On Israel and Palestine- Part 5

Introduction:

The creation of the state of Israel almost 80 years ago and the conflict between its citizens and the displaced Palestinians and surrounding countries has become one of the most polarizing geopolitical topics in popular discourse. Those with any “skin in the game,” so to speak, (eg. Israelis, Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, Jews) probably have very strong beliefs about which “side” is in the right, and the actual facts and events occurring on the ground are unlikely to significantly change those beliefs, myself included. Discourse about this conflict across all forms of media is rampant in an attempt to sway public opinion, with wild claims being made to justify the actions of one side or another. It’s obviously a very complex topic and I encourage anyone interested in an in-depth look at Palestine to do their own research and reading, while being very critical of what biases sources may have.

The purpose of this series of essays is to give some basic background information for those with relatively little knowledge of the conflict and its history, to help clarify some of the conflicting and opposing claims you will often hear online or in the news, and help explain why I believe the actions of the state of Israel definitively put them on the wrong side of history and merit harsh criticism.

This will be an 8-part series that I will post over the following weeks/months, with this identical introduction in each. I will list sources I referred to at the end of each post but, as this is not an academic treatise, the formatting will be informal and will not be embedded into the text itself.

Parts 1-3 are going to give some historical background on the region. One of the fundamental arguments made by both sides in the conflict is that the land belongs to them on a historical basis. It is helpful then, to have a basic overview of the broad strokes of history and what populations lived there at various points throughout history. This will be an extremely basic summary, as you could read books on each of these periods in history and still have a lot to learn.

Parts 4-8 are going to be formatted essentially as responses to frequent claims made in defense of Israel and will cover a variety of topics, including Israeli behavior in relation to the Palestinians and its Arab neighbors, the relationship between the US and Israel, and what the future may hold. 

This is Part 5, where we will continue to discuss and address some of the claims made by the defenders of Israel to justify their actions with regards to the Palestinians and surrounding Arab countries.

 I highly recommend reading these essays in order, and you can find the other essays here:

Part 1- https://sunflowers.ghost.io/on-israel-and-palestine-part-1/

Part 2- https://sunflowers.ghost.io/on-israel-and-palestine-part-2/

Part 3- https://sunflowers.ghost.io/on-israel-and-palestine-part-3/

Part 4- https://sunflowers.ghost.io/on-israel-and-palestine-part-4/

Part 6- https://sunflowers.ghost.io/on-israel-and-palestine-part-6/

The Palestinians mostly target civilians in their attacks, aren’t they terrorists?

At the risk of being accused of levity, I will quote The Battle of Algiers here:

A journalist asks Ben M’Hidi (a leader of the FLN rebels against the French): “Don’t you think it’s a bit cowardly to use women’s baskets and handbags to carry explosive devices that kill so many innocent people?”

To which Ben M’Hidi replies: “And doesn’t it seem to you even more cowardly to drop napalm bombs on defenseless villages, so that there are a thousand times more innocent victims? Of course, if we had your airplanes, it would be a lot easier for us. Give us your bombers, and you can have our baskets.”

First of all, the resources and capabilities of the Palestinian resistance are far less than the capabilities of the Israeli military. The Palestinians have, for the most part, needed to rely on relatively inaccurate homemade weapons and explosives for many years now.

I think it’s also easy for us to think in terms of international law and how civilians are not valid targets, but keep in mind that the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have not had much benefit from international law, which Israel blatantly violates with its expansion of settlements, use of collective punishment, prolonged detention, and use of torture, to name just a few examples. Thus, if the Palestinians don’t benefit from “international law” while under the thumb of a far more powerful entity that does not itself respect it, why should they be limited by it? Ultimately, the damage and harm done to Israeli civilians by Palestinians is scarcely a drop in the bucket compared to the damage and harm done to Palestinian civilians by Israelis.

It’s also worth mentioning that in the eyes of many Palestinians, understandably, there is no such thing as an innocent Israeli. In the case of virtually all Palestinians in Gaza, and the majority in the West Bank, they will never come across any Israelis/Jews except for the ones overtly participating in their repression. The “democracy” that Israel so likes to tout has lately resulted in ever more right-wing governments who treat the Palestinians increasingly harshly.

