FEATURE

The Israeli state and the ultra-right settler movement

By Jean Shaoul, WSWS
August 22-28, 2005

The campaign by the ultra-nationalist settler movement against the planned withdrawal from Gaza has again demonstrated the extraordinary and disproportionate political influence of these extreme right-wing forces in Israel.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s plan to “disengage” from Gaza and pull out the settlements housing just 8,000 Israelis is a tactical retreat in the face of the escalating cost of maintaining the settlements. More fundamentally, it is aimed at securing Washington’s consent for the annexation of vast swathes of the West Bank that Israel has occupied illegally for nearly four decades. In Gaza itself, Israel will remain the occupying power, retaining control of Gaza’s borders, its seaport, airport and water supply, and will reserve the right to invade whenever it sees fit.

Despite this, members of Sharon’s own cabinet, including the finance minister and former prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who resigned in protest, as well as the ultra-nationalist and religious parties, are opposed to the disengagement. Israel’s extreme right wing regards Sharon’s decision to pull out from any part of the biblical land of Israel as nothing short of treason.

The settlers have staged sit-down protests, poured oil and nails onto the roads, and set tyres alight to block roads in Israel, causing traffic jams for miles. They have beaten, stoned and shot Palestinians in an effort to humiliate them and provoke them into violent retaliation. Sharon has blamed such incidents on the banned Kach movement and ordered a crackdown on the extremists.

Nine soldiers refused to obey orders and prevent Israelis from entering the Gaza Strip. Two went into hiding in a Gaza settlement, while a 10th soldier was tried and sentenced to 21 days in prison. The army disbanded the platoon in an attempt to head off mutiny by right-wing troops refusing to enforce the pullout.

This month, a 19-year-old conscript soldier, who had refused to implement the pullout and deserted the army two months ago, shot and killed 4 Arab Israelis and wounded at least 12 others. Eden Nathan Zaada boarded a bus, where he opened fire with an M-16 rifle, shooting the bus driver and passengers before turning on people on the street. He carried on shooting until he ran out of bullets. The gunman said, “Tell the prime minister this is to stop the disengagement. I will carry out a massacre here.” Enraged bystanders boarded the bus and beat him to death.

Prior to this incident, there were fears that religious fanatics would bomb the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, the third-holiest site in the Muslim world. Three months ago, Zaada was questioned by the police, who suspected him of planning to gain entry into the mosque.

President Moshe Katsav has warned that right-wing nationalists could attempt to assassinate Sharon. He said the atmosphere was very similar to that during the run-up to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination in November 1995 by a religious fanatic opposed to any peace deal with the Palestinians. Cabinet ministers have been fitted for flak jackets.

That the very social forces Sharon cultivated for so long have, like a Frankenstein monster, turned against him is an indication of the depths of the political and social crisis facing the Zionist state. To understand why this situation has emerged, it is necessary to review the basis upon which Israel was founded and the origins and growth of these right-wing layers.

The founding of Israel and the political conceptions of the Zionist movement

The establishment of the state of Israel was bound up with the defeats of the European working class in the 1920s and 1930s and the spread of fascism, which led to the eruption of the second world imperialist war in a quarter century. In the course of World War II, more than half of European Jewry was exterminated.

Prior to the war, political Zionism held little appeal for Jews, many of who were closely identified with the socialist movement. Within Palestine itself, a socialist movement fought to unite Arabs and Jews and create a democratic and secular Palestinian state that would reorganise society on socialist lines.

Several factors led to the creation of the Zionist state in 1948. There was an outpouring of sympathy on the part of ordinary people for the plight of the Jews, hundreds of thousands of whom remained in displaced persons camps in Europe several years after the end of the war. The US, the Soviet Union and France cynically manipulated public opinion to rally the support of their client states in a vote of the United Nations General Assembly to establish a Jewish state on part of Mandate Palestine. These powers supported the creation of Israel largely as a means of dislodging Britain from the oil-rich Middle East in furtherance of their own geopolitical interests.

The Zionist movement—a minority within Mandate Palestine—had long been bitterly divided about the boundaries of such a state, the means by which statehood was to be achieved, and what to do about the hundred of thousands of Arabs who lived in Palestine.

The Labour Zionists under the leadership of David Ben Gurion took a pragmatic approach in relation to the size of the Zionist state: establish a Jewish state, however small, and adjust the boundaries later. Ben Gurion, who became Israel’s first prime minister, also understood that the viability of such a state, surrounded by enemies and carved out of a small portion of what was once the Syrian province of the Ottoman Empire, depended upon the support of a powerful backer.

