Background on Palestine: Colonialism, apartheid, and occupation
The events in Palestine are sometimes depicted as being too complex to understand, or the problems there as being too long-standing to solve. In fact, the fundamental characteristics of the situation are simple.
The area of Palestine covers the current state of Israel and the territories it occupies in Gaza and the West Bank (including East Jerusalem). Gaza and the West Bank are collectively known as the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Israel also occupies the Golan Heights belonging to Syria, and the Shebaa Farms it has conquered from Lebanon.
Over the entire area, Israel upholds an apartheid system that violates the rights of Palestinians and Syrians to ensure the privileges of Jewish-Israelis. Israel also prevents millions of Palestinian refugees from returning to their homes, which is their right according to international law.
Palestinian civil society wants Israel to end the occupation, give equal rights to those Palestinians who are Israeli citizens, and allow refugees to return home. The international solidarity movement aims to support Palestinians and put pressure on Israel so that this aim, in accordance with international law, can be achieved.
Israel’s occupation is part of apartheid, and are both, in turn, parts of settler colonialism. A brief outline of their history is given below. Some sources for further reading are listed at the end.
Israel’s colonialism is rooted in European anti-Jewishness. Jews were discriminated against and persecuted in Europe for centuries because they were not Christians. In the 1700s, a new European ideology, nationalism, changed the situation.
On the one hand, liberal nationalism, influential particularly in the French Revolution, conceptualised nationality as an identity that unites people within a state who belong to different religious and ethnic groups. Due to its influence, Jews were given equal rights based on citizenship in many European countries.
On the other hand, ethnic nationalism defined the nation-state based on ethnicity, and saw the right to full citizenship as dependent on membership in a particular ethnic group. This thinking united nationalism with racial doctrines, and joined citizenship with the concept of race. Jews were seen as a race apart from the imagined European races, and their oppression was justified with racial ideas. This new type of anti-Jewish sentiment became known as antisemitism.
One response to antisemitism was the Jewish national ethos, Zionism. It accepted the antisemitic idea of Jews as a separate nation, while rejecting the claim of Jews as racially inferior. Zionism inherited from antisemitism the idea that Jews and non-Jews cannot live peacefully together. There were different strands of Zionism, but the mainstream Zionist movement soon accepted the thought that Jews should move out of Europe and the United States and establish their own nation-state in Palestine.
Zionists were initially a minority among the Jewish population. The majority of Orthodox Jews opposed Zionism, as they considered it to be a Messianic cult that wanted to replace the Jewish faith with a new and alien ideology, nationalism. The first congress of the Zionist movement in 1897 had to be moved from Munich to Basel due to protests from the Jewish community of Germany. Many Jews also opposed Zionism because they thought that Zionism wanted to turn them into outsiders in the countries whose citizens they were. Also, many of the Jews who had been living in Palestine before the Zionist movement opposed Zionism. Only after the Holocaust, the genocide of the Jews committed during World War II, did did Zionism become generally accepted among Jewish people.
The goal of establishing a natio- state in Palestine linked Zionism, in addition to antisemitism and nationalism, to a third European ideology, namely colonialism. The aim of the Zionist movement was not immigration to be a part of the community of Jews, Muslims and Christians in Palestine, but to dispossess the existing population and replace the existing political system with a new one that would give them the power. This type of colonialism, which aims to replace the existing population, is known as settler colonialism.
Zionism was an openly colonialist ideology. A central Zionist ideologue, Theodor Herzl, named as the spiritual father of the Jewish state in Israel’s declaration of independence in 1948, suggested in his 1896 book The Jewish State that it would “form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism”. Zionist organisations had names such as Jewish Colonial Trust, Palestine Jewish Colonization Association, and Jewish Agency Colonization Department.
Although most Jews did not support Zionism, the Zionist movement presented itself to European leaders as a representative of the Jewish people and took advantage of conspiracy theories about Jewish influence. In part because of this, in 1917 the British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour gave what became known as the Balfour Declaration, in which Great Britain announced its support for establishing a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. Britain invaded Palestine in 1918, and colonisation by the Zionist movement increased under its protection.
Zionism, like other forms of European colonialism, included the view that people outside of Europe do not have a right to the land where they live. Chaim Weizmann, a central figure of the Zionist movement, who later became Israel’s first president, described the British support for Zionism and attitude towards Palestinians like this: “The British told us that there are some hundred thousand negroes and for those there is no value.”
