Whose right of return?

Originally written in May 2020 but, with a few changes, still relevant.

It is a common trope of the political Right that Israeli violence is no more than a justifiable response to violence by Palestinians. Almost always, fingers are pointed accusingly at Hamas, but seldom if ever at the Israeli state. This view needs to be challenged every time it is expressed. Since its violent origins during the Nakba of 1948, the West has been colonising Palestine. This has included a premeditated war of occupation in 1967, and has been continuing ever since. 

Hamas emerged in 1987 at the time of the First Intifada, not only as liberationist movement but also to provide welfare and social services to disadvantaged Palestinian communities. When the Oslo Accords of 1994 proved to be an international betrayal of the Palestinians’ rights of return, a more uncompromising attitude to the occupation emerged. It was about 2001, at the time of the Second Intifada, that Hamas began seriously to resist Israeli colonisation with force.

Rights for all 

When in 2007, following the previous year’s elections, Hamas won political control in Gaza,  a ceasefire seemed possible, in return for an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied Palestinian territories - the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem - together with recognition of Palestinian citizenship rights and the right of return for refugees displaced in 1948. 

But from 2007, Israel continued to tighten its grip, so that Gaza became, in the words of Noam Chomsky and many others, ‘the world’s largest open-air prison’. In the West Bank heavily militarised settlements continued to proliferate. This draconian containment has been just one facet of Israel’s long-term strategy for the whole region, that of creating Eretz Yisroel from the sea to the Jordan and beyond, in which the indigenous population - or what is left of them - should have no status, no identity and no power. Israel, with the USA as its sponsor, was clearly a Western settler-colonial state operating a system of apartheid and ethnic cleansing.

Both-sides-ism 

Time and again, the occupation, the settlement programme and the destruction of lives have been declared illegal under international law. It is a truism that there has been violence on both sides. But it would be wrong to represent this as a ‘clash’ between two equal opposites, or an intractable argument over a ‘disputed’ territory as, for example, the BBC continues to do. One of the world’s biggest military powers confronts a largely unarmed civilian community - the one, a colonising power, the other a captive population with the absolute right to resist according to international law but severely restricted from doing so. 

Overwhelmingly, Palestinians, like the rest of us, want to live peaceful lives in the land of their birth. Increasing numbers of people all over the world - including Jews from both Israel and the diaspora - are aware of this and supportive of it. Yet Israel’s occupation becomes ever more aggressive.

International failure

Meanwhile inaction, acquiescence or outright support for the occupation by the USA, the EU and the UK bring shame to our Western ruling classes. In the interests of their own realpolitik they studiously avoid acknowledging the suffering while at the same time perpetuating it. The USA, Germany, Italy, the UK and several others contribute readily to Israel’s almost unlimited supply of armaments and with it, to the Israeli ruling class’s violent domination of a country where another people lives. This locks Israel into a permanent strategy of hostility and conflict, and is surely unsustainable.

For the sake of all the people of the region - Jews, Christians, Muslims, Druze, Bedouin, communists, conservatives, atheists, agnostics and others - a sane future absolutely depends on radical change. It requires an end to genocide, to racially-motivated annexation, on disbanding the settlement programme, on recognising Palestinian citizenship and on accepting refugee families’ undoubted right of return. Without this, Israel’s blatant claim to be the ‘only democracy’ in the Middle East will remain a lie.

Photo: Jerusalem Old City from across the Kidron Valley