By Jeremy Salt
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. (Design: Palestine Chronicle)
The world has laws and courts to punish criminal states, but they are never used against Israel, or the states, principally the US and the UK, that support Israel and have brought mayhem to West Asia.
The central question is not whether or ‘if’ Palestine should be returned to its people, because the moral, legal, and natural law principles are clear. Borders are one thing, but land ownership is another. Individually and collectively, the land of Palestine belongs to its people, not the settlers who stole it through force of arms.
Clearly, no negotiated peaceful settlement with them is possible. That has been tried repeatedly and broken up on the rocks of their unwillingness to meet the minimum terms for a settlement.
Israel is now infuriated because of the governments that have finally recognized a Palestinian state. This is a paradox because, in reality, there is no Palestinian state, and no unoccupied territory left on which to build one, but the decision is apparently intended to build up the momentum towards one.
This could be taken seriously if these governments had a plan to force Israel out of occupied territory, but they do not. Their recognition seems aimed at burnishing their own tattered self-image rather than actively contributing to Palestinian liberation.
Israel certainly is not going to let go of an inch of Palestinian territory and, as an early payback, consistent with past behavior when confronted, is likely to double down by annexing the West Bank.
Balfour’s poisonous plant is now spreading across the entire region. Confident, arrogant, yet insecure, Israel is proclaiming that it will murder anyone it wants, where it wants, and when it wants, even as it slaughters journalists in Yemen, accredited negotiators in Doha, and civilians in Syria and Lebanon. And it is Israel, not just the government, given the widespread public support for the ‘war.’
The world has laws and courts to punish criminal states, but they are never used against Israel, or the states, principally the US and the UK, that support Israel and have brought mayhem to West Asia.
Israel has lived in violation of international law from the beginning. It is the necessary condition of its existence as an expansionist state. It openly treats the UN with hatred and contempt. With the assistance of the US, it is breaking down key UN institutions, including the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and the WFP (World Food Programme).
It kills UN aid workers, abuses UN officials, bans them from the territory it has occupied, and even rips up the UN Charter on the podium in the General Assembly, yet, unaccountably, is allowed to remain a member of the world organization.
Its criminality has now plateaued with genocide committed openly, as if it wants the world to see what it is capable of doing when threatened.
World outrage is clear and the question is being asked repeatedly. ‘Why aren’t they doing something to stop this?’ The ‘they’ is the collective ‘west.’ After all, this is not some small crime that can be tolerated, but the greatest that can be committed. Even if they are unprincipled, are governments so totally unprincipled and immoral that they can allow genocide to be committed before their own eyes?
The answer is obviously ‘yes.’ After all, they have committed genocides of their own and genocides are not remarkable in history. In the particular instance of Palestine, however, the substitution of its people by another was implicit in what the ‘west’ had in mind after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.
What the Palestinians – and people across the region – wanted was the right to decide their own future on their own land. They were encouraged to think it might be within reach. After all, had not the American President, Woodrow Wilson, promised self-determination in his 14 points?
However, the US had no power to deliver on his promise. It was an observer on the sidelines. The Middle East and North Africa were controlled by Britain and France and they had no intention of letting go of their grip on territory and resources, especially the oil then beginning to spout out of the ground. Their greed was what Wilson described as the “whole disgusting scramble for the Middle East.”
Towards total control, Britain and France would block rising Arab nationalism and independence with all the tools at their disposal: puppet kings, regents and tribal sheikhs, corrupted politicians, military bases, and overthrow when necessary. Divide and rule was the order of the day.
Sham independence was granted to Egypt and the newly created state of Iraq. ‘Historic Syria’ was partitioned. Lebanon was given ‘independence’ under the control of the French High Commissioner. The rest of the country was fragmented into ethno-religious statelets before being incorporated into one Syrian state, with Alexandretta ceded to Turkiye in the late 1930s.
Palestine’s future was suspended for one reason only: the ‘national home’ for the ‘Jewish people’ (in fact, not one people at all, despite the religious bond). In fact, what was intended behind the propaganda of the ‘national home’ was the establishment of a Jewish state as soon as the settlers pouring in from Europe were strong enough to stand on their own two feet.
The 90 percent “existing non-Jewish communities”, as Balfour described them, would have to be reduced to a minority. ‘Transfer’ of the Palestinian people was a consideration from the beginning.
Behind the cover of returning the Jewish people to their ancient homeland lay hard, cold, calculating imperial interest. Israel would stand, not just as a bulwark of ‘western civilization’ in the Middle East, but as an aggressive bridgehead of western power, providing by its very divisive existence a permanent reason for western intervention. The Palestinians would have to pay the price by their disappearance.
Israel was a variation of the ethno-religious ‘minority politics’ played by Britain and France since the beginning of the 19th century. The ‘rights’ of these minorities were repeatedly used as leverage against the Ottoman government. The aim always was imperial advantage over a rival power (generally Russia).
In Palestine, the British actually imported a minority – Jewish settlers from Europe – who could be used to serve their strategic purposes and keep the entire region off balance more or less permanently. The greater the imbalance, the greater the opportunities for the ringmaster to intervene.
