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History lies at the core of every conflict. A true and unbiased understanding of the past offers the possibility of peace. The distortion or manipulation of history, in contrast, will only sow disaster.
This is not a balanced book; it is yet another attempt to redress the balance of power on behalf of the colonized, occupied, and oppressed Palestinians in the land of Israel and Palestine. It would be a real bonus if advocates of Zionism or loyal supporters of Israel were also willing to engage with the arguments herein. After all, the book is written by an Israeli Jew who cares about his own society as much as he does about the Palestinian one. Refuting mythologies that sustain injustice should be of benefit to everyone living in the country or wishing to live there. It forms a basis on which
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before the emergence of Zionism it was mainly Christians who wished, for ecclesiastical reasons, to settle Jews in Palestine more permanently.
In this story, by 1800 Palestine had become a desert, where farmers who did not belong there somehow cultivated parched land that was not theirs. The same land appeared to be an island, with a significant Jewish population, ruled from the outside by the Ottomans and suffering from intensive imperial projects that robbed the soil of its fertility. Every passing year the land became more barren, deforestation increased, and farmland turned to desert. Promoted through an official state website this fabricated picture is unprecedented. It is a bitter irony that in composing this narrative the
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As elsewhere in the Middle East and beyond, Palestinian society was introduced to the powerful defining concept of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the nation.
Despite there not being a Palestinian state, the cultural location of Palestine was very clear. There was a unifying sense of belonging. At the very beginning of the twentieth century, the newspaper Filastin reflected the way the people named their country.6 Palestinians spoke their own dialect, had their own customs and rituals, and appeared on the maps of the world as living in a country called Palestine.
Thus, Palestine was not an empty land. It was part of a rich and fertile eastern Mediterranean world that in the nineteenth century underwent processes of modernization and nationalization. It was not a desert waiting to come into bloom; it was a pastoral country on the verge of entering the twentieth century as a modern society, with all the benefits and ills of such a transformation. Its colonization by the Zionist movement turned this process into a disaster for the majority of the native people living there.
As is quite apparent from this last text, there was an obvious link between these formative ideas of Zionism and a more longstanding anti-Semitism.
Zionism, as we can see, was therefore a Christian project of colonization before it became a Jewish one.
The idea that Jewish wealth exported to Palestine would strengthen the Ottoman Empire from potential internal and external enemies underlines how Zionism was associated with anti-Semitism, British imperialism, and theology.
Zionism was, in a nutshell, a movement asserting that the problems of the Jews of Europe would be solved by colonizing Palestine and creating a Jewish state there.
Zionism was transformed from an intellectual and cultural exercise into a political project through the visions of Theodor Herzl, in response to a particularly vile wave of anti-Jewish persecution in Russia in the late 1870s and early 1880s, and to the rise of anti-Semitic nationalism in the west of Europe (where the infamous Dreyfus trial revealed how deeply rooted anti-Semitism was in French and German society).
David Lloyd George, the prime minister at the time and a devout Christian, favored the return of the Jews on a religious basis, and strategically both he and his colleagues preferred a Jewish colony to a Muslim one, as they saw the Palestinians, in the Holy Land.
The ensuing military occupation brought all three discrete processes—the emergence of Zionism, Protestant millenarianism, and British imperialism—to Palestinian shores as a powerful fusion of ideologies that destroyed the country and its people over the next thirty years.
What matters is not whether the present Jews in Israel are the authentic descendants of those who lived in the Roman era, but rather the state of Israel’s insistence that it represents all the Jews in the world and that everything it does is for their sake and on their behalf.
One famous leader in this respect was Rabbi Kaufman Kohler, who repudiated the idea “that Judea is the home of the Jew—an idea which ‘unhomes’ [sic] the Jew all over the wide earth.”
Thus, they found themselves faced with a challenging paradox, for they wanted both to secularize Jewish life and to use the Bible as a justification for colonizing Palestine. In other words, though they did not believe in God, He had nonetheless promised them Palestine.