The means of the Zionist movement for acquiring land developed over time. In 1882, Jews from Europe established the first Zionist settlements, and used local workers. From the beginning of the 1900s, the Zionist movement started to evict Palestinian farmers from the land they had bought and sought to establish a separate society for Jews. In Palestine, it had been common for farmers to remain in the area even when the landowner changed. Many Palestinians their homes and livelihoods because of evictions by the Zionist movement.
Palestinians opposed the growing influx of Europeans who tried to take their land and dispossess them. In 1936, the Palestinians rose up in armed rebellion. The uprising, known as the Arab Revolt, lasted for three years and was finally crushed by the British military together with the Haganah, a Zionist military organisation.
A leader of the Zionist movement, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, summarised Zionism’s relationship with the local population in his 1923 and 1937 essay The Iron Wall:
”My readers have a general idea of the history of colonisation in other countries. I suggest that they consider all the precedents with which they are acquainted and see whether there is one solitary instance of any colonisation being carried on with the consent of the native population. There is no such precedent. […] Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised. That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of “Palestine” into the “Land of Israel.”
Jabotinsky concluded that Zionism could only be implemented through violence. This thinking became mainstream within the Zionist movement.
After the Arab Revolt, Great Britain put limits on the arrival of Jewish colonisers into Palestine. The Zionist movement continued its violence against Palestinian civilians, and now also targeted the British colonial administration.
Exhausted by World War II, Britain took the issue of Palestine to the newly established United Nations. A UN committee considered two options: establishing a democratic state where everyone would have equal rights and the rights of the minorities would be protected by law, or partitioning the land. It ended up supporting the latter option, and based on this decision, in November 1947, the UN General Assembly recommended that the area be divided into a Jewish state and an Arab state, the first of these getting 55% of the land. At this point, Jews owned 6% of the land. The population of Palestine was two million, of whom a third were Jews, mostly recent arrivals.
Palestinians did not accept that most of their homeland would be given to a colonialist movement that sought to dispossess them. Britain refused to implement the partition plan and announced it would withdraw its troops from Palestine. The situation escalated into a war between the Palestinians and the Zionists. The Zionis aimed to conquer as much of Palestine as possible; the Palestinians tried to prevent this. The Zionist troops outnumbered Palestinian fighters, and were better armed and organised, so the Zionist forces soon gained the upper hand.
From the beginning, the problem with establishing a Jewish state was that Palestine was already inhabited. Already the Peel Commission that had been in 1937 tasked with investigating the causes of the Arab Revolt had observed that partitioning Palestine between Palestinians and Jews would require forced population transfer.
During the 1948 war, the Zionist troops implemented this forced transfer.. The Zionist troops undertook systematic ethnic cleansing, expelling Palestinians and destroying their villages. British rule officially ended on May 14, the Zionist movement declared the establishment of the state of Israel. The neighbouring Arab states officially entered the war. At this point, the Zionist movement had ethnically cleansed over 200 Palestinian villages and expelled approximately 350 000-440 000 Palestinians.
The Zionist troops managed to conquer a larger area than had been proposed for the Jewish state in the UN partition plan. The 1949 armistice agreements left 78% of Palestine under Israeli rule. Only the Gaza Strip at the border of Egypt and the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) remained under the control of others.
In the 1947-49 war, Zionist troops ethnically cleansed at least 531 villages and expelled 700 000-800 000 Palestinians outside the state of Israel. Israel has prevented these refugees from returning to their homes, in violation of international law.
Many of the Palestinians who remained within the borders of Israel were internally displaced, and when their land and homes were confiscated for the use of the Jewish population. Some 150 000 Palestinians, approximately 20% of Israel’s population, remained within the state boundaries. The Israeli state gave 60 000 of them citizenship. Of the rest, 30 000–40 000 were expelled, but on the other hand 25 000 refugees were allowed back; in the end, all Palestinians who remained in the area of the state of Israel obtained citizenship through political struggle.
From the beginning, Israel kept the Jewish and Palestinian populations subject to different laws and attempted to keep power in the hands of Jews. Palestinians in Israel lived under military administration from the birth of the state until December 1966.
Already before the founding of the state of Israel, Jews from the Middle East had immigrated into Palestine. After Israel was established, Arab countries persecuted Jews, whom they associated with Zionism and Israel, following Zionist ideology. The Zionist movement also arranged false flag attacks in Iraq to get Jews in the country to immigrate to Israel. The Zionist movement and the state of Israel it established considered Middle Eastern Jews inferior to European Jews and saw their culture as a threat to the success of the European colonisation project. Before Zionism, there was no contradiction between being Arab by ethnicity and culture and Jewish by religion. However, Zionism turned Jewishness into an ethnic identity and forced Middle Eastern Jews to abandon their Arabness in order to be accepted as Jews.
