The Last Colony

The international reaction to the latest round of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has followed predictable lines, with the US giving Israel full backing and the EU calling for de-escalation on both sides. In the UK, the response has been coloured by the prominence given to antisemitism over the last five years, resulting in the sight of senior politicians suggesting that waving the Palestinian flag may be a criminal offence and that cutting off fuel and food supplies to the civilian population of the Gaza Strip is a legitimate tactic rather than a war crime. That these statements have been made by qualified lawyers, the Home Secretary and the Leader of the Opposition, is striking insofar as it highlights the extent to which attitudes to international law generally, and human rights specifically, have changed over the last decade. It would be easy to point the finger at Brexit and blame the Conservative Party, but it's clear that Labour's respect for international law is no better today, with a notional human rights lawyer in charge, than it was in 2003. Indeed, contempt for due process has become a leitmotif of the Starmer regime.

But there is something else in the British response, and to a lesser degree in the response of other Western powers, that goes beyond political opportunism and the habitual asymmetry in their treatment of Israel and the Palestinians, and that something is the recrudescence of the tropes of colonialism. This has been most noticeable in the British case because it remains firmly embedded in the political culture, even if the ideas that give rise to it are rarely articulated in public. Examples of this have been the belief that violence is the only language that Hamas, and by extension all Palestinians, understand, which is the unstated assumption behind the acceptance of collective and exemplary punishment. There has also been an attempt to devalue the Palestinians, from eugenicist claims about lower IQs due to inter-marriage to the idea that there is a natural "exchange rate" both for hostages (e.g. that one captured Israeli soldier can be exchanged for 1,000 Palestinian prisoners) and for lives (that murdering multiples of Palestinian civilians in Gaza is an eye for an eye).

It has also been noticeable how much of this has stirred a muscle memory of the British state and media's handling of the "Troubles" in Northern Ireland. Leaving aside the opportunistic Corporation-bashing, the claim that the BBC was wrong not to refer to Hamas as terrorists was founded on the myth, pushed by John Simpson, that the national broadcaster has always avoided the term because it would be subjective and partisan. In fact, the BBC often referred to the IRA as "terrorists", notably after it revised its editorial guidelines in 1989 under pressure from the Thatcher government. This was the era of the ban on the broadcasting of Sinn Féin voices, which ran from 1988 to 1994, a surreal example of the "There is no suitable interlocutor" trope in which the state resolutely stuck its fingers in its ears. This was ironic because Britain was engaged in secret dialogue with the IRA at the time. That Israel routinely speaks to Hamas is not in doubt, any more than that Netanyahu's governments have deliberately cultivated the Islamist group to split the Palestinians and undermine Fatah in the West Bank.

The most emotive tropes have concerned the vulnerability of Israelis in the areas bordering the Gaza Strip. The settlers whose suffering has been at the forefront of the media coverage are mostly secular kibbutzim, i.e. they look like "us" - white westerners - posing in family snapshots and dancing at a music festival. They are not the religious Jews who have been rampaging in the West Bank of late. This should remind us that the physical expansion of Israel after 1948 was led by the chauvinist left, not by the religious right. It has been standard practice in Western media to focus the coverage of settlers in the West Bank since 1967 on the religious, despite the fact that many are actually secular (indeed, the usual pressures of housing costs since the neoliberal turn have increasingly attracted the non-religious young to the settlements in search of affordable homes). Settlement is then seen as the regrettable over-enthusiasm of a segment of society rather than the systematic policy of the state. Likewise, the ills of Israeli society are increasingly blamed on a drift to the right, a drift seen as the inevitable reponse to Palestinian resistance, despite the state having been birthed by the terrorism of rightwing groups such as Irgun (the political ancestor of Likud) and Lehi.