There is also the curious phenomenon of suicide bombing, used of course, by the Japanese kamikaze pilots in World War 2, and appearing for the first time in the Middle East with Shia suicide bombers in Lebanon targeting the Israeli occupation, suicide bombing has become something of a staple of Islamist tactics: used by Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Palestine (usually targeting civilians), Islamists in Iraq during the American occupation and by ISIS after the American withdrawal, and used by Islamists in Syria. Robert Fisk, a British journalist, in his book The Great War for Civilization would say that in a normal society where people are treated equally and with justice, suicide is viewed as an aberration, a clear sign that there was an imbalance in that individual’s mind. The situation in Palestine has led to that society’s collective mind becoming imbalanced: when society is dispossessed, when there appears to be no solution to the injustices thrust upon it, when the enemy is all-powerful and the people are bestialized by a never-ending parade of humiliations, then minds turn to the idea of the afterlife, and the idea that by their death, they can fight back. In this context, suicide bombing is not, then, an act of “mindless terror”, but the logical product of a people who have been crushed, dispossessed, cheated, tortured, and killed in terrible numbers.

As for calling any who take up armed resistance terrorists (whether targeting civilians or not, where suicide bomber or not), this is a meaningless term, used to try to discredit those who have just and valid reasons for taking up armed resistance against their oppressors. It is predicated on the idea that the “moral” use of violence lies only with state actors (and specifically, state actors friendly to our own government), and yet the sheer amount of human suffering caused by state actors “legally” using force is immense, how silly then, to use that as the definition for a “moral” use of violence.

For an example of Israeli hypocrisy, prior to the formation of the Israeli state, Irgun, a Jewish paramilitary group, carried out many attacks against Palestinian Arabs and British authorities as guerrillas, including a bombing of a British hotel that killed almost a hundred Brits. The leader of Irgun at the time was Menachem Begin, future prime minister of Israel. Other men affiliated with Irgun assassinated a British official in Egypt, and later they would be given a state funeral in Israel. To the British, these must have been terrorists, and indeed, were labeled as such. Yet these Israeli “terrorists” would either later lead the Israeli government or be honored by the Israeli government for their actions. When Israeli settlers kill Palestinians and then don’t face any consequences in Israeli courts, when Baruch Goldstein massacred 29 Muslims at a mosque, and when Palestinians gathered to access the mosque where the crime occurred and the Israeli army opened fire and killed 25 more, are these not examples of terrorism?

To name an action terrorism, or its perpetrator a terrorist, is to make the decision to not examine why such an action occurred. Fisk, in “The Great War for Civilization” puts it better than I can:

“Terrorism is a word that has become a plague on our vocabulary, the excuse and reason and moral permit for state-sponsored violence— our violence—which is now used on the innocent of the Middle East ever more outrageously and promiscuously. Terrorism, terrorism, terrorism. It has become a full stop, a punctuation mark, a phrase, a speech, a sermon, the be-all and end-all of everything that we must hate in order to ignore injustice and occupation and murder on a mass scale. Terror, terror, terror, terror. It is a sonata, a symphony, an orchestra tuned to every television and radio station and news agency report, the soap-opera of the Devil, served up on prime-time or distilled in wearyingly dull and mendacious form by the right-wing “commentators” of the American east coast or the Jerusalem Post or the intellectuals of Europe. Strike against Terror. Victory over Terror. War on Terror. Everlasting War on Terror. Rarely in history have soldiers and journalists and presidents and kings aligned themselves in such thoughtless, unquestioning ranks.”

Haven’t the Israelis tried to reach peace agreements with the Arabs before? It’s not their fault that negotiations fall through.

This is a common claim that is made, that the current situation is the Arab’s own fault. If only they had accepted the UN partition plan in 1948, or if only they had agreed to peace following any of the disastrous Arab-Israeli wars.

This is an argument made in bad faith, because the Israelis only negotiate in bad faith. With regards to the UN partition plan of 1948, yes the Arabs would control more of the land now (assuming the Israelis did not eventually attack and take it anyway), but the partition plan gave the majority of the land to the Jews, who made up only 30% of the population, and the vast majority of whom were Europeans who had arrived in the preceding decades.

Negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians or between Israel and other Arab states were often facilitated by the US, a profoundly biased mediator that provides unlimited financial and military support for Israel. During the Clinton years as it became clear that the Oslo Accords were not going well, the entire diplomatic team of the US was made up of American Jews, and was even led by a former staff member of AIPAC. This is certainly not a show of good faith to base mediation or negotiations on. Can you imagine the Israeli response if the American diplomatic team had been composed entirely of Arab-Americans or Muslims?

The fact that Israel generally had the upper hand in terms of territorial control and military strength compared to any of the Arabs they might be negotiating with meant that unless proper pressure was applied, the Israelis had little incentive to make any concessions, and the US has historically been unwilling to apply that pressure. This also meant that Israel could appear, on the world stage, to be the more reasonable actor as they could make offers that they knew the Arabs would never agree to, and then point to the Arabs as the unreasonable party unwilling to negotiate.

The Oslo Accords, where Arafat did break away from the other Arab delegations and negotiated with the Israelis in secret, might have given the Israelis an opportunity to show that they could be trusted negotiation partners, but they have since utterly disregarded this agreement. East Jerusalem was annexed, and the Palestinian right-of-return remains off-limits to discussion. Rather than working towards an independent Palestinian state centered around the West Bank, as the Oslo Accords stipulate, Israel has instead continued direct administrative control over the majority of the land (Area C), and has aggressively expanded its settlement program, and continued to disrupt life and stifle economic growth for the Palestinians in the area. This is the reward for the Palestinians for agreeing to come to the negotiating table.

Nor is Palestine the only place where the Israelis have shown they’re not interested in abiding by negotiations. One recent example is the approval of additional settlements in the Golan Heights. This was territory conquered by the Israelis after the War of 1967, and was later annexed. This was never a part of Mandate Palestine. Now that additional territory in Syria beyond the Golan has been invaded and occupied following the fall of Assad’s government in 2024 (surely an opportunity to start off on the right foot now that one of Israel’s most stubborn enemies was out of power, but Israel had other plans), it suggests that Israel believes the military situation to be so lopsided in their favor that they can expand their territory and then consolidate the previous occupied areas with settlers and do so with impunity.

What lesson can be taken from this other than the fact that Israel is not interested in improved relations with the new government in Syria? The Golan Heights are the single biggest point of contention between the two countries, and this is telling them, in no uncertain terms, that the only way to get the Golan Heights back is through war, since negotiations have only led to further loss of Syrian land and now movement of Israeli colonists into that land. Israel certainly does not behave like a country that is interested in negotiations or peace, and America’s continued unconditional support provides them little incentive to do so.

Israel is surrounded by hostile populations. Doesn’t Israel have a right to defend itself?

This is not untrue, but it doesn’t really tell the whole story.

Israel did not get off to a great start with its neighbors, to put it mildly. The very basis for the country relied around bringing Jews (and their considerable resources) from all over the world to Palestine, and then displacing the native population, so that the land could be used as the basis for a Jewish homeland. It is eminently understandable that the Arabs would take issue with that, and because neither side wanted to compromise in negotiations in the UN, war broke out and the Arabs lost.

Since then, Israel has through a combination of American support, superior morale, military technology, and military intelligence, defeated the Arabs at virtually every encounter, and the only times Israel has meaningfully faced a military setback was briefly in the 1973 War when they came under surprise attack but ultimately prevailed, during their occupation of southern Lebanon from 1982-2000, and the 2006 invasion of Lebanon.

This string of military successes has sufficiently cowed their neighbors (or at least their neighbor’s governments; Arab populations are one and all vehemently opposed to Israel) such that Jordan, Egypt, Bahrain, and the UAE normalized relations with Israel, while other Gulf countries are at least cooperating in a more clandestine manner. Iraq (aside from some Shia militias) and Syria (post-Assad) are very careful not to antagonize Israel due to their weakness (a lot of good that did the Syrians, given the massive air campaign the Israelis launched after the fall of Assad and completely unprovoked seizure of additional Syrian territory). That leaves Iran, the Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas in Palestine as the only factions currently actively participating in armed resistance against Israel.

