The century that doesn't want to end ---- The roots of the Arab-Israeli
conflict are deeply rooted in the history of the twentieth century. TheArab-nationalist project and the Zionist project developed within the
dynamics of nationalism that characterized the beginning of the
twentieth century first and the clash between blocs later. ---- Zionism
was initially regarded, at the beginning of the twentieth century, with
suspicion by a significant part of the European Jewish communities that
aspired to assimilation, whether through the means of liberal
democracies or through revolutionary movements, within European societies.
The almost fully accomplished genocidal project of German fascism, which
also exploited the historical anti-Semitic feelings of the populations
of Eastern Europe, as well as the collaboration of Italian and French
fascism, entailed the complete destruction of the Jewish communities in
Eastern Europe within the guidelines of the General Plan Ost. 8
The failure of liberal democracies to block genocidal plans even by
providing refuge to those fleeing Germany and then Europe, such as the
1939 blockade of Jewish immigration to Mandatory Palestine by the
British authorities or the case of the SS St. Louis refugees rejected by
the US and sent back to die in Germany, as well as the abominable
opportunist approach of the USSR marked the end of opposition to Zionism
within what remained of that Yiddish world that survived the Shoah.
Survivors who tried to return to their shtetls of origin were chased
away, if not killed outright, by the Poles, Ukrainians, Lithuanians and
Russians who had occupied the depopulated villages. The winds of
anti-Semitism that were blowing in Stalinist Russia - just think of the
construction of the so-called Medici Plot 9 - certainly did not reassure
the survivors, even those most closely linked to the workers' movement,
a movement in which the Jewish masses of Eastern Europe had also
expressed a large number of militants.
If the Italian and French Jewish communities, although deeply affected
by the Shoah and by local collaborationism, were still able to find a
home upon their return from the extermination camps, the same was not
true for what remained of the Jewish populations in the East.
This situation laid the foundation for mass emigration to the nascent
state of Israel.
The Twenties and Thirties
During the 1920s and 1930s, conflict began to fester in the former
Ottoman region known as Palestine, which had been under British rule
since the end of the First World War.
There are several factors that contributed to this. The approach of
revisionist Zionism, which would later give rise to the Irgun and Lehi
10 , was fully inscribed within the mystique of blood and soil that
permeated European political discourse in those years. At the same time,
socialist Zionism suffered the weight of its own contradictions: the
forcing of a project that was simultaneously classist and nationalist
increasingly fell back towards forms of nationalism with proletarian
hues, well exemplified by the "Jewish Work" directive desired by the
leadership of the Histadrut 11 .
This is not happening because of some arcane colonizing plot but because
of a corrosion of the principles of revolutionary classism that occurred
in the years of reaction that followed the revolutionary momentum after
the First World War. At the same time, Arab nationalism takes shape and
here too we see that mysticism of blood and soil at work, on the other
hand the elites of the colonized peoples went to study in the
universities of the elites of the colonizers. It is wrong to say that
the erosion of relations between the Arab population and the Jewish
population of the Old Yishuv is simply the daughter of the emergence of
the New Zionist Yishuv 12. The Hebron pogrom of 1929 ferociously struck
the members of the Jewish community that had always lived there, a
Jewish community of the Old Yishuv, anti-Zionist for religious reasons.
Jewish immigration to the former Ottoman province of Syria challenged
the idea of Arab supremacy in a land steeped in strong religious
significance given the presence of Al-Aqsa / Temple Mount 13 . The clash
between two nationalist projects in the same land was inevitable.
British Colonialism's Ambiguousness
The ambiguity of the colonial rule of the United Kingdom exacerbated the
conflict. If in a first phase it favored Jewish immigration with the
Balfour Declaration, following the rationale of settling a population
seen as similar and functional to economic development and the
maintenance of colonial rule, it subsequently made an about-face by
limiting Jewish emigration and, in several cases, letting the contenders
slaughter each other. There are several explanations, not mutually
exclusive, for this behavior of the government of London. First of all
there was the use of the classic instrument of divide and conquer: as
long as Arabs and Jews killed each other they did not take it too
seriously with colonial rule. Secondly, Zionism proved to be a political
project that was difficult to control and exploit: the child of the
feeling of revenge of a population that had been subjected to
discrimination on European soil for centuries and that saw anti-Semitic
sentiments growing even in countries that had until then been considered
relatively safe - Germany, Italy and Austria - it had little desire to
be an instrument of Her Majesty's imperialism.
What was supposed to be a marriage of mutual interest, peppered with
mystical Anglican fantasies about Jerusalem, celebrated by Lord Balfour
became a clash between the colonial policies of the United Kingdom and
the attempt to create a safe space for the Jewish masses who felt
increasingly caught in the grip of European nationalisms.
