Volume 7, No. 1, January 2025
Editor: Rashed Rahman
The roots of this genocide were planted a very long time ago and are embedded in the Jewish belief that they were the chosen people. Though initially this belief was cultivated among them to keep up the spirit of a weak community battling great odds, with the passage of time and ever greater hardships it became an article of faith with them. Very early on, the ‘odds’ against them sprang from their being odd or peculiar among the peoples who surrounded them because of their evolving belief in monotheism. This led them to stand out among all those around them who were polytheists of different stripes but who, nevertheless, got along with each other on ‘religious’ grounds by accepting the gods of each other.
In the case of the Jews, their separateness from the others was further accentuated on grounds other than that of worship, which were an obstacle against intermingling with them. Their dietary laws prohibited their breaking bread with others, and this ruled out eating or attending many festivities together. And their laws against nudity did not allow them to make use of gymnasia with them nor to participate with them in ‘games’ etc. The combined effect of all these was that the Jews were marked out as a distinct community on other grounds than those around them were differentiated from each other. It was during their Babylonian captivity (597-548 BC) that they completed the transformation of their religion known to us as ‘Hebrew’ or ‘Israelite’, which was ‘henotheism’, to that of strict monotheism that we know today as Rabbinic Judaism.
This created a real problem for the Jews, especially after Rome conquered Palestine and one Caesar after another was proclaimed a god by the Romans. Jews, who were now the followers of strict monotheism, could not bring themselves to bow down according to the rites of worshipping the Caesars and were thus looked upon as being a rebellious people by Rome. Eventually, this led to open rebellion by them, and the siege of Jerusalem by a Roman army ensued in 70 AD, which led to the conquest of Jerusalem, the demolition of the Temple, and the expulsion of all Jews from the city. And this was followed by one final revolt by the Jews in 132-135 AD, known as the Bar Kokhba revolt, in which the Jews suffered a massive defeat, after which they began leaving Palestine in large numbers and settling down elsewhere in the empire. After this it was 500 years, in 638 AD, when the Muslims defeated the Byzantines and wrested control of Jerusalem that the Jews were given free access to this city once more.
After the Bar Kokhba revolt the only ‘religious’ community in the Roman empire to be treated worse than the Jews were the Christians. It was in 312 AD that the miracle of Constantine’s conversion to Christianity took place and he banned all other belief systems from the empire, leaving Christianity as its sole legitimate religion. Almost overnight therefore, Christians, from being the despised dregs of society arose to become the most fervent persecutors in their own cause. And almost the first people they went after were the Jews, blaming them for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ (PBUH), though historically there was no evidence of this beyond the fact that Christ had rebelled against the Temple Priests and their corruption. And it was they who were keen to be rid of Jesus, who was crucified when he was still a practicing Jew in pursuit of religious reform.
After the Council of Nicaea (325 AD) during which Christian orthodoxy was defined, the Church organised itself, the Christian priesthood became increasingly more influential, and Christianity began spreading into the heartland of Europe and to its extremities. Many Jews, running from the power of the Catholic Church, had located themselves at the fringes of the empire but the spread of Christianity followed them there. With this what also got organised and found structure was anti-semitism as a specifically Christian institution of Europe, which then spread to the four corners of the earth as European settlers put down roots there.
Some of the libels placed at the door of the Jews were founded on fact, but most were rooted in prejudice, bias and falsehood. And from here sprang many laws specifically as they applied to the Jews and were uniformly injurious to them. For example, most professions considered to be respectable were barred to them. One profession they waded into in a big way was banking as the Church prohibited this to its followers because it involved lending on interest. And the irony was that though this served to enrich a tiny fraction of the Jews, the discredit that sprang from the usurious nature of the business rebounded on them all. In most states they were not allowed to own land, and were thus deprived of a livelihood that was both wholesome and respectable. Many became vendors or petty tradesmen. In most large cities they were consigned to the ghetto, and frequently were not allowed to teach or study secular subjects. Often the right of self-defence did not apply to them. In most states they were considered as the property of the king, and many a time they were expelled from various states. Often this was resorted to by kings to wipe out the debts owed by them to Jewish bankers or rich merchants. And often they were visited by pogroms, general looting and massacres of various intensity.
