By Hugh Lanning, Labour & Palestine
Settlements are weapons, not homes. The word settlement sounds innocuous, it conjures up images of wagons bravely travelling across prairies to build homes on wild, open, uninhabited grasslands. This vision is a colonial myth that hides the reality of the brutal genocide of the native Americans.
The examples of America, Australia and elsewhere of the ruthless elimination of indigenous peoples by settlers are being directly mirrored by Israel’s use of settlements to colonise Palestine. The same overwhelming firepower is being used, backed by the ‘official’ armed forces, with the IDF playing the role of the cavalry – not coming to the rescue of the rightful owners of the land, but in league with and indistinguishable from the settlers. Now beholden to the settler movement, Israel’s Government arms, defends and supports the increasingly fascistic settlers on an ever upward curve of violence and displacement of Palestinians from their land and homes.
The media often caveats the description of settlements with phrases like “claimed by Palestinians” to be illegal. But international law is very clear, the Geneva convention sets out that it is a war crime for an occupying force to move its civilian population to settle on the territory it occupies, as it crosses the line from occupying temporarily to taking possession of another’s land permanently.
This is not the accidental by-product of Israel’s settlement strategy. It is its sole purpose. Israel has no objective need of the land, there is enough space for all its population to be housed within the internationally recognised 1948 borders. They are not building homes for people who need them, it is a messianic crusade based on their Zionist belief that Israel has a divine mandate to take all the land of historic Palestine to build a ‘greater Israel’.
Supported, not least by millions of dollars and volunteers from Christian evangelist churches, the world continues to trade with these settlements. Western banks supply financial support; western companies help build them and western companies buy and sell goods with them.
The Oslo agreement in 1993 said there would be a freeze on settlement building. Like most of the other parts of the agreement it has been consistently ignored by Israel with the numbers growing from a figure in the thousands to approaching a million, government subsidised, literally weaponised settlers.
The settlements are not small – they are built on the commanding heights of the West Bank, controlling the landscape, stealing the water and the aquifers. There is a huge infrastructure being built to sustain them. Settler only roads link them to Israel, the apartheid wall is built to protect them and surround and isolate Palestinian villages.
They are built to divide up the West Bank – so it can be easily sealed off, with power and water on tap. Whilst Palestinians have to wait for rain and the water-truck to arrive, nearby settlers luxuriate around their swimming pools. The settlements are deliberately built to destroy Palestinian villages and obliterate their history.
Over the years the EU, the UK government and supermarkets have made token efforts to label or not stock overt settlement goods. But most are indistinguishable from other Israeli produce. Whilst the UK has sanctioned a few settler leaders, the economic lifeline of trade still flows freely sustaining these settler colonial enterprises whilst still hypocritically describing them as illegal.
As the Irish government is showing, banning all such trade by law would be an easy concrete action the Labour Government could take. Not just the goods but following the money too. The US is threatening the ICC with economic sanctions; it is way beyond time for the UK to adopt similar targeted sanctions against all Israeli trade involved in supporting breaches of international law. There is little or no Israeli trade or company that is not complicit. The genocide in Gaza, and the settler violence, are all taking place in plain sight. The ethnic cleansing and forced displacement of Palestinians together with the ever-accelerating growth of settlement construction is building Palestine out of existence.
Gaza is the new target for settlement. A small number of settlers in Gaza were removed by Israel in 2005. Now neo-Zionists are queueing up on the borders plotting and planning establishing settlements along the Gaza coast. The role of settlements could not be more transparent – physically destroy Palestinian homes and infrastructure, drive out the people and move in the settlers.
In Gaza we have witnessed the destruction of hospitals, schools, churches, homes, agricultural land, markets and warehouses, water and utilities. The same processes are going on at an ever-increasing pace in East Jerusalem and across the West Bank.
Israel is a war economy, dependent on US and Western financial support and military aid to keep it surviving. With unemployment growing and its economy struggling, it is vulnerable as never before to global pressure to make it comply with international law. Labour is already on the wrong side of history for its complicity in the unfolding genocide, for which it must surely be held accountable legally.
It has already been held accountable by millions of voters who would normally have voted for them. Palestine will remain a litmus test issue at the next election. Starmer and Lammy say they believe in a two-state solution. Settlements are being used as a weapon of destruction to make impossible any such solution. They are now occupied by 10% of Israel’s population, being used as a Trojan Horse to steal Palestinian land. Labour should not just be calling for an end to settlement building but also making clear that any peace must involve their decolonisation. This means the return of settlers back to live within ‘48 borders, the destruction or handing over of the settlement buildings and tearing down the wall that protects them – brick by brick.
A real ceasefire and the end of the blockade, to stop the carnage and starvation in Gaza, are the most immediate needs, but strategically the settlements must go if there is to be any chance of peace.
- Hugh Lanning is an officer of Labour and Palestine, former Chair of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and former Deputy General Secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union.
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