The Expulsion of Jewish Communities from Arab Countries
At the same time, the process of expulsion of Jewish communities from
Arab countries began. In Iraq, the fascist government of Rashid Ali
al-Gaylani unleashed the pogroms - known as Farhud - of 1941. If until
then Zionism had had little influence in a Jewish community, the Iraqi
one, which aimed at assimilation, after the Farhud, emigration to the
Jewish national home became an obligatory choice for many.
In Morocco, under French colonial rule and the control of the Vichy
regime, local Jewish communities suffered growing hostility that pushed
them towards an almost total emigration to the nascent state of Israel.
Similar situations occurred in Algeria, Tunisia, Yemen, Syria and Lebanon.
This process of expulsion began in the 1920s and was caused by several
factors: the traditional forms of anti-Semitism present in those
countries were exacerbated by the attempts at social engineering by
European colonialism, especially French, which in Algeria granted
citizenship to members of the local Jewish community, a citizenship from
which Arabs were excluded, and by the emergence of an Arab nationalism
that emphasized the supremacy of an Arab and Islamic identity over other
local populations.
1948: The Great Palestinian Exodus
The events of 1948 that led to the convulsive birth of the State of
Israel, supported by the leaders of both blocs but opposed by the
decadent British Empire, caused the exodus of hundreds of thousands of
Palestinian Arabs. While the Arab landowners and merchant classes simply
moved their interests to Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan, the landless and
dispossessed peasants took the road to refugee camps.
To understand the behavior of the USA and the USSR, we must take into
account how both powers needed to scale down the British Empire. The
USA, in the name of opening up new commercial and political spaces to
which they could access without the cumbersome mediation of London and
in ideological continuity with the project of self-determination of
peoples in a bourgeois framework dear to Wilson, the USSR was well aware
that the ruling class of the nascent Israeli state, belonging to
socialist Zionism, was pro-Soviet and planned to draw Israel into its
sphere of influence. The end of the pro-British monarchy in Egypt caused
the USSR to change its front, which went from supplying weapons to the
Israelis to supplying them to the Egyptians, judging Cairo a more
interesting partner. The United Kingdom, in an attempt to maintain
control of Suez, allied itself with Tel Aviv in the disastrous operation
of 1956.
The change of sides of the Israeli state, from a non-aligned state with
relations with both blocs, to a state included in the Atlantic bloc took
place starting from this episode.
The Six-Day War and the Conquest of Jerusalem
The 1950s and 1960s were marked by a continuous state of tension between
the various neighboring countries. The Nasserist attempt to unify the
Arab political space in the United Arab Republic 14 would have as its
fulcrum the opposition to the Israeli state. Beyond the heavy internal
contradictions of the project, which would fail within a few years, one
of the final blows was the failure of the military confrontation with
Israel. The attempted combined attack by the Arab forces in June 1967
ended with a very violent preventive attack carried out by the IDF that
led to the complete destruction of the Egyptian air force, the
occupation of the entire Sinai, of Gaza, until then under Egyptian
control, and of a good part of the Golan and, above all, to the conquest
of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, until then under Jordanian control.
The conquest of Jerusalem must be considered an important turning point
from a cultural point of view, given the role played by this city for
all three so-called Religions of the Book as a fulfilled prophecy.
For religious Zionism, the conquest of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount
provided the ideological fuel for its expansion, transforming it from a
relatively marginal movement into a major mass movement. At the same
time, dispensational Christianity 15 saw the reconquest of Jerusalem as
the fulfillment of prophetic visions of the end times and the approach
of the Millennium.
For part of the Islamic world it was always a prophecy of the end times.
Israel/Jordan: An Ambiguous Relationship
From the period following the Six-Day War, an increasingly ambiguous
relationship will be created between the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan,
the only monarchy in the area not swept away by the social-national
revolutions of the 1950s, and Israel. There are several factors to take
into account: Jordan had maintained strong relations with the United
Kingdom and, through it, had linked itself to the Atlantic bloc; the
Jordanian elite was growing concerned about the presence of large masses
of Palestinian refugees who were organizing themselves in parallel with
the Jordanian state within its borders; the kingdom was interested in
maintaining control, a source of prestige, of Al-Aqsa, of which,
however, it maintains, and already maintained at the time, custody even
if it is territorially incorporated into Israel.
