Palestine, Israel and the 'Two States': Colonial State and State of siege

Lautaro Rivara

According to myth, the siege of Troy lasted a decade. And the siege of Sarajevo, the longest in the history of modern warfare, which imprisoned 350,000 people during the last gasps of the former Yugoslavia, lasted four long years. But a contemporary case surpasses these milestones, only here it is not a war in the strict sense, much less a myth: it is the 18-year relentless siege by Israel by land, sea and air of the Palestinian inhabitants of the Gaza Strip .

The collective punishment of the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, in fact an escalation of a long-standing policy of ethnic cleansing, was one of the most recent episodes of the Zionist-Israeli colonization of the territories of historic Palestine and came in retaliation for the victory of the Islamist organization Hamas, which defeated the moderate and collaborationist Fatah – which leads the Palestinian National Authority in the West Bank – in the 2006 legislative elections in the enclave. The Palestinians, like many other peoples of the Global South, were reprimanded for “voting wrongly”; the vagaries of a democracy conditioned by the geopolitical status that each nation holds in a global order based on exceptions.

It is worth remembering that Gaza is a narrow coastal strip that borders Egypt, the Mediterranean Sea and, curiously, the country itself, that is, the other Palestinian territories occupied by the State of Israel. The scarce territory was largely colonized after the massive and violent expulsion of the local population during the so-called Nakba (“catastrophe”, in Arabic) by Zionist settlers, an expulsion that included several massacres and the action of paramilitary organizations.

At just 365 square kilometers, the Strip is curiously the same size as the European microstate of Malta, from which the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, which was bombed by Israeli drones in the early hours of Friday, May 2 , was planning to depart. But the comparison only goes so far. The difference between the small archipelago that serves as a seaside resort, brothel, casino and tax haven for the most select and opulent Europe and the colonial enclave that has received, since 2023, the kilotons equivalent to several Hiroshima bombs could not be more abysmal.

Around 500,000 people live in Malta, with a very high Human Development Index and a GDP per capita of $30,000, while 2 million souls are crammed into the cramped Palestinian colonial enclave, rightly known as “the world’s largest open prison,” with no infrastructure, medicine, food or clean water. While Valletta Bay sparkles with the lights of cruise ships and nightclubs, in the dark night of Gaza it is almost a miracle to find a light on. One area, cosmopolitan, welcomes high-net-worth tourists from all over the world. The other, made up almost entirely of a homeless population.

One is a “paradise,” according to airline and travel agency advertising. The other is an “uninhabitable place,” according to UN experts. Both, Malta and Gaza, are not only two opposite shores of the Mediterranean, the most contradictory sea in the world, but also the most tangible demonstration of the enormous asymmetries between the Global North and the Global South, between zones of sacrifice and zones of privilege.

As a result of the Israeli siege, and well before October 2023, 85 percent of Gaza’s population was mired in poverty; only 55 percent of the inhabitants were consuming the minimum required calories; 80 percent had no access to clean water; fishermen were prevented from foraging in the open sea; and children’s educational rights were severely restricted. Today, there are not even statistics: the calculations, and those who make them, have also been bombed.

Between 2007 and 2023, Israel – with the cooperation of Egypt – was already controlling and restricting the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza, be it food, medical supplies or construction materials. The direct result of this concerted action was a true humanitarian disaster, questioned by several supranational bodies, even without taking into account the direct and indirect victims of military operations such as “Cast Lead” (2008-2009) and “Protective Edge” (2014), which were implemented during these years of blockade.

Faced with this situation, impervious to questioning by global public opinion and the timid response of some States and supranational bodies, the Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC) set out to challenge the only two States that really exist in the Palestinian territories: the colonial State of Israel and the prolonged state of siege applied to the native population.

What is important and instructive about this story is that it exposes a colossal lie: that the Israeli escalation of genocide was – and remains, in the minds of the most feverish propagandists – a “defensive response” to the Hamas attack of October 7. The real goal has always been the total occupation of historic Palestine, the ethnic cleansing of its indigenous population, and the construction of the colonial, imperial, racial and theocratic project of Greater Israel.

In case there were still any doubts, the “plan” recently announced by Donald Trump translated into English what the bombing had been saying explicitly for months: that the objective of the Israeli offensive was not to annihilate a specific political-military organization, but to empty the coveted territory of the Strip (rich in gas in its coastal zone) of Palestinians, “voluntarily” expelling 2 million inhabitants of Gaza to Jordan, Egypt or Morocco, and even to internationally unrecognized pseudo-nations in the Horn of Africa, such as Puntland or Somaliland.

The project, fervently welcomed by Netanyahu and the Israeli front page, was a timely mix of ethnic cleansing, real estate venture and tourism business, and proposed transforming a graveyard of corpses and rubble into a luxurious “Middle Eastern Riviera,” something like building a casino in the Auschwitz death camp or a shopping mall in La Escombrera or El Mozote.

A few days after the US president's statements, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz joked about the situation in the enclave and referred to the possible departure of a new Freedom Flotilla: “Whoever comes to demonstrate on the shores of Gaza, we will send them to Gaza and we will use the ships to evacuate Gaza residents who want to leave voluntarily,” the minister said in a message published by several local media outlets.

In the end, the ship Conscience, of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition , was unable to leave, but at least it generated an international commotion and demonstrated that Israeli exceptionalism has no borders and that it will attack any actor that stands in its way anywhere on the planet, including Europe itself, from where, paradoxically, many of the thousands of Ashkenazi Jews who colonized Palestine departed.

Furthermore, this new war crime has once again ratified that there is no room for negotiation with a colonial entity that represents a threat to humanity, both in the colonial and apartheid state in the occupied West Bank and in the state of siege implemented against Gaza.

* Lautaro Rivara is a sociologist, journalist and political analyst.

** This article was originally published at https://www.brasildefato.com.br/

*** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL, Independent Media or The African.