1967
Written by Gadi Algazi for the Alternative Information Center (AIC)
This article was translated from the Hebrew original by Daphna Levit. The article was written for the upcoming (July, 2007) issue of /Mitzad Sheni/ <http://www.alternativenews.org/aic-publications/mitsad-sheni/>, the Alternative Information Center’s Hebrew quarterly journal.
Gadi Algazi is a political activist, member of Tarabut--Hitchabrut http://www.tarabut.info <http://www.tarabut.info/>and teaches history at Tel Aviv University.
http://www.alternativenews.org/news/english/1967-20070704.html
In June 1967, Israel broke through its temporary borders, and, under the auspices of a military conquest, embarked upon an extensive colonial project in the newly conquered territories. The historical timing is intriguing: by the late 1960s it seemed that the crises of de-colonization were coming to an end. During the 1950s and the 1960s, anti-colonial movements in Asia and Africa stripped the old colonial powers of the vestiges of the empires they had established at the end of the nineteenth century, and in some cases, since the early modern period. Disillusionment with de-colonization was still lying ahead of the liberated nations: the replacement of direct political rule by indirect domination, the failure of the new elites to fulfill the promises associated with political liberation, and the disenchantment from illusions of “modernization” and unrestrained “development” (in this respect one could have learned much from the longer, bitterer experience of Latin America). In 1967, two years after France’s final exit from Algiers, while the USA just began to flounder in the mess of Vietnam, Israel opened a new chapter in the history of the conflict: it imposed its military rule over a million and a half Palestinians deprived of political rights, but refrained from annexing most of the territories—except for Jerusalem (1967) and the Golan Heights (1981). The military occupation had begun.
Israel became a regional power. It erased the “shame of 1956”—Israel’s forced withdrawal from the Sinai just a few weeks after David Ben Gurion’s triumphant declaration of the founding of Israel’s Third Kingdom. Now his followers could show that the future belonged to them. The military victory blinded the eyes of many—not just those of Israel’s leaders who were drunk with power. It also concealed essential aspects of the new phase from most of the critics of the occupation. The military conquest and the following repression rule, with its horrors and brutal practices, draw attention concealed the renewed colonial project.
In hindsight, it is easy to recognize that the Israeli occupation is essentially a colonial project enacted under the auspices of a military occupation. The occupation provides ideal conditions for the process of dispossession and settlement: it is implemented against residents with no rights of citizenship, under the protective shield of a military occupation which employs emergency regulations and unrestrained power. A large jumble of military regulations, remnants of Jordanian and Ottoman laws, Israeli law and military adjudication enables the colonial process to progress effectively and rapidly, to seize natural resources, land and water and to establish facts on the ground. The settlements are no added bonus to the occupation, no accident that occurred under pressure from the Messianic and nationalistic right; they are its heart and soul and its raison d’être.
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