Will Israel’s right to defend itself continue to the last Palestinian?

(The image shows the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem)

Eamon Dyas

“Israel has a right to defend itself” has been the constant refrain of western leaders to justify every Israeli response to expressions of Palestinian resistance since the state was established. In recent years that refrain from western leaders has usually been linked with a request for Israel to exercise that right proportionately and with due consideration for Palestinian civilians. But besides these two constants there has been a third. And that is, despite such calls for a proportionate response, Israel has never responded to any expression of Palestinian resistance in a proportionate manner. In fact, it is a feature of those Israeli responses that they are invariably disproportionate. Based on the historical record it could be justifiably said that Israel’s commitment to a disproportionate response to Palestinian resistance has been a policy of the Israeli state ever since it was founded. A simple check of the figures for casualties in every expression of “Israel’s right to defend itself” since the start of the present century reveals that to have been the case. Yet, despite what these figures reveal, western leaders never hold Israel to account after the fact of a disproportionate response becomes self evident. Instead they remain silent until the next Israeli response to an expression of Palestinian resistance when the same mantra is repeated and Israel commits the same excesses. And so it goes on interminably in a pattern which western leaders, because of their failure to hold Israel to account, have become complicit in those Israeli actions.  

Let us look at the evidence. The following figures have been taken from a database maintained by the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem. According that that database from the start of the Second Palestinian Intifada in September 2000 to the 27 September 2023 a total of 10,555 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces and an additional 96 by Israeli citizens (for the most part armed settlers). In the same period 550 Israelis had been killed by Palestinians as well as 122 members of the Israeli armed forces. (See: https://statistics.btselem.org/en/all-fatalities/by-date-of-incident?section=overall&tab=overview ). This means that since the year 2000 for every one Israeli killed as a result of Palestinian resistance there have been almost 16 Palestinians killed (many of whom had not offered resistance of any kind and many of whom were children!) Yet, despite such a disproportionate level of killings the United States and its western acolytes continue to rubber-stamp the continuation of this Israeli policy of ensuring multiple Palestinian deaths for every Israeli. This is the reality of the Israeli Government’s relationship with the indigenous Palestinian population and it represents the way in which Israel operates its western bestowed right to militarily defend itself.

The figures for Israeli deaths compared to Palestinian deaths given above are from before the latest conflict. With the Israeli response to the events of 7 October still ongoing there has been no settled figure available at the time of writing but already the figures are weighing in favour of the Israelis and against the Palestinians in multiples. Unfortunately for the people of Gaza, if precedent is anything to go by, Israel will insist on many more Palestinian deaths before it feels that it has inflicted a sufficiently “proportionate” response in the exercise of its right to defend itself.

The Jewish Law of Return.

These casualty figures from 2000 to date suggest that something much more significant has been happening when it comes to Israel’s claim to be simply defending itself against attack. So why does it feel compelled on the occasion of every expression of Palestinian resistance to respond to that resistance in so obvious a disproportionate manner? And why does it do so  knowing that such a disproportionate response only feeds subsequent Palestinian resentmentthat will inevitably result in more expressions of resistance further down the line?

In seeking any reasoning behind this policy we have to go back to the foundation of the state itself and the relationship of the Jews of Israel with the land on which they now exert control. If we look at the population of Israel/Palestine in 1947 just prior to the 1948 clearances that total population was 1,970,000. Of these 630,000 were Jews and 1,324,000 were non-Jews, meaning that Jews made up 32% of the total. A year later we see that the total population was 872,700 with the number of Jews having risen to 716,700 and the number of non-Jews having shrunk to 156,000 and Jews now making up 82.1% of the population. (Note: since then Jews have consistently made up more than 80% of the population until 1996 when their percentage dropped into the 70% range where it has remained ever since. See: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jewish-and-non-jewish-population-of-israel-palestine-1517-present ). It goes without saying that the reason for the decline in the number of non-Jews living in the area of Israel/Palestine between 1947 and 1948 is the wholesale removal of the Palestinian population from the area.

