Since the start of the genocide in Gaza, the violence and repression from the Israeli military have risen dramatically in the occupied West Bank. According to the UN, more than 600 Palestinians, including more than 100 children, have been killed by Israeli forces and settlers in the West Bank since October last year. Now, West Bank villages are being subjected to the heaviest assaults in decades.
But even in these circumstances, students at West Bank universities are organising resistance. Ghaied Hijaz is a Birzeit University activist in the <a href="http://right2edu.birzeit.edu/">Right to Education</a> campaign, which defends the rights to education of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. She spoke to Red Flag’s Danica Rachel about the West Bank’s current situation and Palestinian university activism. The text has been edited for length and clarity.
When did the Right to Education campaign at Birzeit University start, and what is it about?
The Right to Education campaign started in 1988 during the First Intifada. We document any violations, especially when it comes to education or students or academics. We provide legal assistance to students and teachers who get arrested and also after they’re released from Israeli prisons. We help them cope and get back on track with their academic performance and everything else. 
We also mobilise and create a broad network of solidarity groups in the United States, Europe and Asia, basically everywhere. Before the war, we used to receive many visitors to the campus from different universities, mostly US universities. We talked to them about the situation we witnessed, the Palestinian issue and Palestinian rights.
It’s an independent group. It has a diverse collection of people from every single political and ideological background—Fatah or PFLP [Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine] or Hamas or anyone. We work with the student factions in different universities, no matter what their background, and we sometimes create events and activities in different universities.
Has it become more difficult to be politically active in the West Bank since 7 October?
Definitely. In the first 24 hours after October 7, the arrest campaign started in the West Bank, and within the first week, there were hundreds of detainees. It has been ten months, and there have been more than 10,000 or 11,000 arrests. We have seen cases of people being arrested for their Facebook posts, and sometimes their sentence is longer if their post got more interactions. 
People are arrested every day—our friends, classmates or family. Conditions in the prisons are terrible, that we have not seen in years, and maybe we have never seen before. People who get out of prison describe it as a torture camp. They compare it to Abu Ghraib. So it’s become difficult, because you feel like you’re always targeted, and if you’re not targeted by the Israeli occupation, you’re intimidated by the Palestinian Authority. So we feel like every single word we say we’re going to pay for it, and we are watched all the time.
What organising and activism have you been able to do since the genocide started? Are you mainly focused on local issues or is Gaza solidarity also a focus?
Of course, we are focusing on Gaza. Mainly, we have been joining other organisations and grassroots initiatives in the West Bank to try to organise a state of popular, peaceful resistance. But in the West Bank, we have been met with military violence. Before, when towns were raided, they would not shoot at anyone going on the street. The increased military violence increased the fear, and that also decreased the ability to organise. Because when you are organising a peaceful protest heading to a checkpoint or something, it’s almost like a suicide mission. 
In addition to that, with military checkpoints, movement became impossible between cities. And so cities were isolated and people were isolated. There was no ability to join people from different cities and organise a main, big protest or something, and that also decreased the ability to organise, but people still continued organising protests and sit-ins in the centre of the cities or at embassies or at the UN.
And also boycott campaigns. We also keep raising awareness, documenting, researching, and creating spaces where people can sit and discuss political issues. But everything that has been done, whether it was in the university or outside the university, is focused on Gaza, is focused on our efforts to stop this genocide, to resist the occupation and to just save the people.
Is it true that you ran the German ambassador to the Palestinian Authority off your campus?
He was in a museum next to the university. His visit was, he said, an effort to address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and to discuss further cooperation initiatives or something. 
But the students were not able to accept the presence of the ambassador of Germany, who supported the genocide from day one and spread dehumanising propaganda against Palestinians, and denied our right to exist and to resist. There is no acceptance of these colonial powers of these genocidal countries. And so students didn’t even think, and they just went to the museum and demanded that the German ambassador leave immediately. And he left; he was forced to leave.
How does student activism relate to the broader Palestinian resistance?
If we want to look at the history of the Palestinian revolution, it started with students. It started with refugee students in Egypt and in the Gulf areas, and they created the Palestinian factions, all of them, without any exception—from Fatah, to the PFLP, to Hamas. So the role of the students is to maintain this revolutionist mindset, to maintain the resistance, to maintain the ability to organise and to object to what undermines our rights. 
And we have seen the student movement’s role even after that, in the First Intifada and the Second Intifada, and in recent years—how they always stood in the face of any policy that was meant to undermine the role and the meaning of the student movement.
On another level, especially after 7 October, many students have found their way to participate in physical violent resistance, joining small military groups, as in Tulkarm and Jenin, that we call Kateeba Tulkarm [Tulkarm Brigade] and Kateeba Jenin [Jenin Brigade]. They’re just students who, most probably, were not able to get to their university, and lived in a refugee camp for all of their lives and witnessed the continuous Israeli raids. 
So they’re also part of the student movement, and they’re part of the Palestinian revolution, because the Palestinian resistance could not just be forced to be peaceful, because when we are met with extreme violence, we are supposed to defend ourselves in the same way. And so these active students are also part of the student movement to play a fundamental role in the Palestinian resistance and the Palestinian revolution.
Does what you do on the campuses influence the broader politics of the West Bank?
I would say so, yes, because, especially at Birzeit, it’s kind of the most open university and the university where people can actually express their opinions and develop, let’s say, their ideologies and their political identity. So everybody that goes to Birzeit goes through this healthy process of accumulating ideas, accumulating concepts to go into society and be an active political citizen. And many of them go and work with humanitarian organisations, political organisations, cultural organisations. 
What impact has the global student movement had at Palestinian universities and among other activists in the West Bank?
It had such a great effect. Most of the universities in the West Bank turned to online learning for the first three, four months of the war. And still, until now, there are some universities that cannot teach on campus. So student organising, student activism decreased. Students felt like they were out of touch not being able to do anything. 
When the encampments started, students in the West Bank looked, felt ashamed, because these are people outside who are doing stuff that we’re not doing. We’re just sitting home and we’re not able to do anything. So I would say that it’s revived the spirit of the students again, because after three or four months of just continuous disappointment and feeling helpless and useless, they felt again that, yes, students can do something. 
The scenes of the encampments were so inspiring and they encouraged us to try again. Let’s try to organise protests again. Let’s try to have an influence again. If people in the West, in the US, and in Australia and in France, who are not physically connected to the struggle, are doing this, we can do that too. We should do that too. 
And then, in Birzeit, even though we had protests and activities before, we also started a symbolic encampment in solidarity. Then, to strengthen the student movement and the student encampments, we created the Popular University for Gaza, or, as we called it, the Martyrs’ University for Gaza, where we held discussions and lectures and protests, just to strengthen the student movement, to revive the student movement and also to stand in solidarity with the students in Gaza.
Thousands of students in the West have been following what’s going on in Palestine. What’s something you think activists might not know, but should know about Palestine and the current situation?
I don’t know if these are new things to say, but I would say that the most important thing for people to remember is how crucial these days are. This war is not just like any other war. We had escalations before, the violence was escalated before, the First and the Second Intifada, the wars in Gaza. But this war is different.
The threat is not just about the death of people, it also includes the complete erasure of Palestinians. When we say genocide, we mean genocide because we see it happening with more than 40,000 people killed in Gaza, and possibly much, much more.
If the war stops right now, it doesn’t mean that everything is solved, because we still have a major crisis. In Gaza, they have nothing to live with. People would have to leave if they had no schools, no universities, no municipalities, disease spreading. And that’s the plan that [Israeli National Security Minister Itamar] Ben Gvir and [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu were always saying: to limit or to decrease the population of Gaza. That’s genocide, that’s ethnic cleansing, and it has never been more clear. 
And the same is happening in the West Bank. Residents of towns and villages are subjected to daily raids from Israeli settlers, not just the military. And so we are seeing the actual threat of ethnic cleansing—it’s very obvious and it’s very clear.
We must not fall into this discourse of just calling for a ceasefire. We have to call for justice, for freedom.

