[News] The Everyday Violence of Life in Occupied Palestine

[Anti-Imperialist News]

counterpunch.org
<https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/10/26/the-everyday-violence-of-life-in-occupied-palestine/>
The Everyday Violence of Life in Occupied Palestine
Vijay Prashad - October 26, 2023
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[image: Palestinians_wearing_Che_Guevara_tshirts-680x452.jpg]

Photograph Source: Justin McIntosh – CC BY 2.0
<https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/>

Driving along the Jordan River Valley in the Occupied Palestine Territory
(OPT) of the West Bank is a stunning experience. The road is officially
called Highway 90. The arable and irrigated land along this road is held
militarily and illegally <https://press.un.org/en/2016/sc12657.doc.htm> by
Israeli settlers, many of whom are not actually Israeli citizens, but
residents from the Jewish diaspora. A United Nations Commission report
<https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies/hrcouncil/coiopt/2022-10-19/Report-COI-OPT-14Sept2022-EN.pdf>
published in 2022 showed that this settlement activity is a crime against
international human rights law (transfer of population into an occupied
territory). Israeli settlers and the Israeli military that defend them call
Highway 90 *Derekh Gandhi* or Gandhi’s Road. When I first drove along that
road over a decade ago, I was puzzled by Gandhi’s name there. Mahatma
Gandhi was a leader of the Indian freedom struggle, and had on many
occasions—such as in his 1938 article
<https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/lsquo-the-jews-rsquo-by-gandhi>, “The
Jews”—offered his sympathy and solidarity with the Palestinian people. In
fact, the road that slices through the West Bank—a crucial part of a
proposed Palestinian state—is named after Rehavam Ze’evi, who was
ironically given the nickname Gandhi.

Ze’evi led the National Union party, which brought together all the most
dangerous currents of Israeli far-right politics. As the leader of this
party, and, before that, of Moledet <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moledet>,
Ze’evi advocated <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/oct/18/israel2>
the removal of Palestinians from what he considered to be Israel’s land
(East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank). He supported the creation of Eretz
Yisrael
<https://www.encyclopedia.com/politics/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/eretz-yisrael-hebrew-meaning-land-israel>
that would stretch from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. In March
2001, Ze’evi—who would later be accused
<https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2016-04-15/ty-article/.premium/tv-program-rips-image-of-idf-general-zeevi-to-shreds/0000017f-ec5e-d4cd-af7f-ed7ee4100000>
of sexual harassment and of being involved in organized crime—told
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/oct/18/israel2> The Guardian that
“it’s not murder to get rid of potential terrorists, or those who have
blood on their hands. Each one eliminated is one less terrorist for us to
fight.” A few months later, Ze’evi showed that he did not distinguish among
Palestinians, calling all of them a “cancer” and saying
<https://ips-dc.org/where_is_the_outrage/>, “I believe there is no place
for two peoples in our country. Palestinians are like lice. You have to
take them out like lice.” He was shot to death by fighters of the Popular
Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in October 2001. The name of
the road that cuts across the West Bank—promised to a Palestinian state in
the Oslo Accords of 1993—still bears Ze’evi’s name.

Ze’evi was assassinated by PFLP fighters because the Israeli army had
killed their leader Mustafa Ali Zibri by firing two cruise missiles at his
home in Al-Bireh (Palestine). The assassination of Zibri was not an
isolated incident. It was part of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s plan
<https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/and-darkness-covered-land/> to
“cause the collapse” of the Palestinian Authority—created to manage the
Oslo Accords—and “send them all to hell.” Apart from the murder of
civilians on a punctual basis, from July 2001 the Israeli government killed
four political leaders (Islamic Jihad leader Salah Darwazeh and Hamas
leader Jamal Mansour in July, and then Hamas leader Amer Mansour Habiri and
Fatah leader Emad Abu Sneineh in August). After the killing of Zibri, the
Israelis assassinated Hamas’s Mahmoud Abu Hanoud in November. “Whoever gave
a green light to this act of liquidation,” wrote
<https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/sharon-or-arafat-which-sponsor-terror/>
military correspondent Alex Fishman in Yediot Ahronot, “knew full well that
he is thereby shattering in one blow the gentleman’s agreement between
Hamas and the Palestinian Authority; under that agreement, Hamas was to
avoid in the near future suicide bombings inside the Green Line [Israel’s
pre-1967 borders].”

