On the first anniversary of the war in Ukraine, the only thing to celebrate is the scale and courage of the Ukrainian resistance, which surprised everyone, including Ukraine's allies, and perhaps the Ukrainians themselves. Through self-defense, Ukraine achieves its transformation.
"People's desire for justice does not end," says Ukrainian journalist Katerina Semchuk. "It is actually stronger, because citizens are risking their lives in the fight against the genocidal threat of Russia." People are investing their lives in the future of Ukraine and are more than ever worried about how we will live after the war."
Following this new mood, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky recently fired several top officials suspected of corruption and other crimes. It remains to be seen whether Ukraine's anti-corruption campaign will develop into a more radical rethinking of the question of "how we will live after the war."
Will Ukraine just give in to the liberal west and the economic colonization of big corporations? Will Poland join the populist revolt against globalization and the free market? Or will they choose the more difficult path of true social democracy?
These issues are related to the uneven international response to Russian aggression. In order to correctly condemn Russian colonialism, one should be consistent and condemn other examples of colonial subjugation, especially the Israeli oppression of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
It is true that the Israeli occupation of the West Bank is not the result of a military offensive or invasion, but a legacy of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, which the Arab states lost. And it is true that discussions of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute require special caution, as they are often used to fuel anti-Semitism, a growing problem in the West. But they must be led, especially today when violence in Israel is on the rise again.
It is an undeniable fact that the majority of Palestinians from the West Bank were born under occupation and that after almost 6 decades they are losing hope of ever gaining true statehood. On the contrary, they watch helplessly as Israeli settlers gradually appropriate their land. Western media praise Ukraine's "heroic resistance", but pass over Palestinian resistance to a regime that is increasingly similar to the former apartheid in South Africa.
Now that the new Israeli government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is carrying out the de facto annexation of the West Bank, it is increasingly easy to draw parallels with Russia's treatment of Ukraine and the denial of Ukrainians' right to exist as a people. In December 2022, the Israeli government explicitly stated that "the Jewish people have the exclusive and indisputable right to all parts of Israel" including Judea and Samaria, i.e. the West Bank.
Netanyahu's right-wing coalition goes one step further. According to the assessment of the Just Security initiative from the Law School of the University of New York, "the program of the new government indicates a clear and dramatic turn in the organization of the normative framework for the management of the territories: from the law of occupation to the change of the Israeli judicial laws". In practice, it is "annexation in all but name". So, the change in the law on enemy property will return property in the West Bank to Israelis who owned it before 1948. Of course, this change only works in one direction: property taken from the Palestinians will not be returned.
It's a shame, because it would be a progressive act that would show that there is no double standard for Israelis and Palestinians, which is the basis of apartheid accusations. But the new Israeli government is anything but progressive. So how will they manage the annexation? If the West Bank is annexed by Israel, will the nearly three million Palestinians living there become Israeli citizens with the right to vote in elections?
Such an outcome is clearly unacceptable to Netanyahu and his right-wing partners in the government. They can prevent it in two ways: by expelling Palestinians from the annexed territories or by imposing what Just Security describes as "an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination of one racial group over another in order to maintain a regime known as apartheid."
In recent months, Israel has been rocked by demonstrations against the Netanyahu government's attack on the independence of the Israeli judiciary. But the hundreds of thousands of liberal, freedom-loving Israelis who took to the streets more or less ignore the plight of the Palestinians (including the Arabs who make up 20% of Israel's population), even though they will suffer the most under the new government and its i-liberal reforms. The proposed laws are treated as an internal Jewish issue.
A true act of protest would recognize the essence of the problem. To preserve Israeli democracy and the rule of law, liberal Israelis should form a grand democratic coalition with Palestinian representatives. It would be a radical and risky move, because it would abolish the unwritten rule of Israeli politics that Palestinian Israelis should not decide the fate of the country.
But such radicalism may now be the only way to keep Israel from becoming another religious-fundamentalist and racist state. And that would be the ultimate travesty and abandonment of the Jewish historical commitment to enlightenment and the pursuit of justice - and yet another victory for forces committed to darker ideals.
(Project Syndicate; Peščanik.net; translation: M. Jovanović)
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