On October 24, a statement by the Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, caused a sharp reaction in Israel. Addressing the UN Security Council, the head of the UN he said While Hamas condemned the October 7 massacre in the strongest terms, it wanted to remind the world that it did not happen in a vacuum. As he explained, the 56-year occupation cannot be separated from our commitment to the tragedy that occurred that day.
The Israeli government quickly condemned the statement. Israeli officials called for Guterres’ resignation, saying he supported Hamas and justified the massacre. The Israeli media also jumped on the bandwagon, including UN chiefs”has proven the appalling level of moral failure”.
The reaction suggests that a new type of anti-Semitism accusation may now be on the table. Until October 7, Israel pushed to expand the definition of anti-Semitism, to criticize the state of Israel and question the moral basis of Zionism. Now, contextualizing and historicizing what is happening can also lead to accusations of anti-Semitism.
The dehistoricization of these events helps Israel and Western governments pursue policies they rejected in the past for ethical, tactical, or strategic reasons.
Thus, Israel considers the October 7 attack as an excuse to carry out genocidal policies in the Gaza Strip. It is also an excuse for the United States to try to reassert its presence in the Middle East. And for some European countries it is an excuse to violate and limit democratic freedoms in the name of a new “war against terrorism”.
But there are several historical contexts of what is happening now in Israel-Palestine that cannot be ignored. Wider historical context XIX. It goes back to the middle of the 20th century, when Western evangelical Christianity made the idea of the “return of the Jews” a religious millennial imperative and as part of the steps it took to support the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. this would lead to the resurrection of the dead, the return of the Messiah, and the end of time.
At the end of the twentieth century and in the years before the First World War, theology became politics for two reasons.
First, he worked in the interests of the British, who wanted to dissolve the Ottoman Empire and incorporate its parts into the British Empire. Second, it resonated within the British aristocracy, both Jewish and Christian, who became enamored with the idea of Zionism as a panacea for the problem of anti-Semitism in Central and Eastern Europe, which had caused waves of Jewish immigration. Great Britain
When these two interests came together, they pushed the British government to issue the famous (or infamous) Balfour Declaration in 1917.
Jewish thinkers and activists who redefined Judaism as nationalism hoped that this definition would protect Jewish communities in Europe from existential danger by positioning Palestine as the desired space for the “rebirth of the Jewish nation.”
In the process, the cultural and intellectual Zionist project became a settler colonialism that aimed to Judaize historic Palestine, ignoring the fact that the indigenous population lived there.
On the other hand, the Palestinian society, at that time quite pastoral and in the initial phase of modernization and construction of national identity, created its own anti-colonial movement. His first significant action came against the Zionist colonization project The al-Buraq uprising of 1929and it hasn’t stopped since.
Another historical context relevant to the current crisis was the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine, including the forced expulsion of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip from the villages on whose ruins some of the Israeli settlements attacked on October 7 were built. These uprooted Palestinians were part of the 750,000 Palestinians who lost their homes and became refugees.
This ethnic cleansing was noticed in the world but not condemned. As a result, Israel continued to resort to ethnic cleansing in an effort to ensure that it would retain full control of historic Palestine, leaving as few of the original Palestinians as possible. This included 300,000 Palestinians expelled during and after the 1967 war, and more than 600,000 since then from the West Bank, Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip.
There is also the context of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. For the past 50 years, the occupying forces have imposed permanent collective punishment on Palestinians in these territories, subjecting them to constant harassment by Israeli settlers and security forces and imprisoning hundreds of thousands.
Since the election of the current messianic fundamentalist government of Israel in November 2022, all these harsh policies have reached an unprecedented level. The number of Palestinians killed, wounded and arrested in the occupied West Bank he went up. In addition, the Israeli government’s policy towards the Christian and Muslim holy places in Jerusalem became even more aggressive.
Finally, there is also the historical context of the 16-year siege of Gaza, where almost half of the population are children. In 2018, the UN already warned that the Gaza Strip would become a place unfit for humans by 2020.
It should be remembered that the siege was imposed in response to the democratic elections won by Hamas after Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from the territory. It is even more important to go back to the 1990s, when the Gaza Strip was surrounded by thorns and disconnected from the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem after the Oslo Accords.
The isolation of Gaza, the fence surrounding it and the increasing Judaization of the West Bank signaled to the Israelis that Oslo meant the occupation of other paths, not the path to true peace.
Israel controlled the exit and entry points into the Gaza ghetto, as well as the type of food that entered, sometimes limiting it to a certain number of calories. Hamas reacted to this debilitating siege by firing rockets into Israeli civilian areas.
The Israeli government stated that these attacks were motivated by the movement’s ideological desire to kill Jews – a new form of Nazism – ignoring the context of the Nakba and the cruel and barbaric siege imposed on two million people and the oppression of their fellow citizens elsewhere. historical Palestine
Hamas was, in many ways, the only Palestinian group that promised to avenge or respond to these policies. The way he decided to respond, however, could lead to his disappearance, at least in the Gaza Strip, and could also provide an excuse for further oppression of the Palestinian people.
The brutality of his attack can’t be justified in any way, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be explained and put into context. As terrifying as it is, the bad news is that it’s not a game-changing event, despite the high human cost on both sides. What does this mean for the future?
Israel will remain a state established by a settler-colonial movement, which will continue to influence its political DNA and define its ideological character. This means that even if it establishes itself as the only democracy in the Middle East, it will remain a democracy only for its Jewish citizens.
The internal struggle within Israel between what can be called Judea – the settler state wants Israel to be more theocratic and racist – and the state of Israel – which wants to maintain the status quo – Israel, which occupied it until October 7th, will explode again. . In fact, there are already signs of his return.
Israel will remain an apartheid state – as many human rights organizations have stated – however the situation in Gaza unfolds. The Palestinians will not disappear and will continue to fight for liberation, with many civil societies supporting them and their governments with Israel’s protection and granting them exceptional immunity.
The exit remains the same: a regime change in Israel that brings equal rights for all from the river to the sea and allows the return of Palestinian refugees. Otherwise, the bleeding cycle will not end.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
