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ethnic cleansing
From Gaza to the Occupied West Bank, Israel's Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians Is Underway
Let us be clear: these measures are not merely empty gestures or intimidation tactics; they serve as a clear indication of what is to come. The groundwork is being laid for a broader offensive.
Sep 08, 2024
There is a pretense of novelty in Israel’s most recent offensive in the West Bank, which it has glibly called “Operation Summer Camps.” Even before it began, Israel announced that the operation was the most wide-ranging invasion of the West Bank since 2002. What is most striking about this framing is the charade that each new operation represents a fresh response to an emerging threat. In truth, these actions are part of a continuous, unbroken chain of suppression and a bloody impulse through which Israel exercises its power to kill and arrest, all the while undergirded by a continuous desire to see Palestinians disappear.
Many have already observed that Israel’s need for constant initiative across its numerous battlefields is central to the hyped-up nature of its offensive. In Gaza, Israel finds itself consolidating its presence in the Philadelphi and Netzarim corridors, with little military initiative elsewhere in the strip beyond maintaining relentless pressure on a Palestinian population that has endured all manner of horrors over the past 11 months, including daily massacres that are tearing apart the social fabric of the small and dense coastal strip.
In the north, the Lebanese resistance and the Israeli military trade blows within a highly regularized set of rules of engagement. Despite earlier escalations, the battlefield remains largely fixed within specific rhythms, extracting a toll from both sides without any clear resolution in sight.
In other words, Israel’s military campaigns, if not approaching a stalemate, have settled into a war of attrition. The way to regain the initiative is to open up another, perhaps “easier” front that might offer a clearer image of “victory,” even as the actual prospects for decisive victories in other theaters fade. But to whom does Israel want to demonstrate this initiative?
A projection of strength
First and foremost, Israel’s military machine is being driven by the demands of its own settlers and the right-wing agenda that pushes the country toward perpetual war. The need to see things happening — soldiers breaking into homes, Palestinian fighters being killed — is imperative for the type of war Israel is currently waging.
Israel’s disposition toward war is perpetual, and its war on the Palestinians is a daily reality fueled by the complicity of its allies, an endless supply of weapons, and a staggering lack of accountability.
This pressure for more war, originating in a certain segment of Israeli society, is juxtaposed with another pressure from a different segment, which concedes the need for more war but insists on getting back the captives held in Gaza first.
In a prolonged military campaign fraught with economic costs, social and political divisions, and an underlying fear of peace that pervades Israeli society, the military machine must continually find new campaigns to justify its actions — often designating them with bombastic and at times perverse names.
These campaigns serve to placate a restless public, with each operation presented as a fresh initiative, even if they bear a striking resemblance to numerous operations that Israel has regularly carried out in the past.
This narrative of tactical accumulation — the constant movement of troops and the ability to fight on multiple fronts simultaneously — serves to project an image of strength. But it conceals an underlying rot, which is Israel’s lack of viable solutions when it comes to directly confronting its arch-nemesis, Iran, or engaging in open warfare in the north with the Lebanese resistance.
This is why the West Bank offers a convenient respite — a new theater where the illusion of control and progress can be temporarily sustained, even as the broader strategic picture grows increasingly dire.
Psychological warfare and testing boundaries
Second, these operations are also “cognitive” in nature, a term favored by Israeli military leaders and strategists to describe the collection of tactics that include engaging in information warfare, making Israel’s military presence felt, committing war crimes, and causing widespread destruction to infrastructure.
Israel employs this range of military tactics to create an impression — on its own people, but more importantly, on the Palestinians.
In this context, Israel describes the Gaza model as replicable in the West Bank and flirts with the possibility of a wider ethnic cleansing campaign. Additionally, as it reenacts some of Gaza’s imagery in the northern West Bank, Israel is testing the tolerance levels of its international allies and satisfying its right-wing base all at once, gauging the extent to which it can get away with changing the realities on the ground in the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon, and the region.
It forces Palestinians in the West Bank to grapple with the anxiety of a looming war of annihilation without the concrete capacity to resist. It’s a form of collective psychological torture that impacts everyone in the West Bank, who hurry to reckon with the campaign’s purported novelty, intensity, and violence. Rumors spread, and the Palestinian Authority, operating in the shadows, feeds Palestinians talking points that serve to exalt the policy of Mahmoud Abbas — who by not confronting Israel and cooperating with its security apparatus, protects against the replication of the model of annihilative war in the West Bank. This is exactly the conclusion Israel wants Palestinians to reach.