Danica Rachel

Organising under apartheid: interview with a Palestinian student activist

The following is a media release issued by Mohamed Zwahre, a member of the Popular Committees in the West Bank. The attacks detailed below in the village of Wadi Rahal came before Israel launched a major attack on several villages in the West Bank, reported as the “largest assault in twenty years”, <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/8/28/israel-launched-a-massive-assault-on-the-west-bank-why-and-why-now">killing at least ten Palestinians</a>.
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In an unprecedented armed attack on Wadi Rahal, settlers from the Efrat colony killed one Palestinian and injured two with assault rifles.
Last night, on August 26, shortly before 10pm, about five settler colonists from the Efrat settlement colony that surrounds Bethlehem and Jerusalem invaded the village of Wadi Rahal in the south of Bethlehem and attacked a house, throwing stones and attempting to break in. Neighbours immediately came to the family’s defence and prevented the settlers from setting fire to the house, while the family and their two young daughters managed to escape through a back door.
When faced with the community’s defence, the settlers fired a gun into the air and, within minutes, a second group of about seven settlers, according to witnesses, arrived and began shooting what appeared to be automatic M16 assault rifles that are said to fire hundreds of rounds per minute, over distances of 500m-800m, directly at the community. 
During the incessant shooting, the colonists shot Khalil Ziyadeh, who had come to the family’s defence, from a distance of what witnesses describe as roughly 20m. Khalil was shot in the back, with the bullet exiting his chest. While they tried to help Khalil, two others were shot and injured, while the soldiers blocked the road to other villages and held up ambulances, even shooting tear gas at them.
According to witnesses, it took roughly 30 minutes to get Khalil to the nearby clinic in Jurat al Shama’, which is, under normal circumstances, only minutes away. Altogether, it took almost two hours for Khalil to reach the al Husseini hospital in Bethlehem, usually a 25-minute distance away, by which time he had died of his injuries.
Wadi Rahal is a small village of about 1,000 inhabitants, and it’s the first of altogether nine intertwined farming villages that form one community south of Bethlehem. Altogether, around 3,500 dunums [350 hectares] of the villages’ lands have been illegally annexed by Israel to build the Efrat settlement colony and the Apartheid Wall. The communities have organised popular resistance and demonstrations against this ongoing ethnic cleansing for decades.
In spite of this, however, the village of Wadi Rahal has lived in an enforced co-existence with the neighbouring colonisers, with many residents labouring as day workers for Israeli employers. Until last night, they did not know the neighbouring colonists to attack them directly, let alone using assault rifles. 
Last night, this changed. “They came to kill us, as many as possible”, witnesses said.
Initially, the community thought the attack came from the recent outpost in Khallet al Nahla, which was founded by more hardline colonists one to two years ago. Since the Israeli regime declared it legal three months ago, the community have observed it growing in size and colonial ambition.
The attack on Wadi Rahal is, however, the first direct, armed attack from the Efrat settlement colony on any of the nine villages in the past decades, and the community views this serious escalation as a direct result of the current regime’s escalating genocidal policies, its widescale and inciting distribution of assault rifles to settler-colonists in tandem with the international community’s complicity with it.
Witnesses identified the empty cartridges that were found in Wadi Rahal today as US-made.
Since the escalated road closures on October 7, Wadi Rahal and the neighbouring village of Jurat al Shama have become the only routes for Palestinians from the south of Bethlehem and the Hebron area to access Bethlehem, Ramallah or the north of the West Bank.
The location of the attack, which still bears cartridges, bullet holes and other damage to infrastructure, is very close to the villages’ school, which is due to resume classes next week.