Vladimir Jabotinsky was the founder of the Jewish Legion and leader of the Revisionists, who called for a more ruthless and expansionist policy. In 1923, he had written an article entitled “The Iron Wall.” He declared, “Zionist colonisation must be either terminated or carried out against the wishes of the native population. This colonisation can, therefore, be continued and make progress only under the protection of a power independent of the native population—an iron wall, which will be in a position to resist the pressure of the native population. This in toto is our policy towards the Arabs.... A voluntary reconciliation with the Arabs is out of the question either now or in the near future.”

Jabotinsky became increasingly hostile to what he perceived as Zionist acquiescence to Britain’s disregard for its obligations to the Jews. He demanded that Transjordan be included in the Jewish National Home in Palestine. He poured scorn on the Labour Zionists who eschewed the restoration of their own armed forces, which had been disbanded at the end of World War I.

“If you wish to colonise a land in which people are already living, you must provide a garrison for the land, or find some ‘rich man’ or benefactor who will provide a garrison on your behalf. Or else—or else, give up your colonisation, for without an armed force which will render physically impossible any attempt to destroy or prevent this colonisation, colonisation is impossible, not ‘difficult,’ not ‘dangerous,’ but IMPOSSIBLE!...

“Zionism is a colonising adventure and therefore it stands or falls by the question of armed force. It is important...to speak Hebrew, but unfortunately it is even more important to be able to shoot—or else I am through with playing at colonisation.”

Two years later, Jabotinsky founded the Revisionist party, which was to become the Zionist brownshirts, more and more closely mimicking the militarism of Mussolini and Hitler, although Jabotinsky naturally never referred to himself as a fascist. He was quite clear about his objectives. “We want a Jewish empire,” he told a journalist in 1935.

The Revisionists and its armed wing, the Irgun, led by Menachem Begin, and later the Stern Gang, among whose leaders was another future prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, waged a campaign of terror aimed at driving out the British and establishing a Jewish state on the entire land of Biblical Palestine, including Transjordan. With the Jews a minority in Palestine, such a state would necessarily mean expelling the Arab population to ensure its Jewish character.

The war between Israel and its Arab neighbours that followed the United Nations’ partition of Palestine—Israel’s so-called War of Independence—led to the flight or expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Arabs and their transformation into refugees. The Revisionists’ terrorist activities in furtherance of their policy of ethnic cleansing, or population “transfer,” carried out by the Irgun and the Stern gang and sanctioned by the Labour Zionists, played a major role in driving the Palestinians from their homes.

But so bitter were the divisions between the Revisionists and Labour Zionists that all-out civil war nearly broke out only days after the end of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war over whether to try to capture East Jerusalem. It was only averted when the right-wing forces backed down after the sinking of the Altalena, laden with arms to continue the war, by the Labour government’s forces.

Surrounded by hostile neighbours, Israel was from its inception a garrison state and placed its Arab citizens under military law. However, for the next 20 years, the Labour Zionists were to dominate political life in Israel and the extreme right-wing forces, like their counterparts elsewhere, were to remain in the political wilderness until the late 1970s.

While initially the Labour Zionists presented Israel as a David fighting an Arab Goliath and clothed themselves in socialist colours, these myths were soon punctured.

When France and Britain invaded Egypt in 1956 in response to Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal, Israeli troops seized the Sinai desert. But their actions conflicted with US interests in the oil-rich region. The Eisenhower administration refused to accept the former colonial powers’ attempts to regain control of the Canal and maintain their influence in the Middle East, and ordered Britain, France and Israel to pull out.

By 1967, the situation had changed. While the US had largely seen off Britain’s and France’s influence in the region, it now faced the growing radicalisation of the Arab masses and Moscow’s growing interest and influence in the region, marked especially by Egypt’s turn to the Soviet Union for development loans and military aid.

Starting with President Kennedy’s sale of Hawk missiles to Israel in 1963, the US began to view Israel, alongside Saudi Arabia and Iran, as a means of promoting its own interests. While the relationship has not always been a smooth one, it was from this point that US aid began to increase its aid to Israel to the $3 billion a year that it is today.

When Nasser provoked a confrontation with Israel in 1967, the US—fully aware of the latter’s superior forces—sanctioned Israel’s long-planned invasion of Egypt, Syria and Jordan in the Six Day War of June 1967.

The June war, prosecuted by a Labour-led National Unity government that included, for the first time since the establishment of the Zionist state, members of the Revisionist movement, by then renamed the Herut party, marked a turning point in Israel’s history.

It created a new generation of Palestinian refugees—some becoming refugees a second time—and extended Israeli control over all of Mandate Palestine. Israel became the major military power in the Middle East. It initiated the policy of Greater Israel, and spawned a new social layer committed to and even dependent on an expansionary policy.

Within the Labour Party and its political partners, this was expressed in the rise of a new and more overtly imperialist and racist layer of former military commanders such as Yitzhak Rabin, Moshe Dayan, Yigal Allon and Ariel Sharon.

