On October 24, a statement by United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres provoked a strong reaction from Israel. Addressing the UN Security Council, the UN chief said that while condemning in the strongest terms the massacre committed by Hamas on October 7, he wanted to remind the world that it cannot was not produced in isolation. He explained that we cannot dissociate 56 years of occupation from our commitment to the tragedy that unfolded that day.
The Israeli government was quick to condemn the statement. Israeli officials demanded Guterres’ resignation, saying he supported Hamas and justified the massacre it carried out. Israeli media also jumped on the bandwagon, claiming among other things that the UN chief “has demonstrated a staggering degree of moral bankruptcy.”
This reaction suggests that a new type of anti-Semitism allegation may now be on the table. Until October 7, Israel had pushed for the definition of anti-Semitism to be expanded to include criticism of the Israeli state and questioning the moral foundations of Zionism. However, contextualizing and historicizing what is happening could also trigger an accusation of anti-Semitism.
Dehistoricizing these events helps Israel and Western governments pursue policies they had avoided in the past for ethical, tactical, or strategic reasons.
Thus, the October 7 attack is used by Israel as a pretext to pursue a genocidal policy in the Gaza Strip. It is also a pretext for the United States to try to reaffirm its presence in the Middle East. And it is a pretext for certain European countries to violate and limit democratic freedoms in the name of a new “war on terrorism”.
But there are several historical contexts that cannot be ignored in what is currently happening in Israel-Palestine. The broader historical context dates back to the mid-19th century, when evangelical Christianity in the West transformed the idea of the “return of the Jews” into a millennia-old religious imperative and advocated the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine as part of steps taken. this would lead to the resurrection of the dead, the return of the Messiah and the end of time.
Theology became politics in the late 19th century and in the years before World War I for two reasons.
First, it served the interests of the British wishing to dismantle the Ottoman Empire and incorporate parts of it into the British Empire. Second, it resonated with members of the British aristocracy, both Jewish and Christian, who were enchanted by the idea of Zionism as a panacea to the problem of anti-Semitism in Central and Eastern Europe, which had produced an unwanted wave of Jewish immigration to Great Britain.
When these two interests merged, they prompted the British government to issue the famous – or infamous – Balfour Declaration in 1917.
Jewish thinkers and activists who redefined Judaism as nationalism hoped that this definition would protect Jewish communities from existential danger in Europe by focusing on Palestine as the desired space for the “rebirth of the Jewish nation.”
In doing so, the Zionist cultural and intellectual project was transformed into a colonial project – which aimed to Judaize historic Palestine, without taking into account the fact that it was inhabited by an indigenous population.
In turn, Palestinian society, rather pastoral at that time and in its early stages of modernization and the construction of a national identity, produced its own anti-colonial movement. Its first significant action against the Zionist settlement project came with the al-Buraq uprising of 1929, and it has not stopped since then.
Another historical context relevant to the current crisis is the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948, which included the forced expulsion of Palestinians to the Gaza Strip from villages on whose ruins some of the Israeli settlements attacked on October 7 were built. These uprooted Palestinians were among the 750,000 Palestinians who lost their homes and became refugees.
This ethnic cleansing was noticed by the world but was not condemned. As a result, Israel has continued to resort to ethnic cleansing as part of its efforts to ensure it has full control over historic Palestine with as few indigenous Palestinians as possible. This included the expulsion of 300,000 Palestinians during and after the 1967 war, and the expulsion since of more than 600,000 people from the West Bank, Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip.
There is also the context of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Over the past 50 years, occupying forces have inflicted persistent collective punishment on Palestinians in these territories, exposing them to constant harassment by Israeli settlers and security forces and imprisoning hundreds of thousands of them.
Since the election of the current Israeli fundamentalist messianic government in November 2022, all of these harsh policies have reached unprecedented levels. The number of Palestinians killed, injured and arrested in the occupied West Bank has skyrocketed. On top of this, the Israeli government’s policy towards Christian and Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem has become even more aggressive.
Finally, there is also the historical context of the 16-year siege of Gaza, where almost half of the population is made up of children. In 2018, the UN already warned that the Gaza Strip would become a place unfit for humanity by 2020.
It is important to remember that the siege was imposed in response to democratic elections won by Hamas following Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from the territory. It is even more important to go back to the 1990s, when the Gaza Strip was surrounded by barbed wire and disconnected from the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem following the Oslo Accords.
The isolation of Gaza, the fence surrounding it, and the growing Judaization of the West Bank made it clear that Oslo, in Israeli eyes, meant occupation by other means and not a path to genuine peace.
Israel controlled the exit and entry points to the Gaza ghetto, even monitoring the type of food that entered – sometimes limiting it to a certain number of calories. Hamas responded to this debilitating siege by launching rockets into civilian areas in Israel.
The Israeli government claimed that these attacks were motivated by the movement’s ideological desire to kill Jews – a new form of Nazim – without taking into account the context of the Nakba and the inhumane and barbaric siege imposed on two million people and the oppression of their compatriots in other regions. of historic Palestine.
Hamas, in many ways, was the only Palestinian group to promise revenge or response to these policies. However, the way he has decided to respond could bring about his own end, at least in the Gaza Strip, and could also serve as a pretext for further oppression of the Palestinian people.
The savagery of his attack cannot be justified in any way, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be explained and contextualized. As horrible as this sounds, the bad news is that this is not a game-changing event, despite the enormous human cost on both sides. What does this mean for the future?
Israel will remain a state established by a colonial movement, which will continue to influence its political DNA and determine its ideological nature. This means that although it presents itself as the only democracy in the Middle East, it will remain a democracy only for its Jewish citizens.
The internal struggle within Israel between what can be called the State of Judea – the settler state wanting Israel to be more theocratic and racist – and the State of Israel – wanting to maintain the status quo – which preoccupied Israel until October 7, will shatter again. . In fact, there are already signs of its return.
Israel will continue to be an apartheid state – as a number of human rights organizations have declared – regardless of how the situation in Gaza develops. The Palestinians will not disappear and will continue their struggle for liberation, with many civil societies on their side and their governments supporting Israel and granting it exceptional immunity.
The solution remains the same: regime change in Israel that would guarantee equal rights for all, from river to sea, and allow the return of Palestinian refugees. Otherwise, the cycle of bloodshed will not end.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
