When Ted Hughes wrote Apple Tragedy, upending the story in the Genesis, it wasn’t a simple act of mocking but an attempt to problematise the grand Christian narrative of creation. As Hamas fighters clash with the Israeli Goliath, something akin to that is happening in the war of narratives across the world.
The grand narrative, led by the United States and its western allies and pushed 24/7 by the mainstream western media, presents Israel as the victim. This narrative, seasoned by both a sense of guilt at centuries of persecution of Jews by the Christian world — culminating in the horrors of the Holocaust — and modern strategic considerations, presents Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East that shares western values and must, therefore, be militarily supported, strengthened and protected against its enemies.
This thinking, which combines expiation of guilt and strategic calculus, has led the West to give Israel a virtual carte blanche. Even when on occasion US and European governments feel queasy about Israeli actions, they either give it a pass or express little more than displeasure. Israel, for its part, has exploited this thinking to its full advantage, branding any criticism of its actions as anti-Semitic, a charge whose connotations go deep in European history with its pogroms and the Nazi immoral philosophy of eugenics.
The deep irony is that the present victims of Israeli atrocities primarily are Palestinians who neither invented the pogrom nor the racist bio-ideology of eugenics. If anything, as Mark Cohen argued in his comparative analysis of Jewish life under the crescent and the cross, Jewish-Muslim relations were comparatively much better than Jewish-gentile relations, the “neo-lachrymose conception of Jewish-Arab history,” notwithstanding. As he put it, this revisionism “has taken hold in many circles and has flourished in the soil of the ongoing Israeli- Palestinian conflict.”
In the ongoing conflict, the pro-Israel sentiment, predictably, is only focusing on Hamas’ military offensive.
This comparative approach is also important because as Cohen rightly notes, “In the Middle Ages, tolerance, in the modern, liberal meaning of full equality, was not considered to be a virtue to be emulated. Monotheistic religions were by nature mutually intolerant.” (his italics)
The western governments and the mainstream media are not interested in these nuances; nor are the publics at large. In fraught situations, nuances are the first casualty. Even so, it’s important, as Palestinian (and also Arab) scholars and intellectuals have tried to do for decades in the face of mounting odds, to sustain and present the resistance narrative.
In the ongoing conflict, the pro-Israel sentiment, predictably, is only focusing on Hamas’ military offensive. Every television question begins with, “Do you condemn the violence by Hamas?” This is deliberate and strategic. The idea is to present the Palestinians as perpetrators rather than victims, in order to divert attention from the slow, structural violence the Palestinians are subjected to not only in Gaza, but also the Occupied West Bank.
According to a March 2022 report by the UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, the “political system of entrenched rule” in the occupied West Bank and Gaza “satisfies the prevailing evidentiary standard for the existence of apartheid.” In November last year, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing reached the same conclusion in relation to Israel’s policies of Palestinian home demolitions.
The entire exercise is part of a settler-colonial project, a project that began with the infamous Balfour Declaration of 1917 and has subsequently given rise to some of the worst tragedies in Palestine. It is also more perfidious because the colonists are entrenched and have nowhere to go. In that sense, it is more like white populations decimating the natives in the Americas, Australia and Tasmania and laying birthrights to those places.
Earlier, in October 2022, the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the OPT, including East Jerusalem, and in Israel, concluded in its report “that the occupation of the OPT is unlawful due to its permanence and Israel’s measures to annex Palestinian land in law and in practice. In 2022, such measures included retroactive authorisation of settlement outposts, including by the Israeli Supreme Court.”
Serious research and findings by the UN and other rights bodies as well as by independent scholars make clear that Israel has put in place an institutionalised regime of oppression against the Palestinians. Gaza has been under Israeli blockade since 2007. But even in the Occupied West Bank, Palestinians have been segregated and their movements controlled through 560 Israeli checkpoints.
A February 2022 Amnesty report states that Israel exercises control over Palestinians’ rights, fragments and segregates Palestinian citizens of Israel, and denies Palestinian refugees the right of return.
It does so “through massive seizures of land and property, unlawful killings, infliction of serious injuries, forcible transfers, arbitrary restrictions on freedom of movement, and denial of nationality.” All these actions constitute inhumane acts and the crime of apartheid and fall under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court.
In March 2022, Israel re-enacted the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law, which was first enacted in 2003 and was renewed every year until it was set aside in 2021. The law “imposes sweeping restrictions on Palestinian family unification between Israeli citizens or residents and their spouses from the OPT to maintain a Jewish demographic majority.” In another move to legally strangle the Palestinians, the Israeli Supreme Court upheld a law in July 2022 which authorises the Israeli interior minister to strip citizens of their citizenship if convicted of acts that amount to “breach of allegiance to the state.”
