Israel Had No Gloves To Take Off

The effectively stateless Palestinians have always borne the brunt of Israeli genocidal violence.

Photo by Ahmed Abu Hameeda on Unsplash

Note: You can watch or listen to a video version of this article here.

Who authored the violence?

That is the question we must ask. It is the question that corporate media never entertains. CNN, NPR, MSNBC, Fox News, the BBC, none of them give historical context to their stories. And thus, every act of violence between Israel and Palestine is treated as an isolated, incomprehensible incident.

Who authored the violence?

The media did not respond this whole last year as Israel stepped up its oppression against Palestinians. Young Palestinian men throwing rocks were shot and killed. Old women worshipping in the holy lands were beaten and harassed by Israeli Defense Forces. Palestinian olive groves were burned. Their water was poisoned. Their farms were destroyed. Family homes continued to be stolen and bulldozed by Israeli settlers. Israel elected its most far-right, unapologetically fascist and ethno-nationalist government in its entire history. The Palestinians, as always, are paying the heaviest price.

The most recent attack by Hamas fighters against Israelis — brazen, cruel, and horrible as all violence is — was a long time coming. The disproportionate violence being carried out by Israel in response to the Hamas attacks was predictable, and it is nothing new. The difference this time is that Israeli leaders are not even pretending anymore. “We are at war,” Netanyahu said, echoing George W. Bush in the dark days after 9/11. One member of the Israeli Knesset called for a “Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 48,” referencing the ethnic cleansing of approximately 750,000 Palestinians when Israel was imposed upon the land in 1948. Palestinians call this violent event the Nakba, or Catastrophe. Israeli veterans of the Nakba have admitted to mass murdering Palestinian families and committing rapes and looting.

“I ordered a full siege on the Gaza Strip,” the Israeli Defense Minister recently said, “No power, no food, no gas. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.” Every denizen of Gaza — over fifty percent of whom are under the age of 18 — already chronically short on food and medical care, is now suffering under an Israeli bombing campaign that makes no pretense about “targeted” or “surgical” strikes anymore.

Collective punishment is a war crime.

Israel can so easily besiege Gaza right now, using its overwhelming military and technological might (supported by Western governments and their weapons manufacturers and big tech firms), because it has effectively been blockading the region ever since Palestinians democratically elected Hamas to majority seats in the Palestinian Authority in 2006. Since then, Gaza’s borders have been tightly controlled, with few people being let in or out to visit their families in the West Bank or even for medical emergencies and humanitarian needs. Israel has murdered people who have tried to get food and other supplies to Gaza from the Mediterranean Sea. It is this state of affairs that has lead many people to accurately call Gaza the world’s largest and most densely populated open-air prison.

Who authored the violence?

Today, the mediocre leaders of the Western neoliberal world collectively stand up, only after Palestinians have dared to defend themselves, and they proudly proclaim that “Israel has a right to defend itself,” thereby erasing the ample Israeli settler violence that has been used against Palestinians for generations. As journalist CJ Werleman notes:

“Israel has a right to self-defence” is what the Obama administration said when Israeli forces killed 2,200 Palestinian civilians, including 500 children, during its 2014 invasion of Gaza. They are the same words the Trump administration offered when Israeli snipers shot and killed hundreds of unarmed Palestinian protesters, journalists and medics during the Great March of Return protests in 2018-19.

This sentiment also ignores the fact that, under international law, Palestinians, as an occupied people, are right to use “armed struggle” against the occupying force. The U.N. resolution about this is clear. It reaffirms “the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial and foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle.”

In the 2006 elections that saw Hamas, considered a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the U.S., elected to the Palestinian Authority, the Western neoliberal world, that sole purveyor of global democracy, collectively lost its mind and shouted “No! We didn’t mean democracy like that!” The U.S. congress quickly passed a law barring any aid to the Palestinian Authority unless it demonstrated “progress toward purging from its security services individuals with ties to terrorism, dismantling all terrorist infrastructure and cooperating with Israel’s security services, halting anti-American and anti-Israel incitement, and ensuring democracy and financial transparency.” Likewise, the “Middle East Quartet,” composed of the United Nations, the United States, the European Union, and the Russian Federation, issued a statement, saying, “A two state solution to the conflict requires all participants in the democratic process to renounce violence and terror, accept Israel’s right to exist, and disarm.”

Wait, what? So that means Israel also needs to renounce terror, accept Palestine’s right to exist, and disarm? Yeah fuckin’ right. Netanyahu’s own party platform specifically denies support for a Palestinian state.

Three years after the Palestinian elections, Israel launched Operation Cast Lead against the people of Gaza, resulting in the deaths of around 1,400 Palestinians, of whom 1,172 were deemed civilians, including 342 children. Hamas responded with rocket attacks that killed three Israeli civilians. Later, in 2014 fighting, Israel killed 2,202 Palestinians, of whom 1,371 were deemed “non-hostile.” In the same fighting, 68 Israelis were killed, five of whom were civilian. Based on these numbers alone, Hamas is better at avoiding civilian casualties than Israel is.

The U.N.’s 500-page Goldstone Report concludes that Operation Cast Lead was “a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population,” and that “the repeated failure to distinguish between combatants and civilians appears to…have been the result of deliberate guidance issued to soldiers…” The IDF kidnapped, tortured, and used Palestinians as human shields in the operation.

