Testbist

Protracted firefights raged though the night and are continuing with no let up. We barely slept and were tossed from our beds multiple times by nearby explosions. The windows in the building next door shattered at one point. It’s 7 a.m. now and there is no sign that things are quieting. Loud explosions and the constant rattle of gunfire can be heard from near and far. We’re located just north of Abbas’ compound, and are pinned down for now in our apartment, but what we’re hearing is that this is going on throughout Gaza City and northern Gaza.

This is far more than a skirmish. This is a sustained hours long firefight. Unlike past infighting here, this fighting, for the first time, seems to have engaged the full strength and firepower of the Palestinian security services.

The latest bit of news we’ve heard is that Fatah spokesman Maher Mikdad, with whom we had an interview skedded for today, is caught in his house which is surrounded and under siege by Hamas.

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“Forty years ago today was the last day the citizens of Israel were a free people in their own land,” wrote Ha’aretz columnist Akiva Eldar on June 4. “It was the last day we lived here without living other peoples’ lives.”

This sums up the cherished mythology of what is still called the Israeli left and much of the international peace process industry — that prior to the 1967 war, Israel was pure and on the right path. Had it not “become an occupier” the region would have had a happier history and Israel would be an accepted member of the international community rather than a pariah wearing the “apartheid” label.

The exclusive focus on the occupation serves increasingly to obscure that the conflict in Palestine is at its core a colonial struggle whose boundaries do not conveniently coincide with the lines of June 4, 1967.

I do not often agree with leaders of the settler movement, but they speak a truth Israeli and American liberals prefer to ignore when they point out that the settlements in Gaza and the West Bank built after 1967 are not morally different from towns and kibbutzim inside Israel’s pre-1967 borders. The Israel that was created in 1948 was established on land violently expropriated from ethnically-cleansed Palestinians. Israel has been maintained as a “Jewish state” only by the imposition of numerous laws that maintain the inferior status of its Palestinian citizens and forcibly exclude Palestinian refugees.

Even Israelis who condemn the occupation support these racist laws. There is an Israeli consensus that it is legitimate to defend the Jewish state against the so-called “demographic threat” from Palestinians who will be again, as they were prior to 1948, the majority population group in Palestine-Israel despite six decades of Israeli efforts to reduce their numbers with expulsions, massacres and administrative ethnic cleansing. It is the imperative to gerrymander an enclave with a Jewish majority rather than any recognition of Palestinian equality that underpins whatever limited rhetorical Israeli support exists for a Palestinian state.

I would add that’s it’s also not just about the Palestinians, but about the fundamentally destabilizing role of an uneven regional balance of power that US-Israeli regional hegemony has created over the last half-century.

1967 was a year of setback for the Palestinians not only because Israel occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, but also because the new occupation effectively set the older one of 1948 in stone. As political attention quickly turned to the newly occupied areas, it became more difficult to mount challenges to the earlier stages of the occupation, or even to name them occupation. The “occupied Palestinian territories” became the name of the Palestinian areas occupied in 1967, not in 1948. While Israel, in many of its official narratives, refers to the events of 1948 as occupation, the reference to 1948 as occupation dropped from the international vocabulary, effectively naturalizing the existence of Israel and concealing the violence constitutive of its creation.

Since then, attempts constantly to “catch up” with new forms of Israeli subjugation shaped much of Palestinian politics, as Israel consistently raised the stakes on its dispossession of the Palestinians. If the settlements and green areas were the main vehicle for dispossessing Palestinians and confiscating their lands, soon the networks of highways and the separation wall became new mechanisms. But among many Palestinians, this “catching up” produced tragic politics characterized by amnesia. For, if the Palestinians were expected to respond systematically to the newly enacted empirical ends of the occupation, they had to suspend their responses to previous ends. The trouble was that new ends were always being introduced.

Chilling is the great Palestinian analyst Mouin Rabbani’s look at what we might be commemorating on the 50th anniversary of the 1967 war:

June 5, 2007 may well be the last time we commemorate a further decade of Israeli military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. At the rate things are going — the accelerated colonization of West Bank territory most visibly represented by the wall that Israel is building, and unprecedented levels of international neglect/support for such policies — these are unlikely to remain occupied territories for much longer.

Prolonged military occupation lasting successive decades was an untenable proposition to begin with, and has been sustained only by international law, the refusal of the international community to formally recognize Israel’s territorial claims and, most pertinently, the presence and resistance of the Palestinians in the form of individual communities and, until recently, a coherent national movement.

By 2017 that is likely to change. How the international community seeks to accommodate Israel’s claims to strategic portions of the West Bank while maintaining effective control over the rest, and how the Palestinians and others in the region will respond, are interesting questions. The answers are likely to combine elements of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries: the colonialism and ethnic structures of the first, the formal adherence to independence of the second, and the belief of the third that advanced technology can resolve the political challenge resulting from the inherent contradictions of the first two.

Absent drastic changes, remaining doubts about the feasibility of a two-state settlement are also going to be removed in the coming years. Many believe the point of no return has already been passed. Most view it as imminent. The one certainty is that the two-state settlement paradigm is not going to be replaced by that of a secular democratic state — desirable as the latter may be. Rather, the more likely scenario is a regression toward existential conflict, on a more bloody scale than seen thus far and probably with a greater regional dimension than in recent decades.

As a generally pro-Oslo person in my student days in the 1990s, I increasingly believe that another regional war over Israel is not only likely but perhaps the only way to resolve the conflict. But because of the festering occupation and international irresponsibility towards Israel (from both the US and EU), it is probably going to be resolved in a bloodier and more radical way than any of the previous conflicts over that wretched piece of land.