The Gaza Raid

Israel, Palestine and the Settler-Colonial Forever War

I’m in the last week of a book deadline and working every hour, so I haven’t had time to post. Instead I’m reposting the piece I wrote just after 7 October last year.

Normal service to be resumed next week!

Settler-colonial conflicts aren’t like other armed confrontations. They are conflicts between peoples who lay claim to the same territory, in which one side must gain everything and the other must lose everything. In these conflicts, the settlers - a word that sounds much more innocuous than it actually is - aren’t necessarily interested in exploiting or enslaving the people they colonize.

They might do that, as an afterthought, but basically they want land, not people, and given that few people willingly abandon the land in which their memories, their past, their livelihood, and their aspirations for a collective future are all bound up, then the settler-government and settler-army must either subjugate the people who already occupy that land, or drive them away from it.

In the case of the Palestinians, Israel has done both these things, and as in other similar confrontations, the almost constant violence that has continued ever since the 1930s is not like the violence of conventional war.

In settler-colonial confrontations, violence is always bitter and personal. It is face-to-face and fought up close, door-to-door and in the home or the farm. In some cases settlers will throw you out of your own house. Or they will knock your house down. Or put a fence or wall around the land where you wanted to build a house, for yourself, your children or your grandchildren.

And if you persist on staying there, they will tear up your olive trees, kill your animals, throw stones through your windows, and terrorize you till you leave. They might drive you from your land by force with the keys still in your hand, and you might spend years watching as someone else moves into your house, or hunts the animals that you used to hunt, or exports crops from the land that you used to harvest, or builds towns and cities in the places that you already had names for, and turns the country that you thought was yours into their country.

So of course these confrontations are vicious and hateful. They aren’t impersonal battles between uniformed combatants, with distinctions between the innocent and the guilty, civilians or fighters, combatants and non-combatants. And the ferocity of such confrontations is likely to be intensified by the imbalance of power.

Unable to challenge a stronger opponent militarily, the weaker side is likely to attack the soft points in its enemy’s defences. It will seek to maximise its own resources and hurt and wound its enemies where they least expect it, disrupting their confidence and their ability to protect their population, spreading insecurity and fear even in territories they thought they had complete control over, and looking for political gains that go beyond their limited military capabilities.

Sometimes they will do this as part of an overall politico-military strategy, or in order to demonstrate to their own supporters that they are still in the battle, and sometimes they will do it out of pure vengeance.

At this point, it is difficult to know which of these categories the savage and audacious coup de main carried by Hamas over the last few days belongs to. Maybe it contains a little of all of them. In terms of its planning and execution, the raid is an act of military brilliance. It has humiliated Israel’s government and its much-vaunted surveillance system; destroyed its attempts to normalize what Amira Hass has called the ‘largest prison in the world’. It has captured soldiers and even a general, and forced Israel to choose between a series of bad options that are unlikely - even on its own terms - to compensate for the most lethal blow to its internal security and its military prestige that any Palestinian organization has ever managed to achieve.

All this was planned and prepared over months and years without Israel knowing a thing about it, and no wonder some Israelis are looking to blame Iran.

I point this out, not as a cause for celebration. I don’t celebrate the murder of old people waiting at bus-stops, or families in their homes or partygoers - though I do question what kind of society would think it was a good idea to hold a ‘trance music’ rave within earshot of the Gaza prison camp.

Some people might depict these monstrous acts as ‘resistance’, but I won’t dignify them with that label. They are unforgiveable and inexcusable war crimes and crimes against humanity, and should be recognized as such, without any caveats. But - and there is a but here - even if too many of Israel’s supporters refuse to recognize it. There is always a but, which has been drowned out by the usual predictable cant, and the Israeli propaganda chorus that describes the entire raid as nothing more than a continuation of the age-old battle between the evil of terrorism and a moral/democratic/human rights-based society that is supposedly innocent.

Innocent people have been killed, but that does not make Israel innocent . There is a context here, that has always been denied by Israel, and by much of the outside world. Approximately 1.7 million of the 2.1 million people who live in the Gaza Strip are refugees or the descendants of refugees, most of whom originally came from the same areas in the south of Israel that Hamas has just targeted.

So they are products of a settler-colonial confrontation - enabled by military occupation - that is still going on in the West Bank, and which has been going on throughout all the decades of the ‘peace process’ and the decades since the possibility of ‘peace’ vanished.

The West knows this perfectly well, and yet no government has ever seriously raised its voice to condemn it, or put any serious pressure on Israel to do anything about it. The pressure is always on one side only.

All these governments knew that even after its withdrawal, Israel is still the de facto occupier of the Gaza Strip, which controls everything that goes in or out, and which has used that power consistently to deny the Palestinians even the slightest possibility of a dignified existence or a liveable future. They know this because they have been complicit in this stranglehold. And in all Gaza’s wars, and the periods of ‘peace’ in between, they barely raised their voices to condemn the military assaults and bombardments that have killed many more Palestinian civilians than the Israelis who have died at the hands of Palestinians.

