October 7 and the Continued Process of Decolonization!
My contribution to a panel discussion organized by Webster Memorial Church in Jamaica on the historical roots of the Palestinian conflict!
First, let me say that I’m happy to be here among these distinguished panelists and how very pleased I am to play my small part in placing October 7 and all that has followed within history.
The Occupied Territories! When we say that what do we mean?: land (Gaza, East Jerusalem (EJ) and the West Bank…EJ is part of WEST BANK). The Gaza Strip, though, the frequent flashpoint of much of the struggle between the Palestinians and Israel is 25 miles long and 3.7-7.5 miles wide, and it is densely populated by 2.3 million people, half of which are children. It is important to get that deep inward feeling of what we are referring to when we say “The Gaza Strip” and the place it has had in global history and continues to have.
It is quite interesting (a very bland word) in this discussion on the issue of the current Israeli war on Gaza and I say Israeli war because it is not a war in the general sense of armed conflict between two entities of somewhat matching force/armies…it has never been. Gaza is not a state…it has no army. Gaza hasn’t the state-of-the-art sophisticated weaponry that Israel has. Gaza doesn’t have nuclear bombs…Israel does, so it is quite a David versus Goliath violent confrontation and not a war in the true sense of the term.
This discussion reaches back into history and that’s good. Because if our point of departure is October 7 we are discrediting over 75 years of brutality by the Israeli Apartheid state…normalizing and fictionalizing those 75 years of Israeli brutality!
To begin at October 7 is to devalue decades of Palestinian history…to decontextualize and dehistoricize the events of October 7 as the Jewish historian Ilan Pappe so rightly notes.
When the UN Secretary-General admonished that we should not look at October 7 in a vacuum, he was uttering what most likely has resided in his consciousness, perhaps for some time and I daresay in the minds of many in the Western political establishment — public self aside. It is a fact that cannot be overlooked. The Palestinian struggle is a National Liberation struggle and we have to make that very important distinction. More specifically it is an anti-colonial struggle. It is an anti-settler colonial struggle. And it is within that historical framework that we must place any discussion on the conflict.
If we begin at October 7 we are making a sociological error — we are making an historical error because we are looking at the manifestation (symptom) of violence rather than the fundamental root causes (source) of the violence that took place (Ilan Pappe).
If you do not deal with the source of violence it sets it up to recur. And to get to that source you have to reach way back into history. The source of violence lies in the history of the Palestinian Liberation Struggle.
I divided my presentation into what I see as two historical landmarks but weightily on Zionism because the Palestinian issue like any other is much more than a chronicled history (so many are frightened by the study of history because all they see are dates). History is more than dates — - its examination is incomplete if its stories are not anchored in the politics that support and uphold the different landmarks/sign posts themselves. History is politics as much as politics is history — -the two are inseparable, and no more than in this conflict.
Precipitously, it is easy to use 1948 as the recorded factual date of this conflict, but ostensibly this conflict began in the 1890s when the idea for a Jewish homeland was publicly articulated in 1896 by Theodor Herzl’s Der Judenstaat.
In August of 1897, Herzl began his campaign addressing the Jewry at, the First Zionist Conference at Basle. It was here that the establishment of political machinery as per the World Zionist Organization was formed. Subsequently, alliances with Britain (it holding the Mandate over Palestine) saw the production of the Balfour Declaration of 1919 permitting Jewish immigration. It is important to include that at 1919 [Balfour Declaration] the Palestinian national/anti-colonialist movement at the outset had two clear principles which they conveyed to the West from the moment Zionism immigration began:
- The Right to Self-determination for Palestinians. That Palestinins also deserved that right. It was said to the US (Woodrow Wilson) in 1918.
2. Democracy: if you are taking us out of 400 years of Ottoman rule and you want us to decide our post-Ottoman future, what will that look like? We want to decide if we want to be part of greater Syria, an independent Arab Palestine or a federated Arab republic.
The two Palestinian national objectives were made clear in the diplomatic negotiations from 1918 to 1948 but were never respected because while the principle of self-determination and democracy is a foundational principle in the West and is the foundation on which to build the new post-colonial such as Palestine, it didn’t to apply to Palestinians because Palestine was already gifted to be a Jewish state based on some contortion that Jews are a minority and the principle of self-determination cannot apply to Palestinians and also the principle of majority or democratic election.
