This is part 5 of our introduction articles. We highly recommend reading them in order.
By the end of the second Intifada, a general atmosphere of disillusion and powerlessness came to dominate Palestinian society. The Intifada had failed to procure the hoped-for gains, and the Israeli control of increasing areas of Palestine had only tightened. Much of what the Palestinian Authority had built lay in ruins, and with it, general support for the Oslo accords and the two-state solution dwindled.
Parliamentary elections took place in 2006, resulting in a Hamas majority, beating Fateh, its rival and traditional leader of the PLO and Palestinian Authority. In the wake of this victory, Palestinians were subjected to enormous amounts of pressure from the international community as well as Israel, as many claimed that Hamas was a “terrorist organization”. In an effort to counter these pressures, Fateh and Hamas formed a unity government. Unfortunately, this government would eventually crumble from external pressure, as well as internal struggles over tactics, vision and ideology. This would culminate in Hamas taking military action in the Gaza Strip, and seizing control of it from the Fateh-dominated government agencies and security forces.
Even before the second Intifada, Israel had worked hard to cut off the Gaza Strip from the rest of Palestine. Travel between the West Bank and Gaza since the 1990s was always difficult, today it is virtually impossible for the general public. This was further exasperated by the military siege enacted by Israel following the Hamas take-over of the Strip in 2007. For the first time since the establishment of the Palestinian Authority, the West Bank and Gaza Strip would now be politically separated once again.
For all intents and purposes, the Gaza Strip has been turned into a ghetto, with Israel besieging it from most sides. Egypt helps maintain this siege from its side. Gaza has undergone some brutal assaults and wars on its population due to various Israeli pretexts, such as the 2008 and 2014 wars which killed thousands of Palestinians, including hundreds of children. This has made Gaza a convenient testing ground for Israeli arms manufacturers, who tout their equipment as “battle tested”.
As mentioned in the previous articles, the Gaza Strip is a small coastal enclave compromised mostly of refugees ethnically cleansed from their villages by Israel during the Nakba. As such, it does not have the capacity to support such a large population, and according to multiple reports, including a United Nations one, it is teetering towards being unlivable. The water aquifers are gradually becoming poisoned, and its civilian infrastructure is frequently destroyed by Israeli shelling and bombing.
Recently, the refugees of Gaza organized themselves into the Great March of Return, which saw tens of thousands peacefully protesting at the edges of the besieged strip with the goal of ending the siege and for their right to return to their homes. This march was heavily demonized, with Israeli claiming they were “riots” manufactured by Hamas, and its participants were branded “terrorists” and mercilessly shot by Israeli snipers, despite them posing no threat to them. A prominent example of this was the murder of the Palestinian medic, Razan Al-Najjar, who was sniped while providing aid to the protestors. Israel even released doctored footage in an attempt to paint her as a threat, but it instantly backfired since it was apparent that it was tampered with [You can read more about this here]. Almost 200 Palestinians lost their lives, and thousands were wounded and maimed for life.
The situation in the Gaza Strip continues to deteriorate, poverty, Covid-19 and other circumstances have pushed it to the edge of implosion with no end in sight.
Following the destruction of much of its assets, and the Hamas take-over of the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian Authority found itself in the midst of a serious legitimacy crisis. Oslo lay in ruins, and any attempt to resuscitate the process would remain unsuccessful. Meanwhile, the people grew restless and skeptical of the Palestinian leadership and their role in society. So the Palestinian Authority did what any other Arab regime would do in its place; crackdown on dissent, and restructure and strengthen its security forces.
To this end, it would receive ample support, especially from the United States. US. General Keith Dayton would oversee what was officially dubbed “the security sector reform”. This basically entailed training a new generation of Palestinian security and intelligence officers fiercely loyal to the Authority’s leadership. This “reform” saw the ballooning of the security sector and its budget. This would be accompanied by an unraveling of Yasser Arafat’s old patronage networks, and establishing new ones with allegiance to the post-Arafat leadership.
The new tactic of the Palestinian Authority shifted towards state-building, in the hope that if they could prove capable of building effective institutions, the world would deem them “worthy” of a state. Slowly, but surely, things such as resistance and the right of return would be phased out of the Palestinian leadership’s language, and the Palestinian revolution turned from a liberation movement to a quest for autonomy. Not only that, but the security sector “reforms” included a security coordination program with Israel, meaning that the Palestinian Authority would basically become a subcontractor to the occupation.
