The outcome of the latest conflagration pitting Israel against the indigenous population it has sought to displace, but failed to subdue since long before 1948, remains impossible to predict.
As the semi-official death toll in Gaza approaches 41,000 — more than a third of them children or infants — and the Israel Defence Forces extend their wrecking ball into the West Bank, the “moral compass” of the Netanyahu Government and its mainly Western allies points almost exclusively towards 7 October 2023.
That date, associated with the largest single massacre of Jews since the horrific Holocaust in the 1940s, may indeed qualify as a day of infamy. There cannot be much doubt that Hamas, Islamic Jihad and their associates committed atrocities tantamount to war crimes. Two distinct aspects of 7 October tend, however, to be glossed over in much of the subsequent Western discourse.
For one, the precise events of that day remain shrouded in a patchy fog of uncertainties. The obvious questions, about how Israel’s vaunted security and intelligence agencies, which have kept a particularly close eye on the Gaza Strip since Israel’s deceptive withdrawal from the territory in 2005, were caught unawares by an operation with an extended gestation period, or why the military hierarchy ignored the warnings of the (mostly female) soldiers posted near the periphery of Gaza that something unusual was afoot, remain unanswered.
Furthermore, is it indeed the case that IDF troops were shifted in large numbers to the West Bank on the eve of the Hamas-led break-out, in order to aid the violent intimidations and land-grab tactics of the militant settlers? And, following the IDF’s inexplicably delayed response to SOS calls from the kibbutzim under attack, how much of the subsequent carnage can be attributed to the Israeli forces?
One instance of an officer ordering tank shells to be fired at a house in Be’eri kibbutz where Hamas was holding 14 hostages, 13 of whom were killed, has been acknowledged. The Israeli daily Haaretz reported two months ago that the Hannibal protocol — which authorises the use of force to prevent kidnappings, including at risk to hostages’ lives — was invoked. Its consequences remain unclear, and there is no imminent prospect of an independent inquiry.
Meanwhile, the Israeli hasbara machine has deemed it prudent, or at least useful, to exaggerate the Hamas-led excesses of 7 October, perhaps partly to deflect from the embarrassment of a pathetic military response, and partly to justify the genocidal response against “human animals”. Mind you, Yoav Gallant, the defence minister who employed this term, is considered by some in the west as the acceptable face of Zionism, as opposed to Benjamin Netanyahu, who has sporadically held the prime ministerial post since before Vladimir Putin conquered the Kremlin.
Secondly, although the atrocious aftermath of 7 October has been reasonably well documented in both mainstream and alternative media, its historical context is rarely scrutinised. The origins of European Zionism date back to the late 19th century, when it emerged as a response to widespread anti-semitism across the continent, from France to the tsarist empire with its rampant pogroms and the corralling of Jews in the Pale of Settlement on its western periphery. Emigration in that era turned out to be an eventual cultural boon for North America, but there were also those who settled in Palestine, then ruled by the Ottoman Empire.
Local alarm at the influx was sparked only after the Balfour Declaration of 1917, whereby the British empire declared its willingness to facilitate a “national homeland” for Jews in a territory over which it obtained a League of Nations-sanctioned mandate shortly afterwards. The colonial administration and fledgling Zionist militias colluded in combatting a wave of indigenous revolts for a couple of decades, but London incurred the wrath of terrorist organisations such as Irgun, the Haganah and the Stern Group, two of whose veterans became Likud prime ministers.
The rise of Nazism in Germany from 1933 provoked an exodus to Palestine, not so much as a favoured destination for European Jews, but because they were shut out of their preferred destinations such as Britain or the US – both of which evolved into Israel’s biggest supporters. So, for that matter, did post-war Germany, which has gone as far as to criminalise defence of Palestinian human rights even as it clumsily grapples with a neo-fascist resurgence.
Oft-ignored documents point to the fact that the fathers of Zionism were well aware that the success of their project required the eradication of Palestine as even a putative entity. The multiple massacres and associated “ethnic cleansing” in 1948 — with the incipient Israeli military and Zionist paramilitaries unmoved by the parallels between their actions and those of the Nazis — failed to solve the “problem”, and the occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and the Golan Heights in 1967 only exacerbated it. The 1973 war reminded Israel’s Arab neighbours that after 25 years they were still no match for its US-aided military supremacy in the air or on the ground.
A more detailed history of resistance is beyond the scope of this article. Suffice it to say that the Palestinians eventually realised they had to fend for themselves and, predictably disappointed by the outcome of the Oslo Accord, and the once celebrated Fatah and Palestine Liberation Organisation’s acquiescence in serving as the security arm of the Israeli state, they opted for more militant routes to a liberation that remains elusive.
Neither 7 October nor the devastating retribution that has followed came out of the blue. Perhaps neither can be justified, but both should be contextualised. The violence of the oppressed and that of the oppressor cannot be equated. After all, not even the most ardent Zionist could fail to distinguish between the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943 and the Nazi reprisals, or separate the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in occupied Prague the previous year from the annihilation of Lidice.
Mahir Ali
Mahir Ali has worked as a journalist in Pakistan, the UAE and Australia across four decades.
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