CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

A Rupture in Israeli Security Politics: Can the Palestinians Exploit It?

Israeli soldier faces Palestinians waiting at the Huwara checkpoint, at the entrance to Nablus, in the occupied West Bank – CC BY-SA 3.0

“President Trump and I often say: peace through strength – first comes strength then comes peace.” – PM Benjamin Netanyahu, 22/06/2025

“President Trump and I often say: peace through strength – first comes strength then comes peace.”

– PM Benjamin Netanyahu, 22/06/2025

Settler colonialism is a fairly common phenomenon, both ancient and modern, as the unhappy history of the indigenous people of Palestine testifies. The first Israelite settler invasion of their country occurred some 3500 years ago.[1] “When you have crossed the Jordan into the land of Canaan,” God commands Moses to instruct the people of Israel, “you shall drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you…; you shall dispossess the inhabitants of the land and dwell in it, for I have given you the land to possess” (Numbers 33-50-53). The latest invasion, Zionists would claim by the same people “returning home,” began at the turn of the twentieth century and is ongoing.

Nonetheless, settler colonialism is not an easy enterprise to pursue, justify or maintain, let alone to normalize permanently. Native populations always resist their colonization, their very physical and cultural erasure. The ancient Israelites and modern Zionists shared a common goal: to transform Canaanite/Arab Palestine into the Jewish Land of Israel. They both conquered and settled Palestine, and each established state-level governance. But each also faced prolonged resistance from local peoples and never succeeded in eliminating them altogether.[2] Israelite/Judean/Jewish rule lasted only about 450 of the roughly 5000 years since the emergence of Canaanite civilization. True, the pervasiveness of the biblical account of God’s “giving” the Land of Israel to Abraham in the Western and wider Christian worlds makes the claim of Zionist Jews to reasonable if not self-evident, and that has proven a great boon for promoting Zionist colonization. But Zionism’s end-game, to “establish such a society in Palestine that Palestine shall be as Jewish as England is English, or America American,” as Chaim Weizmann told the Versailles Conference in 1919, has proven elusive.

And this is the problem that preoccupies Israel today. Zionism achieved its national goal: establishing a Jewish state in a de-Arabized Palestine. It failed, however, to normalize that achievement, making the Jewish state of Israel “as Jewish as England is English” in the words of Chaim Weizmann, thus foreclosing a Palestinian liberation struggle and securing its status as a legitimate state, regionally as well as internationally. The Israeli authorities had three opportunities to do so. First, by taking advantage of their secret contacts with the Egyptians in the mid-1950s, including an agreement by Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1954 to hold high-level talks, perhaps even a face-to-face meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Moshe Sharett, which Sharett called off.[3] Second, during the Madrid Peace Conference of 1991 and the Oslo peace process, both preceded by the PLO’s acceptance of the two-state solution and its recognition of “the right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and security,” which Israel never negotiated in good faith, doubling its settlements during the course of the negotiations.

From 1967 on, but particularly during the Oslo process when a “Jewish” state of Israel could have won universal recognition in return for a Palestinian state in the Occupied Territories and the return of a limited number of refugees by mutual consent – an offer repeated in the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002 to which the Sharon government never even deigned to reply, the third lost opportunity – it became clear that the Zionist project required all of historic Palestine.

The question of how to normalize a “Greater” Israel receives the same answer as did the efforts to normalize the pre-1967 Israel or normalizing Zionism’s pre-state colonization itself: “normalization through strength” combined with a security politics based on “serving the hegemons.” In terms of the Palestinians, to erect an “Iron Wall” as Ze’ev Jabotinsky described it in his seminal essay of 1923.[4] As the concept has evolved until today, the doctrine contends that an Iron Wall comprised of political, military, economic and technological domination will so overwhelm and exhaust the Palestinians that they will despair of an Arab Palestine and submit. As for the Arab world, the Iron Wall has catapulted Israel into the role of the region’s military hegemon, leaving the Arab states with no choice but to normalize relations, informally if not officially.[5]

This paper examines Israeli security politics but with an agenda: not only to evaluate its effectiveness over time, its limitations and perhaps, since the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, its counter-productivity, but to ask whether Israel’s reliance on hard military power opens opportunities for the Palestinians to resist and ultimately overcome Zionist colonization. Recent events, combined with longer-term geopolitical developments and emerging political and economic realignments in the region, have led to circumstances potentially more favorable to their struggle, if strategically exploited.

