
Given this erasure of history, bringing to light the severity of brutality and destruction that took place during the Nakba is of paramount importance. Many of the details remained classified until decades later, when access to classified files was finally granted to historians such as Ilan Pappe. A vicious program of depopulation, consisting of bombings of crowded civilian areas, aerial bombardments, infantry assaults on of villages, and as mentioned previously, poisoning of water supplies, sought to push southeastern from the predominantly Jewish-held coastal areas in the northwest, dividing the Palestinian territories and expelling their residents, supported by arms acquisitions from the United States and Czechoslovakia (Operation Balak).
The Arab League, watching the emergence of Zionist nationalism for the past decades, and finally beginning to receive refugees from Mandatory Palestine following the beginnings of the ethnic cleansing, came under internal public pressure in favor of military action against the burgeoning Israeli state. Their stated reasons for invading were recorded on May 16th in a cablegram to the UN Secretary General, calling for a one-state solution in Palestine in the absence of the British authority, and enumerating the grievances and misleading of the Palestinian population by the British (who, without question, had subverted the political self-determination of the Palestinians by the imposition of the Mandate for three decades).
The motivations for this war (the 1948 Arab-Israeli War) are another point of major historical distortion, so their stated intentions deserve careful examination. The Israeli narrative is, again, absurdly oversimplified, basically claiming that the Jewish population meekly declared independence, and then were belligerently invaded by the neighboring Arab states due to some fundamental prejudice against Jews. But the cited reasons for the war, a day after its initiation, include the upset of peace by Zionist militant aggression in Palestine, and the ongoing ethnic cleansing — the cablegram specifically cited the massacres that had already occurred, such as the “Deer Yasheen” (Deir Yassin) massacre.
The 1948 war largely failed to restrain or remedy the ethnic cleansing and mass seizure of land by the Zionist militants. A UN mediator appointed to oversee a ceasefire that began at the end of May, Folke Bernadotte, attempted to present a “middle ground” resolution to the conflict. This proposal was rejected by both sides, and Bernadotte was assassinated the next day, September 17th, by the Zionist militant group Lehi.
Battles eventually ceased with the 1949 Armistice Agreements, which outlined provisional borders between the nascent Israeli state and the other Arab nations. The Gaza Strip and West Bank, now occupied by Egypt and Jordan, respectively, now represented a major reduction of Palestinian-inhabited territory, even compared with the already enormous losses for Palestinians proposed in the 1947 Partition Plan (see this map for a comparison of the two).
Suez Crisis
The next major outbreak of hostilities was the Suez Crisis of 1956. The Suez Canal, a critical pathway for global trade and military operations, and thus of key interest to global powers, had been established as a French corporate project in 1858, and had long been under joint British and French control. But, in 1956, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser directed the closure of the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, describing it as its own territorial waters, and nationalized the Suez Canal, denying foreign ownership of the waterway.
Like many actions throughout history by Middle Eastern governments to rebuff Western imperial control in the region, this triggered a war. A coordinated military campaign against Egypt was launched by the “Tripartite” powers — Israel, the UK, and France. This campaign resulted in the temporary seizure of the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt — the large peninsula region bordering Israel. Soon after, Israeli troops did withdraw, and a UN-established force, the UNEF, with Egyptian consent, was given control over the region for its demilitarization.
The “Six-Day” War
The Suez Crisis set the stage for a critical event that would set the foundation for Palestinian history until the present — the 1967 Six-Day War.
