“Europeans needed land, the indigenous population resisted its seizure, and so they were exterminated.“
“Settler colonialism destroys to replace.”
These quotes put in a nutshell what has been going on in Palestine for almost a century, driven by Zionism, the founding ideology of the state of Israel, which is now committing a genocide in Gaza.
The first quote is from Kehinde Andrews’ The New Age of Empire.
The second is from Patrick Wolfe’s article “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native” in the Journal of Genocide Research. Wolfe also quotes Theodor Herzl, the founding father of Zionism: “If I wish to substitute a new building for an old one, I must demolish before I construct.”
We need to face the issue in front of us – a genocide of a people is taking place in Gaza against the background of settler-colonialism and racism.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) refers to it as “plausible genocide”. The ICJ is a court of law and, yes, we can imagine how the judges have to wring their legal hands to determine if it is indeed genocide.
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But while the wringing goes on children, women, civilians are dying, starving and malnourished from indiscriminate bombing and forced blockades of food and supplies.
We have to go beyond the wringing. There was no court to wring its hands while 99% of the natives died in what ended up as the genocide of the Americas. There was no court to wring its hands when only about 75,000 Aborigines were left in 1900 out of about one million in 1788, when the British first arrived, leading to the genocide of the natives of Australia.
Surely, we cannot repeat such wringing only to then have history catch up and then find that – oh, umm, in the end the Palestinian population did suffer a genocide at the hands of the Israelis.
As the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights says, “While States debate terminology – is it or is it not genocide? – Israel continues its relentless destruction of life in Gaza, through attacks by land, air and sea, displacing and massacring the surviving population with impunity.” (End unfolding genocide or watch it end life in Gaza: UN experts say States face defining choice | OHCHR).
It is instructive that the concept of a genocide was not conceived of in the West until it happened to white Europeans in Europe itself (ie the Nazi Holocaust).
As Kehinde Andrews points out: “The fact that the term genocide only came to exist in the West during the [Nazi] Holocaust is testament enough to the problem. Systematic killing of hundreds of millions of ‘savages’ in the colonies did not merit the creation of a new concept.”
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has a penchant for describing Israel’s so-called ‘war’ against Hamas as being one between civilisation and barbarism, seeing Israel at the front line of that battle.
The message is that Israel is fighting that civilisational war as the representative of the modern civilised (read Western) world in a region that is inherently lacking in civilisation.
But given the unfettered prolonged bombings, given the wilful starvation of a whole population as a weapon of war, who really are the barbarians?
It is easy to say that the issue is complicated, or to wave things off because the Middle East is always fighting anyway, or to say we cannot do anything.
There are actually things we can do – boycott Israel-complicit products and services, talk about the injustice, write to the US embassy, protest, march…
But one fundamental thing we should also do is to know the history of the problem. This is important so that we do not just see each episode of violence as just another episode but as part of a long train of ongoing historical injustice.
We too were colonised and have been subject to racism. We should thus be better able to empathise with the Palestinians who, to this day, still face the violent end of it all and are fighting for their survival, dignity, freedom and self-determination.
Injustice from the start
The state of Israel was formed on the basis of a UN partition plan adopted by a resolution of the UN General Assembly on 29 November 1947.
At that time, the indigenous Palestinians made up a two-thirds’ majority of the population while a third were Jewish newcomers who owned less than 6% of the total land area.
Yet, Resolution 181 of November 1947 granted 56% of the land to the minority Jewish settlers and just 42% to the majority native Palestinians. On that basis, the state of Israel was established on 15 May 1948.
The division of the land was completely disproportionate to the demographic realities on the ground. This was driven partly by a desire to compensate the Jews for the Nazi Holocaust in Europe.
We can see how fundamentally unjust this was, especially from the perspective of the Palestinian natives of the land. Your land is partitioned without your consent with a disproportionate majority portion given to newly arrived settlers, to compensate them for a genocide they suffered in Europe that had nothing to do with you.
It is no wonder that such an unjust and ill-conceived plan sparked protest actions leading to what became known as the first Arab-Israeli war. The dispossession of the Palestinians had begun.
Just one day after UN Resolution 181, organised fear, militia violence and expulsions started to be employed against the Palestinians. This was carried out by Zionist paramilitary groups with a series of attacks on Palestinian villages and neighbourhoods.
These initial Zionist assaults were severe enough to cause the displacement of almost 75,000 people. This was the start of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine – well before the Zionist state of Israel was proclaimed in May 1948.
On 10 March 1948 the infamous “Plan Dalet” was adopted by the Zionist leadership. This was a plan to ethnically cleanse the country to make it as fully Jewish as possible, with as few Palestinians as possible. It led to the uprooting of Palestinians from urban centres accompanied by massacres (most notably, at Deir Yassin).
This was the unfolding of the Nakba of 1948, described by Rashid Khalidi in his highly accessible book The Hundred Years’ War on Palestineas a “seemingly endless train wreck”.
By the end of the first phase of the Nakba – before Israel’s founding on 15 May 1948 – about 300,000 Palestinians had been displaced and key economic, civic and cultural centres had been devastated.
The second phase, following 15 May, saw the defeat of weak Arab armies and further expulsions and massacres resulting in the displacement of another 400,000 people – a total of about 700,000 native Palestinian inhabitants.
(The Nakba has never ended and continues with the ongoing displacement of Palestinians over the whole of the occupied territory of Palestine with its worst manifestation in Gaza today.)
Through the use of armed force, the original 56% allocated to Israel under the UN partition plan was increased to 78% and was never reversed.
The series of events that has led to the historical injustice of the case of Palestine was spearheaded by premeditated ethnic cleansing.
Ilan Pappe’s authoritative work The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine draws on the Israeli military archives, Zionist leaders’ diaries, their minutes of meetings and Palestinian historical sources. It establishes a “clear-cut case of an ethnic cleansing operation … regarded under international law today as a crime against humanity”.
It is revealing that David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, wrote to his son in 1937: “The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as war.” As we have seen above, war he did make with the establishment of the state of Israel 11 years later in 1948.
The underlying idea that “the Arabs will have to go” has remained part of Israel’s existence, with the right-wing government today being explicit about it.
This is the first in a series of four articles. Look up the other three articles here.
- Tegakkan maruah serta kualiti kehidupan rakyat
- Galakkan pembangunan saksama, lestari serta tangani krisis alam sekitar
- Raikan kerencaman dan keterangkuman
- Selamatkan demokrasi dan angkatkan keluhuran undang-undang
- Lawan rasuah dan kronisme
