276 - Creeping Apartheid: The End of Palestine

The Aims of the Israeli Right

            By ceding authority over the West Bank to the most extreme of his vengeful cabinet ministers, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu retains his position but largely kills the possibility that a viable Palestinian state could emerge in what is now the contested area between the sea and the river – the cities, towns, and villages over which President Mahmoud Abbas’ Palestinian Authority nominally governs. Israel needs a real Palestine to give substance to the two-state solution and to enable Arab nations to support a Gaza truce deal, whenever it comes. Instead, by Netanyahu letting Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich make apartheid-like policy decisions for the West Bank, Israel loses legitimacy globally as well as with Arab nations. There is no sustainable peace in the Middle East without an independent Palestine.

            It is clear that Smotrich, like many of his hawkish and ultra-orthodox colleagues, is intent on manufacturing a single-state solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conundrum.  That is, in a near future Israel would own, as well as control, all of the land and people between what is Israel proper and Jordan. Extremists and Biblical determinists like Smotrich think that what is now the West Bank needs to be annexed, bringing together all of Judea and Samaria and thus righting historic wrongs that go back at least to Roman times. Smotrich and Netanyahu do not want a Palestinian state.

“We came to settle the land, to build it, and to prevent its division and the establishment of a Palestinian state, God forbid,” Smotrich declared recently. He vowed to “change the map dramatically” by claiming more West Bank land than ever before as belonging to the Israeli state.

            This irredentism of the post-Zionist largely Mizrahi (Middle Eastern) relatively recent immigrants who now connive with Netanyahu (of Ashkenazi descent), and keep him in power as the Likud Party’s standard bearer, have ahistorical and balance-upsetting goals in mind. They want to win a long-running series of battles against secular Judaism, against the largely European and not Middle Eastern and Sephardic upper-class that founded and fought to establish the upstart Israeli state, and against democratic Israelis who want to draft Orthodox youth and tear them away from relentless study of the Torah.

            These searing conflicts internal to Israel have already made the once liberal, democratically inspired, state of its founders a dead letter. When a right-wing youth assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, the curtain fell on the original Israel of 1948 and the wars with Egypt and other surrounding states that followed.  His death also effectively ended the possibility of fulfilling the 1993 Oslo Agreement and achieving a sustainable peace in the Middle East.

            Smotrich is now attempting to craft an extremist total rebuttal to Oslo. He is letting settlers, with military backing, establish what the UN and Washington call illegal permanent Israeli encampments on Palestinian-owned land not only in the west, near Israel proper, but along the Jordan River in the east. Last week Israel annexed 5 square miles of “Palestine” in the Jordan Valley. a move that undermines the prospect of a contiguous Palestinian state.  Another 5 square miles were seized earlier this year closer to Jerusalem.

  Already, more than 500,000 Israelis live in more than 100 settlements in the West Bank. More will be coming in order to strengthen Smotrich and his ilk’s plan to subordinate the current occupants of the West Bank (Palestine) to Israeli sovereignty and, they scheme, expulsion.

            The 3 million residents of the West Bank – Palestinians – live under military rule. That is why many term it being under apartheid. The Palestinian Authority is allowed to administer scattered segments of the West Bank. Few are contiguous. It has charge of no more than 40 percent of what should be its own territory. The remainder is subject to the orders of the Israeli Defense Force. Palestinians are only allowed on some of the roads that cross the West Bank. And Smotrich doles out customs payments (collected in Tel Aviv or other ports) due to the Palestine Authority according to his own whim. Since Obctober, Israel has also barred West Bankers from employment in Israel.

The dreadful charge of apartheid arises because Israel treats Abbas’ West Bank as a kind of Bantustan, with little full sovereignty and a patchwork of places over which Abbas’s administration has some, but never complete, control. Smotrich and his colleagues want to push Palestinians into isolated islands surrounded by Israeli settlements.

Israeli settlers also menace, sometimes even killing, Palestinian villagers and taking their olive groves. More than 1,000 brutal attacks by settlers against West Bank Palestinians have occurred since October. There have been many deaths and serious property damage. Palestinians are understandably frightened, even terrorized.

            Smotrich’s is a one-state solution because it incorporates what was intended to be a Palestinian homeland into an expanding Israel. Smotrich must be aware that the demographics of such an illegally enlarged Israel are immensely dangerous for Israel. Already there are 3 million Arabs in the West Bank and 2.1 million in the Gaza Strip. Joined to the 2 million Arabs who live in Israel proper and hold Israeli (albeit somewhat second-class) citizenship, the odds of Arabs outnumbering 7 million Israelis sometime very soon is high. Even the large families of the ultra-Orthodox (13 percent of Israel’s population) can’t match swelling Arab numbers.

            The parallels with South Africa under apartheid (I was banned by the South African white regimes when apartheid was at its height) are not exact. But as much as it is odious to think of Israel as an apartheid-like state, under Smotrich there are many similarities in how the majority on the land are being treated and are likely in future to behave (if Netanyahu totally gives way to Smotrich).

            What is oft forgotten by the new generation of Israelis is that the establishment of their state in 1948 gave absolutely no rights to what are now the West Bank and Gaza.  Only after Israel defeated Egypt and Jordan in 1967 did Israel gain access to the conquered domains – Gaza taken from Egypt and the West Bank taken from Jordan. Ever since, these war-won provinces have been the scaffolding of a two-state solution that Rabin accepted but Netanyahu has fought surreptitiously ever since to destroy.

            A lasting solution to the war in Gaza, and to quiet on the Hezbollah and Houthi fronts, depends on the kinds of Palestinian integrity that President Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have been promoting for nine months. Smotrich is doing everything he can do to thwart such a result. He and Netanyahu falsely think that they can permanently sabotage even an embryonic real Palestine and still keep Israel safe in a dangerous world. Their delusions imperil Israel and prevent what should be a growing Arab-Israeli entente in the troubled world.

            It is past time for Israelis to abandon Likud and send Smotrich and the other extremists back to their orthodox redoubts.