IN DEPTH: Palestine and Israel, a short history of Political Violence and Class Struggle

IN THE BEGINNING…

“After their exile in Egypt the Jewish people were led back by Moses into Israel, where, by force of arms, they were able to carve out a land of their own around 1100 BC.”

From https://www.historytoday.com/archive/why-were-jews-persecuted

There are a few things we need to know about Judaism to understand some aspects of the modern conflict in Palestine. It is a religion, but it considers that you are born into it rather than can be converted, it is therefore quite hard to become Jewish. This is why it can understand itself as having a physical homeland somewhere and, for this segment, wants to be treated as a nationality. Like most religions it is essentialist, it believes in essences.

As a religion Judaism encourages its people, or at least its males, to be literate, and to be able to criticize and to question things, including to debate its sacred texts. Jews have been persecuted for centuries, partly because they have been favored by the ruling classes who valued their consequent intellectual capabilities and knowledge. This caused resentments, which have often been exploited as convenient scapegoats and foils for the ruling classes for their political, social, and economic problems.

At the same time, at various stages in history, the Jews have also been persecuted for their Biblically described role in the crucifixion of Jesus. A notorious slander was the ‘blood libel’, where Jews were accused of stealing Christian children to drink their blood. Jews were often restricted in what they could do by various laws, such as not being allowed to buy land, so they could be confined to certain professions, and so, if they had money, they also tended towards moneylending.

Some aspects of Jewish traditions can be described as communist, while attempting to reduce class barriers: the kibbutz system of collective farms for instance, and where relevant its military arrangements. For the far right this has also historically represented a reason to blame Jews for any ills they see fit.

The sacred text of the Jews is the Hebrew Bible, which is divided into three books, the Torah (Pentateuch), Nevi’im (Prophets), and Ketuvim (Hagiographa).

Israel as an entity has appeared in history for the most part as a cultural concept according to these religious beliefs, alongside the fact of the ancient existence of the Hebrew language. The religious texts, such as the Bible and the Koran, concerning the geographic region in question, known as Palestine, provide us with beautiful stories which are often conflated with scientific archaeological understandings of the history of the region, for which there is only some small degree of documented overlap.

Nevertheless, from the religious perspective of a literally taken Judaism, the Holy Land, or Palestine, is the Promised Land and given by God to the chosen people, the Jews. Thus, Jerusalem also. But in Islam as well as Christianity Jerusalem is a site of deep holy significance. The prophet Muhammad is said to have ascended to heaven from Jerusalem, and Jerusalem is the site of the Al-Aqsa mosque, the third holiest site in Islam. Jerusalem is also important in Islam for the life of Jesus, as it is for Christians.

The early history of the tribes of the land includes Kenites, Judah, Jebusites, etc., plus competing city states with territories of influence. The northern Kingdom of Israel is generally understood to have existed from about 930 to 720 BCE, and the southern Kingdom of Judah from about 1010 to 586 BCE. The historical reality of any previous United Monarchy is doubted though, as there are no archaeological remains of it that are accepted by consensus. It is from this period that religious stories, such as of King David and Solomon, are ostensibly about.

In any case, it is important not to associate the modern understanding of a kingdom, such as the UK, which is identified with the modern nation state, with these long past kingdoms which were city states, that is, of Samaria and Jerusalem. Tribes and city-states co-existed, and tribes could be migratory or nomadic, there not being the same strict borders of territory, or nation states, as we have today. In this sense the notion of the modern nation state of Israel is not really based on an ancient existing entity.

Since this early time, the region has been ruled by various empires and powers, firstly Babylonian, then Persian, Alexandrian, Ptolemaic, Seleucids, Roman (the Romans are said to have expelled the Jews from Judea in AD 135, creating the Diaspora), Byzantine, Arab Caliphates, and Crusader States. After the European Crusades the region existed under the sway of consecutive Islamic dynasties, under the Islamic Ottoman Empire.

According to the Jewish Virtual Library website:

“Following the Ottoman conquest in 1517, the Land was divided into four districts and attached administratively to the province of Damascus and ruled from Istanbul. At the outset of the Ottoman era, an estimated 1,000 Jewish families lived in the country, mainly in Jerusalem, Nablus (Shechem), Hebron, Gaza, Safed (Tzfat) and the villages of Galilee. The community was comprised of descendants of Jews who had never left the Land as well as immigrants from North Africa and Europe.” From <https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/ottoman-rule-1517-1917>

It does not here tell us the actual number of Jews therefore, we must assume it was more of course, but it ensures us that they had never left the ‘Land’, which of course is important to the writer to establish.

From 1517 to 1869 is a lot of history to bypass, but we will have to.

The Suez Canal officially opened on 17 November 1869 and meant that the region had become highly important as a main trade route, and short-cut, for international shipping. From the point of view of modern global capitalist trade and the development of the big capitalist economies, this was significant.

An 1869 German map of Palestine is found online, available at the time I write (Karte von Palastina); it shows Jerusalem as the biggest city, with Bethlehem, and Hebron, below it, in Samaria, which has a northern part called Galilaea (Galilee I assume). Its north is bordered by Syria, not Lebanon, which did not exist until about 1920.

https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1bg8ajw/1869_german_map_of_palestine/#lightbox

The Suez canal was a focus of international rivalry even during its construction, the British initially being opposed because it might have threatened their established seafaring trade, this led to financial battles over its ownership and the rights to its management, Britain in the end gaining significant shares. The canal was a vital strategic asset during WWI and II. In WWII it provided access to the Middle East oilfields which were essential to the Allies.

Even before the canal, Palestine had always been an important trading route and site of important markets, especially perhaps the markets of Gaza. The summing up of the historical economy of Palestine by Philip A. Harland based on recent research reveals peasants made up most of the ancient population, and:

“The peasantry included small landowners who worked their own land for the subsistence of their families, tenants who worked the land of wealthy landowners and paid rent, and a variety of landless peasants who either worked as wage laborers on large or medium-sized estates or resorted to other activities such as banditry. The elites, consisting of the royal family, aristocrats, religious leaders, and some priests, drew their primary source of income from medium-sized and large estates. Absentee landlords, living in the cities and benefiting from production in the countryside, were common in this social-economic structure. … Production in Palestine centered on the labor of the peasant household to produce essential foods. The principal products included grain (wheat, barley, millet, and rice), vegetables (onions, garlic, leeks, squashes, cabbages, radishes, and beets), fruits (olives, grapes, figs, and dates), legumes (lentils and beans), spices (salt, pepper, and ginger), and meat (fish, cows, oxen, lambs, goats; cf. Klausner 1975 [1930]: 180–86; Hamel 1990 [1983]: 8–56)…. That is, wealth in the form of rents, taxes, and tithes flowed toward urban centers, especially Jerusalem (and the Temple), and was redistributed for ends other than meeting the needs of the peasantry, the main producers. The city’s relation to the countryside in such an economy, then, would be parasitic, according to this view.” The Economy of First-Century Palestine: State of the Scholarly Discussion, Philip A. Harland.

But in modern scholarship there was some disagreement over how trading by merchants mixed into and affected this agrarian economy, which was still quite present under the outgoing rule of the Ottoman Empire.

It seems to me that this kind of feudal economy persisted for a very long time, so its customs and traditions would be likely to rub shoulders, irritably, with modern capitalism’s own, and clearly it had its own class struggles, which easily became conjoined with and exploited by the modern global capitalist manifestations of the same. The broader region known as The Levant had also always been a site of ‘lively’ interaction between different peoples and civilizations throughout history.

The Ottoman Empire cannot be described as Turkish without anachronism, but the Ottoman Turks were a Turkic Muslim ethnic group which remained dominant in the Empire throughout the period. They ruled the region as Sultans. Officially the Empire was an Islamic Caliphate, although it also contained, as we know, other religions, such as the Jewish and Christian.

In 1914, at the outset of WWI, there were 90,000 Jews in Ottoman Palestine, a minority population, but not insignificant.

Having been recently defeated by Italy in North Africa, and in debt to Europe, the Ottoman Empire entered WWI in 1914 alongside the Central Powers, as they were called, consisting of Germany (German Empire), Austria-Hungary (Austro-Hungarian Empire), and Bulgaria. Against them stood Russia, France, Great Britain, subsequently Italy, and later the United States.

From a shallow perspective, the war seemed to be fallen into as if by accident, because the existing mobilizations for war made it seem like a fait accompli, because many politicians expected it, but the giant capitalist economic forces had interests in modernizing the old borders and trade in a way more conducive to the expanding global capitalism, and the difficult to repay debts helped with this aim. I perceive that this force was not willing, or more accurately simply could not be willing, to wait patiently for these changes to happen in a ‘natural fashion’ but had to try to force them into being.

