source: YouTube
No, that's wrong. That perspective - the fanatics of two religions clashing - is just one strain of widespread misinformation about this conflict. This is not a religious war; it's not religious and it's not a war. The only way to describe this conflict as having reached "biblical proportions" is in reference to its scale, or to the severity of the damage done to one side. The mainstream media, as well as spokespersons and politicians on the other side, would have us believe, for 75 years now, that peace in historical Palestine can not be reached because of the inability or unwillingness of the religious extremists on both sides to live peacefully alongside each other. Hamas doesn't want peace, nor do the Zionists; they both want to wipe the other side from the face of the earth...
Well, that's true for one side and has been for more than 100 years. Also, it seems that I've waited for 100 years to write this little rant, even though this latest violent clash between Palestinians and Israel has only been going on for two months now; the amount of destruction, deaths, horror, and misinformation that has reached us in print and on-screen in two months is worth years of warfare. Wait, it's a slaughter, not warfare. A war traditionally refers to the militaries of two nations engaging in armed combat; this is not a war, a fact that can not be stressed enough. What we have here is one people violently occupying the land of another. Zionism is a political movement, a settler colonial project of Jews who, with the aid of imperial Western powers, have created a homeland in historical Palestine. From its inception, Israel was meant to be an ethnical Jewish state, and the eradication, through displacement or murder, of Palestinian Arabs was part of its original design.
Let's provide some of the historical context that's left out in almost all Western news outlets, who want us to believe history began on October 7, 2023, and want us to regard the atrocious attack by Hamas as a mindless brutal act of barbarism. I will leave out the 2000-year history, the biblical history of the "promised land", that's used by the supporters of Israel's disproportionately violent response. "Hey, our people lived here 2000 years ago, and now we've come to take it back," is an argument we wouldn't accept of any other group, so there's no reason I can see to accept it now. It's like someone breaking into your house, pointing a gun at you, claiming that their forefathers 2000 years ago owned this house. But hey, they're willing to share the house with you as long as you stay in your room and politely ask permission before going to the bathroom. No, Palestine existed up until 14 May 1948, with Christians, Jews, and Muslims living in it - mostly Muslims of course. So, I'll start this brief overview of Palestine's tragic history some 100 years ago, in 1917.
Maybe even a bit earlier, because the run-up to the Balfour Declaration of 1917 is also important. Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire, which was defeated by the British Empire in 1918. In 1916 France and the United Kingdom signed a secret treaty called the Sykes-Picot Agreement, in which they divided the territories of the Ottoman Empire. It allocated to the UK control of what is today southern Israel and Palestine, Jordan and southern Iraq, and an additional small area that included the ports of Haifa and Acre to allow access to the Mediterranean. France was to control southeastern Turkey, the Kurdistan Region, Syria, and Lebanon. The British mandate over Palestine lasted until 14 May 1948, on which date the state of Israel was proclaimed by Polish-born zionist David Ben-Gurion. In 1917 a public statement was issued by the British government, the Balfour Declaration, announcing its support for the establishment of a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine. In 1922, the League of Nations adopted the declaration and granted the Palestine Mandate to the British; this is how the UK became the first Western imperial power to support the zionist project of establishing a Jewish national home in Palestine.
Modern political Zionism, founded by Theodor Herzl in 1897, was a reaction to constant and growing antisemitism in Europe. Confronted with antisemitic events in Vienna he concluded that anti-Jewish sentiment would make Jewish assimilation impossible and that the only solution for Jews was the establishment of a Jewish state. It should be noted though that the Jews, and even the Zionists of the world were not united in this conclusion. Liberal Judaism or Progressive Judaism, for example, rejected the idea of a "return to Zion" as expressed in an 1885 resolution stating that "we consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community; and we, therefore, expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning a Jewish state". Zionism is not a monolith, far from it, but the Zionist movement behind the establishment of modern-day Israel was and is a political nationalist project with the aim, from day one, of creating a majority Jewish country in a majority Arab land.