But with the land having been so effectively cleansed of its indigenous non-Jewish population there remained for the Jewish State the need to populate it with fellow Jews. So it was that the State formally emphasised its biblical mission with the Law of Return.

“The State of Israel will be open for Jewish immigration and for the ‘Ingathering of the Exiles.’ This is what the Government in its Declaration of Independence on the 5^th of the month of lyar in the year 5708, May 14, 1948. The integration of immigrants into the social fabric of the community has been one of the central objectives of the State of Israel from the day of its founding, and, as such, it stands at the forefront of the Government’s scale of priorities.” (https://www.gov.il/en/departments/guides/the-aliya-story ) 

That is the opening statement on the website of the Israeli Ministry of Aliyah and Integration and when it refers to “immigrants” it of course means Jewish immigrants. It is a sentiment that dictated the way in which the Zionist architects foresaw the central purpose and role of the state and it was integrated into the fabric of the Israeli legal framework with the passing of the Law of Return by the Israeli Parliament on 5 July 1950. It is important to realise that this has been and remains the central purpose of the Israeli State and the reason why it exists. Knowing that and appreciating what that implies in terms of its assertion of its right to defend itself is critical to understanding Israeli actions in terms of the Palestinians. 

The primary purpose of Israel’s existence is the “Ingathering of the Exiles”. The provision of a safe haven for Jews was associated with this but it was not originally the primary sentiment that went into the making of Israel. Although periodic outbreaks of antisemitism in Russia and Europe highlighted this aspect of the Zionist project it only assumed the importance it did in the aftermath of the Holocaust. It was the Holocaust that provided the practical outcomes that enabled Israel to become a functioning State capable of asserting its existence in the world. It was the Holocaust that generated the sense of political accommodation for such a State amongst the world’s politicians and it was the Holocaust and its legacy that provided the State with its much-needed population in the years immediately after the State’s foundation. (Thus, by 1949 almost one in three of Israel’s citizens were Holocaust survivors). From then on the “Ingathering of the Exiles” became synonymous with the safe haven aspect of the State’s purpose. 

An essential part of the operation of the 1950 Law of Return placed an obligation on the Israeli State to not only facilitate “returning” Jews to Israel but to actively encourage them. The measures put in place to meet that obligation meant that within five years of the foundation of the State the Jewish population more than doubled and during this time half of the national budget of the country was being spent on resettlement costs (with military spending coming a close second). 

These returns of the Jewish diaspora to the biblical land of Israel are referred to as “making Aliyah” and in the context of large-scale immigrations organised by the State the term is usually added to the name of the country from which that group has returned. Thus there was the Iraqi Aliyah in 1950-51 (organised under the name “Operation Ezra and Nehemia”) which involved the airlifting of over 100,000 Iraqi Jews to Israel and the Moroccan Aliyah of 1954 which brought 30,000 Moroccan Jews. The only Aliyahs that have taken place since then were the Aliyah of Ethiopian Jewry in 1984 (there was another in 1991) and the Aliyah from the former Soviet Union in 1990 (which brought a million immigrants to Israel). Since then, the idea of the Aliyah has reverted to its original meaning involving individuals or small groups of individuals making the decision to “return” to Israel. Among these individual and small groups, Jews from the United States are a relatively recent phenomenon and they only began arriving in any significant numbers between 1961 and 1971. Nonetheless they have constituted an important source of Jewish immigration ever since. These immigrants from the United States represent a significant shift in the relationship of Israel with the Jewish diaspora. This is because these Jews have not moved to Israel to escape persecution in their home country but primarily out of a sense of religious zeal or to make a better life for themselves. In that sense the concept of the Jewish safe haven assumes a different meaning for these immigrants. But it also has implications for the historic mission of the biblical Zionists.

The cost of defending the safe haven.

