Summary
Falk’s term, in “Israel’s Politics of Fragmentation” (October 10, 2013) in Palestine: The Legitimacy of Hope, for Israel’s “inward moves designed to weaken Palestinian resistance and induce despair and de facto surrender” — complementing and twinned with the Politics of deflection: “deflection is an unwitting enabler of fragmentation, but it is also its twin or complement.”
Details
- The logic: “to weaken, if not destroy, a political opposition configuration by destroying its unity of purpose and strategy and fomenting, to the extent possible, conflicts between different tendencies within the adversarial movement”. Palestinians stress unity and reconciliation; “the Israelis fan the flames of disunity, stigmatizing elements of the Palestinian reality that are relevantly submissive and pushing the agenda and framework devised by Tel Aviv”. From 1948 to the present there have been ebbs and flows: “maximum unity was achieved during the time when Yasser Arafat was the resistance leader; maximum fragmentation has been evident since Hamas was successful in the 2006 elections and managed to seize governmental control from Fatah in Gaza a year later.” Israel favours the so-called moderates under the Palestinian Authority while punishing Palestinians who adhere to Hamas (PDF p.229-230, p.233-234).
- Historical roots: the British colonial practice of divide-and-rule, which haunted anticolonial movements everywhere (partition in India, Cyprus, Ireland, Malaysia and Singapore, and Palestine; strife in Nigeria, Kenya, Myanmar, Rwanda), and the settler-colonial movements that eliminated or marginalized indigenous resistance (Australia, Canada, the United States, less so New Zealand; South Africa and Namibia only after decades of barbarous racism). In Palestine the key move was the Balfour Declaration of 1917 — at the time the estimated Arab population was 747,685 (92.1 percent of the total) and the Jewish population 58,728 (7.9 percent) — and the mandate administered as “a sacred trust of civilization” (Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant), with fragmentation assuming the form of interethnic and interreligious strife (PDF p.230-231).
- The 1947 UN partition is treated as a further fragmentation: “General Assembly Resolution 18” [as printed; see the source page’s Open questions], decreeing partition and allocating 55 percent to the Jewish population and 45 percent to the Palestinians “without the slightest effort to assess the wishes of the population resident in Palestine at the time” — “a new rendition of Western paternalism”. Israel’s contention that Palestinians forfeited statehood by rejecting it is rejected: Israel has pretended to accept compromise diplomacy while preventing it — projecting force, expanding settlements, “the ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem”, maximalist security claims — “unlawfully creating facts on the ground, then successfully insisting on their acceptance as valid points of departure”, offering with American help “a hard choice…: accept the Bantustan destiny we offer or remain forever refugees and victims of annexation, exile, discrimination, statelessness” (PDF p.231-233).
- Identity politics: “Jews are defined as a “people without borders” who can gain Israeli nationality no matter where they live on the planet, while Palestinians are excluded from Israeli nationality regardless of how deep their indigenous roots in Palestine itself” — the tangible significance of the “Jewish state” designation (PDF p.233).
- Modalities (the post’s subsections):
- Zionism, the Jewish State, and the Palestinian Minority: “Perhaps the most fundamental form of fragmentation is between Jews and Palestinians living within the state of Israel” — pervasive discrimination against “the 20 percent Palestinian minority (about 1.5 million people)” in legal, social, political, cultural and economic rights; Israel “may be the only state in the world that privileges nationality over citizenship”, including family reunification and residence. If demographic projections prove reliable, “Palestinians could be a majority in Israel as early as 2035 and would almost certainly outnumber Jews in the country by 2048”. A secondary form: the minority’s fragmentation from the rest of the Palestinian corpus — erased from the diplomatic imaginary, “unrepresented at the diplomatic level and lacks any vehicle to express its grievances” (PDF p.234-235).
- Occupied Palestine and the Palestinian Diaspora: denying refugees and the diaspora their right of return “as confirmed by General Assembly Resolution 184” [as printed; see the source page’s Open questions]; “between 4.5 and 5.5 million Palestinians are refugees or living in the diaspora, as well as about 1.4 million residents in the West Bank and 1.6 million in Gaza”. The two-state discourse falsely categorises the dispute as about territory, “not about people”, with a tacit understanding — seemingly including Palestinian Authority officials — that refugee rights will be handled via compensation and return to Palestinian sovereign territory, not to the place of dispossession; this “cruelly consigns several million Palestinians to a permanent limbo” and flies in the face of the right of return affirmed in Resolution 194 and Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (PDF p.235-236).
- “The Two Warring Realms of the Occupation of Palestine: The Palestine Authority versus Hamas” [heading as printed]: Israel drove ideological wedges between Palestinians under occupation since 1967 — first trying to discredit the PLO, which had achieved a unified robust national movement, actually encouraging Hamas’s emergence “as a radical and fragmenting alternative to the PLO when it was founded in the course of the First Intifada”, then repudiating Hamas when it carried armed struggle to pre-1967 Israel. Though Hamas entered political life “with U.S. encouragement”, won the internationally supervised 2006 election and took Gaza in 2007, Israel and the Western powers still categorize it “a terrorist organization” with no international status, relying on the designation to impose the Gaza blockade, collective punishment in violation of Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. The Ramallah Palestinian Authority has refused to treat Hamas as a legitimate governing authority despite Mashaal’s post-2009 shift — agreeing “to accept Israel as a state beside Palestine as a state and discontinue armed struggle, provided Israel agreed to withdraw fully to 1967 borders and implement the right of return for refugees”, with the Charter’s whole-Palestine goal “a matter of history”. Territorial fragmentation is reinforced by ideological fragmentation, Israel authenticating the PA’s secular accommodating leadership while repudiating Hamas’s Islamic orientation (PDF p.236-237).
- Cantonization and the Separation Wall: several hundred checkpoints, closures, curfews, and nighttime arrests — “60 percent of whom are detained in prisons before they reach the age of twenty-five” (young male Palestinians) — plus IDF-settler impunity; the Oslo bisection into Areas A, B and C, with Israel retaining residual security rights; “Area C, where most of the settlements are located, comprises more than 60 percent of the West Bank and is under the exclusive control of Israel”. The settler–Palestinian fragmentation “is so severe that it has been increasingly understood in international circles as a form of apartheid, which the Rome Statute governing the International Criminal Court denominates as one type of “crime against humanity.””; the wall, declared a violation of international law by a 14–1 International Court of Justice vote in 2004, separates Palestinians from one another and from their land (PDF p.238-239).
- “Fragmentation and Self-Determination”: fragmentation’s pervasiveness is why the revived peace process is believed to be “one more turn of the wheel”, allowing Israel to take what remains of Palestine “so as to realize its own conception of Jewish self-determination”. “Just as Israel refuses to restrict the Jewish right of return, so it also refuses to delimit its boundaries”; negotiations are approached “as a zero-sum dynamic of gain for itself and loss for Palestine, a process hidden from view by the politics of deflection and undermining through the politics of fragmentation the Palestinian capacity for coherent resistance” (PDF p.239).
Related pages
Palestine: The Legitimacy of Hope, Politics of deflection, Legitimacy struggle, Hamas, Palestinian Authority, Separation wall, Apartheid, Right of Return, Balfour Declaration, Bantustans