So an idea that was always there in the consciousness, at any rate, began to take shape in 1919. But the holocaust gave legs to this idea of a Jewish national homeland which saw the number of migrants vastly increasing. Tensions escalated after, culminating in the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 which led to the establishment of the state of Israel. This event remains the focal point of the Palestinian narrative as it led to the displacement of over 700,000 Palesstinains and those Palestinian Arabs or Arab- Israelis who remained turned into second class citizens.
Since 1948 there has been sustained Palestinian resistance: The People’s Liberation Organization (PLO) led by Yasser Arafat emerged as the leading global voice of that resistance and was formed in 1964.
In 1967, what was dubbed the Six-Day War was fought between mainly Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Israel which started when Israel launched a pre-emptive strike against Egypt. Israel won the war but the most significant thing coming out of the war was that the borders were redrawn which changed the Middle East, aggravated the 1948 crisis (called Nakba by Palestinians ), and led to where we are today, when against international law Israel took control of the Sinai Peninsula (Egyptian), the Golan Heights (Syrian), the Gaza Strip and the West Bank and East Jerusalem (Jordanian). This became a major sticking point because of the loss of Arab land again and the implications for Palestinian independence. It meant that Palestinians were now living under Israeli occupation.
Resistance has come markedly in:
INTIFADAS — uprising against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
FIRST INTIFADA - 1987 - 1993 — was a sustained series of protests and violent riots carried out by Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories and Israel. The first began as fatigue got worse as the 20 year mark of military occupation approached. The uprising lasted from December 1987 and out of that emerged the Oslo Accords in 1994. A central piece of document aimed at achieving peace and a two state solution based on Resolution 242 of the United Nations Security Council, 1967 borders. PLO recognized Israel’s right to exist and vice versa.
SECOND INTIFADA - 2000 - 2005
Known as the Al-Aqsa Intifada, it was a major uprising, characterized by a period of heightened violence in the Palestinian territories and Israel between 2000 and 2005.
A CRITICAL LANDMARK CAME IN 2006, when the military group HAMAS won elections. The response to this among other things was Israel placing a blockade on Gaza (the seat of Hamas) that shut down air, land and sea spaces, restrict the flow of essential goods, contribute to economic hardship, and limits the freedom of movement for Gaza’s residents.
Exit and entry into Gaza is prohibited by sea and air. There are only three crossings to go in and out of Gaza. Two of them controlled by Israel and one by Egypt. According to a 2022 report by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the blockade has significantly reduced movement of people and goods due to reduction in number of exit permits by Israel. Gaza has the highest employment rate in the world — -youth unemployment at 60% is at staggering levels.
IN ADDITION TO ALL THIS, GAZA UNDERGOES SEASONAL INCURSIONS REFERRED TO AS MOWING THE GRASS.
The expression “Mowing The Grass” has been used, quite casually by Israelis and Israeli militants for over a decade now. It is a metaphor that describes the military operations that Israel launches on the Gaza Strip on a seasonal basis. The disportionate use of force is what is significant. The grass/lawn is required to be constantly mowed, which suggests that Israel conducts these operations under the pretext of limiting Hamas’ power but they can be easily classified as a part of the policy of incremental ethnic cleansing, because when mowing the grass, one would cut down everything in their path. This would mean that in the process of trying to ‘eliminate militants’ , killing children and women would simply be considered “accidents” or collateral damage.
Major attacks have been carried out by Israeli forces on Gaza since 2005 — - the year it withdrew from the Gaza Strip:
MOST NOTABLY: December 2008 — Israel launched a 22-day military offensive in Gaza after rockets were fired at the southern Israeli town of Sderot. About 1,400 Palestinians were murdered.
July 2014 – 2,100 Palestinians were killed in Gaza along with 73 Israelis, including 67 soldiers.
March 2018 – unarmed Palestinian protests
called the MARCH OF THE RIGHT OF RETURN began at Gaza’s fenced border with Israel. Israeli troops opened fire to keep them back. More than 170 Palestinians were killed in several months of protests, prompting fighting between Hamas and Israeli forces. STEEL bullets disguised as rubber bullets were used to target the lower extremities shattering the bones and leading to paralysis.