The issue of the uncomfortable presence of the PLO will be resolved by
military means by the monarchy with Black September in 1970. At the same
time, contacts will be created at the highest levels between the
Jordanian monarchy and the Israeli government. Jordan distanced itself
so much from other Arab countries that King Hussein, on the eve of the
Yom Kippur War of '73, went personally and secretly to meet with Israeli
Prime Minister Golda Meir to inform her of Egyptian and Syrian
intentions, in an attempt to avert the war.
The Yom Kippur War itself would see the definitive end of Arab hopes for
military victory over Israel. A war that had begun in an advantageous
position, with a surprise attack on two fronts and the use of innovative
tactics and weapons that allowed infantry to hold their own against
armored forces and to mitigate Israel's superior air capabilities, was
completely overturned in less than two weeks: the Syrian armored
divisions that had almost broken through on the Golan were forced into
an undignified rout; the Israeli army was a few dozen kilometers from
Damascus; the Egyptian third army was surrounded by the Israelis'
crossing of the canal, which reached within a hundred kilometers of an
undefended Cairo.
An armed peace
If the Egyptian and Syrian hypotheses of victory against Israel faded,
so did the Israeli idea, which had dominated since the lightning victory
of '67, of being able to keep its neighbors in check indefinitely. The
peace process between states was thus unblocked. These were the events
that led to the normalization of relations between Israel, Egypt and
Jordan, sponsored by the USA which attracted Sadat's Egypt, and even
more so Mubarak's after the assassination of Sadat by the Islamists,
into its sphere of influence.
The PLO's nationalist, yet secular and socialist, project adopts the
Third Worldist rhetoric typical of the elite of subordinate nations that
were trying to carve out their space under the aegis of the USSR, and
takes shape after the complete failure of the Arab states to provide a
solution through war to the Palestinian question. But the PLO's project
will also fail.
The substantial failure of the PLO is marked by its expulsion from
Jordan in September 1970, by the recourse to a demented - and infamous -
strategy of attacks against the civilian population - not only in Israel
but also in third countries - and by the inability to sustain a military
confrontation, even in asymmetric terms, with the Israeli army. The
normalization of relations with Jordan and Egypt under the aegis of the
United States left the Likud governments, which came to power in Israel
in the late 1970s, free to attack the PLO in depth in Lebanon,
nullifying its military capacity.
Turn right
Since the end of the 70s we can see the shift to the right of Israeli
politics, these are the years of close relations with the South African
supremacist regime and the birth of the settler movement, of the
collaboration with the fascist groups of the Maronites in Lebanon.
During the 80s the emergence of the evangelical millenarian movements in
the United States acted as a driving force for Jewish messianicism. If
initially ultra-nationalist and religious Zionism was relegated to a
corner of Israeli politics, in the following twenty years we will
witness the growing legitimacy of the political sons of Rabbi Kahane 16 .
In these years the question of the Israeli settlements in the West Bank
arose. We are faced with a peculiar phenomenon. If initially the
settlements in the occupied territories, implemented by religious
Zionist organizations, were managed ambiguously by the Labour
governments, who saw them as a possible commodity for territorial
exchanges with neighboring countries and an answer to the perennial
question of strategic depth 17 , the settler organizations managed to
carve out an ever greater political space. When at the end of the 1970s
the Likud, heir of Revisionist Zionism, came to power it did so thanks
to the votes and mobilization of the settlers. During the 1980s and
1990s the most extremist branches of these were however kept on the
margins and a further round of repression took place after the
assassination of Rabin in 1994, an assassination committed by a
Kahanist. The attacker of the Tomb of the Patriarchs came from the same
ranks.
Rabin's assassination will in fact mark the end of the peace process,
which was highly contested in the Palestinian camp because it was too
unbalanced towards Israel, and the window of diplomatic solution that
had opened following the First Intifada will close within a few years.
Conversely, in the Palestinian field we are witnessing the progressive
loss of power of the PLO in favor of entities such as Hamas and the JIP
or Hezbollah in Lebanon. The end of the third-world narrative has given
way to militant Islamism inspired by the Komeynist counter-revolution in
Iran.
This process is due to several factors: the PLO has staked everything on
the peace process, but this, in addition to being contested for its
general approach, has been interrupted; the PLO is increasingly assuming
the role of internal police in the areas under the authority of the PNA
(Palestinian National Authority); the PLO is, ultimately, a corrupt and
clientelist party, more interested in cashing in on international aid
money and placing cousins and nephews of leaders in public positions and
in the "shacks of power" than in carrying forward the political demands
for which it was born.
During the 1990s and 2000s, we will witness the Israeli disengagement in
Lebanon first and then in the Gaza Strip. In the case of the withdrawal,
by unilateral decision, from the Gaza Strip implemented by the Sharon
government in the mid-2000s, several settlements of the settlers will be
demolished, causing an initial fracture between a Likud government,
otherwise led by a hawk, and the movement of the settlers itself.
