Another major round of violence between Israelis and Palestinians was making headlines again this month. Israel sought to illegally expel Palestinians from the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in occupied East Jerusalem, resulting in protests that Israel tried to put down with force. This led to Israeli forces attacking Palestinians on the Temple Mount, including firing tear gas and stun grenades within the Al Aqsa Mosque compound. Hamas threatened that if Israel did not remove its forces from the Temple Mount, it would retaliate. Israeli forces remained and Hamas began indiscriminately firing rockets into Israel, while Israel began indiscriminately bombing Gaza.
Scott Horton had me on his show to discuss the historical context that is critical for understanding this and previous rounds of violence, and for understanding why this cycle will continue until the US ceases its support for Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians.
Scott prefaced the discussion by describing my book Obstacle to Peace: The US Role in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict as an “an incredibly important book”. Speaking about my book’s explanation of how the violence is deliberately perpetuated, he said, “You are one of if not the very best on it in the whole world.”
Topics we covered include:
- How Israel tacitly if not directly supported Hamas when it was originally founded because Hamas posed a challenge to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which posed a threat to Israel because PLO leader Yasser Arafat had dangerously accepted United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 as the basis for a two-state solution to the ongoing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.
- How the PLO’s moderation and movement away from armed resistance toward engagement in a political process threatened Israel because Israel’s goal was to prevent implementation of the two-state solution so that it could pursue its land-grabbing policies under the occupation regime in has had in place since 1967.
- How Israel acted to deliberately provoke the more extremist elements in Palestinian society to engage in violence and terrorism because it required such behavior to serve as a pretext for its brutal oppression of the Palestinian people under the occupation regime.
- How Israel acted to try to ensure that Hamas would not follow the PLO down the path of moving away from armed resistance toward engagement in the political process, such as by assassinating Hamas leader Sheikh Yassin shortly after he had declared that Hamas could accept a Palestinian state alongside Israel in line with the requirement of Resolution 242 for Israeli forces to withdraw to the pre-June 1967 armistice lines.
- How the propaganda narrative of Hamas’s rise in power in Gaza was that the group implemented a “coup” against the President Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority (PA), but the real story is that it was the Abbas and his Fatah party that attempted to implement a coup against Hamas after Hamas legitimately won legislative elections in 2006. (Note: I mistakenly said that Hamas won municipal elections in 2006 and legislative elections in 2007, but the years were 2005 and 2006, respectively.)
- How Israel has utilized its occupation regime to construct Jewish settlements in the West Bank in violation of international law.
- How the cliché that “the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity” is counterfactual and ahistorical, as illustrated by the reality surrounding the UN’s inequitable “partition plan” recommended under General Assembly Resolution 181, which was premised upon a rejection of the Palestinians’ right to self-determination.
- How in every instance in which the Palestinians supposedly rejected a “generous offer” of their own state, every single concession expected was demanded of the Palestinians, with Israel offering negative concessions to the Palestinians.
- How Israel’s policies with respect to its occupation of East Jerusalem amount to a gradual ethnic cleansing of Arabs in violation of international law.
- Why the claim that Resolution 242 did not require Israel to fully withdraw to the positions it held before June 5, 1967, is propagandistic nonsense that ignores both the plain meaning of the resolution’s language and the principle of international law that the acquisition of territory by war is inadmissible.
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