Palestine in 2020

I’ve seen a number of friends talking about Palestine on social media. I’ve also seen their friends asking some version of “what’s happening in the Occupied Territories?” (i.e. questions motivated by both an interest in what life is like there, and a lack of knowledge). I thought I’d share therefore something I wrote a few weeks back – a simple “explainer” setting out for people in the West how the occupation works and its impact on people’s lives

The Palestinians comprise a) nearly two million Arabs living within the pre-1967 borders of Israel, or a bit less than one in five of the Israeli population, where their average income is around a third lower than that of Jewish Israelis,[1] and they are more than twice as likely to have an income below the state poverty line.[2] They suffer discrimination in employment and housing, for example by rules offering employment only to those who have served in the Israeli army. Arab employment in the civil servant stands at just eleven percent, or around half of what it should be were it not for employment barriers.[3]

In theory, those living within the pre-1967 borders are permitted to vote in Israeli elections, and they elects members to the Knesset, enabling Israel to present itself to the world as a normal democracy. However Arab deputies are stigmatised, denounced by government ministers and subject to laws enabling other deputies to revoke their election at any time.[4] According to the Knesset’s Rules of Procedures, the Presidium “shall not approve a bill that in its opinion denies the existence of the State of Israel as the state of the Jewish People.” On the basis of those rules, between 2011 and 2019, four bills related to Palestinians’ rights, including their right to participate in public life, were disqualified before even reaching discussion in that parliament.[5]

There are then b) around 400,000 Palestinians who live in East Jerusalem which was annexed in 1967. They do not have Israeli citizenship, only a limited right to reside which can be taken away at any time (for example, if they marry a non-resident). They are not permitted to vote in Israeli elections. Laws prevent building in East Jerusalem and encourage the demolition of Palestinian homes, which the state does repeatedly, with 265 homes pulled down in 2019 alone.[6]

Then there are c) some four and a half million Palestinians living in occupied West Bank or Gaza. There, average wages are significantly lower than among Arab Israelis, at very roughly a half (the West Bank) or a quarter (Gaza) of what they are in Israel.[7] In spring 2020, the official unemployment in Gaza stood at 45 percent.[8] A small number of Palestinians from the Occupied Territories are employed in Israel or on settlements (around two percent of the population) there they suffer even worse discrimination than those living within Israel’s borders. Health and safety protections are minimal, workers are refused to switch employers, their work permits are routinely cancelled, and wages go repeatedly unpaid.[9] Although Palestinian literacy rates are among the highest in the world,[10] educational infrastructure is crumbling.[11] While, in autumn 2020, as Covid struck, health officials were warning of a lack of ventilators, PPE, and medicine.[12]

In Gaza, economic blockade has meant that fewer than one in ten households have access to fresh water.[13] Access to electricity is interrupted. The roads which join Palestinian towns are broken, every few hundred metres, with a fresh checkpoints, many of them created by Israel’s 400 mile long separation wall, more than four-fifths of which meanders within the Western Bank far inside the Green Line (the supposed border with Israel).[14]

Meanwhile, repeated incursions from Israeli troops, including by helicopter,[15] and in bulldozer raids and night-time bombings cause even during times of apparent peace repeated civilian deaths. Two hundred citizens from West Bank and Gaza were killed in 2019, according to the UN; while eight Israeli civilians also died.[16] Between 2018 and 2020, night-time raids on the occupied territories were taking place at the rate of 250 per month. No warrants were required to justify these raids. They left their victims feeling unsafe in their own homes and beds.[17]

Palestinians residents of the West Bank or Gaza are not citizens of Israel, have no right to travel there unless (exceptionally) for work, and have no rights or legal status within that country. By law even a Palestinian married to an Israeli is prohibited from being a citizen of Israel or residing there. As Prime Minister Sharon explained, when the law was introduced, “There is no need to hide behind security arrangements. There is a need for the existence of a Jewish state.”[18]

The West Bank and Gaza are not contiguous; it is a matter of extreme difficult to travel from one part of the occupied territories to the other. Citizens of the occupied territories are not citizens of Israel, are permitted only to vote in elections for the Palestinian Authority, which has no effective control over most of the matters which normally constitute statehood: people, goods, food, medicines and even water enter only by Israeli consent, which is repeatedly withdrawn.