The National Unity government established settlements in the newly occupied territories within weeks of the war, in defiance of international conventions, ostensibly for security reasons. Yigal Allon, a Labour Party minister and former general, proposed the annexation of the Jordan valley and the Golan Heights—a proposal that was to later become official Labour Party policy. He proposed a Jewish settlement near Hebron, Kiryat Arba, although this was not implemented until it was set in motion a decade later by right-wing settler forces. Today, this town has become the bastion of Jewish extremism.

All parties within the coalition supported this policy. After all, if Jews could live in the Arab towns and neighbourhoods of Jaffa and Haifa and consider them their legitimate homes, there was no reason to prevent them from living in Nablus or Hebron.

Golda Meir became prime minister in 1970 because she wholeheartedly embraced the nationalist perspective of the Labour Zionists and appealed to history as proof of the legitimacy, morality and exclusivity of the Jewish people’s right to the newly enlarged country.

But the Jewish settlements, surrounded by a hostile Arab population, were not attractive to the majority of Israelis. Therefore, under Meir’s leadership, a new wave of religious immigrants, mainly from the United States, was encouraged to come and settle in the Occupied Territories.

Thus, the settlements were to create a small but politically influential social layer that had the most direct vested interest in the expansionary policy of the dominant layers of the Israeli bourgeoisie. They provided a pole of attraction for some of the most reactionary forces, without whom the Labour Zionists could not have established these outposts within the Arab territories.

The origins and character of the new right-wing forces

Some religious right-wing groups had greeted Israel’s surprise (to all but the Israeli military establishment and the CIA) victory in 1967 as nothing short of a miracle. It was the ‘“beginning of Redemption” that offered an opportunity to realise the Biblical vision of the “whole land of Israel” of Judea and Samaria.

They spawned the new theology of the “Land of Israel,” a messianic interpretation of the Zionist state that meant that the settlement of the West Bank was the most important part of a redemption process. It was also fundamentalist: the scriptures provided the basis for understanding reality and determining the mode of behaviour for their members and the Jewish state.

In this, it should be noted, they mirrored their counterparts in the Muslim Brotherhood. Although secular Zionists had always encouraged the return of the Jews to Palestine, they had done so in nationalist terms—arguing that the Jews constituted a nation. For these religious groups, the “return” was bound up with the religious duty to settle the land and with the resurgence of Jewish religious beliefs.

While their forces were small, from the very first the settlers and ultra-religious groups played an important role in shifting Israeli politics to the right. In part, at least, this was because they found a key ally: General Ariel Sharon.

While Sharon had come from a Labour Zionist background, his ruthlessness, opportunism and unpredictability gave him a reputation as a loose cannon. After resigning from the army in 1973, he was elected to the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, for the Liberal party, one of the forerunners of the Likud Party. Within a year, he had resigned his seat in order to resume his military career. He briefly served Labour Prime Minister Rabin as special security advisor before establishing his own party and then, in 1977, dissolving it into Likud.

For Sharon, a secular Jew and military man, the expansion of the Zionist state and the settlements were bound up with security and defensible borders. Even before he resigned from the army in 1973 to take up a political career, Sharon formed an alliance with the religious movement, which he reasoned would provide the necessary forces for the new Jewish settlements. For the religious settlers, Sharon provided the military justification and later the authority, when he became minister of agriculture, to seize land in the Occupied Territories.

The military needs of the political Zionists coincided with those of the religious Zionists. Indeed, whenever the legality of Israel’s settlements and land confiscations faced a challenge in Israel’s High Court, the government could always be relied upon to back the settlements by justifying them in terms of security.

But the pace of settlement development did not match the right wing’s expectations. When the terms of the armistice with Egypt after the October 1973 war, which damaged Israel’s geopolitical stature, forced Israel to make the first territorial concessions in the Sinai Peninsula, the settlers turned to the National Religious Party, one of the components of the 1967 National Unity government, to oppose them. Its failure to do so provided a further impetus for the political development of the settler movement.

In 1974, some of these forces, which constituted a faction within the National Religious Party, formed the Gush Emunim, the Block of the Faithful, under the leadership of a religious zealot, Rabbi Moshe Levinger. Gush Emunim was an extra-parliamentary pressure group unaffiliated with any political party. Levinger became the father of the settler movement.

Even further to the right was Rabbi Meir Kahane, leader of the US Jewish Defence League (JDL), an extremist vigilante movement with the stated aim of defending Jewish neighbourhoods in New York City against anti-Semitism and street crime. Later, the JDL campaigned stridently against the repression of Soviet Jewry and the refusal of the Stalinist bureaucracy to let the Jews emigrate to Israel, harassing Russian artists and demonstrating, often violently, outside Russian agencies. The JDL’s thuggery, which did not flinch at using guns and bombs, helped force Soviet Jewry up the US political agenda, dovetailing with the Cold War agenda of staunch anti-communists and leading to the 1975 Jackson-Vanick amendment to US trade laws. This provision withheld “most favoured nation status” from countries that restricted Jewish emigration. The bill’s principal architect was Richard Perle, who was to become a leading neo-conservative ideologue and ally of the current Bush administration.