Jewish settlers attack West Bank village, killing Palestinian

Reem Yunis conducted the following interview with Dr Bushra Othman, who recently volunteered in Gaza.
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Tell us a bit about yourself and your background
I am a Palestinian Australian who migrated with my family to Melbourne at the age of six in 1992 after the first Gulf War. We came here from Kuwait, where I was born and where my family had initially resided, just like hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who had to flee Palestine due to the occupation and reside in one Arab country or another, becoming known as the Palestinian diaspora. After completing all my schooling and an undergraduate degree in Melbourne, I studied postgraduate medicine in South Australia. I undertook surgical training in regional Victoria and Melbourne and then obtained my qualifications/fellowship in general surgery. 
What is PANZMA? When was it founded and how? And how did you hear about it?
PANZMA stands for Palestinian Australian New Zealand Medical Association. This organisation was founded in 2020 by a group of Palestinian healthcare professionals who are volunteers. Its aim is to provide immediate medical relief to Palestinians living in Gaza (which has been under lengthy siege by the occupation since 2007) and those living in the occupied West Bank. The aim of PANZMA is to establish and support programs, education and training that foster the future of Palestinian health care. 
I was first introduced to PANZMA by a local Melbourne doctor via word of mouth. I had been aware of their fantastic efforts over the last few years in organising educational events and fundraising to buy medical supplies for hospitals in Gaza and the West Bank. More recently, I became aware of a call out for interested healthcare workers to volunteer for a medical mission in Gaza, given the ongoing conflict. 
It took many months and lots of hard work by PANZMA volunteers to make their first medical mission a reality. We were initially going to be a team of nine to ten people. However, we were limited to five after the Rafah border was closed by Israel. Also, only two surgeons (Dr Jamal Merei and I) were allowed to enter on the planned start date (13 June). The reasoning given to us was that one did not qualify, while the other two Australian members were denied entry because they held a Palestinian Identity document, despite declaring it at the border. Later on, two other members were able to join our mission, as a last-minute addition, and so they entered Gaza on 20 June. One is a general surgeon from Jordan, and the other is an engineer from Sydney.
What motivated you to join the medical team volunteering for Gaza, despite the apparent danger involved?
I believe a surgeon’s role extends beyond the four walls of an operating theatre, or even beyond those in my own local community. I, like many others over the last nine months, have been watching daily the sheer destruction of Gaza, the obliteration of its healthcare system, and the targeting of healthcare workers and facilities. I have watched doctors and nurses be completely burnt out from the physical, psychological and emotional tolls of working in a system with dwindling resources on a background of fearing for their safety or being displaced multiple times or being sieged in hospitals. I have spent years cultivating my surgical skills, and I felt a strong sense of moral duty to try and reach Gaza to offer some firsthand help in the hospitals there. As a Palestinian, I also felt as if it were my own family members who were suffering there. I kept feeling helpless that I’m not physically there in Gaza with them to lend them a hand. 
Talk to us a bit about the general situation in Gaza that you witnessed
Although I have never been to Gaza before, I was told many stories by my new friends and colleagues about how beautiful a place it used to be before this war. How friends would go and catch the sunset at the beach while sitting at a nice café drinking tea (with lots of sugar!). How the markets would be filled with delicious fresh fruit, and other produce such as nuts and dates, all locally produced in Gaza. How the Al-Shifa Hospital was the pride and joy of the Gaza community, a healthcare facility that rivalled those in the Western world. Now, however, all these places exist only in memories and in photos or videos on people’s phones. 
Every single person I met—whether an adult or a child or a patient or a relative—has lost at least one member of their family or even multiple. If your home still exists, then it is basically a miracle. Many people have been displaced twice, three times, even up to seven or nine times. Many people live in tents, and I use that term loosely. Not everyone is lucky enough to have a sturdy tent; some have makeshift tents using blankets and aid package wrapping, or whatever spare cloth they can find. 
There is no electricity, so no one goes out past sunset as there are no lights. They have been creative in utilising solar panels and converting that energy into electricity (via the use of a controller and inverter) so they can charge their phones. They have had to use vegetable oil mixed with a little bit of fuel to enable them to drive around, but there are few cars on the roads. For almost nine months, Gazans haven’t had access to chicken or meat or eggs. Shampoo and soap were very difficult to find in the markets. Yet even if these products had entered Gaza, they would be exceptionally expensive. Many people would have to walk a few hours every single day to access (filtered) water for drinking or spend a few hours going to obtain bread or food. All of this is against the backdrop of knowing that there is no safe zone in Gaza, and at any moment, you may have to flee, running for your life. 
Talk to us about the health situation from your experience as a doctor in there
The PANZMA medical mission team was based at Shuhada Al Aqsa Hospital in Deir Al Balah for three weeks. We were fortunate that there were limited attacks around this area during our time in Gaza. Unlike what we have seen in the last couple of weeks, where constant massacres have been occurring, forcing a large number of dead and injured to present to the few remaining hospitals in the south—causing them to be overwhelmed. 
In addition, the European hospital was evacuated two weeks ago, causing further strain on Al Aqsa and Nasser hospitals (in the south of Gaza). Medical and surgical supplies are exceptionally low, and Israel is preventing medical aid from entering via Karem Shalom. The hospital’s infrastructure is run on two backup generators, which often cause the electricity or water to turn off for short periods. 
Sterility is not always possible, and this leads to high rates of wound infections, which can sometimes be life-threatening. On our fourth or fifth day, the hospital ran out of sterile surgical gowns and abdominal packs (used in cases of major bleeding or haemorrhage). There are limited options for sutures and wound dressings. There is not enough appropriate pain relief for patients. Patients often sleep on broken beds, or they may find no mattresses, and so they are primarily cared for by their families due to the very limited nursing staff for this tragic influx of patients. 
Are there any other points you want to bring up?
There is only so much pain and heartache and destruction that a soul, a community, a land can endure—and Gaza and its people are beyond their limit of endurance. 
They do not wish to be heroes or to be resilient in the face of unspeakable crimes. They wish to live a life that holds security, safety, education and access to basic human rights—something that we all deserve.