The fourth and final element of the Palestinian population are d) the refugees of Israel’s wars, who live in exile (many in cramped conditions in refugee camps),[19] and their descendants. Some 4 million Palestinian refugees, including the survivors of the 800,000 people[20] displaced in the 1948 Arab-Israel war, and their families, are registered for humanitarian assistance with the United Nations.[21] Members of this group are excluded from Israel citizenship and deprived from returning to Israel. Their homes and land were part of historical Palestine and are now occupied by Israel. “Our dead are still in the cemeteries of others,” the Palestinian poet and author Mourid Barghouti has written, “our living are clinging to foreign borders.”[22]

When speaking of Palestinian refugees, it should be recalled that Israeli attacks on other countries in the region have destroyed some of the few places where Palestinians were allowed to live in relative peace; notably Beirut which prior to Israeli’s 1982 invasion and the massacre in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, had been “the birthplace for thousands of Palestinians who knew no other cradle … an island upon which Arab immigrants dreaming of a new world landed”.[23]

For all Palestinians, occupation is a constant and ongoing process:

[It] prevents you from managing your affairs in your own way. It interferes in every aspect of life and death; it interferes with longing and anger and desire and walking in the street. It interferes with going anywhere and coming back, with going to market, the emergency hospital, the beach, the bedroom, or a distant capital.[24]

None of these Palestinian groups have the same citizenship rights in Israel as the country’s seven million Jewish citizens[25] – nor indeed the same citizenship rights as Jews living in Britain, France, or the United States. Rather, a panoply of directly and indirectly discriminatory laws make them second class citizens or permanent exiles.[26]

Sources:

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[1] ‘Wages of Jewish workers in Israel 35 percent higher than Arab counterparts,’ Middle East Monitor, 11 December 2019.

[2] Inter-Agency Task Force on Israeli Arab Issues, ‘Israel’s Annual Poverty Report: Decline in Arab Poverty Meets Increase in Depth and Severity’, 5 February 2019.

[3] N. Ahituv, ‘Could Netanyahu Actually Be Good for Israel’s Arabs?’ Haaretz, 31 October 2019.

[4] Y. Jabareen, ‘Silencing Arab members of the Knesset would be a new low for Israeli democracy,’ Guardian, 1 April 2016.

[5] ‘Israel Discriminatory measures undermine Palestinian representation in Knesset,’ Amnesty International, 4 September 2019.

[6] J. Magid, ‘2019 saw spike in Palestinian home demolitions by Israel, rights group finds,’ Times of Israel, 6 November 2020; for justification of previous waves of house demolition, E. Habiby, The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist (London: Arabia, 2010), p. 125.

[7] ‘The Working Conditions of Palestinian Wage Earners in Israel’, Center for Political Economics, February 2017.

[8] ‘Labour Force Survey Preliminary Results First quarter January – March 2020’, 31 May 2020.

[9] Kav LaOved, Worker’s Hotline, undated but accessed 20 August 2020.

[10] Around 4 percent of adult Palestinians, compared to 16 percent in Britain. ‘Literacy Rate of Persons (15 Years and Over) in Palestine by Age Groups and Sex, 1995, 1997, 2000-2013’, Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 2014; ‘Adult literacy’, National Literacy Trust, accessed 26 October 2020.

[11] In 2014, thirty percent of Gaza schools needed rebuilding as a result of that year’s Israeli military attacks. ‘Education,’ United Nations Development Programme (2015).

[12] W. Mahmoud, ‘Gaza declares COVID-19 disaster with health system near collapse,’ Al-Jazeera, 23 November 2020.

[13] G. von Medeazza, ‘Searching for clean water in Gaza,’ Unicef, 10 January 2019.

[14] ‘The Separation Barrier,’ B’tselem, 11 November 2017.

[15] “The helicopter hovering above the refugee camp / As though it were dusting a field,” A. Shabtai, ‘Mice of the World Unite,’ in T. Nitzan and R. T. Back, With an Iron Pen: Twenty Years of Hebrew Protest Poetry (New York: Excelsior Editions, 2009), p. 19.

