Palestine | Gaza: Israeli control as a tool of oppression

The humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza is a constant topic of international discussion, but its political and economic implications are less so. At their meeting in Washington on Monday evening, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump once again openly discussed plans for the "reconstruction" of Gaza and the "relocation" of the surviving residents.

Expanding the perspective on the 20-month-long genocide in Gaza to include the political-economic dimension was the goal of a two-day symposium this weekend. 500 participants gathered at the Spore Initiative building in Berlin-Neukölln to discuss historical continuities of racialized division of labor, exploitation, trade relations, and capital interests.

At a panel whose participants discussed, among other things, the control and exploitation of Palestinian labor since 1948, Riya al'Sanah of the Workers in Palestine initiative criticized the humanitarian situation in Gaza for being "discussed in isolation from a historical and broader regional, anti-imperial perspective." It is clear, she said, "that decades of colonial rule have produced the dependencies and fragmentation we see today." Class issues are thus lost from view. "This renders the agency of Palestinians invisible," al'Sanah said.

It became clear that the dependency and fragmentation of Palestinian territories did not begin with the founding of the State of Israel in 1948. All of this has continuities dating back to the time of the British Mandate in Palestine. Using archival documents, Tariq M. Suleiman reconstructed in a lecture how, during this period, rights to use energy infrastructure and resources were specifically granted to Zionists such as the engineer and entrepreneur Pinhas Rutenberg. In 1921, Pinhas Rutenberg was granted the right to use hydropower from the Jordan River and its largest tributary, the Yarmuk. With the Palestine Electric Corporation, founded in 1923 and now the Israel Electric Corporation, he built power plants and dams. The infrastructure thus established was crucial for shaping the Jewish settlements and the geographical dimensions of the future State of Israel.

The Palestinians' dependence and the fragmentation of their territories began long before the founding of the State of Israel. Documents from the 1920s show this.

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Today, the power company is a central instrument of control and exploitation of the Palestinian population. Israel deliberately created dependence on vital infrastructure such as energy and water. In 2023, 87 percent of the electricity consumed in the Palestinian territories came from Israel. In March of this year, Israel cut off Gaza's energy supply, causing contamination of drinking water and the disruption of medical care. Furthermore, solar power plants in Gaza have been deliberately destroyed in the war waged by Israel since the Hamas crimes on October 7, 2023.

The West Bank is also dependent on the Israel Electric Corporation. Permits for the development of an independent energy supply are not granted. In 2023, Israel also cut funding to the Palestinian Authority (PA) to collect energy debts. This led, among other things, to salary cuts for Palestinian public sector workers in the West Bank, who already faced precarious working conditions. The example of energy infrastructure illustrates the unequal access to resources between Israelis and Palestinians.

Control over the energy and water supplies enables Israel to assert its interests in the region, even beyond the Palestinian territories. This was the topic of a panel on the role of infrastructure. Israel's decision to export half of the natural gas produced in the offshore gas fields in the Mediterranean to countries like Egypt and Jordan, thus remaining dependent on coal and oil imports, serves to strengthen relations with its Arab neighbors. The significance of these resulting dependencies was recently demonstrated by the halting of gas exports following the Iranian attack on the Leviathan gas field.

Israel's increasing integration into the region's energy grid also opens up opportunities for new forms of resistance against the Israeli government, said Sai Englert of Leiden University in the Netherlands. As an example, he cited the mobilization of the Jordanian civilian population around the slogan "The enemy's gas is occupation." The campaign gained momentum after the recent Israeli import bans. It calls for Jordan to withdraw from the gas agreement with Israel and develop an autonomous energy infrastructure. However, electricity supply is only one part of Israel's economic warfare. Gaza serves as a laboratory in which all kinds of infrastructure—checkpoints, gas pipelines, water pipes, surveillance technologies, or the precise calculation of calories in food imports—is used to control the population.

In addition, technologies for influencing the climate are being tested. For example, the Israeli-US startup Stardust plans to apply for patent rights for Solar Radiation Management (SRM). This is a geoengineering technology that involves injecting reflective particles into the atmosphere. Its effectiveness will be tested in Gaza. These tests are already underway, reported Palestinian climate activist Mohammed Usrof.

Nabil Hamdan, an activist and environmental sciences student at the Technical University of Berlin, reported similarly on a panel on arms exports: "Using technologies of control and oppression tested on the Palestinians, Israeli companies and arms firms are gathering knowledge and experience that they are contributing to research collaborations with German universities, among others." He argued that institutes are circumventing civil rights clauses at universities through dual-use regulations. They are thus partly responsible for war crimes.