At the same time, the Palestinian Islamist camp will repeatedly target
Israeli civilians, with a series of suicide attacks against mass
transportation and public places.
Sharon's strategy of disengaging from Gaza, leaving it to the PA
government, to focus on strengthening the settlements in the West Bank
and containing Hezbollah will fail: the PLO will lose the elections
against Hamas, opening a phase of civil war in the Palestinian camp, and
Sharon will end up out of the game, due to a stroke that will make him
spend the rest of his "life" in a vegetative state.
The successive Israeli government coalitions, increasingly shifted to
the right, will have as their main objective the containment of Iran and
Hezbollah - the Lebanese Party of God which cannot be considered a
simple Iranian proxy - and to ensure that no entity emerges in the
Palestinian camp capable of opposing what has now consolidated as an
apartheid system.
It is impossible to address here the complex situation of the Eastern
Mediterranean over the last 20 years, from the US intervention in Iraq
to the Arab Spring, from the Arab Spring to the Islamist
counter-revolution, from Turkish interventionism in the Levant to the
Shiite crescent, in these pages: we will not do so.
Israeli Strategy in the Twenty-First Century
As regards the Israeli strategy that emerged in the 2010s, suffice it to
say that the events of October 7 marked its failure, causing - among
other things - a deep rift with the USA.
It is worth trying, however, to frame the evolution of the Israeli and
Palestinian political framework in the context of the global trends of
the last forty years.
First of all, the emergence of religiously inspired political movements,
Hamas and JIP in Palestine, Kach and its derivatives in Israel, is not a
peculiarity of that geographical area.
Toran-nationalist Zionism, or Hardal, not to be confused with other
historical religious Zionist currents, was born and strengthened in the
same years in which the United States witnessed the imposition in the
Republican political field of right-wing evangelical movements, that
group of evangelical charismatic churches that would provide the votes
for the Reagan and Bush presidencies, and to a lesser extent for the
Trump one, and that would shift US politics extremely to the right. The
pro-Zionism of the American evangelical right has a religious basis and
is intertwined with the economic interests of the US war sector. For
further information on the topic, see the text by Gorenberg cited in the
note.
These movements, which in both cases have an interclassist composition,
emerge with force in the same years in which Neoliberalism imposes
itself and there is a significant retreat from the social conquests of
the previous decades. In Israel this means the dismantling of the strong
welfare state, the crisis of Kibbutz and Moshav, the loss of votes for
the parties of the left, which have embraced neoliberalism and have not
brought home a peace process worthy of the name. The emergence of a
religious dimension gives answers in terms of salvation in the face of a
world that in the space of a few years has completely restructured itself.
On the Arab-Palestinian side, the inability of socialist and nationalist
parties to actually bring home a decent result, the adoption of
neoliberal policies to access the funds of the International Monetary
Fund, will cause the same dynamics. The emergence of entities such as
Hamas and the JIP are the children of the failure of the PLO. The
adoption of a millenarian perspective, common to both the Hardal parties
and the Islamist parties, the atmosphere of constant end times in which
the rationale of decisions taken by the national bourgeoisies are
intertwined with religious visions of an apocalyptic nature, as the
importance assumed by the Temple Mount / Al-Aqsa clearly demonstrates,
are the hallmark of these years.
At the same time, in the Israeli camp, the Netanyahu government, in
order to survive the scandals and the subsequent judicial investigations
caused by the huge bribes received by the prime minister and his direct
political and family entourage, have led the Likud to rely more and more
on the Hardalim-inspired parties. Netanyahu's need to survive
politically and judicially has been joined by the will of the fascist
Hardalim parties to achieve the evergreen, for fascism, mystical union
between people and government. In this perspective, one can frame the
attempt at judicial reform, or rather the attempt to cancel the
independence of the judiciary, one of the cornerstones of the liberal state.
It is a dynamic similar to that of the criticism from the Bannonian
right of the federal bureaucracy in the USA that characterized the first
period of the Trump presidency.
It is, above all, a dynamic that mirrors that of the creation of
religiously inspired party states that has marked the last thirty years
in the Islamic world in the Levant.
Any possibility of emancipation will depend on the need to do away with
these political-religious forces and with the economic system that
evoked and fueled them.
It will not be the uncritical flattening towards religious nationalism,
any religious or secular nationalism, even when it presents itself as
the banner of the oppressed, that will provide a way out.
https://www.anarresinfo.org/27-09-tramandare-il-fuoco-presentazione-e-dibattito/
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