There are Human Beings in Palestine
Review of Against Erasure
Against Erasure (Haymarket Books) is a book, edited by Teresa Aranguren and Sandra Barrilaro, that presents a pictorial history of Palestinians. The photos refute the often-heard canard that Palestine was a land without people. More importantly, the historicity of the photos humanizes the Palestinians. It seems ludicrous to anyone familiar with Palestinians that they would require humanization. Nonetheless, the humanity of Palestinians is denied by many prominent Israeli Jews.
Take, for instance, Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant who besmirched Palestinians as “human animals.” Jerusalem deputy mayor Arieh King upped the ante, stating that Palestinians are not “human animals”; they are not “human beings”; they are “subhuman.”
Such quotations by Israeli officials are serial and nothing new.1
Following the rescindment of the British Mandate, the United Nations forced partition upon the Indigenous people of historical Palestine. The outcome birthed the Jewish State of Israel. The land allotted to the Palestinians has had its sovereignty in limbo. Palestine was, as evidenced by decades without formal statehood recognition by the United Nations, a de jure non-state. It was, however, conferred “observer entity” by the UN General Assembly in 1974. That status was upped to a “non-member observer state” in 2012 by a 138-9 UN General Assembly vote, and that is the situation today.
The sovereignty question, however, pales in significance to the genocide that Israel has magnified in Palestine.
“Thanks to the shameful indifference of the West and the international community, the Nakba of 1948 has become a permanent Nakba,” lamented Bichara Khader, a professor at the Catholic University of Leuven. (p 14)
It seems permanent in the mind of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu who said in Hebrew: “They [the Israeli troops] are committed to completely eliminating this evil from the world.” He then added: “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember.”
The god of the Bible had commanded the Hebrews to carry out a genocide: “Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.” (1 Shmuel/Samuel 15:3)
According to Mother Jones: “The lesson, when read literally, is clear: Saul’s failure to kill every Amalekite posed an existential threat to the Jewish people.”
Khader termed the Nakba a sociocide. This was made clear by the Zionist movement’s stated intention
… to establish a Jewish state in Palestine—which clearly and emphatically meant the “de-Arabization” of Palestine or, in other words, the “invisibilization” of its people to facilitate the Judaization of the country.
The early twentieth century propaganda slogan “a land without a people for a people without a land” represents the hard nucleus of Zionist ideology. (p 8)
The malevolence of the Nakba has been laid bare during the current Israeli onslaught where 20,000 Palestinians (70% percent women and children) have been murdered by Zionist Jews. It must be noted that it is not a minuscule sect of Israeli Jewry. It is a military incursion into Gaza supported by more than 90 percent of Israeli Jews. It is abetted by the United States with the acquiescence of many western countries, and it is being carried out before the eyes of much of the world.
Back in 2014 when Israel was bombing Gaza, Israeli Jews in the nearby town of Sderot would bring out their sofas and chairs to sit and cheer the destruction, rather gleefully as the Buzzfeed News headline made clear: “Israelis Seen Clapping And Eating Popcorn While Watching Bombs Drop On Gaza.”
Photos posted on Twitter (now X) by Danish Middle East correspondent Allan Sørensen prompted outrage at Israeli inhumanity by many commenters.
Aliya Nazki: “I’m sorry but people, any people, celebrating death anywhere is abominable.”
Syed-Makki Shah: “morality of a people so skewed that murder is a public spectle [sic]. an astonishing thing to see in this day/age?”
It would seem obvious that the inhumanity is an attribute embraced by a plurality of a people who seemingly internalized a perverse lesson from World War II.
Nonetheless, the historical collection of photos of Palestinians and the portrayal of their lives is an irrefutable testimony to the humanity of these people. While there is a national commonality shared among Palestinians, there is also diversity among them, such as the Bedouins, Druze, Muslims, Christians, and also Jews.
The Palestinians are mothers, fathers, children; they have families. They jubilate at weddings and mourn at funerals. The farmers grow olives, oranges, and melons. They are fishermen, police, seamstresses, musicians, teachers, postal workers, crafts people, engineers, boatmen, stevedores, doctors, nurses, shopkeepers, and politicians. The existence of organized political institutions attests to indigenous administration despite Ottoman, British, and Israeli attempts to quash Palestinian self-government and sovereignty.