The principal scholarly and secular proof for this narrative has been provided in recent years with the help of what is called biblical archeology (in itself an oxymoronic concept, since the Bible is a great literary work, written by many peoples in different periods, and hardly a historical text
Wherever they were, in order to survive they had to work shoulder to shoulder with Palestinian farmers or workers. Through such intimate contact even the most ignorant and defiant settlers realized that Palestine was totally an Arab country in its human landscape.
Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs … Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home.
One of Britain’s most distinguished professors of history, Sir Martin Gilbert, produced many years ago the Atlas of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, published across several editions by Cambridge University Press.25 The Atlas begins the history of the conflict in biblical times, taking it for granted that the territory was a Jewish kingdom to which the Jews returned after 2,000 years of exile. Its opening maps tell the whole story: the first is of biblical Palestine; the second of Palestine under the Romans; the third of Palestine during the time of the crusaders; and the fourth, of Palestine in
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The official Israeli narrative or foundational mythology refuses to allow the Palestinians even a modicum of moral right to resist the Jewish colonization of their homeland that began in 1882. From the very beginning, Palestinian resistance was depicted as motivated by hate for Jews.
From our present vantage point, there is no escape from defining the Israeli actions in the Palestinian countryside as a war crime. Indeed, as a crime against humanity.
All these implications were totally ignored by the Israeli political elite. Instead a very different lesson has been learned from the events of 1948: that one can, as a state, expel half of a country’s population and destroy half its villages with impunity.
It was clear to the government that denying citizenship on the one hand, and not allowing independence on the other, condemned the inhabitants of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to life without basic civil and human rights.
Before 1967, Israel definitely could not have been depicted as a democracy. As we have seen in previous chapters, the state subjected one-fifth of its citizenship to military rule based on draconian British Mandatory emergency regulations that denied the Palestinians any basic human or civil rights. Local military governors were the absolute rulers of the lives of these citizens: they could devise special laws for them, destroy their houses and livelihoods, and send them to jail whenever they felt like it.
For the Palestinians who lived in pre-war Israel and those who lived in the post-1967 West Bank and the Gaza Strip, this regime allowed even the lowest-ranking soldier in the IDF to rule, and ruin, their lives. They were helpless if such a solider, or his unit or commander, decided to demolish their homes, or hold them for hours at a checkpoint, or incarcerate them without trial. There was nothing they could do.
As we have seen, additional territory was always welcomed by Israel, but an increase in the Palestinian population was not.
The litmus test of any democracy is the level of tolerance it is willing to extend towards the minorities living in it. In this respect, Israel falls far short of being a true democracy.
The Judaization belts separate villages from villages, villages from towns, and sometime bisect a single village. This is what scholars call a geography of disaster, not least since these policies turned out to be an ecological disaster as well: drying up water sources and ruining some of the most beautiful parts of the Palestinian landscape.
From the very beginning of the occupation then, the Palestinians were given two options: accept the reality of permanent incarceration in a mega-prison for a very long time, or risk the might of the strongest army in the Middle East. When the Palestinians did resist—as they did in 1987, 2000, 2006, 2012, 2014, and 2016—they were targeted as soldiers and units of a conventional army. Thus, villages and towns were bombed as if they were military bases and the unarmed civilian population was shot at as if it was an army on the battlefield.
Today we know too much about life under occupation, before and after Oslo, to take seriously the claim that non-resistance will ensure less oppression.
The Israeli state clings to the view that it is a benevolent occupier. The argument for “enlightened occupation” proposes that, according to the average Jewish citizen in Israel, the Palestinians are much better off under occupation and they have no reason in the world to resist it, let alone by force.
Indeed, Hamas became a significant player on the ground in part thanks to the Israeli policy of encouraging the construction of an Islamic educational infrastructure in Gaza as a counterbalance to the grip of the secular Fatah movement on the local population.
