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Criag Mokhiber, a top official from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in his resignation letter dated 28 October asserts:
“As a human rights lawyer with more than three decades of experience in the field, I know well that the concept of genocide has often been subject to political abuse. But the current wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian people, rooted in an ethno-nationalist settler colonial ideology, in continuation of decades of their systematic persecution and purging, based entirely upon their status as Arabs, and coupled with explicit statements of intent by leaders in the Israeli government and military, leaves no room for doubt or debate. In Gaza, civilian homes, schools, churches, mosques, and medical institutions are wantonly attacked as thousands of civilians are massacred. In the West Bank, including occupied Jerusalem, homes are seized and reassigned based entirely on race, and violent settler pogroms are accompanied by Israeli military units. Across the land, Apartheid rules.
This is a text-book case of genocide. The European, ethno-nationalist, settler colonial project in Palestine has entered its final phase, toward the expedited destruction of the last remnants of indigenous Palestinian life in Palestine. What’s more, the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, and much of Europe, are wholly complicit in the horrific assault.”
Let us read the roots of this text-book chapter of atrocities which goes far before the 7th of October. Israel has successfully killed more than 10,000 innocent people in Gaza including around 3,500 children. Targeting houses and big buildings including hospitals and schools has been key to achieve this impressive number of loss of lives in three weeks.
You know Israel is fighting to defend itself against the terror of Hamas who has not approved the almighty potent Israel will to take over all the Palestinian land and transfer the remaining of the Palestinian people whom Ben Gurion had somehow failed to expel in the 1948 independence war or the Nakba of Palestine which witnessed a smart ethnic cleansing of the peaceful people of Palestine with Israel grabbing around 80 percent of mandate Palestine.
Palestine was cleansed in 1948, Israeli neo-historians were among the first to assert this very simple fact: massacres, force, and intimidation were the means to achieve that historic accomplishment. After two decades Israel captured the rest of Palestine, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip which stands for barely the fifth of the land of Palestine. Gradually the Palestinian national liberation movement, the PLO, was convinced that “realistic” solution of giving up the 1948 land and establishing a state on the 1967 borders is a viable solution. However, Israel has never been on the same page. After the Oslo agreement, the Israelis became more decided to carry out a new cunning and patient ethnic cleansing in the West Bank if not in Gaza as well.
The Israelis were convinced that peace and love were going to prevail giving them all necessary time needed to accomplish their cleansing plan. That has been the scenario in the wishful thinking of Israel and the U.S. Unfortunately history has proved that it’s more cunning than that and the story would produce another plot of its own and then, only then, Americans as well as Israelis probably would remember that they would produce another smart and revolutionary Hezbollah in Palestine. Their arms and financial support to the PA in Ramallah have been only undermining the little credibility that it had in the beginning, changing it into completely traitor gangsters in the eyes of the Palestinian people. But let us forget about all this and try to read some history.
American mainstream politics does not like talking about the past. They prefer always to start from the “here and now”, but who can blame them?
When everybody knows that this would entail starting that entire boring story about how they conducted a fabulous genocide war against the native people then imported a few millions from Africa to be enslaved at the temple of American unbelievable heavens of democracy. How could any reasonable man expect America’s politics to fall in love with historical studies?
However, there is no choice. When you face Arabs – a stupid Semitic people – there is no way to avoid history. They would permanently ask for some historical evidence to support your argument or claim…etc. That’s why –perhaps- Moshe Dayan made use of his leisure time to develop his talents as an archeologist. With Arabs you need some narration. And here the narration goes back to some 700 years before Christ when there were some small cities all over greater Syria which were inhabited by the Canaanite people. Some of the Canaanite people would go to Iraq through the Assyrian wars and there they would stay for almost two centuries. When the Persian Empire conquered Iraq, those Canaanites would be converted into monotheism, and they would be sent back to Palestine as a different people. They are the proxy of the Persian Empire’s interest in the area. There had been empires long ago before Columbus arrived in what is now known as the Americas.
In general the Canaanites of Syria had to become gradually Arabs. It’s only those who went to Iraq who developed a new identity as Jews. And that sect had never had any problems with its native brothers.
However, it suffered with foreigners like the Romans and the Crusades. When the Arabs were defeated in Spain in the late decades of the fifteen century, the Spanish started their bloody party with the Arabs and the (Arab) Jews before turning towards the new world to practice the worst genocide and holocaust in history. In less than a century they reduced the population of the “Americas” by more than 90%, almost a hundred million had been killed.
One need not be smart to tell how “different” peoples were treated by the Europeans in the medieval and modern times. The Jews suffered through that history as or even worse than anybody taken to be a heretic or a Muslim or a latin Averroesist. There was no chance for assimilation. Despite the fact that they were citizens of modern Europe, this sadly could make no difference. Just look at these heavens of democracy and see how “others” have been treated, even long before 9/11. They were saved there for the justification of bad luck with nature or God or economy. Human beings in their mythological eras need some “magical” and “supernatural” interpretation of their suffering and the Jews were very appropriate for that ideological/psychological job.
Napoleon had the merit of finding some “business” for the Jews. Why not use them in the war against Britain? He brought the idea of the Jews establishing their state in their promised land Palestine. But Napoleon fell sooner than he thought. And that idea had to wait till India became so important for the British imperialist activities in the 19th century. The British capitalism is indebted to India more than anything else in the “hegemonic” position that it achieved in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
In the context of the invasion of Egypt and later Palestine itself at the end of the First World War (1917), Great Britain adopted Napoleon’s idea. And then the application of the idea did not take more than thirty years. By 1949 Palestine was almost cleansed –to use the term used nowadays by most historians including prominent Israeli historians like Ilan Pappe- and Israel was established on 80% percent of the land of Palestine. And in 1967 Israel in a lightening and fascinating war defeated Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, and so captured a lot of the Arab land including the remaining 20% of Palestine.
Israel did its best since that time to create a situation where there would be nothing called Palestine for Palestinians to claim. When it ran short of Jewish immigration in the last two decades it started to “import” all sorts of “white” people including Russian Orthodox Christian. Some researchers think that a million of them had immigrated to Israel in the 1990s.
Now the Palestinian Arabs- unluckily- are still wandering in the neighborhood. They have not disappeared, which make the story a little bit more complicated than that of the Native American people –the red Indians.
And despite many similarities, history does not look like repeating itself. At the moment the Palestinians are asking for only 22% of their land which was left in 1948. Personally, I think that the best thing for both sides is a one state for Palestinians and white European Israelis. However, Israel is still thinking that there is some hope for some ways –massacres, cleansing, transference, etc. to get rid of the Palestinians completely. This is of course possible, but there is also another possibility that the U.S. loses its powerful hegemonic position or losing its interest in the Middle East after oil withers away and then Israel would not be in the same situation of dominating Arabs and Palestinians so easily.
That’s why I think it’s even in the interest of Israel to give up its racist identity and practices, and to try to be assimilated in the area as part of the Arab world. Being a European white man’s colony is not in favor of the interests of Israel if it hopes to be a normal part of that region of the world. The problem is that the elites in Tel Aviv are now more than any time in the past seeing themselves as superior white people. I do not think this identification with European supremacy is going to be particularly helpful in the common life in this little land. However, this is another story that needs some independent treatment.
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Najeh Shahin is a Palestinian writer based in Ramallah, Occupied Palestine.