Gaze at the photos and see Palestinians at the bazaar, at work, in school, in boy-scout troops. They play basketball, soccer, and swim. The Palestinian transportation network allowed them to travel by car, train, plane, and boat. They attended churches and mosques. For leisure they’d go on picnics, watch open-air cinema, listen to Palestinian orchestras, eat in restaurants, and go to the beach.
Palestinians have all the trappings of what constitutes humanity. The photos in Against Erasure bring forth that Palestinians are humans like us. The humanity of Palestinians ought to have been unquestionable for everyone, and for those who doubted this, give your head a hard shake. But as they say: better late than never. If you are curious about what Palestinians were like before the Nakba, before the 2014 Gaza massacres, and before the current Israeli genocide or, more importantly, if for some peculiar reason, you need further affirmation of Palestinian humanity get Against Erasure and humanize yourself.
ENDNOTE:
The Fate of the Palestinians
The Gaza Plantation
Except for acceptances of United States requests during the Gulf and Lebanon Wars, Israel’s governments have nonchalantly proceeded with their plans, disregarding multiple United Nations (UN) Resolutions that affected them and eschewing suggestions from United States leaders. Knowing the history of the one-way relationship, why is President Joe Biden recommending the Palestinian Authority (PA) govern Gaza after Israel liquidates a major part of the Gazan population? Could it be to delude others into thinking that, after Israel destroys Gaza, a new and refreshing life awaits the Gazans? Once rid of “corrupt Hamas,” who built an amazing amount of residential housing, educational institutions, medical facilities, sports facilities, and cultural institutions, which have been purposely destroyed by “benevolent” Israel, the Gazans who survive the onslaught will have a barren space to rest and thrive. The American president continues his Don Quixote role, slaying the Gaza windmills, with Secretary of State Blinken, his faithful Sancho Panza, at his side.
Three problems with the thoughts emanating from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and from others who believe they can inform the world of how to direct the fate of the Palestinians after their destruction:
(1) Israel intends to destroy the Gazan community and landscape so that it will not be governable.
(2) Israel has unofficially announced it will surround the entire Gaza area with a military force. which means Israel’s high command will filter communication with the remaining Gazans.
(3) Whatever Biden proposes, Israel will do the opposite.
Tally the daily slaughter of Palestinians by the most vicious and repulsive fighting force in modern history, extrapolate it to the eventual termination of the bloodletting, and we have tens of thousands murdered, hundreds of thousands wounded, hundreds of thousands in shock, children without parents, parents grieving lost children, women without husbands, husbands without wives, extended families of up to 30 destroyed, and suffering people unable to find a close relative or authority to reach out for assistance.
· Security and safety will not exist. Gazans who return home will return to rubble. Buried under the rubble of 100,000-plus destroyed buildings are possessions, memories, and identifications. Destruction of the home is a metaphor for the destruction of the psychological existence of its former occupants.
· Medical assistance will be sketchy; illnesses will escalate, and contagious diseases will be difficult to control.
· Work, income, and ability to provide food, shelter, and clothing will be constrained. Subsistence diets and marginal living will be the norm.
Keep in mind that the ethnic cleansing that began in 1948 did not achieve its goal and morphed into a quiet genocide that has grown in intensity. The genocide is an ongoing plan and Israel has not shown any intention of changing direction. So, how does having the military surround the territory enable the genocide plan to be fulfilled?
Gazans will be separated from agricultural lands and the sea. Growing food, grazing animals, and fishing will be impossible. Israel will control the food supply, entrance of all raw materials, and imports of all goods. Communication with the outside world will be limited and electronic communication will be controlled. Capital for loans and investments will be nonexistent. Outside of home industries, the Israeli military will parcel all work. If Israel gets its way, Gaza will be a collection of individuals, without a central government, the inhabitants relying on one another for support ─ a slave labor camp, the Gaza plantation.