Despite all of this, the Palestinian Authority never had any real “authority” to begin with, and this was by design. It is a purely administrative entity created to manage the “dirty work” of education, health and other burdens the occupying power is usually responsible for, while having absolutely no sovereignty or decision over any political aspect. This, of course, remains in the hands of Israel. For example, the Palestinian Authority can’t even determine who a Palestinian citizen is. The citizen registry for Palestinians is under the control of Israel. Meaning that if a Palestinian marries a non-Palestinian, their spouse will never be able to gain Palestinian citizenship as Israel’s demographic obsession would not allow for any preventable increase in the Palestinian population. Even Abbas needs to coordinate with the Israeli military to be able to visit other Palestinian cities, cities of a “country” he is supposedly president of.
The world, especially through its foreign aid, has effectively subsidized the Palestinian occupation and relieved Israel of many of its responsibilities, while maintaining all of the benefits.
Even though these changes to the Palestinian Authority have received praise from the IMF, and other international organizations, many of which deemed them ready for statehood, this did not sway Israel who was never truly interested in a real Palestinian state. This prompted the Palestinian Authority to take symbolic gestures, such as stamping “State of Palestine” on its paperwork instead of the traditional “Palestinian Authority” insignia. This gesture, of course, fell flat on its face when Israel threatened to not recognize these documents, which forced them to backtrack from stamping any papers that needed Israeli approval. A symbolic move which was supposed to signal independence ended up proving the exact opposite.
Meanwhile, not only would the occupation and colonization of the West Bank go on, but it would become even more entrenched. Although both militarily occupied, the form of the occupation in the West Bank differs to that in the Gaza Strip. Whereas the occupation in the Gaza Strip is maintained at long range through siege as well as aerial and artillery bombardment, in the West Bank this occupation experience revolves around the daily presence of an occupying military and policing force. As a result, there are context specific effects to the occupation in one region which are not as prominent in the other; for example, arrest of Palestinians is much more common in the West Bank than in the Gaza Strip, but the destruction of homes due to war and bombing is much more prevalent in the Gaza Strip. This is not to say that there are no deaths or demolitions in the West Bank, but the contrast between the regions is significant.
All aspects of life in the West Bank today are run by Israel, either directly or indirectly through the Palestinian Authority. This control extends from your basic rights, down to the most mundane of things, such as your phone coverage. Settlements continue to expand, now holding over 600,000 settlers with no indication of stopping. Increased areas are being annexed, and support for annexing area C is gaining more and more traction inside Israel. The annexation of the Jordan Valley, for example, has recently featured prominently in Israeli election campaigns.
Although the Eastern part of Jerusalem is technically part of the West Bank, Israel has never treated it as such since its capture in the 1967 war. Claiming that the “eternal capital” has finally been reunited with its western counterpart, which Israel occupied in 1948. East Jerusalem was officially annexed in 1980. This annexation, of course was illegal and not recognized by the world community barring a few exceptions, such as the United States under Donald Trump.
Although Israel claims that Jerusalem has been reunited, this is mostly in the realm of rhetoric and propaganda. East Jerusalem is subject to a slew of measures, laws and procedures that specifically target its majority Palestinian population. Palestinians are granted a special “residence” permit that is often revoked with the flimsiest pretexts. For example, if you were to study abroad or decide to move outside of Jerusalem, this could very easily get your residence revoked, forcing you to live in the West Bank instead.
As with every other area of Palestine, East Jerusalem has been undergoing serious colonization efforts, with the building of colonies and the transfer of settlers into it with the declared plan to have Jerusalem with a 74% Jewish population. Towards this end, discriminatory lawfare is waged against Palestinians to find justifications for their removal. Thousands of Palestinian families have lost their right to live in Jerusalem over the decades, in what can only be described as protracted and silent ethnic cleansing of the city. Accompanying this is the erasure of traditional Palestinian names and toponomy, and replacing them with Israeli and Jewish names.
Massive discrimination in services, resource allocation and funding are the norm. Palestinian neighborhoods are underserviced, poorer and dirtier. You can read about this in detail [here].
Settlers in Jerusalem, naturally, do not need to worry about any of this or the risk of losing their homes.
A cornerstone of Israeli propaganda efforts is the claim that all Israeli citizens are equal, this claim aims to obfuscate the fact that Israel distinguishes between citizenship and nationality.
What does this mean?
You can be a citizen of Israel but be a Druze national, or a Jewish national. Your nationality is determined by your ethnicity and it cannot be changed or challenged. Many of the rights you are accorded in Israel stem from your nationality not your citizenship. Meaning an “Arab” Israeli citizen and a Jewish Israeli citizen, while both citizens, enjoy different rights and privileges determined by their “nationality”. Seeing how Israel is an ethnocracy [You can read more about this here] it is not a mystery who this system privileges and who it discriminates against.
This is not merely discrimination in practice, but discrimination by law. Adalah have composed a database of discriminatory laws in Israel that disfavor non-Jewish Israelis. For example, the Law of Return and Absentees’ Property Law are but two examples of flagrant racism and discrimination in the Israeli legal system.
