Israel’s violent expansion is never done, yet it still cannot ‘finish the job’

Settler-colonialism is never finished.

It is an ongoing project that continues until it is overthrown.

Last week, illegal Jewish settlers burned down a Palestinian mosque in Salfit, in the northern West Bank, and spray-painted racist graffiti on its walls. On the same day, the Israeli occupation army shot and killed two Palestinian children near Hebron in the southern West Bank.

In doing so, the settlers and the soldiers maintain an old Zionist and Israeli tradition. 

Indeed, the ideology of racial separatism and its commensurate land theft has been foundational to Zionism since the beginning of the 20th century. Yet Arab regimes remain unfazed by what all this portends for their own future.

Some Arab countries are eager for US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to conclude the Gaza genocide and are already pursuing ways to reward Israel by normalising or deepening the normalisation already in place.

It seems also that Algeria, which has yet to normalise with Israel, seeks to follow suit, if its vote in the UN Security Council on Monday supporting the re-colonisation of Gaza is any indication.

Meanwhile, Jewish settlers have intensified their attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank during this year’s olive-picking season – destroying trees, burning warehouses and attacking Bedouin tents. 

Since 7 October 2023, Israel and its illegal Jewish settlers have killed more than 1,070 Palestinians in the West Bank, injured 10,700 and abducted (“arrested” in Zionistspeak) 20,500. 

The latest genocidal war has left Israel politically, economically, diplomatically, and even militarily weakened, judging by its army’s failure to destroy Hamas after two years of a war of annihilation

Jewish settlers alone have attacked Palestinians 7,154 times and counting. Israeli authorities have also continued to confiscate Palestinian land and expel its people to make room for more illegal Jewish settlers.

In recent months, Israel has expelled 40,000 Palestinians, razing homes and entire neighbourhoods, including in the Jenin and Tulkarm refugee camps, destroying their fields and burning their crops. 

Last week, the Israel Land Authority sent eviction notices to Palestinians living north of occupied East Jerusalem, giving them 20 days to abandon their property, including 130 dunams (about 32 acres) near the West Bank village of Qalandiya that are slated for confiscation for a new Jewish settlement. Already 40 percent of Qalandiya’s land is cut off from the rest of the village, lying on the western side of the 2002 Israeli apartheid wall and effectively lost to its owners.

While Palestinians in Gaza continue to be annihilated by the Israeli genocide, which has resulted in more than a quarter of a million dead and injured and more than two million refugees, Palestinians in the West Bank face Israel’s continuing repression and violence at the hands of its military, settlers and Palestinian Authority (PA) collaborators, all of whom partake in killing them. 

Land and labour

Despite western powers’ hypocritical condemnations of settler attacks and their mild criticisms of Israel’s assault on Gaza, none of this is new in the history of Zionism and Israel. These are simply continuations of the settler-colonial policies Israel has followed all along. 

Zionism’s two tenets of “conquest of the land” and “conquest of labour” have guided the settler-colonial movement since its inception. Some examples from a century ago, specifically the 1920s, demonstrate just how persistent these Zionist colonial efforts have been – and why settler-colonialism is never finished. 

By the early 1920s, Zionist colonisation had already accelerated into a systematic campaign to seize Palestinian land and remove its inhabitants. 

On the “conquest of the land” front, the Jewish National Fund, the financial arm of the Zionist Organization, went on a shopping spree, purchasing Palestinian land from Beirut- and Cairo-based absentee landowners and displacing thousands of peasants, who increasingly joined uprisings and revolts against the colonists and their British sponsors. 

Zionism’s two tenets of ‘conquest of the land’ and ‘conquest of labour’ have guided the settler-colonial movement since its inception 

The struggle over land in the village of ‘Affulah in the Marj Ibn’ Amir area, which encompassed 22 villages slated for eviction, together with the planned displacement of Palestinian Bedouin from their agricultural and grazing land (about 10,000 acres) in Wadi al-Hawarith, became a major ignition point in October 1924. 

The latter’s displacement was delayed due to their resistance and refusal to leave, as well as pending rulings by the British Mandate’s courts. They were finally forced out by the British in 1933.

