Why Israel wants to erase context and history in the war against Gaza
Dehistoricizing what is happening helps Israel pursue genocidal policies in Gaza.
ILAN PAPPE
On October 24, a statement by United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres sparked a sharp reaction from Israel. Addressing the UN Security Council, the UN chief said who, while condemning in the strongest terms the massacre committed by Hamas on October 7, wanted to remind the world that it did not occur in a vacuum. He explained that 56 years of occupation cannot be dissociated from our commitment to the tragedy that occurred that day.
The Israeli Government was quick to condemn the statement. Israeli officials demanded Guterres resign, alleging that he supported Hamas and justified the massacre he carried out. The Israeli media also jumped on the bandwagon, stating among other things that the UN chief “has demonstrated an astonishing degree of moral bankruptcy.”
This reaction suggests that a new type of charge of anti-Semitism may now be on the table. Until October 7, Israel had pushed for the definition of anti-Semitism to be expanded to include criticism of the Israeli state and questioning the moral basis of Zionism. Now, contextualizing and historicizing what is happening could also trigger an accusation of anti-Semitism.
Dehistoricizing these events helps Israel and Western governments pursue policies that they rejected in the past for ethical, tactical, or strategic considerations.
Thus, Israel uses the October 7 attack as a pretext to apply genocidal policies in the Gaza Strip. It is also a pretext for the United States to try to reaffirm its presence in the Middle East. And it is a pretext for some European countries to violate and limit democratic freedoms in the name of a new “war on terror.”
But there are several historical contexts for what is happening now in Israel-Palestine that cannot be ignored. The broader historical context dates back to the mid-XNUMXth century, when Western evangelical Christianity turned the idea of the “return of the Jews” into a millennial religious imperative and advocated the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine as part of the steps that would lead to the resurrection of the dead, the return of the Messiah and the end of time.
Theology became political towards the end of the XNUMXth century and in the years before the First World War for two reasons.
Firstly, it favored the British who wanted to dismantle the Ottoman Empire and incorporate parts of it into the British Empire. Secondly, it resonated with members of the British aristocracy, both Jewish and Christian, who were enchanted by the idea of Zionism as a panacea for the problem of anti-Semitism in Central and Eastern Europe, which had produced an unwanted wave of Jewish immigration to Great Britain. Brittany.
When these two interests merged, they prompted the British government to issue the famous - or infamous - Balfour Declaration in 1917.
The Jewish thinkers and activists who redefined Judaism as nationalism hoped that this definition would protect Jewish communities from existential danger in Europe by focusing on Palestine as the desired space for the “rebirth of the Jewish nation.”
In the process, the Zionist cultural and intellectual project was transformed into a settler colonial project, the aim of which was to Judaize historical Palestine, ignoring the fact that it was inhabited by an indigenous population.
In turn, Palestinian society, quite pastoral at that time and in its initial phase of modernization and construction of a national identity, produced its own anti-colonial movement. His first significant action against the Zionist colonization project came with the al-Buraq uprising of 1929, and it hasn't stopped since.
Another historical context relevant to the current crisis is the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine, which included the forced expulsion of Palestinians to the Gaza Strip from villages on whose ruins some of the Israeli settlements attacked on October 7 were built. These uprooted Palestinians were part of the 750.000 Palestinians who lost their homes and became refugees.
The world took note of this ethnic cleansing, but did not condemn it. As a result, Israel continued to resort to ethnic cleansing as part of its effort to secure full control of historic Palestine with as few native Palestinians as possible. This included the expulsion of 300.000 Palestinians during and after the 1967 war, and the expulsion of more than 600.000 from the West Bank, Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip since then.
There is also the context of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Over the past 50 years, occupation forces have inflicted persistent collective punishment on Palestinians in these territories, exposing them to constant harassment by settlers and Israeli security forces and imprisoning hundreds of thousands of them.
Since the election of the current Israeli messianic fundamentalist government in November 2022, all these harsh policies have reached unprecedented levels. The number of Palestinians killed, injured and detained in the occupied West Bank skyrocketed. Furthermore, the Israeli government's policies toward Jerusalem's Christian and Muslim holy sites became even more aggressive.
Finally, there is also the historical context of the 16-year siege of Gaza, where almost half of the population are children. In 2018, the UN already warned that the Gaza Strip would become a place unfit for human beings by 2020.
It is important to remember that the siege was imposed in response to the democratic elections won by Hamas following the unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the territory. Even more important is to go back to the 1990s, when the Gaza Strip was surrounded by barbed wire and disconnected from the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem following the Oslo Accords.
The isolation of Gaza, the barbed wire surrounding it, and the increasing Judaization of the West Bank were a clear indication that, in the eyes of the Israelis, Oslo meant an occupation by other means, not a path to genuine peace.
Israel controlled the entry and exit points of the Gaza ghetto, even monitoring the type of food brought in, sometimes limiting it to a certain number of calories. Hamas reacted to this debilitating siege by launching rockets into civilian areas of Israel.
The Israeli government alleged that these attacks were motivated by the movement's ideological desire to kill Jews - a new form of Nazism -, without taking into account the context of both the Nakba and the inhumane and barbaric siege imposed on two million people and the oppression of their compatriots in other parts of historic Palestine.
Hamas, in many ways, was the only Palestinian group that promised to avenge or respond to these policies. However, the way in which it decided to respond could lead to its own demise, at least in the Gaza Strip, and could also serve as a pretext for further oppression of the Palestinian people.
The savagery of his attack cannot be justified in any way, but that does not mean that it cannot be explained and contextualized. As horrible as it was, the bad news is that it is not a game-changing event, despite the enormous human cost on both sides. What does this mean for the future?
Israel will remain a state created by a settler colonial movement, which will continue to influence its political DNA and determine its ideological nature. This means that, despite defining itself as the only democracy in the Middle East, it will remain a democracy only for its Jewish citizens.
The internal struggle within Israel between what can be called the State of Judea - the settler state that wants Israel to be more theocratic and racist - and the State of Israel - which wants to maintain the status quo - that worried Israel until On October 7th it will explode again. In fact, there are already signs of his return.
Israel will remain an apartheid state - as several human rights organizations have declared - no matter how the situation in Gaza develops. The Palestinians will not disappear and will continue their struggle for liberation, with many civil societies on their side and their governments supporting Israel and providing it with exceptional immunity.
The way out remains the same: a regime change in Israel that brings equal rights for all from the river to the sea and allows the return of Palestinian refugees. Otherwise, the cycle of bloodshed will not end.
