OPINION - De-contextualizing and de-historicizing Gaza

By Professor Ilan Pappe

-The author is the Director of the European Center for Palestine Studies, University of Exeter.

ISTANBUL(AA)- The Hamas operation, “Al-Aqsa Flood” on Oct. 7 and the brutal Israeli retaliation “the War of Swords” is an appropriate, be it terrible, moment to ponder the battle of narratives on the current realities in Israel and Palestine, and those of the past.

What began with a military success of breaching the ghetto wall of the strip, occupying military bases, and capturing soldiers, deteriorated into a set of atrocities and war crimes committed by the Hamas fighters entering into the Jewish settlements near the strip, and joining in the killing of many participants in a huge party near the Gaza border. It is estimated that among the 1,200 killed on that day about 300 were IDF soldiers.

Israel retaliated with a genocidal attack on the Gaza Strip that by the end of 2023 claimed the lives of more than 22,000 Palestinians, many of them children. Ten months later, it rose to nearly 40,000, with still many unaccounted for under the rubble.

- Not only a battle on the ground

Apart from the battle on the ground, a battle of narratives also broke out. I would like to call it the clash between the pretext and the context. And in the context, I mean both the historical and moral foundations for the events that unfolded in the last months of 2023.

The UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres commented that while he condemned in the strongest possible words the massacre committed by Hamas on the morning of Oct. 7, he wanted to remind the world that these actions were not taking 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 reaction was instantaneous: the government demanded his resignation and claimed that he supported Hamas and justified the massacre inside Israel.

This Israeli reaction is not new. Israel insists that criticism of Israel is antisemitism. It is a new version of this allegation. Until Oct. 7 the definition of antisemitism was related to criticism against the state of Israel or questioning the moral basis of Zionism and to allegations of Holocaust denial. Now, contextualizing and historicizing the Palestinian actions is both a basis of allegation of antisemitism and in some countries a possible cause for being indicted with justifying terrorism.

The de-historicization of these events provides a pretext for governments to pursue policies they shunned in the past due to either ethical, tactical, or strategic considerations. Thus, the attack on Oct. 7 is used as a pretext for Israel to pursue genocidal policies in the Gaza Strip. It is a pretext for the US to try and reassert its presence in an area after years of absence and it is a pretext for some Western countries to violate and limit democratic freedoms in the name of a new war on terror.

This historical de-contextualization also exposed a mismatch between the messages of support and solidarity coming from the Western governments to Israel, and the way these messages are interpreted by Israel. While they may have meant to show compassion and care, they were understood as a Western absolution for any past Israeli violations of international law and of the Palestinian basic rights and as "a carte blanche" to continue the current massive destruction of the Gaza Strip.

- Historical context: The roots of Israeli ethnic cleansing

In fact, the historical context goes further back than the one mentioned by the Secretary General of the UN. In fact, we can return to the mid 19th century when evangelical Christianity 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.

The theology became policy toward the end of the 19th century and in the years leading to the First World War for two reasons. It fitted those in Britian wishing to dismantle the Ottoman Empire and incorporate parts of it within the British empire and it resonated with those within the British aristocracy, Jews and Christians, who became enchanted with the idea of Zionism as a panacea to the problem of antisemitism in central and eastern Europe (which also produced an unwelcome wave of Jewish immigration from there into Britain). When these two interests fused, they propelled the British government to issue the famous, or infamous, 1917 Balfour Declaration.

This trajectory from an elusive theological vision into a political project began in the mid 19th century and matured in 1917. Jewish thinkers and activists who redefined Judaism as nationalism, hoped this definition will protect Jewish communities from existential danger in Europe by honing 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 a Judaizing historical Palestine; regardless of it being inhabited by an indigenous population.

The Palestinian society, quite pastoral and in its early stage of modernization and construction of a national identity, produced its own anti-colonial movement. Its first significant action against the Zionist colonization project was in 1929 and it has not ceased since.

A more recent historical context, relevant to the present crisis, is the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine that included the forceful eviction of Palestinians into the Gaza Strip from villages on whose ruins some of the Israeli settlements attacked on Oct. 7, 2023 were built. These uprooted Palestinians were part of 750,000 Palestinians who lost their home and became refugees and who lived until 1948 in more than 500 villages and a dozen of towns.

This ethnic cleansing was noted by the world but not condemned. As a result, Israel continued to utilize ethnic cleansing as part of the arsenal of means to ensure that it has the space that used to be historical Palestine with as few of the native Palestinians 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 form the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip ever since.