Tor Wennesland, UN special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, told the UN Security Council in August this year that escalating violence is being fuelled by growing despair about the future among Palestinians and a lack of progress towards achieving an independent state. He was referring to happenings in the Occupied West Bank where according to the “UN humanitarian coordinator Lynn Hastings… 77 healthcare workers were injured and 30 ambulances damaged while trying to help people in the occupied territory so far in 2023, whether during raids or protests or just on average days.”
In the same month, Israeli troops mounted an air-ground raid on the Jenin refugee camp, killing nine Palestinians, including two children. Additionally, violence by illegal Israeli settlers has been on the rise. On September 21, 2023, Associated Press reported that “Violence from Israeli settlers has displaced over 1,100 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank since 2022, according to a UN report released Thursday, with officials describing the exodus as unparalleled in recent years.”
The issue is simple: Israel is in occupation of Palestinians territories, refuses to end the occupation, has left no space for negotiations, dispossesses and kills Palestinians at will, demolishes their properties, and deprives them of their rights and dignity as part of a well-crafted strategy.
One can go on since the list is long and goes back to the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe). Every legal and administrative action by Israel that seeks to dominate and subjugate the Palestinians and their lives is documented and on the record, and is enforced through Israel’s coercive power. Mark LeVine, professor and director of the Programme in Global Middle East Studies at UC Irvine has the best description of Israel’s total and criminal control of every aspect of Palestinian life — In an essay titled, The quantum mechanics of Israeli totalitarianism, LeVine wrote: “With its matrix of control, Israel has achieved an unparalleled and uniquely successful synergy of “bio” and “necro”-politics, controlling life and death at most every scale of Palestinian existence. The matrix is continuously adjusted with as much care as Israel has adjusted the caloric intake of Gazans during its periodic intensifications of the Gazan siege.”
LeVine’s reference to necro-politics is important and cites the 2003 essay, Necropolitics, by Achille Mbembe. Mbembe explains that [his] “essay assumes that the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die.” Hannah Arendt spoke of the horrors of concentration camps, a place “that… stands outside of life and death.” Quoting Giorgio Agamben, Mbembe writes: “According to Agamben, [the camp] acquires a permanent spatial arrangement that remains continually outside the normal state of law.”
These descriptions capture perfectly everyday life of the Palestinians. The entire exercise is part of a settler-colonial project, a project that began with the infamous Balfour Declaration of 1917 and has subsequently given rise to some of the worst tragedies in Palestine. It is also more perfidious because the colonists are entrenched and have nowhere to go. In that sense, it is more like white populations decimating the natives in the Americas, Australia and Tasmania and laying birthrights to those places.
Every television question begins with, “Do you condemn the violence by Hamas?” This is deliberate and strategic. The idea is to present the Palestinians as perpetrators rather than victims, in order to divert attention from the slow, structural violence the Palestinians are subjected to not only in Gaza, but also the Occupied West Bank.
The space which opened up in the run-up to and after the Oslo Accords for a peaceful settlement has long disappeared. Two Israeli ministers, Bezalel Smotrich (Justice) and Itamar Ben-Gvir (National Security) are rightwing illegal settlers. Their views on illegal settlements and how to deal with Palestinians are a matter of record. Last month, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took a map of Israel to the UNGA and brandished it before the world. The map included in Israel all of Palestinian areas, including Gaza and the occupied Golan Heights.
The issue is simple: Israel is in occupation of Palestinians territories, refuses to end the occupation, has left no space for negotiations, dispossesses and kills Palestinians at will, demolishes their properties, and deprives them of their rights and dignity as part of a well-crafted strategy. The question, therefore, is simple: what exactly should the Palestinians do? Should they let Israel wipe them out? Should they be condemned when they stand up to fight for their rights, dignity and survival?
These are not emotive or rhetorical questions. They are grounded in cold facts, facts recorded by, as noted above, UN bodies, rights organisations and independent scholars and analysts, including in Israel.
In a brilliant 2006 book, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, Professors Mearsheimer and Walt, both hard-nosed structural realists, argued that Israel is a liability and the US needs to rethink its “rock solid, unwavering” (Joe Biden’s recent words) support. Far from any “shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives,” argue Mearsheimer and Walt, “the overall thrust of US policy in the region is due almost entirely to US domestic politics, and especially to the activities of the Israel Lobby.”
As Israel blockades and bombards Gaza, continues with its illegal settlements and refuses to end its occupation, it is time for America to heed the advice of Mearsheimer and Walt.