“The old world is dying and the new world is struggling to be born; Now is the time of monsters,” wrote the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci in 1929.
These words come to mind as I observe the rapid disintegration of apartheid Israel, in the historical sense. It is a settlement colony that fails in its mission, namely to wipe out the indigenous population and replace it with “civilized” settlers. As the apartheid regime slowly implodes, Palestinians, particularly Palestinians in Gaza, are paying a terrible price.
The “Jewish State,” as it describes itself, has committed unimaginable war crimes and violated countless international laws. And he managed to escape all these crimes thanks to the unlimited support of the colonial West.
Nevertheless, the collapse continues apace. Many have failed to understand that this disintegration is inevitable, including, paradoxically, the leaders of the Palestinian people. It was for this lack of foresight that Palestinian leaders signed the Oslo Accords and made the “racist two-state solution” a national slogan disguised as “independence.”
Oslo effectively erased the colonial nature of Palestinian oppression and instead presented it as an “ancient war” over land ownership. By signing the accords, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat completely ignored the reality of settler colonialism from which Palestinians suffer.
Immediately after the handshake between Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1993, Palestinian academic Edward Said wrote: “Now that the euphoria has worn off a little, we can take a closer look at the agreement between and the PLO with the necessary composure. . It turns out to be far more inadequate and unbalanced for most Palestinians than many initially thought. The vulgar staging of the White House ceremony, Arafat’s humiliating performance thanking the world for giving up most of the rights of the Palestinian people, and Bill Clinton’s laughable role as a 20th century Roman emperor accompanying his two vassals. kings in rituals of reconciliation and submission: all this could only temporarily obscure the truly incredible scale of the Palestinian capitulation.
Sometimes I wonder if Arafat and the rest of the PLO leaders had read Said, Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, Ghassan Kanafani or any of the anti-colonial figures of their era.
Political Zionism, claiming to represent “the Jewish nation,” emerged in 19th-century Europe and naturally imitated European ideologies of the time. He claimed “the right” to establish his own state on any territory in the world, anywhere. He set his sights on Palestine, declared it to be “a land without a people for a people without a land” and did what Europeans had already done in Africa, in the Americas, in Australia, in New Zealand and in parts of Asia.
Genocide – as numerous anti-colonial works have documented – is and always has been an intrinsic component of settler colonialism. They are inseparable. And this is the case with colonial Zionism.
We cannot understand the live massacre of the two million inhabitants of Gaza and the fact that the majority of Israelis boast about it on social networks without linking it to this hegemonic colonial ideology.
Since its creation, Israel has systematically pursued the “elimination” of indigenous people. Gaza is currently paying the price for what leading Israeli fascist historian Benny Morris considers Israel’s failure to “transfer” all Palestinians out of Palestine in 1948.
Indeed, by 1948, Gaza became the world’s largest refugee camp, filled with indigenous Palestinians who refused to endure ethnic cleansing and genocide and who constantly reminded Israelis of “unfinished business.” They now face the wrath of a genocidal Israel determined to establish its claims as fact – that “the Palestinian people do not exist”.
But the prosperity of apartheid and settler colonialism is now history. A state based on these principles cannot survive.
Amid the genocide in Gaza this may not be as obvious, but let us remember that the fall of the apartheid regime in South Africa began in the darkest moments of South African history, in the late 1980s, when everything seemed so bleak. At that time, people did not realize that the racist regime was disintegrating and a new dawn was approaching.
Resistance, in its various forms, mixed with the highest level of “sumud” (firmness) has become the norm in Gaza. This resistance and sumud should spread throughout historic Palestine and other places.
Gaza has become the center of the universe. If it fails, the countries of the South will follow suit. The world has no choice but to dismantle the only remaining apartheid regime that is committing genocide unprecedented in the 21st century.
Sometimes I dream of having the opportunity to visit the future and return with a message. In the future, I will drive my car on the coastal road from Gaza in the south to Haifa in the north, listening to the angelic voice of Fairuz and telling my daughters about the horrible past when a state called Israel banned us from visiting the rest of our country. . I tell them about a time when the world stood by while Israel massacred tens of thousands of children and women and finally people of conscience decided enough was enough.
As the American writer Mike Davis so eloquently said: “What keeps us together, ultimately, is our love for each other and our refusal to bow our heads, to accept the verdict, too. almighty as it seems. »
I come back from the future full of optimism and think that “the time of monsters” will soon be over.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.
