14.12.23
Editorial Note
Dr. Jason Thomas, the director of Frontier Assessments, a group that analyzes risks and develops solutions, published an article in the Australian press. In “Islamist Terrorists Have Won War for Hearts and Minds,” Thomas argues that Hamas’s October 7 attack shows that the West did not win the global war on terror and that Hamas presented “successful psychological operations” aimed at Western audiences.
The author explained that the attack and the Gaza war play well to “the Islamist global insurgency,“ a plan to harness the power of hundreds of thousands of Western-hating, males who entered Europe during the war in Syria. “All the Islamist insurgency had to do was wait patiently for the right moment, using the sanctuaries secured in generous Western countries to drive its campaign into the heart of all facets of our Judaeo-Christian society.” The Islamist insurgency’s strategy also involves “deploying our own principles against us.”
Thomas wrote that the global Islamist insurgency aims to “break the US-led Western resolve by targeting our centers of gravity, belief in ourselves, driving splinters of hot dissent among Western populations who are now less sure of themselves and more divided… The Iranian-funded and coordinated attack on Israel and its multifaceted, hybrid nature is fourth-generational guerrilla warfare deployed against the West. This is the world we must now be prepared to face… Right now, the West’s enemies are coordinating a network of state and non-state actors, criminals, terrorists and international cartels while inspiring sympathizers at home to launch a perpetual multipolar conflict.”
All these, while spreading the message that the Islamist Jihadists, including Hamas in Gaza, are interested in peaceful coexistence.
As IAM reported since 2004, more than a handful of Israeli academics adopted the theme that Israel alone is to blame for the failure of peace with the Palestinians.
Rather than going through a heart-searching revision of their views, the October 7 massacre saw them doubling down on their defunct theory. Ironically, they have been busier than ever, giving interviews and writing articles to explain why they are right.
IAM gathered samples of some of their writings, focusing on a small group of activist academics.
Prof. Nurit Peled-Elhanan recently discussed in Haaretz her Facebook post for which she was attacked. She wrote that in Gaza, “referring to the context from which the murderers emerged – a brutal siege of almost three decades. To paraphrase words written by Jean-Paul Sartre: After so many years in which their necks were suffocated under your boot, and they were given a chance to raise their heads, what kind of a look did you think you would find? We saw this look on October 7. The vengeful and hateful gaze of the Nakba refugees, their children and grandchildren, young people whose lives range between oppression and humiliation, scarcity and repeated bombings that wiped out entire families, institutions and infrastructure… The occupation corrupts both the conqueror and the conquered. The occupier grows rotten fruits in the image of the terrorists of the hills whose representatives sit in the Israeli government today and encourage their ‘boys’ to perpetrate pogroms in the West Bank and even in Jerusalem without interference, and the occupied grows rotten fruit in the image of Hamas boys. Both see their neighbors as enemies in heart and soul and do not distinguish between a soldier and a civilian, between a man and a woman, between an old man and a young man or a baby.” Peled Elhanan added, “Anyone who dares to acknowledge the suffering of the residents of Gaza or the West Bank is denounced as a supporter of terrorism and could be harmed.”
Another fellow academic activist, Shlomo Sand, published an article discussing “The Global Left.” He touched upon the “radical right wing that was growing more extreme” while “the long historical bond between Jews and the liberal or social left loosened… Then came the horrors of 7 October. Hamas’ murderous attack shook Jews around the world. It was especially hard for Jews from the global left. On the one hand, you could no longer support the traditional argument, dating from Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon, that defends the violence of the oppressed, and on the other hand it was hard to ignore the siege that Gaza’s residents have been living under, while at least half of them are descendants of refugees from the 1948 war.” Sand argues that the IDF’s “response against all Gaza residents has made it even harder to defend Israel, and to continue to only see in Israel a victim of immediate circumstance.” For Sand, “the rise of Judeophobia among Islamists, seen against the rise of Islamophobia among right-wingers and centrists in Europe, has embarrassed left-wing Jews. They have been torn between their universal values and this intensifying mutual hatred.”
Another activist, Prof. Ariella Aisha Azoulay, published an article in the Boston Review, titled “Seeing Genocide,” where she declares, “Israel’s weaponization of images since October 7 obfuscates its genocidal campaign against Palestinians.” She argues that to convince the world that the violence waged upon Gaza is not genocidal, governments and institutions in the West have enacted an ideological campaign of terror, weaponizing accusations of anti-Semitism against those who reject these claims and the conflation of Jews and Israelis.” She postulates, “My point of departure is that genocide can be recognized when a certain group is turned into a ‘problem’ to which violent ‘solutions’ are offered in the form of expulsion, concentration, forced vulnerability, incarceration, murder, destruction, and extermination. A genocidal regime is one that produces, cultivates, trades, uses, and legitimizes these forms of violence while at the same time socializing its citizens to see them as necessary for their protection and well-being. Over the last few weeks, we have been watching Palestinians in Gaza undergo a genocide. Meanwhile, the Israeli propaganda machine has launched its latest campaign to silence those who refuse to accept its narratives.” She terms it a “genocide targeting Palestinians.”
Likewise, Prof. Ilan Pappe wrote an article for Palestine Chronicle, for Pappe, “genocide taking place.” Pappe can “draw some hope, in these dark times, from the huge and growing solidarity movement all over the world. This movement doesn’t cave in to scare tactics employed by governments and politicians, and is advocating for an immediate ceasefire…. The political elites of the Global North and some of the Global South will continue to provide international immunity for Israel’s criminal policies on the ground. Yet their civil societies will continue by and large to stand behind the Palestinian liberation movement. On the ground, the military imbalance between Israel and the Palestinians – despite the surprise attack – will remain the same, and quite a few Arab states will eventually continue the normalization process. For Pappe, “the framing of Zionism and Israel as a settler-colonial project is a consensual issue among all the leading scholars on the Middle East, and it is rejected as an accurate paradigm only among mainstream Israeli academia.” The Global North, according to Pappe, has to take a stand: “Are they with the liberation movement or against it? There is no middle ground anymore. There is no way of supporting the liberal occupier, the progressive ethnic cleanser and the leftist genocider. The attempt to frame the stance I am calling for as racist or antisemitic will not hold water.” Pappe concludes, “This is indeed the time for people with moral courage, as the struggle for freedom and liberation will be a long one and needs such allies to support it.”
Another activist academic, Prof. Neve Gordon, recently published an article discussing Human Shields. Gordon postulates that Israel’s “claim that Hamas uses human shields should be understood as a pre-emptive legal defense against accusations that Israel is committing war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. The Geneva Conventions prohibit the use of human shields: ‘The presence or movements of the civilian population or individual civilians shall not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations, in particular in attempts to shield military objectives from attacks or to shield, favor or impede military operations.’ In other words, it’s legal to bomb a site protected by human shields.” For Gordon, Israel accuses Hamas while Israel kills civilians or destroys hospitals because Hamas has used them as shields. “Thirty thousand tons of bombs have so far been dropped on Gaza, and more than two hundred mosques, two hundred schools and over forty hospitals and other medical facilities have been damaged or destroyed. More than five thousand children and around ten thousand adults have been killed. Most of them were civilians.” For Gordon, these are attempts by the Israelis to “justify their carpet bombing and blame Palestinians for bringing disaster on themselves.”
As the above quotes make clear, the anti-Israel Israeli academics bought into what Dr. Thomas described as the propaganda action for the Islamist global insurgency.
