These are days of anger on both sides of the Israel-Palestine divide. It is no coincidence that Homer used the word anger in the first sentence of his Iliad, an anger with which Agamemnon and Achilles are recklessly filled. The fury of believing oneself superior, Greek tradition tells us, blinds us to the complexities of reality. In their anger, Israelis seek the unconditional destruction of the other; and Hamas, together with its supporters around the world, calls for the eradication of Jewish existence “from the river to the sea.”
Israel's war in Gaza reverberates in European capitals like no other conflict does. From London to Rome, from Antwerp to Berlin, Israel is denounced as a “terrorist state”; and, eighty years after the annihilation of European Jews in the Holocaust, angry protesters invite Jews back “to the gas.” Jews across Europe once again sense the shadow of Kristallnacht looming over their communities. The monstrous pairing of legitimate solidarity with Palestine and anti-Jewish invective degenerates into waves of anti-Semitic attacks of a magnitude not seen since the darkest days of the 1930s. “Kill the Jews, rape their daughters!” was one of the slogans chanted in the streets of the city of London. That and much more is what Hamas did.
Amid the unspeakable tragedies of war – Hamas' barbaric massacre of civilians in Israeli communities on October 7 and Israel's devastating response – Israel has once again been branded an oppressive colonial power in many Western circles. In the eyes of Hamas and its useful fools in the West, Israel's colonial attributes apply not only to the occupied territories, but to Israel itself and its rule over the significant Palestinian minority. They would be surprised to learn that “decolonization” is not exactly what Palestinian Israelis want. According to a survey conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute, Palestinian Israelis' identification with the Jewish state, which was 48% in June, has now increased to 70%.
There is no denying the colonial practices of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. However, it is also true that, with their typical denial of all moral responsibility and their Pavlovian rejection of one peace offer after another so far this century, the Palestinians have inadvertently served as fuel for the Israeli fundamentalist right. Yasir Arafat's rejection of Bill Clinton's peace parameters in 2000 received the strong condemnation of the then Saudi ambassador to the United States, Bandar bin Sultan, who considered it a "crime against the Palestinian people." The second proposal was made in 2008. The late Saeb Erekat, then chief negotiator for the Palestinians, acknowledged that Israel “offered us 100% of the land” and a capital in East Jerusalem. His response was: “Why should we hurry now, after all the injustice done to us?” He was right about the injustice, but criminally wrong about the rest. Also painfully disappointing has been the vehement denial by important Palestinian figures, partners of the Israeli left in denouncing the occupation, of the October 7 massacre itself. It is a lie conceived by Netanyahu and US President Joe Biden, declared Hanan Ashraui, a historical member of the PLO.
The betrayal of Israel's cause by progressive liberals in the West, even before Israel responded to the massacre, is the final nail in the coffin of the waning Israeli left. An unnatural alliance of progressive activists and Islamist groups has put Hamas and Hizbullah on a pedestal, in whose social order of religious obscurantism and degradation of women the basic principles of the progressive left would not fit. Not since the Holocaust have Jews experienced such a bacchanal of hatred and rejoicing at his death. A Cornell University professor called the Oct. 7 massacre “exciting, joyous and exhilarating.”
For philosopher Judith Butler, Hamas and Hizbullah are “progressive” social movements that are part of the global left, and their solution is “coexistence” from the river to the sea, whatever that means. Lara Sheehi, of George Washington University, reconciles her discomfort with the massacre of October 7 with the affirmation that we must “accept the horror of liberation.” She, of course, was not referring to the liberation of Gazans from the tyranny of Hamas.
Luckily, philosopher Slavoj Žižek refuses to give in to hollow moralisms, and correctly sees a problem in the tacit alliance between fundamentalists on both sides. His warning that Israel could be presented as the ultimate oppressor of this age may come true, but that would also be a caricature of a complex reality and a justification of the many existing tyrannies. Forever mired in anonymity would remain the 400,000 dead, most of them civilians, from the war in Yemen between the agents of Iran and a Saudi-Emirati alliance. Joyce Karam, Washington bureau chief for the pan-Arab newspaper Al Hayat, once said: “Muslims killing Muslims seems more acceptable than Israel killing Arabs.”
The two-state solution for Palestine has become one of the most pervasive clichés of our time. A Palestinian nation state is something totally foreign to the philosophy of Hamas; The core of its Founding Charter is the victory of Islam and “the annihilation of Israel.” It would take a Talmudic interpretation of that Charter to discern in it a tactical willingness to take part in a struggle for independence, provided, of course, that it was a step towards the liberation of the sacred land of Palestine “from the river to the sea.” ”.
Forgotten are the sins of Western imperialism in distant lands (I am still under the impact of the recent book of horrors written by Caroline Elkin, Legacy of violence: a history of the British empire); Therefore, Israel can be presented as the ultimate colonial oppressor. Analogies with Algeria and Vietnam serve only superficial slogans, as no less than Noam Chomsky, the chief critic of Israel's conduct, warned. Israelis are not Algerian pieds noirs.