But in most of the Islamic states of the time they were not subjected to any of these indignities or tyrannies. They lived under the laws applicable to the ‘Dhimmis’. This allowed them the rights of second-class citizens, under which they had to pay the jizya, but were extended the full protection given to all the other citizens, with their own courts to settle such religious or cultural disputes as were distinct to them. Notwithstanding the fact that they were Dhimmis, many reached the highest positions in court, became ministers, exalted diplomats in the service of the state, and chief physicians to various kings. In short, they were not looked down upon in any of the Muslim lands on the basis of their beliefs. Indeed, when Ferdinand and Isabella reconquered Spain and expelled all the Jews on March 31, 1492, an overwhelming majority among them took shelter in Muslim countries, and the Ottoman Sultan specifically invited them to his realm, declaring quite openly that Jews were excellent subjects for a state to have, as by their endeavours they helped to enrich the state.
The ‘anti-semitism’ practiced by the Christians over the last 2000 years was against Judaism as a religion. When people in the west accuse Muslims of being anti-semitic (over the last 100 years) they only go to prove that they are ill-informed halfwits. Muslims are merely anti-Zionist because of what Zionism has proved to be. They, being obligated to believe in all the prophets mentioned in the Holy Quran, just cannot be anti-semitic in the Christian sense of the word!
The Jews were retrieved from their world of darkness, insecurity and random violence to a large extent by Napoleon Bonaparte. His legislation brought an end to most of the discriminatory laws against them and got them out of the ghetto, both in France and the states he conquered. Though, after his defeat, many states reinforced the laws set aside by him, but things in western Europe were never the same again, as they were before Napoleon.
In Eastern Europe and Russia, Jews continued to suffer much as before, and became victims of a number of pogroms in Russia. This, and the wave of nationalism in many parts of Europe, set the Jewish leaders in western Europe thinking in terms of Jewish nationalism (Zionism) and the aspiration of a home for the diaspora Jews was born, and subsequently debated in the First Zionist Congress in Bazel, Switzerland, in 1897 under the chairmanship of Theodor Herzl. Though Herzl recommended this homeland to be established in Uganda, and there were other suggestions as well, but eventually Palestine was chosen because of its religious significance for the Jews, and ironically because of Zionist Christian (Dispensationalist) pressure as well.
The latter wanted an ingathering of Jews to occur in their ancient homeland to be hurried in order to bring forward the second coming of Christ before which, as per their belief, there would be the epic battle of Armageddon resulting in the slaughter of most of the Jews, while the rest would be converted to Christianity, i.e. Christ would descend in a world cleansed of all the Jews, which was a precondition for his second coming according to Dispensational belief! Thus the earlier the Jews were gathered in the Holy Land, the earlier the world could be cleansed of them, and the earlier would the second coming of Christ occur!
In short, while diaspora Jews wanted a home to be established in Palestine for religious reasons and those of security, their Zionist Christian allies wanted them to be gathered in one place so that they could conveniently be slaughtered at the Battle of Armageddon! In short, both had religious reasons of their own. The Jews believed that God had promised them a return to the promised land to be secure in, while Christian Zionists believed that if they were all gathered in one place, this would facilitate the act of cleansing the earth of their presence. It is indeed a wonder in convergent thinking that Jewish and Christian Zionists are still allies, and the latter still believe in their interpretation of the scripture and fervently pray for all the Jews around the world to be gathered in the holy land so that they can then be eliminated!
A very important aspect of a friendly Zionist state being created in Palestine, from Britain’s point of view, was its close location to the Suez Canal through which much of its sea traffic to the eastern reaches of its empire flowed. Later this importance would be transferred to the US and its interest in controlling much of the flow of the world’s oil.
The First Zionist Congress laid the foundation stone of a Zionist state in Palestine, began collecting funds for the project, and arranging for Jews to immigrate there. At this point this was not a project of any government, but unofficially most European governments were in favour of it, though not for any altruistic reason. What most of them wanted was that Jews being driven out of Eastern Europe and Russia, instead of immigrating to their countries, would do so instead to Palestine, i.e. leave their countries pristine. Anti-semitic sentiments, though not quite as openly expressed in polite society as before, were still deeply held and rampant.
The slogan accompanying the launch of the Zionist project was: “a land without people, for a people without land”. That it was expected for this slogan to find general acceptance attests to the optimism behind it. In the year 1900, Jews formed 10 percent of the population of Palestine, while Palestinian Arabs were the other 90 percent. As such this slogan did not do very well. But the Zionist project did, especially from 1917 onwards when the British wrested control of Palestine from the Ottomans during the course of World War I (WWI).