Supporters of the Israeli government don't want to hear this, but there's only one way to establish a majority Jewish country in a majority Arab land, which is to get as many Jewish people as possible to migrate to that land and, on the other hand, get as much Arabs as possible to move out of it. This has always been the aim. And they've succeeded thus far: in 1945 the Jewish population accounted for roughly 33% of Palestine's population, while in 2019 they make up 52% of the population of Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip combined, and 79% of Israel proper (source). The ongoing ethnic cleansing of historical Palestine started with the Nakba of 1948; 78% of Mandatory Palestine was declared as Israel, some 700,000 Palestinians were expulsed, over 500 Palestinian villages were depopulated or destroyed by Zionist militias and later the Israeli army (IDF). This mass displacement of Palestinians wasn't temporary, as the Israeli government quickly denied the Palestinians the right to return; you can find tons of photos online of Palestinians showing the key to their house, which they kept as they expected to be able to return once the hostilities quieted down.
The reason why the UK and now the US support Israel wholeheartedly is purely geopolitical. The British wanted a safe buffer and a corridor over land, from Haifa, through Jordan and Iraq, to their Indian colony. The US wants a (heavily armed) ally in this oil- and gas-rich region of the planet, as well as a military outpost as a deterrent to the forces that oppose their geopolitical and capitalist interests. The Zionists were betrayed by the British in 1939 when they realized they would need the Arabs on their side on the eve of the Second World War, for reasons that are well explained in the video at the end of this post, by promising the Palestinians a nation of their own, a promise they've never kept of course. But even the British couldn't escape the wrath of militant right-wing Zionists as the King David Hotel in Jerusalem was bombed in a 1946 terrorist attack:
The British administrative headquarters for Mandatory Palestine, housed in the southern wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, were bombed in a terrorist attack on July 22, 1946, by the militant right-wing Zionist underground organization the Irgun during the Jewish insurgency. 91 people of various nationalities were killed, including Arabs, Britons and Jews, and 46 were injured.
The hotel was the site of the central offices of the British Mandatory authorities of Palestine, principally the Secretariat of the Government of Palestine and the Headquarters of the British Armed Forces in Palestine and Transjordan. When planned, the attack had the approval of the Haganah, the principal Jewish paramilitary group in Palestine, though, unbeknownst to the Irgun, this had been cancelled by the time the operation was carried out. The main motive of the bombing was to destroy documents incriminating the Jewish Agency in attacks against the British, which were obtained during Operation Agatha, a series of raids by mandate authorities. It was the deadliest attack directed at the British during the Mandate era (1920–1948).
source: Wikipedia
From 1922 until the British essentially gave up on trying to contain the hostilities between Palestinians and Zionists in 1939, the Zionists were trained and armed by the British; this conflict has never been a fight between equal forces. Effectively in 1967, with the Six-Day War between Israel and the Arab nations (Egypt, Syria, and Jordan), as a result of Egypt closing the Suez Canal to Israeli ships, the US took over the political and military support for Israel from the British. As a result of this war, 325,000 Palestinians fled from the then-Jordan-occupied West Bank. In the aftermath of this conflict, Egypt closed the Suez Canal until 1975, eventually leading to the 1970s energy crisis and 1973 oil crisis due to the impact on oil deliveries coming to Europe from the Middle East through the Suez Canal. Here we see the first clear indication of how important Israel is to the general "West" as a strategic, geopolitical, and economic partner.
What I want you to get from this quick overview of modern Israel's history is that it's always been a colonial settler project to convert a majority Arab country into a majority Jewish state based on Zionist settler colonial principles. Its history is marked by ethnic cleansing and genocide and its current state is one of an apartheid state with two distinct classes of citizens and an even more distinct class of noncitizens. Jewish Israelis enjoy all the rights and privileges of a citizen in a democratic nation, while Palestinian Arabs' rights have four tiers; no rights in the Gaza Strip, some rights in the West Bank outside the Jewish settlements, a bit more rights in part of Jerusalem, and full rights in Israel proper, albeit with some 20 laws on the books that limit their freedoms concerning owning land, landing certain jobs and the right to return for expulsed family members, to name a few. Think about it: Jews from all over the world are allowed to immigrate, but Palestinian refugees in the surrounding countries can not. Heck, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, who can look through the fence and see their ancestral land can't even leave...
But Israel has a right to defend itself! This is so tiresome, just like the notion that Israel has a "right to exist". These are all stupid arguments. No country has a "right to exist". Countries or nations are the results of historical events, ethnic bonding, the development of a common language, political decisions, and military conquest, and over many, many years they are accepted as a fait accompli. The region of the Middle East of which Palestine is a part, is fairly unique and Israel is even more unique. The many straight lines on the map in that region are a clear remnant of the partitioning of the region in the Sykes-Picot treaty between France and the UK, lines drawn by people who have no affinity with the peoples inhabiting the actual land, often crossing through ethnical and religious historical unities. And for Palestine, there was the additional curiosity that it was promised in advance to the Jews of Europe who suffered from centuries of European antisemitism culminating in the holocaust of the Second World War.