While I personally find armed struggle against the Israelis to be entirely just, it’s also only human that the Israelis would want to neutralize those threats against themselves. But it is also necessary to do so in a proportionate manner. I would say that it is indefensible, for example, that in order to neutralize the threat of Hamas, the Israelis have tried to justify the massacre of almost 80,000 Palestinians and have turned Gaza into a wasteland. It is indefensible that, in trying to destroy Hezbollah, whose rocket attacks into Israel have killed a small handful of Israeli civilians, the Israelis have displaced over 20% of the Lebanese population, killed thousands, and destroyed large amounts of infrastructure in a country that was already in an economic crisis.

The idea of a disproportionate response is a codified and established part of Israeli doctrine. When looking at the 2006 invasion of Lebanon, the head of the Israeli army in the North was quoted as saying “What happened in the Dahiyah quarter of Beirut…will happen in every village from which Israel is fired upon… We will apply disproportionate force on it and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, there are no civilian villages, there are military bases. This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved.”

Israel, by using its military to bulldoze any opponents, by using its military strength and unconditional support from the US to refuse to negotiate or do so in bad faith, by making living conditions deplorable for the Palestinians and killing them, is directly responsible for creating the conditions that make their neighbors hostile to them. When an Israeli airstrike wipes out half of your family or kills your spouse and your children, wouldn’t anyone devote their life to the destruction of the perpetrators of that crime?

This is likely all by design. There have been successive right-wing governments in Israel for many years now, they have significant electoral success and by ensuring that they continue to antagonize the Palestinians and their neighbors, they create enemies and conflicts that keep the population of Israel scared and feeling like they need to vote for a government that will take an ever-harsher stance.

And indeed, this concept of a “forever war”, so commonly used by governments to justify staying in power is codified into Israeli military doctrine. The expression, “mowing the grass” is used to signify the idea that Israel is never going to have peace with its neighbors (and more specifically, with the Palestinians) and their chosen way of dealing with it is to have short, targeted military operations to prevent their enemy from getting too strong, while never having to commit to a long-term solution for peace. In this manner, Israel has justified random air strikes on their neighbors to prevent nuclear weapons development (in Syria, Iraq, and Iran), for example, or carried out assassinations against their opposition (such as in Iran), or used the smallest pretext to bomb villages in southern Lebanon, but it’s primarily implemented against the Palestinians themselves. Unfortunately, it’s this military doctrine that has contributed to the persistent miserable condition of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, and keeps them trapped in endless violence. (it also is perceived to have failed in Gaza after the October 7 attacks, and in Gaza Israel is now implementing a scorched earth policy instead).

So yes, Israel has a right to defend itself, but this is not an excuse to massacre civilians, and it is not an excuse to perpetuate the conditions that will only feed into more conflict, two things that Israel truly excels at.

Is what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians a genocide?

I don’t think this is a terribly helpful question. What is a genocide anyway? According to its initial codification by the UN in 1946, it means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group such as: killing members of that group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, imposing measures intended to prevent births, or forcibly transferring out their children.

Insofar as the Palestinians of Gaza are a discrete, national, ethnic and religious group separate from the Israelis attacking them, I think it would be impossible to argue that what is going on in Gaza is not a genocide. Over 80,000 Palestinians are dead, and much of the remaining population lives in tents on the cusp of starvation in a wasteland without electricity and scarcely any medical supplies or water, hemmed in on all sides by the Israeli army and with death in the skies. Hundreds of thousands of children (the ones who don’t die, anyway) will grow up with profound trauma and a lack of education and opportunity. Of course it’s a genocide.

And what if it isn’t a genocide? What if you try to make the argument that it’s not a genocide because the Palestinians of Gaza are not a discrete national, ethnic, or religious group? If the horrors ongoing in Gaza do not have the label “genocide” placed upon them, does that make it any better? Is it somehow acceptable to do this because it isn’t as bad what the Jews suffered during the Holocaust? And if it is unacceptable, “genocide” or no, why the quibbling about vocabulary?

It calls to mind Arie Caspi’s (an Israeli journalist) comment on the Israeli attack on Jenin in 2002 during the Second Intifada. Initial reports were of a massacre of hundreds of Palestinians, and it later came about that “only” 50 or so Palestinians died, after which many of the people who called it a massacre backtracked.