We must look back a bit now for the sake of explanation of some important threads:

Already in 1903, the first of what was going to be called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were published as part of a series in the Russian publication Znamia, which claimed there was a Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world, mixing up Judaism with capitalism. They were fakes made with the help of the then Russian secret service. The Russian bourgeois Revolution of 1905 had led to pogroms against the Jews, chiefly instigated by the League of the Russian People, known as the Black Hundreds. The Russian Proletarian Revolution occurred during October 1917. Lenin came to power, who, in this context, did not consider Jews to be a nationality but thought of anti-Semitism as contrary to egalitarianism and wanted assimilation. Tsarist Russia, however, was an ally of Great Britain in the war, so the 1917 October revolution and its anti-tsarism and contra-capitalism probably seemed a setback for most British parliamentarians, who must have felt a need to shore up an opposed sentiment.

Jewish Zionism was at this time a relatively new phenomenon, originating in central and eastern Europe in the late 19th century. Before WWI it only represented a minority of Jews. It was probably partly a reaction to the tsarist pogroms. It was a Jewish nationalist movement the goal of which was to establish a Jewish national state in Palestine, in other words in the Holy Land, containing Jerusalem, in which historically was located a hill called Zion.

The name Zionism, if you did not attach it specifically to the Jewish religion, was however just another term for fascist ideology: the belief in a national innate ethnic superiority. Because in this case the name has some link to a conspiracy theory (the Protocols of Zion), we must, I think, remember that it has its own history with these inflections. The Jewish faith, from roughly this period, can be divided into non-Zionist or Haskala Jews, the latter who sought to assimilate into western secular society, and Zionist Jews who sought a homeland as the right defined biblically, as well as by the historical connection of Jews with Palestine.

The infamous British Balfour declaration of 1917 (during the war) was a short letter presented by the government to parliament, in which it declared support for a ‘national home’ for the Jewish people in Palestine, then still the region of the Ottoman Empire containing the minority Jewish population over which they fought for control. The letter stated that it would make its best endeavors to “facilitate the achievement of this object”. It also expressed a general sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations. On to this, it tacked some rather perfunctory provisos about respecting the civil and religious rights of the local non-Jewish population but made no mention of their political rights; it was also vague as to what a ‘national home’ meant.

In the lead up to this declaration, consultations were made with Zionist and non-Zionist Jews, but none were made with the local people, for instance, the Bedouin Arabs or the Palestinian Arabs.

The letter was published 9 November 1917. Perhaps it has been exaggerated in its significance since, and it certainly feeds conspiracy theories. On reflection it probably looks more prescient than it was. But was it made with a view to the need to obtain a western foothold in the region, due, at this time, to the importance of the Suez Canal, especially in wartime? Or did it just reflect a coincidence between Christian and Jewish Zionism in opposition to Islam, at an opportunistic time? 

The backdrop to this in the ongoing world war was two recent defeats for the British in the Middle Eastern theatre, in the Sinai and Palestine campaign at Gaza, for the British Empire’s Egyptian Expeditionary Force, with the loss of 10,000 men to the Ottoman Empire. These defeats were soon to be reversed at the October 1917 Battle of Beersheba. The Armistice of Mudros concluded this Middle Eastern theatre of WWI, on 30 October 1918, between the Ottoman Empire and the Allies. The Turkish war of Independence overthrew a final Ottoman leftover in the aftermath of WWI, and the Treaty of Lausanne in July 1923 sealed its fate.

 

THE PALESTINE MANDATE

A League of Nations mandate was a legal method cooked up by dominant ruling classes by which territories could be passed from one nation to another, principally the defeated to the victor. The defeated in this case was the Ottoman Empire, which had ruled Palestine. On this account, France received the Mandate from the League of Nations for Syria (and Lebanon), the British Empire for Mesopotamia and Palestine (Palestine, Trans-Jordan, Iraq), which started officially from 29 September 1923. The British Mandate in Palestine was to last until 1948, a span of roughly 25 years.

The victor’s terms gave the Allies the right to occupy any Ottoman territory, and the Ottoman Army was demobilized. To the Allies, all ports, railways, and strategic locations were made available. The Treaty of Lausanne dealt with the awkward leftovers from this conflict. It was sheer horse trading, with boundaries being drawn and ethnic peoples being exchanged like goods, with amnesties for the genocides that tool place. Many historians have referred to this treaty as an official endorsement of ethnic cleansing, forced population transfer, expulsions, deportations, and extermination.

Of the early modern period in Palestine Joel Kovel writes:

“In their The Global Political Economy of Israel, Jonothan Nitzan and Shimson Bichler describe how, as the Jewish settlement in Palestine took shape in the 1920s, it was comprised of three ‘pluralistic’ blocs: the ‘national sector’, a network of internationally founded financial organizations that arose intercurrently with the Herzlian movement and provided its capital; the ‘Histadrut sector’, comprising the direct economic activity of the powerful labor movement in Palestine (including the kibbutzim); and the private, or ‘civil sector’, a loose conglomerate of small economic interests. In addition, there were various investors and multinational corporations, and, conveniently forgotten, the fact that, up until 1948, ‘the whole process was embedded in a vibrant Palestinian society that was itself starting to industrialize.” (Overcoming Zionism, 2007)

The implication of such an ‘embeddedness’, as a ‘settlement in Palestine’, implies that already there was some form of imposition on the existing Palestinian society, which Kovel has noted, or at the very least there were two distinct major social and ethnic entities, the Jewish one and the Palestinian, with the Jewish being more modern capitalist, so there was probably already some friction between these groups. In any case, this shows us that the apparently sudden emergence of the state of Israel in 1948 was not lacking in some economic preparations or groundwork.

The stated aim of the Mandate was to ‘lead the native population to self-government’, implying that it lacked such a thing, but it specifically facilitated Jewish immigration. Arab Palestinians resisted this influx, at first by peaceful diplomacy, boycotts, and civil disruption, but by 1936, after this had had little effect, things became more serious with the 1936-39 Great Arab Revolt, and in particular the Arab national general strike starting April 1936, which lasted until October, and which developed into a rebellion, so much so that two divisions of the British Army were deployed to try to restore order.

In Amin al-Ḥusaynī, the British had ensconced an Arab nationalist mufti, who came to lead the Palestinian Arab movement after a bitter clash with other nationalist elements. - During most of the period, the British authorities encouraged divisions between the Arab groups to weaken their unity. Nevertheless, by 1936 all the Palestinian Arab groups had joined to make a permanent executive organ named the Arab High Committee under Ḥusaynī's chairmanship. The committee demanded the ending of Jewish immigration and the prohibition of land transfers from Arabs to Jews. The general strike demonstrated to the British ruling class that these Arab working-classes could no longer be so easily controlled through the vested interests of those it had compromised. It was one of the longest ever anti-colonial strikes. During its progress Jewish settlers were evicted or fled and much Jewish owned farmland was destroyed.

To try to deal with this situation, in 1937, the British Peel Commission proposed a partition between a small Jewish state, from which the Arab population was to be expelled, and an Arab state to be attached to Jordan. This scheme was rejected by the Arabs and by the Zionist Congress but was accepted by the latter as a basis for negotiations with the British Government. In the wake of this recommendation an armed Arab uprising spread throughout the country, and over the next 18 months the British lost control of Jerusalem, Nablus, and Hebron.

As their response, the British forces, supported by 6000-armed Jewish auxiliary police, suppressed this uprising with the deliberate and pre-planned use of overwhelming force. This use of extreme force was to set a precedent, and become a characteristic of conflicts in this region, it was in some respects a continuation of older customs of how to carry out colonial rule that the British Empire, and its adversary empires, knew well.

Charles Orde Wingate, a British officer who supported Zionism ‘for personal religious reasons’ (so it is said), organized 'Special Night Squads' composed of British soldiers and Jewish volunteers which conducted raids on Arab villages. These squads used indiscriminate violence. The conflict resulted in the deaths of 5,000 Palestinians and the wounding of 10,000. In total 10% of the adult male population was killed, wounded, imprisoned, or exiled, and by the time it ended in March 1939, more than 5,000 Arabs, 400 Jews, and 200 Britons had been killed and at least 15,000 Arabs wounded. The political strategy was chiefly to repress the working-class Palestinians by sowing hatred, bitterness, and division through extreme violence. After this, the British removed Ḥusaynī from the council presidency and declared the committee illegal in Palestine. In October 1937 he fled to Lebanon, where he reconstituted the committee under his leadership.

Oil was found in Saudi Arabia in 1938 (the largest oil discovery in the world so far is in Saudi Arabia). The Suez Canal had, as said, already made the region a strategic flashpoint for the health of global capitalism, but this greatly added to its strategic importance. This same year was the infamous Munich pact, when Hitler was not opposed by Britain, Italy, and France, in its partition of Czechoslovakia, and there was Kristallnacht in Germany, when Nazis instigated the destruction of Jewish homes, shops, and places of worship. A prelude to the Holocaust.