*Hot Violence, Cold Violence*

For centuries, Palestinian Christians, Muslims, and Jews lived side-by-side
in the lands that would eventually be Israel and the OPT, including along
the Jordan River Valley. Since the expulsion of the Palestinian Christians
and Muslims and the arrival of European Jews, the legal apparatus—or the
“cold violence,” as the writer Teju Cole calls
<https://www.versobooks.com/products/132-letters-to-palestine> it—worked
alongside paramilitary and military violence against the Palestinians to
create a fantasy of an ethno-nationalist state project (the Jewish State,
as it was then called). The erasure of the non-Jewish Palestinians was key
to this project, either by massacres (Deir Yassin
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deir_Yassin_massacre> in 1948) or the
wholesale removal of the Palestinian population from their land (the Nakba
of 1948). The massacres and the population transfers came alongside the
denial of the *reality* of Palestine and the Palestinian people. The heir
to Ze’evi, current finance minister Bezalel Smotrich said
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-smotrich-palestinians-no-such-thing>
this March, “There’s no such thing as Palestinians because there’s no such
thing as a Palestinian people.” This is not an opinion that can be
dismissed as a far-right rant. Likud member Ofir Akunis, minister of
science and technology, said
<https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/281166> three years ago, “There’s
no place for any formula to establish a Palestinian state in Western
Israel.” The phrase “Western Israel” is a chilling statement about the
Israeli consensus on full annexation of the West Bank with disregard for
international law.

A focus on Gaza is essential. The Israeli “hot violence” is extreme, with
the death toll of Palestinians—almost half of them in Gaza of children—over
5,000. The Israeli land invasion has been blocked, for now, by the
recognition of high morale among the Palestinian resistance. The latter
will fight every Israeli soldier that goes into the ruins of Gaza. Before
this Israeli incursion, 450 trucks crossed
<https://www.ft.com/content/5027f41d-90e6-4481-a386-0fde2cdffa63> into Gaza
with supplies for the 2.3 million residents; it was taken as a victory when
nine United Nations trucks and 11 trucks of the Egyptian Red Crescent
crossed into Gaza on October 21. Amnesty International looked at only five
bombings of the Israelis and found
<https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/10/damning-evidence-of-war-crimes-as-israeli-attacks-wipe-out-entire-families-in-gaza/>
evidence of war crimes, which should alert the International Criminal Court
to re-open its file
<https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/statement-icc-prosecutor-fatou-bensouda-respecting-investigation-situation-palestine>
on Israeli atrocities. This should include the crime of collective
punishment by cutting water and electricity to Gaza, and bombing access
roads to the Rafah crossing into Egypt, and by bombing the Rafah crossing
itself.

Large demonstrations across the world demand a ceasefire (at a minimum) and
an end to the occupation. Israel is not interested. Its defense minister
Yoav Gallant told
<https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/gallant-says-after-hamas-vanquished-israel-will-seek-new-security-regime-in-gaza/>
parliament that his forces have a three-point plan—to destroy Hamas, to
destroy the other Palestinian factions, and to create a new “security
regime” in Gaza. The Palestinian people—not just the armed factions—are
resolute in their resistance to Israeli occupation. The only way for
Gallant’s new “security regime” to work would be to erase this resistance,
which means to remove all Palestinians from Gaza either by massacres or by
dispossession. The United States is following along with this extermination
plan: a U.S. State Department memorandum says
<https://www.huffpost.com/entry/state-department-internal-emails-gaza-israel_n_65296395e4b0a304ff6ff95d?ykm>
that its diplomats must not use phrases such as “de-escalation,”
“ceasefire,” “end to violence,” “end to bloodshed,” and “restoring calm.”

*This article was produced by **Globetrotter* <https://globetrotter.media/>
*.*

*Vijay Prashad’s most recent book (with Noam Chomsky) is The Withdrawal:
Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and the Fragility of US Power (New Press, August
2022).*
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