By Ilan Pappé
Ilan Pappé traces Gaza’s destruction to Zionism and international complicity, urging decolonization and a Palestinian vision of freedom and coexistence.
Over the last year, alongside my other assignments, I have been finishing a short book on the history of Gaza, from the early Ottoman period until the eve of Al-Aqsa Flood operation. This history shows that Gaza is not merely a strip, but a central city and district from 1517 to 1948.
Throughout that history, Gazans confronted human-made and natural disasters and recovered each time: rebuilding their lives and even improving them. Some earthquakes and quite a few conquerors inflicted massive devastation, but all of it pales in comparison to the destruction inflicted by Israel, not only in the last three years but also in its military operations since 2008 and, of course, during the genocide.
And yet, even the worst chapters of previous centuries are not comparable to what the people of the Gaza Strip have endured since 2005. The global and regional silence in the face of what I have termed an incremental genocide, and the indifference to the genocide of 2024, have their roots in the normalization of the 1948 ethnic cleansing.
That same complicity was exposed even more horrendously during the livestreamed genocide of the Gaza Strip starting in October 2023.
The 1948 ethnic cleansing, while known to Western governments and international bodies such as the United Nations, was totally ignored. The message to Israel was that the dehumanization of the Palestinians and their removal from Palestine, by whatever means, were tolerable in the eyes of the international community in general, and Western democracies in particular. At the end of my book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, written in 2006, I concluded that this international attitude would be understood in Israel as a license to complete the ethnic cleansing it commenced in 1948 and that this kind of racism would be part of the DNA of the Zionist movement.
What I did not fully grasp, or probably did not want to imagine, was that such a racist inclination, legitimized internationally, would be translated into a genocidal policy: the massive torture of prisoners and daily pogroms in the West Bank.
But from our vantage point, we can see clearly that these policies are inevitable in a settler-colonial project that could only become genocidal.
This DNA of the Zionist movement has recently been recognized by the Green Party in Britain, as it was by the UN General Assembly in 1975. The fact that the powerful USA was able to secure the revocation of the 1975 resolution, and that the Green Party is now isolated in British and European politics for stating the obvious, clearly illustrates the challenge the solidarity movement with Palestine faces today.
The question is: is there an alternative to demanding that Zionism be at the heart of the discussion on how to stop Israeli policies on the ground? For so many in that movement and for so many Palestinians, this is a rhetorical question.
So, when I look back on the last three years, I do believe we are caught between urgency and strategy. The escalating brutality of Israeli policies against the Palestinians needs to be confronted by the world and the region as the inevitable result of the regime’s ideology and nature, not as the policy of one government or another.
Strategically, this effort would benefit from a clear idea of what will replace the genocidal reality created by present-day Israel.
History provides us with a good model of genuine coexistence between Muslims, Christians and Jews in pre-Zionist Palestine; at some point in the future, we will need to be guided by an authentic and consensual Palestinian vision of what such coexistence would entail in a decolonized and de-Zionized Palestine. Until then, this horrific chapter in the history of modern Palestine is not over, and the need for a proper analysis in the West of why it has occurred remains as acute today as it has been in the past.
– Ilan Pappé is a professor at the University of Exeter. He was formerly a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Haifa. He is the author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, The Modern Middle East, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples, and Ten Myths about Israel. He is the co-editor, with Ramzy Baroud of ‘Our Vision for Liberation.’ Pappé is described as one of Israel’s ‘New Historians’ who, since the release of pertinent British and Israeli government documents in the early 1980s, have been rewriting the history of Israel’s creation in 1948.