The Paradox of Survival

This article by Dianne Kirby first appeared in Unity, the weekly publication of the Irish Communist Party.

THERE is no West Bank. There is no two-state solution. There is only Israel’s destiny. So says Miko Peled, whose insights into the Zionist mind-set inform his advocacy for Palestine. Asked about Israel’s ‘endgame,’ Peled was forthright. It is a Jewish state. Israel will make sure it remains so. Arabs can support it or die fighting against it. According to Zionism, antisemites are everywhere. Antisemitism can be better dealt with in the Jewish state.

Zionism seeks to erase the Palestinian people, their culture, history, monuments, to rename the country, its streets, cities and towns, to settle and change the demographics. All was evident from the beginning. Israeli society supports the Gazan genocide. Israel cannot exist without genocide, ethnic cleansing, apartheid. The Israeli package requires getting rid of the Arabs. Make them leave or kill them. Israel has not become more right-wing.

 It was genocidal from the beginning. Gaza was designed and built as a concentration camp. It is now a death camp. What else did people expect? This is the endgame. For Peled, only external intervention to protect, to provide some semblance of safety and security, can stop Israel. Otherwise, ‘This is never going to end.’

Western intervention, and that of its Arab allies, has been entirely on the side of the Israelis. Trump’s Board of Peace, constituting representatives from repressive regimes and Trump appeasers, requires Gazans to choose between annihilation or incorporation. Wielding the genocide threat, it reframes Gaza in administrative terms aimed at concealing the intent to expunge liberation and sovereignty.

Reeking of colonial domination and deceit, it offers deferred statehood, as did Oslo, in return for submission to Zionism. Presented as temporary governance, the vision is permanent and global. Trump publicly promotes his central plan to oversee the UN.

Amid a pulverised Gaza, Hamas knows Palestine’s freedom struggle was successfully twisted by Israel into a justification for genocide. Hamas agreed to a ceasefire, yet to emerge, for humanitarian assistance, yet to be delivered.  In a moment resonant with contradiction, where simple survival symbolises victory, the demand for disarmament is a demand for domestication, a move from resistance to submission. If Hamas rejects its terms, the people for whom it is socially responsible will be subjected to yet more savagery and barbarism.

The Peace Board emulates the Mandate system. It does not deny but defers Palestinian statehood. Staged sequences of graduated autonomy conceal a permanent process of postponement that facilitates the Israeli project of dispossession and irreversible geography. The Palestinian Authority, born from resistance, transited to managing an occupation it once sought to end. Confronted with a genocidal regime committed to the elimination of Palestine, allied to the neo-colonial imperial hegemon, simple survival, preserving the capacity to resist, seems a viable alternative.

It is a strategy fraught with dangers, exemplified by the PA. Peace Board inducements entice, but PA affiliation risks confirming its collaborationist status. Internalising subordination over altercation, management over mobilisation, institutional preservation over national liberation, the PA transformed temporary tactical accommodation into permanent political orientation. Subsequently, its self-serving inclinations led to a loss of legitimacy.

The provision of apparent Palestinian consent to Israeli coercion highlights the PA’s political failure. Its inability to exercise meaningful leverage on the people’s behalf is reflected in its partial alignment with the Peace Board, endorsing it while invoking national sovereignty.

Palestine’s political arena is fractured, fatigued, daily doused with death and destruction. The power imbalance between Israel and Palestine is monumental.

Western states back Israel to the hilt. Not so their people. Moshe Dayan recognised that ‘Israel cannot afford to stand against the entire world and be denounced as the aggressor.’ It is the aggressor. We must never allow the Peace Board to pretend otherwise.

We must join Peled’s advocacy for sanctions on Israel, exclusion from athletic, academic, cultural and diplomatic arenas.

We must impress on everyone, everywhere, that the system denying Palestinian humanity, rights, freedom, is committed to militarism and ecocide.

We confront a common enemy.