On 20 September, the UK recognised the state of Palestine, alongside France and Canada. With the customary arrogance of leaders from the western world, they all spoke as if their words were shifting the axis of history.
Israel bristled with anger. The press erupted with fanfare. Have several western states broken with Washington? Is Israel being isolated?
All the powers involved understand that ‘recognition’ changes nothing. Starmer’s posturing is a cheap facade, masking business as usual with Israel.
The Zionist state remains armed, trained, and financed by the West. If this gesture carried any weight, the US would never have let its lackeys sign off on it.
This ‘symbolic’ move was aimed at the homefront, not the people of Palestine. Starmer, Macron, and co. have been unable to squash the powerful Palestine movement.
Instead, in recent months, feeling the pressure below, they have changed tack, making overtures to the movement in words and words alone.
The political theatrics serve one purpose: to wash western imperialism of Israel’s crimes. But the trail of blood leads right back to their doors.
Netanyahu and his government of settlers have been granted, for nearly two years, total political impunity. It is with this incredible latitude that Israel has reduced Gaza to rubble, and ramped up the construction of ‘Greater Israel’.
This cynical spectacle of ‘recognition’ has served to divert attention away from what Israel is actually carrying out on the ground.
Iron Wall
Whilst the eyes of the world have been fixated on the horrors in Gaza, the Zionist regime has maneuvered to seize control of the West Bank.
At the beginning of the year, ‘security’ in the occupied West Bank was declared an official Israeli war aim. Under the cover of ‘war’, Operation Iron Wall was launched in January – the largest IDF campaign in the West Bank in decades.
Israel Katz, the foreign minister, declared that the battle in the camps was “a war in every sense”, insisting that Palestinians be treated “exactly” as in Gaza.
The assault began in Tulkarem and Jenin, before spreading to camps in Nablus and Tubas. Armoured bulldozers followed Israeli airstrikes, upending life in the camps. The brutal siege on Jenin was described by one refugee as “worse than the Second Intifada”.
Roads, water, and sewage infrastructure were deliberately targeted, while entire residential blocks were detonated. With strict prohibitions on rebuilding homes and roads, this flagrant aggression was an attempt to permanently displace the predominantly refugee population.
It was an extension of the genocidal campaign in Gaza – with the Zionists carrying out collective punishment of an entire people, designed to ‘cleanse’ the land and crush dissent. A refugee interviewed by 972+ Magazine captured it clearly:
“What’s happening here is simply a smaller version of Gaza…A deliberate campaign to destroy, make life unlivable, and send a message to everyone in the camp and the city: leave. Get out of the West Bank. Go somewhere else.”
Over 40,000 Palestinians – the vast majority descendants of those expelled during the Nakba – were displaced. This was the largest act of displacement in the West Bank since 1967. The IDF campaign cleared the way for settlers.
Indeed, settler violence has reached unprecedented levels this year, with over 200 Palestinian communities brutalised. Before 7 October, when settler pogroms struck towns like Huwara, Israeli authorities would intervene to say: “Don’t be vigilantes, leave it to the IDF.” No longer.
This year, Itamar Ben Gvir, the Israeli interior minister, established a ‘First Response Unit’ under the West Bank police – composed of settlers. It erased any line between security forces and messianic settler militias.
Unchecked, unmonitored, and underreported, the settler movement now acts with complete impunity. Their violence is not incidental – it is a direct product of orders from above.
Divine promise
Beyond the state-sanctioned violence of the settlers, the Israeli government has used all means at its disposal to seize the land of the Palestinians.
Brute force is not the only method. In May, as the IDF began its ground offensive in Gaza, the legal-bureaucratic machine of the Israeli state was used to facilitate one of the largest land grabs of the century.
The Israeli government retroactively approved the establishment of twenty-two new settlements in the occupied West Bank. Furthermore, in one stroke of a judge’s pen, the land registration process was completely overhauled, cancelling any recognition of Palestinian land records in Area C (60 percent of the West Bank).