The founding of Israel was a significant achievement of the Zionist movement. However, the aim of a state with only Jews was not realised, as it did not manage to completely get rid of the indigenous population. Also, part of Palestine remained unconquered.
The second problem was solved in 1967, when Israel attacked neighbouring states and in the Six-Day War conquered the rest of Palestine, in other words, the Gaza strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. In addition, Israel conquered the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt and the Golan Heights from Syria. These areas came under military occupation, and Israel started to demolishing the homes of the indigenous population and moving its own civilian population into the occupied territories, in violation of international law. In the history of Israeli, there is only a six-month period during which it has not held Palestinians under military rule. Palestinians living within the borders of Israel were under military administration until December 1966, and the occupation began in June 1967.
Since 1967, all Israeli governments have integrated the occupied territories into Israel. More settlements intended only for Jews are built, and Palestinian homes are destroyed to make way for the settlements and to drive Palestinians away. From June 1967 to October 2023, Israel demolished over 56 000 Palestinian buildings in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. House demolition and settlement building violate international law. The occupation is also illegal in itself.
In 1987, an uprising, the intifada (the word literally means “to shake off “) against Israeli military rule started in the Occupied Territories. Israel tried to crush the uprising with violence and killed about a thousand Palestinians (Palestinians killed about one hundred Jewish-Israelis during the uprising). In the end, Israel was forced to negotiate for changes within the occupied territories.
Negotiations were not conducted with the grassroots representatives of the uprising. Instead, Israel negotiated with the official representative of the Palestinian people, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) led by Yasser Arafat. As a result of secret negotiations, the first Oslo Accord was signed in 1994, the second in 1995.
The Oslo Accords established the Palestinian Authority, was tasked with governing parts of the Occupied Palestinian Territories and preventing Palestinian resistance to the occupation. The Palestinian Authority is financially dependent on outside aid, most of which comes from the EU and the United States, which are allies of Israel.
The Oslo Accords divided the West Bank into zones A, B, and C. Zone A covers 18% of the West Bank and contains the big Palestinian cities. There the Palestinian Authority is responsible for administration and security. Zone B covers 22% of the West Bank and includes Palestinian villages and smaller towns. There the Palestinian Authority is responsible for administration. Zone C covers 60% of the West Bank – it contains the Israeli settlements and their surroundings, most of the farmland and key roads. It is under complete Israeli control. Israeli occupation forces are active everywhere in the West Bank, including Zones A and B.
According to the Oslo Accords, final agreement on the fate of the Occupied Palestinian Territories was to be concluded and the occupation ended by 1999. This did not happen, but instead, military rule continued and the occupied territories were isolated even further isolated. As a consequence, the second intifada began in 2000.
Like during the first intifada, Israel responded to the uprising with violence. This time, also the Palestinians began to use widespread and strong violence. The second intifada is especially remembered for suicide bombings. The number of deaths grew, and the proportions of dead Palestinians and dead Jewish-Israelis grew closer. During the First Intifada in 1987–1993, some ten times more Palestinians than Jewish-Israelis were killed, whereas between 2000–2005, approximately 1000 Jewish-Israelis and 3000 Palestinians were killed.
The second intifada ended in 2005. Israel withdrew the settlements and military bases from Gaza, but continued to occupy it. The Palestinian group Hamas, which had risen to a strong position during the intifada, started a unilateral ceasefire. Hamas took part in the Palestinian political process and won the parliamentary elections of the Palestinian Authority in 2006. Israel, the United States, and the EU refused to recognise the result of the election. In 2007, the Fatah Party that had previously run the Palestinian Authority planned to take over the Palestinian Authority in a military coup with the support of Israel and the United States, but Hamas stopped this with force. Fatah did, however, gain control of the West Bank, and the elected government remained in power in Gaza. Because Fatah, which worked in collaboration with the Israeli military occupation, no longer controlled of the Gaza Strip, Israel and Egypt placed the area under a strict siege.
During the second intifada in 2002, Israel began to build a wall in the West Bank. The wall runs mainly within the occupied territories and encloses a large part of the settlements on the Israeli side. The purpose of the wall is to segregate Jewish-Israelis from the Palestinians of the occupied territories, and to strengthen Israeli control. Because the locations of the settlements have been chosen to dominate the West Bank, the wall also leaves on the Israeli side a number of Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories and cuts Palestinian villages in half. In addition to the wall, many other obstacles to movement fragment the West Bank into small pieces.