Tensions had continued unabated since 1956. Israel had assured Jordan’s King Hussein that the armistice line between the two would be respected intact, amid tensions with militants who had been expelled to the Jordanian-controlled West Bank. However, on November 13, 1966, Israel responded to a mine attack from Fatah militants in the West Bank (killing three) with a major escalation. Israel mobilized 4,000 troops, sent 600 into Jordan, killing 16, destroying a Jordanian police post, and destroying the town of Samu with dynamite, including the town’s medical clinical, school, and mosque. The border between Israel and Syria proved to be contentious as well. Israel made repeated claims to the agreed-upon demilitarized zone between it and Syria as an area it would annex and cultivate. In April of 1967, they provocatively drove tractors into the region as part of this planned cultivation, with the intention of inflaming tensions and provoking a military response from Syria. This was attested to by Moshe Dayan, the Israeli Defense minister at the time:
“at least 80 percent” of two decades of border clashes were initiated by Israel. “We would send a tractor to plow some [disputed] area . . . and we knew in advance that the Syrians would start to shoot. If they didn’t shoot, we would tell the tractor to advance further, until in the end the Syrians would get annoyed and shoot. And then we would use artillery and later the air force also, and that’s how it was. (Washington Post, 1999)
The Syrian forces responded by firing upon the tractor, as the Israelis predicted. Those hostilities escalated into full-scale assaults, with artillery and tank involvement, and Israeli attacks on Syrian fighter jets. Israeli press internally went so far as to describe this as a state of war.
Egypt and Syria had at this point already signed a mutual defense pact the previous November. Egyptian President Nasser was told on May 13th via Soviet intelligence that Israeli troops were amassing on the Syrian border, seemingly a continuation of the previous conflict — this was only two days after Yitzhak Rabin had announced, on May 11, that:
The moment is coming when we will march on Damascus to overthrow the Syrian Government, because it seems that only military operations can discourage the plans for a people’s war with which they threaten us.
This report of an Israeli build-up was apparently false, but Nasser’s understanding of that seems to be a point of contention. Regardless, the next day, May 14, Nasser moved troops to the border of the Sinai and Israel, and on the 19th expelled the UNEF peacekeepers that had been stationed there with Egyptian consent since the Suez Crisis. Four days later, apparently anticipating an Israeli invasion, he also ordered a closure of the Straits of Tiran to prevent oil from reaching Israel — the closest thing to an act of war by any of the Arab powers. It was alleged by Israeli diplomats on May 27th that Egypt had planned to attack in Operation Dawn, but that this attack was called off — there appears to be little to support the theory that the attack was intended to occur beyond internal Israeli interpretations. Soon after this, on May 30, a mutual defense pact was signed between Jordan and Egypt.
These tensions, in the context of the traditional Israeli narrative of the war, give ample ground to promote an interpretation that the war was a case of Arab aggression. But, despite all the tensions, it was not one of the Arab countries that launched the initial strike — rather, Israel itself finally seized on the situation to launch a surprise air raid from the Mediterranean sea, obliterating Egypt’s air force in a surprise attack. This immediately granted them air superiority, a major upper hand which would prove decisive in securing their victory in the conflict.
With the evidence available today, it’s clear this was an illegal action in the absence of UN Security Council approval, and with key Israeli officials later saying that they didn’t believe Nasser intended to invade — for instance, Yitzhak Rabin, later Prime Minister and then Chief of the General Staff of the military, stated:
I do not think Nasser wanted war. The two divisions he sent to the Sinai in May [1967] would not have been sufficient to launch an offensive against Israel. He knew it and we knew it.
Menachem Begin, the Prime Minister of Israel between 1977 and 1983, also stated:
In June, 1967, we again had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai did not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.
As an interesting aside, Menachem Begin was regarded as a terrorist by the British in relation to his activities in Mandatory Palestine — he was refused a visa in 1955, being described as the “leader of the notorious terrorist organization Irgun,” the perpetrators of the King David Hotel bombing mentioned earlier — and this restriction was not lifted until 1972.
The character of the beginning of this war is incredibly important, because it illustrates one of the two fundamental fallacies at the heart of the Palestinian situation today (the other being that of the Nakba). The ensuing Israeli military advance, after the destruction of Egypt’s air force leaving the Arab countries openly vulnerable, led directly to Israel’s ongoing (and illegal, regardless of who initiated the war) annexations of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Syrian Golan Heights, and, until 1979, the Sinai Peninsula. The conventional Israeli narrative claims this was an excusable annexation of territory in a war that was defensive in nature, as a rightful penalty of war, “the way war goes,” or similar rationales. But the war was deliberately provoked, and followed by land annexations which, besides the Sinai, have still not been abandoned a staggering 56 years later. That includes the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Syrian Golan Heights, excepting the Sinai Peninsula, which was later traded back to Egypt in 1979. Israel went so far as to formally announce an annexation of Golan Heights, as its own territory, in 1979, a move that prompted international condemnation. Likewise, the international community, via numerous UN resolutions, continually condemned the ongoing settlement activity in the other territories mentioned.