Taking the fight to the resistance
Third, on a tactical level, the military campaign is designed to take the fight directly to the armed movements in the northern West Bank. This is particularly crucial in light of growing signs that some factions within the mosaic of groups in the north are shifting toward more offensive actions. These include failed attempts to plant a bomb in the heart of Tel Aviv and the resurgence of car bombs originating from the south of the West Bank. The campaign aims to put the Palestinian resistance on the defensive.
Yet even on those terms, the Israeli campaign already seems to be a failure, since during the campaign three car bombs were discovered elsewhere in the West Bank (one near Ramallah, and two near Bethlehem), and a shooting attack by a former member of the PA Presidential Guard left three Israeli security personnel dead in the southern West Bank hills of Hebron, far from the center of Israeli operations in the North.
As the West Bank increasingly transforms into a hotbed of resistance and a theater for regular military operations, the Israeli army — already stretched thin across multiple fronts — will be compelled to commit substantial resources not only to conduct offensive operations but also to maintain a robust defensive posture across a territory spanning 5,000 square kilometers.
This dual demand on manpower and resources presents Israel with a problem that is already forcing a discussion about the potential impact of a third front on the military operations on the Lebanese borders and Gaza. In the past, Israel’s more pragmatic leadership made calculated decisions that allowed it to secure significant gains in its wars with the Palestinians. During the Second Intifada, Israel strategically chose to withdraw from Gaza, allowing it to concentrate its military efforts on suppressing the Intifada in the West Bank. However, Israel is now governed by leaders who vehemently opposed the Gaza disengagement, with a Prime Minister more preoccupied with his own political survival and legacy than with long-term strategy. This leadership clings to the belief that perpetual war will somehow advance Israel’s interests, despite mounting economic, political, diplomatic, and military costs. They frame Israel’s current struggle as a second “independence” war, yet as the conflict spirals and deepens, their mismanagement of strategic dilemmas starts to take a toll.
Israel is essentially relying on time and military force to resolve its challenges, but like any gamble, the outcome remains uncertain. While force may provide short-term gains, the longer-term risks and costs are accumulating, and betting on indefinite conflict could ultimately prove to be a severe miscalculation.
Beyond the operation: strangling the West Bank
More fundamentally, Israel’s policy of “economic deprivation” in the West Bank, alongside efforts by its right-wing factions to decouple Israeli trade, labor markets, and infrastructure from the territory, gives a glimpse of the type of war advocated for by figures like Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir. Since October 7, the leaders of the messianic settler movement, who are now driving Israel’s government agenda, have intensified their efforts to arm settlers en masse and are directing the state to further decouple Israel from the West Bank economically, financially, and infrastructurally.
This strategy reflects a broader vision of the right-wing: by cutting off the West Bank from Israel’s economy, they aim to deepen Palestinian isolation, further entrench Israeli territorial control, and weaken the relations that have created a comfortable status quo for the Israeli state in the past two decades.
It also aims to artificially induce economic collapse and shrink the Palestinian economy in the West Bank. Some of these policies, such as pirating Palestinian customs taxes, have been in place for a long time, but Bezalel Smotrich is now pushing for more aggressive measures. He has hinted in the direction of financial decoupling from Palestinian banks and other forms of economic warfare designed to create abject conditions in the West Bank. These moves would deepen the economic isolation of Palestinians. It would also delink Israelis from any interests in trade and labor with the West Bank and create the conditions for an economically- fueled ethnic cleansing — but more importantly, it will set the stage for a forcible campaign of ethnic cleansing.
While the mere flirtation with such policies is itself a form of power, instilling fear, anxiety, and disorientation among Palestinians, it also outlines the gradual erosion of their daily lives. These policies signal the slow but steady loss of economic and social stability.
Let us be clear: these measures are not merely empty gestures or intimidation tactics; they serve as a clear indication of what is to come. The groundwork is being laid for a more comprehensive and systematic effort to further isolate and delink Israel from Palestinians in the West Bank, make more aggressive land grabs, and prepare for a broader offensive.
Israel’s disposition toward war is perpetual, and its war on the Palestinians is a daily reality fueled by the complicity of its allies, an endless supply of weapons, and a staggering lack of accountability. When Israel Katz declared on X that Israel must “address this threat by all necessary means, including, in some cases of intense combat, allowing the population to temporarily evacuate from one neighborhood to another within the refugee camp,” he was not merely making a tactical suggestion. Katz was speaking directly to Israel’s counterparts around the world, laying the groundwork for an escalation in the use of firepower in the West Bank and normalizing the forced displacement of Palestinian populations from their homes in refugee camps, towns, and villages.