This echoes the Orwellian absentee property law after the Nakba. As the Arab proverb says: When the judge is your enemy, to whom shall you complain?
This, as with every act of ethnic cleansing, is a flagrant violation of international law. But there has been a conspiracy of silence against this move in the western media. With not so much as a squeak of opposition from the ‘international community’ on these matters, the Zionists continued their offensive.
On the parliamentary front, a non-binding resolution to annex the entire West Bank was passed in July in the Knesset with near-unanimous support. As the Speaker of the House, Amir Ohana, stated after the vote: “This is our land. This is our home. The Land of Israel belongs to the people of Israel.”
Ohana continued: “Jews cannot be the ‘occupier’ of a land that for 3,000 years has been called Judea.” Wrapped up in language of divine promise and return, the Zionist ruling clique has seized the moment.
Crisis becomes opportunity
As a former Israeli minister warned, Netanyahu has surrounded himself with “Jewish supremacists” eager to hasten the “last war”.
The security crisis of October 7 furnished the Zionist ruling clique with this golden opportunity. Handed endless blank cheques by the Biden administration, Netanyahu and his kingmakers have set out to deliver on their imperialist, expansionist dreams.
Bezalel Smotrich, a proud theocrat and settler, found his ‘calling’ as the de facto governor of the West Bank. Whilst running the Finance Ministry, he presided over a gold rush of settlement expansion: connecting outposts to Israel’s natural gas grid, laying down segregation roads, and tightening the noose around Palestinian civic life.
For a time, the theft was carried out by stealth. But after 7 October, he openly moved to annex the entire West Bank.
A man who fondly recalls “running on the hills [of the West Bank], erecting tents” in his youth, Smotrich now seeks to fulfill that same vision with state power. In his own words:
“It is time to apply Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria [the biblical term for the West Bank] and remove, once and for all, the idea of dividing our small land and establishing a terrorist state in its heart.”
Every lever of power – legal rulings, parliamentary motions, settlement budgets, and IDF violence – has been harnessed to economically and politically dominate the whole of historic Palestine.
The settlers are the shock troops. In the West Bank and East Jerusalem, they number 750,000, growing at more than twice the rate of Israel proper.
But this, Smotrich believes, is just the start. His stated goal is to bring in a million more settlers and with them, the erasure of Palestine itself.
Point of no return
This is the backdrop for Smotrich’s recent boast of “burying” the two-state solution: the so-called ‘doomsday settlement’, known as the E1 plan.
E1 is a stretch of roughly 3,000 acres in the West Bank, lying between East Jerusalem and the illegal settlement of Ma’ale Adumim.
The approved plan’s design severs the West Bank into two cantons. Travel from Ramallah to Hebron, for instance, would require Israeli-controlled bypass roads, echoing the Bantustan system of apartheid South Africa.
East Jerusalem, long envisioned as the future capital of a Palestinian state, would be hemmed in by settlements, cut off entirely from the rest of the West Bank. In short, there would be no contiguous territory left to call ‘Palestine.’
E1 was once a ‘red line’ that Western powers insisted could not be crossed – until now. The New Arab reported:
“For decades, Washington and Brussels thundered that such a move would be the death knell for Palestinian statehood, the unravelling of international law, and a point of no return.
“Yet as Israel openly dismantles the possibility of a Palestinian future, Europe is silent, the United States is complicit, and the international community is a passive witness to the erasure of Palestinians.”
In a matter of weeks, these ‘absolute limits’ on Zionist expansion have vanished into dust.
The leaders of Britain, Canada, and France, meanwhile, remain criminally silent about the shifting realities on the ground. Instead, they grandstand.
To those paying lip service to the fiction of a two-state solution, we ask: where is this state meant to be? In Gaza, buried beneath the rubble? In a West Bank carved into disconnected, strangled enclaves? In Saudi Arabia, as Netanyahu has recently jibed?