A doctor’s account of the situation in Gaza

The International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) 19 July <a href="https://www.icj-cij.orghttps://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/case-related/186/186-20240719-adv-01-00-en.pdf">advisory opinion</a> that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories violates international law argued that the occupation should be ended “as rapidly as possible”.
The 83-page judgement further found that “Israel’s policies and practices in the West Bank and East Jerusalem implement a separation between the Palestinian population and the settlers transferred by Israel to the territory”. 
In other words, Israel is implementing apartheid.
The ICJ declared Israel was obliged to “immediately cease all new settlement activity”, repeal legislation and policies that discriminate against Palestinians or are “aimed at modifying the demographic composition of any parts of the territory” and “provide full reparation for the damage caused” by its illegal occupation. 
Twenty years ago, the ICJ issued another <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/016/2004/en/">advisory opinion</a>
that the construction of Israel’s “separation barrier” (better known as the apartheid wall) inside the West Bank was contrary to international law. Just as it did in 2004, Israel is today thumbing its nose at the ICJ’s findings. 
Since Hamas’ “Operation Flood” on 7 October last year, Israel’s efforts to extend and consolidate its occupation of Palestinian territory through settlement expansion and settler violence have dramatically escalated.
<a href="https://www.ohchr.orghttps://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/2024-03/Palestine-March2024.pdf">According to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights</a> (OHCHR), 465,000 Israeli settlers lived in the West Bank in September last year. An additional 230,000 lived in East Jerusalem. From 1 November 2022 to 31 October 2023, 24,300 new settlement housing units were approved, the largest increase on record. 
This year, the Netanyahu government has announced thousands of new settlements planned across East Jerusalem and the West Bank. At the same time, settlers have become increasingly emboldened to establish new outposts. These typically begin without official government approval but receive assistance to establish roads and infrastructure. The Israeli military stands ready to detain any Palestinians that get in their way.
On 21 July, Faz3a (a civil protection group, pronounced faz’a) reported that just one day after the ICJ statement, three of its international volunteers were evacuated to a hospital after being attacked by Israeli settlers in the village of Qusra in the northern West Bank. The volunteers were part of Faz3a’s recently launched <a href="https://www.defendpalestine.org/">Defend Palestine Campaign</a>, which seeks to build a mass protective presence for Palestinians under attack.
The settlers, using metal pipes and wooden batons, attacked Palestinian farmers tending to their lands alongside the volunteers seeking to protect them. As in past cases, the Israeli military failed to stop the attack.
“The attack today, not even 24 hours after the ICJ ruled that Israeli occupation is illegal and that settlers enjoy impunity when exercising violence, serves as further proof for the dire need for international civil protection in Palestine”, Mohammed Khatib, a Defend Palestine Campaign organiser, <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/C9sx1wFID6X/">said in a statement</a>. “Eighteen communities in the West Bank have been completely wiped out by such violence since October, and the Palestinian people have no time to wait.”
According to Faz3a, Qusra has been the target of “nearly daily attacks by Israeli settlers, who attack villagers, vandalise farms and have even burnt several houses in the village with complete impunity”.
On 11 October, four Palestinians were killed in the village when settlers attacked a family home. Two more were killed the following day.
Saeed Amireh describes a similar situation in his village, Ni’lin, located west of Ramallah in the central West Bank. Amireh told Red Flag that the violence of the Israeli soldiers and settlers since last October “is something we’ve not seen in decades”.
“Since 7 October, they have blocked the entrance of my village to isolate it and cut it off from the rest of Palestinian villages and cities. We can’t move in and out easily and we risk being shot dead”, Amireh said. 
The siege of Ni’lin is having a dire economic impact on its residents. Those employed outside of the village have lost their jobs. Farmers were unable to harvest their olives last season because of settler and soldier attacks. Eight olive pickers were shot, according to Amireh, his cousin being permanently disabled as a consequence.
Many residents are unable to pay their electricity bills because they are denied an income. Settlers are also attempting to deny residents access to communal water sources. 
“When we try to protest, they shoot directly at us with live bullets and arrest us”, Amireh said.
One of the most violent settler groups, known as the “Hill Boys”, is directly supported by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. 
“The Hill Boys have even stolen sheep from Palestinian Bedouin communities and cut us off from all sources of life and existence”, Amireh told Red Flag. “The settlers are helped fully by the Israeli soldiers at every step. They work as gangs ... they invade our homes, they steal whatever they see of value: money, phones, televisions, gold, cars etc. They even film their actions and laugh about it.”
The pattern of Israeli soldier and settler violence has been repeated throughout the West Bank over the past ten months. Since 7 October, <a href="https://www.ochaopt.org/content/humanitarian-situation-update-175-west-bank">according</a>
to UN monitoring group Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), 554 Palestinians have been killed by the military in the West Bank, and at least ten more have been killed by settlers. 
<a href="https://www.unicef.org/mena/press-releases/child-casualties-west-bank-skyrocket-past-nine-months-unicef">According</a>
to UNICEF, 143 of the Palestinians killed are children. On average, a Palestinian child has been killed every two days in the West Bank since October, an unprecedented figure.
The OCHA further reports that, since 7 October, Israeli authorities have demolished, confiscated or forced the demolition of more than 500 Palestinian homes, resulting in the displacement of nearly 3,000 people. 
Israel’s demolition of Palestinian homes and displacement of residents is not a new policy. Since 1967, the Zionist state has continually expanded its West Bank settler population to take more and more Palestinian territory. However, the escalating state violence is making Palestinian resistance more difficult. 
Amireh told Red Flag that military checkpoints are now a daily occurrence in Ni’liin. 
“If they find anything [on residents’ phones] related to Palestine such as a Palestinian song or flag, or that the person liked something in favour of the [Palestinian] resistance ... they arrest that person directly and put them in administrative detention”, he said.
“Administrative detention” refers to imprisonment without charge or trial, which is lawful in the West Bank for stateless Palestinians, who are subject to military law, but not for settlers, who hold Israeli citizenship. 
Amireh explained that, since last October, the military has detained 743 Ni’lin residents, mostly under administrative detention orders. Only seventeen have been released. A further 900 people have fled, while the remaining 4,300 residents remained trapped and isolated in the village.
In the last ten months, <a href="https://www.ohchr.orghttps://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/documents/countries/opt/20240731-Thematic-report-Detention-context-Gaza-hostilities.pdf">according</a>
to another report recently released by the OHCHR, the military has “initiated daily mass, apparently arbitrary, arrests of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, affecting all sectors of Palestinian society”.
By the end of June, 9,440 Palestinians from the West Bank and East Jerusalem were being held in Israeli prisons, effectively hostages of Israel, almost double the number held at the end of September. 
Palestinians are held in shocking conditions. In interviews conducted by the OHCHR, former detainees alleged torture and other forms of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, including sexual abuse of both women and men. 
“The testimonies gathered by my office and other entities indicate a range of appalling acts, such as waterboarding and the release of dogs on detainees, amongst other acts, in flagrant violation of international human rights law and international humanitarian law”, UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk <a href="https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/07/un-report-palestinian-detainees-held-arbitrarily-and-secretly-subjected">said on 31 July</a>.
According to the OHCHR, at least 53 Palestinian detainees are known to have died in Israeli military facilities and prisons since 7 October.
The village of Ni’lin sits in West Bank Area B, defined as land that is under joint Palestinian Authority civil control and Israeli military control. The Palestinian Authority (PA) acts as Israel’s accomplice. 
Since 7 October, PA forces have reportedly killed eleven Palestinians protesting in solidarity with Gaza, and arrested hundreds more. Like the Israeli military, the PA has been found to carry out arbitrary detention, torture and ill treatment of its prisoners. One former detainee, arrested by the PA while participating in a Gaza solidarity demonstration in Hebron last December, told the OHCHR that during his detention he was slapped and punched repeatedly, kept in solitary confinement and deprived of the use of toilet for more than seven hours.
In Area C, approximately, 300,000 Palestinians live alongside the 400,000 Israeli settlers, who reside in approximately 230 settlements. This area, which constitutes 60 percent of the occupied West Bank, remains under Israeli military control. 
“The big target for the settlers is to annex all of Area C”, Amireh told Red Flag. 
Israel’s Civil Administration administers Area C directly, along with Israel’s settlements across the West Bank. The Civil Administration is headed by Smotrich, who is himself a settler. 
“To keep his coalition government alive, Netanyahu has given the settlers the West Bank like a gift to do whatever they want. They [the military] have armed over 150,000 settlers. They are very well armed and are preparing to massacre the [Palestinian] people. They are escalating the situation step by step, beginning by isolating people, separating us from each other. They are focusing now on attacking us in bigger and bigger groups”, Amireh said.
“My greatest fear is that if a war starts with Lebanon, they will try to massacre us like they did in 1948. It will become a catastrophe.”
In response to the escalation of settler violence, Faz3A is <a href="https://www.defendpalestine.org/en/join">appealing</a> for international volunteers to travel to the West Bank for the next olive harvest in the coming months. Once in Palestine, Faz3A volunteers undertake training to provide both direct protection to Palestinian civilians facing Israeli settler violence and attacks, as well as to monitor, document and report on violations of their rights.
At the same time, solidarity activists need to increase the pressure on our governments to isolate Israel. In this regard, the ICJ opinion focuses attention on the many ways Western governments continue to aid and abet Israel’s crimes. 
The ICJ noted that all states must cooperate with the UN to put in place measures to end the occupation (in other words, sanctions) and achieve “the full realisation of the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination”. No state, it said, should “render aid or assistance in maintaining ... Israel’s illegal presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory”.
To date, the Australian government has followed the examples of the US, Britain and Canada by announcing sanctions against only a handful of extremist settlers. However, this measure avoids any meaningful action against Israel.
If Israel is to be stopped from ethnically cleansing the entirety of historic Palestine, we must act now to demand our government—and governments around the world—break all diplomatic, military and trade ties with apartheid Israel.
Nick Everett is the chair of Friends of Palestine Western Australia.