They gave Israel carte blanche, to the point when it is barely possible to criticize Israel in the UK without running the risk of being called antisemitic or a terrorist sympathizer; when even local councils are banned from engaging in campaigns intended to put pressure on Israel.

Anyone who thought this would bring about ‘peace’, is either dreaming or complicit in the suffocating occupation-at-a-distance or occupation at firsthand that has crushed but never entirely defeated the Palestinians who live under the Israeli boot.

Those who - rightly - condemn the murder of young Israelis, where were their voices over the last few years, when Palestinian children were shot dead in record numbers in the West Bank by settlers and soldiers?

Those who claim to want the Palestinians to demonstrate peacefully, where were they when Palestinian children had their legs and arms broken by Israeli soldiers on the orders of the peacemaker Yitzhak Rabin during the first Intifada? And where were their condemnations when Israeli soldiers shot and wounded thousands of unarmed Palestinians who demonstrated at the border fence in Gaza in 2018?

When are Israeli soldiers ever prosecuted or even criticized for the endless cruelties and humiliations they have heaped on the Palestinians? Why were these voices who condemned the ‘terror’ of Hamas silent when Israel bombed cities all over Lebanon with the sole intention of terrorizing the civilian population into abandoning its support for Hizbollah? Or when the journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was shot in 2021? Where were these peacemakers, while Israeli settlers - with the complicity of the army - terrorized and bullied Palestinian farmers in order to drive them off their land?

These are rhetorical questions, because we know the answer. When Palestinians die, their deaths are barely worth a rueful shake of the head. They are inconsequential collateral damage, anonymous inhabitants of a savage and senseless fanatical world inhabited by people who, in the eyes of so many governments, will never achieve the status of full humanity.

Before this week’s raid, 10,757 Palestinians had been killed since 2000, compared with 1, 346 Israelis, according to the United Nations. Of these, 2, 345 Palestinians were children, compared with 143 Israeli children.

Anyone care to explain that disparity?

When Israelis die, they have names, stories and biographies, because they are ‘victims of terror’. Palestinians, on the other hand, will never be much more than another Muhammad or Ahmed shot dead in a war zone, victims of snipers who are never asked to justify anything, or ‘surgical strikes’ that are never that surgical.

Don’t get me wrong - because I know there are those who specialise in such misunderstandings - they should have names, stories, and biographies. But if humanity is reserved for one side only, don’t expect that the side whose humanity has been denied will not notice. Don’t expect it to observe the rules, or the morals, that you claim to uphold when you don’t uphold them.

And if you talk of peace in the context of a settler-colonial project, facilitated by military occupation, and only expect the side that has been occupied, dispossessed, humiliated and oppressed to recognize the existence of the occupier, while demanding no concessions from the occupier, then you are on a fool’s errand. Or maybe you are just a hypocrite. Either way, you are not doing Israel any favours, and you certainly aren’t doing the Palestinians any.

Nor, of course, is Hamas. Because if there is one thing we know for certain about Gaza’s latest war, it is that Palestinian civilians will pay the greatest price for it. There are those who are already talking of ‘turning Gaza into a car park’ - without even realizing the disparity of force that that implies.

Hamas undoubtedly knew this, and factored it in to its calculations. So whatever satisfactions this raid has brought to those who wanted to hurt the oppressor are likely to be temporary.

Most governments will simply urge ‘restraint’, and ‘stand with Israel’ while Israel takes its revenge for the vengeance that Hamas has taken. When Netanyahu calls for the Gazans to ‘leave’ the prison in which Israel has trapped them, the same governments will be silent, as they have always been silent.

Here in the UK, the scum of the Tory Party are using these awful events to try and attack Corbyn - and by association, the Labour Party - because Corbyn called for an end to the occupation. In the United States, the dregs of MAGA are blaming Biden, while Biden offers Israel the usual uncritical support that the US has always given, with the sole exception of the Suez invasion.

None of this will do a single thing to bring this horrendously destructive conflict to an end. This uncritical support for Israel will merely encourage Israel to indulge its worst instincts. And uncritical support for Hamas will encourage it to indulge its worst instincts.

In 1919 Arthur Balfour - the author of the 1917 Balfour declaration which laid the foundations for the creation of the state of Israel - wrote the following memorandum:

In Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country. The four powers are committed to Zionism and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desire and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.

This was entirely at odds with Balfour’s public pledge ‘that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.’

More than one hundred years later, that essential dishonesty still prevails, after so many wars, rebellions, blows and counter-blows, and occupations. And until it changes, and the West uses its power to bring about a just resolution to this nightmare instead of blindly cheerleading the occupier in everything it does, there will be more raids, more wars, and many more deaths - most of which will be Palestinians - and neither Palestinians nor Israelis will ever know security or peace.