As long as the JDL’s activities suited Washington’s Cold War politics, funding flowed Kahane’s way and his penchant for violence was tolerated. But in 1971, after receiving a suspended sentence for the illegal possession of guns, ammunition and explosives and inciting violence, he fled to Israel. By the mid-1970s, the FBI consistently referred to the JDL as a terrorist group.

In Israel, Kahane set about establishing a fascistic party, which he called Kach, to claim the inheritance of the Revisionist movement. Kahane used violent provocations to polarise relations between Palestinians and Jews and to create the conditions for expelling the Palestinians not only from the Occupied Territories, but from within Israel itself—where in the late 1970s they constituted 16 percent of the population.

The mission of Gush Emunim, Kach and similar forces was to oppose further territorial concessions and to struggle for the extension of Israeli sovereignty over the Occupied Territories. The land was, they claimed, holy, God-given, inalienably theirs, and thus non-negotiable. Their task was to force the Labour government to establish as many settlements as possible in the “Land of Israel” and East Jerusalem, including the heavily populated Palestinian areas, and to engineer the “transfer” of the Arab population.

They also took note of a broad-based extra-parliamentary protest movement that arose in the aftermath of the October 1973 war demanding the resignation of the leading government ministers responsible for Israel’s lack of preparedness for the war and, coalescing with a broader social movement, calling for widespread political reform. Following a critical report from the Agranat Commission, Prime Minister Golda Meir, Defence Minister Moshe Dayan and Foreign Secretary Abba Eban were forced to resign, to be succeeded by a new generation of Labour leaders: Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres.

Gush Emunim was also active in opposing any agreements with Egypt and Syria. It mounted demonstrations and set up illegal settlements in the West Bank, frequently becoming involved in confrontations with the Israeli army.

Its adherents would settle a site without government permission or contrary to government policy or under false pretences, to force the government to recognise it later as an accomplished fact. For example, after seven unsuccessful attempts in 1974-1975 to establish settlements in the Nablus area, they reached a compromise with the then-Labour minister of defence, Shimon Peres, who allowed them to stay at an army base called Qadum, west of Nablus. Two years later, the base was officially transformed into the settlement of Qedumim.

It was Ariel Sharon who defended the settlers against the military sent in by the Rabin government in 1974. He told an Israeli newspaper that it was an “immoral military command, and it is necessary [for the soldiers] to refuse such orders. I would not have obeyed such orders.” For Sharon, it was immoral because it undermined Israel’s “security needs,” not because it violated religious duties.

By 1977, almost 30 settlements with some 4,500 Israeli inhabitants had been built in the West Bank, mostly in areas earmarked for development under the Allon Plan. A further 50,000 Israelis lived within the newly extended city limits of Jerusalem.

The Labour government, despite its democratic pretensions, had to administer a military occupation of the territories seized during the 1967 war both to defend its colonisation policy on the ground and to subjugate the Palestinians. The occupation became increasingly brutal as the Palestinians resisted. Kach’s thugs played a crucial role in this.

Within Israel itself, the end of the long postwar boom, soaring inflation, the massive military expenditure—nearly half of the gross domestic product—and the impoverished conditions of the immigrants to Israel from the Middle East and North Africa gave rise to increasing social tensions.

Tensions also heightened between Jewish and Arab Israelis over land and jobs. Firstly, the government’s announcement in February 1976 that it would confiscate thousands of acres of land in the West Bank to “develop the Galilee for both its Jewish and Arab inhabitants” provoked a general strike among Arab Israelis and violent confrontations with the army that left six Arab Israelis dead and scores injured, and several dozen policemen wounded. Right-wing student activists and future Likud members of parliament used these events to engineer provocative confrontations and launch heir own political careers.

Secondly, there was growing competition for lower-paid jobs as Jewish bosses realised that Arab Israelis as well as Palestinians from the Occupied Territories provided a cheaper alternative to heavily unionised Jewish labour.

In the years that followed the 1967 war, Herut, the political heir to the extreme right-wing Revisionist movement that appealed to and was led by Jews from Eastern Europe, transformed itself through a series of mergers and name changes into Likud, which opposed any territorial compromise with the Arabs. It made a conscious effort to whip up and manipulate the divisions between the poor and more prosperous Israelis that corresponded in some degree to their origins in the Middle East and North Africa, and Europe, respectively.

By 1977, the social forces set in motion by the 1967 war combined to bring down the Labour Zionists, who had ruled Israel for nearly 30 years, and pave the way for Israel’s lurch further rightwards and increasing political instability. The expansion of Israel’s rule via military conquest required a different type of government.