Nick Everett

Israeli settlers’ West Bank rampage escalates

Israel’s brutal war against Gaza has cost at least 40,000 Palestinian lives, most likely many more. Nearly 2 million have been forced to flee their homes and are targeted even in declared safe zones. Israeli forces have flattened vital infrastructure such as hospitals, schools and water supplies. Such is the devastation in the territory that polio and other deadly infectious diseases now threaten even more lives.
Now, with the assassinations of senior Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in Beirut and Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, the situation could escalate into a regional war. Israel has already done its best to bring such a war closer since 7 October, carrying out more than 6,000 attacks on Lebanon, 144 attacks on Syria and further attacks on Yemen and Iran.
Feda Abdelhady Nasser, a Palestinian representative to the United Nations, was absolutely right when she said on 1 August: “Violence and terror are Israel’s main and only currency. There is no red line for Israel, no law it will not breach, no norm it will not trample, no act too depraved or barbaric”.
The United States has backed Israel in all international forums and provides the weapons to massacre the Palestinians. It claims that it was given no warning of Israel’s assassinations, but it gives Israel vital intelligence that enables it to carry out these deadly acts.
Any regional escalation could draw America into direct military engagement. The consequences would be devastating for the oppressed working classes of the region—particularly those in Iran and Lebanon, who already suffer greatly under the authoritarian and reactionary rule of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Hezbollah, respectively.
The US talks about furthering the “peace process” in Qatar, but nothing is on the table that will bring justice to Palestine. Israel’s assassination of Haniyeh and the US’s refusal to condemn it shows their attitude to these negotiations. The peace process is simply a fig leaf the US and the Arab leaders have adopted to cover their betrayal of the Palestinians.
The real attitude of many US leaders was shown by the 50 standing ovations Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu received when he addressed a joint sitting of the US Congress last month. US politicians, who lecture other nations about the need to abide by the “international rules-based order”, cheer to the rafters a man facing war crimes charges at the International Criminal Court. 
The US itself is ramping up military spending. Last year, the government spent nearly US$1 trillion on its military, almost 40 percent of the world’s total. Adding in its NATO allies along with South Korea, Japan and Australia, the US-led bloc of states spent $1.5 trillion in 2023, 60 percent of the global total. All of this is in readiness for a war with China and potentially Russia, which themselves are rapidly building their military forces. 
With the death count increasing daily in Palestine, the media are fixated on the medal tally in the Olympics circus. While Gazans line up for rations, hoping to receive even half a serve of rice for the day, as starvation grips the territory, every Australian news site and news bulletin begins with a recapping of just how many ceremonial necklaces have now been handed out in Paris, often accompanied with sympathetic stories about the adults who cried because they failed to secure one.
While Palestinians desperately try to cheat death one more time, we are told about the horror of potential cheating in “the games”, be it by Chinese swimmers or Algerian boxers. The horror that adults who have dedicated their lives to the noblest of causes, such as swimming in a pool, might be cheated out of a ceremonial necklace. 
All the while, the purported grown-ups who sit in parliaments and editorial offices still can’t agree that the mass murder of 40,000 people, the destruction of a whole society, is a horror. 
The overwhelming tenor of the moment is that Australians should identify with Australian athletes in their struggle for supremacy—not with Palestinian children and families in their struggle for survival. The latter proposition is “divisive”, “controversial”. The former is supposedly “unifying”.
What a farce. What an indictment of what passes for public commentary. 
One of Australia’s chief allies, Israel, has spent ten months carrying out a genocidal campaign to wipe out an entire nation, and it is this cashed-up circus on the Seine that dominates the media. 
Any system that elevates the trials and tribulations of pampered, government-funded athletes above the humanitarian catastrophe that is unfolding in Gaza is morally bankrupt and has to go. 
One that allows trillions to be spent on weapons of destruction and that keeps the world on the edge of devastating conflicts year in and year out is not worthy of the name “civilisation”. 
We need to build an alternative to the capitalist system of perpetual conflict. That begins with fighting against Israel's war on Palestine, the government’s drive to increase military spending, the mindless jingoism fostered by the Olympic coverage and the entire capitalist agenda that is taking the world to the precipice. 
We need to build a socialist alternative.

Tom Bramble

Oppose Israeli escalation, build a political alternative

Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza could lead to the deaths of more than 186,000 people, according to a letter published in the British medical journal, <a href="https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)01169-3/fulltext"></a><a href="https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)01169-3/fulltext">Lancet. </a>Written by scientists who model the direct and indirect impacts of war on health, the letter estimates that the number of Palestinians killed by Israel is likely to exceed by far the official death toll of 38,000, as reported by the Gaza Health Ministry. 
Collecting casualty figures in Gaza is an increasingly difficult task for Palestinian officials due to the destruction of much of Gaza’s infrastructure. The letter explains that the Gaza Health Ministry has had to use “information from reliable media sources and first responders” as well as its usual methods of counting bodies brought in to hospitals or people who have died in hospital to get a realistic measure of deaths. 
According to the authors, this makes the data less robust. “Consequently”, they note, “the Gaza Health Ministry now reports separately the number of unidentified bodies among the death toll. As of May 10, 2024, 30 percent of the 35,091 deaths were unidentified.” 
This development was designed to improve data quality. Yet Israeli politicians have jumped at the opportunity to undermine the veracity of the official death toll, contesting the Gaza Health Ministry’s figures even though they have been accepted as accurate by the state’s intelligence services and international organisations such as the World Health Organization and the United Nations. 
Pro-Israel politicians and media have likewise tried to discredit or downplay the destruction Israel has inflicted on Gaza, casting doubt on the figures published by the “Hamas-run” health ministry. They have suggested that Hamas purposely inflates the casualty figures to demonise Israel. 
The scientists’ revelation that the number of reported deaths is likely an underestimate is a searing indictment of those arguments. There are thousands of bodies still buried under rubble. According to the letter, “the UN estimates that by February 29, 2024, 35 percent of buildings in the Gaza Strip had been destroyed, so the number of bodies still buried in the rubble is likely substantial, with estimates of more than 10,000”. 
But the impact of Israel’s so far nine-month war on Gaza reverberates beyond the direct harm from violence. As the authors explain, “even if the conflict ends immediately, there will continue to be many indirect deaths in the coming months and years from causes such as reproductive, communicable, and non-communicable diseases”. 
Already, the widespread destruction of healthcare and housing infrastructure, severe shortages of food and water, the lack of safe refuge for internally displaced persons and the substantial loss of funding to the United Nations Relief Works Agency have led to thousands of deaths.
Based on scientific modelling of the direct and indirect effects of war, the authors estimate that “such indirect deaths range from 3 to 15 times the number of direct deaths ... Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death to the 37,396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza”. As a proportion of the population, this means that 8 percent of the 2.3 million total population in the Gaza Strip are likely to have been killed in this war. 
An immediate end to Israel’s assault on Gaza is urgent and necessary. But to prevent further deaths, it must be accompanied by large-scale rebuilding of the infrastructure and housing necessary to sustain social life, including schools, hospitals, water treatment plants and electricity generation facilities. 
A realistic assessment of the life lost in Gaza is not only a legal requirement for Israel, but also, as the authors note, an important part of the historical record. There will be no justice for the Palestinian people without truth. The dead deserve to be counted.