Even closer to our time, we have to revisit the history of Israel and Palestine in the last 50 years. The long-term occupation of the West Bank that sent hundreds of thousands of Palestinians at one moment in their lives to be imprisoned or interned without trial, to be exposed to collective punishments and settlers’ harassment and living with no say in their future. Since the election of the fundamentalist messianic Israeli government in November 2022, all these harsh policies reached unprecedented levels in terms of the numbers of Palestinians killed, wounded and arrested. On top of it, a new Israeli aggressive policy towards Christian and Muslim holy places in Jerusalem unfolded under the new government.

And then there is the historical context of the more than 17 years of siege that followed the Israeli disengagement from the Gaza Strip in 2005 (the siege began in 2007). This was, very much like the Oslo Accord, presented as a generous Israeli gesture, while in practice it was a ploy for a different kind of occupation – controlling the Gaza Strip from the outside as if it were a mega prison.

Already in 2020, the UN warned that this is not a sustainable human existence. It is important to remember that the siege was imposed in response to democratic elections by the people of the Strip who preferred Hamas to the Palestinian Authority as its next government, after the unilateral Israeli withdrawal. Even more important is to go back to 1994, when the Gaza Strip was already encircled by barbed wire, disconnected from the West Bank, and was denied an organic link that Israel controlled in a way that defeated the very idea of a future two-state solution. This was constructed a year after the signing of the Oslo Accord which was meant to bring peace on the basis of a two-state solution – the fence and the increased Judaization of the West Bank were a clear indication that Oslo in the eyes of the Israelis was occupation by other means rather than a genuine gesture and search for peace.

Israel controlled the exit and entry points to the Gaza ghetto, monitored the kind of food (at times even in terms of calories), goods, medicine and basic commodities of life. Hamas reacted with launching rockets in civilian areas in Israel: Israel claimed this was down to its ideological wish to kill Jews as if it was an extension of Nazism, disregarding the context of both the Nakba and the inhuman and barbaric siege of two million people and the oppression of their compatriots in other parts of historical Palestine.

Hamas in many ways, was the only Palestinian group promising to avenge or respond to these policies. Although it is clear now that the way it responded may bring its own demise, at least in the Gaza Strip, and provided a pretext for further oppression. The savageness of some of Hamas’ actions cannot be justified in any way, but that does not mean it cannot be explained and contextualized.

As horrific as it was and as barbaric as the Israeli response to it, the bad news is it is not a game changing event despite the huge human cost on both sides. Israel will remain a state established by a settler colonial movement – a history that still influences its political DNA and determines 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 of the present Israeli realities) that preoccupied Israel until Oct. 7 will erupt again, in fact, there are already signs of its return.

- There is still hope

The definitions offered by human rights organizations such as Amnesty International of Israel as an apartheid state will still be valid however the events unfold in the Gaza Strip and beyond. And the Palestinians will not disappear and will continue their struggle for liberation, with many civil societies in the world siding with them, while their governments will continue to back Israel and provide it exceptional immunity.

The way out will be the same – a change of regime, with equal rights for everyone from the river to the sea, with the return of the refugees – otherwise the cycle of bloodshed will not end.

In the battle of narratives, Israel insists that Hamas’ action was directed from Iran as part of its desire to destroy Israel and that the actions on Oct. 7 are another Holocaust by an organization that is Nazi in its nature and worse the Daesh/ISIS.

It was very clear from the Iranian reaction, and its instruction to Hezbollah in Lebanon not to join forces with Hamas, that Teheran was not consulted. Secondly, there is nothing that would please the Holocaust deniers more in the world than to compare, as horrific as it was, the killing of 1,200 people, hundreds of them soldiers of an occupation army, to the industrial genocide of a whole nation. Finally, the Hamas is not part of a world Jihadi terror that has no clear vision. The Palestinian liberation movement from its very inception had a political Islamic group within it. In fact, all the anti-colonialist movements in the Arab and Muslim worlds had a political Islamic group as part of the general movement.

In history, the Palestinian liberation movement was for many years more secular and Leftists, and always had a strong Christian component in it. The failure of the secular forces to deliver liberation moved some people toward the political Islamic groups, some Christians as well, not necessarily as support for its dogma, but as a wish to give another option a chance.

It is up to the Palestinian people to decide who would lead them and what organization represents them best. But whoever it will be in the future, the main task of the solidarity movement would be to repel any attempts to narrate the history of the Palestinian liberation movement as a terrorist movement and insist that its present and future struggles are part of legitimate anti colonial struggle for liberation and freedom. A struggle that should it succeed can bring peace to historical Palestine that in the past would enable an honorable coexistence between Christians, Jews and Muslims in a state that would be a beacon for better life for the region as a whole.

*Opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Anadolu