What else can we call the warnings from the Israeli government – and from Benjamin Netanyahu himself – for Gazan civilians to seek safety, and the claims it is working to create “safe areas” for civilians to evacuate to, but “Compassion Theater.” According the Washington Post, the State of Israel has even said that it has “no desire to harm the population” of Gaza.
Actions speak louder than words, and 15,000 dead Gazans, mostly civilians, are certainly evidence of the State of Israel’s desires.
This Compassion Theater is certainly meant for overseas consumption, like for Britain, which will be conducting aerial reconnaissance flights over Gaza on behalf of the State of Israel. But, even more, it is for the benefit of Israelis and diaspora Zionists, who will point to the performance and say “see? The State of Israel really is concerned about civilian casualties!”
Concerned? Yes. Interested in minimizing them? Almost certainly not. The IDF has escalated its bombing campaign in South Gaza, exactly where the State of Israel told Gazans to flee for safety in the first place, and where the bulk of refugees from its brutal campaign has fled.
Did the State of Israel intentionally pack the barrel with human fish? I doubt it. But Netanyahu, his gang, the IDF, and the Israelis and Zionists who support them just don’t care. They have the fantasies of the stage to console them, and to allow them to think that this is a just war.
And 15,000 are dead.
***
The bombing started again overnight. I had somehow thought – irrationally – that the “pause” would be more than that; that, after a week of not killing, the humans in the Israeli war machine would lose their stomach for the work. It has happened before, after all. In 2003, 27 IDF pilots signed an open letter that appeared in newspapers across the State of Israel. It read, in part:
“We, veteran and active pilots alike, who served and still serve the state of Israel for long weeks every year, are opposed to carrying out attack orders that are illegal and immoral of the type the state of Israel has been conducting in the territories. We, who were raised to love the state of Israel and contribute to the Zionist enterprise, refuse to take part in Air Force attacks on civilian population centers. We, for whom the Israel Defense Forces and the Air Force are an inalienable part of ourselves, refuse to continue to harm innocent civilians. These actions are illegal and immoral and are a direct result of the ongoing occupation which is corrupting all of Israeli society. Perpetuation of the occupation is fatally harming the security of the state of Israel and its moral strength.”
Part of me – that tiny part of my psyche still capable of hope and optimism – really did hope that, having had the opportunity to stop and reflect for a week, Israelis would step back from the carnage that their government has been inflicting on Gaza with their support and complicity.
Today, something like the Pilot’s Letter, in which human beings reflect on their own humanity and the humanity and justice of their actions, seems impossible in the State of Israel. The bombing started again, as promised, at the appointed time, and adorned up with the window dressing and tinsel of “humanitarian considerations” (as one Israeli official phrased it) for overseas consumption. It is as if the clock, set to snooze twice, finally ticked over, and the killing just started again, as it was ordained to.
There is no humanity in all of this, and there is no hope. Just the shattering concussion of bombs and the roar of jets over the inferno of Gaza.
“Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate.”
***
There are a few Zionist shibboleths about Palestine that I hear (and read) over and over again. I have no doubt that Zionists truly believe them and are never inclined to go much deeper into them than to nod sagely in agreement. One of these is “they hate us.” The “they” in question is rather capacious and can, in different circumstances, encompass extremists like Hezbollah and Hamas, all Palestinian political groups and leaders, and even all Palestinians. Most often, it refers to the latter (all Palestinians), and is deployed as an apologia for the brutality of the occupation, the unwillingness of the State of Israel to acknowledge Palestinian human rights and self-determination, and the current (though temporarily paused) military devastation of Gaza.
The logic typically goes like this: “They (the Palestinians) hate us, and that makes them unreasonable, so we cannot deal with them through diplomatic means.” Or, “They (the Palestinians) hate us, so they are a continual, enduring threat against which we must use the most extreme measures to defend ourselves.” In this latter formulation, Zionist narrative produces Palestinians as mindless animals and savages – rhetoric frequently deployed by people like Benjamin Netanyahu – who are motivated by a mindless animus.
This is an effective strategy for Zionists and the State of Israel; the Jewish people have been, and continue to be, the targets of vicious and genocidal hate throughout our history. After the ghettos, the pogroms, the expulsions, the Shoah, the mass shootings, and all the rest, the knowledge that we are a hated people is pretty deeply ingrained in our collective cultural consciousness. Zionists need only invoke the word “hate” to activate a vast pool of atavistic fear and, through its hegemonic power in the world Jewish community, Zionism has largely succeeded in equating hatred of the State of Israel with hatred of all Jews.
So, “they hate us” stands as an un-interrogated ideological premise that mobilizes uncritical support for and blind obedience to the State of Israel among the majority of the world Jewish community: “They hate us, so we have to stand together, even if that means abandoning your commitment to social justice and human rights.”
I have little doubt that the members of Hamas and Hezbollah, activists in the Palestinian freedom movement, and most – even possibly all – Palestinians hate the State of Israel. Moreover, since the State of Israel claims to be “The Jewish State,” and Israelis are almost always the only Jews with whom Palestinians in Palestine have had any contact, it would not surprise me if most Palestinians conflated their hate of the State of Israel with a hate for Jews. Significantly, however, in virtually every case that I know, when Palestinians living their Diaspora encounter Jews-who-are-not-Israelis, that conflation fails. One commenter on a friend’s post said last week that “I had no idea until I moved to the US that there was a difference between Israelis and Jews.” Three of my Palestinian students buttonholed me last week to thank me for my “humanity” and for disabusing them of the idea that their great adversary was “the Jews.”
