Palestine is bearing the brunt of the imperial boomerang: in globalised capitalism, regimes of domination adapt to those who resist them by circulating techniques of war, surveillance and repression between colonial and metropolitan battlefields.
Although this imperial mechanism has propelled the colonisation of Palestine from the beginning, it has failed to extinguish the “arts of resistance”.
Since the start of the British Mandate in Palestine, colonial domination has suffered regular counterattacks. To maintain its hold, the occupier articulated methods of counterinsurgency – that is, war within and against populations – tested in the empire and throughout the history of western colonisation.
This dynamic gained momentum in the face of the Arab Revolt, the Palestinian uprising against the British Mandate and its support for Zionism that took place from 1936 to 1939.
Officer Charles Tegart, who led the counter-guerrilla operations, had made a career in intelligence in Northern Ireland during the Irish War of Independence before heading the Calcutta police, where he was notorious for the widespread the use of torture against separatists.
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In Palestine, where he was sent in 1937, he ordered the building of numerous fortified police stations, a border fence and torture centres.
A vast system of registration, mass arrests and administrative detention was combined with torture, collective punishment, deportations and summary executions
Another senior office in Mandate Palestine was General Orde Wingate, originally from a family of British settlers in India.
He served in Sudan before being dispatched to Palestine, where he developed the “Special Night Squads”. These police commandos made up of Jewish settlers were tasked with punitive expeditions against Palestinian villages. These paramilitary militias helped found the Israeli army.
French colonial expertise also played an important role. Like in Haiti, where it was used to re-establish slavery in the early 19th century, paramilitary units and dogs were used to hunt insurgents. Modelled on French colonial methods in Syria and Algeria, a vast system of registration, mass arrests and administrative detention was combined with torture, collective punishment, deportations and summary executions.
All of these techniques profoundly influenced the early Israeli military and security apparatus, but none was sufficient to quell the sumud, the spirit of Palestinian resistance.
A global and permanent war against Palestinians
The Israeli state was concretely forged on the basis of a colonial war involving the destruction of numerous villages, mass expulsions and massacres in the classic style of western colonisation.
Facing persistent indigenous resistance like his European predecessors, the Israeli officer of the Carmeli Brigade tasked with “de-Arabising” Haifa in August 1948 seized on the genocidal dynamic. He ordered: “Kill any Arab you encounter; torch all inflammable objects and force doors open with explosives.” Palestinian refugees were bombarded with mortars.
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Faced with the reorganisation of the rebellion, Israeli counterinsurgency methods continued to evolve through regular exchanges with western colonial powers.
In January 1960, two Israeli generals, Yitshak Rabin and Chaim Hersog, future prime minister and president respectively, observed French techniques of “counter-revolutionary warfare” in Algeria: separation walls, population displacement and mass internment, widespread torture, rape and enforced disappearances, massacres by bombing and chemical weapons, all combined with industrial propaganda following a dynamic of general militarisation of society.
This savoir-faire similarly failed to break the determination of the Algerian people, but it has continued to resonate through the methodical crushing of Palestinian lives. In 1967, during the so-called Six Day War, patrols sent to Gaza were trained to throw grenades into homes before entering them. Soldiers were ordered to shoot and kill any civilian who resisted the raids.
Mechanisms of extreme violence also governed the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the war launched in 2002 against the Palestinian Al-Aqsa Intifada. During Operation Defensive Shield, the military-police lockdown of the West Bank city of Jenin likewise failed to overcome the rebellion.
These methods are taught to security forces around the world and thereby contribute to updating global counterinsurgency
It served however as a model for the new imperial wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and for urban security planning in the world’s major cities.
Mass racial internment has also structured the global history of counter-insurgency since the first concentration camps created by Spain in Cuba at the end of the 19th century or those established by Germany to intern the Herero and Nama people in Namibia as part of the first genocide of the 20th century.
Israel has seized on it as a “social engineering” technique aimed at emptying the “human terrain” and reformatting the inmates’ personalities. These principles guide the arbitrary, sometimes indefinite, incarceration of thousands of Palestinians and the transformation of Gaza into an open-air concentration camp.
Nevertheless, Palestinian resistance perseveres and continually reorganises itself beyond the walls.
A laboratory for counter-insurgency
As early as 2010, researcher Laleh Khalili described Palestine as “an archetypal laboratory and a crucial node of global counterinsurgencies”. Researcher Jeff Halper, for his part, sees Israel as a model of “security state” based on a form of permanent counterinsurgency. In this framework, deploying extreme violence against civilians constitutes a rationalised doctrine.
For example, Israel recommends shooting in the head to kill (shoot-to-kill policy), as well as the principle of “escalation dominance” that justifies the intentional use of disproportionate force to subdue the enemy. These techniques are integrated into a concept known as “cumulative deterrence” that advocates the systematic conjunction of violent treatments.
The war against the people has caused human carnage while largely benefiting the military-security industries. However, it has failed to eradicate the spirit of liberation of the oppressed
These methods are taught to security forces around the world and thereby contribute to updating global counterinsurgency.
They constitute commodities valued in the same way as all the weapons tested by Israel against the Palestinian people and then labelled “combat-proven” in the international fairs of war and control. In the era of security capitalism, the crushing of Palestine constitutes a global political economy.
Since the counterattack of 7 October 2023, this economy has been operating at full capacity to benefit a “Greater Israel” plan to colonise the entire region through the destruction of Gaza and its inhabitants.
Armed, financed and given impunity by the Western bloc, this phase of intensified genocidal warfare operates through the systematic bombing of civilians. This technique, too, is rooted in colonial history, dating back to 1911 when an Italian plane struck a camp in Libya in the first aerial bombardment in history.
Israel is innovating by integrating artificial intelligence technologies to automate, maximise and accelerate the mass killing of civilian populations. Algorithmic extermination thus joins the global counterinsurgency repertoire.
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In Gaza, the Israeli state is destroying homes, schools and hospitals, refugee camps and facilities delivering vital supplies. Humanitarian aid and access to healthcare are blocked through a strategy known as “food and resource control” that was used by the United Kingdom in South Africa during the colonial era and by the United States military in Cuba, the Philippines and Vietnam.
Israel stands out by weaponising humanitarian aid to massacre starving populations.
Chemical weapons such as white phosphorus and toxic gases that have been used to make Palestine uninhabitable resonate with the use of mustard gas by France and Spain against the anti-colonial resistance in the Moroccan Rif, as well as the use of napalm and Agent Orange against the Algerian and Vietnamese revolutions.
On each of these battlefields, the “war against the people” has caused human carnage while largely benefiting the military-security industries. However, it has failed to eradicate the spirit of resistance of the oppressed.
Following Haiti, Vietnam or Algeria, Palestine embodies what rises up and holds firm against global counterinsurgency. Across borders, against the imperial boomerang, its name resonates through international solidarity, showing the determination of the oppressed to resist in order to exist and to unite for emancipation.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