The idea of a safe haven is that it provides a space within which those entering it feel a level of safety that is absent from the place they left. In the case of those who enter it from a state which was genuinely perceived by them to be dangerous to their well-being or prosperity they would bring with them the capacity to withstand the lesser threat from Palestinians because they felt the protection of the Israeli State. This is why so much effort has been invested in building up the public reputation of the likes of the IDF and Mossad. However, unlike the earlier Jewish immigrations which consisted of people who held a genuine fear for their futures in their countries of origin the Jewish immigrants since the 1970s have in many cases not done so to escape persecution but to find a better home for themselves and with the Israeli State providing that home and generous inducements it has tended to attract an increasing number of what are considered in some Zionist circles as the less committed type of Jew or even Gentiles. All of this has created a dilemma for the Israeli State. On the one hand it needs to continue to attract Jews from the wider diaspora in order to meet the challenge of its own diminishing fertility rate in comparison to that of the Palestinians but on the other hand many of those Jews making the Aliyah have in recent decades come from areas of the world in which there is no significant threat to them as Jews and therefore are more susceptible to the potential threat from Palestinian resistance. While that is not necessarily an issue for those Jews who came to Israel from a committed religious belief as such people would have a tendency to endure, it was and continues to be an issue for those Jews of the more secular variety.

It is in that context that Israel feels obliged to continue to inflict a disproportionate price in lives on the Palestinians at every point of resistance. Such a price is not so much meant to serve up a lesson to the Palestinians but more to act as a kind of perpetual assurance to the ingathered Jews of the present and of the future. In the mind of the Zionist, without such a response the idea of the safe haven for Jews begins to dissolve. This importance of the idea of the safe haven for Jews was articulated by Rushi Sunak in the debate in the House of Commons on 16 October when, in referring to the events of 7 October as a pogrom, he said:

“This atrocity was an existential strike at the very idea of Israel as a safe homeland for the Jewish people.” (Hansard, 16 October 2023, col. 23).

The point at which the threat from Palestinians on Jewish immigrants assumes sufficient potency to discourage Jewish immigration is the point at which the idea of a demographic decline in Judaism in Israel takes on a greater reality. It is important not to underestimate this fear among the Jews of being outbred by Arabs. 

The charting of Palestinian birth rates had long been a preoccupation of Israel and it was based on the fear that the reproduction rate of the Palestinians would outrun the reproduction rate of Jews and with the last great Aliyahs of “ingathered” Jews having taken place in the early 1990s that source has failed to make up the difference. This consideration was clearly articulated by Ariel Sharon’s deputy leader, Ehud Olmert, in an interview he gave to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in November 2003 where he said:

“There is no doubt in my mind that very soon the government of Israel is going to have to address the demographic issue with the utmost seriousness and resolve. This issue above all others will dictate the solution that we must all adopt. In the absence of a negotiated settlement – and I do not believe in the realistic prospect of an agreement – we need to implement a unilateral alternative. . . More and more Palestinians are uninterested in a negotiated, two-state solution, because they want to change the essence of the conflict from an Algerian paradigm to a South African one. From a struggle against ‘occupation,’ in their parlance, to a struggle for one-man-one-vote. That is, of course, a much cleaner struggle a much more popular struggle – and ultimately a much more powerful one. For us, it would mean the end of the Jewish state.

Of course I would prefer a negotiated settlement (for two states). But I personally doubt that such an agreement can be reached within the time-frame available to us.”

Olmert’s formula for the parameters of a unilateral solution are: to maximise the number of Jews; to minimise the number of Palestinians, not to withdraw to the 1967 border and not to divide Jerusalem.” Large settlements such as Ariel would “obviously” be carved into Israel. . . “Twenty-three years ago,” he says, “Moshe Dayan proposed unilateral autonomy. On the same wavelength, we may have to espouse unilateral separation. We won’t need the Palestinians’ support for that. What we would need is to pull ourselves together, to determine where the line should be run.