Bella Beiraghi

Counting the dead in Gaza

Mick Armstrong

The hidden history of Lebanon’s revolt

Prominent Democrat and the most senior Jewish figure in American politics, Chuck Schumer, gave a controversial speech to Congress in March. In it he called for fresh elections in Israel and criticised current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for “allowing his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel”. “Israel”, he continued, “cannot hope to succeed as a pariah opposed by the rest of the world”. Later, Schumer maintained that these comments were motivated by a desire to “save Israel”. 
Schumer is not alone in this desire. Liberal opinion across the Western world, as well as inside Israel, agrees. The editorial team of Israeli newspaper Haaretz recently <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/editorial/2024-06-12/ty-article-opinion/final-call-to-gantz-and-eisenkot-join-israels-people-and-protest-against-the-government/00000190-0e0c-db28-a995-4f9d0b840000">argued</a> that Netanyahu must go “[f]or the sake of the country’s existence, status, security, economy, nature and essence, for the sake of the country’s future”. Accordingly, the problem with Netanyahu’s genocidal war against the Palestinians is that it imperils Israel’s legitimacy. Israel has been hijacked; it is becoming a rogue state and needs rescuing from itself. 
An important element of this argument hinges on the nature of the Netanyahu coalition. In 2022, to ensure his own political survival, Netanyahu entered government with two prominent fascist parties: the Religious Zionism Party and Jewish Power. The leaders of these parties, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, are now the finance minister and national security minister respectively. 
The project of these Israeli fascists is unabashed genocide, not just in Gaza but in the West Bank too. The Netanyahu government is broadly committed to this goal. For instance, in December 2022, a day before the new government was sworn in, Netanyahu issued a list of goals and priorities for his new cabinet. “The Jewish people”, it read, “have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the land of Israel”. The project of reconquering the West Bank has accelerated since 7 October. A New York Times investigation revealed that, while much of the world is focused on Gaza, Israeli settlers in concert with the Israeli military are terrorising Palestinians into leaving their homes. Building has commenced in numerous settler outposts defended by militias armed by Ben-Gvir. 
The Times investigation exposes decades of military cover and legal impunity given to settlers stealing Palestinian land. Such investigations reveal something profound. The fascists, far from being an anomaly in Israeli political life, have been created by the Israeli body politic itself. They have taken the general climate of Jewish supremacy to its logical conclusion. The New York Times, however—rather than conclude the obvious, that there is a fundamentally racist, genocidal dynamic at the heart of Zionism—argues that Israel has been “hijacked”. Israel has in fact not been “hijacked” by these forces; it depends on them. 
What’s more, focusing solely on the fascists or the settlers is a distraction. Last December, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced limited visa bans on Israeli settlers responsible for violence in the West Bank. This month, Australia followed suit and banned extremist settlers from gaining entry visas. In neither case were these moves accompanied by a ban on sending weapons to Israel or the breaking of any diplomatic or military ties. The visa bans, as with the emphasis on the settlers and the fascists, serve as cover for the genocidal intent of the Israeli state. 
The individuals and parties put forward as alternatives to the fascists, the settler parties and Netanyahu are no alternative. Take Benny Gantz, who, since his resignation from Netanyahu’s war cabinet, is being touted by the international media as a brave and principled Israeli statesman. In fact, Gantz has long been a war criminal. He was the army’s chief of staff in 2014 when he directed the murderous 50-day assault on Gaza known as “Operation Protective Edge”, which killed more than 2,000 Palestinians. In 2019, he boasted about “sending Gaza back to the Stone Age”. Although many Western leaders have celebrated Gantz as a potential fighter for democratic rights inside Israel, when he was in government, he banned Palestinian NGOs by declaring them terrorist organisations. In 2022, he ordered Israeli troops to raid their premises and weld their doors shut before arresting many prominent Palestinian activists. 
The other “alternatives”, from Yair Lapid of the centrist Yesh Atid Party to Yair Golan, the chairperson of the Labor Party, are similarly implicated in the Israeli war machine. As Israeli oppositional journalist Gideon Levy put it in a Haaretz
article in February: 
“Parts of those not on the right support the war from within the government, and another part supports it from the outside, and everyone in the choir sings the same song, conducted by the right. The whole world is calling for an end to the war, and in the Knesset [Israeli parliament] there is not a single Zionist who will do so. Democracy? Opposition? Alternative? Not here, not now.”
Zionism has always been this way. Historically, there have been different strategies for pursuing the colonisation of Palestinian land. They have all—from the early Labor Zionists to the current fascists—sought a Jewish supremacist state established in all of historic Palestine. 
There is nothing to be “rescued” in the Israeli state. The attempts to do so by Western politicians stem from a desire for a postwar scenario in which they can maintain relations with Israel, albeit an Israel with a shiny new government unstained by the atrocities in Gaza. By contrast, the left should fight for the fall of the Israeli state and the establishment of a Palestine free from war, oppression, religious division and exploitation.

Vashti Fox

There is no saving Israel

Bassem Tamimi, a prominent leader of the Palestinian resistance in the occupied West Bank, has finally been released from an Israeli military prison after more than seven months in captivity. In a <a href="https://twitter.com/hzomlot?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1799912349811302517%7Ctwgr%5E15e5be6c92e2f02a52e88f88d68dd050e9010033%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&amp;ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.newarab.com%2Fnews%2Fpalestinian-activist-bassem-tamimi-freed-israeli-detention">photo posted on X</a> by Palestine’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, Bassem appeared emaciated, his black t-shirt hanging from his body, his arms looking more like a starving child’s than a 57 year-old’s, and his face far narrower than when he was detained.
His freedom should be a source of joy for activists across the world. But the Palestine movement can’t rest until the torturous military prison that housed him, and all those like it, are pulled apart brick by brick.
“I didn’t sleep that night when I saw him. He had a very difficult time and could have died in there”, Waleed, Bassem’s nephew, told Red Flag via a messenger service.
Bassem was arrested on 29 October and placed in administrative detention, giving the Israeli military the ability to hold him for six months without charge. In late April, a new six-month detention order was issued. He was finally released after a judicial review, <a href="https://www.newarab.com/news/palestinian-activist-bassem-tamimi-freed-israeli-detention?amp">according to London-based news site the New Arab</a>. While Bassem was imprisoned, the military refused to list any allegations against him. 
In October 2022, his nephew, 19-year-old Qusay Tamimi, was murdered by Israeli forces in Nabi Saleh. He had been protesting against an Israeli attack in Nablus, which killed five Palestinians and reportedly wounded twenty others. At the time, Bassem told Red Flag:
“The policy of Zionist colonialism is killing, violence and terrorism, in order to break the will of the Palestinian people in the struggle to achieve [our] right to self-determination, to achieve national independence and deliverance from colonialism ... While lighting tires at the entrance to the village, the soldiers from the military tower shot Qusay in the chest with live bullets. 
“He fell to the ground and died in less than twenty minutes. He arrived at the hospital as a martyr. This only proves that brutality and violence of the Zionist occupation are used to suppress any Palestinian movement in fighting for freedom and independence and trying to stop it from spreading to the surrounding Palestinian areas.”
A year after burying Qusay, almost to the day, they came for Bassem—like they have come for thousands of others who stand up for their rights. 
There are currently 3,410 Palestinians held in administrative detention out of a total 9,300 political prisoners in the West Bank, <a href="https://addameer.org/">according to Addameer</a>, a Jerusalem-based prisoner rights organisation. It’s not a stretch to call them hostages, given the arbitrary nature of their detention. <a href="https://www.amnesty.org.au/israel-opt-horrifying-cases-of-torture-and-degrading-treatment-of-palestinian-detainees-amid-spike-in-arbitrary-arrests/">Amnesty International last year noted</a> that there were around 1,300 people in administrative detention at the beginning of October. The human rights group described widespread use of torture by Israeli soldiers and prison guards, including “beating and humiliating Palestinians while detaining them blind-folded, stripped, with their hands tied”.
Bassem’s bravery and determination have kept hope alive in the village of Nabi Saleh, west of Ramallah, for two generations. When soldiers seized one of the village’s water springs in 2009, Bassem organised weekly demonstrations against Israeli theft of Palestinian land. He and other activists formed village committees across the West Bank to coordinate protests and strikes. They linked the local committees together in the semi-formal Popular Struggle Coordination Committee. 
But even when Palestinians engage in peaceful protest, the Israeli military uses terror to try to silence them. Bassem has been arrested more than a dozen times. In 1993, he was tortured so badly by Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security force, that he suffered a haemorrhage and was partially <a href="https://mondoweiss.net/2012/02/bassem-tamimi-to-israeli-military-judge-i-do-not-recognize-the-authority-of-the-israeli-occupation/">paralysed for several months</a>. His partner Nariman and their children, including prominent activist Ahed Tamimi, have also been imprisoned many times.
While Bassem Tamimi is now free, it won’t be the last time this family is targeted.
Those of us in Australia and across the world have to follow Bassem’s example and keep marching, picketing and occupying for a free Palestine.