For the small settler movement, the Likud government’s electoral victory was a dream come true. The political heirs of the Revisionist movement had come to power. Led by Menachem Begin, the Irgun terrorist leader infamous for the massacre at Deir Yassin of 250 Palestinians in 1948, Likud had crafted a political line that had fused social resentment towards the privileged Labour elite with economic liberalisation and “free market” reforms, ultra-nationalism and anti-Arab chauvinism.

At the core of this ideology was the pledge to hold on to the Occupied Territories as part of Greater Israel. The Likud government would be instrumental in furthering the growth of the settler movement.

Whereas Labour’s policy had largely involved building settlements that encircled the Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the incoming Likud government sought not only to expand the number of settlements, but also to build them throughout the Occupied Territories, with the intention of making life as miserable as possible for the Arab population so that they would eventually leave.

In September 1977, Ariel Sharon, who had been rewarded for dissolving his own small party and joining Likud with the post of minister for agriculture, unveiled a master plan called “A Vision of Israel at Century’s End.” He called for the settlement of 2 million Jews in the Occupied Territories by the end of the twentieth century and a new wave of immigration to Israel, particularly from the Soviet Union and the US. He claimed that it was no less valid to create a Jewish majority on the West Bank than it had been for the Zionist pioneers to do so along the Mediterranean coast during the 1920s and 1930s.

Such settlements, he reasoned, would impose a Jewish majority on the West Bank and make it impossible for Israel to relinquish it without expelling hundreds of thousands of Jews and precipitating civil war. In this way, he sought to pre-empt any agreement based upon trading land for peace.

In less than four years, Sharon built 62 new settlements at a cost of more than $1 billion, completely changing the landscape of the Occupied Territories. Not without reason has he become known as the political godfather of the settlement project.

He also claimed in a newspaper interview in 1973 that he had been “the initiator of the idea of establishing Jewish settlements in the [Gaza] Strip.” He explained, “I established Kfar Darom [the first settlement in the Gaza Strip] and I established Netzarim, and encircled their territory with fences.”

In its alliance with the settlers, Likud helped build a monster that has not always proved easy to control. The attempt by the Begin government to strike a deal with Egypt at Camp David in 1978 that entailed giving back Sinai and Yamit, a Sinai settlement, and giving autonomy to the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza outraged the settler movement. Some right-wing politicians left Likud in disgust and formed the Techiya party. A faction within the Gush Emunim set up the Jewish Underground that espoused vigilante terrorism. It blew up the cars of the mayors of Ramallah and Nablus and threw a hand grenade into a mosque, injuring a dozen Arabs. It even planned to blow up the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.

These atrocities and countless other acts of violence went unpunished. Kiryat Arba, near Hebron, was Rabbi Meir Kahane’s stronghold and served as a focal point for violence against the Palestinian population.

Having lavishly funded Gush Emunim, which had carried out his expansionist policy, Begin refused to take action against the Zionist terrorists or rein in their activities even though the secret services knew of their plans. Gush leaders, including men later jailed for terrorism, were welcome in Begin’s rooms in the Israeli parliament.

Another and much larger Gush Emunim faction played an important role in the radicalisation of the extreme right: the Movement to Halt the Retreat in Sinai. Formed to oppose the Israeli evacuation of northern Sinai required under the Camp David agreement with Egypt, it mobilised about 1,000 activists to prevent the pullout from Yamit and a few cooperative settlements. Although Sinai had no biblical significance whatsoever, they feared that it heralded the beginning of a wider territorial compromise. Several violent confrontations ensued, to no avail. They were forced to withdraw. But they had served a warning that any pullout from the West Bank would mean a much more determined struggle.

The rise of the right-wing forces did not go unopposed. Peace Now was launched shortly after Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem in 1977. It was triggered by an open letter to Likud Prime Minister Menachem Begin, signed by 350 reserve officers in the Israeli army, many of whom were highly decorated, opposing the establishment of Zionist settlements in the territories occupied since the 1967 war. They too shared a Zionist standpoint, stating that they preferred a smaller Israel at peace with its neighbours to a Greater Israel at permanent war. Any other policy would create “doubts as to the justice of our cause.... Real security can be achieved only in peace. The real strength of the Israeli army grows out of the citizenry-soldiers’ identification with state policy.”

Nevertheless, the right wing denounced the signatories as traitors. In response, 40,000 people spontaneously took to the streets to defend them. Peace Now focused on the settlements in the Occupied Territories as the main obstacle to peace. In June 1979, it organised rallies of more than 3,000 people at Elon Moreh, a Gush Emunim settlement near Nablus. Its demonstrations encouraged Palestinian landowners to file a suit in an Israeli court claiming that their land had been seized illegally.