As for the Zionist “conquest of labour”, it operated under the idiom of “Hebrew labour”, which sought to deny work to the indigenous Palestinians – first in Zionist and Jewish-owned enterprises operating in Palestine, and later, under the British Mandate, across the entire country. 

While calls and strategies to impose “Hebrew labour” existed from the earliest years of Jewish colonisation, they intensified under the Mandate, when an aggressive campaign was launched to deny Palestinians work and replace them with Jewish colonists. 

What began as a focus on agricultural colonies and farms, as well as urban construction sites, expanded to encompass nearly all sectors in the country, including ports, railways, quarries and even the British Mandatory Administration itself. 

The labour Zionists, who led the Jewish colonists in Palestine, especially through their racially separatist “labour union”, the Histadrut, organised a picket campaign to harass Palestinian workers and their Jewish capitalist employers, labelled “displacers” and “alienators” by the Zionists, in order to force Jewish employers to hire Jews exclusively.

Jewish employers were also labelled “traitors” and were subject to a boycott by the Jewish colonist community until they relented and replaced their cheaper Palestinian workers with Jewish colonists. 

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The pickets began in earnest in 1927 and continued until 1936. These Palestinian workers were, in fact, the very same peasants who had been evicted from their lands after the Zionists purchased them from absentee landlords, and who sought employment following their eviction and the loss of their livelihoods. 

But the sadistic Zionist colonists pursued them without respite. 

Much like their Black South African counterparts, who had been attacked by white workers a few years earlier, Palestinian workers in the citrus groves or in the construction sector – busy building the Jews-only colony of Tel Aviv for their Jewish colonisers – were beaten, chased and harassed constantly to dissuade them from working at these sites.

Ironically, these indigenous Palestinian workers were referred to as “foreign workers” by the Zionist colonists. But the matter of Palestinian labour became moot once the majority of Palestinians were expelled in 1948.

Colonial provocation

The policy of colonial racial separatism was such that the Zionists sought to take over the Buraq Wall (referred to in the West as the “Western” or “Wailing Wall”) of the late 7th-century al-Aqsa Mosque. 

The religious importance of this part of the wall, considered to be all that remained of the original structure surrounding the ancient “Second” Jewish temple destroyed by the Romans, was magnified by the ostensibly secular Zionists and endowed with a newly invented national and religious significance it had not previously possessed. 

Zionist attempts in the second half of the 1920s to sequester that section of the wall, which belonged to a Palestinian Muslim endowment and was traditionally part of al-Aqsa Mosque complex known as al-Haram al-Sharif, one of Islam’s holiest sites since the late 7th century, galvanised Palestinians, especially the displaced peasants and laid-off workers, into a major revolt. 

That the August 1929 Palestinian revolt was the culmination of the 1920s evictions of Palestinians from their land by Jewish colonists, and of the dismissal of former peasants-turned-workers from their jobs through the Zionist picket campaign, was rejected by the Zionists as not the “real” reason for the revolt.

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Rather, they insisted that it was motivated by “antisemitism”. 

The Zionist deployment of “antisemitism” as a canard to describe all Palestinian (and Jewish) anti-colonial efforts, which started in the 1880s, continues to be effectively used by Israel in its public relations campaign in the West to this day.

It is in this context that major Palestinian demonstrations broke out in October 1933 against British and Jewish immigration and colonisation.

They were mainly organised by the patriotic Palestinian Istiqlal (“independence”) party and other youth organisations, who were unsuccessfully goading the elite Palestinian leadership represented in the Arab Executive – the body that spoke in the name of Palestinians to the British authorities – to adopt a policy of non-cooperation.

The Arab Executive finally succumbed and issued a call for demonstrations.

Thousands marched across Palestine, including 8,000 in Jaffa alone, among them 600 Palestinians expelled from their lands in Wadi al-Hawarith only months earlier, in June. British police went on a rampage, killing 26 unarmed Palestinian demonstrators in Jaffa and Haifa, and injuring dozens more.