The most insidious form of this recrudescence of the colonial in the UK media is the use of Israeli liberals to advance arguments that combine humanitarian piety with language that dehumanises the Palestinians. Just as the arch-imperialists of Victorian and Edwardian Britain were liberals rather than conservatives, so it is the voice of centrist reason that today demands unswerving support for the Israeli state while insisting that the promise of a two-state solution can still be maintained against all the evidence of its failure. An example of this was the Guardian article by Yuval Noah Harari that sought to frame the history of the region since 1948 as a series of hopeful experiments by the well-meaning Israelis, all of which had come to grief due to the intractability of the Palestinians. Thus Israel's "generous offer" during the Oslo peace process was met with the Second Intifada. "Maybe Israel’s peace offer wasn’t generous enough. But was terrorism the only possible response?", Harari disingenuously asks. 

At this point, it's worth recalling Northern Ireland in 1969. The re-emergence of the IRA was driven not simply by an angry response to the Stormont government's violence during the riots of that year, or by the decision of the London government to deploy British troops to keep the peace (but actually to reinforce the Northern Ireland state). Nor was it evidence of some inherent moral failing on the part of the Catholic community: a distaste for dialogue or a propensity for violence. The Northern Irish Civil Rights movement was consciously modelled on the US example of non-violence and ecumenical discussion. It's demise and the consequent turn to violence was the result of a political failure: the realisation that the Catholic community could not expect its concerns to be addressed or its interests defended by a gerrymandered state that systematically denied it effective political representation. 

What eventually brought (relative) peace to Northern Ireland was the collective agreement of the "powers" (the UK, the Republic of Ireland and crucially the US) that a political solution, power-sharing, had to be pursued. For all the claims that today is the moment of greatest peril for Israel, there is absolutely no willingness on the part of the powers (the US again to the fore) to seek a political resolution to the conflict because that would reveal the bankruptcy of the two-state solution as currently envisaged. Instead there is a determination to preserve the status quo, which in turn has meant the acceptance of a system of apartheid. The institutionalisation of this system since 1967 has led not only to the claim that the Palestinians aren't a people as such, and therefore have no claim to a homeland, but to the suggestion that they are interlopers. This was a common refrain during the imperial era when the movement of peoples across imaginary borders, often the result of famines brought about by the conversion of the economy to cash-crops in a global export market (see Mike Davis's 'Late Victorian Holocausts'), was presented as a threat to the recently-established settler economy. 

I think what some people in the UK and elsewhere have found "horrifying" in this week's events is not simply the individual stories of death and destruction but that their acceptance of the asymmetry of the conflict has been disturbed. The Palestinians are expected to suffer, and we're meant to feel sorry for them, while Israel is expected to act with impunity, and we are meant to at best regret the evils this leads to. Hamas didn't keep to the script. The Yom Kippur war, 50 year ago, similarly upset expectations, leading to the slow but steady attempts at accommodation between the Arab states and Israel, but it also relegated the Palestinians to the collateral damage of geopolitics. Since the failure of Oslo, the West and the Arab states have had the opportunity to either impose a solution on Israel - specifically through boycott, disinvestment and sanctions (BDS), hence the focus on delegitimising it by Isarel and its supporters abroad - or to accept the gradual erasure of the Palestinian people. Everything we've seen this week suggests that the latter remains the preference.

Palestine is the archetypal frozen conflict, but we've seen many others since 1989, e.g. Kosovo and Ukraine, and the obvious problem is that they're not frozen enough: the situation changes. Perhaps the most consequential development was the recent Azeri takeover of Nagorno-Karabakh, which proved that international opinion will accept ethnic cleansing if there isn't too much media coverage. This is clearly the hope of Israel too, a country whose history is founded on the ethnic cleansing of the Nakba and its adoption of a colonial project of progressive land-theft and settlement. And the chief characteristic of that colonial society is not the rightwing nature of its government, nor the influence of the religious on its laws, but the obliviousness of secular, liberal opinion. As Tariq Ali rightly pointed out in the New Left Review, "Earlier this year, Palestinians watched the demonstrations in Tel Aviv and understood that those marching to ‘defend civil rights’ did not care about the rights of their occupied neighbours.  They decided to take matters into their own hands." The impending destruction of Gaza is above all a political failure and the US and UK are complicit in this.