REFERENCES
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/islamist-terrorists-have-won-the-war-for-hearts-and-minds/news-story/44122722c1f18dcefba43f304726e9b0
30 Nov. 2023Islamist terrorists have won war for hearts and minds JASON THOMAS Watching Melbourne schoolchildren protesting against Israel, supported by parents and teachers, it’s clear the West did not win the global war on terror – because we saw it only as a physical contest.
Al-Qa’ida leader Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attack on the US, would have been proud because Islamist terrorism now is mainstreamed into Western society, including right here in Australia.
This phenomenon has been successful because it is coinciding with the denigration of everything that made the West strong since the Enlightenment. The fact is the October 7 attack on Israel was one of the most successful psychological operations against the West at the height of its weakness.
I witnessed Islamic State in Syria and northern Iraq, the Taliban in Afghanistan, the New People’s Army in The Philippines and the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, as well as other rebel movements such as the Mai-Mai in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. One thing they all have in common is that their mission reaches beyond a physical dimension.
They have a cognitive network that is borderless. And when combined with a well-supplied sanctuary supported by a big brother, then they are hard to defeat. This is made even harder when they are allowed to swim in what Mao Zedong called the warm waters of the population.
In Australia and across the West, we have large pools of disgruntled, impressionable, narcissistic communities nurtured on identity politics, envy and hate, a generation reared on fear except the fear of losing the soul of the West. This is being legitimatised by leading global organisations such as the UN.
I recall when in northern Iraq describing to a UN security meeting in Erbil that ISIS was coming across from the east into Sinjar and they needed to be prepared. The response was “we don’t call them ISIS”. I then was proudly informed that UN secretary-general Ban Kimoon had sent a strongly worded letter to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al- Baghdadi. The Kurds couldn’t believe it.
The fact is, the war on Islamist terrorism never ended with the demise of ISIS.
Instead, the Islamist global insurgency manoeuvred into the next phase of its plan. A climate was created for hundreds of thousands of young, fit, Western-hating, fighting-aged males to cross freely into Europe and other Western countries during the civil war in Syria. All the insurgency had to do was wait patiently for the right moment, using the sanctuaries secured in generous Western countries to drive its campaign into the heart of all facets of our Judaeo- Christian society.
The plan has been evolutionary, with moments of revolution- ary fever, as we are now witnessing.
In the history of guerrilla warfare, insurgents are rarely defeated when they have sanctuary. Now that sanctuary is here.
Saudi-born Shaykh Youssef al- Ayyiri, who was killed in mid-2003, was one of al-Qa’ida’s key strategists and best communicators.
He said: “The entire world has become a battlefield and not in theory.” It is a fight beyond time and geography. Don’t be foolish to believe this is only about the Palestinian territories and Israel.
Terrorism is the tactic used by the insurgent to push forth their strategy. Its initial impact is physical, yet its lasting influence is psychological. The strategy is coopting as many centres of power and influence as possible within civil society. This is how I organised the Dozo groups on the border of Ivory Coast and Mali against al-Qa’ida affiliates.
The Islamist insurgency’s strategy also involves deploying our own principles against us. The success of this strategy is now evident.
The sight of many Western women celebrating or offering excuses for a movement that rapes, mutilates and kills women is an example.
Before our mind’s eye, the people and institutions we looked to for guidance and leadership turned the terrorists into the victims and the victims into the terrorists.
The strategy has been so successful that not even many of our politicians can make a distinction between the evil acts of the terrorists and the desperate plight of the people in the Palestinian territories.
Right now the West’s enemies are co-ordinating a network of state and non-state actors, criminals, terrorists and international cartels while inspiring sympathisers at home to launch a perpetual multipolar conflict in which Australia is also a target.
Their cunning will be in not triggering a world war. The aim is to break the US-led Western resolve by targeting our centres of gravity, belief in ourselves, driving splinters of hot dissent among Western populations who are now less sure of themselves and more divided – populations losing faith in everything that has made us strong since the Enlightenment.
The Iranian-funded and co-ordinated attack on Israel and its multifaceted, hybrid nature is fourth-generational guerrilla warfare deployed against the West.
This is the world we must now be prepared to face.
Jason Thomas is the director of Frontier Assessments.
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Ideas
29 November 2023Left-wing Jews are torn between their values and the intensifying conflictThe IDF’s response against all Gazans has made it harder to only see in Israel a victim of immediate circumstance.
By Shlomo Sand
As is well known, in the long history of the left there have always been many Jews. Although in both of the great revolutions, the English and the French, that opened the modern age there were no significant figures of Jewish background. The moment that the left started to form in 19th-century Germany, people such as Karl Marx and Ferdinand Lassalle, and later on in eastern Europe Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, and many other Jewish revolutionaries, became an inseparable part of the formation and spread of socialism in the West.
Many of those figures did not ask questions about their Jewish heritage, but others were preoccupied with the issue of Jewish identity, and tried to mediate in different ways between being part of the political left and having a unique background. They ranged from Moses Hess who, in his early career, was close to Marx through Bernard Lazare (the French anarchist who sparked the Dreyfus affair), to Harold Laski, the economist and political theorist who chaired the British Labour Party, or even the historian Isaac Deutscher, author of Message of the Non-Jewish Jew.
That modern anti-Semitism had already blossomed in the 19th century, including among different left-wing currents, did not deter Jews from identifying with the universal values of socialism. In the 20th century the alliance between Jews and the myth of social and political equality was strengthened and turned into an almost unquestionable fact.
Within the international Zionist movement, too, the left grew and spread until, with the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, the left became the hegemon. In fact, it was the left that built and established Zionist society, at least until the 1970s. It is noteworthy that both the socialist and communist movement, led by Josef Stalin, supported the founding of the Jewish state.
Since the end of the 19th century, the relationship between Jews and the traditional right (Catholic, Protestant, or orthodox), or extreme secular right was always unstable and tense. The immigration of Jews from the Russian empire to the West had raised the level of hate towards Jewish immigrants even higher, and extreme nationalism turned the Jew into the chosen enemy of the nation. The peak of that hate was the Nazi genocide, but even after that, radical right-wing parties remained suspicious of any Jewish population in Europe.
Two developments slowly changed attitudes towards Jews, real or imaginary. First, Israel’s decisive victory over Arab states in the 1967 Six Day War turned the country into a symbol of aggressive national force, which stood out as unique against the background of Western defeats through decolonisation. Second, the significant immigration of Muslim workers to Europe again increased the xenophobia there under the surface, and Israel’s harsh treatment of Palestinians living under occupation increasingly became a political model worthy of replication. The image of the strong, fighting Jew became popular in the eyes of conservatives and, at a later stage, in the eyes of a radical right wing that was growing more extreme.
At the same time, the long historical bond between Jews and the liberal or social left loosened. In the 1960s dreams of the revolution sparkled among the Jewish youth, but with the defeat of the radical left in the 1970s, some joined growing waves of conservatism. In fact, the movement of many Jewish intellectuals to the right was an accompanying factor in the retreat of the global left.
Then came the horrors of 7 October. Hamas’ murderous attack shook Jews around the world. It was especially hard for Jews from the global left. On the one hand, you could no longer support the traditional argument, dating from Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon, that defends the violence of the oppressed, and on the other hand it was hard to ignore the siege that Gaza’s residents have been living under, while at least half of them are descendants of refugees from the 1948 war.
The Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) response against all Gaza residents has made it even harder to defend Israel, and to continue to only see in Israel a victim of immediate circumstance. In addition, the rise of Judeophobia among Islamists, seen against the rise of Islamophobia among right-wingers and centrists in Europe, has embarrassed left-wing Jews. They have been torn between their universal values and this intensifying mutual hatred.