Jasmine Duff

Bassem Tamimi: a hero of the Palestinian resistance

“A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of settler colonialism.” So opens a recent article by Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese in the Australian magazine Overland. For today’s left, anti-colonialism has become the key framework for understanding many forms of contemporary injustice. The racist oppression of people of colour, migrants and refugees, and Indigenous peoples across the world is all said to be due to both the history of European colonisation and ongoing systems of colonialism.
It is the Israeli state’s brutal treatment of the Palestinians that is at the centre of most contemporary discussions about colonialism and anti-colonialism. And it isn’t hard to see why.
Zionism emerged during the high point of European colonialism and was deeply influenced by it. Israel itself was founded on the dispossession of the Palestinian population and has always sought to ally itself with the imperialist nations of the world. Today, right-wingers and Zionists pump out propaganda trying to defend Israel from the accusations of colonialism. Pro-Israel organisations like the American Jewish Committee have published lengthy articles seeking to rebut the claim that Israel is a settler colony, while the Tory MP Michael Gove denounced the “prevailing intellectual fashion of decolonisation” as antisemitic in a recent speech to the UK parliament.
For many, the politics of anti-colonialism has been a starting point for rejecting the racist lies of capitalist society and supporting the struggles of the oppressed. In this way, it is a positive move away from the limitations of liberal multiculturalism and moderate centrism with their emphasis on gradually reforming capitalism into a supposedly “post-racial”, “colour-blind” society.

