Israel, a settler colonialist project, craves recognition as a real state

We look back on seven decades of Palestinian resistance against the Israeli occupation and the international support, or lack thereof, for the Palestinian cause as violence from Zionist mobs unfolds against Palestinians in the heart of the capital of Palestine, the Holy City of Jerusalem.

The Palestinian cause has always been a core pillar of the Arab and Muslim homeland, the ummah, as well as an important religious issue.

The capitol of Palestine, Jerusalem, is home to the three major monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

And of course, the Palestinian issue is also an issue of anti imperialism.

Israel was created in the wake of a mandate under the British Empire. And the Zionist ideology consists of dispossessing Palestinians of their homes and giving them to Jewish settlers from Europe and elsewhere.

Let's take a look at 73 years of Israeli occupation and Palestine, and international support for the Palestinian struggle.

In 1916 during World War One, the British and French empires carved up the Middle East and divided it between themselves under the secret Sykes–Picot Agreement, named after Sykes, a British diplomat and Picot a French diplomat.

During that time, the British had used the Arab tribes to organize an Arab revolt, rising up against the Ottoman Empire and defeating them, with promises of independence for the Arabs.

But these promises of an Arab homeland were short lived, and instead replaced with more colonial rule once again.

In 1917, the British government issued a public statement, saying that it would create a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

Shortly after following the end of World War One, Palestine became a mandate under British rule from 1923 to 1948.

In 1947, the United Nations came up with a Partition Plan, which would divide Palestine and one half for the Arabs, one half for the Jews, and the holy city of Jerusalem as a separate international entity.

When the United Nations officially adopted the Partition Plan, 33 nations voted in favour, 13 against and 10 abstained.

The Palestinians and Arabs vehemently rejected this plan, which was seen as just another colonial partitioning, but this time for different settlers.

After the British Mandate was established in May 1948, and the Israelis declared their so called independence on the last day, the other Arab countries declared war in support of Palestine, among them Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

This war resulted in a defeat for the Palestinians and Arabs and is known in Arabic as the Nakba, the catastrophe or capitalism.

Palestinians were robbed of their homeland, their independence and the right to self determination. This was followed by the systematic destruction of homes, villages; the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

Exodus of the dispossessed

Millions of Palestinians were forced to flee in a mass exodus seeking refuge in neighboring countries like Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Millions more were displaced and scattered internally inside Palestine, becoming refugees and stateless on their own land.

And to this day, Palestine has yet to be recognized as a state by the United Nations, despite the fact that Israel is, even though Israel is sitting on Palestinian land, occupying the Palestinian people, and made up of settlers who come from around the world that are not indigenous to Palestine.

1948 was not the only attempt by the Arabs to liberate Palestine. They tried many more times throughout the 20th century, again in 1967 and 1973, and have supported the various Palestinian resistance and liberation groups throughout the years.

Although there have been several wars and attempts to liberate Palestine, Arab support for the Palestinian cause has varied greatly through these many decades.

Some consider the Arab support to be invaluable in keeping the Palestinian cause alive and sustaining the resistance.

However, others feel that Arab support has not always been unwavering, and in some cases, even blunted parts of the Palestinian resistance in order to protect their own interests, which is seen as being selfish and not in the interest of Palestine.

The 1950s and 1960s marked the peak of Arab nationalism.

In a period of decolonization, or supposed to decolonization, many Arab countries sought to unite with each other, and leaders like Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser were revered all across the Arab world.

The idea of Arab unity, or Pan-Arabism, even resulted in Syria and Egypt forming a country called the United Arab Republic from 1958 until 1971. Egypt even kept this name for several years and Syria still has the same flag.

The Six Day War

However, at the height of all this, the war in June 1967, marked the first great defeat for the Arab world.

The Six Day War resulted in a crushing resounding military defeat.

In a period of just six days the Arabs not only failed to liberate Palestine but in fact lost even more territory than they had begun with.

As a result, Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria, the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza strip from Egypt, the West Bank and Jerusalem from Jordan.

It was a soul crushing and humiliating defeat, which resulted in the fracture of Arab nationalism with Nasser's resignation and showed that the Arabs lacked unity.

If the Arabs were too divided to even defend their own land, how could they possibly free Palestine in the holy city of Jerusalem?

Since then, Israel has continued to illegally occupy the vast majority of these territories in violation of international law.

So far, Israel has only given back the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt, but still illegally occupies everything else.

There have been multiple United Nations resolutions demanding that Israel withdraw from these lands and recognising them as not Israeli.

The United Nations Security Council resolution 242, which was passed in November of 1967, clearly demands the withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.

However, to this day, 53 years later, Israel still refuses to do so.

The UN and the international community have always recognised Jerusalem as a separate territory, or corpus separatum. This is specifically outlined in UN Security Council resolution 181, which was adopted in 1947.

