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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

Zionism's strategies « Previous | |Next »
October 11, 2006

In the Introduction to the second edition of his Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict Norman G. Finkelston says in relation to the creation of Israel:

Basically the Zionist movement could choose between only two strategic options to achieve its goal: what Benny Morris has labeled 'the way of South Africa'--- 'the establishment of an apartheid state, with a settler minority lording it over a large, exploited native majority'---or the 'the way of transfer'--- 'you could create a homogenous Jewish state or at least a state with an overwhelming Jewish majority by moving or transferring all or most of the Arabs out.'

He says that Israel confronted the same dilemma after occupying the West Bank and Gaza as at the dawn of the Zionist movement: it wanted the land but not the people. Expulsion, however, was no longer a viable option. Accordingly, after the June war Israel moved to impose the second of its two options mentioned above---- apartheid. It is this kind of occupation which has proved to be the chief stumbling block to a diplomatic settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Finkelstone quotes a study undertaken by B’ Tselem (Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories) entitled Land Grab, which says that:

Israel has created in the Occupied Territories a regime of separation based on discrimination, applying two different systems of law in the same area and basing the rights of individuals on their nationality.

Finkelstone goes to say that as Jewish settlements expanded Israel has begun corralling West Bank Palestinians into eight fragments of territory, each surrounded by barbed wire with a permit required to move or trade between them (trucks must load and unload on the borders ‘back-to-back’), thereby further devastating an economy in which roughly one-third of the population is unemployed, half the population lives below the poverty line of $2 per day, and one fifth of children under five suffer from malnutrition largely caused ---according to US, UN and European relief agencies--- by Israeli restrictions on transporting food.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 3:21 PM | | Comments (0)
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