The coincidence of these events and dates are unlikely to be totally accidental. Zionist fascism, like Nazism, sought to at the very least be able to influence the management of the vital strategic interests present in this region, the Suez Canal shipping trade routes, and the new-found oil fields.

In Europe, World War II began the following year, on September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. In many respects, the unfinished business of WWI was now to be the business of WWII.

We shall from here tend to ignore the broad expanse of this war to concentrate on issues concerning the Middle East and Palestine specifically.

Meanwhile, however, capitalism had been developing the less religiously focused modern form of the moral representation of its imperialist interests through the media and its global, universal, humanitarian organizations, the media being perhaps the new form of religion, the latter perhaps the equivalent of the old missionaries.

1938 was the same year the Nansen International Office for Refugees (founded 1921) won the Nobel Prize for Peace. It had become an Office of the League of Nations in 1931 and was able to issue passports for the stateless; it had a Mandate to solve the refugee problem, but originally it did not apply to refugees from the Third Reich or to those from the civil war in Spain. Even though it was unable to solve the problem, it still received its prize for its ‘humanitarianism’. The increased number of refugees, from 1933, out of Germany meant that a new office was established in London called the High Commission for Refugees, now for all refugees.

The British government had sought to improve the Hagenah, the Jewish armed force, which had at its peak 3000 permanent and 16000 temporary personnel, but the Arab Palestinian uprising forced them to make concessions to Arab demands, and in any case by 1939, expecting the new war in Europe, Britain also began to seek support from the Arab nations. So, to this latter end, Britain announced a White Paper in May that the ‘Jewish National Home’ had now been achieved and that from this point Jewish immigration would be kept to 75,000 over the next five years, which was also meant to depend on local Arab Palestinian consent. This paper tends to put the Balfour declaration in perspective as a similar, merely self-interested, imperialist device.

The Jewish community in Palestine resisted these restrictions until the fall of France to the Nazis meant that there needed to be a more united front with the British to fight Germany. Ḥusaynī, though, rejected the policy and aligned with the Nazis, and, no longer playing an active role in Palestinian affairs, resided most of the rest of the war in Germany. With the defeat of Germany, he fled to Egypt.

On 25 November 1940 the Jewish paramilitary the Hagenah sank the ocean liner SS Patria in the Mandatory Palestinian port of Haifa by a bomb while trying to prevent the deportation of those onboard to Mauritius. This terrorist act killed 267 Jewish refugees and injured 172. The group claimed it was a miscalculation.

In February 1942, the Struma, a small ship with 791 Jewish refugees on board coming from Romania, was sunk after being towed through the Bosphorus and abandoned, and was there torpedoed, some say, by a Soviet submarine that had been ordered to prevent supplies reaching Nazi forces. The ship had docked in Istanbul where British officials wanted to apply the terms of their 1939 White Paper, but Turkish officials would not allow disembarkation. Over weeks the dispute continued, but after some refugee departures were allowed, the rest of the refugees, in the old boat with a useless engine, was towed out and forgotten.

The Hagenah, LEHI (Fighters for the Freedom of Israel, otherwise known to the British as the Stern Gang, a small fascist splinter group) and Irgun, were Jewish military forces; to the British LEHI and Irgun were terrorist organizations. Britain nonetheless trained the strike force of the Hagenah and helped it to gather intelligence during the war. But this also meant the Hagenah were able to circumvent restrictions on immigrant arrivals, given they had good insight into British strategy. This seems to me possible examples of ‘accidentally on purpose’ actions by the British government and ruling class, but these things are shrouded in secrecy.

Throughout WWII the Zionists endeavored to increase Jewish immigration to Palestine, while the British tried to prevent this, given they regarded it as a threat to the stability of a region they considered essential to the war effort. In effect, therefore, the Balfour declaration had been put on the back burner, although there still apparently survived some underlying assistance for the project. - On behalf of the Jewish Agency Ben-Gurion famously declared: “We shall fight this war as if there was no White Paper and we shall fight the White Paper as if there was no war” in response to the British attempts to prevent Jewish immigration, and which led to the sinking of the Patria and the Struma. The Irgun, under the leadership of Menachem Begin, and LEHI, initiated extensive attacks on the British authorities, such as the murder of Lord Moyne, the minister of state, by two LEHI members in Cairo in November 1944. Thus, through to 1943 the Hagenah was resisting British government attempts to disarm them.

The unconditional surrender of Hitler’s Third Reich, Germany, was signed Monday, May 7, 1945, at Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) at Reims in northeastern France. On September 2, 1945, WWII officially ended in the Pacific with the defeat of Japan.

From 1944, after four years of ceasefire with the British, the Zionist Irgun movement had restarted its campaign of armed revolt, as noted above, which involved terrorist bombings of British assets and the hanging of British servicemen in retaliation for the British execution of Irgun members. 91 British personnel and civilians were killed in the bombing of the British HQ at King David Hotel, Jerusalem, 22 July 1946.

On April 19 of the same year the League of Nations formally dissolved; the United Nations officially began its charter 24 October 1945, after a two-month conference in San Francisco (began 25 April 1945), so there was a brief period of overlap of about seven months between the two institutions. Perhaps the overlap acted as a kind of chaotic cover for some underhand schemes to go ahead.

The League of Nations had had its main headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. The new United Nations main headquarters was and is toady in Manhattan, New York, USA. This geographical change is not insignificant in revealing the shifts in global imperialist power from Europe to the US. The US however had not been a signatory to the original League of Nations covenant. This covenant once covered 44 nations. It grew to 58 during its largest manifestation, but at its conclusion it only numbered 23. It was often ridiculed as a club for protecting the colonial interest of Britain and France and was nicknamed the ‘League of Victors’, probably for such reasons as its protections of the rights to self-determination did not apply to British or French colonial possessions, such as the former territories of the Ottoman Empire, these instead fell under the terms of the Mandate system that held them ‘in trust’ until these communities ‘could be provisionally recognized as independent nations’.

The criteria supposed to be applied to achieve this status was never clarified though, which for Palestine would be crucial.

The old League, with its arbitration and sanctions (it lacked any armed forces of its own) had proved incapable of preventing Italy or Germany invading territories, or the militarization that had led to WWII. According to various commentators the motivation for the new United Nations was to prevent what had just occurred in WWII. Even so, there was also an understanding that the United Nations was inheriting the general principles of the League, which was inevitable. These principles had lasted for 26 years since the Paris peace conference of the Treaty of Versailles. One of the planned ideas of the League had already been to encourage transparent relations and deals between nations instead of the secret transactions and alliances that had been blamed at least partly for causing WWI.

However, by 1946, it was still the case that under the terms of the League of Nations Mandates all the countries that had been Mandated would revert to being sovereign nations. But peculiarly, this happened to all of them, except Palestine.

The UN deal, or its lack, concerning Palestine obviously contradicts the UN ideals of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to both large and small states alike. Thus Palestine seems to have particularly suffered from the failure of the fine words of the League to become reality, and then this failure being continued by the UN, due probably to the interests of the major powers, and particularly the US, in the post war circumstances, this coming into play even during the birth pangs of the new UN, with all its ideals, as I hope to further demonstrate.

Anyway, the British Mandate in Palestine was allowed to dissolve without any real clarification by the UN concerning the status of the land of Palestine, which effectively meant that now, if it was not solely the problem of the British - as it would be de facto for a while - it would also not be a problem for the other Allies such as France, or the US.

As stated, on April 19, 1946, the League of Nations was officially dissolved. As soon as September of the same year the British Government called a joint Jewish-Arab conference in London, which ended without agreement. At this time, thousands of Jewish refugees, potential immigrants, were being held in Cyprus and camps in Palestine after being intercepted in ships on their way there. In 1947 the government of Britain communicated that it did not want to manage this problem alone and referred it to the newly named United Nations. After WWII few western states were willing to accept the 600,000 or so Jewish displaced survivors of the Nazi Holocaust, so to these people Palestine probably held some allure as a destination where they might feel more legitimate, even if they were not outright Zionists.

 

A KEY YEAR POST WWII - 1947

Thus, about three years after the founding of the UN, in February 1947, Britain announced its intention to exit Palestine by 1948.

The story of one ship perhaps illustrates the conflicts and contradictions of this fraught period, in the one year, 1947, in which many things seem to come to a head. During this period, the ship Exodus 1947, renamed from the USS President Warfield, was modified for passenger transport by US sympathizers with the plight of Jews, and by the Hagenah, to carry 4,518 Jewish refugees, who were mostly Holocaust survivors and had no legal immigration certificates, to sail from France to Mandatory Palestine.

Eventually, two British Royal Navy vessels intercepted the ship in international waters and took it to Haifa, from where the passengers were meant to be returned to refugee camps in Europe.

Now, in May 1947 the UN had formed the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) to provide a report on recommendations for Palestine. The committee consisted of Australia, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Guatemala, India, Iran, the Netherlands, Peru, Sweden, Uruguay, and Yugoslavia.

