Our complicity in Gaza has set the stage for a second genocide - in the West Bank ... the back story that utterly undermines Israel's "self-defence" narrative in Gaza by Jonathan Cook

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Jonathan Cook

@Jonathan_K_Cook

There is a revealing back story to Israel's so-called E1 Plan, a massive settlement project that includes the building of many thousands of new homes. The plan’s goal is to irreversibly sever the illegally annexed eastern, Palestinian side of Jerusalem from the West Bank, and then break the illegally occupied West Bank into two separate territorial cantons, destroying any hope of future Palestinian statehood.

 

That back story utterly undermines Israel's "self-defence" narrative in Gaza.

 

The media are playing up the role of Bezalel Smotrich, the self-declared fascist minister in Netanyahu's government, in the E1 Plan – as though it somehow reflects his ugly and malign influence. That is pure misdirection.

 

In fact, this plan has been around since the 1990s and was first formulated by the supposedly "peacenik" Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. It was intended as a parallel move to the “peace accords” of that time negotiated in Oslo.

 

The Oslo accords had incited huge divisions in Israeli society because it was assumed that they would cede back to the Palestinians significant pieces of territory Israel was illegally occupying and colonising in the West Bank. Domestic opposition ultimately led to Rabin’s assassination.

 

In Rabin's eyes, E1 overrode those objections. It would protect the then largest of the illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank, Maale Adumim, incorporating it into the eastern side of Jerusalem, which Israel had already annexed and was furiously settling with Jews while displacing Palestinian communities there.

 

As an aside, let us note that Rabin, who won the Nobel peace prize along with Yasser Arafat for signing the Oslo accords, was expressly against the creation of a real Palestinian state. He wanted “ an entity which is less than a state” – a vision that appears to have viewed that “entity” as little more than a glorified local authority running schools and collecting the rubbish.

 

Notably, Rabin also drew up plans for a separation wall across the West Bank between Israel and its settlements, on one side, and Palestinian communities on the other. A successor, Ariel Sharon, a hawkish former army general, would be the one to build that wall nearly a decade later, imprisoning Palestinian communities behind steel and concrete fortifications, and in the process stealing vast swaths of their agricultural land. Western capitals, as ever meekly protested to zero effect.

 

After Rabin, every Israeli prime minister, whether they identified with the Zionist left or right, advanced the E1 Plan: Netanyahu, Ehud Barak, Sharon, Ehud Olmert.

 

And all helped build the initial infrastructure – the roads, and even a police station – to make E1 become a reality.

 

The plan was formally frozen in 2009 only after the US exerted huge pressure on Israel. Why? Because the realisation of E1 could mean only one thing: a permanent end to the pretence of a two-state solution. Israel's interest in "peacemaking" would be exposed as the hollow charade it always was, even under Rabin.

 

Smotrich has made precisely that point in his usual blunt way, saying E1 is necessary because it will “bury the idea of a Palestinian state”. It is the prelude to his ambition, one shared by the rest of the Israeli government and large parts of the public, to formally annex the West Bank.

 

Which is why the Guardian and other media are calling the E1 Plan " hugely controversial" – a predictable and hugely controversial understatement.

 

In fact, E1 is utterly illegal. 

 

It is the precise opposite of what the International Court of Justice – the world's highest court –

ordered last year. Which was for Israel to begin dismantling the settlements, end its system of apartheid rule over Palestinians that has been required to enforce decades of colonisation, and restore all of the territory stolen by the Israeli occupation regime from the Palestinian people.

 

Spinning this the best way he could for Israel, the Guardian’s veteran foreign affairs correspondent Peter Beaumont observed, as if he was some sort of rookie journalist: “It remained unclear on Thursday how much buy-in Smotrich has from Netanyahu and the Trump administration.”

 

“Buy-in”?! As noted, every Israeli prime minister has sought to advance E1 – Netanyahu at least as enthusiastically as the rest of them. There is nothing controversial about the E1 Plan inside Israel.

So how does all of this relate to Gaza?

 

Establishment media, including so-called liberal outlets such as the BBC and Guardian, would like you to digest the news from the West Bank and the news from Gaza as though they are happening in entirely different universes. As though what Israel does to Palestinians in Ramallah is unconnected to what it does to Palestinians in Gaza City.

 

That is patently ridiculous. The two territories, the two occupations, the two systems of apartheid, the two programmes of ethnic cleansing draw on exactly the same Israeli impulse for domination, the same Israeli desire for ethnic cleansing and colonisation, the the same racist Israeli disregard for Palestinian life.

 

Israel’s settler colonial project has been going on for decades. All too obviously, the West Bank and Gaza are only separate territories – disconnected parts of the same Palestinian homeland – because Israel enforced their separation.

 

All Israeli leaders have signed up to the same settler-colonial programme that requires the removal and replacement of the Palestinian people. In Gaza, that removal is being carried out to a tight deadline and has required an overt genocide. In the West Bank, it is – for the time being, at least – being carried out more by stealth, more incrementally, more obliquely.

 

But the intended fate of the people in the West Bank is ultimately no different from the fate of the people in Gaza – unless we in the West stop it by refusing to remain silent about what is happening.

E1 is the last phase in an apartheid system made concrete by Israel in the form of the checkpoints and walls it has built across the West Bank. E1 is that territory’s version of the military cage Israel built around Gaza in the early 1990s, when the E1 Plan was first on the drawing board. It will create the conditions for an intensified blockade of the West Bank, in the same way that the cage around Gaza made possible the siege of Gaza that began in 2007.

 

We know where Gaza’s siege led: to years of different forms of Palestinian revolt, including

non-violent protests at the perimeter of their cage. Ultimately it led to Hamas’ break-out on 7 October 2007, and Israel’s genocidal response.

 

When we continue to do nothing to stop the Gaza genocide, or actively assist it as our governments have been doing for the past two years, Israel feels more emboldened. Our complicity in Gaza is precisely why Israel is dusting off the E1 Plan for the West Bank now.

 

Israel will continue intensifying its oppression there until it creates conditions for open revolt, as it earlier did in Gaza. Israel will seize such a revolt, as it did in Gaza, as the pretext for committing a second genocide – this time in the West Bank.

 

We know what is coming. The question is: Have we learnt anything? This time, will we act?