On November 2, 1917, the British signed the Balfour Declaration, which promised “to view with favour” the formation of a Jewish state in Palestine. British assurances were being given to their Jews ever since the abdication of Czar Nicholas II of Russia, and it was expected that Russia would withdraw from WWI any day. This would leave Germany and the Central Powers as victors of the War, unless American Jews could prevail on their government to enter the War on the side of the Allies, which they did in April 1917. The Balfour Declaration is considered by some to be a fulfilment of British Prime Minister (PM) David Lloyd George’s promise to British Jews. In its wording, this was a lukewarm commitment, but the trouble with it was that Britain had already promised independence to all Arab lands under the overlordship of Sharif Hussein of Mecca, in return for which promise his tribal coalition was already battling the Ottomans on the side of the British. And among the Arab lands promised to Sharif Hussein was Palestine. Thus, the Balfour Declaration ended up promising Palestine to two antagonistic parties. A lot of trouble would brew from this in the coming years.
Within a year of the Balfour Declaration, WWI came to an end, and Jewish immigration into Palestine became much faster. And as it grew so did the alarm among the indigenous Arab population of Palestine who clearly saw that the demographic character of Palestine was being changed by this immigration, which would inevitably lead to political and other changes as well. This led to what has come to be known as The Arab Revolt (1936-39) against British occupation and the Zionist project.
The Peel Commission was sent to investigate the causes of this revolt. It determined the Arab demands as a) an end to Jewish immigration into Palestine, b) an end to the sale of land to Jewish immigrants, and c) political independence for Palestine. Very soon WWII had broken out. This greatly enhanced the importance of Arab cooperation with the British towards the war effort. Therefore the flow of Jewish immigration into Palestine was reduced, but this led to Zionist attacks against the British. This grew into what Israel regards as their war of independence. Because it was Britain that was the main backer of the Zionist Project in Palestine, the Mufti of Jerusalem threw in his lot with Hitler and the Axis powers against the Allies. His ‘anti-semitism’ was therefore entirely political and had little or nothing to do with his being anti-Jewish.
As WWII ended, Jewish immigration to Palestine went into high gear. Concurrently, an exhausted and bankrupt Britain decided to vacate Palestine, set May 15, 1948 as the date for its withdrawal, but before announcing this date it referred the Palestine issue to the UN for settlement. On November 29, 1947, the General Assembly of the UN passed Resolution 181, which partitioned Palestine. This Resolution gave 56 percent of Palestine to the Jews, who amounted to 33 percent of its population, while allocating 44 percent to the Arabs whose population at that time was 67 percent.
This partition plan clearly reflected the bias of Europe and especially of the US in favour of the Jews. And this bias largely had to do with the exposure of the full range of horror and atrocities the Jews suffered during the Holocaust. Though the direct guilt of this, one of the great crimes committed against humanity, lay with Germany and the Axis Powers, the rest of the west could not escape the guilt of looking away when this crime was being committed. So, to assuage their guilt they followed the formula of the first (the guilty) party, compensating the second (the injured) party, by giving them what belonged to the third (the innocent) party!
On May 15, 1947, the British withdrew from Palestine. That very day the Egyptian, Syrian, Iraqi and Jordanian armies attacked the Israeli army, who drove back the invading force and increased its land area from 56 percent of Palestine to 80 percent, with the Jordanians holding the West Bank and East Jerusalem and the Egyptians controlling the Gaza Strip. This left the Palestinian state erased from the map!
As this war ended, two of the foundation myths of Israel were spawned and propagated far and wide. These retained their credibility and currency till they were decisively debunked (in 2006) with documentary evidence by Illan Pappe, a Jewish Israeli historian. These two myths were:
a) That the heroic Zionists single-handedly defeated the combined might of the Palestinians and four allied Arab armies. Pappe decisively proved that the Zionists had more strength than that of the combined numbers of their adversaries; they were better trained, with many having war experience; were better equipped, and that the Jordanians, the only well-trained and disciplined Arab force, already had an agreement with the Israelis not to enter the fray beyond designated areas.
b) That the Zionists were not responsible for the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians that forced more than half their population to flee their homes and destroyed more than half their villages and rooted them out of towns where they had a majority. The general belief that they inculcated among their own citizens and also the world at large was that the Palestinians who fled their homes did so voluntarily. It was alleged that they did so in response to encouragement by the invading Arab armies who promised them that they would be allowed to return after the Jews had been driven into the sea. Illan Pappe decisively debunked this narrative in his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, using documentary evidence to do so. He proved that the Israelis began ethnically cleansing the Palestinians well before the invasion by the four Arab armies; that the ethnic cleansing operation was begun in December 1947 and was continually updated and ‘improved’; that its final blueprint was approved on March 10, 1948 by eleven Zionist civil and military leaders; that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine was foreseen by most of the Zionist leaders as attested to by their private notes and diaries as soon as the final decision to launch the Zionist operation was taken, and finally that the ‘invasion’ by the four Arab armies was instigated by popular pressure built up on account of Palestinian refugees who had already been driven out by the Israelis and had fled to their countries.