“Maximum, minimum, Dayan, unilateral line – all these seem to add up to large-scale withdrawal from the West Bank and probably full-scale withdrawal from Gaza. . .  Olmert says his unilateralism “would inevitably preclude a dialogue with the Palestinians for at least 25 years.”  (‘Maximum Jews, Minimum Palestinians’, by David Landau. Haaretz, 13 November 2003).

Here we have the encapsulation of the plan that Israel put into effect two years later and they reveal the intentions that have dictated policy ever since. In the above quote Olmert makes it plain that Israel had no intention of moving back to the pre-1967 borders as had been required by United Nations Resolution 242. He also clearly understood that this refusal would not be accepted by the Palestinians as it precluded the emergence of a functioning Palestinian state. Therefore, having decided to destroy the prospect of an independent Palestinian state but yet needing to find some way of surgically removing them from having any real influence on the Israeli body politic in the future, the idea of corralling them inside a cordon sanitaire became the preferred option. 

Olmert’s fear that the Palestinians were breeding at a faster rate than the Jews of Israel had one year earlier been brought to the attention of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon by the Israeli demographer, Arnon Soffer. This was reported in Haaretz as follows:

“About three months ago Prof. Arnon Sofer sent an urgent letter to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. The subject was the need for separation from Palestinians. ‘Most of the inhabitants of Israel realise that there is only one solution in the face of our insane and suicidal neighbour – separation,’ wrote Sofer. ‘You should have known this months before they did, as the grave demographic data were put on your desk many months ago. In the absence of separation, the meaning of such a majority (of Arabs) – is the end of the Jewish state of Israel. You should remember that on the same day as the Israel Defence Force is investing efforts and succeeding in eliminating one terrorist or another, on that very same day, as on every other day of the year, within the territories of western Israel, about 400 children are being born, some of whom will become new suicide terrorists! Do you realise that?’” (A Jewish Demographic State, by Lily Galili, Haaretz, 27 June 2002)

Sofer was the Head of the Geography Department at the University of Haifa and a long-established lecturer at the Israeli Army’s Staff and Command College. He had been warning about the prospect of Arabs outnumbering Jews in Israel and the occupied territories since the 1980s and had predicted that this would happen by around 2010. But Sofer was no ordinary academic. According to the American Jewish paper Forward, by the time of his letter to Ariel Sharon in 2002 he had become highly influential with the Prime Minister, with Ehud Barak, Benjamin Netanyahu and with hundreds of other Israeli politicians, and military and economic leaders of Israel. It was his idea to cede territory to the Palestinians as a means of diminishing their influence on the future of Israel.

“He wrote: ‘If such a course is carried out, there will remain within the bounds of Israel in 2020 an Arab population of 1,300,000, [while the] Jewish population will then number six million. These are statistics that a Jewish-Zionist Israel can digest,’ If the borders don’t change, he added, current population trends point in 2020 to 6,300,000 Jews in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza combined – alongside 8,740,000 Arabs. . . 

“A Jewish state can live with Arabs inside its borders, he said, but not with a majority of them.” (Sounding the Alarm About Israel’s Demographic Crisis, by Larry Derfner, Forward, 9 January, 2004).

Although Sofer’s predictions were to prove incorrect (the current Jewish population of Israel is over 9.2 million whereas he said it would be 6,300,000 and the population of Gaza and the West Bank is 5,410,000 whereas he said it would be 8,740,000). There are obviously a number of reasons why his predictions were incorrect but there is one main reason and that is the action taken by the Israeli Government in response of his advocacy of an arbitrary withdrawal from Gaza and the West Bank. So it was that in 2005 the Israeli government unilaterally implemented a limited disengagement plan from some of the territory it had seized during the Six-Day War. That disengagement plan involved the removal of all of the 8,000 residents of the 21 Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip and four settlements in the West Bank. 