It does not matter what prosperous Palestinian state you imagine for tomorrow when your actions have ensured there is nothing left to call Palestine today.
Zionism’s end point
Like all that followed him, the pioneer of the Zionist project Theodor Herzl did not believe in sharing Palestine with the natives.
Herzl was inspired directly by the British colonialists: that the only language the Palestinians would understand is force.
For the founding father of Israel, David Ben Gurion, expansion followed from the Nakba as naturally as growth followed birth. This, he insisted, would not be achieved by “sermons on the mount”, but with “machine guns”.
From the outset, the Zionist project sought to conquer all of historic Palestine. Since Israel was proclaimed in 1948, the guiding principle has been to deprive Palestinians of their livelihoods, and ultimately, their country. The pace has varied, but the goal has remained constant.
Netanyahu and his kingmakers have certainly accelerated this process. But ‘Greater Israel’ was in Likud’s 1977 programme, long before Netanyahu entered the world of politics:
“The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable…between the Sea and Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”
For decades, Israel has proudly flouted international law, and solidified its total economic domination over the West Bank.
One of the most lucrative businesses in the West Bank is gravel quarries, which Israeli capitalists use to extract limestone to fuel the construction industry in Israel ‘proper’ as well as the settlements.
Many industrial zones have been developed, such as Barkan and Mishor Adumim, which produce plastics, textiles, metal goods – benefitting from cheap land and even cheaper Palestinian labour.
Fertile soil in the Jordan Valley feeds the global ‘Made in Israel’ agribusiness, while so-called defense firms such as Elbit Systems test surveillance and security technology on occupied land. Occupied Palestine serves as a testing ground for defense firms.
The two economies are linked by a thousand threads, with the shekel being the common currency, and the Palestinians a captive market.
Behind this economic domination lies the logic of imperialism.
Zionism, though often cloaked in religious garb, is the powerful ideology of the Israeli ruling class: used to smooth over differences within Israeli society.
Through military conquest, annexation, and constant fear-mongering, with the aid of religious illusions, the Israeli capitalists have welded together Israel.
As Israel has consolidated its grip economically over Palestinian resources, there has been a gentlemen’s agreement between Israel and the West. Palestinian statehood would remain unrealised, but Israel would play its part by every so often indulging in the fiction of it.
“Annex land, but do it by stealth.” “Defend yourself, but don’t push it.” This has been the advice from the ‘enlightened’ leaders of the western world.
But the process is too far gone. Israel is no longer the obsequious junior partner it once was. It answers not to diplomatic pressure, but, in the words of the messianic settlers, to God alone – and their divine ‘command to conquer’.
Bitter fruits of Oslo
The fiction of a ‘two-state solution’ should have died with the Oslo Accords in 1993. For the small price of paying lip service to a future Palestinian state, the Zionists got everything they wanted – and more.
From the Zionist perspective there were two aims: carve the West Bank into small, isolated Palestinian enclaves masquerading as a state; and install a new jailer – the Palestinian Authority.
The ‘peace process’ betrayed a powerful Palestinian struggle. Yasser Arafat traded the militancy of the First Intifada for the prestige of official recognition.
The Oslo Accords laid the blueprint for the violence today. The West Bank stratified; settlements proliferated; apartheid walls erected; East Jerusalem colonised; no right to return: all sanctified by the official ‘peace process’.
The first proponent of the E1 plan was none other than Yitzhak Rabin, the very Israeli premier who signed the Oslo Accords.
In order to quell frustration about Oslo in Israeli society, Rabin pulled back the mask in the Knesset. His vision was never a state but “an entity which is less than a state”.
His successor, the rising Benjamin Netanyahu, promised to stop Oslo in its tracks.
Financial incentives flowed into the settler project: tax breaks, cheap loans, subsidised housing, and huge grants for businesses. Israeli private real estate prospered. Mega-settlements were built for Israel’s poorest Jewish communities, while ultra‑Orthodox investors enjoyed minimal regulation and taxes.