Today, the West Bank has suffered the most visible erosion of territory since then, now carved up into scores of isolated enclaves surrounded by Israeli roads, checkpoints, and characterized by the perpetual violent expulsion of Palestinian residents by Israeli settlers, with either the tacit approval of the Israeli military or its active collaboration.
Two other events before and during the 1967 war bear mention as well — the attack on the U.S.S. Liberty on June 8, two days before the end of the traditional demarcation of the Six-Day War (June 10), and the development of a clandestine nuclear program by Israel, at least fifteen years prior, with an open standoff with the United States over the program having taken place in 1963. The existence of nuclear weapons under Israeli control today is widely acknowledged, though Israel has never formally acknowledged possessing them — something with represents an alarming double standard in regard to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Tensions remained extremely high throughout the end of the 1960s. Following their defeats in the Six-Day War, Arab nations in the 1967 Arab League Summit issued the Khartoum Resolution, outlining a stance of opposition to Israel, declaring opposition to its existence as a state, an intention of Arab unity, and a rejection of external influence and control over Arab states.
Stalemate and Capitulation
The “War of Attrition,” between Egypt, Israel, Jordan, and the PLO (the Palestinian militant organization that eventually evolved into the political coalition of Palestine, and presently the West Bank), continued from 1967 until 1970, with a formal escalation of war by Nasser in 1969. This brief war was waged in an attempt to force Israel’s withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula they had annexed in 1967. Nasser died in 1970, however, leading to the end of the war and Egypt failing to meet its objective.
By 1971, Egypt had already broken ranks with the Khartoum Resolution Nasser’s successor Anwar Sadat announced in February that he was willing to recognize Israel in return for the restoration of Egypt’s control over the Suez Canal and Sinai Peninsula. In reaction to this proposal, then-Prime Minister Golda Meir — who, as a side note, was infamous for this horrific quote:
We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.
rejected the proposal, even a committee she convened recommending it be accepted. The U.S.’s Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, Joseph Cisco, stated:
Israel would be regarded responsible for rejecting the best opportunity to reach peace since the establishment of the state
The Israeli Foreign Minister (Eban) stated that Israel would refuse to return to the pre-Six-Day War border lines on a “security” basis — a refrain that would be repeated over and over in the future for justification of any land annexation by Israel, including the day I’m writing this (December 1st), as Israel has just declared that it wants a “security buffer” following its destruction of the Gaza Strip.
This dynamic of annexation inevitably erupted into war yet again, this time the 1973 Yom Kippur War. At this point in history, while U.S.S.R. involvement in the region had been apparent for years, any previously covert or unclear U.S. involvement was now explicit, and the Middle East evolved into a hot-war front of the geopolitically dominant Cold War. Sadat of Egypt and al-Assad of Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel, apparently to regain some of the losses of the 1967 and 1969 wars. Despite early military successes, this evolved into yet another defeat.
By 1978, the dynamic had changed dramatically. Egypt, formerly in the broader sphere of Soviet and Arab influences, participated in the Camp David Accords, and in 1979 signed a peace treaty with Israel, specifying mutual recognition between Egypt and Israel, the return to Egypt of the Sinai Peninsula (and its demilitarization), and recognition of the Straits of Tiran and Gulf of Aqaba as international waterways, settling the question of the contested passage for the foreseeable future.
Diplomatically, these agreements represented a major shift towards the present status quo, in which the role of the United Nations became increasingly less relevant, and U.S. “mediation” in tandem with Israel — or more cynically stated, U.S. and Israeli projection of military force to manipulate the political dynamic in the Middle East — became the norm. The Camp David Accords and subsequent peace treaty both specified measures to be taken for a transition to Palestinian autonomy — described as a five-year transition in the Accords — which, as we can see today, never materialized — and which was rejected by the UN as invalid without the participation of the Palestinian people in the process, in UN General Assembly resolution 34/65 B.