What is left for us is to turn to a wise Jew who expressed his view about the ongoing conflict when it had only begun. On 25 November 1929, after the terrible massacre of Hebron – when Arabs murdered 69 Jews following rumours that Jews were planning to seize the Temple Mount in Jerusalem – Albert Einstein wrote to Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader: “Should we be unable to find a way to honest cooperation and honest pacts with the Arabs, then we have learned absolutely nothing during our 2,000 years of suffering and deserve all that will come to us.”
This article is part of the series What It Means to Be Jewish Now.
Shlomo Sand
Shlomo Sand is an Israeli emeritus professor of history at Tel Aviv University
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עקב רדיפה פוליטית החלטתי להתפטר ממכללת דוד ילין
נורית פלד אלחנן
20:10, 06 בדצמבר 2023
מדיניות הריגול, ההלשנה והשיסוי שמבקש להנהיג שר החינוך קיש במוסדות להשכלה גבוהה מצאה חייל נאמן בדמותו של נשיא מכללת דוד ילין יוסף פרוסט
המכללה האקדמית לחינוך ע”ש דוד ילין.
“הפתעה! גם להם נמאס לפעמים” כתבתי בפייסבוק, בעודי משוחחת עם בת דודי מבארי, שהיתה כלואה עם בעלה בממ”ד 28 שעות רצופות. כתבתי זאת לנוכח ה”הפתעה” שהפגינה ממשלת ישראל, עם היוודע דבר התקיפה של יישובי הדרום על ידי החמאס וגרורותיו. הפוסט הביע תדהמה על ההפתעה. הוא לא הביע הצדקה למעשי הרצח, הביזה וההתעללות שעליהם נודע לנו מאוחר יותר, אולם אי-הבנת הנקרא, שמן הסתם הייתה מכוונת, שימשה את שופרות השלטון להטיף לי מוסר, ולצאת במתקפה אישית. ה”עיתונאי” עמית סגל שהתחנך על ברכיו של מחבל מורשע, פרסם כתבת נאצה בנושא כחודשיים לאחר פרסום הפוסט. זאת כמובן מבלי לבקש כל תגובה או התייחסות מצדי.
בהנחה שלא מדובר בהסתה מכוונת נגדי אלא באי הבנת הנקרא יש לקרוא את הפוסט כמתייחס להקשר שממנו צמחו הרוצחים – מצור אכזרי של כמעט שלושה עשורים.
בפראפרזה על דברים שכתב ז’אן פול סארטר: אחרי שנים כה רבות שבהן צווארם היה חנוק תחת עקב מגפכם, וניתנה להם הזדמנות להרים את הראש, איזה מבט חשבתם שתמצאו שם?
את המבט הזה ראינו ב-7 באוקטובר. מבטם הנוקם ומלא השנאה של פליטי הנכבה, ילדיהם ונכדיהם, צעירים שחייהם נעים בין דיכוי והשפלה, מחסור והפצצות חוזרות ונשנות המחסלות משפחות שלמות, מוסדות ותשתיות. בחורים שהם עיוות של מה שהוא אנושי כיוון שחייהם הם עיוות של כל מה שהוא חיים אנושיים.
הכיבוש משחית גם את הכובש וגם את הנכבש. הכובש מגדל פירות באושים בדמותם של מחבלי הגבעות שנציגיהם יושבים היום בממשלת ישראל, ומעודדים את “נעריהם” לחולל פוגרומים בגדה המערבית ואף בירושלים באין מפריע, והנכבש מגדל פירות באושים בדמות נערי החמאס. אלה ואלה רואים בשכניהם אויבים בלב ובנפש ואינם מבחינים בין חייל לאזרח, בין גבר לאישה, בין זקן לצעיר או לתינוק.
אולם לומר שיש הקשר למתקפה ולטבח, ושלא היה זה פוגרום אנטישמי שנולד יש מאין, הוא פשע נורא יותר מרצח בארץ הזאת שכבר מזמן התהפכו בה הערכים שהכרנו. המלים הפכו למסוכנות וכדורי המוות ללגיטימיים. אנשי המלים נרדפים שעה שרוצחים נהנים מחיסיון. אדם ששרף למוות משפחה שלמה נחשב לצדיק ואילו מי שמעז להכיר בסבלם של תושבי עזה או הגדה, מוקע כתומך טרור ודמו מותר.
מדיניות הריגול, ההלשנה והשיסוי שמבקש להנהיג שר החינוך קיש במוסדות להשכלה גבוהה מצאה חייל נאמן בדמותו של נשיא מכללת דוד ילין יוסף פרוסט, שמיהר ליישמה. מדיניות זו הולידה את הנזיפה שזכיתי בה על היותי “תומכת טרור” ונזיפה זו הזינה את כתבת הנאצה של סגל. לפיכך, לפני יומיים הודעתי למכללת דוד ילין על החלטתי להתפטר. במכתבי נאמר, “בכל שנותיי כמרצה לחינוך לשוני לימדתי שהדיאלוג הפתוח, הביקורתי, הוא לב לבה של ההוראה ולב לבו של הלימוד. על כן, באווירת ציד המכשפות ברוחו של ארגון הרדיפה ‘אם תרצו’ לא אוכל להמשיך ללמד במכללה”.
מכונת הרעל שנועדה לשכנע אותנו ש”אלה החיים” ולהסיט את תשומת הלב הציבורית ממחדלי הממשלה, מחלוקת הנשק הלא-אחראית שאת תוצאותיה חווינו לפני מספר ימים, ומן המשבר שפוקד את ישראל בכל תחום, מפנה את חיציה אל מורים ומחנכים כמוני וכמו מאיר ברוכין המתעקשים לראות בשכנינו בני אדם. כדאי להזכיר למלעיזים שלא אני ולא אף אחד מן המרצים והסטודנטים הנרדפים, לא פיטם את החמאס במאות מיליוני דולרים, לא הפקיר את יישובי הדרום, לא הסיג את הצבא מן הגבול, לא פירק את יחידות הכוננות מנשקן ולא מנע את כניסתם של 500 חיילים לקיבוץ בארי. כדאי גם לזכור שנקמת ממשלת ישראל על שנתפסה בקלונה אינה מסתכמת ברדיפת המוקיעים בשער, אלא מתבטאת בעיקר בהרג הבלתי פוסק של חפים מפשע שהיא מבצעת מאז ועד היום בעזה.
ובמיוחד כדאי לזכור שגם אם נהרוג עשרות אלפים, אם נחריב את עזה ונחזירה לתקופת האבן, לא נחדל לחיות בין רצח מצד זה לרצח מצד זה, עד עולם. לא זה הגורל שמגיע לנו.
הכותבת היא פרופסור לחינוך וכלת פרס סחרוב לזכויות האדם ולחופש המחשבה מטעם הפרלמנט האירופי.
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https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/seeing-genocide/Seeing GenocideIsrael’s weaponization of images since October 7 obfuscates its genocidal campaign against Palestinians.
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay
December 8, 2023
I.
The pair of images above, Gaza “before and after,” has circulated in Israel as an image of victory over Hamas. If it were perceived by its perpetrators as evidence of a crime, it would have been censored so that it could not be used as proof of the spaciocide waged upon Gaza. Rather, it has been disseminated with pride, announcing that Palestinians can no longer walk along Al-Rashid Street in Gaza City, and more broadly cannot return to the Northern part of Gaza, which became a territory free of Palestinians.