Some of the members of UNSCOP witnessed the fraught transfer of the Exodus passengers at Haifa to the three ships for deportation back to France.

The ships left Haifa on July 19, 1947, for a port near Marseilles. At the port a stand-off developed over disembarkation, with the refugees refusing to leave the ships, with some assistance in this from the French authorities. It gained critical media attention and the British government finally decided on the astounding (at least to us) decision to transport the passengers to the British controlled zone of post-war Germany, apparently the largest site freely available to them. So, the ships went to Hamburg. The disembarkation there was resisted, but eventually these Jewish people were returned to be, again, in camps in Germany. This drew, as you can imagine, some bad press, and the conditions in the camps were exaggerated as being like Nazi camps according to some sources, but in the end, many interns were able to reach Palestine by escaping to the US zone and from there were assisted onward.

On 3 September 1947 UNSCOP reported to the General Assembly of the UN.

It put forward two main proposals. The majority recommended two separate states in Palestine with a joined economy, the minority a single binational state with autonomous areas. The Arab nations and committees opposed both options, but the Jews accepted the first (as they had before to the British). An alternative proposal suggested that only those Jews who had arrived before the Balfour Declaration, and their descendants, would be able to be citizens of the state. This did not win Jewish approval.

Who were representing the apparent Jewish interests at this time, at the UN, and who objected?

This question is pertinent, of course, given that the state of Israel did not yet exist to argue for itself.

- There was the Jewish Agency, other Jewish organizations and sympathizers, and there was a great deal of intense lobbying of the US government by these Jewish ruling class interests, also to put pressure on other nations to support the Zionist project. The Jewish lobby would not have been local to Palestine, or Palestinian Jews. We can see the last stated proposal thwarted Zionist aims in Palestine, but it would also be likely objected to by the US administration, because it would prevent Jewish immigration to Palestine, by default putting more pressure on the US to accept them as refugees (about which we will see more later). There was little direct democratic voice of the local Palestinians involved in this decision-making, and we cannot simply assume the Arab nations and their ruling classes were expressing valid opinions for them. That these Arab nations in the end objected to both options, perhaps was also unfortunate for Palestinians, because it left them out of this pseudo democratic process, so the people who were living in the land simply had no real voice in the forum that was deciding their future.

 

END OF THE BRITISH MANDATE AND BEGINNING OF ISRAEL

In Europe in 1947 a committee had been formed to help resettle the millions of displaced persons caused by the war, - the International Refugee Organization, which promoted the immigration of Jews to other countries.

By this date, many nations sought able-bodied workers from the displaced persons camps, but they apparently wanted Gentiles, none expressed any preference for Jews, Belgium for example selected 20,000 Baltics and Ukrainians to work in its mines, while the British selected 30,000 single adults also for mining, agricultural and domestic tasks, the impression is these would be workers used in their domestic class struggles to undercut the price of local labour.

In May 1948 Britain formally ceded its Mandate.

The modern state of Israel was created on May 14, 1948, with a declaration of independence. This was enabled, however, by the previous 29 November 1947 UN approval of the partition of Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab, in Resolution 181.

Thirty-three countries voted in favour, including the US, 13 voted against, 10 abstained. The UK and China abstained. This resolution authorized a Jewish state on half of British Mandated Palestine when Jews comprised less than a third of the population and owned less than 7 percent of the land. So, it essentially put the stamp of approval of the UN on the use of force to gain territory, and it by default linked the Jewish refugee problem to it.

The bias towards Jewish interests in Palestine directly contradicted many aspects of the UN charter, and particularly the Declaration Governing Non-Self-Governing Territories, Chapter XI. Nevertheless, it passed.

However, the actual borders of Israel and Palestine were not agreed or established at this time. This quote from Frontlineworld describes this:

“The borders around me seemed uncertain, as always throughout Israel's history. When Israel declared statehood in 1948, it didn't declare borders -- but in 1949, it agreed with each of its neighbors on ceasefire lines that also defined the West Bank and Gaza. For a time, Israel negotiated treaties that included stipulations on frontiers -- with Jordan in 1994; with Egypt in 1979; even provisionally with Syria in 1974. But the official status of the West Bank and Gaza, which Israel occupied in 1967, has not been decided. After more than 50 years, the state of Israel has never established legal, binding borders.”

From <https://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/frontlineworld/fellows/israel/intro.html>

Thus, the current (2024) de facto borders between Israel and Palestine and Israel’s other neighbouring countries (Egypt, Syria, Jordan) have only been achieved through warfare.

The founding of a modern state is bound to be a violent act, because it is based on the physical enforcement of the legal rules of that state, and which determine its borders and the laws that cover these borders, which here meant the establishment of the internal borders between the two major population groups, newly ethnically defined by the new state of Israel. It stands to reason that to do this, to achieve this end, there must be strong enforcement, so strong forces, such as police and military forces. Without very special geographical and linguistic boundaries, this is how a nation state becomes a nation state.

The way the new leaders of Israel framed the Arab nations refusal to accept the UN plans was ‘Arab hatred’ for any Jewish state ‘of their own’, but the local Palestinians did not have a state “of their own” either, at this time. This also lumped together the local Palestinian population with the objecting neighbouring Arab nations, and their ruling classes, which were not the same thing.

A shared single state with restrictions on Jewish settlers might have been the better option for local people, Arabs and Jews and others, since it would not require large transfers of land and population and the conflicts that would be likely from this, and perhaps might have reflected better what had already existed up until now. But this would have left the Jewish refugee problem unsolved for western nations.

Thus, in UN Resolution 181, theoretical borders were drawn between Palestine and Israeli, but not the actual borders. The Palestinian areas defined here were not quite as contiguous as Israel, but the largest part of Palestine surrounded the city of Jerusalem. However, the borders of much of Palestinian territory were surrounded by Israel and seems not to be so favorable to them strategically or economically, since a lot of trade would probably have to pass through Israel.

After the vote there were demonstrations and a general strike by the indigenous Palestinians.

Zionist fascist military groups then attacked Palestinian villages. Palestinian groups organized and defended their territory.

The attack on the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin, west of Jerusalem, on April 9, 1948, is notable (it had once been captured as the useful strategic point that it was by the British in 1917, since it was a high point and provided useful cover over the route between Jerusalem and the Mediterranean coast), forces of the Irgun and the Stern Gang killed about 100 of its inhabitants. Arab Palestinian reprisals followed. The Kfar Etzion kibbutz massacre was after a two-day battle, May 13, 1948, in which 127 Hagenah were killed by the Jordanian Arab Legion and local men.

Because the Israeli state had agreed to the UN partition and the Arab nation states had not, the new state of Israel could defend its enforcement of the partition as democratically justified, and as giving to it its oft repeated right of self defence. Technically this was therefore correct. Thus, today it is rare that any media mentions the Palestinians having any ‘right to self defence’, because, unlike Israel, according to the UN, they do not have a state that could be recognized as having such rights. However, the fact is that it is the UN which is the vehicle that denies the right to a Palestinian state in the first place (today many countries recognize Palestine to be a state, like China).

In 1947, in the Middle East, the Arab neighbors of Palestine warned that the proposed partition of Palestine would have impacts on the thousands of Jews living in their countries peacefully. The Zionist terrorist groups Irgun and LEHI ostensibly opposed it, as Menachem Begin said, because it bisected their homeland, and other Zionist acceptances of the conditions appears only to be tactical, with the full expectation of later expansion.

Britain declined to enforce the UN plan and refused to share the administration of Palestine with a proposed UN transition regime, or to allow militias to be created by Jews or Arabs, or assist in the handover of territory, to anyone. This position is curious. It seems to reflect the British arrival at a kind of stalemate in its own policies over this land. Did it mark a reluctant but practical recognition that its Empire was truly over?

The partition was especially bad for working class Palestinian Arabs which had previously engaged in relatively successful class struggles. Because such struggles were already watched with fright by the Arab neighbor nations ruling class leaders, these tended to acquiesce to the western powers bribes and cajoles to keep them subdued.

Meanwhile, generally, not allowing the post war Jewish refugees to settle in the US in any number, especially given its mainland and civilians were relatively untouched by the war compared to Europe, seems also to be one key to the later conflagrations, since it forced many Jews towards Palestine by default.

We must look at this episode in more detail for a moment:

 

THE POST WWII REFUGEE AND DISPLACED PERSONS PROBLEM

The US Stratton Bill, the ‘Emergency Temporary Displaced Persons Admissions Act’, languished, because,

“Most congressmen knew little about displaced persons, could not understand why they had not gone home after the war, and feared an economic depression or a glut on the labor market if a large number of immigrants started coming to the United States.”