 Israeli Security Politics: “Serving the Hegemons”

Every settler colonial movement needs a metropolitan sponsor, especially since it inevitably faces stiff local and sometimes regional resistance. The Zionists initial metropole came from the organized Jewish community of Western and Central Europe; the World Zionist Organization (WZO) was founded in Basle in 1897 as a political and diplomatic instrument for colonizing Palestine. Since it was not a state body, it had to establish its own institutions to finance land acquisition and settlement, as well as a functional government, the Jewish Agency, mandated by the League of Nations Mandate in 1922 “to secure the co-operation of all Jews who are willing to assist in the establishment of the Jewish national home.”

The WZO lost no time in offering its services to the hegemon who could advance the Zionist project. Already in 1898, the Second Zionist Congress endorsed diplomatic efforts to acquire a Charter from the Ottoman Empire for Jewish settlement in the Holy Land in return for relieving much of the Empire’s external debt.[6] While that initial attempt failed, serving the next power to rule Palestine, the British, succeeded beyond the Zionists’ wildest dreams. Not only did they obtain a virtual charter to Palestine in the form of the Balfour Declaration, but the League of Nations Mandate reaffirmed that “The Mandatory [the British] shall be responsible for placing the country under such political, administrative and economic conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home.” By 1947 Britain had allowed the Zionists to acquire strategic lands and establish a functional governmental authority (the Jewish Agency and other “national institutions”) fortified with a trained military. The crushing of the Arab Revolt by combined British and Jewish forces between 1936-39 fatally weakened the Palestinians ability to resist the Zionist take-over in 1947-48.[7]

“Serving the hegemons” requires a quid pro quo, of course. For the Ottomans it was financial; for the British a mixture of manipulating the religious sensibilities of the Christian Zionists who made up a key part of the British Establishment, exaggerating the political benefits world Jewry could bring to the British and placing Zionist resources at the disposal of the British authorities in their attempts to control Palestinian resistance. Israeli independence, however, posed a major dilemma. Although having succeeded in obtaining the status of a sovereign state recognized by the UN, Israel was still an extension of Zionist settler colonialism. For the Palestinians, the Arab and Muslim peoples just emerging from their own anti-colonial struggle or still embroiled in them, as well as for much of the Global South, Israel represented a colonial entity from which the colonized Palestinians must be freed. Zionism still needed metropolitan protectors. But as a small settler state in a geopolitical region crucial for Western imperial interests and energy, what quid pro quo could it offer a metropolitan power willing to support it?

David Ben-Gurion addressed this issue immediately. He identified five sources of Israeli leverage: (1) a qualitative edge in conventional means of warfare;  (2) the threat of nuclear deterrence; (3) technological and economic superiority; (4) national resilience based on Jewish immigration, settlement and hasbara (public relations) playing on Jewish victimhood and religious sensibilities – all leading to (5) a special relationship with a superpower in which Israel has its quid pro quo: making its prowess in the areas of weapons development and deployment, counterinsurgency and counter-terrorism, surveillance and domestic securitization, as well as cutting-edge technology, available to the metropole – in which Israel is more than happy to act as its regional enforcer.[8]

That strategy soon paid off. In the early 1950s, Britain, which viewed Israel as a counterweight to Russian efforts to push it out of the Middle East, began supplying it with heavy weaponry, as did the US and West Germany. France, however, became Israel’s major metropolitan support. Not only did it supply Israel with sophisticated arms, but it provided weapons technologies which allowed Israel to rapidly develop an arms industry of its own. By the mid-1950s Israel was taken seriously enough as a military power that in 1956 it joined in the French and British attack on Egypt, the French providing Israel with a massive shipment of Mystère IV jets, Super-Sherman tanks and tank transports, trucks, armored personnel carrier, ammunition and other sophisticated armaments.[9] France, it must be noted, also provided Israel the foundations of its nuclear weapons program, inaugurated in 1952.[10]

The alliance with France lasted until 1967 when, post-Algeria France began seeking renewed influence in the Middle East, finally breaking with Israel during the 1967 War. The shift to the next and current hegemonic protector, the United States, began in the early years of the Kennedy Administration, when the decision to sell the Hawk surface-to-air missile system opened the way to the transfer of other sophisticated weapons to Israel and eventually the virtual incorporation of the Israeli weapons industry into that of the Americans. (For a detailed exploration of this relationship, see my book War Against the People: Israel, the Palestinians and Global Pacification (2015).

The Political Logic and Success of Israel’s Security Politics in the Region: “Normalization Through Strength”

If “serving the hegemons” requires Israel to identify a quid pro quo that addresses a........

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