So, we must ask why “they hate us” or, more accurately, why Palestinians hate the State of Israel. This should not be a difficult question to answer for anyone with even a passing familiarity with the history of the State of Israel and Palestine. The past 75 years have been a history of dispossession and oppression at the hands of the State of Israel, from the Naqba, to 1967, to the settlements, to the slaughter today in Gaza. If Palestinians hate the State of Israel, they hate it for reasons; given the history, one can no more expect them to love the State of Israel and Zionism than to expect Jews to love the Catholic Church, Russian nationalists, or the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. That would be absurd.
By understanding the history of this hate, and remembering our collective, Jewish complicity in the violent excesses of Zionism and the State of Israel – a complicity embodied as much in passive toleration or indifference as in positive support – we might be able to repair three generations of wrongs. But we won’t. Because acknowledging that Palestinians hate the State of Israel, and all that it means, for legitimate reasons and interrogating those reasons would undermine some of the foundational premises of Zionism: that we, alone, are the victims of history, that we, alone, deserve a homeland, that this homeland is ordained by some extra-historical (perhaps divine) right… And Zionism cannot have it.
Far better to perpetuate the racist canard so central to Zionist myth: “The Arab” (or Palestinian in contemporary discourse) of this mythology is simpleminded, illiterate, ignoramus, capable of no more reason nor discernment than “wild animals,” as Netanyahu has called Palestinians; they have no motivations beyond the basest of impulses, and they do not hate for any reason, they merely hate to hate. This is what the apologists for the War on Gaza, and for the atrocities committed by the State of Israel truly believe – it is what they are really saying when they declare “they hate us,” and leave it at that.
***
Another Zionist shibboleth is “the settlers of the Yishuv were not colonizers, they paid for their land!” The truth is that the early Zionist movement described Zionism as a colonial enterprise; in Der Judenstaat, Theodor Herzl cites the Nueva Germania colony established by the hyper-antisemitic German nationalist Bernhard Förster in Argentina (to guarantee the “purity of the German race”) as a model. He describes the settlers of his proposed Jewish State as “colonists” who would “there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.”
The language of colonization suffused every aspect of the Zionist project from the beginning, invariably appealing to the European colonization of the “unpopulated” Americas (unpopulated in their imaginations) as authority for the settling of the Levant. The earliest Zionist settlers of Hovei Zion stated explicitly in the 1890s that they were building a colony, and Baron de Hirsch’s fund for buying the land for Zionist settlement was called the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association.
So let’s not be coy here.
Even setting all of that aside, the narrative that “we bought this land for fair compensation” vastly oversimplifies the dynamics of the settling of the Second Yishuv (the Zionist polity that would evolve into the State of Israel). While Zionist organizations like the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association (PICA) and the Jewish National Fund did pay for the land that they acquired, articulating thoroughly European, liberal-capitalist notions of land tenure, the landowners they acquired it from were embedded in a system of feudal land tenure.
What this means is that, while they might have owned the land in their own right (at least after the late-19th century Ottoman land reforms), they did not work the land or even necessarily live on it. The majority of these landowners were absentee landlords with residences in Beirut and Damascus, and they were eager to make a profit from the sale of their land to support their lavish lifestyles. The people who actually lived on the land were Fellahin – propertyless tenant farmers whose labor had been exploited by the absentee landlords.
When the PICA and the JNF bought the land “fair and square,” they did not spend much time or effort considering the plight of the poor fellah who was expelled from the land that he and his family might have farmed as tenants for generations. And it was the policy of Zionist organizations to exclude Palestinian Arabs from all economic aspects of these colonial communities. For example, one stipulation of business and property development loans from the Jewish Colonial Trust (the Yishuv’s largest bank, now Bank Leumi) was that recipients were forbidden to employ non-Jewish workers or use non-Jewish suppliers. Histadrut, the Zionist labor organization, operated a closed shop, ensuring that the businesses and institutions that it organized did not employ Palestinian workers.
So, even if, by European liberal-capitalist standards, the Zionist project acquired the land upon which it built its colony “fairly,” it did so at the expense of the vast bulk of the Palestinian Arab population, who were already being exploited by their absentee landlords, and had no property rights. They were dispossessed by the Zionist Project, which did not even acknowledge their existence – nowhere in Der Judenstaat, for example, does Herzl even allow that Palestine is populated – and by a class of oppressive absentee landowners who regarded them as irrelevant, disposable labor.
From the very beginning, Zionist colonizers intervened in a system of economic exploitation, on the side of the exploiters, only to dispossess the exploited even further. This is a part of the process that the Zionist myth refuses to accept and why so many Zionists remain perplexed as to why “they hate us.”
***
I have to wonder what the “Pause” will seem like in a week. Will it be “extended” for a few more days? Will we even fully remember it or will this short truce recede into the grey mists of memory when this is all over, the dead are tallied and it is inevitably recalled faintly as we think of what “might have been?” How was the Christmas 1914 Truce remembered by March, or even January 1915; was there anyone left alive, apart from the generals and politicians who weren’t there, to remember the silence at all?