This is not some old, odd oversight, but a very deliberate part of the design of Israeli society. This is periodically reinforced whenever some Israelis petition the Supreme Court to recognize an Israeli nationality that does not discriminate based on ethnicity. A recent example of these petitions was in 2013, where the Supreme Court rejected such an idea on the grounds that it would “undermine Israel’s Jewishness“.
It says quite a lot about Israel that a unifying egalitarian identity not based around ethnicity would “pose a danger to Israel’s founding principle: to be a Jewish state for the Jewish people” as the court ruled. The fact that such discrimination is seen as a cornerstone of Israeli society only reinforces its colonial ethnocratic nature, and undermines any claims to equality among citizens.
But this kind of discrimination is only the tip of the iceberg, as it only covers some aspects of de jure inequality. Inspecting the de facto discrimination against non-Jewish Israelis shines an even brighter light on Israel’s ethnocratic hierarchy.
Almost half of all Palestinian citizens of Israel live under the poverty line, with a considerable percentage close to the poverty line. They also have a considerably lower life expectancy, a higher infant mortality rate, less access to education and resources as well as less municipality and government funding. Should you be interested in delving into some of the more detailed aspects of this discrimination, you can read Adalah’s The Inequality Report. It is an excellent overview of many issues.
Additionally, you could read this report from the Adva center which illustrates quite clearly how this discrimination touches almost every aspect of life.
Furthermore, most land inside the green line is off limits to Palestinian citizens of Israel. A large percentage of land in Israel is under the control of the Jewish National Fund (JNF), which has:
“..a specific mandate to develop land for and lease land only to Jews. Thus the 13 percent of land in Israel owned by the JNF is by definition off-limits to Palestinian Arab citizens, and when the ILA tenders leases for land owned by the JNF, it does so only to Jews—either Israeli citizens or Jews from the Diaspora. This arrangement makes the state directly complicit in overt discrimination against Arab citizens in land allocation and use..”.
The JNF is not the only entity blocking Palestinian citizens of Israel from purchasing, leasing or renting land and property, but also the so-called regional and local councils, which account for the vast majority of land. These councils have the authority to block anyone from settling in these areas that do not seem like a “good fit”, for example a religious community would not want to allow secular residents from moving in on the grounds that it would be against the spirit of their communities. In practice, this has translated into a virtual ban on non-Jewish Israelis moving into Jewish areas. In a Statement submitted by Habitat International Coalition and Adalah to the United Nations, it was estimated that almost 80% of the entire country is off limits to lease for Palestinian citizens of Israel. You can click here to read their full statement.
No matter how you look at it, Israeli society is a heavily segregated and hierarchical one. Whether through the legal system or just the attitudes of average Jewish Israelis, the ethnocratic nature of Israel and its obsession with ethnic gerrymandering always rises to the surface. Some would deny it, citing standards of living or some random “Arab” judge as a refutation of this point, but as discussed in [This] article, none of these challenge the extreme inequality -by design- of Israeli society. This denial is not unique to Israelis, we saw similar sentiments among white Americans who denied the existence of white supremacy, even though they reaped its benefits either directly or indirectly.
Today, the Palestinians expelled during the Nakba and the Naksa and their descendants form the majority of the Palestinian people worldwide. Situated mostly in refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Palestine, they continue to be denied the right of return despite many still holding the original deeds and keys to their houses, now expropriated by the Israeli state. They live under harsh conditions and yearn for the day they are able to return.
Not only does Israel deny their right to return, but it has also been waging a war on the very concept of the Palestinian refugee, arguing for the redefinition of the term to exclude descendants. This would run counter to every refugee population in the world, which has its descendants recognized as refugees in the cases of protracted conflicts, such as in the occupied Western Sahara [You can read more about this here].
The return of Palestinian refugees is the core of the Palestinian question, and their expulsion formed the basis for the establishment of Israel. Therefore, any proposed solution that neglects this, as the Oslo framework did, is doomed to failure. These approaches are preoccupied with finding solutions to symptoms, rather than dare address the root cause, which is Zionist settler colonialism and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. This can be clearly seen when taking the 1967 borders as their starting point, although today not even that is good enough for Israel, which seeks to annex increasing territories of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Palestinians are then pressured to relinquish any rights or hopes for their millions of refugees, or their rights to live in over 80% of the land they were ethnically cleansed from.
As you can see from these articles, the democratic, progressive Israel we hear so much about in the mainstream media has never once existed. From its inception, it functioned as an ethnocracy with the intent of taking over as much land as possible with as few Palestinians as possible. Although a new tactic of Zionists is to try and claim that Zionism was a liberation movement with the aim of decolonization, this is belied by the very detailed writings left behind by movement founders.