The high court ruled that Elon Moreh must be dismantled. But Army Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan and Agriculture Minister Ariel Sharon fought tooth and nail to get around the ruling. Within six months, the Israeli cabinet announced, in defiance of international conventions, that henceforth any land that had previously belonged to Jordan, or that was unregistered or uncultivated, could be expropriated for settlers. The great West Bank land grab had begun.

In the 1981 election campaign, which Labour was expected to win, Begin and the Likud party accused Labour of corruption and discrimination against the poor Sephardi Jews of Middle Eastern and North African origin, stoking long-held grievances. The campaign became violent and led to a narrow Likud victory over Labour, which served to legitimise the violence pioneered by Kach and later Gush Emunim.

Right wing sets Likud’s political agenda

Having concluded a peace agreement with Egypt, the way was now clear for the Likud government to further expand the settlements in the Occupied Territories. Likud expropriated thousands of acres of Palestinian land in the West Bank, pushing land in Jewish ownership up from 0.5 percent in 1967 to 40 percent in 1984. Much of this was acquired by corrupt, fraudulent or illegal means, enriching Israeli land dealers and builders around Sharon in the process. The government even sent its salesmen to promote West Bank land sales to rich American Jews. By the beginning of 1984, it had established 112 settlements.

The government also had a free hand to deal with the Palestine Liberation Organisation, based since 1970 in Lebanon, secure in the knowledge that Egypt would not intervene. Begin advanced the former Stern Gang terrorist Yitzhak Shamir and made Ariel Sharon defence secretary. A murderous all-out war against the PLO and Lebanon was now only a matter of timing. In June 1982, Sharon invaded Lebanon, drove the PLO out of south Lebanon and prepared to besiege Beirut.

The first anti-war protests broke out soon after the war began, when Peace Now reservists received a few days’ break. Only Begin’s denials that Israel was about to invade Lebanon had prevented anti-war demonstrations prior to the war. Now, 120,000 demonstrators took to the streets of Tel Aviv to protest the war. This was the first time that any Israeli movement had dared to protest a war waged by the Israeli army. Right-wing forces jumped in to defend Begin and Sharon.

Although there were other anti-war movements, the religious right and ultra-nationalists singled out Peace Now for vilification and intimidation because of its position on settlements in the Occupied Territories. When Peace Now sponsored an enormous rally of 400,000 Israelis to oppose the massacre of Palestinians by Christian militia in the Beirut refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla in September 1982, and to demand an inquiry into the role played by Israeli forces under Sharon’s command, tensions reached fever pitch. For months after the invasion of Lebanon, Peace Now activists kept up a vigil outside Begin’s official residence, demanding withdrawal from Lebanon and holding up placards with the number of Israeli casualties. Many thought that their action had played a part when in 1983 Begin suddenly resigned, a broken man, without any explanation, shortly after the number of Israeli casualties reached 500. Begin was succeeded by Ytzhak Shamir, an even more right-wing former terrorist, as prime minister.

The right-wing activists were infuriated by Peace Now. In 1983, a fanatic assassinated one of Peace Now’s leading activists, Emil Greentzweig, during a demonstration, and wounded a score of other demonstrators. Prominent liberal academics, artists and journalists became targets for right-wing violence. When one political pollster reported that the majority of Israelis wanted to trade land for peace, his apartment was torched.

The climate of intimidation and fear was stoked by politicians like Sharon, who branded members of Peace Now “traitors” and “defeatists.” Left-wing meetings were attacked and broken up in a style reminiscent of the fascists of the 1920s and 1930s. It was in this fetid atmosphere that Rabbi Kahane was able to mobilise support to lift a 10-year ban and win a seat in Israel’s parliament in the 1984 elections.

The event that really exposed the degree to which these extremist forces had penetrated the Israeli political elite was the trial of the Jewish Underground movement that had tried to blow up the Al Aqsa mosque, the third most holy site in the Moslem world. Al Aqsa is built on the site of the second Hebrew temple, and these religious fanatics believed that the catastrophic upheavals that would follow its removal would pave the way for the redemption of Israel and the building of the third temple.

The trial became a cause célèbre of the right wing. Twenty members of parliament from all the right-wing and nationalist parties, including Likud, openly campaigned on behalf of the defendants, who claimed that they had the support of another 25 MPs. Some MPs even appeared as character witnesses for the defence. Rabbis also supported them.

Three of the accused were sentenced to life imprisonment, while the other 12 received sentences of between four months and seven years. So lenient were most of the sentences that supporters of the Underground shouted out, “We’ve won, we’ve won.”

But the settlement project failed to generate sufficient support within Israel. When the supply of religious settlers dwindled, Gush Emunim planners working with the Likud government decided in 1983 that the only way to judaicise the West Bank was to offer huge public subsidies and attractive housing to Jews then living within the 1967 borders. By the following year, subsidies to the settlements were four times higher per capita than aid to the Jewish residents of the Upper Galilee. Under the prevailing conditions of hyperinflation and severe economic dislocation, this constituted a major attraction for hard-pressed Israeli families, and created a broader political constituency on the West Bank for the right-wing political parties.