 A further resolution, 252, which was passed in 1968, urges Israel to refrain from unifying Jerusalem which is essentially akin to annexation.

In July 1980, Israel violated these resolutions and passed the so called basic law or Jerusalem law, through which it illegally annexed East Jerusalem and declared the holy city its capital.

The UN Security Council passed a further two resolutions in 1980, resolutions 476 and 478, calling on Israel to desist from altering the character and the status of the holy city through legislative and administrative measures, and censuring Israel's Jerusalem law.

A year later, in December 1981, Israel went on to illegally annex the occupied Syrian Golan Heights in violation of resolution 242, without any ramifications.

Israel has categorically refused to abide by any of these UN Security Council resolutions.

At this point, it's perhaps easier to count the number of resolutions that Israel has abided by rather than the ones that it hasn't.

At the time, especially after the defeats of 1948, 1967 and 1973, Arab nationalism and support for the Palestinian cause had significantly declined, and Israel had received not just the full political backing of the West, but also its military backing through NATO, along with various forms of aid and military assistance from the United States and its allies.

Throughout the years, one need only look at a recent map of the region to see how much land Palestinians have lost in one form or another to Israel. And the more land that Palestinians lose, the more they're forgotten by the world and their supposed Arab brothers.

Through colonization, war and annexation Israel has taken more and more Palestinian land, and even just last year in the run up to July of 2020, threatened to annex more of it; up to another 30% of the West Bank in an annexation plan put forward by Netanyahu.

This ultimately did not take place, but the Israelis definitely gained something else instead.

The majority of Arab countries do not recognize Israel as a state. However, Israel has succeeded in bringing some of them on its side through various measures.

Egypt and Jordan were ultimately drawn into making peace and establishing ties with Israel through help, or some might say, coercion, by the United States.

Recently, even more Arab nations proceeded to recognise Israel and establish ties with the Zionist regime. after former US President Donald Trump pushed through the Abraham accords in 2020.

With the Abraham accords, through this agreement, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, opened embassies and economic relations with the Israelis.

It had been known for some years that some of these Arab kingdoms had ties with the Israelis. But now this was finally out in the open and their cards on the table.

There are still other Arab countries who are suspected of engaging with the Israelis, such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar, although they have yet to openly normalize relations with the Zionist regime, but it's rumored that they will in the near future.

Since Israel, as a settler colonialist project, deeply wants to be recognized as a real country. This is something that the Israelis crave very much.

Perhaps one of the only valuable cards that Arab countries still hold is their refusal to recognize Israel.

It would appear this is the only political leverage that they have, since virtually none exists militarily or economically.

More importantly, perhaps, it is a moral imperative not to do this. How can these Arab countries recognize an Israeli state on Palestinian land when the Palestinians do not even have a state on Palestinian land?

This is not only about leverage but about common sense and solidarity. And nevertheless, when Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Sudan recognise Israel, they threw away that leverage.

When Iran had its Islamic Revolution in 1979, it was not just a rejection of imperialism, beginning with the ouster of the Shah, who was a puppet installed by Britain and the United States for access to Iran's oil, but also the beginning of a new source of Support for the Palestinian resistance.

Where the Arabs had failed, perhaps Iran had stepped in. One of the core pillars of Iran's Islamic revolution has been the Liberation of Palestine.

Under the Shah, Iran had established ties with the Zionist occupation because the Shah was doing the bidding of the West.

However, in 1979, Iran severed ties with the Israelis and handed over Israel's embassy in Tehran to the Palestinian Liberation organisation, the PLO.

Every year since then Iran celebrates Quds day, or Jerusalem day, as a show of solidarity with Palestinians and for the liberation of the holy city of Jerusalem.

This is not just celebrated in Iran, but also internationally with various marches of solidarity and other countries and cities across the world. Israel has, of course, dubbed the celebration anti-Semitic, which is what it says about any criticism of Israel. And now the holiday has actually even been banned in Germany.

If we go back a bit in time, in terms of Arab support for the Palestinian cause, we find that in 1948 Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan and Egypt all took up arms and went to war, in the name of Palestine.

However, their support has been variable and has often changed over the years.

Could you break down why this happened, and why there was a kind of split in factions, and then in terms of support from the Arab countries towards the Palestinian cause?

That's a very important question. We, as we can see, today, if you start looking at the situation from today's perspective, several Arab countries have officially announced normalization with the Zionist regime, and of course, this is a result of decades of an increased cooperation between several Arab regimes and the Zionist entity.

And of course, it has to do with Israel throughout the last 23 years becoming quite a strong player in this region, obviously, through it being supported by the United States and most western countries, to an extent that allows Israel to expand its expansionist and the hegemony it has in the region.

And, of course, numerous Arab countries, certainly those that have quite recently announced normalization with Israel are, as well, regimes that are not necessarily democratic countries, but unelected dictatorships that work in accordance with the United States and its allies, which makes them natural allies oftentimes, as well.