From <https://www.yadvashem.org/articles/academic/american-immigration-policy.html>

The opposed Senator Revercomb of West Virginia was most worried about the possibility of communists entering the country this way, despite its apparent popularity amongst the US public (a 1947 RKO documentary film This is America, series 5, No. 9, Passport to Nowhere, encouraged sympathy). It was Revercomb who was appointed to lead an investigative tour to assess the situation in the temporary Displaced Persons (DPs) camps in Europe, chiefly occupied by Jews. Subsequently, House and Senate committees reached the conclusion that something should be done, but part of their understanding was that the opening of Palestine to the Jews would help end the ‘logjam’.

The Fellows Bill followed.

From <https://www.yadvashem.org/articles/academic/american-immigration-policy.html>

It put strict limits on immigration to the US per year and on who could be allowed to enter the country by discriminating on national, occupational, and religious grounds. Truman ameliorated these harsh criteria by appointing sympathetic people to run the program, and more Jews were allowed in than expected, but these liberals were soon suspected of allowing in communists etc. (they were evidently not concerned about Nazis or fascists), and it became strictly enforced again. There was a struggle to liberalize the Displaced Persons Act of 1948, but by 1950 displaced persons were no longer so relevant, presumably because Palestine had solved it for them. Note that many of the US official texts referenced in this period do not refer specifically to Jews, only DPs.

Many of the European Jews had been in death camps, had lost their homes, and probably their wealth, and probably did not want to return or stay in countries (or could not) that had helped to transport them to the death camps, or had done little to prevent this.

Europe was also happy to connive in this unhelpful attitude towards making a home for these people, and the responsibility could in any case relatively easily be shifted onto British shoulders. Already, in 1903, the British had proposed to the Jewish Zionists some uninhabited land in Uganda, which they had rejected.

It was likely that the decision was attractive to the western powers, and to their imperialist interests, because they surmised a well-armed nation in the Middle East with a western cultural, largely white, leaning due to immigration from Europe, might be malleable to their concerns, in this now oil rich region. And it also probably would have seemed useful to them to exacerbate the existing deep religious differences (already the traditional useful tactic of colonial rule) to keep the locals in a relatively backward state, allowing more easy manipulation, so lessening the chances of any developing threat. On the face of it, however, the reason was antisemitism and anticommunism amongst the ruling classes and their politicians, and this was undeniably present and the vehicle.

 

THE FIRST WAR BETWEEN ISRAEL AND NEIGHBOURING STATES

Nevertheless, probably to save face somewhat, the ruling classes of Israel’s neighboring Arab states decided to economically blockade the newly independent state (Egypt ended its blockade in 1979 and Jordan from 1994). However, immediately after the declaration a full state on state conflict between Israel and the surrounding Arab countries began. As soon as the morning after the Israeli declaration of independence and so immediately after the British Mandate ended, on 15 May 1948, the militaries of a coalition of Arab states crossed into the contested territory of Palestine, this effectively turning the existing small scale civil war into a bigger conflict, involving the forces of Transjordan, Egypt, Syria, and forces from Iraq. Curiously, such a conflict would assist the state of Israel to define its borders inside Palestine, since this could not be done without some sort of force. Having foreseen this war, and indeed even wanting it, the Israeli leaders had prepared by gathering armaments and equipment from abroad, particularly the west; the smuggling of weapons was apparently assisted by US aviators, so the records say.

The hostilities lasted only ten months. It led to Israel's emphatic victory, and the expansion of its borders beyond those in the original UN partition theoretical plan. This event was to be called the Nakba (Catastrophe) by Palestinians. More than half of the Arab Palestinian people lost their homes during this war, and only a small number were allowed to return once it ended. Many massacres were conducted and about 400 Arab majority towns and villages were ethnically cleansed, a lot being destroyed completely or taken over by Jewish settlers.

As a kind of sop to the problem of the new Palestinian refugees now created by the problem of the displaced Jewish refugees from Europe settling in Palestine, UN resolution 194 of 11 December 1948 resolved that these refugees had the right to return to their homes and live in peace with their neighbors. It was and is in many ways a disingenuous resolution, representing fine language that its authors must have known would not be implemented. Many other resolutions with similar good intentions would follow.

The quick decisiveness of the Israeli victory leads one inevitably to wonder if the invasion was treated seriously by the combatants and whether it was intended to be of any real help to the Palestinian people. It seemed somewhat performative.

The invaders, who were members of the Arab League, were not well prepared for this war, the King of Transjordan seemed to be after his own gains, and the Egyptian ruling class was apparently mostly motivated by preventing Transjordan’s ambitions. So, there was rivalry, and a lack of unity of purpose, and so perhaps a lack of coordination and determination, and we can assume this would probably have affected strategy; while for the Jews in Palestine, in general, this war meant everything, - survival. Additionally, during the conflict many members of the Arab Palestinian petit bourgeois and bourgeois classes simply fled Palestine abandoning the working class. Remember, it was not impossible for ruling class moneyed interests to cross ethnic divides and find common aim against the working classes, even Arab and Jew. But even so, the outright success of Israel seems a little strange.

A suggestion is that the ruling class leaders of some of the neighboring Arab states feared the success of the Palestinians in the form of their class struggles more than the success of the Israeli ruling class, but felt obliged, in the interests of public opinion at home, to at least make a semblance of a fight, if they lost, after all, who would suffer? And the question is, were there to be rewards for ‘losing’ this war, such as for their class from the USA? Perhaps secrecy hides a lot here, this is the only certainty.

 

THE AFTERMATH

Since this time, the Jewish population in Israel has grown massively, but far more from immigration than from natural increase, while the Arab population has grown chiefly through high birth rates. The latter caused, and still does, quite some consternation among the Israeli ruling class, because an ethnically religious based state requires an ethnic majority to maintain at least some semblance of legitimacy for its rule.

October 1953 saw the Oibya massacre. Israeli troops, under Ariel Sharon, attacked the West Bank village, then under Jordan’s stewardship, and killed sixty-nine Palestinians. Houses, mosques, and schools were also destroyed. Two thirds of those killed were women and children. It was depicted by the Israelis as a reprisal attack for a cross border raid in which an Israeli woman and two children were killed.

1956 saw the ‘Suez Crisis’ when Egypt’s nationalization of the Suez Canal under Nasser threatened British and French interests in the canal, so led to them conniving with Israel to secure this prize, also using the UN, a strategy which was quite successful at this time with the resounding Israeli defeat of Egyptian forces. However, the Europeans had to leave the canal in Egyptian hands after world nuclear war was threatened between the US and the Soviet Union over the issue. The British Prime Minister Anthony Eden had to resign. Perhaps more than any other conflict, the 1956 Suez crisis exposed the role western capitalists saw Israel as playing in the region, as an important policing force for their interests. In a Senate session, in 1986, Joe Biden made a speech in which he said that if Israel did not exist the US would have to invent one to protect US interests.

https://youtu.be/FYLNCcLfIkM?si=XsXZAAvo_ihIWV5Z

In 1967 there was the Six Day War, the third of the Arab Israeli wars. 1967 resembled a rerun of the first disunited and ineffective Arab war against the Israeli state. Israel’s victory was uncannily overwhelming again, particularly their pre-emptive attacks (so-called) on the unprotected aircraft capacities of their enemies. Israeli forces captured the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt (again), the Gaza Strip, the West Bank from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria. After Egypt closed the Suez Canal at the beginning of this war, on 5 June 1967, it remained closed for eight years.

16-18 September 1982 saw the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps massacre, Beirut, during the Lebanese Civil War, in which about 3000 civilians, mostly Palestinians and Shia Lebanese were murdered. Ariel Sharon was found to be personally responsible (among others) by the Israeli Supreme Court Kahan commission and Israeli forces (IDF) found indirectly responsible. The Likud government of Israel today seeks to reduce the power of the Israeli Court system for such reasons.

By now massacre was cemented as a kind of normal modus operandi for hostilities in the region, principally instigated by the state of Israel, but not entirely, always justified under its defensive posture.

The European Holocaust was of course not a result of anything done by the Palestinians, even if one of their leaders, who was set up, after all, by the British, sided with Germany, this did not mean Palestinian Arabs were Nazis, rather that this was the type of character the British ruling class preferred to deal with as their ensconced leader of troublesome foreign workers. Some Arab Palestinians were fooled by the early days of Hitler’s apparent socialism, indeed, just like Germans at the time. But this supposed Nazi connection would be exploited thereafter by Zionists. Subsequently, the Holocaust was repeatedly pointed at as if the Palestinians were somehow a guilty part of its legacy.

The precarious way the Israel state was born encouraged its use of terror to survive, - its apparent lack of legitimacy, the already extremely traumatic background of many of its citizens, its uncertain and contested multiple borders, all added to the feeling of the Jewish people in Palestine that it was necessary to be ruthless to survive, which, among other religious perspectives, led it to condone extremely harsh measures in response to any resistance to the state of Israel. These migrants, colonists, probably lacked a feeling of ethnic roots even if these were supposed by the religion. Thus they needed to be soldierly and tough even if not officially in the armed forces, they needed to impose themselves, like early colonists in the Americas or Australia, not your standard citizen. Class differences between bourgeois and working class jews would likely have been relatively subdued by these shared difficult living circumstances in earlier times. However, this led to the way the Israeli ruling class would keep up the violence it apparently needed for it to maintain its total authority, by encouraging the repeated election of its extremist far rightists, based on constantly working up threats, and the fear of those threats, to the existence of the Israeli state.