Strategically, for the U.S. and Israel, this represented a capitulation by Egypt, and by extension, the broader region, toward the desired outcome of Western powers —de-nationalization and open access to the Suez Canal as a military and trade route, under its now firmly established status as an international waterway. Sadat may have thought this would work to his benefit, such as through U.S. arrangements for military aid to keep him in power — but in practice, it resulted in his assassination in 1981. Hosni Mubarak, his Vice President and successor, wounded in the attack, remained firmly in control of Egypt until the 2011 Arab Spring, exercising a perpetual state of emergency as the basis for a dictatorial regime. In terms of the unity of Arab states against the historical onslaught of imperial influence, Sadat’s concession to U.S. and Israel represented a major fracture. Egypt’s regime, starting with Sadat and continued with Mubarak, as the dominant power in the region, had broken ranks with the attempt to resist the Israeli onslaught, leaving a fractured coalition of Arab states in its wake.
Conflicts continued on many other fronts around this period. Syria remained in a perpetual state of war with Israel since 1948, participating in most of the military engagements previously mentioned, as well as later acting as a front for hostilities between Israel and Iran. With regard to Jordan, following the Israeli annexation of the West Bank in 1967, and the relocation of much of the PLO to Jordan, tensions came to a boil among the more Marxist and militant PFLP (a sub-group of the PLO) and the monarchy in Jordan, whose legitimacy they questioned. Their political inclusion in Jordan, with their open hostility to Israel, contrasted with the more timid approach by the Jordanian monarchy, who had less interest in bearing the repercussions of militant activity against Israel. A series of events known as Black September began — the PFLP engaged in several hijackings to attempt to bring attention to the unresolved “Palestinian problem,” a dynamic deeply reminiscent of recent events from Gaza. After a dramatic military conflict with thousands of deaths, this resulted in the expulsion of Palestinian militants to Lebanon.
That expulsion predictably led to cross-border conflicts between Israel and Lebanon, and Israel’s 1978 invasion of Lebanon (Operation Litani), in which Lebanon was occupied in response to a bus hijacking. Israel then sponsored Lebanese Christian militants, the South Lebanese Army (SLA), to continue a civil war following their official withdrawal from Lebanon, prompted by UN Security Council Resolution 425. In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon again to attack the PLO, laying siege to Beirut, killing roughly 10 to 20,000 people, and resulting again the PLO’s expulsion to Tunisia.
Syria intervened intermittently in these Lebanese conflicts, originally trying to back the Maronite Catholic government in the 1976 civil war, which set off a Syrian occupation of Lebanon that lasted until 1976, overlapping in part with an simultaneous Israeli occupation from 1985 to 2000. This instability played a key role in spawning the organization Hezbollah (“Party of God”). The eventual withdrawal of Israel and Syria from Lebanon between 2000 and 2005 culminated in further political instability — a mysterious series of political bombings/assassinations that were rumored to originate from Syrian actors (though accusations were also leveled at Israel), eventually erupted in the 2006 open war between Hezbollah and Israel, prior to a UN Security Council-ordered ceasefire. In short, this was yet another cycle of instability tracing its roots back to the failure of the international community to resolve the grievances of the Palestinian people.
The “peace process”
Throughout this period, token US attempts at a “peace process” or “diplomatic resolution” to the “Palestinian problem” continued. The most notable stage in this was that of the Oslo accords, a summit convened by U.S. President Bill Clinton in Oslo, Norway, with the participation of Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat.
The problems with the Oslo Accords are nearly too numerous to list. The presence of the U.S. as a “mediator,” given their status as a primary military backer of Israel, along with the fundamental power disparity between Israel and the PLO, deeply compromised the possibility of an impartial process. Accordingly, the outcomes of the agreements abjectly failed to solve the fundamental political problems, first and foremost the issue of Palestinian sovereignty — despite obtaining PLO recognition of Israel, Israel’s recognition of an independent Palestinian state was not an outcome of the accords. The absence of Palestinian sovereignty was compounded by the agreements’ specification of a systematic division of the West Bank, making not only the West Bank as a whole surrounded by land under Israeli control, but dozens of individual enclaves within the West Bank. Israel committed to the dissolution of its Civil Administration of the West Bank following the inauguration of the Palestinian Legislative Council, which never materialized — the Civil Administration still maintains a military occupation of the West Bank.