For discrediting the above foundational myths of the Israeli state, Illan Pappe had to leave Israel and settle in the UK. Though Pappe knocked out the narrative manufactured by the Jewish state with regard to its massive crime of ethnic cleansing, there was no way he could do the same about its religious claim to justify this crime, i.e. that because Jews were a chosen people, and most especially since they were victims of the Holocaust that was a crime unique in human history, they had thereby gained a special dispensation to flout the laws that lesser people were expected to abide by. In short therefore, they were not to be judged by the yardstick of international law when considering their treatment of the Palestinians. By its very nature this claim could not be formally advanced. But repeated Israeli criminal actions visited on Palestinians and the silence with which most of the west accepted them were signs that the Zionist claim of exceptionalism also found acceptability with them. Additionally, there was the ‘German’ factor that also played a part in Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. When the decision was taken to establish NATO against a possible military threat from the USSR, it was clear that Germany was central to any such military alliance. But in view of the long list of Nazi crimes, it was not easy to admit Germany into the ranks of the civilised nations. And without this, Germany could not be admitted into NATO. But if the Jewish voices against Nazi crimes could be toned down, the goal of admitting Germany into NATO would become that much easier. But the price to pay for this was that the west had to overlook the Israeli crime of ethnically cleansing the Palestinians. This brought about a felicitous accommodation between the victorious western powers, a defeated Germany, and the state of Israel, newly established on a foundation of crime. And this tripartite relationship still survives and prospers to this day.
In the June 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the Israelis captured Sinai and the Golan Heights from Egypt and Syria respectively, evicted the Egyptians from the Gaza Strip and the Jordanians from East Jerusalem and the West Bank territories, and occupied them. Immediately after this they began establishing Israeli settlements in the occupied territories, which was illegal under international law, and simultaneously expelled another 350,000 Palestinians from the occupied territories. Fifty-six years later, these territories remain occupied to this day.
After the 1967 Arab-Israeli War Israel had decided that:
To bring a formal end to the Arab-Israeli War of 1967 and to resolve the new issues arising from it, the UN passed Resolution 242, also known as ‘The Land for Peace Resolution’. The gist of this was twofold: that the affected Arab states grant Israel’s right of peaceful existence among them, for which Israel would return them their land. Israel accepted Resolution 242, but the Palestinians, under the The Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) declined to do so. In the early 1970s the PLO gave indications that it was ready to accept its part in the Resolution. According to historian Norman Finkelstein, this caused alarm bells to begin ringing among the Israeli establishment because peace would mean the evacuation of occupied Palestinian territories and this would lead to the establishment of a Palestinian state. Thus the coming ‘peace offensive’ from the Palestinian side needed to be sabotaged. So Israel contrived an excuse to launch an attack on the Palestinians based in Lebanon in 1982. The massacres of Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps followed the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and the PLO had to flee Beirut to Tunis.
The Palestinians began their first civil protest, known as the First Intifada, on December 7, 1987. This remained a largely peaceful affair for the first two years, but the use of overwhelming force by Israel brought blood on the streets. On December 8, 1988, Yasser Arafat, the Chairman PLO, on a visit to the US, declared that the Palestinian parliament in exile “had accepted the existence of Israel as a state in the region.” He said that this was a milestone, but his declaration was immediately dismissed in Israel and treated coldly in Washington. Peace was never the aim of Israel or the US because peace would have meant the establishment of a Palestinian state, which was not acceptable to Israel from day one.
The next major step on the road to ‘peace’ was the beginning of the Oslo Peace Process. On September 9, 1993, letters of mutual recognition were exchanged between Israel and the PLO. In these, while the PLO recognised Israel’s right as a state to exist in peace, and also formally accepted UN Resolution 242, Israel merely accepted the PLO as the legitimate authority representing the Palestinian people and to continue negotiations with it within the Middle East Peace Process. In short, the Palestinians got nothing from the Oslo Accords, not even a promise of statehood.
After this the PLO was supplanted by the Palestinian Authority (PA) as a political party and a subservient administrative arm of the Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, and they were given some minimal administrative functions to perform. Immediately following Oslo, the Israeli settlement project in the West Bank saw a manifold increase. This chiselled up the West Bank in a manner that establishing a Palestinian state there was no longer practically possible.