The ambiguities in Israel’s official attitude to terrorism can be seen in neat microcosm in the early history of its military forces, and in particular the LEHI group, which, as said, was designated a terrorist organization by the British and UN authorities in the 1940s and even by Israel itself in 1948, but which by 1980 has been honored by Israeli leaders in retrospect, despite that, in 1940, LEHI proposed intervening in WWII on the side of the Nazis - it offered assistance in ‘evacuating’ European Jews, in return for Germany’s help in expelling Britain from Mandated Palestine. It is peculiar how opportunist and crass an entire state can be, in this sense, by swiveling its perceived interests and having no qualms.

In the current State of Israel there are strong internal divisions. The major one is that between the two main Jewish groups, the Ashkenazic, who are European in origin and tradition, and the Sephardic who are Mediterranean. The Sephardic Jew is traditionally the poorer of the two groups and is less represented in high politics than the Ashkenazim.

Within Israeli society, there are internal fault lines, as there are bound to be, that are a microcosm of its general fractious situation regarding its external neighbours and Palestinians.

One of these is the exemption from military service of ultra-Orthodox religious Jews. The political parties of these groups, called Haredi, the rightist ultra-Orthodox Shas and United Torah Judaism parties are important to the survival of the Likud party of Netanyahu for it to remain in government, and which therefore gives to them outsized power.

These parties demand that their exemption from military service be allowed to continue, after it was threatened by new legislation, and the Israel High Court decision in 2017, which called blanket military service exemptions discriminatory and illegal.

Internally to Israel, these rightist communities have acted in a not so dissimilar way towards their Israeli secular and liberal fellow citizens as they have towards Palestinians, although not so violently of course, such as by their aggressive services and building policies displacing secular and liberal Jewish institutions (like in Kiryat Yovel where The Times of Israel reports that a local outstanding school was given over by the municipality to make an ultra-Orthodox school for girls) in favour of those for far right religious groups.

Class divisions perhaps are not so apparent when there are these factions which are caste-like, but they lie behind the friction as the contending social classes vie for dominance and rights, a process which is likely to grow as Israel society matures, the widespread social protests over the government attacks on the judiciary in recent years reveal this happening even while the far-right dominates in government.

In Israel, Palestinian Arab citizens are generally the poorer community compared to these Jews, though ostensibly they hold full citizenship and have almost full rights under Israeli law. There is a degree of autonomy for all the various religious groups, e.g., Muslim, Christian, and Druze, but the catch is that the number of Arab citizens is tightly controlled and kept below the number of Jews and identity cards describe your ethnicity rather than citizenship; - it is essentially an apartheid system. This fact goes mostly unreported in the western press. For instance, today, in 2024 (as I write during the Israel/Gaza conflict), in effect, there are bans, especially on Arab but also Jewish citizens who want to call for peace and a ceasefire in Gaza, or who in any way wish to express opposition to the war. Jewish Israeli and Arab Muslim Palestinian Israeli citizens lead segregated lives already, but during conflicts this situation is exacerbated. To quote:

“There have been dozens of Israelis detained, fired or harassed for criticising the war or expressing solidarity with civilians in Gaza – mostly, but not all, members of the Arab minority – in a lopsided crackdown on civil rights and freedom of speech inside Israel. “Calling for an end to the war became a symbol of treason, the whole of society feels they have a right to be a policeman to question you or even snitch on you because of a sentence like ‘stop the war,’” said Abu Al Asal.”

From <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/10/israel-arabs-protesters-demonstration-speak-out>

The state of Israel today has, as we all cannot fail to see, camps, fenced camps where an ethnic people are concentrated, thus Gaza and the West Bank are the areas that have been designated to contain Arab Palestinians, the other ethnic claimants contesting the territory. It is a terrible irony that displaced Palestinian refugees from the conflicts in this land have been denied their right of return to their homes, even when they had obvious native ancestry for generations, while people of the Jewish faith have the globally enforced right to live in Israel/Palestine, even when their ancestors have had no real connection to the territory. In this place the mystical and religious positions take precedent over science and historical facts, even for advanced western nations with sophisticated scientific communities.

Different borders from different periods are often mooted by the western powers, post 1948, like 1967, but they all assume that the Israeli state is legitimate from the date of the UN planned partition of the land, while the Palestinians are taken for granted to remain without a genuine state, but always on their way to possibly achieving one ‘if they behave’.

The non-Israeli citizen Arab Palestinians inevitably find themselves living in an extra-authoritarian manifestation of the Israeli state, standing even more above the people, and even in their designated ‘territories’, like Gaza (ostensibly ‘free’) and the West Bank (occupied). These Palestinians of course resist their enforced status as inmates and refugees in the land of their forefathers.

This form of ownership, which is ownership by use and time, is however precisely what is contested by the declaration of the modern state of Israel in Palestine.

Particularly authoritarian is the regime in the Occupied West Bank, where Palestinians cannot move freely from city to city, can be summarily arrested and held without trial indefinitely in Israeli prisons (administrative detention), a fate which includes many children, while in this area Jewish Zionist settlers also use extreme violence to force Palestinians off their land, with the assistance of the Israeli army.

While the Gaza Strip is ‘freed’ in the sense that Israel is superficially ‘hands off’ here, it has been a cage with only one border opening to a state other than Israel, to Egypt, which nevertheless also blockades it through its agreement with the Israeli and US ruling class, based on various bribes to the Egyptian leaders. Every so often when the friction becomes too great, the Israeli state bombs these people.

The people of Gaza are mostly forced to survive on aid from abroad, indeed they are fed and watered but cannot develop a real economy or, organically, shall we say, a genuine state. This in turn means that its working class is reduced in numbers and self-awareness as a class. The demolition of this working class seems to be deliberate policy, perhaps a historic response to the last great strikes by the Arab Palestinian working class.

The spectacular breakout by Gazan Palestinian Hamas forces, and others, onto Israeli territory on 7^th October 2023 killed about 1200 people including Israeli and some Arab citizens and foreign workers, many captives were also taken back into Gaza as captives. The circumstances of this attack were covered widely in the media and created considerable controversy over its ruthlessness and cruelty, but also there were some false and deliberately exaggerated reports made about it, such as in the New York Times; nevertheless, some atrocities happened, and discipline among the attackers failed, but according to investigations the 40 beheadings of babies did not occur, nor the reported systematic rapes, and there were also some killings of Israeli civilians by ‘friendly fire’ from Israeli Apache helicopters.

The overall framing of this attack in the western mainstream media was as if the conflict in Palestine started from this moment, the historical context of the Israeli state occupation being forgotten, including its most recent long embargo of the Gaza Strip; but even when this context was mentioned by various brave people, it was labelled as excusing atrocities and antisemitism. Thenceforth, this kneejerk reaction, which could be understood initially, was not allowed to slowly evaporate to be replaced by rationalism, the media instead deliberately nursed it along, forever keeping it in the audience’s mind.

Just as we should remember the Holocaust, we should not turn our heads away from reasons for gross atrocities. For if you can indeed just ignore and forget Shabra and Shatila, say, why not all the other genocides in human history? What was really happening was that we were being told to forget the past heinous acts of fascism, to forget history, on behalf of contemporary fascism. It was strange how the media appeared to be complicit in this, how it failed to see any contradictions in raising antisemitism while ignoring ongoing war crimes. By default, it seemed to seek the most sensational outcome by choosing the most exacerbating position in the current situation.

One of the instigating factors for the Hamas attack had been said to be the deliberate recent western policy to simply ignore the Israeli occupation by the world’s media, and the possibility that was threatened because of this of normalized political relations between, for instance, Saudi Arabia and Israel. The Israeli far-right did not want such a normalization either, so the attack peculiarly fulfilled, whether by default or something more conspiratorial, some unspoken aims on both sides, and it was suitably vicious and sensational, in other words, as if made to order.

Tony Blair once said in an interview with Donald Macintyre in 2017 that he regretted the western decision not to engage with Hamas after it won the legislative election in the Palestinian Territories in 2006 (and gained the majority in the Palestinian Legislative Council), which left Hamas short of political options and perhaps forced it to its military position. This winning of a democratic election by Hamas was regularly ignored even in the liberal press, and when this transfer of power had to be referred to it was generally stated as if Hamas had ‘seized’ power violently in a coup.

During the horror of the Israeli attacks on Gaza the calls of the UN and aid agencies for Israel to follow the laws of war seemed almost ridiculous in their ineffectiveness, as did the weak laments of the few western politicians who called on them to avoid civilian casualties. Meanwhile, the propaganda of the Israeli ruling class and the Likud party in government resembled far-right trolling. Witnessing a modern ostensibly democratic nation state resorting to such propaganda was, although a sign of the times, still shocking.  