It is completely wrong to present the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in terms of a confrontation between a reactionary colonial power and a colonized and socially progressive people, as seen by Judith Butler, among others. The Palestinians have brought untold tragedies upon themselves by their blindness to the authenticity of the Jewish drive to regain spiritual and political roots. By attributing all responsibility for the tragedies that had befallen them to the dark forces of Zionism and “Western imperialism,” the Palestinians have locked their cause into a dead-end paradigm.
Zionism was not an extension of the nineteenth-century European struggle for colonies and raw materials. Unlike the European colonialists, who behaved as a bridgehead for the strategic interests of the motherland, the Zionists cut their ties with the countries of origin and initiated for themselves a radical break with Jewish history. Decimated by the Jewish catastrophes of Eastern Europe, the Jews who came to build a national home in the middle of the vast Arab Middle East were not emissaries of any foreign power; They were idealistic pioneers and nation-builders. A social utopia, an innovative cooperative economy, and an old-new language were to be two fundamental pillars of that new beginning.
If the colonial paradigm were simply applicable to the Jewish state, Israel should have long since completely collapsed and disintegrated as the “invented” and “artificial” entity it supposedly was. Even today, Hamas's war remains inspired by the conviction that if it is not defeated now, being “weaker than a spider's web” (as Hizbullah's Hasan Nasralah likes to say), Israel will collapse later. or early as the Crusader kingdom did in the 12th century.
However, no colonial power in history, no matter how powerful, resisted such a long national liberation struggle, which has already lasted fifty-six years in the Palestinian territories and 75 years in Israel proper. A genuine colonial occupation is never so existentially vital to the colonial power that it is willing to persist in it against a continuing national uprising, the growing opprobrium of the international community and, in the case of Israel, the hostility of the entire world. Arab world, which has also waged war after war against the “Zionist Crusader State,” supposedly for the good of Palestine. On the other hand, no colonial power in history has been born as a result of an existential war of self-defense. Israel's occupation of the West Bank in 1967 came while repelling an unprovoked attack by three Arab armies. Jordan, then an illegal occupier of that territory, joined the war after repeated requests from Israel and the United States not to do so.
This entire colonial debate is relevant because it has a direct relationship with the viability of the two-state solution. Two names are missing from it: Albert Memmi and Edward Said. In his work Portrait of the Colonized Preceded by Portrait of the Colonizer (1957), Memmi, a Tunisian “Judeo-Arab,” as he defined himself, passionately advocated for the liberation of colonized countries. His later Decolonization and the Decolonized (2006) is a lament of the trajectory of “widespread corruption, tyranny, restriction of intellectual growth, violence towards women, xenophobia and persecution of minorities” in many decolonized countries.
Memmi's concern was shared by none other than Edward Said, a prominent Palestinian intellectual and passionate defender of the cause of his disinherited nation. He, too, lamented the way postcolonial states were disfigured by one-party tyrannies, rapacious oligarchies, corruption, and civil wars. In Palestine's potential attainment of a state, he saw “the hallmarks of a marriage between the chaos of Lebanon and the tyranny of Iraq.” Israel's dilemma is, therefore, atrocious. The occupation is evil and must end, but Israel is forced to admit that the territorial withdrawals, from southern Lebanon in 2000 and from Gaza in 2005, have only invited death and destruction, the former at the hands from Hizbullah and the second from Hamas.
Therefore, even assuming the validity of the colonial paradigm, context matters. There is a notable difference between an overseas colony, as has been the case with Western imperialism in distant lands, and a contiguous territory on the mainland, as is the case with Israel with the West Bank and Gaza. This is not a banal geographical reality. It haunts Israeli negotiators, because like Memmi and Said, they are aware of the potential risks of Palestine's journey toward statehood, such as failed state-building or the danger of a radical Islamist group ascending to power. power and forge alliances with Israel's regional enemies. In reality, the ongoing war is also about breaking Iran's siege on the Jewish state by militias that possess the firepower of militarized countries, from the Yemeni Houthis and Hamas in the south to Hizbullah in Lebanon and other actors. In Syria. None of these rogue forces is interested in an Israeli-Palestinian peace, and none will lay down their arms if it is possible to achieve it.
The truth is that Israel deniers have run out of method to interpret it. This is not a colonial story, but a Hegelian tragedy between two legitimate causes. We all agree that Palestinian suffering – the horrific human and material destruction of the current war rightly evokes memories of previous tragedies – must also end. However, the grand vision of a permanent settlement will require that the population, and also the statesmen, free themselves from the trap that distorts their perception of the Palestinian problem and presents it as a simple binary issue of colonizers and colonized. The dissolution of the toxic coalition led by Netanyahu and the curb on Hamas, whose government since 2006 has led the Palestinians to the hell in which they now find themselves, are also necessary conditions.
The urgent search for a way out of this moral hell must be resumed. The Gaza war has returned Israeli liberals to the fold of a broad national consensus, from which they must disassociate themselves if they want to remain an agent of reconciliation once the current war is over. They cannot remain on the same front for too long alongside Netanyahu's alliance of messianic nationalists, for whom war is the best recipe for political survival. Israeli liberals have to shift the goal of the war to the immediate release of each and every one of the 240 hostages, if necessary, in exchange for thousands of Palestinian terrorists in Israeli jails. This is the only victory Israel can hope for before her soul is lost in the tunnels of Gaza.