What history tells us, especially in the context of Israel’s war on the Palestinians, is that wars are often won by accumulation — through a relentless combination of psychological warfare, overwhelming firepower, and the deliberate creation of unbearable conditions designed to drive the Palestinian population to leave. This is the lens through which we should view the current struggle in the West Bank and the inevitable military operations that will continue to define the region for the foreseeable future. These actions are not isolated incidents but part of a slow, yet steadily escalating strategy, edging both the Palestinians and the world closer to the brink of the abyss.
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Israeli Racism Shouldn’t Get a Pass in America
Why isn’t Israel shunned as a pariah nation, as South Africa once was, for denying the human rights of Palestinians and for the immorality of its ethno-supremacist practices?
Aug 10, 2024
In 2013, Justine Sacco, an executive at a New York public relations firm, sent a tweet in which she joked about AIDS among Black Africans. “Going to Africa,” her tweet said, “Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” The tweet, which went viral, was denounced as racist and, despite an abject apology, Sacco was fired from her job.
Amy Cooper earned a similar fate. In May, 2020, Cooper was roaming in New York’s Central Park when a male birdwatcher confronted her about her unleashed dog. Cooper then called the police. “There is a man, African American,” she reported, “and he is recording me and threatening me and my dog... please send the cops immediately!” For this racist ploy, Cooper was publicly condemned. She, too, ended up losing her job.
On July 8, 2024, the WRAL (Raleigh, North Carolina) news website ran the headline, “Millions of Tax Dollars Going to a Company Accused of Racism. WRAL Investigates Why the State Still Hasn’t Taken Action.” The headline implies that what’s allegedly going on is wrong and should be investigated, presumably to stop state support for a racist enterprise.
These examples of anti-racist reaction suggest that as a society we’ve reached a point where public expressions of racism, as well as public support for racism, are unacceptable. One offensive joke can get you fired. Yet we now see an egregious double standard being applied in the U.S. when it comes to tolerance of and support for racism.
Imagine a revised version of that WRAL headline: “Billions of Tax Dollars Going to a Country Accused of Racism. Mainstream Media Coordinate Efforts to Investigate Why the Federal Government Still Hasn’t Taken Action.” Don’t hold your breath waiting for it.
The reality is that billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars are going to a country not only accused of racism, but which, as many see it, was founded on racist premises, still practices apartheid, and whose leaders have for decades made unabashedly racist public statements. That country is, of course, Israel.
Israel’s anti-Palestinian racism is a glaring example of the dehumanization that racism entails and the murderous brutality racism enables.
Since October 7, 2023, blatantly racist statements by Israeli leaders have been widely reported. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu likened Palestinians to Amalekites, an ancient tribe in Old Testament lore whom Yahweh told the Israelites to destroy—men, women, children, infants, and cattle. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant referred to Israel’s assault on Gaza as a fight against “human animals.” Other Israeli officials called for erasing Gaza from the face of the Earth, claiming that no Palestinian civilians are innocent.
Cued by their political leaders, Israeli soldiers have released racist videos on social media celebrating their dominance of Palestinians and the destruction of Palestinian homes.
From the top echelons of government to army field units, Israeli racism has been on clear display to the world. These expressions of virulent racism mattered to the International Court of Justice, which took them as evidence of genocidal intent, but they did not seem to matter to U.S. political leaders, except perhaps as instances of bad optics.
Partisans of Israel sought to explain away these expressions of anti-Palestinian racism as uncharacteristic outbursts, products of the rage many Israelis felt in the aftermath of the October 7 attack by Hamas. There is no doubt some truth in this claim; anger conduces to saying hateful things. But the history of anti-Palestinian racism in Israel did not begin in 2023. In fact, it precedes Israel’s founding.
Theodor Herzl, one of the principal architects of political Zionism in the late 19th century, saw the native Arabs of Palestine as “primitive and backward,” according to Israeli historian Avi Shlaim. Herzl expected Palestinian Arabs to be grateful for the prosperity that a Jewish influx would bring to Palestine. Consistent with the ideological fantasies of earlier generations of European colonizers, Herzl imagined that Jews would merit credit for assuming the white man’s burden of civilizing the natives.
Other early Zionists differed in the degree to which they anticipated Arab resistance to the formation of a Jewish state in Palestine. But all accepted the principle that it ultimately didn’t matter what the Indigenous people wanted. By use of military force backed by outside imperial powers (Britain; later the U.S.), and through diplomatic sidelining of Palestinian Arabs, Zionists aimed to create the ethnocratic state of Israel, regardless of the conflicting nationalist aspirations of Palestinians.