The western media dutifully presented this conflict as a ‘war’, but such unequally arraigned combatants could not really justify the term, it seemed to be only a way to frame the high death rate of Palestinian civilians as justified instead of being a disproportionate collective punishment, a war crime in other words.

Some Palestinian commentators noticed that some of the extreme Israeli media accounts of the October 7^th attacks included descriptions of atrocities that took place for real in the Shabra and Shatila massacre by Israeli and other forces against Palestinians, presumably trying to inflame the situation even further. There were indeed atrocities enacted which they could have mentioned, but strangely, instead, the Israeli media seemed to prefer these stories.

The Israeli Defence Force relentlessly bombed the enclosed Gaza Strip; while doing so it disingenuously suggests the northern population of Gaza evacuate to the south and safety, but then also bombed the south and fired on the people taking the pre-arranged route. They at the same time laid siege to Gaza to deprive them of water, food, fuel, and electricity, and invaded with ground forces.

That these acts by Israel included war crimes was as plain as the light of day, even documented on social media by IDF soldiers, but the western media insisted on applying a ‘balance’ to their coverage and refused to see it. Indeed, they did not have reporters on the scene because they had been denied access by Israel, but this denial did not raise any condemnation or even any suspicion as to why in the mainstream press, disclosing a willful ignorance.

(We can ask the question why this happened, here, but cannot give a full answer. The unity of the global press I think demonstrated at this point the existence of media state apparatuses that were not in any way ‘free’ as we were supposed to think.)

As we have documented above, the Israeli ruling class had historically used terror to achieve its aims; it was and is in this sense a terrorist state, even according to some of its own representatives, who embraced the Nazi-like connotations.

But the Israeli state was and is now a fact, it is not feasible that it could be dismantled, and it has been victorious in its conquests. This was the material circumstance of the conflict. It was also true, at the same time, however, that Palestinians would never give up their claims to rights over their land, because for the Palestinians the borders were all imposed undemocratically.

The role of an individual here also had some impact on these events: the Israeli PM Netanyahu did not have much interest in quickly concluding the conflict, given that afterwards he would probably be indicted for corruption in Israel, and so he told his troops to be in no hurry. Indeed, if the conflict in Gaza were to halt, probably he would try to open-up another front and the conflagration would spread, probably to Lebanon.

Most leading western politicians, excepting to a degree the President of France (France at least joined the first calls for a ceasefire at the UN), were all remarkably OK with what was being committed, or feigned being unable to see the horror; they stalled and prevaricated, most supported the US line, and thus became complicit in the genocide.

The UN for its part continued to stand aghast at the civilian death toll, including the unprecedented number of deaths of its own personnel in Gaza. But it had, as a bourgeois institution, as we have seen, historically been instrumental to all this.

All along there had been a glaringly different western response to the invasion of Ukraine by Russia and the denouncing of the Russian occupation and apparent war crimes, like Bucha, in contrast to the Israel attack on Gaza, which has led to accusations of double standards and hypocrisy, although this also was hardly voiced in the western media. Social media seemed different, here at least the criticism of genocide was available, like Owen Jones’, of the killings; the only thing missing from this understanding was the reason for it.

Even so, despite this ubiquitous pro-genocide mainstream media coverage, people have demonstrated globally in their hundreds of thousands, calling for a ceasefire, with many Jews also coming together to do this, including in Tel Aviv.

On 26 January 2024 the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the highest court of the UN, momentously decided that Israel had a case to answer regarding the threat of genocide committed by Israeli forces in Gaza (over 30, 000 people killed to this date). The case was brought by South Africa. It made an interim judgement that was damning of Israel. Its judgments are regarded as binding, but the court does not have its own means to enforce them.

The western media apparatuses response, as a coordinated maneuver, obtusely, was to downplay this ruling and spin the lack of a direct call for an immediate ceasefire as a backhanded endorsement of Israel’s actions.  A ceasefire could not have been considered by the court because it would have required the agreement of both sides in the conflict, or two states, and it was only dealing with Israel as a state, since Palestine was not regarded as a state. The US administration responded by saying that it still considered the claims of genocide to be unfounded, such law being not important to it when it disagreed with it, while at other times it had used international humanitarian law to reprimand other nations, for instance Russia most recently in its conflict with Ukraine. Meanwhile the bombing, siege, and attacks on Gaza continued and increased. Simultaneous with the judgment being reported another news item was however immediately released that referred to allegations that some employees of the UN’s Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (UNWRA) had participated in the attack of 7th October.

“The Israeli dossier contains the names and jobs of the 12 UNRWA employees and the allegations against them. Ten are said to have been members of Hamas and another affiliated with Islamic Jihad.”

From <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/29/school-counsellor-among-unrwa-staff-involved-in-7-october-attack-says-israel>

“This was strong and corroborated intelligence,” the official told Axios, a US news website based in Virginia, according to the Times of Israel. “A lot of the intelligence is a result of interrogations of militants who were arrested during the October 7 attack.”

Just, presumably, when something was felt needed by the western ruling classes to counterbalance the ICJ victory for South Africa, one magically surfaced. In a swift, choreographed series, most western nations, including the US, Canada, Australia, Italy, Netherlands, Switzerland, Finland, and the UK, lined up to cease funding to UNRWA, pouring more suffering onto the Palestinian civilians of Gaza already dying of bombardment, hunger, thirst, disease, the cold (it was now winter), and the absence, due to their destruction, of healthcare facilities, which had been attacked.

During this conflict, as has already been remarked, over one hundred UN and UNRWA personnel had been killed so far by Israeli forces, but there were no similar sanctions for the perpetrators of this by these same nations, - aid, funding, arms supplies, to Israel indeed increased.

Unlike the South African politicians, some of whom seem to have forgotten how such a struggle usually goes, danced in celebration after the ICJ result came through, but Palestinians at home were markedly reserved, I suppose knowing what the likely outcome would be. Jan Egeland, secretary of the Norwegian Refugee Council, gave the appropriate response to the halting of aid, saying “lifesaving aid” in Gaza is being threatened by donors “recklessly suspending aid”, and that “UNRWA has rightly terminated the contracts of those alleged to violate our neutrality principle,” (writing on X), but “Donors, do not starve children for the sins of a few individual aid workers.” This latter statement is probably incorrect though, unfortunately.

The staff who were allegedly involved were summarily dismissed, according to the UN, by ‘reverse due process’, a kind of ‘shoot first, ask questions later’ policy.

If true (given the track record of the Israeli government it probably was not), this would have to be more a case of infiltration than direct employee involvement, which was how it was first conveyed in the media. In the past, aid institutions have indeed been found to be infiltrated, including by western secret agencies (such as the Red Cross during the Balkans war). Such infiltration seems highly likely under the circumstances that are usually prevailing for these aid institutions, and of course they were not de-funded when western intelligence used them. So, it would be quite surprising if Israeli intelligence had not itself infiltrated UNWRA themselves, and indeed questions are hanging over the knowledge that Netanyahu might have had over the October attack by means of such intelligence.

The way in which the Israeli authorities discovered this apparent infiltration was by its own admission via espionage and interrogations. The accusations, that had evidently been known for some time, were obviously deliberately released just after the ruling by the UN ICJ, to smear, punish, and balance against the ICJ decision. All the western ‘free’ media were clearly prepared and ready to headline these claims, as if they were facts, immediately and in a coordinated manner. Whether these claims have any truth to them or not this media activity is revealing; they generally presented the Israeli findings as if these were not infiltrators but straightforward UNRWA employees, a malicious framing in the context.

A month later the UN had still received no evidence from the Israeli authorities about the alleged involvement of staff in the 7 October attack. Some countries resumed funding.

By March, the US, which had hitherto vetoed repeated calls at the UN for a ceasefire, finally put forward a draft resolution calling for one. This presumably came because the situation in Gaza was on the verge of, if not already in, a state of famine due to the siege, and the deaths of millions possibly loomed now also due to hunger and thirst. Perhaps, given a US presidential election was looming, this may have been a factor too; and mass deaths caused by famine would be harder to put down to collateral damage and less easy to prevaricate over. Evidently there was some efforts to be made in now wanting to appear blameless, or at least to muddy the waters.

At the same time, Netanyahu kept to his position and persisted with his threat to attack Rafah. This was the city to which hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians had fled, in the south near the border crossing with Egypt, after being instructed to do so by the Israeli authorities, as a ‘safe refuge’. Nevertheless, Rafah and other southern cities were still being bombed. This was under the IDF rationale that Hamas battalions were present among, and under the civilians in tunnels. In central Gaza, desperate Palestinians who amassed waiting for aid trucks carrying food were shot at and many killed by the IDF.

