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(en) Italy, Federazione Anarchica Torinese: Passing the Fire: Towards a Libertarian Approach to the Palestinian Question. A Critique of Essentialism and Nationalism III. (3/4) (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Date Wed, 2 Oct 2024 09:09:29 +0300


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. The Arab-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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