On 9 July 2004, upon the request of the UN General Assembly, the International Court of Justice gave its statement on the separation wall. The court stated that the wall cannot be justified by the security arguments put forward by Israel, that it is illegal, and that where it is built on occupied territories, it should be dismantled. Encouraged by this, Palestinian civil society put forward on 9 July 2005 the call for the cultural, academic, and economic boycott of Israel, well as economic sanctions, following he South African example.
This Palestinian BDS campaign (BDS is an abbreviation of the words boycott, divestment, and sanctions) has become a major counter toIsraeli apartheid. It is also important because it makes it clear what Palestinians seek. According to the BDS call, Israel must recognise the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination and comply with international law by:
1. Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall
2. Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and
3. Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194.
The BDS call and its demand to implement the rights of all groups of Palestinian, as guaranteed by international law, enjoys broad support among Palestinians. It is supported by all major political parties and trade unions, and many non-governmental organisations and umbrella organisations, in Israel, in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and outside Palestine. Although there is currently no political body that would represent all Palestinians, the voice of the Palestinian civil society is clear.
After Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian Authority elections, Israel placed Gaza under a tight siege. Already from 1989, Israel had restricted the movements of the Palestinians in Gaza, but from 2006 onwards, the siege escalated catastrophically. Israel, along with Egypt, tightly governs movements to and from Gaza. Israel limits the entry of food and other necessary supplies into Gaza, with the intent of keeping the area continuously at the brink of a breakdown, as Israeli officials have told United States officials.
The Israeli military also attacks Gaza farmers and fishermen on an almost daily basis, and makes dozens of ground attacks annually into the area. It destroys farmland, poisons crops, and destroys and steals fishing vessels. Israel also often bombs Gaza, sometimes in response to rockets fired from there.
The International Committee of the Red Cross, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay, and the Council of Europe, among others, have stated that the blockade is unlawful.
At least 95% of the water in Gaza is not safe for drinking, 80% of the population is dependent on external help, and the situation has worsened over the years also due to repeated Israeli attacks. Israel has made major attacks into Gaza in 2006, 2008-9, 2012, 2014, and 2021. The United Nations has noted that Gaza has become unliveable. n October 2023, Israel started a genocide in Gaza.
On 7 October 2023, armed Palestinian resistance groups, notably the armed wing of Hamas, attacked Israel from the besieged Gaza Strip. In the attack, about 1 100 people were killed, two-thirds of whom were civilians. Some were killed by Palestinians, others by the Israeli military in indiscriminate attacks and intentionally to prevent them from being taken captive.
Israel started bombing Gaza, placed the area under a total blockade, and began a land attack. The attack has been more destructive than any before it, and based on the total violence of the Israeli military and statements from decisionmakers, it can be concluded that its purpose is to destroy Palestinians in Gaza Palestinians in whole or in part, in other words, genocide. Many experts of international law warned about the risk of genocide already in October. The UN Special Rapporteur to the right to food Michael Fakhri, the UN Special Rapporteur of the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese, as well as other Special Rapporteurs, have concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
Israel has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza and systematically destroyed the civilian infrastructure. Israel has also used starvation as a means of genocide.
South Africa has taken Israel to the UN International Court of Justice for genocide. The court found on 26 January 2024 that the accusation is plausible, and that Gaza Palestinians are under real and immediate risk of being killed in genocide. The court ordered Israel to cease all actions that violate the genocide convention. Israel has not complied. On March 28 2024 the court issued a new order to the same effect. Israel has not complied.
As of the beginning of 2024, about 15 million people live in Palestine. Of them, 7.5 million are Palestinian, 7.2 million are Jewish-Israeli, and some half a million are neither. Of these Palestinians, 1.7 million are Israeli citizens, the other 5.8 million live under occupation, although a small number of the Palestinians who live in occupied East Jerusalem have Israeli citizenship. In addition, approximately 7 million Palestinian refugees live outside Palestine, mostly descendants of the victims of the 1948 ethniccleansing. Some have citizenship of the country of their residence; others have no citizenship at all. Of the Jewish-Israelis, 700 000 live in illegal settlements on the occupied territories.