In this gigantic plantation, where a huge population cramps into an area that cannot contain it, labor will be plentiful and jobs will be scarce. Gazans will work for low wages and receive a marginal life. With every aspect of their lives controlled by an outside force, they will not be able to control their destiny; population increase will be regulated and population decrease will be ruthlessly managed.
This extreme view of the fate of the Palestinians sounds too shocking to believe and comprehend. Is it more shocking than the 75-year and ongoing oppression of the Palestinians, which is too shocking to believe, but happened and continues to happen? Read the words of Ghassan Abu Sitta, a British Palestinian doctor, who spent 43 days tending to the wounded in Gaza City. The Washington Post reported his comments on December 17, 2023.
There was this little girl. I think she was 8 or 9 years old, the daughter of a doctor at al-Shifa Hospital. The doctor was killed and her two [other] kids were killed, and [the girl was] alone. Half of her face was missing. Half her nose, her eyelids had been ripped from the bone and had moved sideways. When you start out those cases, you have to clean them, because it’s all dirt and dust and gravel in the wound.
Multiply the indiscriminate killing of this girl’s family and her wounds by tens of thousands, and you have a clue to Israelis monstrous behavior. The controlled fate of the Palestinians is not encouraging.
Hamas’ October 7 military action lacked leadership, clarity, know-how in responding to unforeseen circumstances, and strict control to prevent atrocities. Killing innocent civilians and taking them captive is disgraceful and beyond the bounds of civilized behavior. Too few know that Israel made it acceptable. Starting from 1948, almost every day has been a mini October 7, 2023 in occupied Palestine.
Classified Docs Reveal Massacres of Palestinians in ’48 – and What Israeli Leaders Knew, by Adam Raz, Haaretz, 9 December, 2021, details mass atrocities committed by Israeli forces, including rapes. These are not rumors, these are excerpts from Israel cabinet meetings
Morris recorded 24 massacres during the 1948 war. Today it can be said that the number is higher, standing at several dozen cases. In some of them a few individuals were murdered, in others dozens, and there are also cases of more than a hundred victims. With the exception of the massacre in Deir Yassin, in April 1948, which has resonated widely over the years, this gloomy slice of history appears to have been repressed and pushed aside from the Israeli public discourse.
Among the major massacres that took place during Operations Hiram and Yoav were the events in the villages of Saliha, Safsaf and Al-Dawayima. In Saliha (today Kibbutz Yiron), which lay close to the border with Lebanon, the 7th Brigade executed between 60 and 80 inhabitants using a method that was employed a number of times in the war: concentrating residents in a building in the village and then blowing up the structure with the people inside.
In Safsaf (today Moshav Safsufa), near Safed, soldiers from the 7th Brigade massacred dozens of inhabitants. According to one testimony (subsequently reclassified by the Malmab unit), “Fifty-two men were caught, tied them to one another, dug a pit and shot them. Ten were still twitching. Women came, begged for mercy. Found bodies of 6 elderly men. There were 61 bodies. 3 cases of rape.”
In the village of Al-Dawayima (today Moshav Amatzia), in the Lachish District, troops of the 8th Brigade massacred about 100 people. A soldier who witnessed the events described to Mapam officials what happened: “There was no battle and no resistance. The first conquerors killed 80 to 100 Arab men, women and children. The children were killed by smashing their skulls with sticks. There wasn’t a house without people killed in it.” According to an intelligence officer who was posted to the village two days later, the number of those killed stood at 120.
Dan Eliyahu Ya’akov Illouz, a Canadian-born Israeli politician, must have been referring to Israel when he said, “It is dangerous to reward violence with statehood.”
Another way of predicting the fate of the Palestinians is by examining Israel’s response to Hamas’ October 7 attack. Numbers tell the story. After silencing the militants who had entered their dispossessed land and who exacted excessive revenge on those who had ethnically cleansed their parents and grandparents, Israel could have pursued an entirely different path than all-out war. Addressing the imminent dangers of another Hamas incursion and harm to the captives had priority and was a preferred solution to the menacing situation.