A question never asked by the ‘free press’ was how do the Israeli forces know enough to be able to distinguish civilian from militants in Gaza, as they constantly said they could, while they bomb? Hamas and other Islamist groups active in Gaza do not all wear identifiable uniforms, and they are drawn from the civilian inhabitants. It therefore means that the Israeli claims to be targeting only militant Hamas etc., must be untrue, or are at least disingenuous. Such arguments nevertheless apparently gave them, in the media, the excuse to target suspicious civilian activity. But the repeated claims to be focusing on, and locating, ‘command centers’ etc., all of which are terms implying this was a conventional conflict, must be false, and they sounded false. The Israeli embargo itself has after all ensured that the armed resistance that they face is not organized like a professional state army, since it cannot be a state army, a state is forbidden to them, it must be a guerilla conflict. From this alone we might conclude that Israel’s conduct in the conflict, which treats it like a conventional war, and which has killed so many Gazan inhabitants so far, including very many children, was planned as a genocide because of the numbers of Palestinians in the population of the region recently overtaking that of Israelis. Hence, they are being reduced in numbers. This would also explain the unprecedented death rate of children and women in this conflict, given they are the producers of the Palestinian future. The attempt to starve to death the remaining Palestinians was also obviously a war crime, but at best the ‘free press’ reported as if there were two sides that balanced in the argument. In any case, all these humanitarian laws and rules had been flouted so much already that they did not mean much anymore unless they were backed by actions.

 

 

Bibliography

Overcoming Zionism, Joel Kovel, 2007, Pluto Press.

“Importance of the universal realization of the right of peoples to self-determination and of the speedy granting of independence to colonial countries and peoples for the effective guarantee and observance of human rights.”

From <https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/62072?ln=ar>

From https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-to-seek-to-end-unrwa-gaza-activities-after-staffers-fired-for-oct-7-involvement/

From https://www.historytoday.com/archive/why-were-jews-persecuted

https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1bg8ajw/1869_german_map_of_palestine/#lightbox

From <https://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/frontlineworld/fellows/israel/intro.html>

 From <https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter/full-text>

From <https://www.gchq.gov.uk/information/palestine-mandate>

From <https://www.gchq.gov.uk/information/palestine-mandate>

From <https://www.palquest.org/en/highlight/159/un-partition-plan-1947>

From <https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/league-of-nations>

From <https://www.britannica.com/topic/United-Nations-Resolution-181>

Source: Dinnerstein, Leonard, “The United States and the Displaced Persons”, in: Gutman, Yisrael and Saf, Avital (eds.), She'arit Hapleta 1944-1948, Rehabilitation and Political Struggle, Proceedings of the Sixth Yad Vashem International Historical Conference, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, 1990, pp. 357-363 .

From <https://www.yadvashem.org/articles/academic/american-immigration-policy.html>

 

 

THEORY: Humanism and Humanitarianism (regarding Gaza)

Humanism is a philosophy that, to put it simply, replaces classic religions with ‘Man’ or the 'Human Spirit'. There are many kinds of humanism, there is even a version of socialist humanism, sometimes called utopian socialism (Engels wrote against this tendency). Often Marx is described wrongly as a humanist, or in humanist terms.

The link between humanism as a philosophy and humanitarianism might seem obvious at first glance, the ethics of humanism appears to call for an understanding of the human spirit that is essentially humanitarian, in that it apparently cares for people.

Is it possible to be humanitarian without also being humanist?

You might assume that all ideologies, politics, religions, and philosophies, can advocate humanitarianism if they want, but is this true?

Marxism is not a version of humanism (the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser wrote about this), but this does not stop it from being a supporter of humanitarian measures. However, it should be circumspect of humanitarianism at least, for its close connection with humanism. This is because the humanist face is bound to be two sided. The kindly caring one and the cold hearted one, this is its Janus face. Its caring attitude can easily flip over into anger and hatred, in fact it can encourage this, because some versions of this philosophy are based on understanding things sentimentally, and as essence or innate spirit: for instance, ethnic essences and nationalities. Nationalism therefore has these two sides and is a form of humanism.

You can consider most media to be fundamentally humanist in orientation. For instance, because they always refer to nations as ‘thinking’ and ‘deciding’ certain things, Britain thinks this, the US thinks that; Israel wants this, etc. This is true especially for the capitalist democracies, where the leviathan (Hobbes) that is understood as generated by the electorate, becomes identified with the popular will via the elected government, and this is then assumed to be ‘Israel’, or ‘France’ etc.

This is also anthropomorphic, unless we really believe in the myth of the leviathan, the giant human figure as a manifestation of a democratic will.

The question as to whether voting can generate such a thing, in spirit, whether democratic representation of this kind is real or not, in detail unfortunately must be left aside here, it is a long argument. But suffice it to say, fundamentally such humanist framing of the debate automatically excludes any discussion of class conflict in the media, except on rare occasions. It is not just a question of laziness on the part of the media worker (although considering class certainly makes the positions of nations more complex, so it probably plays a part), but a reflection of the inertia of the media as an industry, which I suggest we call a state apparatus of the ruling class.

The media of course presents itself as free, as the ‘free press’ etc, which adds to this notion of the universal ‘spirit’ or ‘will’ of the people thought to be expressed in this media.

You can see that a great deal hinges on this concept of democratic representation, the freedom achieved by this, and the free media, which is a part of the same humanist framework. Whilst Eisenhower warned us to watch out for the military-industrial complex regarding the far right, he left out any questioning of a media-industrial complex, presumably because this was what he was using to make his warning; it is in fact a more hidden secret of bourgeois rule, the close relation between capitalist industry and the industry that is the media.

Sometimes communists are drawn to the idea of being a family and a ‘broad church’, perhaps being influenced by the sheer ubiquitousness of this humanist media (almost every film, TV series, news source, has this ideology and aesthetic underlying it), but the communist concept of being a comrade really comes from being soldierly, being comrades at arms, in a class struggle, and of course the family can be understood as an apparatus of the state, so not always a good thing, there are of course also abusive families, and patriarchal families, and exploitative families.

On the other hand, sometimes we communists go to the other extreme to get away from this quagmire, and end up seeming unemotional, almost sociopathic, for whom everything comes down to economics and science, so this is not the entire answer, we should not fall into this false dialectical opposition in the first place.   

Is humanitarianism really something exclusive to humanism, does it force a humanist philosophy on whoever adopts a humanitarian approach?

In the same way that the love of God was often practised as the missionary arm of conquerors, enslavers, and colonisers, I suggest the humanitarianism of modern times are a way to enforce modern, basically western, ethics onto the people who are to be exploited, and to excuse their massacres when they become necessary to them.

Today there are many institutions, like the UN and the non-governmental aid agencies, plus those that watch over the conventions of war and international criminality such as the ICJ (International Court of Justice, a part of the UN) or the ICC (International Criminal Court), that hold to the humanist philosophical ethos. They are all very western in orientation. This is presumably why they seem reluctant and slow to take to task any central western power if they breach these rules, this is not who the rules are intended to apply to, - themselves in other words.

A relevant current example: recently some western powers led by the USA and the UK bombed the rebel Houthis in Yemen for trying to defend the Palestinian civilians in Gaza by attacking shipping trade routes through the Red Sea, which is very important to global capitalism, led by the USA, and one of the few avenues for resistance available. This bombing by these western powers was authorized by the UN. Yet, the highest UN court, the ICJ, if it finds Israel guilty of genocide in the case currently being brought by South Africa against Israel, would automatically justify the actions of the Houthis (I suggest) and make the attacks of these western countries and the UN complicit in defending genocidal acts. In short, the UN would be contravening itself. I am certain that it is doing so in any case.

These institutions generally support the rules of the capitalist mode of production and exchange. To exploit a fresh market, the exploited must feel the superiority of the conquering force, which says that it is not just by force alone that it rules, but by spirit too, it must also have the moral high ground, it must not just win by its superior force, it must win in all other ways, morally, aesthetically, it must seem to be at the forefront of ethics, and have the complete right to rule.

We might ask, why can the ruling class not simply look itself in the mirror and say that it wants to further its imperial strategy to secure future economic profits and is willing to kill innocent civilians to achieve this? Well, presumably it perceives as a class that a significant tactical advantage is to be gained by supporting certain myths about itself in its media, it must be important for its self-image and so for its morale in the class struggle, as well as to spoil and confuse the understanding of their opponents in this struggle and so to reduce their class morale.

So therefore, the question of Marxist science versus humanism is a crucial one exactly on this point. Does a Marxist humanist conception improve the confidence of the working class and communists in the class struggle? Not really, since it is, ultimately, approving all these myths of freedom within bourgeois class rule and about its essential righteousness and fairness, all the while it is carrying out the ruthless expansion of capital interests. It is not just conjuring away the class consciousness of its struggle and its interests in this struggle; but preventing the feelings that correspond to this from flourishing, of comradeship and solidarity, leading to feelings of isolation which it might seem only the media can solve.