Everywhere in Palestine, the Israeli government enforces a regime aimed at segregating Jewish-Israelis and Palestinians and maintaining Jewish-Israeli domination over Palestinians. All of above-mentioned groups of people are subject to its rule. In Israel, this system is sometimes referred to with the Hebrew word hafrada, which means separation – the same as the Afrikaans word apartheid.
This system fulfills the criteria of apartheid as defined in international law. The first systematic analysis of the Israeli regime in the Occupied Palestinian Territories from the point of view of international law was published by South Africa’s Human Sciences Research Council in 2009. In 2011, an international civil society court, The Russell Tribunal on Palestine, published the first analysis of Israeli apartheid that covered also Israel and the refugees. In 2017, the UN Economic Commission for Western Asia published an expert report that expanded the HSRC report to include the area of Israel and refugees.
After this, reports on Israeli apartheid have been published by many respected instances: the Israeli human rights organisations Yesh Din and B’Tselem, international human rights organisations Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, as well as the Palestinian human rights organisations Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights, Al-Haq, and Addameer, the last mentioned in collaboration with Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic.
In international law, apartheid means a system where one racial group inhumanely oppresses other racial groups to dominate them. An emblematic part of it in Israel, like in the apartheid system that ended in South Africa in 1994, is segregating different groups into different residential areas and keeping them subject to different laws. Israel’s apartheid manifests in laws and practices that set Jews and non-Jews in an unequal position. A number of restrictions apply to non-Jews depending on the group the person belongs to: are they an Israeli citizen, do they live in the West Bank or in Gaza, do they live in Zone A, B, or C, or in East Jerusalem, and so on.
As B’Tselem notes in their report, “In the entire area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, the Israeli regime implements laws, practices and state violence designed to cement the supremacy of one group – Jews – over another – Palestinians.”
A large number of high-quality reports and studies have been written about the situation in Palestine. Some sources have already been referred to in the text, some others are listed below. The BDS movement has a good background of Israeli colonialism and apartheid.
News and analysis
Human rights organisations
Palestinian Centre for Human Rights
Overviews
Ali Abunimah: One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse (Metropolitan Books, 2006)
Jonathan Cook: Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books, 2008)
Jeff Halper: Decolonizing Israel, Liberating Palestine: Zionism, Settler Colonialism, and the Case for One Democratic State (Pluto Press, 2021)
Rashid Khalidi: The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A history of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 (Metropolitan Books, 2021
Hannu Reime: Israel/Palestiina: kahden kansan luvattu maa (toinen uudistettu painos, Rauhanpuolustajat & Like, 2011)
Syksy Räsänen: Israelin apartheid (Into, 2017)
Ben White: Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner’s Guide (Pluto Press, 2009)
Zionism
Nur Masalha: Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948 (Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992)
Shlomo Sand: The Invention of the Jewish People (Verso, 2010)
Ethnic cleansing
Nur Masalha: The Palestine Nakba: Decolonising History, Narrating the Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory (Zed Books, 2012)
Ilan Pappe: The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld Publications, 2007)
Rosemary Esber: Under the Cover of War: The Zionist Expulsion of the Palestinians (Arabicus Books & Media, 2009)
Palestinian citizens of Israel
Susan Nathan: The Other Side of Israel: My Journey Across the Jewish/Arab Divide (HarperCollins Publishers, 2005)
Ilan Pappe: The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel (Yale University Press, 2011)
Ben White: Palestinians in Israel: Segregation, Discrimination and Democracy (Pluto Press, 2011)
The era of the Oslo peace process
Amira Hass: Drinking the Sea at Gaza (Owl Books, 2000)
Edward Said: The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After (updated and revised edition, Granta Publications, 2002)
BDS movement
Omar Barghouti: BDS: Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights (Haymarket Books, 2011)
Ashlei Dawson and Bill V. Mullen (ed.): Against Apartheid: The Case for Boycotting Israeli Universities (Haymarket Books, 2015)
Maya Wind: Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom (Verso, 2024)
Israeli attacks on Gaza
Max Blumenthal: The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza (Nation Books, 2016)
Norman G. Finkelstein: This Time We Went Too Far: Truth and Consequences of the Gaza Invasion (OR Books, 2010)
Mads Gilbert and Erik Fosse: Eyes in Gaza (Quartet Books, 2010)
Gideon Levy: The Punishment of Gaza (Verso, 2010)
Israel and the Arab countries
Noam Chomsky: Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians (Pluto Press, 1999)
Hannu Juusola: Israelin historia (Gaudeamus, 2005)
Avi Shlaim: The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (Penguin, 2001)