Reinforcing the border and containing Hamas behind the border was not difficult and would have resolved one issue. Negotiating release of the captives was only a matter of numbers in a quid pro quo deal that may have irritated Israel’s leaders but would have satisfied Israel’s anguished population. That leaves combatting the mortars and rockets that cause havoc to Israel. That problem could be simply resolved if the larger problem of oppression was resolved.
Unlike media presentations of Hamas wanting to destroy world Jewry and their nation of Israel, Hamas has never attacked Jews, has a limited number of fighters who can encroach far into Israel, and would have trouble overcoming Tunisia in a war. Hamas preferred to warn Israel that if it continued murdering Palestinians in the West Bank, seizing their properties, and encroaching upon the Haram-al-Sharif, its military wing would respond. Israel knows that if it provokes, Hamas will send rockets and the continuous oppression of the Palestinians will be responsible for the damage done to Israelis. The two situations are linked together and Israel concluded it could only separate the link by a bloody operation that hurts both. Wrong! Israel would have suffered less if it allowed the rockets to fall, which is mostly on barren ground.
Exact statistics on Israeli casualties due to rockets fired from Gaza in the last 10 years, after barrages became heavy, are difficult to confirm. Research and estimation have about 25 Israelis killed from rocket fire, an average of 2.5/year. As of December 24, 145 Israeli soldiers have been killed in the invasion. Before hostilities end this toll will rise to more than 150. Israel has traded 60 years of deaths to its citizens for assuring there is no Hamas to launch rockets. Why does Israel prefer to have its youth immediately killed and all hostages severely endangered when another plan is less deadly to the Israel population? Does that sound plausible? Netanyahu says the only way to save the hostages is by the invasion. Does that sound plausible?
Plausible is that the carnage is the driver for genocide and, once started with full force, has no brake. Ceasing hostilities does not mean halting the genocide; herding the Palestinians into complete dependency, into an area that does not permit independent survival, and navigating them into psychological defeat with traumas that cause the people to lose a sense of security and a will to live are the next steps in the genocide.
It may be overkill, but let’s dig deeper into the wanton killings that have nothing to do with waging war against Hamas. What war with Hamas? News reports have not mentioned a single battle with Hamas, only bombs pulverizing buildings and snipers killing unarmed people.
Samar Anton, 49 a Gaza City church worker, knew there was a risk in helping her mother Nahida, a grandmother in her seventies who was weak from two months of war and little food, to the bathroom. A sniper bullet cracked through the air and into Samar’s head. Another hit Nahida, a grandmother of 15, in the stomach.
GAZA, Dec 18 (Reuters) – When the Israeli soldiers entered the Gaza school where Yousef Khalil was sleeping near his family, they began shooting indiscriminately, killing nine people including children, he said, pointing to bullet-pocked, bloodstained walls. Reuters footage of the school filmed Dec. 13-15 showed ruined classrooms, at least two corpses on the floor of indeterminate age, bloodied bedding, and bullet holes and bloodstains low to the ground.
The deliberate killings during 1948-1949, the last 75 years of repression of the Palestinians, and the wanton slaughtering in Gaza, which now includes deliberate starvation and peomoting disease, tell us that the genocide is growing in intensity and design. Bringing the genocide to another inconceivable level, if that is possible, is the combination of a murderous mentality and a public relations force that disguises the mentality that solicits support for genocide. Israel’s supporters do not ask Israel to stop the slaughter, they ask “Why is Israel unable to explain the war in Gaza to the world?”
Especially disturbing is that for the first time in history, a worldwide assembly of people and organizations manipulate people and governments into approving Israel’s genocidal policies. Most egregious and serious is control of the U.S. government and the patriotic and nationalist American people permitting this to happen. Much is written about Russia steering elections by having ads on Facebook and China engaging in cyber spying, which enrage American audiences to almost calling for war. Little attention is given to:
• Trained Israeli supporters dominating most social media — Facebook, twitter, Quora, Reddit with massive trolls who contest, deceive, lie, twist, and distort news reports and information.