“Ceasefire now,” “lift the siege,” and “stop the killing” are emergency calls to put an immediate end to Israel’s bombardment and destruction in Gaza. They are voiced by millions of people all over the world, in the streets and on social media. And yet, they are being rejected by liberal governments of the West as well as by institutional leaders from academia to the medical organizations. These groups turn these bare minimum demands—stop the killing—into controversial statements. Indeed, in an effort to convince the world that the violence waged upon Gaza is not genocidal, governments and institutions in the West have enacted an ideological campaign of terror, weaponizing accusations of anti-Semitism against those who reject these claims and the conflation of Jews and Israelis.
Images do not have an innate truth; they live in community with or against those who are involved in them.
There is no such a thing as an image of genocide; but images in plural, made over time, can be used to refute the terms of the conversation that deny the racialization of a group and its transformation into the object of genocidal violence. My point of departure is that genocide can be recognized when a certain group is turned into a “problem” to which violent “solutions” are offered in the form of expulsion, concentration, forced vulnerability, incarceration, murder, destruction, and extermination. A genocidal regime is one that produces, cultivates, trades, uses, and legitimizes these forms of violence while at the same time socializing its citizens to see them as necessary for their protection and well-being. Over the last few weeks, we have been watching Palestinians in Gaza undergo a genocide.
Meanwhile, the Israeli propaganda machine has launched its latest campaign to silence those who refuse to accept its narratives, which run counter to what they see, hear, remember, and think when they follow non-Western media. The Israeli government has used photographs and videos taken on October 7 to manufacture consent for genocidal violence against Gaza and Palestinians more broadly. A forty-seven-minute compilation of images and videos has been privately screened to sympathetic journalists, statesmen, and lobbyists in forty countries both to garner global support for genocidal violence against Palestinians and to reinforce the global intimidation and punishment campaign against whoever opposes or “misunderstands” this putative war against terror, which is mostly a war directed against Arabs and Muslims.
But images do not have an innate truth; they live in community with or against those who are involved in them. Painful as images from October 7 are, the violence inscribed in them can no longer be prevented, but it can be attended to. The eruption of violence against those who live on the other side of the wall is inseparable from the genocidal condition that must be reconstructed in connection to what is left outside the frame of every image taken between the sea and the river. The fact that images of violence targeting Israelis are being weaponized as decisive proof for the legitimacy of Israel’s response is itself a testament to this genocide targeting Palestinians.
This staging of a battle of images, through which Israel seeks to deny, obfuscate, and extend its violence, is not new. It has been a tool of this regime from its start in 1948, when the use of genocidal violence to destroy Palestine was justified through images in which the “triumphant solution” of creating a state for the Jews “won” in the eyes of Euro-American imperial powers. The destruction of Palestine and the attempt to bury it under the state of Israel—thereby undermining recovery, redress, and return for Palestinians—imposed a genocidal condition in the space between the river and the sea. This condition is innate to settler colonial regimes. It is sustained by the colonizers, who seek to perpetuate it at any price to ensure that what they did to Palestinians and what was expropriated from them goes unquestioned. The colonizers and the colonized are positions people occupy, regardless of their individual approaches to this condition of violence. The difference in their positions, as well as in their exposure to violence and the duration of this exposure, is not foreign to the realm of images.
II.
The “after” image above differs from many images taken during the last few weeks in Gaza. Other images, most captured on phones by Palestinians as a means of bearing witness and alerting the world to the violence being waged, center persecuted Palestinians, their homes, and institutions. In this image, by contrast, the genocidal condition itself is foregrounded, and yet it is worth underscoring. This is an image of a place from which inhabitants have been removed—either killed, maimed, wounded, and deported—for no reason other than that they are Palestinians.
As of this writing, the soil in Gaza has been violated with more than 25,000 tons of explosives—equivalent to two nuclear bombs—that were dropped from the air and shells that were fired by thousands of soldiers who didn’t refuse orders to destroy entire worlds in Gaza. The soldiers who drove tanks in an imperial procession decimated worlds whose inhabitants were forced to leave if they were not already killed. They are fighting a demonized Hamas, which they compare to the Nazis to justify their actions, while denying that they themselves are enacting genocide against Palestinians. But of course, this before-and-after should not mislead us, since Israeli genocidal violence is also inscribed in the “before” image.
Prior to 1948, Gaza was not an isolated, narrow strip, and its inhabitants enjoyed free movement in the entire region of greater Palestine. With the isolation of Gaza from other part of Palestine in 1948, however, even the open sea was transformed into a border surveilled by the Israeli navy, which restricts the ways inhabitants can access it. Before the current genocidal campaign, more than half of the refugee population of Gaza lived in eight overcrowded refugee camps in Gaza, and the strip’s density allows only two main roads to connect North and South. Destroying Gaza now, Israel’s military forces have erased seventy-five years of memories inscribed in the region—wounds and scars of multiple genocidal “solutions” imposed on its inhabitants. The destruction of this geophysical archive of the Nakba, and the second mass expulsion of those who effectively became its archivists—Palestinians who are familiar with every bit and piece of it—are consistent with genocidal violence, seeking to erase the evidence of its crimes.
There is no such a thing as an image of genocide. But images in plural, made over time, can be used to refute the terms of Israel’s battle of images.
The Israelis who destroyed this world made themselves masters of this crying land with the exclusive right to photograph it. The aim was to ensure no Palestinians would be left to take their own photographs or photographs of their perpetrators. Yet despite Israel’s imperial aim to monopolize the meaning of its actions and eliminate human plurality from the photographic field, we still recognize the crimes these photos evince; we know that, until a few days ago, a world used to be here, before its inhabitants were deemed superfluous for being Palestinian. Though we see the way the tanks trampled the face of the earth, we also see the soil refusing to surrender and forget. We hear the tears, the groans, and the moans.
Despite the erection of different separation walls in the land between the sea and the river—including eighteen years of military rule, borders preventing return, an archipelago of enclaves surrounded by checkpoints, fences, and cement walls—the systematic racist violence and differential rule imposed there by the Israeli regime impacts and organizes the life of all its inhabitants. Only inculcated lies and a militarized state can create the illusion that the group responsible for creating and maintaining this racial regime can be protected from the consequences of its oppressive actions. The level of exposure to violence is obviously different for the racialized groups therein; nonetheless, whatever is done to impact the life of Palestinians also impacts and endangers Israelis. Hamas’s painful attack on October 7 did not transform this condition but rather revealed it.
What followed was an intensified campaign to essentialize the violence of its perpetrators as proof of who Hamas is and, by identification, who all Palestinians are. Thereby, Israelis’ grief was weaponized to continue to deny their positions and actions as colonizers and operators of genocidal technologies. Acknowledging this call is not a justification of the attack or a minimization of the harm, nor is it proof of a lack of empathy for the attack’s victims, as Israelis tend to interpret it. It is rather a refusal to forget that this attack, and the genocide that followed, could have been prevented if this genocidal and suicidal regime ceased to exist. Acknowledging the crimes against Palestinians prior to October 7 and opposing the genocide against them is the required minimum if one aims to imagine a shared future free of genocide in this place. And reconstructing the longer imperial history of this place is necessary for imagining the abolition of its regime and for restoring Palestine to a place rich in human diversity. One must remember that history didn’t start on October 7.
III.