The plan for this action was first proposed in 2003 by the Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, and approved by the Knesset in February 2005 as the Disengagement Plan Implement Law with the removal of the settlers being completed between August and September of that year. The removed Jewish settlers were paid more than $200,000 per family by way of compensation. Those who refused were forcibly removed by the Israeli army – something that caused much turmoil within Israel at the time – and sold to the West as evidence that Israel was willing to exchange land for peace.

But from the Israeli perspective this arrangement meant that they could implement a tighter blockade of Gaza while maintaining a presence in the West Bank. By this means Israel took control over every aspect of the lives of the Palestinians of Gaza including access to fresh water, food, electricity, communications etc. This arrangement was explained by Dov Weisglas, an aide to Ehud Olmert, at the time as “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger”. The idea of starving the Palestinians was not an acceptable option but the next best thing was to ensure that the population could be kept under control by other means. How successful these other means were can be gauged by the fact that at the time of the imposition of the 2005 arrangement the fertility rate of Palestinian women in Gaza was 6.2 births per woman. Since then it has declined every year to where in 2020 it was 3.64 births per woman and it has continued to decline since. (See chart of the Total Fertility Rate of women in Gaza at https://www.indexmundi.com/g/g.aspx?v=31&c=gz&l=en and for Palestinian women in general at https://www.worldometers.info/demographics/state-of-palestine-demographics/#tfr ). 

Other demographic outcomes reveal a similar constraint on the Palestinian population in comparison with the Israeli Jewish population are as follows. The life expectancy of Israelis is 83.39 years (for Palestinians it is 74.28 years). Infant mortality among Israelis is 2.8 per 1,000 live births (for Palestinians it is 13.8 per 1,000 live births). Deaths of the under 5 years among Israelis is 3.4 per 1,000 live births (for Palestinians it is 16.2 per 1,000 live births). The statistics relate to 2023 and are available at https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/ .

So it has to be said that, although it hasn’t stopped the expansion of the Palestinian population, in terms of curtailing it, the incarceration of the Palestinian population inside Gaza and “keeping them on a diet” has been successful from the Jewish perspective of Israel’s right to defend itself from the Palestinian demographic threat. 

The immigrant dilemma

It should be added as one final point that the changing nature of Jewish immigration to Israel in recent years has created a further dilemma within the country. Bezal Smotrich, the lawyer and religious Zionist leader who has served as Finance Minister in the Netanyahu cabinet since December 2022, and Avi Maoz, head of the ultranationalist Noam Party, have committed to changes in the Law of Return as they feel that it is no longer serving the purpose for which it was originally formulated. (See “Israel’s far right targets Law of Return to restrict Jewish Immigration”, by Shira Rubin, Washington Post, 22 December 2022). They view those recent Jewish immigrants arriving under the Law of Return as the type of Jew that cannot be relied upon to contribute to the Zionist mission for the recreation of Jewish control over biblical Israel. From that perspective, the growing number of such Jews constitute a threat to that mission as under the conditions of Israeli democracy their influence would be used to counter their agenda. Consequently, they are eager to ensure that the Law of Return should be tightened to enable only the more religious Jew to enter Israel in the future. 

The same body of opinion is working towards a change in the legal code of Israel from its current secular basis to one that relies on Jewish religious law. This is a growing body of opinion within Israel and is particularly influential among the Israeli settlers. Hundreds of those same settlers stormed the Al-Aqsa mosque in early October (coming in the wake of an assault on the same mosque by Israeli police in April), and happening as it did only a matter of days before, should be viewed as part of the context leading up to the events of 7 October. It is the immigration of this more robust type of religious Jew that the likes of Smotrich and Maoz wish to encourage in their proposed changes to the Law of Return while ensuring that the less robust type of Jew is kept out. Should this trend in Israeli Zionism continue to grow there is no way of knowing where it will lead and what it will mean for the Palestinians. But, given the attitudes of western leaders up to now wherever it leads we can expect them to continue to support Israel’s right to defend itself while wringing their hands at the cost that the Palestinians will be paying.