Normalization: Zionism’s End Game – The Campaign Against Normalizing Israeli Apartheid

Trump’s disability – narcissism, mixed perhaps with a dose of aphasia and the general insensitivity to human suffering embedded in the profession of slumlord – has one advantage in the political arena: unlike practiced politicians like Biden, who mask their true intent in diplo-speak, Trump seems incapable of lying or covering up. (For a narcissistic person, the truth is what you perceive it to be, even if a lie is demonstrable.) And so he states flatly – like, duh! – what past presidents have always denied: first, that the United States could not care less about Palestinians or their national rights; and second, that allowing Israel to replace Palestine is fine, whether out of reasons of realpolitik – the role Israel plays militarily in protecting Western hegemony over the Middle East – or out of some perception that Israel is “us,” part of the “Judeo-Christian”/Western world, and is on our side in the War of Civilizations. Like the region’s “moderate” Arab governments, Trump simply wants the pesky and disruptive Palestinian issue to disappear and, in his transactional America First worldview, sees no political, legal, or moral impediment to making that happen.

That Trump vision dovetails perfectly with Zionism’s 130-year project of Judaizing Palestine. Carried out through a militarized settler colonialism, Zionism has already accomplished two of the four tasks required for transforming an Arab state into a Jewish one: it has taken the Palestinians’ land (85% of Palestine is now Israeli State Land or its military equivalent, almost completely “cleansed” of Palestinians) and it has displaced the Palestinian population – half of the 15 million Palestinians live in exile abroad, and half are confined to enclaves on 15% of their homeland.

That leaves two more. First, the final pacification of the Palestinians, suppressing both resistance and political opposition to the point where any struggle against colonization becomes impossible. Military pacification is now clearly evident in Gaza and in the refugee camps of the West Bank. Political pacification ranges from the banning of political parties and the imprisonment or execution of Palestinian political figures, intellectuals, and activists (almost 5,000 being held indefinitely and without charge in administrative detention) to raiding the Educational Bookstore in East Jerusalem and arresting its owners and on to preventing foreign solidarity groups from visiting the Occupied Territory.

The second and final task that remains is normalization – the way settler colonialism is ultimately consummated. Normalization does not entail negotiations. As the Abraham Accords demonstrate, it is an agreement between states that leaves out the colonized – in this case the Palestinians – altogether. Normalization legitimizes whatever “facts on the ground” the colonial enterprise has managed to establish – in our case, a “Jewish” state of Israel possessing total control over Palestine. After normalization little political space remains in which the Palestinians can continue their struggle. The issue has been resolved in the eyes of the governments involved, the Palestinians have received whatever they were given (a truncated, semi-sovereign, non-viable Bantustan-”state” on 15% of their country), and the world moves on. A Judaized Palestine is then anointed as “Israel.”

And this is how the normalization process will go down in the next few months:

Saudi Arabia, the Jewel in the Crown for completing the Abraham Accords, has conditioned normalization with Israel on a vague, never-to-be-implemented commitment to a "pathway" to a Palestinian state at some undetermined future date. No details or conditions necessary; for example, would the Palestinian state be territorially contiguous, genuinely sovereign, and economically viable? Why spend the political capital to get into problematic details over an eventuality that “everybody knows” (to quote Leonard Cohen) will never materialize? The other Arab states that have already normalized with Israel – Egypt, Jordan, the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco – haven’t made even those modest symbolic demands.
Arab government collusion with Netanyahu and Trump (and Biden – this is not just a Republican plan) empowers Israel to define less what the Palestinian Bantustan-”state” would look like and more the expanded Israel they would be normalizing. The parameters are clear, laid out in detailed maps during Trump’s first term, and define the state of Israel in its 1967 borders plus its settlements. Israel thus expands to 85% of historic Palestine while the Palestinian “state” is reduced to three enclaves in the West Bank and an uninhabitable Gaza. For “security” reasons Israel also controls the borders (Palestine will not have a border with an Arab country), the airspace, and even internal movement between the enclaves. No territorial contiguity, no sovereignty, no economic viability, and no provision to bring the refugees home. A Palestinian Bantustan within an all-encompassing Israeli apartheid regime.

The fact that the normalization process is nearing its completion explains Israel's push to ethnically cleanse Area C, the 62% of the West Bank where its settlements are located, and which is planned to be annexed. The most violent Israeli settler youth have been unleashed on Palestinian communities; indeed, they have been recruited into a special IDF unit called Desert Frontier where they join other army units in driving Palestinian farmers and shepherds from their villages and lands. More than 50 rural communities have been forcibly abandoned since October 7, and more than 40 new settlement “outposts” have been established to replace them. All to establish the “facts on the ground” that will then be normalized.

Whether a couple million Gazans are relocated semi-voluntarily or by force, or whether they just rot there under some puppet Palestinian or Arab authority makes no difference. Israel has no strategic interest in Gaza and, a few settlers aside, no interest in integrating it into a Greater Israel. It is marginal and expendable – and hence the utility of Netanyahu’s embrace of Trump’s “bold” if harebrain scheme of turning Gaza into an American Riviera; though it will never happen, it “makes sense” to both. Israel’s main interest is removing 2.3 million Palestinians from its direct rule, then placing the remaining three million in its West Bank Bantustan under some Palestinian Authority-type subcontractor. Thus a Greater Israel with a Jewish majority of 70-80% covering all of historic Palestine.

The only actual condition imposed on Israel by the US and Saudi Arabia for the normalization process to go ahead is industrial quiet, quietizing the Palestinian issue so that it simply drops out of sight. Thus Israel's intense campaign of pacification, beginning with eliminating Hamas in Gaza, the last bastion of effective resistance, but now extending into the West Bank where Israel is “Gaza-fying” the Jenin, Tulkarm, and Nablus refugee camps as well as other pockets of resistance. (Sickeningly, this process is actively supported by the collaboration of the Palestinian Authority, as it desperately “proves” to Israel and the US that it is capable of taking control of Gaza.)
Then normalization takes its final turn, and “Greater” Israel is recognized by Saudi Arabia, much of the Arab and Muslim world, and the United States, as Palestinians are relegated to a management problem.” This will then be sold to the international community as the long-awaited “two-state solution.” Others will call it by its real name: two-state apartheid.

Settler colonialism thus ends not through conquest or victory but through normalization imposed by the strong on the weak and gradually ratified more by being perceived as “normal” and self-evident than by official political transactions and pronouncements. At the heart of the Trump/Netanyahu drive for normalization between Israel and the Arab world is the elimination of the Palestinian struggle for their national rights. For them, normalization represents closure. Once an expanded Israel and its apartheid regime is recognized by the international community – if not formally by much of Europe, the BRICS Bloc, and the Global South, then certainly de facto, which for Israel is good enough – there is little political space for the Palestinians to continue pursuing freedom. Completion of the Abraham Accords and its normalization represent the greatest threats to the Palestinians since the 1948 Nakba.