All this preceded WWII, the Holocaust, and the formal creation of Israel. The forcible displacement of 750,000 Palestinian Arabs from their homes and land—what we today would call “ethnic cleansing”—in the 1948 Nakba was largely a matter of putting into practice an idea rooted in political Zionism from the start: The lives, wishes, and well-being of the native Arab population would not be allowed to deter the creation of a Jewish state.
In one sense, little has changed since 1948. Successive Israeli governments have used different levels of violence to quash Palestinian resistance to colonial oppression, but all have adhered to the principle that Israel should be a Jewish state, run by Jews for Jews, with as few Palestinians as possible from the river to the sea. Nor has any Israeli government relinquished the idea that Palestinian desires for freedom and self-determination must be subjugated if necessary for Israel to exist as a Jewish state.
Today, the heir to this racist philosophy is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Over 30 years ago, in his book A Place Among the Nations: Israel and the World, Netanyahu slandered Arabs across the board, writing, “Violence is ubiquitous in the political life of all the Arab countries. It is the primary method of dealing with opponents, both foreign and domestic, both Arab and non-Arab.” Netanyahu goes on to call terrorism “the quintessential Middle East export,” saying that “its techniques everywhere are those of the Arab regimes and organizations that invented it.” Projection much?
To be clear, what makes Zionism racist are its implicit assumptions that the desires of Jews to live in freedom, safety, and dignity take precedence over Palestinian desires for the same things; that it is acceptable for a militarily powerful Jewish state to impose its will on a stateless and vulnerable Palestinian group; and that the goal of maintaining a Jewish state trumps the basic human rights of Palestinians.
Anti-Palestinian racism helps to legitimate these ideas and is further reinforced when it is invoked, as by Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders, to justify violence and the daily humiliation of apartheid. These are not radical observations. In much of the world, outside the sphere of U.S. influence, Israel’s anti-Palestinian racism is plain as day, and what I’m saying here would be uncontroversial.
So when other expressions of racism are unacceptable in the U.S. today, why does anti-Arab Israeli racism get a pass? Why isn’t Israel shunned as a pariah nation, as South Africa once was, for denying the human rights of Palestinians and for the immorality of its ethno-supremacist practices?
One answer is that realpolitik rarely bends to morality. As former Secretary of State and Army General Alexander Haig once put it, Israel is like an unsinkable American aircraft carrier in the Middle East, projecting power in a region of great economic importance to the U.S. ruling class. Relative to the larger geopolitical stakes at play in the region, the fate of a stateless Arab minority is not that important, except as a potential source of instability. If this source of instability were somehow made to go away, many U.S. political leaders would be perfectly happy, regardless of the racism embedded in the solution.
Another reason many Americans are willing to tolerate Israeli racism is that the two nations are seen as sharing a similar origin story, one that makes racist crimes forgivable.
Just as European colonists once sought freedom from popes and kings by forging a new nation in North America, Jews sought freedom from pogroms and antisemitism by creating a Jewish state in the Middle East. Yes, some Indigenous people got hurt in the process, and that’s a shame. But this suffering pales when weighed against the benefits America and Israel have brought the world. What’s more, after the Holocaust, Jews have an undeniable claim to seek their own version of Manifest Destiny. So the story goes.
Those who accept this settler-colonial mythos—underscored by biblical fables, post-Holocaust guilt, and devaluing of a racialized Other—may have trouble seeing what Israel has done and is doing to the Palestinians as wrong. It will be admitted that maintaining an ethnocratic Jewish state is ugly, even bloody, at times; but the ends justify the means.
Nor should we forget that anti-Arab racism abounds in the U.S. as well as Israel. Americans are thoroughly propagandized to accept the stereotype of Arabs as terrorists, or as Islamic fanatics rooted in a regressive medieval culture. The racist Israeli view of Arabs thus fails to shock in the U.S., fails to shock as it should, because the same view is normalized here. Our “special relationship” with Israel is built in part on this shared infection with the virus of colonial racism.
Israel’s anti-Palestinian racism is a glaring example of the dehumanization that racism entails and the murderous brutality racism enables. This is what the world has seen play out in Gaza these last 10 months. There could be no better example, right now, of why Israeli racism should not get a pass in the U.S., nor anywhere, ever again.
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The Simple Question Those Who Smear Cori Bush Refuse to Answer
People like Kansas City Star editorial board member Melinda Henneberger are as cowardly as they are common.
Aug 01, 2024
Soon after the Gaza war began 10 months ago, a prominent newspaper columnist denounced Congresswoman Cori Bush under a headline declaring that “anti-Israel comments make her unfit for reelection.” The piece appeared in the newspaper with the second-largest readership in Missouri, the Kansas City Star. Multimillion-dollar attacks on Bush followed.