Haifa, November 1948. Image: AP Photo/Jim Pringle
In the wake of World War II, as part of Euro-American imperial powers’ efforts to secure their influence in the Middle East, the imperial technology of partition was employed, and Euro-Zionists were entrusted with Palestine.
The promise of Zionist statehood in Palestine was at the same time another “solution” to Europe’s century-old “Jewish question,” which, at the end of the war when Europe’s racializing apparatuses were not dismantled, had to be “solved” again. Unsure of how to manage the many Jews left uprooted in camps in Europe after the Holocaust—who were still undesired in Europe and unwelcome in the United States—Euro-American imperial powers empowered Zionist leaders aiming for a sovereign state in Palestine and recognized them as the sole representatives of Jews. Their interests coalesced as the West didn’t want to lose this precious colony, situated in the heart of the Jewish Muslim world. As part of their campaign to withhold the right to indigenous sovereignty, Euro-American powers thus turned their own enemies—Palestinians—into the Jews’ enemies. Before then, no historical enmity existed between Jews and Palestinians, and more generally between Jews and Arabs and Muslims; for centuries, being Palestinian and Jew and being Jew and Arab were not mutually exclusive. Jews had lived together with Muslims in the wider region since before the emergence of Islam and were part of the Arab world.
Toward the end of World War II, the United Nations was created as a major instrument to facilitate the imposition of a “new world order.” It sought to legitimate partition and population transfer, giving these the imprimatur of international law and recognition. Barely two years after its creation, the UN announced the partition plan for Palestine in November 1947. With the help of colonial committees such as the Anglo-American Committee, the partitioning of Palestine was crafted and proposed as a “solution” against the will of the majority of the inhabitants of Palestine and the broader region (already divided and under French and British colonial rule), where many non-Zionists Jews lived. This UN resolution gave the greenlight to some Zionists armed groups to use an array of genocidal technologies for its implementation.
The outcome was the destruction of Palestine and Palestinians as a people, and along with them, their ancestral lands, practices, and heritage. The majority of Muslim and Arabs inhabitants of Palestine were expelled from the new nation state built in its place and have not been allowed to return, even to this day and those who live between the sea and the river are constantly forcibly displaced. Undesired in this racializing state, they were transferred to different disconnected sites. This first genocidal campaign against Palestinians was silenced through the UN’s recognition of the formation of the state of Israel as narrative of Western-Zionist triumph and as a national “solution” for the Jewish people. Through this logic, Muslims and Arabs were transformed into potential threats to this touted Jewish sovereignty. Since then, millions of children—myself included—were born Israelis, born as pawns for the orchestrated denial of Palestine’s destruction and as aids to the global campaign to recognize Israeli-Jews as the legitimate inhabitants of Palestine.
Though we see the way the tanks trampled the face of the earth, we also see the soil refusing to surrender and forget.
The outcome of this convergence of interests between the Zionist and Euro-American imperial powers was the destruction of Palestine and its replacement with the state of Israel. Both transpired alongside a narrative of historical enmity which figured the events as part of a conflict of “two sides,” a conflict between two identity groups: “Palestinians,” who were denied recognition as the survivors of a genocidal campaign, and “Israelis,” who were yet to be invented in 1948, out of Zionists, Palestinian Jews, survivors of genocide. If there were at that moment “two sides,” they were the colonizers and the colonized. At the center of the invented colonial identity donned by Israelis is the denial of the genocidal violence that enabled them to replace Palestinians and take over their lands and property. Thus, lying at the heart of Israeli identity is the interiorized notion that the Palestinians are the Jews’ enemies and not those whom Zionists dispossessed. Since the creation of Israel, those imperial states that support Zionist interests in Israel have invested in keeping Israelis the enemies of Palestinians and in blurring the differences between Israelis and Jews writ large.
From the end of November 1947, one place after another was destroyed and turned to rubble to prevent Palestinians who were expelled from returning to their homes. So too, this systemic destruction was sought out to facilitate the fabrication of an Israeli memory from which Palestine could fade away and emerge as the name of a threatening enemy. Alongside the expulsion of the 60,000 Palestinians from Haifa alone, Zionists started to destroy the heart of the city, approximately 220 buildings. What is captured in the photograph above are not signs of war but of a colonial policy—turning Haifa into a Jewish city so that the barely 30,00 Palestinians who were not expelled would no longer recognize themselves in their city, nor would they feel at home in it.
Beyond what we could read from it about Haifa, the photograph is also a generic image of the genocidal condition that, since installed in 1948, has turned towns, cities, and villages where Palestinians live into rubble, concomitantly destroying Palestinians’ livelihood, heritage, rights, histories, dreams and memories. Inscribed by the racial regime erected in this place, this condition provides constant proof that Palestinian life can be taken away at any moment; it also proves that attempts to rebuild Palestinian spaces are always shortcut by genocidal precarity. This condition inscribed here reveals itself in endless images taken throughout the years, in which it is always Palestinians who are being targeted. Under UN leadership, the world clock was set on May 15, 1948, to mark the birth of Israel, while Palestinians’ accounts of the genocide they endured were silenced, distorted, and replaced with other narratives. Institutions of culture and education flourished to promote this newly invented colonizing subject, the Israeli, whose identity is premised on the obliteration of the memory of its own birth.
IV.
In several public interviews and in an op-ed in the New York Times, historian Omer Bartov warns that Israel’s ongoing attack on Gaza has the potential to become a genocide. He calls to condemn the onslaught “before it occurs, rather than belatedly condemn it after.” Bartov quotes a few published statements of several Israeli military officials and members of the government in which, as he writes, the intent of genocide is explicit. And yet, what is happening on the ground in Gaza, Bartov assesses, is not a genocide: “there is no proof that genocide is currently taking place in Gaza, although it is very likely that war crimes, and even crimes against humanity, are happening.”
When Bartov discusses the actual violence, he somehow puts aside these genocidal intents and rather chooses to believe the rhetoric that the Israeli military employs—in coordination with their lawyers and other specialists in international law—to describe their actions. He repeats their narrative as proof that their actions do not reflect their voiced and written intents:
Israeli military commanders insist that they are trying to limit civilian casualties, and they attribute the large numbers of dead and wounded Palestinians to Hamas tactics of using civilians as human shields and placing their command centers under humanitarian structures like hospitals. . . . And so, while we cannot say that the military is explicitly targeting Palestinian civilians, functionally and rhetorically we may be watching an ethnic cleansing operation that could quickly devolve into genocide.
What leads Bartov to assert that what he sees doesn’t fit the UN’s 1948 definition of genocide—“the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”—is his trust in the way the perpetrators of this genocidal violence justify their actions and shamelessly attribute their consequences to Hamas.
If Bartov were writing an article about the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, which is what he recognizes is presently happening, I would not argue with him, since ethnic cleansing is a proper term to use here, among and alongside others. However, given the history of the instrumentalization and exceptionalization of the genocide perpetrated against Jews, using one’s authority as historian of genocide and the limited language of the 1948 UN document to judge that this is not a genocide—and doing so based on evidence provided by the perpetrators—participates in the fetishization of the term “genocide” and its reservation for exceptional cases in which the West is not the direct perpetrator—as in, the Rwandan or Bosnian genocides.