The rightward shift in Israeli politics was indicated by the results of the 1984 election. While the right wing as a whole maintained its share of the vote in relation to Labour, Likud lost seats to other right-wing parties, Techiya and Morasha.

The religious zealot Rabbi Meir Kahane and his Kach party were elected to parliament, attracting votes from the poorest sections of Israeli society, including many in the army. The second on his list had been imprisoned for political thuggery, while the third, Dr. Baruch Goldstein, would 10 years later gun down 29 men and children at prayer in a mosque in Hebron.

It was not simply that the Labour Party had failed to offer a progressive alternative to Likud that facilitated the shift to the right in Israel. When Likud proved unable to continue to govern as a result of the fragmentation of the right wing, Labour came to its rescue. Likud-Labour governments of national unity were formed between 1984 and 1992.

While some of the more left-wing Labour bloc of parties refused to join forces with the right wing, the participation of most of the Labour Alignment and its willingness to sanction the creeping annexation and settlement of the Occupied Territories served to legitimise the large number of settlements built between 1977 and 1984, and, through this, the activities of the ultra-nationalist and religious parties.

The right wing both in and out of Likud continued to grow, pushing the government itself ever further to the right. The fracturing of the Zionist political establishment spawned new right-wing formations of which Shas, a religious party orientated towards the Jews of Middle Eastern and North African origin, was but one manifestation. In part, the appeal of such parties was in their network of social welfare facilities for the poor and in part because they were not associated with the elitist and corrupt Labour establishment.

The price of establishing a large coalition dependent upon small right-wing parties was the offer of seats round the cabinet table, where each party sought to obtain posts that would provide opportunities for political patronage. Parties and leaders used the coveted interior and housing ministries to build up their own social constituencies.

By 1992, it had become clear to the Israeli financial elite that on every count the government’s right-wing policies in pursuit of a Greater Israel had produced a disaster. The army was bogged down in Lebanon. The economy was stagnant. Palestinian workers and youth had been in revolt against their dreadful economic and social conditions since December 1987.

Despite the most brutal reprisals, the army had been unable to put down the uprising. The costs of the war in the Lebanon, the occupation, and the subsidies for the settlements were eroding the very economic and political foundations of the state. Israel’s position as a garrison state, isolated from the regional economy, had led to a sharp economic and social crisis. The Israeli capitalist class had to break out from its economic isolation.

The 1993 Oslo Accords

In 1992, Yitzhak Rabin came to power as the head of a Labour government with a pledge to reach an accommodation with the Palestinians within a year. With the help of Peace Now, the Labour party cast itself as the party of peace, advancing a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians as the most rational solution to the conflict from the perspective of Israel’s own national interests.

The 1993 Oslo Agreement between Israel and the PLO epitomised the failure of the PLO’s bourgeois nationalist perspective to secure the democratic and social aspirations of the Palestinian masses. It was an agreement imposed by US imperialism on an isolated Palestinian leadership, in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Gulf War, and the wholesale accommodation to Washington of the Arab regimes.

In return for a promise of a heavily truncated degree of self-rule and the eventual creation of a Palestinian mini-state on the West Bank and Gaza, the PLO agreed to recognise the state of Israel.

But Israel too had been forced to make compromises. Oslo signalled the recognition by Israel’s more perceptive politicians that the end of the Cold War had also weakened Israel’s position. In addition to Israel, the US could now rely on a number of Arab regimes, such as Egypt and the Gulf States, to police the region, as the 1991 Gulf War had demonstrated. Moreover, in a globalised economy, Israel needed access to Middle Eastern markets if it was to prosper, and the price for this was to agree to the creation of the Palestinian Authority.

But even such partial concessions contained in the agreement famously initiated on the lawn of the White House in September 1993 were unacceptable to the rightist settlers’ movement to which the policy of “Greater Israel” had given rise.

Within Israel’s fractured political system, small political parties were able to take advantage of their position as king-makers to extract enormous financial concessions that buttressed their own social base. They therefore had no interest in seeing a peace agreement signed, especially as many of their own supporters were adversely affected by the relocation of industries to the West Bank, Jordan and Egypt in search of a ready supply of cheap labour.

The negotiations were continually frustrated by the need to placate the right-wing Zionists for whom any surrender of the settlements was an anathema. And Jewish settlements continued to be built at an even faster rate than before in the West Bank and Gaza for mainly US and Russian immigrants. A system of roads was built that divided Palestinian towns and villages from each other while linking the settlements, thereby denying the Palestinian entity any territorial contiguity. But even this was not considered sufficient by the settlers.

