A-Infos (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]

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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