• Public media — print, radio, cinema, and television are injected with administrators who guide the narratives to favor Israel. Interviews with employees and internal documents obtained by The Intercept indicate that Upday, the largest news aggregator app in Europe, gave directives to color the company’s coverage of the war in Gaza with pro-Israel sentiment.
• American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC) raises massive funds for candidates friendly to Israel through political action committees and its own Super-PAC.
• Tens of Jewish organizations bring Israelis to the United States to influence Americans and send Americans to Israel to be influenced by Israelis.
• The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) springs into action with new revelations of ant-Semitism every time Israel blasts the Palestinians.
• Israelis migrate to America, mostly to New York, Florida, and California, where they become dual citizens, influence voting patterns in those states, and determine close elections
• Israel on Campus Coalition and Canary Mission act as key intelligence assets for the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, and, together with highly secretive intelligence organizations, silence anti-Israel dissent and gather names of Israel’s critics.
• Jewish day schools and Birth Right Israel, which gives Jewish youth free “transformational and educational trips to Israel,” condition Jews to automatically accept Israel as their beautiful mother country. Listen to Americans, born in America, raised in America, and living the most wonderful lives in America ignore their own country and enter rapture when they hear the word Israel spoken.
All peoples in the world, from Lapland to Tierra del Fuego and from the Philippine archipelago to the Peloponnesian islands should be aware of this repugnant arrangement of worldwide human resources, used to manipulate information and control minds into accepting the destruction. After knowing the truth, billions of people can march to the borders of Israel and proclaim in a loud voice. “We don’t want genocidal maniacs steering our lives, and huff and puff so that the symbolical walls of apartheid come down — making sure that Joshua does not return to blow down the walls of Jericho, complete the Reconquest of the biblical land of Canaan, and slaughter of all its inhabitants.
Dan Lieberman publishes commentaries on foreign policy, economics, and politics at substack.com. He is author of the non-fiction books A Third Party Can Succeed in America, Not until They Were Gone, Think Tanks of DC, The Artistry of a Dog, and a novel: The Victory (under a pen name, David L. McWellan). Read other articles by Dan.
Erasing Gaza
In the words of the UN Chief Antonio Guterres, the US-Israel assault has created “a graveyard for children” in Gaza, a tiny sliver of land that is home to several generations of impoverished refugees, half of whom are children. Gazans arguably make up one of the most vulnerable populations globally. They live in the “largest open-air prison” or the “largest concentration camp” in the world. Since 2007, Gazans have been subjected to a cruel siege by Israel, with cooperation from Egypt, and support from the US, which has led to unbearable conditions of life. As early as 2012, the UN warned that Gaza would become “uninhabitable” by the year 2020 with 60% of its households already “either food insecure or vulnerable to food insecurity” in 2012 “even when taking into account the UN food distributions to almost 1.1 million people.” The UN said Gaza was “kept alive through external funding and the illegal tunnel economy.” Since the siege began, Israel has militarily assaulted Gaza at least six times killing thousands, injuring many thousands more, and destroying homes and critical infrastructure in what it cynically calls “mowing the lawn.”
As bad as the conditions had been pre-October 7, they are now unimaginably worse. Between 7 October and 23 December, the US-Israeli assault killed 28,091 Palestinians (11,023 of whom are infants and children, 5,683 women, and 25,741 civilians) and injured 54,311. The dead include 95 journalists and 226 healthcare staff. By now 1.9 million Gazans of a total population of 2.2 million have been displaced.
Human Rights Watch has accused Israel of using the starvation of civilians as a weapon of war. The Israeli forces, it said, are “depriving the civilian population of objects indispensable to their survival.” Israel bombed “Gaza’s last operational wheat mill on November 15” ensuring that “locally produced flour will be unavailable in Gaza for the foreseeable future.” The “decimation of road networks,” the destruction of “Bakeries and grain mills … agriculture, water and sanitation facilities,” and the “sustained bombardment, coupled with fuel and water shortages, alongside the displacement of more than 1.6 million people to southern Gaza, has made farming nearly impossible.” The report states that “agricultural land, including orchards, greenhouses, and farmland in northern Gaza, has been razed,” and that “livestock in the north are facing starvation due to the shortage of fodder and water, and that crops are increasingly abandoned and damaged due to lack of fuel to pump irrigation water.” Another report by 23 UN and NGOs has found that the entire population of Gaza faces an imminent risk of famine if present genocidal policies continue, with 576,600 persons at catastrophic or starvation levels. “It is a situation where pretty much everybody in Gaza is hungry,” said the World Food Program economist.