The shift in Israeli policy, so necessary for the Israel capitalist class, set off an explosive reaction among the extreme right-wing forces. The March 1994 massacre of 29 Palestinians in Hebron by the US-born fanatic and Kach member Baruch Goldstein was only the first significant expression of their opposition.

In October 1995, the opposition Likud party was silent as right-wing religious nationalists denounced Prime Minister Rabin as a traitor in front of an angry demonstration in Jerusalem. A month later, Rabin was assassinated by a young religious zealot, Yigal Amir. The first killing of an Israeli leader since the founding of the state of Israel was carried out not by an Arab, but by a Jew.

The assassination achieved its political objective. It brought Binyamin Netanyahu’s Likud government to power in 1996, and the peace talks came to a virtual standstill.

The majority of Israelis were still anxious for some resolution of the conflict and voted Labour’s Ehud Barak in as prime minister in 1999 to reach an agreement with the Palestinians. Barak’s Labour coalition tried to breathe new life into the faltering peace talks, but failed. This was in part because he was not offering anything to the Palestinians that met even their elementary requirements. But it was also because even the concessions he was prepared to offer were vetoed by the right-wing and religious parties that were for the first time brought into a Labour-led coalition, including Shas and Yisrael B’Aliya, the Russian immigrant party.

Sharon’s visit surrounded by more than 100 heavily armed security forces to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem in September 2000 was expressly designed to put an end to any prospect of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza by provoking a violent response by the Palestinians.

Too many people had prospered on the back of the illegal settlement policy lavishly bankrolled and supported by Washington. Fortunes had been made by siphoning government funds earmarked for development projects. And for many poorer people, the facilities provided by the religious parties extracted from the government as the price of their support provided a lifeline. It was, in the final analysis, impossible to make any concessions to the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinians within the context of a religious state that had come into existence through the expulsion of the Palestinians from their homes.

Since coming to power in 2001, Sharon has done everything in his power to forestall any possibility of a Palestinian state. He has used the continuing violence—which he has done so much to provoke with four years of roadblocks, curfews, house demolitions, political assassinations and military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza—to further his plans to expand the Zionist state. In the name of waging a “war on terror,” he has implemented a veritable war of terror that has seen the framework for his Greater Israel come together.

Settlement expansion has greatly accelerated over the last five years, particularly in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, where 450,000 Jewish Israelis now live. Sharon’s settlement project has been so successful that few believe that the “two states” solution called for under Oslo is a viable option. He has embraced the Labour Party’s idea of a separation wall that cuts through the West Bank and will permanently annex the best Palestinian land to Israel. All these measures have been carried out with the full support of the Bush administration.

In return, Sharon has offered the minor concession of pulling out the settlements from Gaza and four small ones in the West Bank. His is a tactical retreat to facilitate a strategic advance in the spirit of realpolitik. His approach allows him to deal with the question of borders and settlements without negotiations and on terms favourable to Israel. His close confidant, Dov Weisglass, blurted out the truth when he said that the disengagement plan was “actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.”

Sharon himself made it clear at the Sharm el Sheikh summit in February 2005 that “there will not be a direct transition from the disengagement plan to the Road Map” and has said that his plan “constitutes a mortal blow to the Palestinians.”

He is no longer willing to spend an exorbitant amount of money to defend a few isolated settlers in the West Bank and 8,000 settlers surrounded by 1.3 million hostile Palestinians in the Gaza Strip when he can annex, with the consent of the White House, much of the West Bank and thereby reduce the possibility that it will have to be surrendered under any future agreement. Even as he pulls settlers out of 1,700 homes in the Gaza Strip, his government has authorised a far more significant settlement programme by tens of thousands of people in the West Bank, in defiance of the “Road Map” requirement to halt on all housing construction there.

In the process, Sharon has been called a “peacemaker” and received the support of his former opponents on the left and in Peace Now. Last year, the Labour Party stepped in to prevent the Likud-led coalition government’s collapse after the resignations and sackings of cabinet ministers and parties opposed to the pullout. All the polls have consistently shown that 70 percent of the Israeli population supports the pullout because they want an end to the long-running conflict with the Palestinians on the basis of some land-for-peace agreement.

None of these considerations count as far as the extreme right is concerned. They too view their old ally as a “peacenik” and therefore a traitor to the Zionist cause. The growth of such a fascistic layer opposed to any concessions to the Palestinians, even when made in return for the much greater prize of US backing for the consolidation of Israel’s hold on the West Bank, raises the spectre of civil war in Israel—between religious and secular Jews. As such, it again exposes the myth that the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine at the expense of those already living there would provide a solution to the persecution of the Jews.

It is not only peace with the Palestinians and Israel’s Arab neighbours that is incompatible with support for the Zionist state apparatus and the nationalist ideology of Zionism—but peace between the Jews themselves.

Courtesy of World Socialist Web Site

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