This way Palestine traded an occupation by the British, who only had a military and political presence in the land, for an actual occupation by the Zionists, who wanted to make the land their home, and theirs alone. So please stop with the "Israel has a right to defend itself" argument. Palestinians have a right to defend themselves against their violent occupiers, not the other way around. Especially when it comes to the Gaza Strip, which has been under a brutal blockade and siege since 2006, and has rightfully been called the world's largest open-air prison or concentration camp. On October 7 2023 some of those prisoners broke out and committed atrocities that can't be justified, but can be understood. When you treat people like animals for long enough, do not be surprised if they act like animals when given a chance, when they finally break free from their cage. Whenever caged people rise to their oppressors, such violence is to be expected and has been witnessed throughout history. So, don't feign surprised indignation, please.
I've long believed that the Palestinians' fight was with the government of Israel, especially the right-wing Zionist extremists thereof, not with the majority of the Israeli Jewish population. But lately, while Israel once again ramps up its genocidal tactics, I've come to doubt that. It stands to reason that, regarding the brief history sketched above, many Jews who left their homes all over the world to return to "their" ancestral land, were Zionists who shared the opinion of its founders that it is indeed theirs to reclaim. Israel's Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has referenced Amalek by saying, in Hebrew, "You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember." In the Bible God commands King Saul in the first Book of Samuel to kill every person in Amalek, a rival nation to ancient Israel. "This is what the Lord Almighty says," the prophet Samuel tells Saul. "'I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. Now go, attack the Amalekites and destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.'"
The genocidal intent is clear when listening to Israel's government officials. A member of the Knesset has called for a second Nakba and a military spokesperson said about Israel's airstrikes that "the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy." Just as a general rule, there's little to no effort on their side to distinguish in their rhetoric between Hamas and the general population of the Gaza Strip. By now the death toll stands at 15,000 at least, of which two-thirds are women and children. And because there's no fuel, no water, no electricity, no sanitation, and most hospitals are rendered inoperative due to targeted attacks by the IDF, diseases are spreading rapidly as well. The UN warns that deaths from disease in Gaza could outstrip deaths from war, while retired Major General Giora Eiland, former head of the National Security Council and current advisor to the Israeli Defense Minister makes the case that epidemic among Gazans is to be cheered:
In a Hebrew article on the printed edition of the centrist Yedioth Ahronoth titled "Let's not be intimidated by the world," Eiland clarified that the whole Gazan civilian population was a legitimate target and that even "severe epidemics in the south of the Gaza Strip will bring victory closer." His bottom line leaves no doubt as to his view: "They are not only Hamas fighters with weapons, but also all the 'civilian' officials, including hospital administrators and school administrators, and also the entire Gaza population that enthusiastically supported Hamas and cheered on its atrocities on October 7th."
source: Mondoweiss
Chilling. But that's still official voices, that's not the opinion of the general Jewish Israeli population. It's an old and well-established trick to conflate criticism of the Israeli government or Zionism with antisemitism, so it's important to make that distinction. Right? Well, I'm not so sure anymore. As I said, it's reasonable to think that most Jewish immigrants truly believe the land has always been theirs to begin with. Also, recent polls show that a plurality of Israelis believe that the current slaughter of Gazans is justified. Also, the violence in the West Bank has shot up while all cameras are pointed at Gaza, and in the last two months, more than 200 Palestinians have been killed there by the IDF and armed settlers. And recently the number one song on Israeli charts was a Hip-hop war anthem called "Charbu Darbu," which in Hebrew slang means "raining hell on one's opponent". This was reported by "The Times of Israel" on 21 November and the song again references Amalek ("I spit on you, sons of Amalek"), comparing Hamas to the Biblical enemy of the Israelites who must be obliterated. Combine that with the loss of distinction between Hamas and Gazans... Chilling.