It should be immediately clear to people looking at this map that this is not an acceptable situation. Under broad international recognition, none of this land is Israeli, and yet it’s under an ongoing military occupation by Israel. The settler population in the West Bank has swollen to 500,000, a violation of international law in itself, and the constant Israeli raids in the region, 30 years since the onset of the Accords, are a constant reminder of the absence of statehood.
Yitzhak Rabin, not long after the Oslo Accords, was assassinated by an Israeli extremist group (associated with the present Minister of National Security, Ben Gvir, who made a public threat against Rabin by displaying the hood ornament of his car, weeks before his assassination), on account of the Oslo Accords, despite their draconian terms for Palestinians, being too far concessionary for the Israelis.
The Oslo Accords were followed by the 2000 Camp David Summit. The same power dynamic as the Oslo Accords persisted, a negotiation “mediated” by then-U.S. President Bill Clinton, between delegations including Yasser Arafat and the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. They failed in a dramatic fashion. Without public coverage of the proceedings, we’re today forced to rely on contradictory secondhand accounts of the events, which assign blame either predominantly towards the Palestinian or Israeli delegations — including accounts by Bill Clinton, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and other high-level officials who were present. However, American and Israeli negotiators are actually split on assigning blame, while the Palestinian side was not, offering a key clue about historical revisionism of the course of events.
What’s largely agreed upon is that Israeli presented a position with yet another reduction of West Bank territory beyond the 1949–1967 Green Line borders, seeking again to legitimize its annexations and incursions beyond preexisting international suggestions or accepted borders. Shlomo Ben-Ami, Israel’s Minister of Foreign Relations, who participated in the talks, stated that those borders were unacceptable to the Israeli delegation, despite being Israel’s internationally recognized borders — he further stated, “If I were a Palestinian, I would have rejected Camp David as well.” The subset of the West Bank Israel did propose would be connected to the Gaza Strip by an elevated highway and railroad under Israeli sovereignty, and the West Bank itself would be subdivided into non-contiguous regions, each bordered by Israeli territory. It’s critical, in examining these proposals, to consider the implications for trade and security for a Palestinian state if they were realized— you could take any other example of historically hostile states, for instance, Japan and China, or Turkey and Greece, and propose relocating one as several isolated islands inside the opposing state. Between these territorial issues, and a more specific dispute about sovereignty and control over “holy sites” — in particular, regarding the Al-Aqsa compound, including the Temple Mount, Western Wall, etc. — the talks fell apart, with Yasser Arafat reportedly walking away from the negotiations.
The collapse of these talks, and ongoing grievances of the occupation and settlements, and another provocative visit of Ariel Sharon to the Al-Aqsa mosque, soon led to the Second Intifada, another characteristically deadly episode for Palestinians, with roughly 1000 Israelis killed and about 3200 Palestinians killed. Four years after the Camp David Summit, in 2004, Arafat himself would die, raising speculations of an assassination by poisoning.
So, what is the historical significance of these peace processes, and why did they fail as they did?
At the core, Israel’s original position in 1948 was completely unjustifiable. They claimed as much land as they could using military means, committing acts which squarely meet the definitely of genocide. The people living on that land were violently expelled. They were crowded into Gaza, or the West Bank, or Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, attempting for decades to foster enough of a military offensive to reclaim their land from an invading force. The 1967 war was initiated by Israel, by every indication with the purpose of claiming additional territory, which, with the exception of the Sinai Peninsula, it has not relinquished, a near-universally recognized violation of international law. A country, under international law, is simply not permitted to annex land. Through perpetual claims of “security concerns,” “buffer zones,” etc., or by outright attacks by settlers and the Israeli military, Israel has systematically excluded Palestinians from those areas, parcel by parcel. In maintaining policies of resource control and limitation, constant military and settler harassment, and the liberal use of oppressive acts like arbitrary arrests or spraying “skunk water” on civilian homes, it’s able to maintain a policy of perpetual tension, inspiring random, isolated acts of resistance from Palestinians, which are then used as justification for additional crackdowns and additional forced removals. This is the Strategy of Tension.
