Nine years ago, in an essay I recommend to everyone, Noura Erakat demolished Israel's claims to have a right to self-defense under international law in occupied Palestinian territory--and Gaza is "still considered to be occupied by Israel by the United Nations":
the right of self-defense in international law is, by definition since 1967, not available to Israel with respect to its dealings with real or perceived threats emanating from the West Bank and Gaza Strip population... This is not to say that Israel cannot defend itself-but those defensive measures can neither take the form of warfare nor be justified as self-defense in international law...
An occupying power cannot justify military force as self-defense in territory for which it is responsible as the occupant...
Israel is distorting/reinterpreting international law to justify its use of militarized force in order to protect its colonial authority. Although it rebuffs the de jure application of Occupation Law, Israel exercises effective control over the West Bank and Gaza and therefore has recourse to police powers. It uses those police powers to continue its colonial expansion and apartheid rule and then in defiance of international law cites its right to self-defense in international law to wage war against the population, which it has a duty to protect.
We're now beyond the "occupied territory" issue and Israel's game of denying it "occupies" the various geographical prisons whose every facet of life it controls. It is clear now that all Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank, Gaza, or the Green Line, "from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea"--a majority of the population--are under the single apartheid "regime of Jewish supremacy," and have the full right of resistance thereto. It's important that everyone recognize, as Joseph Massad points out, that "Israel's leaders now accept that Jewish colonists and their descendants will forever be a minority in historic Palestine," in "their own settler-colonial state."
That regime not only does not have the "right" to defend itself against its subjugated population, it does not--and we should have no compunction to say so--have the "right" to exist. Per Sharmine Narwani, also nine years ago, the Zionist enterprise is "the last modern-day colonial-settler experiment, conducted at a time when these projects were being unraveled globally." I reprised that point in my aforementioned article, where I said it was possible in the few years after WWII "because racism and ethno-supremacist colonialism were still integral parts of the Western worldview. The great world powers could still blithely dismiss the lives, land, and humanity of an Arab population as dispensable--secondary both to the aspirations of the largely European Jews who formed the Zionist vanguard and to the guilty consciences of European gentiles. It was compensatory colonialism, with the compensation paid by an expendable third(world) people."
And James Baldwin: "the state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews; it was created for the salvation of the Western interests... and for Europe's guilty Christian conscience."
It was a propitious historic opportunity for Zionism. Ten years later, when anti-colonial struggles were raging, no Western liberal would have dared to suggest any such project had a "right" to exist. Seventy-three years later, it should be just as unimaginable.
That the Zionist movement never considered demanding territory from Germany or any white European country that participated in the Holocaust (which would have at least had some ethico-political logic), although it did start out considering Uganda and Argentina, indicates its self-understanding as a child project of white supremacy and imperialism. "Little Ulster," and all.
So it is good, finally, to see "apartheid" and the "colonization of Palestine" being named and opposed by Democratic activists and prominent politicians, including Palestinian-American Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, on the floor of the Congress, and AOC and her squaddies tweet-storming "Apartheid states aren't democracies.". And it's good to see legislation introduced by Congresswoman Betty McCollum, with "more than a dozen" supporters, to prevent U.S. aid to Israel from "paying for the military detention and abuse of Palestinian children, the demolition of Palestinian homes, or the annexation of Palestinian land."
Though I find too much of it--AOC and Bernie in particular--about whether we can get our politicians to speak in really neutral terms. Let's recognize everyone's humanity. Palestinian lives matter, too. This isn't about finding a way for the victims and opponents of Zionist apartheid to get along peaceably with its enforcers and proponents. It's about finding a way to defeat them.
There is definitely a new trend. The Zionist narrative is losing--among large sectors of younger adults (Jewish and Gentile) has, I would say, already and irretrievably lost--its air of legitimacy, virtue, and necessity. Nothing has done more to undermine that narrative than the open internet and social media (which is why no force is more interested in imposing controls on those channels than acolytes of Zionism). The scenes of Palestinian dispossession and Israeli rampage are just too blatant to ignore. A divide is opening up in the country over Palestine-Israel, and it is reflected in the Democratic Party, a majority of whose constituency understands that you can't claim to be anti-racist and continue to support the US being the indispensable enabler of Israel's Mohammed Crow apartheid. There is no such thing as Progressive Except Palestine.
It also remains the case that both political parties and
the entire media, academic, and cultural apparatus--none of which is controlled
by popular will--are firmly committed to Zionism and the unconditional support
of Israel in ways that will be extremely difficult to reverse. We still live in a polity
where 75% of
House members "oppose placing any conditions on aid to Israel, including some
progressives from the Democratic Party's left [sic] wing," and signed an
AIPAC-backed letter saying so; a country where Creepy Joe ("I am
a Zionist" "the
USA would have to invent an Israel") Biden is ratifying the
decisions of Bad Orange Man to recognize Israel's illegal annexation of Syria's
Golan Heights within the apartheid
"regime of Jewish supremacy," with the whole of Jerusalem as its capital; where
it was the Cool Black Guy preceding both of them who first gave
bunker-buster bombs to Israel, secretly, and made it
a non-negotiable demand that Native Americans must recognize that America
will be a White Man's State "Palestinians must recognize that Israel will
be a Jewish state"; a culture where, under the auspices of the Republican and
Democratic Parties' largest donors (uber-Zionists Sheldon & Miriam Adelson
and Haim Saban) and the occasional Israeli-spy
producer many of them work for, the crà ¨me de la Hollywood crà ¨me shows
up dutifully twice a year to raise $50
million a night in comfort money (to provide "well-being
facilities") for the Israeli Army that is pulverizing apartment towers and
killing multi-generational families in Gaza. (Fear not, though, the Dem celebs do
not hesitate bravely to ruffle feathers at such events by challenging their
Republican counterparts);
where the United States military itself can, without objection, be described as
"a Zionist institution"; and on and on.
In a deep sense, America has become a Zionist country. There is a lot of Zionist-committed money and power controlling the institutions that make policy and manufacture consent and that have made Zionism into a core component of American ideology and politics. They will have to be forthrightly and fearlessly named, opposed, and defeated to change the way the United States enables the apartheid "regime of Jewish supremacy." There will be a lot of hemming and hawing to avoid doing that.
I'll point out, for example, that if Betty and other tweet-storming "left-wing" progressive legislators really want to disrupt the military aid to Israel that is right now enabling the killing of children in Gaza, they have no need for new legislation to do so. All aid to Israel-every dollar--is already illegal under the terms of the Symington and Glenn Amendments, which prohibit aid to any country acquiring nuclear weapons. The latter came about because Sen. John Glenn was concerned specifically about "diversion [of weapons-grade uranium] from U.S. nuclear contractor NUMEC to Israel's nuclear program"--an act of nuclear espionage and theft abetted by that Hollywood spy-producer, which, for some reason, didn't subject him and his confreres to the same fate as Julius and Ethel.
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