The attacks on October 7th were brutal and crimes against humanity were committed on that day, there's no doubt about that. But the attack didn't come falling out of the sky. The young Palestinians who broke out of their prison had no past, nothing in the present, and no future. All they knew was captivity in the world's largest open-air prison and many of them are the descendants of those who were ethnically cleansed in 1948 and who can see, but never return to the land that's rightfully theirs. Let's also not forget that the Kibbutzim situated near the Gaza fence aren't simply civilian settlements; they are heavily militarized and are strategically placed to act as a buffer between Gaza and Israel. Although 800 of the 1200 killed that fateful day were designated civilians, I'm not so sure anymore if I'd call them completely innocent. They are active participants in this colonial settlement project and at the very least it's insensitive to have a rave party right next to the people you've robbed of their land and keep imprisoned under a brutal siege.
There's so much more to say... The daily lies coming from the Israeli government are repeated verbatim by the Western mainstream press and sometimes later corrected... There's yet to be given evidence for 40 baby's having been decapitated (trust me, there is no evidence), mass rape of innocent women (again: we'll probably be waiting still long after de destruction of Gaza is complete), the thousands of Hamas operatives Israel claims to have killed, and so on. The extent to which the Western media are beholden to the Israeli narrative has never before become as apparent as with the weeks-long debate about that one missile landing on, or right next to a hospital in Gaza. Debate, audio "evidence", and video analysis, all to establish whether the rocket was fired by the IDF or Hamas, for weeks. While all the time Israel was bombing all hospitals, schools, homes, ambulances, journalists, and international humanitarian entities, we were captured by a discussion about one rocket... Where's the proportionality in that? That was a misdirection of biblical proportions, I would say.
There already exists one nation "from the river to the sea" and all who want to call that an antisemitic slur are simply not informed about the facts on the ground. The weaponization of antisemitism deserves a whole book on its own and has gone way too far, to the point that you risk your job, and your future by publicly expressing support for the Palestinian cause or by criticizing Zionism and the Israeli government or its official apartheid policies. The nation that exists is an apartheid state in which the use of violent oppression is inherent to keep the occupation going. Israel is the aggressor here and it does not have a right to defend itself. That's simply not a right that the aggressor can claim. And I will not condemn Hamas as a terrorist organization. I will condemn all atrocities on both sides, but only one side will have my sympathy and understanding.
I'll also say it's easy for me to pick a side here, as I have no personal stake in this conflict. But the facts are the facts, and the Palestinians have been wronged here, by the Zionists and by all Western governments supporting them to this day. I'm tired of the occasional rhetorical support that's been given to the Palestinians: it means nothing. Only when the American, British, and European governments punish the clear war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the Israeli government will there ever be a chance for peace in the region. No child is worth more than another. Currently, one million Palestinians are displaced within the Gaza Strip and Israel now bombs and attacks the south, leaving no place for the population to hide, which is all according to the Zionist plan to drive them all out and into Egypt. Yes, this plan exists: look it up for yourself. If anything, for Israeli Zionists the October 7 attacks are a great excuse to continue and accelerate their ethnic cleansing to finally make their dream of creating a majority Jewish state in all of ancient Israel and Judah come true. They'll settle for nothing less.
So, just to be thorough, let me mention that none of the above is meant to be taken as a reason to be antisemitic or as a reason to hate Jews as an ethnic or religious group. They've suffered enough of that shit and they don't deserve it. There are tons of valid reasons why Jews would want a land of their own; it's simply a historical fact that they've been persecuted throughout history, something that's continuing even today. The weird thing is though, the thing I can't fully understand, is that it's obvious that the way the Zionists behave in this latest conflict will increase antisemitic sentiments all over the world. This is wrong; I'll just point to the many signs seen at pro-Palestine protests all over the world carried by Jews reading "Not in Our Name!" If you see in any of this factual overview a reason to hate Jews, you're making the same mistake as the Israeli extremist politicians who fail to distinguish between Hamas and Gazans or Palestinians or Arabs; Jews are NOT Israel or its government, and not all Jews are Zionists, and not all Zionists subscribe to the principles of the political Zionism as founded by Theodor Herzl.
I'll leave you with a video that places this conflict in its proper context, please watch it as it clarifies a lot of what I've said here and it adds a lot more. In it, Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian-American historian of the Middle East and the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, and author of "The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917- 2017", is interviewed by Chris Hedges. Khalidi has personally been involved with peace negotiations between Palestine and Israel. He is a testament to the fact that David Ben Gurion's reputed comment that "the old will die and the young will forget" was wrong. Victims of brutal conquest and constant oppression never forget.
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