Greg Shupak: As Darryl Li points out, “Since 2005, Israel has developed an unusual, and perhaps unprecedented, experiment in colonial management in the Gaza Strip,” seeking to “isolate Palestinians there from the outside world, render them utterly dependent on external benevolence,” and at the same time “absolve Israel of responsibility toward them.” This strategy, Li goes on to argue, is one way that Israel is working to maintain a Jewish majority in the territories it controls so that it can continue to deny equal rights for the rest of the population.
The suppression of Palestinian resistance is crucial to the success of the Israeli experiment. But there is a corollary, which is a cyclical interaction between Israeli colonialism and US militarism. As Bashir Abu-Manneh explains, there is a relationship between American imperialism and Zionist policies. American policymakers believe that an alliance with Israel helps the US control the Middle East. So the United States enables Israeli colonialism and occupation, which in turn creates contexts for further US interventions in the region that can be used to try to deepen American hegemony. He points out, furthermore, that the “United States has been determining major economic and political outcomes” in the region since at least 1967, and that Israel plays a “crucial role in their realization. In Israel-Palestine, this has meant that force and colonial peace have alternated as main instruments of policy.” Yet all the while the main objective remains “a constant: Jewish supremacy in Palestine — as much land as possible, as few Palestinians as possible.”
What both Li and Abu-Manneh highlight is Israel’s concern with keeping Palestinians in a state of powerlessness. Driven by both its own settler-colonial agenda and by its function as an American partner in the geopolitical system, Israel strives to balance its desire to maximize the territory it controls against the imperative of minimizing the number of Palestinians living in the territories it seeks to use for its own purposes. One way to destroy any sign of Palestinian power has been on display during Protective Edge, during which Israeli violence has sought to stamp out signs of Palestinian independence — hence Economy Minister Naftali Bennett’s call for “defeating Hamas.”
The result is that Palestinians are not merely subject to extreme violence. Rather, their capacity to live autonomously in historic Palestine is being attacked. The destruction of infrastructure, as in the recent attack on the Gaza Strip’s lone power plant, is one index of that. Not only does the current Israeli onslaught end the physical existence of specific Palestinian individuals, it aims to obliterate Palestinians as a people with the capacity to live independently in their homeland. While denying refugees their legally protected and natural right of return is the most overt tactic that Israel uses to maintain its desired demographic picture, creating conditions inhospitable to the autonomous existence of Palestinians can also in the long run secure for Israel “as much land as possible, [and] as few Palestinians as possible.” Violence that abides by this logic is not unique to Zionism. It is central to settler-colonialism and finds historic parallels in, for example, the American Trail of Tears or in Canada, the clearing of the plains through the deliberate starvation of Aboriginal peoples. The meaning of Protective Edge is similar. More here.