So why has the Israeli state historically behaved in this manner? A reasonable theory would be that it does so in an attempt to de-legitimize efforts towards Palestinian statehood, and to radicalize the population in a way that neither poses an unacceptable level of danger, nor dismisses the concept that the general Palestinian population somehow poses a threat to the state of Israeli. This balance of antagonism of the Palestinian population serves a major political purpose — the dehumanization of the population, with Islamophobic stereotypes, depictions of them as “terrorists,” as “security threats,” or as “antisemitic,” give the Israeli state a pretext to seize power, to expand the control of the state over surrounding territories, and to expand the control of the state over its own population. This entrenchment of power, beyond there, goes a long way to serve the interests of Western powers in the region, who are able to use this expanding state as a means to project force and control over the entire Middle East.
The machinery of the empire
It’s clear, in the history of the Israeli state, that, as far as the Western powers supporting it (the U.S., the UK, and affiliated countries) were concerned, it was never a humanitarian project. The early Western figures supporting the creation of Israel at different points— such as Lord Balfour himself, or U.S. President Harry Truman — were openly antisemitic, imperialist figures. The continued Western military support to Israel over the decades — in the context of perpetual violations of international law, of land annexations, of Israel developing a nuclear program and developing into a rogue nuclear state, of the endless destabilization of the Middle East caused by its establishment , of the endless belligerence and human rights violations Israel commits — becomes impossible to explain under the theory that Western powers are simply trying to defend the Israeli state, or the global Jewish population. Instead, we’re forced to look at alternate explanations for their motivations.
The Palestine-Israel area occupies a critical geographical point. The route between the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea, to the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, is critical to global trade and military operations, the only other alternative routes being either around the Cape of Good Hope below South Africa, or through the seas north of Russia. The nations nearby make up a huge portion of global fossil fuel reserves. Britain itself originally experienced, during World War I, that the Levant (the broader area around Palestine/Israel) was a key land military pathway for the Ottoman Empire in the region — the only land bridge between Africa and Europe and Asia.
Thought of these terms, Israel’s intense militarization and arms production, and the acceptance of its perpetual human rights abuses by Western powers, makes a lot more sense. We repeatedly observe connections between Israeli businessmen, and the Israeli arms industry, with atrocities throughout the world, particularly in Africa. In the context of the 2023 Israeli offensive against Gaza, many have noticed the connection between the Israeli arms industry and atrocities in Congo, Sudan, and the Congo. Further back in history, Israeli arms were also supplied to Hutu militias in the Rwandan genocide, to the South African apartheid regime, and to VRS forces in the Bosnian genocide.
The connection to African resource extraction is also impossible to ignore. Companies run by Israeli billionaires such as Dan Gertler, Beny Steinmetz, or Roman Abramovich, are present in regions of Africa where grave human rights abuses have occurred in connection with the resources those companies trade in. For instance, Dan Gertler, founder and president of DGI Group, has been intermittently subjected to U.S. sanctions under human rights accusations. Many of the details regarding the activities of these companies are being unveiled as we speak, but preliminary evidence suggests the same dynamic we’ve witnessed in the past, with Western corporations having deep connections to the political instability that’s plagued Africa throughout the “post-colonial” era since the 1950s, much in the same way we’ve observed those dynamics at play in relation to fossil fuel control and geopolitical meddling in the past.
These dynamics reinforce the theory of Israel as a colonial outpost — as a mechanism for Western powers to exercise effective military and political control over the Middle East and Africa. Indeed, U.S. military sponsorship and activity, in the wake of the instability caused by the establishment of Israel, has extended to most countries in the Middle East — to Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran, Libya, Pakistan Afghanistan, Syria, Morocco, and more — and this exertion of influence has led to the establishment of the “petrodollar,” helping to cement the US dollar as a dominant currency for global trade.
Other theories about the inexplicable support of United States politicians (and those of affiliated countries) for the current Israeli onslaught in Gaza continue to proliferate, such as theories about fossil fuel reserves offshore from Gaza, or of grandiose plans to build the “Ben Gurion Canal,” an alternate to the Suez Canal. As with any clandestine or secretive political activity, without concrete evidence pointing otherwise, these remain in the realm of speculation, or more derogatively put, “conspiracy theories.” What can be stated without doubt, regardless, is that these Western powers have proven themselves willing to tolerate extreme human rights abuses in the name of Israeli expansionism.