Instead of repeating the language of Israeli expressions of genocidal intent, I want to point to these expressions’ endurance and prevalence throughout Israeli history and society. As someone who was born and raised in the Zionist colony in Palestine, I heard such expressions repeated regularly, in oral and written modes, in public and private venues, by statespersons and lay persons. People older than me heard them expressed since 1948; they were socialized to see Palestinians enduring extreme violence again and again, always alongside justifications that obfuscate its genocidal nature—its aim to eliminate them as a group with its own history, desires, grievances, and dreams. The endurance and permanence of these open expressions require us to reconfigure the temporal premises of the term genocide. The temporal dimensions ascribed to the legal definition of genocide enable genocides perpetrated by Western colonial regimes to be dismissed, denied, and legitimized. Such genocides do not constitute a discrete event but unfold over time and share their duration with the lifespan of the regime that commits them.
Destroying Gaza now, Israel’s military forces have erased seventy-five years of memories inscribed in the region—wounds and scars of multiple genocidal “solutions” imposed on its inhabitants.
Instead of assuming that “we still have time” to warn of genocide, we have to reverse and say that we are running out of time; the genocide has already brought to extinction so many aspects of Palestinian life, so we must keep screaming that it’s genocide and act to stop it!
Settler colonial genocides have a blurred nature since they are often committed by liberal so-called “democratic” regimes that are sustained by a body of citizens—a single group among other groups governed—who believe that despite the fact that their government wields violent racial technologies against its colonized subjects, the regime’s foundations are democratic and fair. This is what happened in North and South America, in Algeria, and in Palestine, as colonial actors installed and maintained their regimes using different genocidal technologies. These technologies operate also through epistemological mechanisms which keep elements, which together could testify to a genocide, apart. It is the decades-long consistent use of genocidal violence against Palestine and Palestinians as a group that we have to assess, not each disparate event of which the genocide consists. The genocidal condition is the cumulative outcome of a genocidal regime built against Palestinians with the aim of their elimination.
The current totalitarian regime of speech orchestrated by Israel, which turns truth into “terrorist content” and looks for or reproduces it into a criminal form of “consumption,” didn’t emerge yesterday. Global imperial mechanisms were already in place to silence, distort, censure, intimidate, and punish those who countered the true meaning of the regime that was imposed in Palestine. It was under this regime that Palestinians were made disposable and deported to concentration camps called refugee camps, where life was impacted by humanitarian crisis and slow death, and simultaneously Israeli citizenship was shaped to prevent their return and redress, thus beckoning the militarization of all aspects of Israeli life. The way historians and other intellectuals globally betrayed Palestinians by complying with the triumphal narrative of this regime’s emergence in 1948 is still to be studied.
V.
Genocide is not at the forefront of images, though it can be traced within them. If we wish to see beyond the bodies of the victims captured in discrete photos, we notice a template and the imprint that the systematic use of genocidal technologies left upon the colonized. All these images reveal a single aim: Israel’s aim to eliminate Palestinians from the land between the sea and the river and to eliminate Palestinians’ ways of life, their imprint upon the land’s soil, their autonomy, dignity, livelihood, and worldliness.
The excessive abundance of photographs of Palestinians testifies to this aim. Photographing Palestinians in such abundance didn’t start immediately in 1948. Few are the photos from the expulsion of Palestinians to Gaza and the from creation of the “Gaza strip” as a “solution” to separate and contain the 200,000 Palestinians expelled by Zionists from other parts of Palestine. As I visually reconstructed in From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of State Formation(2011), the expellees were forced into this narrow strip of land where, up until then, only approximately 75,000 Palestinians lived. Soon after the area was closed behind barbed wires, the first humanitarian crisis erupted.
This was the expected outcome of the combined use of the genocidal technologies of expulsion, concentration, and killing. Very few photos interrupted the first two decades of the state’s existence. Most were taken in refugee camps in surrounding countries; in them Palestinians figure as worldless refugees, bereft of the world in which they lived in fullness in Palestine. During this period, the Zionist interest in state-building converged with Europe’s needs to absolve itself from the genocide it committed during World War II and to present itself rather as the liberator of the Jews. Under these conditions, Zionists, in concert with European imperialists, shaped the existence of Israel into a fait accompli. In 1967, despite the conquest of Gaza and West Bank and parts of Syria by Israel, the inhabitants of the refugee camps constructed therein resisted for several years. In response, Israel used genocidal technologies to destroy and internally displace Palestinians, implementing different “solutions” to eliminate them as a group and indenture their labor.
Gradually, Gaza, like the West Bank, became the biggest militarized open photography studio in the world; there, Palestinians could be turned at any moment into subjects of what are commonly known as “human rights photographs.” Waging consistent military assaults (with names like “Pillar of Defense,” “Returning Echo,” and “Cast Lead”) every few months, or sometimes more frequently, Israeli forces targeted Gazans with genocidal violence. During the First Intifada, Gaza became a true photographic mine and a spectacular laboratory for testing both new arms on Palestinians as well as the West’s tolerance for the exercise of these technologies in plain sight. Out of this mine, hundreds of thousands of photos of Palestinians were extracted, published, discussed, circulated, purchased, sold, auctioned, and held in press archives, museum collections, NGOs archives, and so on. Despite many noticeable differences between the myriad photographs, in almost all of them Palestinians are captured as disposable life, so that their killing is not a disruption but rather a validation of their disposability. When Israelis are also captured in the frame, they mostly appear as soldiers “on duty,” agents of the state, its law and order.
Such photos are commonly captioned through the lens of human rights, which focuses on the predicament of the victims rather than on the regime and technologies used to produce these conditions. Such captioning, which visually signals a call for humanitarian aid as opposed to denunciation of a regime that violates humanitarian law, normalizes the disposability of Palestinian life. In 2005, following Israel’s declaration that it would withdraw from Gaza, another “solution” was imposed upon it: its transformation into the biggest concentration camp on earth.
This was achieved through the use of a carceral technology that isolates Gaza from other parts of Palestine and from the world, creating a general condition of slow death for Gazans, which, as we have witnessed in the wake of October 7, can be accelerated at any moment. Contrary to the statements of the agents of this carceral regime that they no longer rule Gaza, the Israeli state continues to dispense attacks from the sea, the air, and the land while keeping Palestinians isolated from the world. Marketed for so long as precarious subjects in images of human rights violations, Palestinians are now exterminated in front of the worlds’ eyes without being recognized as victims of colonial genocidal violence.
Plans to further destroy Gaza were not drafted on October 7. They had been in preparation for years, and they were implemented on small and large scales from 1948 onward. The violence waged in last few weeks is different in scale and concentration of horror than ever before. So too is the resistance of millions of people around the world who are refusing to accept the imperial narrative that Israel and the United States use to justify this violence. But the violence waged over the past few weeks cannot be understood separately from the systematic use of genocidal technologies against Palestinians over the last seventy-five years. Those who prepared those plans waited for the occasion to implement them. As many generals and politicians in settler colonial regime have said along the years, the Israeli military just needed the occasion or event that would justify their intervention; once they received it, they would then bring it to fruition.
VI.
Palestinians fleeing North Gaza, November 10, 2023. Image: Reuters/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa
In her account of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt wrote that “genocide is an actual possibility of the future,” and, hence, “no people on earth . . . can feel reasonably sure of its continued existence.” Imperial governments do not represent humanity but the logic of their racializing regimes. This endows them with imperial rights to support each other when they use genocidal violence. The millions in the streets all over the world, blocking roads, protesting in front of the offices and factories of arms manufacturers, blocking shipments of arms, and marching in unprecedented numbers in support of Palestinians know that the order of humanity is being attacked yet again. They affirm that we should not fail to recognize the genocide that is happening right now. If this wave of genocidal violence will also pass unrecognized, and if the genocidal regime which is perpetrating it goes unquestioned, then not only Palestinians but more people will be unsafe.
