These are days of anger on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide. It is no accident that Homer used the word anger in the first sentence of the Iliad, an anger that Agamemnon and Achilles are unwisely full of. The fury of believing ourselves superior, the Greek tradition tells us, blinds us to the complexities of reality. In their anger, the Israelis seek the unconditional destruction of the other; and Hamas, along with 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. 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 demonstrators invite the Jews to return "to the gas". Jews all over Europe once again perceive the shadow of the night of broken glass that hangs 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 never 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. Hamas did this and more.
Amidst the unspeakable tragedies of war (the barbaric slaughter of civilians perpetrated by Hamas 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. According to 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 know that "decolonization" is not exactly what the Palestinian Israelis want. According to a survey by the Israel Democracy Institute, the identification of Israeli Palestinians with the Jewish state, which was 48% in June, has now increased to 70%.
There is no need to deny the colonial practices of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. However, it is also true that, with the typical denial of all moral responsibility and the Pavlovian rejection of one peace offer after another since the turn of the century, the Palestinians have served as fuel for the Israeli fundamentalist right without realizing it. know Yasser Arafat's rejection of Clinton's peace parameters in 2000 drew strong condemnation from the then Saudi ambassador to the United States, Bandar bin Sultan, who called 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 answer was: "Why do we have to rush now, after all the injustice that has been done to us?". He was right about the injustice, but he was criminally wrong about the other things. Also painfully disappointing has been the vehement denial by leading Palestinian figures, partners of the Israeli left in denouncing the occupation, of the same slaughter of October 7. It is a lie conceived by Netanyahu and the President of the United States, Joe Biden, declared Hanan Ashrawi, a historical member of the OAP.
The betrayal of Israel's cause by progressive liberals in the West, even before Israel responded to the slaughter, 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 had the Jews experienced a bacchanal of hatred and joy at their death like this. A Cornell University professor called the October 7 massacre "exciting, joyful and exhilarating."
For the philosopher Judith Butler, Hamas and Hezbollah are "progressive" social movements, which are part of the global left, and the solution is "coexistence" from the river to the sea, whatever that means. Lara Sheehi, from George Washington University, reconciles the discomfort with the massacre of October 7 with the statement that it is necessary to "accept the horror of liberation." Of course, he was not referring to the liberation of Gazans from the tyranny of Hamas.
Fortunately, the philosopher Slavoj Žižek refuses to give in to empty moralisms, and rightly 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 materialize, but it would also be a caricature of a complex reality and a justification of the many tyrannies that exist. The 400,000 dead, most of them civilians, from the war in Yemen between the agents of Iran and a Saudi-Emirati alliance would remain forever shrouded in anonymity. Joyce Karam, head of the Washington bureau of 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 widespread clichés of our time. A Palestinian nation-state is something totally foreign to Hamas's philosophy; the core of its founding charter is the victory of Islam and "the annihilation of Israel". It would take a Talmudic interpretation of the letter to discern in it a tactical disposition to be part of a struggle for independence, provided, of course, that it was a step towards the liberation of the holy land of Palestine "from the river to the sea".
The sins of Western imperialism in distant lands are already forgotten (I am still under the impact of the recent horror book 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 only serve for superficial slogans, as warned by no less than Noam Chomsky, the chief critic of Israel's conduct. Israelis are not Algerian pied-noirs.
It is totally wrong to approach 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 upon themselves untold tragedies by turning a blind eye to the authenticity of the Jewish drive to reclaim spiritual and political roots. When all the responsibility for the tragedies that had befallen them has been attributed to the dark forces of Zionism and "Western imperialism", the Palestinians have enclosed their cause in a paradigm with no way out.
Zionism was not an extension of the 19th century European struggle for colonies and raw materials. Unlike the European colonialists, who acted as a bridgehead for the strategic interests of the motherland, the Zionists cut ties with the countries of origin and began a radical break with Jewish history for themselves. Damaged by the Jewish catastrophes of Eastern Europe, the Jews who went 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 builders of a nation. A social utopia, an innovative cooperative economy and an old-new language were to be two fundamental pillars of the new beginning.
If the colonial paradigm were simply applicable to the Jewish State, Israel should have collapsed and disintegrated long ago as the "invented" and "artificial" entity it supposedly was. Even today, Hamas's war is still inspired by the conviction that if it is not defeated now, it is "weaker than a spider's web" (as Hezbollah's Hassan Nasrallah likes to say), Israel will 'sooner or later it will collapse like the kingdom of the Croats 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 the face of continued national uprising, the growing opprobrium of the international community and, in the case of Israel, the hostility of the entire Arab world, which, moreover, has waged one war after another against the "Zionist Crusader State", supposedly for the sake 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 took place while repelling an unprovoked attack by three Arab armies. Jordan, then an illegal occupier of the territory, joined the war after repeated requests from Israel and the United States not to.
The entire colonial debate is relevant because it has a direct relationship with the viability of the two-state solution. To enrich the debate we need two names: Albert Memmi and Edward Said. In the work Portrait of the Colonized preceded by Portrait of the Colonizer (1957), Memmi, a Tunisian “Judeo-Arab”, as he defined himself, passionately defended the liberation of colonized countries. The later Decolonization and the Decolonized (2006) laments 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, prominent Palestinian intellectual and passionate defender of the cause of his disinherited nation. He too lamented the way in which post-colonial states were disfigured by one-party tyrannies, rapacious oligarchies, corruption and civil wars. In the potential achievement of a State by Palestine, he saw "the distinctive features 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 territorial withdrawals, from southern Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza in 2005, have only invited death and destruction, the former in the hands of Hizbullah and the second of Hamas.
Therefore, even if the validity of the colonial paradigm is taken for granted, context matters. There is a notable difference between an overseas colony, as has been the case of Western imperialism in distant lands, and a contiguous territory on the mainland, as is the case of Israel with the West Bank and Gaza. This is not a banal geographical reality. It obsesses Israeli negotiators, who, like Memmi and Said, are aware of the potential risks of Palestine's journey to statehood, such as failed state-building or the danger of a radical Islamist group rising to power. power and forge alliances with Israel's regional enemies. In reality, the ongoing war is also trying to break Iran's siege of the Jewish state by militias that have the firepower of militarized countries, from the Yemeni Houthis and Hamas in the south to Hezbollah in Lebanon. and other agents in Syria. None of these criminal forces are 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's denialists have run out of methods to interpret it. This is not a colonial story, but a Hegelian tragedy between two legitimate causes. We all agree that Palestinian suffering (the appalling human and material destruction of the current war rightly evokes memories of past tragedies) must also end. However, the grand vision of a permanent agreement will require that the population, as well as statesmen, rid themselves of 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 headed by Netanyahu and the curb on Hamas, whose rule since 2006 has led the Palestinians to the hell they are in now, 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 heart of a broad national consensus, from which they must disassociate themselves if they wish to remain an agent of reconciliation once the current war is over. They cannot stay too long on the same front together with Netanyahu's messianic nationalist alliance, for whom war is the best recipe for political survival. Israeli liberals must shift the goal of the war to the immediate release of each and every 240 hostages, if necessary, in exchange for thousands of Palestinian terrorists in Israeli prisons. It is the only victory that Israel can hope for before its soul is lost in the tunnels of Gaza.