Continued attacks

The Zionist attempt to seize the Buraq Wall in the 1920s would finally succeed in 1967, after Israel’s conquest of East Jerusalem. Since then, and in defiance of the ban in Jewish teachings and rabbinical rulings prohibiting Jews from entering the mosque area as an act of heresy, settler-Zionism has fashioned a new Zionised version of Judaism led by settler rabbis who lifted the ban. 

This allowed Likud leader Ariel Sharon and his settler supporters to invade the Haram al-Sharif in September 2000 with the protection of 1,000 Israeli police. 

Since then, the storming of the mosque has become a regular affair.

Just last month, Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir led dozens of settlers in storming al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied East Jerusalem during the Jewish High Holy Days under Israeli police protection.

Thousands of settlers have illegally entered the compound since the beginning of September to perform religious rituals.

Ben Gvir has also intensified attacks on Palestinian citizens of Israel, carrying out a series of home invasions in the Israeli (and formerly Palestinian) cities of Ramleh and Lydda under the pretext of fighting crime.

The attacks coincided with a new expulsion order targeting Palestinian citizens in the Naqab, part of Israel’s decades-long campaign to destroy their villages and expel their inhabitants.

Last week, the Israeli Supreme Court rejected an appeal by residents of the Naqab village of Ras Jarabah, east of Dimona. The highest court ordered the expulsion of 500 of them and gave them 90 days to comply.

These are just some of the myriad precedents for the horrors inflicted on Palestinians today, with the major exception being the sheer scale of the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza – an extreme escalation of Israeli and Zionist crimes that have not ceased since the 1880s. 

Failed project

One would think that Israel, the Zionist movement and their western supporters would be able to recognise a basic historical fact: settler-colonialism is a process that is never finished except through the complete annihilation of the native population.

This is, after all, the history – and present – of the major white settler colonies of the western world, whether the US, Australia, Canada or New Zealand, to say nothing of Central and South America. 

Yet despite Israel’s best genocidal efforts, millions of Palestinians remain alive, and half of them still live on the land. Israel’s Jewish colonists, therefore, still have their work cut out for them.

Despite Israel’s genocidal efforts, millions of Palestinians remain alive… Israel’s Jewish colonists, therefore, still have their work cut out for them

That Israel’s settler-colonial violence continues inside its 1948 borders and across the territories it has occupied for nearly six decades speaks to the regime’s failure to “finish the job”.

Indeed, the latest genocidal war has left Israel politically, economically, diplomatically, demographically and even militarily weakened, judging by its army’s failure to destroy Hamas after two years of a war of annihilation. 
That its primary goal of expelling Gaza’s Palestinians outside Palestine has also failed adds insult to injury.

Normalising Arab regimes, including those like Saudi Arabia hoping to further normalise with Israel as a reward for its recent genocide, suffer from a surprising level of gullibility.

They seem convinced not only that Israel will survive indefinitely as a settler-colonial Jewish supremacist state, but also that once Hamas is defeated and dismantled for good, normalisation with the genocidal state can proceed unimpeded, as though Palestinian resistance could simply be extinguished.

This fantasy is shared by the unflappable PA President Mahmoud Abbas, who still believes he and his coterie of PA collaborators will be installed to rule Gaza and preside over a phantasmatic sovereign Palestinian state that Israel’s western supporters, save for the US, have recognised.

If a century and a half of Jewish settler-colonialism, sponsored by western colonial powers, has failed to safeguard Israel’s future as a Jewish-supremacist state, then whatever plans Israel and Trump are cooking for Gaza – let alone for the West Bank, Jerusalem or even Israel itself – are doomed to fail in ensuring the continuity of Israeli settler-colonialism. 

Israelis understand this well.

It is evident in the growing turmoil among their political and economic elites, who fear the collapse of the settler-colony, as former prime minister Ehud Barak himself now does, and among the Jewish population, many of whom have already abandoned it, while many more contemplate doing the same.

In fact, in preparation for such an eventuality, Harvard University has amassed a vast archive of all things Israeli in a secret site to preserve it “in case Israel ceases to exist”. The question is whether the Arab elites and Israel’s western sponsors will ever come to grasp this reality.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.