These are not discrete images of what happened but visual megaphones calling us to recognize the decades-long genocide and to stop it now.
Arendt’s discussion of crimes against humanity is instructive. Those crimes, Arendt writes, are written in the bodies of their victims, but they are also committed against the community in the name of which they are perpetrated—against the community’s law, and more broadly against an order of humanity defined by its diversity. Palestine was destroyed because Zionists didn’t want Palestinians living among them; the regime the Zionists erected was meant to be the materialization of this genocidal intent. The enforcement of a racial law, an affront to human diversity, has been the raison d’être of this regime since 1948. It lies at its basis, and it is this law that should be abolished between the river and the sea for all inhabitants therein to be free. It must be abolished for the sake of Palestinians, so that they can regain their rights to return to live in Palestine and rebuild their world; and, so too, it must be abolished for the sake of Israeli Jews, so that they can liberate themselves from Zionism, free themselves from the position of perpetrators—the only one they can inhabit under this genocidal regime—and reclaim the diverse Jewish histories of which they were deprived when they were forced to embody a fabricated Israeli identity defined by its enmity to Palestinians. Israelis can choose to act as citizens of their genocidal regime and endorse the transformation of the tragic day of October 7 into its justification, or as some have done, they can reclaim their place as members of a shared humanity and reject the genocidal foundation of their regime.
The images of genocide over the last few weeks could have even inspired different outcomes—forcing Israelis to recognize that they are settlers and to overcome the false belief that wielding genocidal violence could keep them completely safe from the resistance of the colonized, or sparking a popular movement calling for a general strike against the colonial regime, one that refuses to support and execute its genocidal violence and serve in its army whose genocidal intents are clear. The flow of images in which nonstop genocidal violence is exercised against Palestinians—mainly in Gaza, but also in the West Bank—could have been prevented at any moment, had the use of such technologies not been normalized, justified, and legalized as a means for targeting Palestinians.
What makes this current genocidal violence revelatory is that it echoes and reiterates the inaugural moment when this genocidal regime was established. In 1948, it was 750,000 Palestinians—the majority of Palestine’s inhabitants—who were expelled in a period of over a year. Now, in barely a few weeks’ time, at the speed of a death factory, more than 1.5 million Palestinians—who were already living in a concentration camp, ghetto, or prison—have been displaced, and between 1 and 2 percent of the population of Gaza has been wounded or exterminated.
In an uncanny and painful way, the black-and-white still images taken in Palestine during the Nakba of 1948 are coming alive, in the form of moving images and in color. The images coming out of Gaza—at least when Israel hasn’t shut down the electricity and Internet—can only falsely be called images, since they capture the people who are calling to stop the genocide in rectangular immaterial forms. These are not discrete images of what had happened but visual megaphones calling us to recognize the decades long genocide and to stop it now. Recognizing the genocide also means rejecting any further genocidal solutions for Gaza and Palestine once this killing stops.
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Ariella Aïsha Azoulay
Ariella Azoulay is a curator, filmmaker, and Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. Her latest book is Potential History—Unlearning Imperialism.
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The Righteous Fury of the Israeli Left – Ilan Pappé
November 16, 2023
‘One can only draw some hope, in these dark times, from the huge and growing solidarity movement all over the world.’ Ilan Pappé
By Ilan Pappe – The Palestine Chronicle
There is no middle ground anymore. There is no way of supporting the liberal occupier, the progressive ethnic cleanser and the leftist genocider.
It is hard to write on anything that is not aimed at informing people of the genocide taking place and adding our voice to those who are doing all they can to stop it.
This notion is reinforced by such tragic estimations as, for example, a recent statement by the World Health Organization, that every ten minutes, a child is killed by the Israeli military in Gaza.
However, one can only draw some hope, in these dark times, from the huge and growing solidarity movement all over the world. This movement doesn’t cave in to scare tactics employed by governments and politicians, and is advocating for an immediate ceasefire.
As horrific as this chapter in the history of modern Palestine is, it is unfortunately not a game changer.
The basic constellation of powers – locally, regionally and globally – will remain the same.
This might be more transformative if the fight spreads to include an uprising in the West Bank and inside Israel, and the opening of fronts in the east and north of Israel. As this piece is being written, this has not yet unfolded.
The political elites of the Global North and some of the Global South will continue to provide international immunity for Israel’s criminal policies on the ground. Yet their civil societies will continue by and large to stand behind the Palestinian liberation movement.
On the ground, the military imbalance between Israel and the Palestinians – despite the surprise attack – will remain the same, and quite a few Arab states will eventually continue the normalization process.
Also, the struggle in Israel between the messianic settlers and the secular Jews fighting over their own versions of apartheid will continue.
And it is in this context, that I would like to focus on the way that liberal Zionists, mainly through the newspaper Haaretz – but also with the support of liberal Zionists around the world – loyally stand behind Israel’s actions. This incomprehensible logic is also reflected in the way western powers justify their immunity to any accountability regarding the genocide in Gaza.
One after the other, main spokespersons for the Zionist Left publish daily op-eds in Haaretz, where they give vent to their righteous fury against what they call the Global Left.
Their anger is worth analyzing, if only just for the purpose of reminding us once more why there is very little hope for change from within Israel.
Zionist Left in a Limbo
The Zionist Left in Israel is in a limbo.
On the one hand, it is ostracized by Jewish society as, at best, being naïve and, at worst, as being accused of betrayal. This is in reaction to their support for the two-state solution and the call to end the occupation. This alienation, of course, is now more acute after the events of October 7.
On the other hand, they are not considered, and rightly so, genuine allies of the Palestinian liberation struggle.
The Israeli Left’s biggest hope was that the Global Left, as they call it, would share the same language and attitude regarding the October 7 operation by Hamas; namely to be unconditionally behind Israel.
The Israeli Left was outraged that, in the eyes of the Global Left, the Hamas operation did not absolve Israel from its past criminal policies nor did it provide Israel with a green light for its genocidal policies in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
To their great surprise, the Global Left in its entirety was galvanized behind the call to “Stop the War” and “Free Palestine”, rather than echoing their government’s repeated response of “We support Israel’s right to defend itself”.
Israel and Colonialism
What is most illuminating – in the dialogue the liberal Zionists have with themselves on the pages of Haaretz – is their vicious attack on any one associating colonialism with Israel.
For some reason, they chose Judith Butler as the main culprit, which would leave many of us disappointed, as we devoted our careers to frame Zionism as settler colonialism, probably going back to the 1960s.
In fact, today, the framing of Zionism and Israel as a settler-colonial project is a consensual issue among all the leading scholars on the Middle East, and it is rejected as an accurate paradigm only among mainstream Israeli academia.
The Global Left is guilty of two ‘sins’, in the eyes of the liberal Zionists: one, it refers to Israel as a settler-colonial state and two, it provides a context for the Hamas attack on October 7.
No Middle Ground
This self-righteousness and fury is not just typical to the Zionist Left. You will hear it from actors in Hollywood, journalists and mainstream academics in the Global North, who suddenly have to take a stand: Are they with the liberation movement or against it?
There is no middle ground anymore. There is no way of supporting the liberal occupier, the progressive ethnic cleanser and the leftist genocider.
The attempt to frame the stance I am calling for as racist or antisemitic will not hold water. It is a matter of where you would see yourself at this critical juncture in history, and how you value your own sense of self respect.
At least, a small ray of hope appeared on my horizon last week. A high school history teacher in Israel was arrested on November 10 for mentioning the context of the Hamas attacks on social media.