[16] ‘Data on Casualties’, United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, accessed 20 August 2020.

[17] P. Beaumont, ‘Dehumanising: Israeli groups’ verdict on military invasions of Palestinian homes,’ Guardian, 29 November 2020.

[18] A. Abunimah, The Battle for Justice in Palestine (Chicago: Haymarket, 2014), p. 25; U. Forat, ‘For an Israeli Married to a Palestinian, Family Unification Is Forbidden,’ Haaretz, 1 June 2020.

[19] Sahar Khalifeh writes of “Life in the refugee camp, in a tiny room the size of a chicken coop, amid the clamour of people and their secrets”. S. Khalifeh, The End of Spring (Northampton, Massachusetts: 2008), p. 9.

[20] David Gilmour writes that the exact number of refugees was never established. The UN Economic Survey Mission put the total at 726,000; the Refugee Office of the UN Palestine Coalition Commissions placed it at 900,000, and the true figure is probably somewhere in between. D. Gilmour, Dispossessed: The Ordeal of the Palestinians (London: Sphere Books, 1982), p. 74. The Jewish population of Palestine was at that time just 630,000 people. S. Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People (London: Verso, 2009), p. 281.

[21] ‘Palestine Refugees,’ United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees int the Near East. Accessed 1 August 2020.

[22] M. Barghouti, I Saw Ramallah (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), p. 38.

[23] M. Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), p. xii.

[24] Barghouti, I Saw Ramallah, p. 48.

[25] ‘Monthly Bulletin of Statistics,’ October 2019.

[26] Adalah, the Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, has published a list of more than 60 Israeli laws which at discriminate directly or indirectly against Palestinian citizens in Israel or Palestinian residents of the occupied territories. ‘Discriminatory Laws in Israel’, Adalah, accessed 26 August 2020.

Trump-Biden: The 90-10 Election

As the election comes closer, it’s worth asking how much remains of the fear, which was widespread two months ago, that Trump would refuse to accept the election result? Or, indeed of the related concern that Trump is pushing the United States closer to fascism?

The answer I’m going to give is that this election is best understood as a “90-10” election; in other words it’s 90 percent likely that once the dust has settled on the Trump Presidency, we’ll look back at this time as an aberration in US politics: a moment when the abyss could be seen and people pulled back from it. There is still however something strange and hostile about how Trump operates. If you want, you can all it a 10 percent chance that something really unpleasant is just about to start.

The hard thing in the next day couple of days is going to be balancing these two kinds of possibilities: one which is unlikely but could be exceptionally bleak, and another which is more likely and reassuring but contains its own dangers.

The starting point, for me, is the argument I’ve just put in my book Fascism: History and Theory. What I say there is that if you read through the history of Marxist theories of fascism, a coherent understanding of that politics emerges.

First of all, such writers as Klara Zetkin, Antonio Gramsci, Leon Trotsky, etc, saw fascism as part of the political right. It wanted bosses to win against workers, the army strengthened, increased power for the police. It sought to deepen and entrench all the social privileges, of men against women, of “aryans” against racial outsiders, it sought to destroy the few organisations that protected workers against the poor.

Second, fascism was unlike mainstream conservative parties (or indeed the military dictatorships around it) in that fascism gave a much greater active role to a mass movement, whose members would listen to Hitler on the radio, or see him in the cinema, and take part in his parades. Its “activism” included shooting socialists off the streets, in hundreds of political murders, culminating in the fascist seizures of power.

Third, the real place at which fascism distinguished itself was that it kept this reactionary and this mass element in balance. Most far-right parties opted for state power at the expense of their own movement and ended up behaving much like other conservative parties just without elections. Fascism went much further, kept on radicalising, culminating in the war and the Holocaust.

The 90 percent chance

From that perspective, how different is Trump from an ordinary Republican candidate? After all, anyone with any knowledge of US politics will know that ever since 1945, the Republicans have been accusing the Democrats of being closet Communists, and the Democrats have been accusing Republicans of being actual fascists. From Nixon to George W. Bush, the left has used the same line of attack, and (until recently) its main effect has been to make Democratic candidates seem bolder than they were, while exaggerating the difference between them and their rivals.