However, there are also significant limitations with the contemporary politics of anti-colonialism, even if these problems have nothing to do with what right-wingers are ranting about. Most importantly, it either discounts or heavily distorts the relationship between imperialism and oppression, and abandons any serious understanding of class and capitalism more broadly. This has important implications for developing the kind of organisations and struggles we need to confront successfully oppression in the Middle East and throughout the world.
Take, for instance, the popular idea that the reason Western countries like Australia, the United States, Canada and New Zealand, support Israel is their common heritage as settler colonial states. As Jewish Voice for Peace Deputy Director Cecilie Surasky put it in a talk published on her organisation’s website, “The ‘special relationship’ between Israel and the United States is rooted in our common national narratives and founding mythology”.
But this can’t explain why governments that have suffered from colonialism, such as Modi’s administration in India or the Kenyan government, are such strong supporters of Israel. Conversely, it cannot explain why countries like Indonesia that are currently engaged in colonisation (West Papua) are capable of opposing Israel’s actions, even if only rhetorically.
Even in the cases of the US and Australia, the establishment’s support for Israel has little to do with some shared history of settler colonialism. They support Israel because it is in the interests of their ruling classes to do so. They want to enforce their dominance over the global capitalist system by strengthening their hold over one of the key pillars of Western imperialism in the Middle East. If for some reason it was no longer in their imperialist interests to support Israel, then the ruling classes of the West wouldn’t do so, no matter what shared history they might have. This explains why neither the US nor Australia are particularly supportive of Chinese colonisation of Tibet and Xinjiang.
The idea that Western nations support Israel because of their common colonial history also repeatedly spills over into cultural explanations for imperialist backing of Israel rather than geopolitical ones. Surasky from Jewish Voice for Peace argues that “the root of this special relationship” is “our [own] national narrative” that it is “right to expand onto other people’s land”. “[O]ur resistance must also be at the level of narrative”, Surasky concludes. “All of us in this movement have to decolonize our minds.”
It is true that Western support for Israel isn’t due to the influence of AIPAC. But nor is it simply rooted in “our national narrative and the feelings it engenders”. Narratives can change, and feelings are fickle, but America’s bipartisan support for Israel is grounded in material interests that are yet to be shaken.
The origins of the Israeli state are commonly portrayed by anti-colonial theorists as lying in the Jewish settlers making a pact with the West to serve its interests in the region and in the process transforming themselves into a “white” population. As academic Johannes Becke wrote in a 2018 article for International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, “While American Jews became white by suburbanisation, Israeli Jews did so by colonization”. This is a very reductive understanding of the origins of Israel on a number of levels.
First of all, it obscures the fact that imperialist nations came to support the Zionist state because it was perceived to be in the interests of their ruling classes and states to do so. It wasn’t in the interests of the undifferentiated mass of people living in the Western countries, the vast majority of whom had no say in the matter. 
Secondly, it places the similarities between the colonial ideologies of the Zionists and the West as key to explaining why Western governments supported the creation of Israel. However, the relationship between Western governments and the Zionist movement was complicated and tension-filled, and it evolved over time, undermining the idea that common cultural affinities drove the relationship.
The British government, the key Western player in the region before 1948, was
primarily concerned with entrenching its control over mandate Palestine—not, at least initially, in supporting the narrow goals of the Zionist movement. There was considerable debate within the London colonial elite about the positives and negatives of the Zionist project. These debates were underpinned by discussions about what course would best serve the interests of British imperialism first and foremost. 
While the British were happy to suppress the rights of the Palestinians, they were hesitant for a long time about unconditionally backing the creation of a Jewish state. They preferred to lord over the region themselves and play the Jewish and Arab populations off against each other, even while granting more concessions and privileges to the Jewish settlers. As the Zionist movement emerged as a powerful force, the British government came to endorse this project as seemingly the best way to stabilise Western influence over the Zionists and the region in the upheavals of the postwar world.
The US, which would emerge in the postwar world as the major Western imperialist power, was also ambivalent about Israel for some time. It endorsed the establishment of Israel in 1948 but then opposed the 1956 invasion of Egypt by Israel, Britain and France. There was a strong “Arabist” wing of the US State Department that worried that if the US backed Israel, it would send Arab states into the arms of the Soviet Union. It was only after Israel had proven its military credentials in the 1967 war that American state officials swung around to build the tight alliance with Israel they have today.
It is also important to note that it was not only the traditional imperialist countries of the West that endorsed the establishment of Israel. The Soviet Union was the first country in the world to recognise Israel, and both the USSR and its satellite states in Eastern Europe supported the UN partition plan in 1947. Until the 1950s, the Soviet Union either supported Israel or took a neutral position on conflicts between it and the Arab states. This further complicates the idea that Israel was simply created by the West.
The argument that Jewish settlers transformed themselves into a “white” population and that Israel is an example of white supremacy is also dubious. There are indeed white nationalists like Richard Spencer who champion Israel. There are also certain similarities between how Zionism racialises the Arab world and racism in Western countries. And there is clearly discrimination against Jews from non-white backgrounds in Israel, such as those who arrived from the Middle East, North Africa or Ethiopia.
However, the idea that Jewish settlers—including the many Black and Brown ones—became “white” springs from the illogical underpinnings of identity politics which is deeply embedded within the anti-colonial framework. It flows from the idea that imperialism, racism and colonialism are products of “whiteness” and Western culture, rather than something pursued by capitalist states and nationalist movements regardless of their race or ethnicity.
Are Hindu nationalists in Modi’s India “white” because they organise violent attacks on Muslims and other minorities? Granted, these divisions have historic roots in the imperialist strategies of the old British Raj, but they continue today because of the political dynamics of contemporary Hindu nationalism. 
The reality is that violent oppression is something that all sorts of capitalist states, political parties and movements can participate in. As capitalist development has spread across the world, including into the global South, more and more non-Western countries have become violent and oppressive capitalist states. To explain this by claiming that ruling figures in these societies have become “white” would mean describing large parts of Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and Africa as such.
Most of the current settler colonial projects in the world today are being carried out by “non-white” countries. China’s ongoing push to replace Uyghurs with Han Chinese settlers in Xinjiang, India’s colonisation of Kashmir and the genocide of the Rohingya by the military of Myanmar are just some of the most prominent examples. Most theorists of settler colonialism show little interest in this, presumably because it goes against the thesis that settler colonialism is a product of Western culture, and it cuts against the softness on non-Western governments notable in anti-colonial theory circles.
The anti-colonial framework also downplays how the class divisions within the Palestinian population and the broader Arab world facilitated the rise of the Zionist state. 
Absentee Palestinian landlords sold large tracts of land to the Zionist organisations, helping them gain a substantial foothold in the region. When Palestinian peasants and workers erupted into protest against Zionist attacks, some sections of the Arab elite helped the British crush these movements. Abdullah I, the king of Jordan, for instance, forged an alliance with the Zionists in the 1930s and received money from the Jewish Agency, a branch of the World Zionist Organization. When the revolt of 1936 began, he helped Zionist and British forces isolate and eventually defeat the rebellion. At one point he even tried to encourage Zionist settlement in Jordan, a move blocked by the British government.
Palestinian elites, such as the al-Husayni family, held back the struggles of the Palestinians, instead placing their hopes in negotiations with the British government. This led to a series of tragic defeats for the Palestinians that paved the way for the victory of the Zionist forces in 1948. After the Nakba, Arab ruling classes treated the mass of poor Palestinian refugees disgracefully, shunting them away into refugee camps. It was a different story for the elite of Palestinian society, who quickly carved out a position for themselves within the Arab states as successful business owners and professionals.
Since 1948, class divisions amongst Palestinians have continued to be an important issue. The hundreds of thousands of Palestinians expelled from Palestine were integrated into the class structures within the surrounding Arab states, which if anything exaggerated the already existing class differences among Palestinians. Wealthier Palestinians were more insulated from the worst effects of the expulsion. Many Palestinian merchants, bankers and entrepreneurs already had well-established links with capitalists and markets in Arab countries, and transferred what movable assets they could. They then quickly merged into the broader Arab ruling classes, their sons and daughters marrying the children of the Jordanian, Lebanese and Saudi elites. By the 1960s there were hundreds of Palestinian millionaires throughout the Gulf states. The vast majority of the Palestinian refugee population, however, were former peasants and unskilled workers who were viewed as unwelcome and potentially rebellious visitors by the Arab governments. 
It is these class divisions that lay behind many of the political debates within the Palestinian national movement. The disastrous concept that the Palestinians should look primarily to the Arab states for support didn’t come out of nowhere, but reflected the fact that the upper sections of the Palestinian population were deeply connected materially to the Arab regimes.
Some anti-colonial theorists can acknowledge divisions within national movements, but they see elite layers within nationally oppressed populations as simply sell-outs putting their own narrow interests above those of the national movement as a whole, rather than a class pursuing its own class interests. They also often underestimate the problem of middle-class layers within these movements having different class interests to the mass of workers.
The role that the Palestinian Authority has played in working with the Israeli state to suppress any genuine resistance to Israeli rule is often seen as an example of a small section of elites selling out the nation’s cause. However, in his book Lineages of Revolt, academic Adam Hanieh explains that the actions of the Palestinian Authority are only explicable from an analysis of the class structure of Palestinian society. Since Israel occupied it in 1967, the economy of the West Bank has transformed from a mainly rural one dominated by structures of traditional village life into “an incorporated, dependent, and subordinated appendage of Israeli capitalism”. This shift dispossessed the mass of the Palestinian population of what little land they still controlled and proletarianised it while at the same time there developed “a tiny layer of Palestinian capital that articulates Israeli rule and whose accumulation is dependent on that mediating position”.
The politics of anti-colonialism are not simply ill-thought-out ideas. If taken seriously as a guide to action, they would be disastrous for building a movement that can actually challenge imperialism and capitalism. In South Africa, the theory that Africans suffered from “internal colonisation” was developed by primarily white intellectuals around the South African Communist Party. They used the theory to justify the pro-capitalist strategy of the African National Congress, which sought to narrow the radicalism of African workers around a program to simply replace the racist apartheid regime with a new capitalist government controlled by a Black elite. 
In the US, Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael and political scientist Charles V. Hamilton used the theory that African Americans were a colony within the US to argue for building up a Black political power bloc. This ultimately primarily benefited the layer of Black mayors, congresspeople and police chiefs who were elected to supposedly decolonise urban spaces. 
In Australia, anti-colonial rhetoric is just as often used to argue for more Indigenous-owned businesses, NGOs and government bureaucracies as it is for any genuine struggle against racism, let alone capitalism.
Throughout the 20th century, anti-colonial movements were able to win across Africa, Asia and the Middle East. While socialists celebrate the end of direct colonial rule, we need to be clear that in none of these cases did anti-colonial revolutions lead to societies based on equality and justice. Instead, new capitalist states were created with continued exploitation and oppression.
There are those on the Left who adopt the politics of anti-colonialism but consider themselves to be fighting for something more radical than the examples raised above. But the problem is that the logic of anti-colonial politics inevitably leads towards pro-capitalist so-called solutions to the issues of racism and imperialism. Its very framing reinforces the idea that the key division in the world is different national groups rather than classes, and that the problems of the world are due to things external or secondary to capitalism, rather than the fundamental nature of the system itself.
For instance, in Settler Colonialism: An Introduction, Sai Englert, a socialist writer, argues that one of the benefits of anti-colonial politics is that it can foster “unity across different sections of the Palestinian people”. But unity with whom and on what political basis? Englert discusses many examples of movements against national oppression, including in Palestine, but at no point even acknowledges, let alone discusses, the different class forces within them, opting for uncritical veneration instead.
Many of the people protesting for Palestine today are doing so at least in part because of these anti-colonial ideas, which make sense as a starting point given the weakness of class struggle and the left. But faced with another century of brutal wars and vicious oppression, we need a clear Marxist politics that emphasises the necessity of confronting the underlying structures of capitalism through the immense potential power of the working class.
Jordan Humphreys is the author of “Palestine and the classless politics of settler colonial theory” in the upcoming issue of the Marxist Left Review. He is also the author of Indigenous Liberation and Socialism available through Red Flag books.

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Counting the dead in Gaza

The hidden history of Lebanon’s revolt

There is no saving Israel

Bassem Tamimi: a hero of the Palestinian resistance

Capitalism and colonialism today

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