In any case, the bizarre dynamic between the United States and Israel — as well as key partners, such as the United Kingdom, France, Germany, or Australia — has been fully revealed to much of the world at this point, including to the United States public, with the world watching in horror as tens of thousands of videos and images from a modern, mechanized genocide, of a fully captive population, proliferate across social media. They also see United States politicians unanimously repeat well-rehearsed half-truths, and reassurances about their good intentions, while quietly shoveling $14.5 billion dollars in military “aid” towards Israel for arms purchases from U.S. manufacturers — on top of the $4 billion that’s been committed to Israel already on an annual basis.
The Western world as a whole has, as a result, gone far past the limit where it can continue to claim moral legitimacy and human rights as a cudgel against the rest of the world. The “global South” (typically, central and South America, Africa, the Middle East, and most of Asia) have generally known for a long time, since they experienced it themselves, the destructive nature of Western imperialism, but for the first time since perhaps the Vietnam War, there has also been a massive awakening inside Western nations to the hideous consequences and intentions of the “foreign policy” they enforce outside of their borders. The United States government, arguably the force best equipped to halt the current atrocities, has as of yet only paid lip service to “pressuring Israel” about prioritizing humanitarianism and minimizing casualties, but the myth that these countries operate independently of each other has already fallen by the wayside. Meanwhile, the United States President and Congress, in uncharacteristically bipartisan fashion, have drawn a line between themselves and the public, swearing unequivocal support to Israel and issuing a resolution (H.R. 888) denouncing opposition to Zionism as “antisemitism,” in a clear attempt to marginalize and potentially even criminalize opposition to the geopolitical status quo. All of this in spite of a majority of the public calling for an immediate ceasefire.
Accordingly, the U.S. government, and the geopolitical order it maintains with its military, is at a precipice. A disconnect between the management of the government and the will of the people, as well as basic moral and humanitarian standards, has been illustrated. It was somewhat common knowledge within the United States that its government operated for the benefit of private/corporate interests, at the expense of the general population, but never before had it been illustrated to such a degree. Nor has it been illustrated in such a direct way, with donations from a lobby such as AIPAC being able to so clearly dictate the actions of politicians across the entire government, even to the extreme of supporting an genocide openly incited by its perpetrators.
The U.S. has long been in need of deep political reform. Fundamental issues plague the nation — an economy rampant with inequality, corporate capture of governance, an electoral and representative system that entrenches power and distorts democratic will, and a judiciary with near-absolute power — the list goes on. Addressing these problems meaningfully requires a Constitutional rework, ideally one that moves towards a direct democratic system, discarding the outdated and vulnerable notions of “representative democracy,” which at this point have been demonstrated to be anything but representative.
We can only hope that the severity of this crisis is the tipping point to bring these desperately needed reforms to the United States, and by extension, the destructive global order it’s perpetuating. The severity of public alarm at this crisis, and the quickly approaching 2024 election, represent a unique opportunity for a bipartisan popular shift to a new party dedicated to fundamental reforms.
Repairing the Middle East
The state of Israel, in its current form, is suffering a fundamental crisis of legitimacy as well. We can look to similar genocidal states in history to inform potential paths out of this crisis. Politicians speak of a “right to exist” for Israel — but, while people within Israel and Palestine retain the same human rights as anyone else in the world, states themselves do not have rights beyond the rights of the people within them.
The term “state” refers to multiple different things. A state, in the sense of a government — is not a physical thing, but rather, a social construct. It’s a mechanism, an arrangement of people, a protocol, a way of managing the affairs of a society. Such a thing does not have inherent rights. It’s a method, and a method is to be judged on its merits. An oppressive dictatorship is inferior to a democracy with equal rights. And Israel’s state bears no resemblance in reality to its reputation as “the only democracy in the Middle East” — rather, it’s a state that’s perpetrated an apartheid system for decades, and which is currently engaged in the crime of genocide. Not to mention its apparent complicity in collaboration with Western powers for decades in fostering Western hegemonic control throughout Africa and the Middle East.