At least 369,000 Gazans are suffering from infectious diseases under rapidly declining health conditions. “We are all sick,” the Times quoted Samah al-Farra “a 46-year-old mother of 10 struggling to care for her family in a camp housing displaced Palestinians in Rafah, in southern Gaza. ‘All of my kids have a high fever and a stomach virus.’” At the time of the gravest healthcare need, according to the World Health Organization, just 9 out of 36 health facilities in Gaza are operating, and only partially. At the same time, there are “no functional hospitals left in the north.”
The deliberate destruction of Gaza’s health system amounts to a slow and more painful death sentence for the tens of thousands of injured whose minimal urgent care needs cannot be met.
The US-Israel genocidal assault on Gaza reveals much about the US political system and the ‘rules-based international order” as well. For example, a poll in mid-December showed that 68% of North Americans, three-quarters of Democrats, and half of Republicans support a ceasefire. Contrast those numbers with not only the refusal of the Biden administration to support a truce but the fact that as of 21 December only 62 members of Congress (11.6%) had joined a call for a ceasefire. The persistence of a wide split between the political elites and the public is a clear indication of political dysfunctionality in the US despite ongoing protests including the largest pro-Palestine demonstration in US history on November 4. There remains a slight window of opportunity to influence policy as the 2024 elections approach and polls indicate that the Biden administration is losing public support on this issue. Reportedly “there was some concern in the administration about an unintended consequence of the pause: that it would allow journalists broader access to Gaza and the opportunity to further illuminate the devastation there and turn public opinion on Israel” and against the Biden administration. A growing public opposition may be all we have in constraining Washington from pursuing a wider regional war on behalf of Israel.
It is important to note that the US as the chief enabler of Israel can stop this genocide. Instead, it continues to give full military, diplomatic, ideological, technological, and economic support to Israel. For example, The Times of Israel reports that “244 US transport planes and 20 ships have delivered more than 10,000 tons of armaments and military equipment to Israel since the start of the war.”
Furthermore, investigations by several mainstream US news establishments like the New York Times and CNN show that in the first month of its assault on Gaza Israel used mostly US-manufactured 2000-pound bunker-buster bombs. These heavy munitions “can cause high casualty events and can have a lethal fragmentation radius – an area of exposure to injury or death around the target – of up to 365 meters (about 1,198 feet), or the equivalent of 58 soccer fields in area.” According to CNN’s analysis: “Satellite imagery from those early days of the war reveals more than 500 impact craters over 12 meters (40 feet) in diameter, consistent with those left behind by 2,000-pound bombs. Those are four times heavier than the largest bombs the United States dropped on ISIS in Mosul, Iraq, during the war against the extremist group there.” CNN quotes John Chappell, “advocacy and legal fellow at CIVIC, a DC-based group focused on minimizing civilian harm in conflict” stating that “The use of 2,000-pound bombs in an area as densely populated as Gaza means it will take decades for communities to recover.”
Crucially, the US also shields Israel from global initiatives at the UN Security Council that aim at halting its consistent and gross violations of international humanitarian laws and the UNSC resolutions, including those calling for an immediate ceasefire.
The most recent example of the latter occurred on 22 December. The US abstained from voting on a UNSC resolution (13-0-2) that called for aid access and temporary pauses in Israel’s bombing of Gaza. For 5 days, the US delayed the vote on an earlier draft, a tactic aimed at giving Israel more time, and vetoed an amendment calling for a complete ceasefire and the establishment of a robust UN inspection mechanism in Gaza. The hollowed-out and meaningless resolution that was passed is another triumph for the US obstructionism in support of Israeli genocide albeit in the form of an abstention; earlier the US twice vetoed resolutions calling for immediate ceasefire and the release of all hostages.