Doesn’t this all sound familiar? We had to destroy the village to save it. Kill anything that moves. We’ll show those “human animals” what happens when they vote for Hamas. What we say goes. Collective punishment rules the day.

A vote for Hamas is a vote for terrorism, while a vote for the genocidal right-wing Israeli party currently in power is a vote for democracy. Never mind that Israel is a regularly belligerent nation that bombed Egypt, bombed Tunisia, is currently bombing Syria, invaded, occupied, and subjected Lebanon to state terror throughout the 1980s and ‘90s; never mind that Israel regularly assassinates Iranian civilians; that it is carrying out the longstanding occupation and ethnic-cleansing of Palestine; never mind that Israel is the only nuclear-armed superpower in the region; all of these actions are legitimate means of self-defense, whereas every rock thrown by a Palestinian child at an Israeli armored vehicle is an act of international terrorism.

The denotation of an individual or group as terroristic is a thought-ending designation. “How terrorism was defined, and by whom, was rarely asked in the mainstream media in the decades after 9/11,” writes Antony Loewenstein in The Palestine Laboratory, “…There is an interchangeability between terrorism experts who appear in the media to talk about the never-ending risk from insurgents big and small, deliberately conflating Hamas with Hizbollah, al-Qaeda with ISIS, and the Taliban with the Islamic Republic of Iran as if they were all the same irrational, Jew-Hating force to be defeated by military means alone.” Taken to an extreme, such inability to reckon with nuance allows for overheated rhetoric such as when Israeli politician Yair Lapid equated the nonviolent Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel with Islamic terrorism, saying “we must remind the world that behind these movements are the people responsible for 9/11, for the terror attacks in Madrid and London, and for the 250,000 people already killed in Syria.” This reactionary assessment came from a relative “centrist” in Israeli politics, no less.

Who authored the violence?

The United States gives more annual funding to Israel than to any other foreign nation (barring the recent flood of unaccounted arms and money to Ukraine). The ruling American political class, both conservative and liberal, is staunchly Zionist. As such, it has blood on its hands. America is a full-partner in human slaughter. It is we, Israel and America, a partnership made in hell, who are the terrorists. Some Palestinians mince no words about this. In the documentary Killing Gaza, free to watch and linked below, one bereaved Palestinian father had this to say to America:

We thank the Americans, who are very good people, who treat us kindly and respectfully. They give us a loaf of bread and a sandwich, and they give Israel missiles, tanks, and warplanes...This boy here will make an atomic bomb in his house in 10-15 years and erase Israel completely. Why? Because he saw his father die before him, he saw his uncle martyred before him, his family house was looted, and from now on he has to live in a tent. This little kid won’t have food or water. So how can we lift the hatred from the hearts of these children? How can we lift it? In what way? Tell us. How do we teach these children to feel joy again? Should we kill them all with missiles? Or should we fool them with a piece of bread? No, he can’t be fooled. Who wants American bread, young children? Obama is sending you some small balloons, do you want them?

In 2018, A Palestinian man took to Facebook and shared a post that spurred the Great March of Return. He wrote:

What could the occupation bristling with arms do to a mass of human beings advancing peacefully? Kill ten, twenty, or fifty of them? And then what? What could it do in the face of an unwavering mass peacefully marching? [We are] a people that want life and nothing more. Nothing can delay this idea but the shackles of our self-delusions. We are dying in this tiny besieged place, so why not bolt before the knife reaches our throats? Since they are plotting to kick us south after slaughtering us wholesale, why don’t we preempt them and begin to run north? If there must be a price to pay, then let it be in the direction of what is right, in the direction of returning to Palestine, where we can get new land and deepen the enemy’s existential impasse. Once we implement this idea and achieve a historic breakthrough, we’ll find out that we’ve wasted many years on hesitation and forbearance. Revolt! You have nothing to lose, but your chains.

I appreciate the allusion to Marx and Engels in the final line. More to the point, his sentiment is strikingly similar to the logic of the Jewish Warsaw Ghetto Uprising against Nazi extermination (which was stamped out by a final, brutal Nazi assault on the Ghetto which set most of the buildings aflame). One of that uprising’s surviving leaders, Marek Edelman, himself a staunch anti-Zionist, wrote: “One can hardly speak of victories when Life itself is the reason for the fight and so many people are lost, but one thing can surely be stated about this particular battle: we did not let the Germans carry out their plans. They did not evacuate a single living person.”

Edelman understood the parallels between the uprising he helped organize in Warsaw and the Palestinian struggle. “Always with the oppressed, never with oppressors,” he would say. Edelman knew that Zionism, the mere notion of an ethno-nationalist state, must inevitably lead to apartheid. There can be no peace under apartheid. There can be no democracy under apartheid. There can be no justice under apartheid. There can be no rule of law under apartheid.

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is a shining, towering example for people all over the world, including the Palestinians, of an oppressed people carrying out a righteous armed struggle against their oppressors. A people so desperate, as the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto were, and as the Palestinians in Gaza are today, will finally revolt, deciding at last not to let the oppressor choose the time and place and means of their oppression, of their deaths. This is not a mystery. It is not surprising. It is not something to sanctimoniously judge. It is human. Tragically so.

From the Native Americans to the Haitian Revolution to the anti-colonial struggles of Vietnam, India, South Africa, Kenya, the Philippines, and of course Palestine, the colonizer will always find itself menaced by the same violence it uses to maintain its own violent system of colonization. From the river to the sea, the colonizer will never know peace.

Who authored the violence?

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