Bernard Spiegal

‘Under cover of Gaza war, settlers working to fulfil state goal of Judaizing Area C.’

That B’tselem headline above has it right, or almost right, for the Judaizing of Area C has long been underway. A project of displacement and replacement: the indigenous Palestinians removed to make way for Israeli Jews. And this not limited to Area C, but like a malign tentacle reaches out to, for example, Occupied East Jerusalem.

It’s an ugly enterprise, but at one with Israel’s founding Zionist ideology and intent: the colonisation of Palestine from the river to the sea. That ideology requires, as an indispensable condition of its existence, the application of violence. The Zionist project could not, and cannot now, realise itself in the absence of violence, for no indigenous people willingly relinquishes its homeland, its sense of self so woven into the fabric of daily existence located in this place – Palestine – and no other.

Violence is what Israel is good at: from the daily assaults and harassment of Palestinian school children in the West Bank; the destruction of homes and livelihoods in the Jordan Valley and Hebron Hills; to the forcible eviction of Palestinian East Jerusalemites from their homes to make way for Jewish Settlers holding a gun in one hand, the bible in the other.  And so much more.

It’s hard to convey the types and levels of violence experienced virtually on a daily basis by, for example, the shepherds of the Jordan Valley. Perhaps the extract below and photo from Touching Photographs can help connect us to the regular, somehow undramatic, quotidian violence perpetrated by Jewish settlers, a violence in effect supported by the police and IDF.

Now it’s the turn of Ein Rashash. Settlers from the illegal outposts are making this stunning place, situated on the ridge overlooking the Jordan Valley, into a living hell. They enter the village at all times of the day and night. Usually they are armed with guns and clubs. They attack, they throw rocks, they yell over their megaphones and threaten and curse, they enter the tents, open the refrigerators (if there is one) and steal whatever they want, break whatever they find. They take their herds of sheep into the little that is left of the Palestinian fields…. Sometimes they set their dogs on the sheep. Sometimes they drive their tractors through the village, just for fun. Then they burn down the tents. In short: a reign of continuous terror.

Apart from the brave and incredibly persistent Jewish volunteers who place themselves in harm’s way between settlers and shepherds – like the ones connected to Touching Photographs – Israeli opinion is largely indifferent.

This indifference, perhaps better characterised as self-induced forgetfulness and denial, was well demonstrated during the recent so-called pro-democracy protests when hundreds-of-thousands of Israelis marched to oppose the Netanyahu-led government’s proposed reforms of the judiciary.

I’ve tackled that subject in an earlier blog so no need for more detail here beyond noticing, once again, that those seeking to ‘protect’ Israel’s warped democracy had no interest in, paid no heed to, Palestinians or the Occupation. It’s not even that the pro-democratic movement effectively closed the door on Palestinian aspirations and concerns. Rather, it seems there was no door that might be opened, or closed.

A question to be asked: do the sins of Hamas absolve Israel from the sins it is now enacting?

All the above, and more, pre-existed Hamas’s 7 October cruel assault and killing spree in southern Israel where at least 1,400 Israelis, including children, were slaughtered, and over a hundred hostages taken[1]. But history, the history of Israel and Palestinians, did not begin on the 7^th October.

It aids no-one if the wider context from 1948, through to 1967, then to 2007 when the effective entrapment and besieging of Gaza’s entire population began is not considered and taken into account in the attempt to understand why the 7^th October happened. In particular, nothing is gained, and understanding is occluded if, as has already occurred, ahistorical and mistaken parallels are drawn between the 7 October and the Holocaust.

In other words, prior to Hamas’s murderous onslaught, Israel was a state rooted in lawlessness and discrimination towards Palestinians, coupled to and arising from a culture, an ethos of state-endorsed discriminatory provisions and practices. Gaza’s assigned role in this was to keep quiet, to accept its siege-like existence, to grant its children no hope of a future.