This was imperial mischief at its finest, enabling the making of the Middle East under the old imperial ringmasters and enabling the ongoing remaking of the entire region under US/Israeli management. The final push is now underway, with country after country targeted in Israeli attacks.
And herein lies the answer to why the collective ‘west’ is not intervening to stop the genocide. It is the inevitable outcome of the imperial plan drawn up for Palestine more than a century ago. Because of the demographics, the success of the settler state project depended not just on the suppression of the indigenous population but on their numerical removal. It had to happen, which is why the ‘west’ sat back and allowed the genocidal first wave to proceed without interruption in 1948.
The Palestinians managed to survive as a people and continue the fight for the restitution of their rights despite all efforts to destroy them. Palestine is now the stumbling block in the way of the ‘new’ Middle East. It must be removed for the US/Israeli grand plan for the region to succeed.
Currently, one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world, next to Damascus, Gaza, is being destroyed. This is not just Samson pulling down the pillars of the temple. This is total destruction, as in everything being ground to dust.
No one apparently has the power or the will to stop this rampage, not just the collective ‘west’ but also Russia, China and the rest of the BRICS states.
It is not as if we have not been at this point in history before. The same ‘west’, watching the genocide in Gaza and the US/Israeli rampage across the Middle East, watched the rise of the national socialist and fascist states in the 1930s.
They did nothing to stop them for strategic imperial reasons of their own and then it was too late. The smaller wars launched against republican Spain, Ethiopia and China ended in one big war.
Just as it has continued to trade with genocidal Israel, so the British government continued to trade with Germany up to 1939. Up to that point, despite the invasion of China and the massacres that shocked the interwar generation, Japan was almost completely dependent on the US for the supply of essential war materials that would be used to bomb Pearl Harbor.
Saddam Hussein was equally dependent on the US and Europe for his war materials in the 1990s, supplied on the understanding that they would only be used against Iran. How many Iranians would die was of no concern to the American and European suppliers of chemicals, armaments and ‘dual use’ war material.
In 1943, the British publisher Victor Gollancz asked this question of Lord Vansittart: “Shall our children live or die?” We know the answer to that. We know the answer when Iraq was attacked. The same question can be asked of Gaza, and we know the answer to that, too.
The leading figure against appeasement of Nazi Germany, Vansittart believed that only a crushing military defeat would bring peace to Europe. The “other Germany” – anti-war and peace-loving – only existed as a small and ineffective minority.
The same is true of Israel. Only armed intervention will stop the genocide and prevent the current crisis from spreading any further. That should be crystal clear by now. The Israeli opponents of the ‘war’ on Gaza for the sake of the Palestinians are few and far between and just as ineffectual as liberal Germans were during the Nazi period.
With the US complicit in the genocide, there will be no meaningful intervention of any kind, and the crisis will spread further. In the eyes of Donald Trump, of course, it is not a crisis at all but an opportunity.
Israel and the US are the outlaw states of our time, committing crimes as wicked as those of the national socialists and the fascists in the 1930s, if not more so. Guernica in 1937 was a footnote compared to the mass destruction and death in Fallujah in 2003, and now, Fallujah is not even a footnote to the genocide in Gaza.
This is a tide that is going to seep into every corner unless it is stemmed. No one should think that only the Palestinians, the Lebanese, the Syrians, the Iraqis and the Yemenis are going to pay for it.
Now that the game is up, Israel is lashing out in mad dog style and doubling down rather than backing off. The world is now rapidly turning against it, which will only madden it still further. Trade and diplomatic relations are going to be ruptured, and its isolation is going to increase.
Even the US is beginning to turn its face in the other direction. Israel still has Trump and his cohort, but they are not going to be there forever and they might even be around for a shorter time than anyone expects, once the courts hold them accountable for their violations of constitutional rights.
Netanyahu has proclaimed that Israel is now a “little Sparta,” an isolated state that must exist solely by force of arms. What he did not mention is that arms alone were not sufficient for Sparta. It was weakened by military defeats before being destroyed by the Visigoths in the fourth century AD.
Of course, the Spartans had swords and spears, not nuclear weapons, Israel’s trump card since it began developing them in 1948. After Gaza, Israel has to be regarded as capable of using them if facing military defeat. The most likely occasion is a war that starts but cannot be won without resorting to its nuclear arsenal.
What is now apparent is that Israel has backed itself into a corner. It seemed like an unassailable fortress, but a corner is what it has become.
The exit point was a Palestinian state on part of the territory Israel has occupied but it has deliberately closed off that option. Now it has trapped itself. The only option left is force and, even on this front, the wheels are turning against it, as the bruising encounter with Iran in June this year showed.
– Jeremy Salt taught at the University of Melbourne, at Bosporus University in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara for many years, specializing in the modern history of the Middle East. Among his recent publications is his 2008 book, The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press) and The Last Ottoman Wars. The Human Cost 1877-1923 (University of Utah Press, 2019). He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
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