Why Israel wants to erase context and history in the war on Gaza

The dehistoricisation of what is happening helps Israel pursue
genocidal policies in Gaza.

by Ilan Pappe

Ilan Pappe is the Director of European Center of Palestine Studies at
the University of Exeter.

Published On 5 Nov 20235 Nov 2023

https://t.co/jWRIUsXDS8

On October 24, a statement by United Nations Secretary-General Antonio
Guterres caused a sharp reaction by Israel. While addressing the UN
Security Council, the UN chief said that while he condemned in the
strongest terms the massacre committed by Hamas on October 7, he
wished to remind the world that it did not take place in a vacuum. He
explained that one cannot dissociate 56 years of occupation from our
engagement with the tragedy that unfolded on that day.

The Israeli government was quick to condemn the statement. Israeli
officials demanded Guterres’s resignation, claiming that he supported
Hamas and justified the massacre it carried out. The Israeli media
also jumped on the bandwagon, asserting among other things that the UN
chief “has demonstrated a stunning degree of moral bankruptcy”.

This reaction suggests that a new type of allegation 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,
contextualising and historicising what is going on could also trigger
an accusation of anti-Semitism.

The dehistoricisation of these events aids Israel and governments in
the West in pursuing policies they shunned in the past due to either
ethical, tactical, or strategic considerations.

Thus, the October 7 attack is used by Israel as a pretext to pursue
genocidal policies in the Gaza Strip. It is also a pretext for the
United States to try and reassert 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 going on now in
Israel-Palestine that cannot be ignored. The wider historical context
goes back to the mid-19th century, when evangelical Christianity in
the West turned the idea of the “return of the Jews” into a religious
millennial 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 policy toward the end of the 19th century and in the
years leading up to World War I for two reasons.

First, it worked in the interest of those in Britian wishing to
dismantle the Ottoman Empire and incorporate parts of it into the
British Empire. Second, it resonated with those within the British
aristocracy, both Jews and Christians, who became enchanted with the
idea of Zionism as a panacea for the problem of anti-Semitism in
Central and Eastern Europe, which had produced an unwelcome wave of
Jewish immigration to Britain.

When these two interests fused, they propelled the British government
to issue the famous – or infamous – Balfour Declaration in 1917.

Jewish thinkers and activists who redefined Judaism as nationalism
hoped this definition would protect Jewish communities from
existential danger in Europe by homing in on Palestine as the desired
space for “rebirth of the Jewish nation”.

In the process, the cultural and intellectual Zionist project
transformed into a settler colonial one – which aimed at Judaising
historical Palestine, disregarding the fact that it was inhabited by
an Indigenous population.

In turn, the Palestinian society, quite pastoral at that time and in
its early stage of modernisation and construction of a national
identity, produced its own anti-colonial movement. Its first
significant action against the Zionist colonisation project came with
al-Buraq Uprising of 1929, and it has not ceased since then.

Another historical context relevant to the present crisis is the 1948
ethnic cleansing of Palestine that included the forceful expulsion of
Palestinians into 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.

This ethnic cleansing was noted by the world but not condemned. As a
result, Israel continued to resort to ethnic cleansing as part of its
effort to ensure that it had complete control over historical
Palestine with as few of the native Palestinians remaining as
possible. This included the expulsion of 300,000 Palestinians during
and in the aftermath of the 1967 war, and the expulsion of more than
600,000 from the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip ever since.

There is also the context of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank
and Gaza. Over the past 50 years, the occupational forces have
inflicted persistent collective punishment on the Palestinians in
these territories, exposing them to constant harassment by Israeli
settlers and security forces and imprisoning hundreds of thousands of
them.

Since the election of the present fundamentalist messianic Israeli
government in November 2022, all these harsh policies reached
unprecedented levels. The number of Palestinians killed, wounded and
arrested in the occupied West Bank skyrocketed. On top of that,
Israeli government policies towards Christian and Muslim holy places
in Jerusalem became even more aggressive.

Finally, there is also the historical context of the 16-year-long
siege on Gaza, where almost half of the population are children. In
2018, the UN was already warning that the Gaza Strip would become a
place unfit for humans by 2020.

It is important to remember that the siege was imposed in response to
democratic elections won by Hamas after the unilateral Israeli
withdrawal from the territory. Even more important is to go back to
the 1990s, when the Gaza Strip was encircled by barbed wire and
disconnected from the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem in the
aftermath of the Oslo Accords.

The isolation of Gaza, the fence around it, and the increased
Judaisation of the West Bank were a clear indication that Oslo in the
eyes of the Israelis meant an occupation by other means, not a path to
genuine peace.

Israel controlled the exit and entry points to the Gaza ghetto,
monitoring even the kind of food that entered – at times limiting it
to a certain calorie count. Hamas reacted to this debilitating siege
by launching rockets on civilian areas in Israel.

The Israeli government claimed these attacks were motivated by the
movement’s ideological wish to kill Jews – a new form of Nazim –
disregarding the context of both the Nakba and the inhuman and
barbaric siege imposed on two million people and the oppression of
their compatriots in other parts of historical Palestine.

Hamas, in many ways, was the only Palestinian group that promised to
avenge or respond to these policies. The way it decided to respond,
however, may bring its own demise, at least in the Gaza Strip, and may
also provide a pretext for further oppression of the Palestinian
people.

The savageness of its attack cannot be justified in any way, but that
does not mean it cannot be explained and contextualised. As horrific
as it was, the bad news is that it is not a game-changing event,
despite the huge human cost on both sides. What does this mean for the
future?

Israel will remain a state established by a settler-colonial movement,
which will continue to influence its political DNA and determine its
ideological nature. This means that despite its self-framing as the
only democracy in the Middle East, it will remain a democracy only for
its Jewish citizens.

The internal struggle inside Israel between what one can call the
state of Judea – the settlers’ state wishing Israel to be more
theocratic and racist – and the state of Israel – wishing to keep the
status quo – that preoccupied Israel until October 7 will erupt again.
In fact, there are already signs of its return.

Israel will continue to be an apartheid state – as declared by a
number of human rights organisations – however the situation in Gaza
unfolds. The Palestinians will not disappear and will continue their
struggle for liberation, with many civil societies siding with them
and their governments backing Israel and providing it with an
exceptional immunity.

The way out remains the same: a change of regime in Israel that brings
equal rights for everyone from the river to the sea and allows for the
return of Palestinian refugees. Otherwise, the cycle of bloodshed will
not end.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not
necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Source: https://t.co/jWRIUsXDS8
or
<https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/11/5/why-israel-wants-to-erase-context-and-history-in-the-war-on-gaza>

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