[lbo-talk] 1967, an article by Gadi Algazi

[Bryan Atinsky]

It is quite a long piece, so I only put a section of it here:

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.

[...]

For the whole article:
http://www.alternativenews.org/news/english/1967-20070704.html