Meanwhile Hamas, which did not accept Israel’s right to exist, was established as a political party in 1987 and began getting Israeli support and funding so that it could mount a political challenge to the PA. The goal of this was that political opinion among the Palestinians be so divided that they would not be able to mount another peace offensive and derail Israel’s political goal of retaining the whole of Palestine.
In 2005 Israel decided to withdraw its settlements from Gaza where 6,000 Israelis were in control of 40 percent of Gaza territory, while nearly two million Palestinians had only 60 percent of Gaza’s land. The economic costs of providing adequate security to 6,000 Israelis led to this step being taken. However, the withdrawal of these settlements promised Israel rich dividends in terms of political propaganda.
Under US pressure Israel scheduled elections to be held in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza in 2006, and it encouraged its protege, Hamas, to take part. Hamas won these elections and stunned both Israel and the US, but the PA was encouraged not to hand power over to Hamas. And though the PA had its way in the West Bank, Hamas overthrew its control over Gaza in a violent coup. Immediately upon this Gaza was put under a tight siege by Israel so that nothing could move in or out of it except by Israel’s leave. And since then, Gaza has been an “open-air prison” as described by the ex-British PM David Cameron.
Through these years the Palestinians have been progressively degraded and dehumanised as a matter of policy. Without viewing them as subhuman, it was not possible for the state and the people of Israel to treat them as such and to subject them to the regime of slow genocide and strangulation that they are undergoing. Things could never have gone so far had Israel not received the total support of the US and the wilfully imposed insensitivity of most of Europe. In a world where general awareness and education is so widespread as ours, seldom have those with such exalted claims to being the most civilised, relied on such blatant hypocrisy to impose such wilful blindness upon themselves so that they cannot see an unfolding genocide in Palestine.
The Israeli-Palestinian issue has been deliberately framed incorrectly as a clash between two rival nationalisms. It was always a clash between settler colonialists on the one hand, and the natives who were to be cleansed to make way for colonial settlements on the other. Ethnic cleansing was central to the Zionist project from the time it was conceived. That is why Israel is the only state that has never demarcated its borders, constant expansion being one of its goals. And concurrent with that its settlement policy in occupied territories attests to the fact that a Palestinian state was never acceptable to them.
It is this driving sentiment and motivation where the genesis of the Gaza genocide springs from.
The Zionist leadership was very clear about its end goal from the beginning, and therefore was leading all the initiatives with the help of the main power in the world, i.e. the west. The Palestinian leadership was always reacting to the Zionists and was therefore always a step behind. Thus we see that the Palestinians, seeing themselves as victims of a land grab, always rejected formulas of land sharing given to them for acceptance. They were looking for justice. Being the ones whose land was to be taken away, they could not see any justice in these formulas. They saw them merely as tools to legalise and formalise an injustice. But at each step of the way as they realised that there was to be no justice for them, they accepted the best that was given to them. But each time they accepted this, things had moved on and their acceptance of an old formula had become irrelevant to the ‘new facts’ on the ground, which Israel was continually creating.
To begin with, the leadership of the Zionist project was largely composed of atheist Jews with a secular outlook. But even they were apt to proffer religious alibis in furtherance of their claims in Palestine. For example, though most of them did not believe in God, they never hesitated to quote the Bible as evidence that Palestine had been promised to them by the same God whom they did not believe in. Or they quoted history and their ‘expulsion’ from ancient Palestine as laying the grounds of their ‘redemption’, which, in religious language, meant their right to return to the land from which they had been expelled. Of course, as far as the historical record is concerned, they were expelled by the Romans from Jerusalem, and not from Palestine as a whole. But they presented history as suited them best.
When the Zionist project began, secular Zionists were in leadership positions, and hard right wing Jews, mainly the Mizrahis, were politically at the bottom. But by 2021 the tables had turned and no government could function without the support of the latter. And as per their belief, nothing less than the whole of Biblical Israel, in which there could dwell no other people but as subservient non-citizens, is acceptable to them. Therefore it was their demand that the slow genocide of Palestinians be expedited to high gear and they be driven clean out of Israel.
Gaza has thus become a wounded quarry, surrounded and being shot at from all sides for daring to ask and fight for its freedom. The genocide of Palestinians has added a unique chapter to the enactment of this inhuman drama. This is the first time in an age of awareness that genocide is being carried out under the full glare of publicity, and is being passed on and accepted as a form of self-defence by the aggressor.