Moreover, as I’ve pointed out on this site and elsewhere, the US state has not taken on new authoritarian power compared to 2016: deportations are running at half the rate they were four years ago, the border wall has hardly grown…

It’s in this context, especially once you factor in the extreme negligence of Donald Trump’s handling of the Covid crisis, and the way he has risked the lives of the most important part of his voting base, that the “90 percent” part of this 90-10 election emerges. Kit Adam Wainer has set out the dynamics which point to a “normal” handover: the lack of support from the military for American business or a coup (I’m pretty sure that’s right), the satisfaction of the Republican grandees now they have their Supreme Court majority (looking at their record, I think she’s being unduly optimistic).

Focussing just on the shrinking support for Trump and the continuity in carceral power between 2016 and 2020, by far the most likely result of the Presidential election is that Trump will lose, his plans to declare a victory will look like bluster. In three months’ times everyone will be thinking, why did we ever call him a fascist?

The 10 percent chance

On the other hand if you go back to my book on fascism the one thing, I argued, which distinguished fascist parties above all else from other far right traditions was what I called the “fascist style”, i.e. a leadership cult (think QAnon), an emphasis on violence (think of the Patriot and the Proud Boys). Normal conservative parties, I argued, didn’t have a relationship with people who used violence repeatedly against the left. On the other hand, Trump has built that movement, multiplied its audience, and (even now) still envisages a role for it.

It’s in this context that Trump’s plans for the election take on their most menacing overtones. The point is not just that he is likely to declare a victory on election night, even if the popular vote has gone against him, but an election where much of the voting is done postally gives him untold opportunities to do so. From that perspective, the most troubling things we’ve seen in the election campaign were Trump’s two comments during the first election debate: his “stand by” order to the Proud Boys, and his call for “poll watchers, a very safe, very nice thing,” in other words for his supporters to go the polling stations, harass the people voting, and those counting the votes. Those weren’t mere boasts, rather they’ve been listened to: just think of what happened in Texas to the Biden bus.

What that means is that, alongside the 90 percent chance that this election will end peacefully, in a clear victory for either camp (or, almost certainly, a clear victory for Biden), there remains a ten percent chance that the result will be close enough so that Trump will be able to derail the election count before it finishes, and that groups of his supporters will be involved in harassing voters and vote-counters, in a repetition of the 2000 election count, except this time with guns. And that this process of relying on Trump’s supporters in QAnon, the militia, etc, will so change Trump’s government that his next four years will be radicalised even compared to what went before. If you want to understand how bad it could get, with Trump losing controlling of his supporters, and the police backing them, read this piece by Adam Turl, then imagine those dynamics – which have shaped American and global politics – turned up to 10.

Fitting these two things together

What I’m encouraging people to understand, in speaking of this 90-10 moment is that both routes remain open. We have the impossible, unbearable, task of living these last few hours in the knowledge both of the overwhelming likely of relief, and the real possibility that politics in America is about to change for the worse. It’s not like watching a conflict you expect to win, or an argument that could end terribly, it’s both of them at once, and it could easily stay like this for days.

The last point I want to make is that if Trump wins, the political battle is going to be straightforward. Every cause in which I and you believe will have suffered a reverse but, at least, the immediate task will be obvious: take to the streets. You need to go there even in the certainty that the police will be against you – and that the Democrat governors will be on their side. We saw the BLM protests in the summer: we’ll need them and more of them.

But, if Biden wins, the American army will be in no way reduced. Any measures to reduce global warming will operate at a pace capable of stop ecocide somewhere only in such a distant future that hundreds of millions of lives will be lost. And, if Trump has been negligent in solving Covid, do not expect much better from a Democratic Party whose hostility to socialised healthcare is entrenched. Even if Biden wins this round, in other words, anti-fascist are going to be facing a far right whose leader will still have in his possession 90 million followers on Twitter and all the authority of his recent spell in office. His relationship to them will continue. They will still hold all their guns. They will have been told that his election defeat was illegitimate. And they will be looking for a new leader figure to take forward an increasingly unhinged right.

The civil war in American hearts and minds isn’t going to end this week.