So, that is the basic anatomy of the history, the historical context of the Palestine conflict. But we are bound to place the struggle within the context of a National Liberation struggle and make that connection between all National Liberations struggles: the slave resistance against colonialism/imperialism/settler colonialism in the New World: the Maroons, the Haitian Revolution, the National liberation struggles in Afrika: Algeria, Mozambique, Angola, the Mau Mau in Kenya, the ANC in South Africa, Kashmir, East Timor, the continued struggle of the Irish Republican Army and, the struggle for independence by the people of West Papua.
It is our duty to place the Palestinian National Liberation struggle, generally within the context of the struggle against Western imperialism/colonialism and settler colonialism but particularly within the context of Zionism.
To talk about the conflict is to conflate it with Zionism.
The Politics of Zionism
Zionism is one of the clearest expressions of the anatomy of racial hate! Strong language, but as Jewish historian Ilan Pappe exhorts, the language we use to counter Israel and Western propaganda is very important. It is crucial because we need to understand that Zionism and the the Jewish question are branded on the minds of the governing authority in the West, and until recent years on the consciousness of the global public. The manipulation, indoctrination, and fabrication of the truth by the Western political status quo is real and achieved through the overt and subliminal messages sent through the media, the entertainment industry, documentaries, memorials, monuments , documentaries, and Christianity. If American military support is what upholds Israel — is the enforcer — Christianity is the social philosophy/ideology that underpins it and which carefully inoculates Israel. We saw it immediately after October 7: the deliberate planting of the word UNPROVOKED attack and the ugly, manipulated exhortation that ISRAEL HAS A RIGHT TO DEFEND ITSELF, in global consciousness — -normalizing and fictionalizing the history of over 75 years of oppression, 56 years of occupation and 17 years of blockade. That didn’t matter! And it didn’t matter because to acknowledge the past is to justify the Palestinian Liberation Struggle within the context of historical liberation struggles.
I’m going to call it what it is: Zionism is a political ideology used the justify a colonial project of ethnic cleansing, genocide, and land theft based on hijacked religion, white supremacist/fascist notions of racial superiority, differentials and entitlement. The same ideology used to uphold slavery. It is so very important to make the linkage.
It is unreservedly a racist ideology belonging to the family of racism (Pappe) that cannot be propagandized historically, as a national liberation movement. Neither can it claim a place among the history of the national movements of Western Europe, Asia or Latin America, according to Pappe.
Zionism was birthed in racism. If not in origin it was created to justify (as the Europeans did to justify the Transatlantic Chattel Slavery) what happened and continues to happen to the Palestinians. The racist rhetoric coming out of the Israeli leadership after October 7 is a testament.
It is this racist ideological thinking that upholds settler colonialism and makes the elimination of the native population critical to the project of settler colonialism: you want as much of the land with as few of the people as possible. The US ethnically cleansed the Indigenous population and those who were left were sent to reservations.
Ilan Pappe and Ahmed Paul Keeler explains it well.
The demographic, geographic, population and land dimensional issues are solved through the eliminatory strategy of ethnic cleansing, genocide, and apartheid! The success and duration of the process hinge on the population ratio and the sociopolitical environment within which it is taking place: how strong and widespread are the resistance forces, how armed, how organized? In other words the military might of the resistance forces vis-a-vis the settler occupier. In terms of the Palestinian conflict, the PLO, and later Hamas and other resistance, are not a state, with an army going against Israel, which has both. The combat is uneven and heavily weighted in favour of Israel!
Since 1929 we have witnessed the Zionist Policy of Elimination. The genocide taking place now the most overt and deliberate we have seen since 1948.
An idea in the Zionist consciousness moved from a musing to the ethnic cleansing, expulsion, and establishment of Israel at the expense of the destruction of Palestinian villages and other mass atrocities to achieve the goal of an Israeli state. That is the origin of the 75-year-long conflict — - that is the point of the departure in understanding October 7, 2023! That origin has its roots in the Zionist racist ideology and how fundamental that is to the elimination of the native Palestinians.
Historically racism has underpinned all settler colonial projects to justify land expropriation: you have to eliminate the indigenous population — - there is no getting around that. This was no different from the genocide of the indigenous people in America. Again, I emphasize the importance of locating the Palestinian cause within the history of settler colonialism. It is important to do so, so that you can understand and explain October 7 and not feel that you are losing your moral capacity (Pappe).