And at the same time, of course, within the so called Arab world, several countries have never had any conflict with Israel, whereas others such as I mean, beyond Palestine, of course, Lebanon, and Syria, are until this day affected by to some extent, daily invasion by Israel, and look at Lebanon, where Israel is invading the Lebanese, Lebanese airspace, several times a day.

So there have been different experiences and different orientations towards the Zionist regime that range from opposition to complete acceptance of the Zionist settler colonial project.

Dr Denijal Legic, Writer and Researcher

Was there a split in terms of support in regard to strategy because, you know, some countries perhaps, Egypt didn't want to get drawn into a war with Israel again so they hindered the Palestinian resistance, is that an accurate assessment?

Definitely. I mean, countries have been under pressure, if it were, you know, Egypt, or Jordan will have officially signed peace treaties. All of this was also based to some extent to keep to keep themselves safe and secure within their own borders.

And then, to that extent, Palestinians have oftentimes been an obstacle for these regimes in order to control their own political economic goals. And, of course, I guess, United States plays a very particular role there as well, which also exerts pressure on its allies to move towards closer ties with the Zionist regime.

Dr Denijal Legic, Writer and Researcher

This brings to mind a famous speech from the Syrian Defence Minister Mustafa Tlass where he vents his anger at Arafat for going to the White House, for engaging with the Israelis.

And what is most interesting about that speech is that he doesn't actually mention the occupied Syrian Golan Heights; not even once.

He speaks specifically about Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine. Why is that? I mean, obviously, it's a holy city, to all the parties who support the Palestinian resistance. Why does Jerusalem, al Quds, hold so much importance?

Quite interesting because Jerusalem I think, is the symbolic representative of the whole colonial inscription and indigenous erasure.

Just I mean, this week, there have been several incidences of violence or settler violence of Israeli forcing Palestinians from their homes. There's a constant recreation of violence on a territory that is officially occupied under international law. And then of course, it has a historic significance, being the capital, declared capital of Palestine and plays a particular role in numerous religions, which is why I think it has symbolically, or politically, quite a strong importance, but it's also a declared goal of the Zionist movements to get to Jerusalem and to converted into their city or what they call as unification of Jerusalem. So that's why it is also central in ideas of equalization and Liberation of Palestine.

Dr Denijal Legic, Writer and Researcher

You mentioned the recent violence that's taking place there, in Jerusalem, these pogroms you know, these angry mobs chanting “death to Arabs” and the Israeli border police, they're essentially just letting them do it.

Palestinian support from their neighbors and the international community appears to be nonexistent, since this is happening in broad daylight and no one appears to notice or says anything. Would you agree?

Absolutely. In terms of social media, where, I guess on a daily basis, there are new videos and audio, visual evidence, Israel, Israel's crimes, (people) being killed, live on camera evicted from their homes.

The international community has remained either silent to some extent, at the same time as also throughout the last decades, we've  framed the Palestinian cause from a struggle, the colonised peoples struggle for liberation, into a sort of diplomatic conflict between two equal sides.

This is something I guess we also see in the media coverage. Also, of the latest events in Jerusalem where oftentimes (the situation) is presented as (an) alleged fight between Jews and Arabs, Israelis and so on. Whereas effectively it is, of course, a very genocidal settler colonial movement and language plays a very particular role in that and we see that even, as you mentioned, the Arab regimes that have normalised the ties with Israel as well, aren't paying as much attention to that as they might have done decades ago, but the violence has become quite normalised.

And even though there are numerous new eruptions of violence they have been referred to in the media recently, they are part and parcel of a structure because Zionism as a settler colonial movement, is genocidal in its structure and continues to kill Palestinians and to destroy Palestine. Whereas again, [the] international community isn't really intervening, but rather choosing euphemisms and synonyms for ways in which they can maybe reduce, at least linguistically, these genocidal dimensions of Israel's violence.

Dr Denijal Legic, Writer and Researcher

Let us talk a little bit about Quds Day or Jerusalem day. As you know, this is something that has been celebrated by Iran to show solidarity with Palestine eversince the Islamic Revolution, and I wanted to ask if you could maybe expand on that and also how Iran, despite being the only non Arab country in the region, has still shown huge support of Palestine in general, from 1979 to the present.

Iran has shown and continues to show strong support for the Palestinian resistance. Both of course, solidarity ideology as well as, I guess economically and financially. Iran's support for the Palestinian cause has also been an issue for several Arab regimes that have maybe been more indifferent towards the Palestinian cause, and such was also used by the Zionist regime in their propaganda. Pretty much as in mean, there's this continuous decision of orientalist tropes that the Zionist regime has employed and whereas it was previous to Hamas it is today oftentimes Iran that is a direct target of the Zionist regime, being accused of anything that has to do with the resistance efforts to that extent that as a non Arab country, Iran plays a major role in the continuity of Resistance efforts; Efforts of liberation against the Zionist regime.