Unlike the lost souls on the liberal Israeli Left, this brave teacher reminded his students of the atrocities Israel perpetrated over the years, the right of the Palestinians to defend themselves, and the need for Israel to respect international law.
Such a view is a crime in Israel and, now, the British Home Office wishes to make it a crime in Britain as well.
This is indeed the time for people with moral courage, as the struggle for freedom and liberation will be a long one and needs such allies to support it.
– Ilan Pappé is a professor at the University of Exeter. He was formerly a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Haifa. He is the author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, The Modern Middle East, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples, and Ten Myths about Israel. Pappé is described as one of Israel’s ‘New Historians’ who, since the release of pertinent British and Israeli government documents in the early 1980s, have been rewriting the history of Israel’s creation in 1948. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
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https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2023/december/on-human-shields
1 DECEMBER 2023 On Human Shields
Neve Gordon
In the early 1990s I worked at Physicians for Human Rights – Israel. Not long after the Oslo Accords were signed we moved from offices on Gordon Street in Tel Aviv to larger premises on Allenby Street, not far from the Great Synagogue. Walking home from work one day, I noticed a small plaque near the synagogue’s entrance. Written in Hebrew and English, it says: ‘The Lehi used the basement and attic of this synagogue as a secret arms cache. It was discovered by the British during the “great curfew” imposed in July 1946, and the weapons were confiscated.’
Lehi was a Zionist paramilitary organisation that operated primarily against the British forces in Mandatory Palestine, but it was also among the groups that carried out the 1948 Deir Yassin massacre, killing at least 107 Palestinians. Four years earlier, the group had assassinated Walter Guinness, also known as Lord Moyne, the British minister resident in the Middle East. Later terrorist attacks included the assassination in 1948 of the Swedish diplomat Folke Bernadotte, the United Nations mediator between Israel and Arab countries.
The first provisional government of Israel declared Lehi a terrorist organisation and arrested more than two hundred members, but offered them a general amnesty before the first elections in January 1949. Thirty years later, Israel introduced the Lehi ribbon, honoring the militant group’s ‘activity in the struggle for the establishment of Israel’ and in 1983 a former leader of the organisation, Yitzhak Shamir, became prime minister. It was around this time that the plaque was placed in front of the Great Synagogue commemorating its role in the Zionist struggle for liberation – namely, hiding arms deployed in Lehi’s terrorist attacks.
A few kilometres from the Great Synagogue, in Ramat Gan, the first elementary school in the city was used for similar purposes. Its plaque says that the place was used by the Etzel during the 1930s and 1940s for weapons training and as a secret arms cache.
Etzel, a Hebrew acronym for Irgun Zvai Leumi (the National Military Organisation), is the group that bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946, killing 91 people and injuring scores of others. Led at one stage by Menachem Begin, the paramilitary group also participated in the Deir Yassin massacre and several other terrorist attacks before morphing into the ‘Freedom Party’ (Tnuat Herut). A letter to the New York Times in December 1948, signed by Hannah Arendt, Albert Einstein and others, described the party as ‘closely akin in its organisation, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties’. In 1977, it became the major partner of the newly formed Likud, which has been ruling Israel on and off ever since.
Synagogues and schools were not the only places Zionist paramilitary groups used to hide fighters and equipment. The Magen David Adom (Red Star of David) station in Netanya has a plaque which says that ‘the medical centre was used to cover and camouflage the operations of Haganah’s command centre in Netanya – the military arm of the state to come.’ This plaque also suggests that the pre-state use of civilian sites as a cover for military purposes is something that Israelis today should be proud of.
The use of civilian sites by paramilitary groups was in no way unique to Mandatory Palestine. When the Prussians occupied France in 1870, the French francs-tireurs or free shooters were ‘farmers by day and fighters by night’. From the American Revolution and the Italian Risorgimento to anti-colonial struggles in Malaya, India, Sri Lanka and Vietnam as well as Algeria, Angola and Palestine, militants have hidden among civilians in what we now call people’s wars. Given the asymmetry of power between non-state paramilitary groups and national armies, the ability to blend into the civilian population was necessary for military survival. Today, hi-tech state militaries deploy new surveillance technologies and enhanced weapon systems to find and kill militants much more easily, driving paramilitary groups across the globe to move into densely populated urban settings where they can conceal themselves more easily. Hamas, in this sense, is no outlier.
It has consequently been accused by Daniel Hagari, an Israeli military spokesperson, of using human shields. ‘Our war,’ Hagari said, ‘is against Hamas, not against the people in Gaza. Especially not the sick, the women, or the children. Our war is against Hamas who uses them as human shields.’
Hagari was referring not to the remaining Israeli hostages held by Hamas in secret locations across the Gaza Strip, but to the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians who were unwilling or unable to flee when Israel instructed them to. Many of them have been taking refuge in hospitals, schools and mosques. They are cast as shields because Hamas has built what are believed to be hundreds of kilometres of underground tunnels beneath Gaza and the people above are in the way of Israel’s ability to destroy the tunnels. An IDF spokesperson said last week that ‘Hamas has been systematically using hospitals in Gaza to run its terror machine. Hamas built tunnels underneath hospitals … using the protected status of hospitals as a shield.’
Hagari’s claim that Hamas uses human shields should be understood as a pre-emptive legal defence against accusations that Israel is committing war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. The Geneva Conventions prohibit the use of human shields: ‘The presence or movements of the civilian population or individual civilians shall not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations, in particular in attempts to shield military objectives from attacks or to shield, favour or impede military operations.’ In other words, it’s legal to bomb a site protected by human shields (provided legal principles, such as proportionality, are followed). The subtext of Hagari’s accusation, then, is that Hamas is to blame when Israel kills civilians or destroys hospitals because Hamas has used them to ‘shield’ its tunnels.
In recent years the ‘human shield’ accusation has been adopted by several state militaries trying to justify the killing of civilians in Mosul in Iraq, Raqqa in Syria and elsewhere. This justification, however, functions only in one direction. When state actors kill civilians, it’s become standard to describe them as human shields. But when non-state actors attack military targets in urban settings, the civilians they kill are still recognised as civilians.
When Islamic State captured Mosul in 2014, for example, there were no human shields in the city, but two years later, when the American-led coalition was preparing to retake it, headlines across the world warned readers that the jihadist militants were using 100,000 civilians as human shields. Israeli citizens living next to the military command headquarters in central Tel Aviv have never been cast as human shields, even though Hamas has targeted it. This is not to condone the brutality of IS or Hamas, who have frequently targeted civilians, but to show how state militaries exculpate themselves from the killing of civilians.
Besides the Great Synagogue in Tel Aviv, the primary school in Ramat Gan and the medical facility in Netanya, there are more than fifty other buildings in Israeli cities that have plaques commemorating how they were used to hide combatants and weapons before 1948. The British armed forces sent infantry troops to raid civilian sites that they suspected of being put to military use. In the Gaza Strip, the Israeli armed forces have sent in ground troops only after bombing.
Thirty thousand tons of bombs have so far been dropped on Gaza, and more than two hundred mosques, two hundred schools and over forty hospitals and other medical facilities have been damaged or destroyed. More than five thousand children and around ten thousand adults have been killed. Most of them were civilians. The attempt by the Israeli authorities to justify their carpet bombing and blame Palestinians for bringing disaster on themselves through the use of ‘human shields’ is not only political sophistry, but forgetful of Israel’s own history.
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