Western Double Standards!
But what makes the creation of Israel more inexplicably profound was that it was done after WW2, the year of the Declaration of Human Rights (DHR) — the groundbreaking document that heralded the era of decolonization as a sign of Enlightenment and a seismic shift in global politics — - a move towards a moral based sociopolitical order as a bulwark against the recurrence of the atrocities that marked World War II. How contemptuous that two apartheid states were created in the very same year. The West turned a blind eye to Israel’s ethnic cleansing in 1948 and it is doing it once again. The message is that rules -based international laws and the the landmark Declaration of Human Rights are not applicable to Israel.
So, on goes Israel for 75 years, positioning its unrelenting ethnic cleansing as a subject/function of National Security/survival of the Israeli ethnostate or as we have always heard, whenever there is an act of resistance from the Palestinians, and what has been repeated ad nauseum since October 7, is that “Israel has a right to defend itself”. But if you are a critical thinker, if you invoke the history of over 75 years, if you invoke the legal instruments under international law how can an occupier claim a right to self-defense? As per international law, it is the occupied that has the right to resist and defend itself. Again, as long as you contextualize, you preserve your moral capacity to see October 7 for what it is — an act of decolonization like so many that history has witnessed before. An act that reaches back to the consequences of Israel being given the blessing to commit ethnic cleansing:
- Over thirty-six villages decimated between 1948 and 1967.
- The further expulsion of over 700,000 West Bank Palestiniand in 1967. Ethnic cleansing became a claimed right by Israel — - it became a pathology — - the creation of a Palestinian ghetto enclave, separate and unequal from historical Palestine.
So here is where resistance is born. Here is where October 7 was born. Isn’t revolt a logical and natural response to oppression? Isn’t it conditions like these that have fostered and fuelled rebellions throughout history?
Yet rather than contextualize, the Western political oligarchy with MSM in tow has launched a cognitive warfare, reinforcing Islamophobic tropes with no evidence to corroborate allegations of rape was a tool of war and dead, decapitated babies — - the kind of arsenal designed to make anyone that falls outside Western ideals, “Others”. We see it with how they stereotype Afrikans, for example. This is a tool of western imperialism. To debunk it becomes imperative and we can only do so if we invoke the history of what societies were before the fatalistic contact with European/Western imperialism. Black Panther invoked the question of “What if?” and it is that same kind of musing that we must apply to the Palestinian conflict: What if Zionism hadn’t destroyed the peaceful coexistence of Muslims, Jews, and Christians that existed before 1948? What if Zionism hadn’t inserted itself into a fully operational society that existed before the Zionist migration? What did Palestinians lose to the fatalistic Zionist imposition and how is that linked to October 7?
It is important in our revisitation into the past to have an understanding of the brutality and racist ideological oppression that is at the heart of Zionism and how it was and has continued to be propped up by the Western status quo — - primarily the US. This pillar is an important reminder of what Zionism did or what Palestine could have been.
We have to put this conflict within the context of the past, that places it firmly within the context of National Liberation struggles and the decolonization process that began after WW2, but was withheld from the people of Palestine. What happened on October 7 was a part of the continuing struggle of the Palestinians to free themselves from Zionist settler colonialism — - just like the people of Apartheid South Africa. None of this must be lost in the war on Gaza and the genocide taking place in real time. The struggle for Palestinian liberation continues. You don’t have to condemn Hamas because you can never lose your moral compass if you contextualize October 7.
The coverage in the global North Atlantic alliance/ Global North (media and academia) has been to take an event and start with it as if it has no history. The Ukraine war was antecedent to the coverage of October 7.
For example, MSM has hammered away at the so called atrocities of October 7, conveniently omitting that on the ruins of Palestinian villages were built some of the kibbutz that were briefly occupied by Hamas and some of the Hamas fighters. It was on these ruins that the musical festival for peace, ironically, was taking place when across the fence was unimaginable suffering and oppression in the Gaza ghetto.
Palestinians want and deserve peace and the only thing standing in the way is the ethnostate, Israel! The solution to this conflict is and has always been in the hands of Israel to do the right thing! If we never question the basic right for liberation and independence then why now? Why is it so different for Palestinians than it is for Ukrainians?
