Judaization: The Erasure of Palestine
Settler colonialism is by its very purpose a necessarily violent, unilateral, zero-sum enterprise. Since it requires the targeted country’s land, the displacement of its inhabitants and its transformation into a settler state to succeed, it can never be accepted by its victims and cannot make meaningful concessions in any process of negotiations or conflict resolution.
Since the aim of settler colonialism is to establish settler domination and control, all such projects contain a “logic of elimination.”3 The indigenous population must be removed or marginalized in whatever way feasible, be it through expulsion (half the Palestinian people are refugee populations living outside of their homeland), displacement (the Palestinians remaining in Palestine are confined to marginalized and isolated enclaves on about 15% of their country) or physical genocide (as in Gaza). In Zionism – and in official Israeli government policy documents – this is known as Judaization, the transformation of an Arab country into a Jewish one. This, in turn, requires the de-Arabization of Palestine, the flip side of Judaization: eliminating the Palestinians’ very cultural, historic and even physical presence. Genocide, both physical and cultural, is therefore baked into Zionism as a settler colonial movement.
That set the stage for “transfer,” the Zionists’ term for expulsion or ethnic cleansing, the operational part of Judaization. More than a century ago, Israel Zangwill, the Jewish writer who coined the phrase “A land without a people,” complained that “Palestine is not so much occupied by the Arabs as overrun by them.” The violent expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians during the 1948 Nakba – more than half the Palestinians population of the country, 85 percent of those inhabiting what became the state of Israel – marked the actual inception of Judaization-by-transfer. That process of transfer repeated itself in 1967 when Israel conquered the rest of historic Palestine. Called by the Palestinians the Naksa (“setback”) or, more tellingly, the Second Nakba, it witnessed the flight of 280,000 to 325,000 Palestinians fled the country – although “flight” was in fact an expression of expulsion, since it occurred on the background of intense military violence directed at civilian populations of the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights, including mass demolitions and the “emptying” of refugee camps by the Israeli army. In terms of Zionism’s settler colonial project, the 1967 war was a “demographic war” given Israel’s goal of “thinning out” a major Palestinian population.
The destruction of Gaza, Israel’s genocidal attacks on its civilian population and the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank by both the army and settler militias represent the culmination of the Judaization process. “Stuck” in the meantime with seven million Palestinians, half the country’s population if not a fraction more, Israel is forced to institute a racialized regime of control: apartheid. The trick will be – and this is the task of the Abraham Accords, the normalization process – to sell apartheid as a “two-state solution.” Relying on the fact that the public does not read maps or the fine print of international agreements, the Palestinian “state” will be nothing more than a series of truncated, semi-sovereign, non-viable enclaves on 15% of Palestine, all controlled by Israel.
Judaization, transfer, normalization – these are the ways settler colonialism is ultimately consummated. And they are unilateral: normalization does not entail a “peace process” or negotiations with the colonized. The Abraham Accords are an agreement among states that leaves out the Palestinians and imposes on them an apartheid regime that de facto Judaizes Palestine. And the great danger for Palestinians is that after normalization little political space remains in which they can continue their struggle. In the eyes of the world’s governments and much of the public, the Israeli-Palestinian “conflict” has been resolved. The world moves on; a Judaized Palestine becomes “Israel.”
Links to articles relevant to this section:
Internal documents reveal Israeli settlers dedication to ousting 'Arabs' from the West Bank - (Haaretz subscription required)
Cabinet approves West Bank land registration process to strengthen Jewish settlement
Displaced Communities, Forgotten People: Israel’s Forcible Transfer of Palestinians in the West Bank