Harris should stop the ethnic cleansing

It is easy to quarrel with B’tselem’s picture of what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank. Many will want to cite Hamas’ behavior as the cause. Some will want Israel to continue the fight until Hamas is routed. Others will doubt that the policy is coherent and concerted, as Ms Novak claims.

Results

But it is hard to quarrel with the results she anticipates. Re-occupation of Gaza may not be the intention. But it is hard to see how Israel can accomplish its announced goals, demilitarization and deradicalization, without imposing a draconian military regime there.

Absorption of the West Bank into Greater Israel is the explicit goal of the settlers and their supporters. Netanyahu’s maps already show the West Bank as part of Israel. He is doing “from the river to the sea” while Palestinians and their supporters are only chanting about it.

The future of Israel and Palestine

These results condemn Israel to a one-state future of unequal rights. Call it apartheid if you like, though that South African regime had its own unique characteristics. It will certainly be a regime of Jewish supremacy.

A situation that was in the past regarded as temporary will be recognized as permanent. Gaza will become what some claimed it was in the past: a giant prison. Jewish settlements will riddle the West Bank. Israel will prevent the two Palestinian territories from uniting in a single state.

Inside Israel proper (that is the 1967 lines), Palestinians will continue to be better off than their compatriots in Gaza and the West Bank. But their communities will get less money than Jewish communities from the Israeli government, the police and army will treat them as second class citizens, and they will continue to suffer inhumane treatment, including dispossession and displacement. These are not incidents occurring in a fair and just system. They are consequences of a system that priorities Jews and Jewish property, a system in other words of Jewish supremacy.

Is Jewish supremacy necessary?

Jewish supremacy is not necessary to preserve the Jewish-dominated state within its 1967 borders. It is however necessary if you want the Jewish state to occupy all of the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean (Greater Israel), since the numbers of Jews and Arabs in that territory are more or less equal. And the Arabs have higher birth rates. That is one of many reasons why a two-state solution is desirable. It would preserve the Jewish state while creating a Palestinian one.

Many Israelis and Palestinians no longer support a two-state solution. But their one-state objectives are different. Israelis want Palestinians to either go away or accept second-class citizenship, or no citizenship at all. The Palestinians want a one person/one vote system of equal rights. With higher demographic growth among Arabs than Jews, this would ensure Arab dominance. I wouldn’t expect Israelis to like that.

So Jewish supremacy is necessary in a Greater Israel, not in the 1967 one. Netanyahu’s continued pursuit of the Gaza war as well as his government’s mistreatment of Palestinians on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem aim, among other things, at reducing the Palestinian population. In other words, ethnic cleansing.

The United States should not be tolerating it. I hope President Harris won’t.