In the sense of a state as a political entity, including some people and excluding others, the problems with “Israel” are deep. Since its inception, the idea of Israel has that of a state purely for the Jewish people— an exclusionary, and as shown historically, supremacist idea that would be rejected in any other context. It paints itself as a “democracy,” but paradoxically, seeks to exclude an ethnicity that would change the outcomes, sentiments, and behavior of that “democracy,” something which is fundamentally undemocratic in nature.
To draw an example in another context — most in the West would not accept a white nationalist Christian state. Coming from an audience in the United States specifically, the concept of promoting a Jewish-only state is especially hypocritical — the United States, despite its many failings and historical atrocities, is now a relatively pluralistic society with constitutionally enshrined equal rights under the law. And yet, we promote ethno-religious nationalism in Israel. On what basis? If it’s on the basis of Jewish safety, it has failed on that front — Israel, through its belligerent, expansionist and apartheid policies, and by deliberately attempting to blur the line between the state itself and the global Jewish population (many of whom openly condemn it), has, if anything, exacerbated global antisemitism. Why should a state, composed mainly of both Jewish and Muslim populations, not be able to operate under a system of collaborative governance? We can even observe that a long-lasting peace between these populations was viable for hundreds of years in the same region prior to the 20th century and the onset of Zionism.
The international refrain for years has been to promote a “two-state” solution — one for Israel, one for Palestine — on the belief that these divisions cannot be reconciled. Many have stated that this approach is fundamentally flawed, a sentiment I tend to agree with — notably, a director of the UN OHCHR, Craig Mokhiber, recently resigned in protest, and gained international media attention, stating protest against failed paradigms such as a two-state solution in the international approach to the Palestine-Israel issue.
Typically, these solutions suggest a “two-state” partition based on some variation of the 1949–1967 borders, potentially with land swaps being made to resolve specific issues, such as existing settlements. Those borders have an critical issue — the absence of a contiguous Palestinian state, with the same historical split between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank we see now — in other words, separate, unconnected territories - has serious implications for the viability of a Palestinian state. It strongly discourages open migration within the territory, and complicates civil administration And as shown earlier in this article, Israel also does not have a history of peaceful behavior towards its neighbors, evidenced strongly by provocative incidents like those that led to the 1967 war.
This is why, despite the dark history between the inhabitants of the broader Palestine/Israel region, I think the only practical solution is a one-state, democratic, secular solution. There are key advantages to the one-state approach, in particular that it allows ongoing disputes and grievances to be resolved by an internal democratic process, instead of complicated and potentially rigged international diplomatic efforts. The exact mechanisms of the state would be completely unrestrained by existing institutions, and thus, can freely be engineered to act as an democratic body for the mediation of any disputes involved in the region, including those between internal ethnic groups with conflicting interests, or international actors that may have claims or obligations within the region (many of which may not be legitimate). The issue of land disputes becomes much simpler under a single civil administration not biased towards expansionist Israeli claims as the current power dynamic is. The diversity of the broader population being involved in the democratic process can mitigate the influence of violent extremists of any persuasion. A purpose-built constitution, with enshrined protections against any form of ethnic discrimination, or other ways in which a power imbalance over the government could emerge, can eliminate the problems of apartheid and military occupation that have plagued the region for the last 75 years, and set the region on a path towards actual equality under the law. And a new system can be heavily democratic in nature, eliminating the risk of governmental institutions being held captive to the interests of special interests at odds with the interests of the wider population.
There are, however, major obstacles to achieving any solution, especially a one-state solution. All of these obstacles become worse the longer that hostilities continue — the trauma of ongoing genocide, the wholesale destruction of Gaza and West Bank villages, settler land theft, and military occupation continue to worsen the severity of the hatred and division of the broader populations of Palestinians and Israelis. This is yet another urgent reason, on top of the extreme humanitarian and moral concerns already present, for an immediate cessation of hostilities in the region. The Israeli population is deeply entrenched in a cult-like mentality, pursuing the wholesale destruction of the Palestinian people, and this cannot possibly be stopped without a full arms embargo and immediate international action, an absolute prerequisite for any lasting peace in the region.
This article is a living document — I’m not a professional historian, and I’m gathering information from histories rife with propaganda and distortion, so please share any corrections or additional info.