The last time the US blocked a UNSC resolution calling for a ceasefire and the release of all hostages was on 7 December. The UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres had invoked Article 99 of the UN Charter (a rare Article akin to a global “panic button” to trigger a UNSC vote) and urged the UNSC to act on the war in Gaza. The UN Chief referred to the situation in Gaza as “apocalyptic” and stated that he believes Gaza’s humanitarian system and civil order are at risk of “complete collapse.” The US not only vetoed the resolution but on that same day approved the sale and immediate delivery of 14,000 tank shells to Israel without congressional approval, displaying its dedication to protecting Israeli terror.
Less mentioned in the news is the US vote on 19 December against a resolution adopted by the UN General Assembly affirming the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination. The vote count was 172-4-10. The other three countries that joined the US to reject the resolution were Israel, Micronesia, and Nauru. Affirming the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination is the very heart of a just resolution of the Question of Palestine. US rejectionism ensures the continuation of Israel’s colonization, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, occupation, siege, and genocide, as well as Palestinian resistance to oppression and rightlessness.
Of course, the dominant view in the US equates Palestinian resistance with terrorism motivated by hatred of Jews. Such a view can only persist in the absence of historical context. To ensure that absence, corporate media rarely feature Palestinian voices. Propaganda often works not by spin alone; omission is a crucial part of manipulating public opinion. Omitting context has allowed the US and Israel to weaponize the October 7 Hamas attack to mobilize public support for the genocide and ethnic cleansing they are committing in Gaza, ostensibly in response to October 7. This is reminiscent of how the US hijacked the 9/11 attacks to silence dissent and push through its ruinous and criminal post-9/11 wars. Public opposition eventually emerged in the longer term to those 9/11 wars of choice.
The ongoing genocide in Gaza is no different although the shift in public opinion in the US has been much swifter this time as compared to the post-9/11 period. As mentioned above, by now most people in the US favor a ceasefire. Additionally, polls found that “more people ages 18-29 sympathized with Palestinians than with Israelis in the current conflict … 28 percent expressed more sympathy with Palestinians vs. 20 percent for Israelis.” There have been massive pro-Palestinian protests globally and huge ones in the US, including unprecedented ones by staff at the State Department and the White House. The Israeli Jews on the other hand have taken a super hawkish position on the use of force in Gaza. Polls found that just 1.8% believed Israel was using too much firepower in Gaza. That is a remarkable figure indeed and a sign of the general moral decline of Israeli society.
We might therefore say that to contextualize is to act radically because the understanding that necessarily accompanies contextualization undermines the dehumanizing and racialized language used to justify atrocities against the Palestinians: such as calling the Palestinians terrorists, human animals, and antisemitic Nazis.
What, then, is the missing context for understanding what has been taking place in Palestine? To answer, we can begin by asking “What are the Palestinians struggling against?” and “What are the Palestinians fighting for?”
The Palestinians struggle against a US-backed Zionist colonizing state of Israel itself allied with several reactionary Arab client states of the US. They fight not just against Israeli apartheid, ethnic cleansing, occupation, siege, theft of their lands, and colonization, but against US imperialism. Israel is a component of the US empire and serves its interests in this region by opposing radical Arab nationalism. The Palestinians fight for a free Palestine with equal rights for all its inhabitants, including Muslims, Christians, Jews, Druze, the non-religious, and others. Because they cannot free themselves unless they defeat the forces of imperialism and reaction arrayed against them in the region, their liberation necessarily entails the possibility of liberation for all the peoples in the region.
In the broadest sense, the struggle for a free Palestine is a struggle for the liberation of all the peoples of that region from imperialism and domination. The proper context to view this is therefore a confrontation between imperialist domination and the people’s movements for liberation. A sub-context of this confrontation is that between the Palestinians and the Zionist colonizing state of Israel. The latter is bent on completing its ethnic cleansing of historical Palestine and uses every opportunity to advance its incomplete project of settler colonialism until it achieves its final goal of conquering what it calls Greater Israel which includes the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The goal of Zionism is to take as much land of historical Palestine with as few Palestinians as possible. The Zionist colonizing state has waged a war on the Palestinians since 1948, not October 7.