“Okay so there wasn’t a massacre. Israel only shot some children, brought a house crashing down on an old man, rained cement blocks on an invalid who couldn’t get out in time, used locals as a human shield against bombs, and prevented aid from getting to the sick and wounded. That’s really not a massacre, and there’s really no need for a commission of enquiry, whether run by ourselves or sent by the goyim. The insanity gripping Israel seems to have moved beyond our morals…many Israelis believe that as long as we do not practice systematic mass murder, our place in heaven is secure. Every time some Palestinian or Scandinavian fool yells “Holocaust!”, we respond in an angry huff: This is a holocaust? So a few people were killed, 200, 300, some very young, some very old. Does anyone see gas chambers or crematoria?”

At the end of the day, there will not be a solution until the Palestinians stop pursuing violence as a way to achieve their political aims.

This is the very heart of the issue, isn’t it? If the Palestinians would just accept what Israel is giving them, and be happy with that instead of choosing armed resistance, then Israel wouldn’t be forced to subject the Palestinians to overwhelming humiliation and violence and torture and rape and death.

How often have we heard “what would you do if Hamas was your neighbor and the town next to yours was launching rockets into your backyard?”, and “there won’t be peace until the Palestinians learn to love their children more than they hate us”?

But this take ignores history, it ignores the facts. It ignores the fact that only 2% of the population of Palestine was Jewish in 1880, and it was only the concerted effort of political Zionism and the persecution of European Jews by the Europeans that led to immigration to Palestine of these foreigners (ie. demonstrating that in its origins, Israel is a settler-colonial project). It ignores the fact that even by 1948, despite all of these foreign Jews coming into Palestine, they only made up 30% of the population yet were given 55% of the land of Mandate Palestine. It ignores the fact that the creation of Israel occurred concurrently with the Nakba, the displacement of 750,000 Palestinians who had been living in that land for generations beyond count, and the perpetrators of this ethnic cleansing and their immediate descendants are enjoying the fruits of this crime, while the victims and their immediate descendants still hope to return to the lands taken from them (this is not ancient history after all (unlike the 2,000 year old claim of a Jewish homeland), many of the displaced individuals are still alive, or else are only 1 or 2 generations removed from the Nakba). It ignores the fact that since 1967, Palestinians have had to live under an oppressive Israeli occupation that denies them statehood, limits their economic opportunity, destroys their houses, bulldozes their orchards, surveils them, harasses them, jails them, tortures them, rapes them, and kills them. It ignores the fact that despite “successful” negotiations and the 1993 Oslo Accords, the promise of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank has been reneged on by the Israelis, and instead an aggressive campaign for settlement expansion continues and all signs point to Israel’s eventual plan to annex the West Bank. It ignores the fact that the Israelis have left the Palestinians no avenue but armed resistance.

Injustice after injustice after injustice. The fruits of “peace” that Israel promises are predicated on ignoring a century of history that has proven only one thing: Israel has no intention of ever allowing a Palestinian state. The idea that Israel can “beat the violence out” of the Palestinians is a self-defeating one, improvement in living conditions and assurance of basic rights is what will start to convince them of an alternative to armed resistance. As it is now, can anyone blame the Palestinians that choose to fight?

Part 6- https://sunflowers.ghost.io/on-israel-and-palestine-part-6/ 

Sources:

• The Modern Middle East: A History by James Gelvin
• The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2000 Years by Bernard Lewis
• The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East by Robert Fisk
• Night of Power by Robert Fisk
• Pity the Nation by Robert Fisk
• The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories by Ilan Pappe
• Lords of the Land: The War Over Israel's Settlements in the Occupied Territories, 1967-2007 by Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar
• For events since 2023: mostly news sources such as Al Jazeera and Reuters
• 1998 Amnesty Internation Annual Report and Amnesty International 2001: Israel and the Occupied Territories: State Assassinations and other Unlawful Killings
• Amnesty International Reports on 2006, 2008, 2012, 2014, and 2021 Conflicts in Gaza
• UNOCHA 2011 report on the effect of the blockade in Gaza
• UNOCHA 2005, 2013, and 2026 reports on settler activity in the West Bank
• United Nations webpage on genocide
• Institute for Policy Studies: Destroying the Lawn in Gaza by John Feffer