I say all this not to exculpate the perpetrators of the 7th October’s shocking, to be condemned, events, but to suggest an answer, and if not an answer, perhaps at least a partial explanation, as to how comes it that Israel feels morally entitled, that it has the right, to unleash its exterminatory military might against Gaza’s civilian population. That unleashing to date (26 October) comprises:

• A total of 481 fatalities, including 209 children, were reported over the past 24 hours (as of 18:00 on 26 October) by the Ministry of Health (MoH) in Gaza.
• Overall, 7,028 Palestinians were killed in Gaza since the start of hostilities, of whom 66 per cent are children and women, according to MoH.
• About 1,600 people, including 900 children, have been reported missing and may be under the rubble. 
• UNRWA has warned that unless fuel is allowed into Gaza immediately, the agency will be forced to halt all operations as of tomorrow, 25 October
• Since 11 October, Gaza has been under a full electricity blackout, rendering hospitals and water facilities dependent on backup generators run by fuel. 
• No fuel is allowed to enter Gaza.
• Of the hundreds of aid lorries at the Rafah border, only a handful have been allowed access. Hundreds a day are needed to meet the need.

Seeking healing through vengeance

One understands that Israel is wounded and afeared, its sense of mastery and control shattered by Hamas’s bloody incursion into Israel, including the unleashing of missiles deep into Israeli territory. Israel’s previously much-vaunted military preparedness and intelligence-gathering capabilities now cast into doubt. 

And in response, Israel seeks vengeance, in part as an act of self-healing, an attempt to re-prove to itself its own essential military competence; a desire to return to the time before its self-image was shattered so comprehensively.  

But a desire for vengeance bestows no rights, nor offers hope of solution to the ills that beset this region.  

Bulldozing reality

Just as Israel quite literally bulldozes Palestinian homes, livelihoods and infrastructure in order to erase their physical presence, so Israel attempts to bulldoze away uncomfortable facts and assessments.

Thus, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, has expended significant effort in seeking to close down and demonise UN Secretary-General António Guterres who made the startlingly obvious point that the events of 7^th October ‘did not happen in a vacuum.’ What event does?

The Secretary General went on to say the ‘Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation…But the grievances of the Palestinian people cannot justify the appalling attacks by Hamas. And those appalling attacks cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.’ I’d call that a balanced statement, befitting the role the UN Secretary General is required to play. 

Israel’s ambassador to the UN, however, took grave exception to the Secretary General’s remarks saying ‘It’s truly sad that the head of an organisation that arose after the Holocaust holds such horrible views.’

The reference to the Holocaust has become standard issue when Israel’s behaviour is called into question. This misuse of references to the Holocaust is deployed in order to stifle, no, to scare away criticism. Scatter gun deployment of the Holocaust actually debases its significance.

In a retaliatory gesture, Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen, who pronounced himself ‘so upset’ by Secretary General’s remarks ‘that he cancelled a meeting with the secretary-general that was supposed to happen Tuesday afternoon.’ And in another swipe at the Secretary General, ambassador Erdan crowed that ‘We have already refused a visa for Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Martin Griffiths. The time has come to teach them a lesson.’ Such is the manner of Israeli diplomacy – a bullying aspect secure in the knowledge that the bigger bully, the US, is ‘watching Israel’s back’.

But the stifling of adverse comment is not restricted to the international field, but plays out at home as well. Ha’aretz reported that an Arab-Jewish Conference was cancelled after Israeli police warned the venue owner of ‘Consequences’ if it went ahead.

The owner of an event hall in Haifa made a last-minute decision to cancel a Jewish-Arab conference calling for an end to Israel’s war with Hamas. Israel Police informed him that holding the conference, scheduled for Thursday, would have ‘various consequences.’

The theme of the conference was “our partnership in the struggle for justice and against war.” Scheduled participants included former lawmaker Avraham Burg and Muhammad Baraka, chairman of the Higher Arab Monitoring Committee.

Israel: reinforcing prejudice and othering  

Israel has constructed for itself a world that disseminates and self-reinforces prejudices and disdains it must believe in, that must be nurtured and passed on to each new generation if it is to live its life as a specifically Jewish state.

Thus, the school system, from the earliest age, marinades pupils and students in skewed history, in the un-acknowledgement of, and distortions about, Palestinians. (It will be worth saying more about Israel’s education system in a subsequent article.)

In the OPT, the soldier, often barely out of school, is the arbiter of the minutest detail of Palestinian life, including who may go where and when. Who is to be dragged from their bed in the middle of the night; who is to go home, who is to be detained; who is to live, who is to die.

The soldier, nurtured in prejudice and superstition, afeared and yet dismissive of the persons – child, woman, man – they must oversea, their gun as their talisman and agent of ultimate control. 

From this cauldron of misbegotten ideas and prejudices emerges a set of attitudes and insensitivities’ such that Gazan civilians, be they infant, child or adult, are not quite fully human. From there its but a small step to unleash death and destruction on a defenceless population.