The tragic events overtaking the Palestinian people - the genocide in Gaza that Israel threatens to complete, egged on by the United States; the vicious campaigns of the Israeli army to pacify the last vestiges of resistance to colonization, now spreading to all the cities and refugee camps of the West Bank; the unleashing of murderous settlers to drive Palestinians out of their towns and villages; the government's brutal suppression of political dissent, even among Israelis - deserve our full attention in and of themselves. They must be understood, however, in the context of Zionism's 130-year campaign to Judaize Palestine, to turn an Arab country into a Jewish one, which is nearing its culmination.
Settler colonialism does not triumph in a dramatic victory. Rather, it prevails and becomes a permanent "fact on the ground" through the grey, secretive, almost invisible process of normalization, hardly something against which masses of protesters can be mobilized. Trump's "Deal of the Century," his push to complete the Abraham Accords, now with the willing support of Mohammad bin Salman, does not involve the Palestinians. It is not a peace process or a negotiated settlement. It is a diktat. Israel's apartheid regime extending over 85% of historic Palestine, will be recognized by the US and the "moderate" Arab states, and gradually by the international community as a whole, de facto if not formally.
And the Palestinians? Who cares? In our transactional world of international relations, powerless actors like the Palestinians have no say, are not even at the table. The Palestinian "issue," however, must be quietized; its disruptive potential evident to all.
Pacification precedes normalization. What we are witnessing throughout Palestine is the eradication of any effective resistance, the inauguration of the industrial quiet without which normalization is impossible. Industrial quiet does not resolve Zionist colonization or address Palestinians just and moral struggle for self-determination in their own homeland. Instead, it takes the easy way: recognize a "greater" Israel, concentrate the Palestinian population into truncated, non-sovereign, non-viable enclaves under Israeli control, and then declare those enclaves a Palestinian "state." Voila, all done! A "two-state solution"! Two-state apartheid, normalized in a way South Africa was never able to do.
The pacification campaigns being carried out throughout Palestine - which include the suppression of support for Palestinian rights and opposition to apartheid by complicit governments, universities and media abroad - is intended to create that industrial quiet. Pacification destroys the colonized people's ability to resist, enabling conflict management to replace any genuine political resolution. Pacification even criminalizes resistance, since what are the colonized attacking? A normal peace-loving population just trying to live a normal life in a normal country?
We must begin using an anti-colonial terminology. We must begin reframing the Israeli-Palestinian "conflict" into what it truly is: a struggle of a colonized Palestinian people for their national and human rights against a Zionist/Israeli settler regime intent on erasing it and replacing their country with its own. Unilateral and violent settler colonialism, dispossession, Judaization, resistance, pacification, erasure and genocide, apartheid, normalization, decolonization -- these are some of the terms we should be using to present what is happening in ways people can understand and act on.
At this moment, the ongoing campaign of pacification and the process of normalization already underway demands our immediate attention.
Jeff Halper
February 2025