occupation, apartheid and ethnic cleansing: what's in a name?

Around the time I was in Gaza, the Israeli military patrols along the Strip's eastern border had discovered a new pastime. They were setting Gazan farmers' fields on fire. They would wait until the grain was crackling dry, almost ready to be harvested, after the farmers had spent months tending their fields under constant threat of being shot at by these very same patrols. Then they'd roll along and firebomb the fields.

There are many, many things that Israel attempts to justify under the guise of "security." The wall, the checkpoints, the constant surveillance and control of Palestinian movement, buffer zones, air strikes, demolishing homes and destroying olive groves, house raids, arrests and torture. You may argue--correctly--that none of these things actually make Israeli civilians any safer, to say nothing of the Palestinians who are the victims of such abuses. But if you buy into the idea that Israel needs to defend itself from the resistance it itself has created...well, you can sort of see the logic.

But then there are things like this. There is just no possible military justification for setting somebody's crops on fire. That's not to say that if there were a military justification, specious or otherwise, it would all be okay. But I do think it's reasonable to assume that most Israeli soldiers believe their actions to be rational and justified in the name of Israel's security. Which makes me really wonder what was going through these particular soldiers' heads as they lobbed incendiary bombs onto the scant agricultural land of a starving, imprisoned population.

All occupations and colonial situations involve immense levels of violence, racism, and dehumanization of the oppressed. But I think many people familiar with Palestine will admit that Israeli colonialism brings with it a particular viciousness that demands a particular explanation. How are we to understand this action, or any of the countless other Israeli policies--from destroying Palestinian wells and rain-water cisterns to denying imports of chocolate to Gaza--that seem to exist out of nothing more than sheer, deliberate, calculated cruelty?

There are two possible explanations. One is racist: that Israelis are just inherently mean people. But saying all Israelis are sadistic bastards (while that may certainly appear to be true if you live in the Occupied Territories) is really no better than saying all Palestinians are fanatical terrorists, right?

The other explanation is that there is an intentional program of ethnic cleansing going on in Palestine--that the utterly ruthless way in which Israel attacks every possible facet of Palestinian society and daily life is part of a conscious plan to make life so unbearable for the Palestinians that they leave. The staggering level of brutality, and its thoroughly deliberate and calculated nature, can only be understood as actions carried out by people who see their claim to the land as superior to all others and refuse to acknowledge Palestinians as equal human beings.

Many comparisons have been made between Israel and apartheid South Africa. Those comparisons are absolutely valid--particularly the comparison between South Africa's Bantustans and all currently proposed models for a Palestinian state. The Palestine solidarity movement should absolutely continue to make those comparisons, because apartheid is a system that was de-legitimized by an international solidarity movement working in coordination with a national liberation struggle inside South Africa. Apartheid is now internationally not cool, thanks to the work of those movements. Zionism has yet to be de-legitimized in the same way, although it needs to be if any just solution is to be implemented in Palestine.

But the reality is that Israel has developed its own unique and particularly virulent strain of settler colonialism, one that goes much farther than South Africa's white supremacists ever dreamed. From its inception in the false idea of Palestine as "a land without people for a people without a land," Zionism has always had a genocidal edge that seeks to deny the existence of the Palestinians as a people--and, if necessary, create that reality on the ground. It is these aggressive, expansionist, exclusionary and exterminatory tendencies in Zionism--tendencies that slide straight into fascism at their most extreme--that make Israeli colonialism so particularly vicious, unstable and dangerous a system.

I recently had a debate with a fellow traveler about whether using terms like "ethnic cleansing" and "genocide" was useful in discussions about Palestine with folks who may just be beginning to understand that the Palestinians are the oppressed group in the situation, even if we-who-know-the-score agree that what's going on in Palestine IS ethnic cleansing and genocide. I think it is not only correct, but vitally important.

I think the most basic job of the left is to tell the truth, which those in power often have an interest in obscuring. By not calling something what it is, we are doing a disservice to ourselves, by muddying our own understanding of the situation; to those we are trying to persuade, by not giving them a full and accurate picture of the massive crimes taking place; and to those we stand in solidarity with, by assuming that the reality they live every day needs to be watered down for an outside audience. In the case of this particular issue, we are also giving in to the mainstream narrative that seeks to normalize Israel as a democratic state responding to terrorist threats, instead of an ethnocentric colonial entity that was built on the dispossession and expulsion of the indigenous population, a process that continues to this day.

As usual, Israelis themselves are more clear-eyed about this issue than the American left. A majority of Israelis not only believe that what's going on in the Occupied Territories is ethnic cleansing--they support it. A new poll recently revealed that 53% of Israelis surveyed support "transfer"--the forcible mass expulsion of the Palestinian population of the Occupied Territories (and, many fear, of the Palestinian minority inside Israel as well.) In fact, transfer--that is, finishing the job of ethnic cleansing that was started in 1948--is now the most popular "solution" to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict among Israelis. This is a significant, and frightening, hardening of Israeli racism that is essential for Americans to understand.

After visiting Gaza, two things are absolutely, inescapably clear to me. One: what Israel is doing is a calculated, conscious and systematic program of ethnic cleansing. Two: the Palestinians will never give up. This means that the situation is fundamentally unstable and can only be permanently resolved in one of two ways--equality or genocide. A resolution on the side of equality--the dismantling of Israel as an exclusionist state and the creation of a home for all people, regardless of race or religion, in all of historic Palestine--is far from impossible, but it is also far from guaranteed.

It is crucial that Americans and other internationals in solidarity with Palestine understand exactly what it is we are fighting against, and exactly how high the stakes are. Palestinians, I have no doubt, are already quite aware. Unless we are able to look Israel's true nature in the face, unless we truly understand what it is we are facing, how can we expect to comprehend what it will take to win?