“the Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation.”
as Israel began to renege on almost all the pledges it had made during the negotiations, support for Hamas once again received a boost. Particularly important was Israel’s settlement policy and its excessive use of force against the civilian population in the territories.
It would be fair to conclude, then, that successive Israeli governments did all they could to leave the Palestinians with no option but to trust, and vote for, the one group prepared to resist an occupation described by the renowned American author Michael Chabon as “the most grievous injustice I have seen in my life.”
The Israelis also continued to give absurd, indeed sinister, names to their operations. “First Rain” was succeeded by “Summer Rains,” the name given to the punitive operations that began in June 2006. “Summer Rains” brought a novel component: a land invasion into parts of the Gaza Strip. This enabled the army to kill citizens even more effectively and to present this as a consequence of heavy fighting within dense populated areas; that is, as an inevitable result of the circumstances rather than of Israeli policy.
Hamas had been building tunnels out of the Gaza ghetto in order to bring in food, move people out, and indeed as part of its resistance strategy. Using a tunnel as a pretext for violating the ceasefire would be akin to a Hamas decision to violate it because Israel has military bases near the border.
Hamas responded to the Israeli assault with a barrage of missiles that injured no one and killed no one. Israel stopped its attack for a short period, demanding that Hamas agree to a ceasefire under its conditions. Hamas’s refusal led to the infamous “Cast Lead” operation at the end of 2008 (the code names were now changed to even more ominous ones). The preliminary bombardment this time was unprecedented—it reminded many of the carpet bombing of Iraq in 2003. The main target was the civilian infrastructure; nothing was spared—hospitals, schools, mosques—everything was hit and destroyed. Hamas
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In 2012, Hamas reached Tel Aviv for the first time—with missiles that caused little damage and no casualties. Meanwhile, with the familiar imbalance, 200 Palestinians were killed, including tens of children. This was not a bad year for Israel. The exhausted EU and US governments did not even condemn the 2012 attacks; in fact they repeatedly invoked “Israel’s right to defend itself.” No wonder that two years later the Israelis understood that they could go even further.
It is unthinkable that a national struggle for liberation, now almost 150 years old, might end with conditional autonomous rule over just 20 percent of the homeland.
The two-states solution, as noted earlier, is an Israeli invention that was meant to square a circle. It responds to the question of how to keep the West Bank under Israeli control without incorporating the population that lives there. Thus it was suggested that part of the West Bank would be autonomous, a quasi-state. In return, the Palestinians would have to give up all their hopes for return, for equal rights for Palestinians in Israel, for the fate of Jerusalem, and for leading a normal life as human beings in their homeland.
The two-states solution is based on the idea that a Jewish state is the best solution for the Jewish problem; that is, Jews should live in Palestine rather than anywhere else. This notion is also close to the hearts of anti-Semites.
The leader of the UK Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, attracted of a lot of criticism when he explained, to my mind correctly, that blaming Judaism for Netanyahu’s policies is like blaming Islam for the actions of the Islamic State. This is a valid comparison, even if it rattled some people’s sensitivities.
The two-states solution is like a corpse taken out in the morgue every now and then, dressed up nicely, and presented as a living thing.
The charade will end soon, peacefully or violently, but either way painfully.
The settler movement that arrived there in the late nineteenth century now accounts for half the population and controls the other half through a matrix of racist ideology and apartheid policies. Peace is not a matter of demographic change, nor a redrawing of maps: it is the elimination of these ideologies and policies.
Colonialism can be described as the movement of Europeans to different parts of the world, creating new “white” nations where indigenous people had once had their own kingdoms. These nations could only be created if the settlers employed two logics: the logic of elimination—getting rid by all means possible of the indigenous people, including by genocide; and the logic of dehumanization—regarding the non-Europeans as inferior and thus as not deserving the same rights as the settlers.
Zionism offered itself as the solution to anti-Semitism, but became the main reason for its continued presence.
