The Political Economy of Israeli Apartheid — Specter of Genocide: 'We are seeing pre-genocidal activity in Israel-Palestine'

Israeli soldiers arresting a 8-year-old Palestinian child. (Screen capture from YouTube
video)

By William I Robinson
Just days before the seven-week siege of Gaza this past July and August that left some 2,000 Palestinians dead, 11,000 injured and 100,000 homeless, Israeli lawmaker Ayelet Shaked, a senior figure in the Jewish Home Party that is part of Israel's ruling coalition, posted on Facebook that "the entire Palestinian people is the enemy . . . including its elderly and its women, its cities and its villages, its property and its infrastructure." The post went on to declare that "behind every terrorist stand dozens of men and women, without whom he could not engage in terrorism. They are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads. Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there."

Shaked's Facebook post was shared over 1,000 times and received nearly 5,000 "likes." A few weeks later, on August 1, The Times of Israel published an op-ed piece by Yochanan Gordan titled "When Genocide Is Permissible." Gordan claimed that "there's going to have to come a time where Israel feels threatened enough where it has no other choice but to defy international warnings." He went on: "What other way then is there to deal with an enemy of this nature other than obliterate them completely? Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu clearly stated at the outset of this incursion that his objective is to restore a sustainable quiet for the citizens of Israel . . . If political leaders and military experts determine that the only way to achieve its goal of sustaining quiet is through genocide is it then permissible to achieve those responsible goals?"

Echoing these sentiments, the deputy speaker of the Israeli parliament Moshe Feiglin, a member of Netanyahu's Likud Party, urged the Israeli army to kill Palestinians in Gaza indiscriminately and use every means possible to get them to leave. "Sinai is not far from Gaza and they can leave. This will be the limit of Israel's humanitarian efforts," Feiglin said. "The IDF will conquer the entire Gaza, using all the means necessary to minimize any harm to our soldiers, with no other considerations. . . . The enemy population that is innocent of wrong-doing and separated itself from the armed terrorists will be treated in accordance with international law and will be allowed to leave."

These calls for ethnic cleansing and genocide are increasing in frequency. The political climate in Israel has continued to shift so sharply to the right in the past few years that a fascist discourse is now palpable in the daily life of the country. In Tel Aviv in August, some of the right-wing protesters who beat leftists demonstrating against the siege of Gaza wore T-shirts bearing neo-Nazi symbols and photos, including T-shirts bearing the slogan "Good night left side," a neo-Nazi slogan popular in Europe at rock concerts featuring far-right bands, as a response to the original anti-fascist slogan: "Good night white pride." Nearly half of the Jewish population of Israel supports a policy of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and major portions of the population support complete annexation of the occupied territories and the establishment of an apartheid state, according to a 2012 poll.

Fear that fascism is on the rise in Israel led 327 Jewish survivors and descendants of survivors and victims of the Nazi genocide to publish an open letter in The New York Times on August 25 expressing alarm over "the extreme, racist dehumanization of Palestinians in Israeli society, which has reached a fever-pitch." The letter continued: "We must raise our collective voices and use our collective power to bring about an end to all forms of racism, including the ongoing genocide of Palestinian people."

The Zionist project may have been founded - we now know from the spate of historical studies that have emerged in recent years - on systematic ethnic cleansing and terrorism against the Palestinians. Article II of the UN Convention of 1948 defines genocide as "acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group." There is little doubt that we are seeing pre-genocidal activity in Israel-Palestine. What are the underlying structural roots in the Israeli political economy bringing about such genocidal pressures?

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