Bush’s opponent, county prosecutor Wesley Bell, “is now the number-one recipient of AIPAC cash this election cycle,” according to Justice Democrats. “Almost two-thirds of all his donations came from the anti-Palestinian, far-right megadonor-funded lobby group.” The Interceptreports that “AIPAC’s super PAC, United Democracy Project, has gone on to spend a total of $7 million so far to oust Bush” in the Aug. 6 Democratic primary in her St. Louis area district.
“The $2.1 million in ads spent for her campaign is up against $12.2 million spent to attack her or support Bell,” The American Prospectpoints out. AIPAC “is trying to pull voters away from her without ever saying the words ‘Israel’ or ‘Palestine.’ Instead, their advertising against Bush centers around her record on infrastructure legislation, in a manner that lacks context.”
Denial about Israel’s massive and ongoing crimes against Palestinian people is pervasive—and often used to attack principled progressives in election campaigns.
It's easy to see why AIPAC and allied forces are so eager to defeat Bush. She courageously introduced a ceasefire resolution in the House nine days after the bloodshed began on Oct. 7, calling for “an immediate de-escalation and ceasefire in Israel and occupied Palestine.”
The Kansas City Star article, published shortly after Bush introduced the resolution, was written by former New York Times reporter Melinda Henneberger, now a member of the Star’s editorial board. “A military attack in response to the massacre of civilians by a group committed in writing to ‘carnage, displacement and terror’ for Jews is not my idea of ‘ethnic cleansing,’” she wrote in early November. “But it is Missouri Rep. Cori Bush’s, which is why she deserves to lose her congressional race next year.”
Bush supposedly became unfit to keep her seat in Congress because, after three weeks of methodical killing in Gaza, she tweeted: “We can’t be silent about Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign. Babies, dead. Pregnant women, dead. Elderly, dead. Generations of families, dead. Millions of people in Gaza with nowhere to go being slaughtered. The U.S. must stop funding these atrocities against Palestinians.”
Henneberger’s response was hit-and-run. She wrote a hit piece. And then she ran.
Ever since late April, I’ve been asking Henneberger just one question, over and over. Every few weeks, I have sent another email directly to her. I also wrote to her care of an editor at the newspaper. And I even mailed a certified letter, which the post office delivered to her office in June.
No reply.
Henneberger’s column had flatly declared that Bush’s tweet was a “projectile spewing of antisemitic comments and disinformation” because it said that Israel was engaged in ethnic cleansing.
So, my question, which Henneberger has been refusing to answer for more than three months, is a logical one: “Do you contend that the Israeli government has not engaged in ethnic cleansing?”
If Henneberger were to answer no, the entire premise of her column smearing Bush would collapse.
If Henneberger were to answer yes, her reply would be untenable.
No wonder she has chosen not to answer at all.
My question, which Henneberger has been refusing to answer for more than three months, is a logical one: “Do you contend that the Israeli government has not engaged in ethnic cleansing?”
What Israel has been doing in Gaza clearly qualifies as “ethnic cleansing”—which a UN Commission of Experts defined as “a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas.”
But denial about Israel’s massive and ongoing crimes against Palestinian people is pervasive—and often used to attack principled progressives in election campaigns. And so, two months ago, in the St. Louis area, 35 rabbis supporting Bell against Bush issued a statement that alleged the congresswoman “continually fanned the flames with the most outrageous smears of Israel, accusing the Jewish state of ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘genocide’ as it has fought to defeat the terrorists.”
The electoral forces against human rights for Palestinians have been armed with huge amounts of cash. AIPAC dumped $15 million into successfully defeating progressive New York Congressman Jamaal Bowman early this summer. While the spending amount set a record, the approach was far from unprecedented.
In 2022, AIPAC beat Michigan Congressman Andy Levin, who had expressed support for Palestinian rights. “I’m really Jewish,” Levin said in an interview days before losing the Democratic primary, “but AIPAC can’t stand the idea that I am the clearest, strongest Jewish voice in Congress standing for a simple proposition: that there is no way to have a secure, democratic homeland for the Jewish people unless we achieve the political and human rights of the Palestinian people.”
AIPAC excels at strategic lobbying on Capitol Hill, relentlessly prodding or threatening lawmakers and their staffs to stay on the right side of a Zionist hardline, always brandishing the proven capacity to launch fierce attacks—while conflating even understated criticism of Israel with antisemitism. The basic formulas are simple: Israel = Judaism. Opposition to Israel’s lethal violence = antisemitism.
Such formulaic manipulation has long been fundamental to claims that the Israeli government represents “the Jewish people” and criticisms of its actions are “antisemitic.”
That’s what the heroic Congresswoman Cori Bush is up against.
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