Dr Denijal Legic, Writer and Researcher

Would you say the support that comes from Iran, Syria, Lebanon, the support they give to Palestine, is actually one of the main reasons the West targets them for regime change?.

Yes, of course there is solidarity among some population in these countries also beyond in the in the broader region with Palestine. At the same time, of course, Lebanon and Syria and Iran themselves are targeted by designers regime because Israel's violence has ever been restricted. To historical Palestine, I think this place and Need your role and makes a difference? Between these countries and other countries in the region if we have more of a normalised or sense towards Israel or not a conflict at all of course, it is simply And they are, as you mentioned, victims of sanctions or warfare or both. by the United States that also puts them in a in a role of a struggle that again, connects them to the Palestinian struggle, I guess.

Dr Denijal Legic, Writer and Researcher

So just to wrap up, you know, I don't know if you heard about this, but just as Iran has its Quds day, the Israelis have something with a similar name, they celebrate Jerusalem day. I don't know if you've heard of that. But the Israelis  call the Iranian Quds Day celebration anti Zionist and anti semitic. Well, they equate the two.

And, as you know, when the Israelis celebrate Jerusalem day they are, in actuality, celebrating the capture of Jerusalem in 1967. Which in and of itself is an act of war. It is a violation of international law as well as ethnic cleansing. What are your thoughts on that?

I mean it makes perfect sense because this whole Zionist narrative is really just based on myths and ways to construct the history and the connection to the land that was not there before the settler colonial movement and, I mean as far as I know, Quds day has been banned in some parts of Europe because there are these I mean, at least in Germany, I think there's anti-Semitic and so on in line of course with this very Zionist, and actually anti-Semitic narratives that equate Israel with, with Judaism but I'm not surprised to hear that the Zionist regime is having their own day because it's also a way for them to inscribe themselves into Palestine and to construct the connection to the wire that wasn't there before.

Dr Denijal Legic, Writer and Researcher

More than 70 years of occupation, war, bulldozing of homes and ethnic cleansing Israel can only be built t the expense of Palestinians and always has been. 

Don't take our word for it. Take the word of the Israeli people.

We take house after house. All this area will be a Jewish neighborhood. We are not finished the job. We are going to the next neighborhood and after that we'll go mow our dream; that all East Jerusalem will be like a West Jerusalem Jewish capital of Israel.

Yonatan Yosef, Spokesperson for Israeli Settlers in Sheikh Jarrah

I see this as a continuation of the Zionist project. The return to Zion. Is it at the Arabs’ expense? Yes.  But our government institutions were also built at the expense Arabs who lived here. And so was the state itself.

Israelli Settler

 The Palestinian issue is really not a complex issue; it is in fact very simple.

All these educational video, reports, documentaries and people rewriting Whitewash history, want to frame it as war.

It's not a war, it's an occupation. It is a settler colonialist project born out of the ashes of the British Empire.

The only difference between the right wing Israelis and regular Israelis is their methodology, but the result is still the same.

One of these “regular Israeli”, a young lady, when asked whether she agreed with the viewpoint “Lets burn the Arab villages, and death to Arabs” said “Maybe not in that way”…and when asked to clarify her statement, she responded thus:

I speak it in a mannered and proper way. I don’t say let’s burn their villages; I just say that they should get out from it, and we to take over the lands.

Israeli Settler

That sounds like ethnic cleansing, which is a crime against humanity.

And in order to justify its occupation, Israel seeks to criminalize any criticism of Israel by shutting down even the mildest criticism.

The Zionist occupation defines the boundaries within which any speech about it is permissible. Israel uses its lobbying power in the United States, and Europe to ensure that, politically and culturally, people are not allowed to criticize it.

Although the majority of Arab people support the Palestinian cause, unfortunately, it seems there are not many governments left who do so as well.

Who assists Palestine besides Syria, Iran, Lebanon, Iraq and Algeria?

It seems that some Arab governments have forgotten their brother and bretheren in Palestine and the holy City of Jerusalem which is at least what they signal when they accept this occupation and establish ties with it.

Nevertheless, despite the varying degrees of support from Arab countries throughout the years and the international community's inability, or unwillingness, to hold Israel accountable, this doesn't Change what Zionism fundamentally is.

It is a racist settler colonialist ideology that treats Palestinians as third class citizens and uproots them from their homes.

It is incumbent upon every human being with a conscience to oppose Zionism on moral and ethical grounds, and to see the situation for what it is.

It's an occupation. The Palestinian struggle is a struggle for human rights. It is a struggle against imperialism, against colonialism and against oppression.

Everyone all across the world should support the Palestinian cause and the Palestinian people.

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