October 7 provided Israel with another opportunity to further its ethnic cleansing objectives in Gaza. On the night that Israel killed 250 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injured another 500 just in the 24 hours over Christmas eve, Benjamin Netanyahu, the right-wing prime minister of Israel, announced “the three prerequisites for peace between Israel and its Palestinian neighbors in Gaza”: “We must destroy Hamas, demilitarize Gaza and deradicalize the whole of Palestinian society.” These are impossible objectives. Hamas is a resistance group. Even if all its members are killed, its ideology remains as one form of resistance to Israeli genocide, colonization, and oppression. It’s dialectical, stupid! Repression generates resistance. Plus, the ongoing genocide will surely further radicalize the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank too, making Hamas more popular, not less, regardless of whether Israel can declare victory in Gaza. Even putting the latter point aside, the goal of deradicalizing the Palestinians essentially means turning Palestinians into Zionists. That is even more absurd than the goal of eradicating Hamas. No wonder the Israeli army Chief of Staff said on the same day that “achieving war’s goals ‘will take months.’” By the time Israel is done, there will be no structures left for any Gazans to come back to while many tens of thousands more will have died due to the spread of infectious diseases, hunger, despair, and hardships of disruptions and displacements, if not from US-made bombs.
The genocidal actions of Israel in Gaza are consistent with a leaked document produced by Israel’s intelligence ministry 6 days after the bombing of Gaza began, titled ‘Options for a policy regarding Gaza’s civilian population’ that recommended the ethnic cleansing of Gaza with its population expelled into “tent cities” in Egypt’s Sinai peninsula before constructing cities in a “resettled area” in the north of Sinai to house them. So far Egypt has refused to cooperate.
But the Egyptian intransigence may not have stopped Israel from its forced mass displacement plans. According to an Israeli daily newspaper report published in early December, Netanyahu plans in secret to “thin out” the population of Gaza. He has “instructed Ron Dermer, his minister of strategic planning and a close aide, to have a plan for the ‘day after’ in Gaza and, if necessary, one that ‘enables a mass escape [of Palestinians] to European and African countries’ by opening sea routes out of the strip.” The report said that “Netanyahu sees this as a strategic goal.”
Indeed, the UN expert warned on 22 December that Israel is working to expel the civilian population of Gaza. Paula Gaviria Betancur, Special Rapporteur on the human rights of internally displaced persons (IDPs), said: “As evacuation orders and military operations continue to expand and civilians are subjected to relentless attacks on a daily basis, the only logical conclusion is that Israel’s military operation in Gaza aims to deport the majority of the civilian population en masse.”
It’s worth noting that Israeli Jews are overwhelmingly supportive of ethnically cleansing Gaza. A Direct Survey poll published on December 21 in Israel included the following question: “To what degree do you support encouraging the voluntary emigration of Gaza Strip residents?” The response was as follows: “68% support it strongly,” “15% are quite supportive,” “8% don’t really support it,” and “9% don’t support it at all.” That is, 83% favor what is euphemistically called “voluntary emigration” but is ethnic cleansing and a war crime.
The deafening din of Zionist propaganda in the US has drowned two essential truisms about the Question of Palestine:
1) The Palestinians are not fighting Israel because they hate Jews. They are fighting against their dispossession, occupation, and erasure and for liberation from oppression, domination, colonization, and imperialism.
2) The source of the problem isn’t the Palestinian resistance, in whatever form, but the US imperialist domination of the region in alliance with the racist Zionist colonizing state of Israel and a coterie of reactionary Arab states.
The historical contextualization would undermine the dominant dehumanizing Zionist narrative and open pathways for crucial solidarity work towards a free, democratic, equal, and inclusive Palestine from the river to the sea.
Faramarz Farbod, a native of Iran, teaches politics at Moravian College. He is the founder of Beyond Capitalism a working group of the Alliance for Sustainable Communities-Lehigh Valley PA and the editor of its publication Left Turn. He can be reached at farbodf@moravian.edu. Read other articles by Faramarz.
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