Zionist settlements key to colonialist strategy

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Begin as the commander of the terrorist Irgun group in 1948 In the past week or so the Ziorist state of Israel has engaged in instituting new set tlements in territ Dry previously closed to Jewish settlers.

The manner in which this is customarily done and the reasons for doing it are noty disputed and provide L -11-an occasion for a examination of the nature of the Israeli state and its motives for pursuing this policy.

The Israeli state has its origins in the historic persecution of Jews.

- Religious roots It is'a fact that Jews have been widely persecuted, but it is a fact that is denied by most present day Near and Middle Eastern regimes.

Persecution was not confined to the Near and Middle East however. It had a world-wide character and was particularly vicious in central and Eastern Europe around the turn of the 19th Century.

Some Jews responded to this not by looking for the class origins of this persecution but by peddling the idea of reuniting the Jewish people in a land the believed was promised to them by God-"Zion"

This "Zionism" had religious roots but, as expressed by ideologues at the turn of the last century, it became a political philosophy.

Steady trickle

Whereas previously the reunification was to be left to God, now it became the province and task of man.

Funds were established to buy land in Palestine for Jewish settlement, and a steady trickle of hardy settlers made their way there.

Disputes broke out almost immediately as native tenant farmers whose land had been literally sold out from under their feet by absentee landlords fought to retain control of their sole means of livelihood.

That the newcomers were Jewish was in the first instance, of little importance to the native farmers.

They might have been martians for all they cared. What was important was that their long established water rights, grazing rights and security of tenure were now threatened.

In this context fortified Jewish settlements were established-kibbutzim.

It is no accident that even today these kibbutzim to which many western youth make pilgrimages in the summer, in the belief that they hold the key to a socialist future, are situated in outlying border areas.

Their collective character Thai, allantin shamentam is then forced upon them by circumstances; shoulder to shoulder to fight a common enemy.

Non-Jews are exploited by the kibbutzim as labourers, but very few are permitted to join.

As the trickle of Jewish settlers turned into a flood, ds a resuit oi increasea in meansm persecution of Jews by European fascist states, fighting in Palestine spread, and acquired an anti-Jewish character as the local landed nobility and infant bourgeoisie egged on the peasantry.

By this time the local landed nobility and emerging bourgeoisle were teeing threatened by what they rightly interpreted as moves by the imperialist powers to establish a Jewish state in the area, a state from which they would be largely excluded.

Campaign of terror

When that State was proclaimed in 1948 there followed a widespread Zionist campaign of terror to drive potentially hostile non-Jewish elements out of the area.

Hundreds of villages were dynamited flat to prevent them returning.

The refugee problem began.

Since that date it has been the policy of the Zionist state to establish settlements of sympathisers all over the area that it occupies in order to be better able to police that area.

The latest settlements are part of that process and their institution becomes the more urgent the more that Zionist territorial gains are threatened.

The recent relinquishment of settlements in Sinai is no exception. It was a straight exchange for the right to build other settlements elsewhere.

Under pressure from their US paymasters the Zionist ruling clique exchanged their Sinai settlements for an Egyptian government assurance that it would not intervene to prevent them being built elsewhere.

In practice this is the meaning of the Egyptian government's recognition of the State of Israel.

While this racially exclusive state continues to exist there can be no solution to the problems of the dispossessed Arab and Palestinian masses whose land . is now within the borders of Israel.

Nor, under conditions where the Zionist settlements are so intricately bound up with military policy and diplomatic manoeuvre, 1s it simply a question of opening them up to all those who wish to settle in them.

Rather the fight must be for the mobilisation of the Arab and Palestinian masses in the struggle for the overthrow of the bourgeois state of Israel in which the Zionists exploit and repress both Arab and Jewish workers and the establishment of a democratic secular Palestine, in which minority rights are granted to Jewish workers.