Jewish settlers were bussed into fortified towns secured by military checkpoints, creating a labyrinth of colonies cutting across the West Bank.
Road to nowhere
Since the Second Intifada, the Zionists have insisted that the settlements are an irreversible fact of life.
Washington would object, and object a little more, but always end up conceding. In George W. Bush’s much-vaunted Road Map for Peace in 2003, the US ended up accepting Israel’s mandate for annexation.
This set a tremendous precedent, which is now being pushed to the limit.
As Bush stated at the time: “If all parties choose to embrace this moment, they can open the door to progress and put an end to one of the world’s longest-running conflicts.”
In his roadmap, Bush insisted that all the Gazan settlements be disbanded. For the Zionists, the door of populating Gaza shut, momentarily, but the door to the West Bank swung wide open.
As the disengagement of the Gaza plan kicked in, Ariel Sharon, the then-prime minister, advised his Likud Party: “There is no need to talk. We need to build, and we’re building without talking.”
In 2005, the year the Israeli government evacuated all Gazan settlements, an estimated 14,500 new settlers were funneled into the West Bank – almost double those lost in Gaza.
The decline of American influence in the region has not tempered Israel’s ambitions; it has sharpened them. Zionist intransigence grows, and with it, the acquisition of further concessions.
Trump’s “deal of the century” did more than redraw maps: it enshrined Jerusalem as an undivided capital for one people, while leaving another dispossessed.
What is being styled today as the beginnings of ‘peace process’ is a farcical version of Oslo. There is no semblance of self-governance for the Palestinians.
In fact, Trump’s ‘Riviera of the Middle East’ plan for Gaza graphically demonstrates where bourgeois diplomacy leads: to the erasure of the Palestinians as a people.
As if this weren’t cruel enough, Tony Blair is now being touted to govern Gaza. A new colonial framework is being celebrated by the so-called ‘international community’.
This is where ‘diplomatic’ deals led by the corrupt gangsters of the world will always end up.
They do not heed moral appeals. Their eyes are blinded by money and markets; power and prestige.
Frankenstein’s monster
Zionism is a Frankenstein’s monster of western imperialism.
From the euphoria of Israel’s ‘triumph’ in the Six-Day War; to today’s systematic annexation of the West Bank: Israel has been allowed to act as a law unto itself.
Since Israel was proclaimed, it has been a beachhead for western imperialism in the Middle East. It first acted as a strong counterweight to Arab nationalism, and later buffeted the influence of the Soviet Union.
Still to this day, Israel is the most reliable ally in the region for US imperialism. This ‘special relationship’ has bred a singular exceptionalism, and an eagerness to wage war without end.
Now, as this unruly creature tears through Gaza City, Starmer and others put on a show of disowning it, pretending the blood on its hands is not theirs. Yet western imperialism cannot escape the consequences of the catastrophe that they have helped bring about.
The Palestine movement can see straight through these smoke and mirrors. The struggle for the Palestinians to live – and live freely – has become the defining issue for an entire generation.
Since 7 October, the western imperialists have acted as Israel’s true iron dome: shielding it from criticism, and deflecting any mention of the Palestinians’ history of dispossession.
This has radicalised millions against the status quo that enables genocide.
As long as there is a Zionist state and reactionary Arab dictatorships in the region, there will be no meaningful peace for the Palestinians. One-state, two-states, or a sea of isolated enclaves: there will be no just settlement for the Palestinian people on a capitalist basis.
Our call as the Revolutionary Communist International is to organise against all the forces of reaction that have aided and abetted the ruin of the Palestinians and oppressed masses of the world.
Western imperialism has left a trail of destruction across the entire Middle East, transforming it into a carnival of bloodshed and oppression.
Our task is to bury the system that produces this endless horror. This system has a name: imperialism. And the struggle against it begins at home, against the warmongering ruling classes that uphold it.
