"Israel has a right to defend itself"

“Israel has a right to defend itself” - I hear this phrase unthinkingly parroted so often, but it seems almost nobody expressing or questioning this sentiment gives much thought to what it means, to the difference between a war of defence and a war of aggression or occupation, or to the fact that notwithstanding this currently pending invasion of Gaza, the Palestinians have been living under a brutal Israeli apartheid occupation for decades. I've written a lot about it in a previous post here.

Is the forced expulsion of 1.1 million residents in a humanitarian disaster zone under siege - virtually the entirety of Gaza city - and a full scale invasion that is likely to flatten their homes and leave many of those who survive nothing to return to, in the world’s largest open-air prison - a war of defence? Imagine that Iraqis or Vietnamese or Chileans or Iranians or any other country that has suffered unchecked aggression or terrorism by British or American forces (or by US-funded militias or terrorists) had the resources to “defend” themselves in this way, and did the same - imagine that they amassed troops on the border and ordered the expulsion of the entire population of New York or Washington or London from their homes in advance of a full scale military invasion - because they, too, have a right to defend themselves. If that is how we define "defence", where does it stop? The war in Iraq itself - which we now all know was justified by a hoax orchestrated by top-level leadership in the US and Britain - was pitched to the British and American public as a pre-emptive war of “defence”.

There is a racist, imperial logic underpinning all this - when Palestinians kill Israeli soldiers and civilians as an act of resistance to occupation, they are "terrorists". Yet British or American or Israeli troops, no matter what they do, even when they invade other countries illegaly and with impunity, murder civilians and commit war crimes, torture, rape women and children, are always fighting a war of "defence". Once they have defined their objective as 'defence' and ensured the effective dissemination of that message via an entire array of military-industrial media networks, there is no limit to what they can do.

Anyone who doesn't get the point, I have no words for you. Trigger warning - I've survived two years under siege by Serbs in Sarajevo, all the while they were proclaiming in the media that the Bosnians / Muslims were "bombing themselves" and using civilians as "human shields" - as if it's even possible to fight a war under siege in a densely-populated urban area, to resist occupation, without defending fighters at some point being in close proximity to civilians, at least from the viewpoint of long-range artillery. The Nazis themselves perfected this kind of logic, referring to the partisans as 'terrorists'. And the Serbs too saw themselves as "defending" Europe from Muslim hordes, in the process committing genocide.

But "Hamas denies Israel's right to exist, it's in their charter." Oh yes, and Israel likewise, quite clearly denies the Palestinian state the right to exist, and has been much more successful at it than Hamas, given that the Palestinians don’t have a state - Israel has denied them that since long before Hamas existed, from the creation of Israel and the Nakba in 1948. When they tried legitimate means, through free and fair elections in 2005, Israel reacted by arresting Palestinian legislators, jailing hundreds of them indefinitely without trial - for the crime of election campaigning. Not exactly the way to encourage a peaceful solution and dialogue.

On the whole, it is not really in the Palestinians' interest to disrupt the peace process - it has largely been successive Israeli governments that have repeatedly disrupted the peace process, because they cannot possibly ever agree either a one state or two state solution, for as long as Palestinians outnumber Israelis, and for as long as a number of Palestinians or their descendants may seek to exercise a 'right of return' to the homes they were expelled from in what is now Israel. Even the creation of Hamas as a formidable force is the Israeli government and IDF's doing - because they needed to undermine the legitimacy of the moderate and secular PLO led by Yasser Arafat, and demonise the Palestinians. You can read all about it here.

And, I have to add, putting my lawyer hat on - technically, any Palestinian questioning Israel's right to exist does have an arguable case here. The population of Mandatory Palestine under British rule in the 1920s was around 80% Arab - if a democratic state had been created, it should have been majority Arab; which is why the creation of a Jewish state necessitated the forced expulsion of a significant portion of the Arab population from what is today Israel, which resulted in the 'Nakba' - in other words, ethnic cleansing, which is not only unethical but illegal under international law. Any fair-minded person, equipped with the facts and knowledge of the history of the region, should be able to appreciate that you don't have to be a bloodthirsty religious fanatic to legitimately think that Israel should not exist. It's not very different from Native Americans feeling that the United States should not exist, however impractical the sentiment may be as the foundation for a political platform.

And make no mistake - the historical expulsion of Jews from the Holy Land over the millennia was not the Palestinians' or Arabs' doing - oh no, for most of history, until the early 20th century, and until the British colonial administration massively fucked things up with their 'divide and conquer' style of governance, the Arabs were among the few allies Jews have had had in the region. The exile and persecution of Jews in the Holy Land has been largely at the hands of Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, and later Christian Crusaders in the Middle Ages. Ironically, it was the Persians (ancestors of modern Iranians) and later the Arabs and Ottomans who brought the Jews back to the Holy Land. The Ottoman empire was a refuge for Jews exiled from Europe during the Spanish Inquisition and various other pogroms. And in Jerusalem under Ottoman rule for four whole centuries (until 1917), it was common practice for Muslims and Jews and Christians to all pray together at the site of the Al Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount - one of the holiest sites in Islam, and for Jews as well, being the location of the former Jewish Temple (first destroyed by Babylonians, later the Romans). That this would be unthinkable today, is a measure of how bad things have got, and how fast.

Understandably, the Zionist cause got a boost after the Holocaust. The Jews needed a state of their own. But why did the Palestinians have to pay the price for it? Why wasn't it somehow pinned to those responsible for the historical wrongs done to Jews, from the Roman Empire and Christian Crusades to the Spanish Inquisition and the Holocaust - the Germans, Italians, Spanish? They should have been made to pay. You think Hamas are extremists for taking extreme measures to resist occupation? Think of the Nazis, the Fascists, the Inquisitors and Conquistadores - nobody did anything to them to make them genocidal psychopaths. They were not oppressed or living under siege. Let's also not forget previous incursions into Gaza, or the Lebanon war of 2006, in which Israel launched a full scale invasion of southern Lebanon, displacing around 1 million people and killing over a thousand, and causing extensive damage to civilian infrastructure. Why? Because Hezbollah attacked an Israeli military transport patrolling the border and kidnapped two Israeli soldiers, demanding the release of prisoners held by Israel.

But I digress. What I want to say is, this pending invasion of Gaza is not about 'defence'. The Israeli leadership are seizing on an opportunity to kill more Palestinians, flatten more Palestinian homes (something they have been doing for decades, not just with artillery but even plain old bulldozers), and in the long term seize more land, once it’s become uninhabitable for Palestinians. Hamas is useful to them. They started the occupation, they created Hamas (literally), and they ultimately provoked this. There is no fair solution, fair to all - two state or one state - that the Israeli leadership would accept. They are outnumbered, and they know that. You think Hamas are extremists? Look at the Israeli politicians. Ayelet Shaked, one of the most influential Israeli lawmakers, formerly Minister of Justice and Minister of the Interior, has in the past posted statements on Facebook referring to Palestinian children as "little snakes", and condoning the collective punishment of Palestinian civilians, suggesting they should all be treated as "enemy combatants", not just those doing the actual fighting. I fear that many Israelis themselves have, in their historical memory of exile, internalised the European racism that was once turned against Jews and Arabs alike (rooted in the Crusades and Inquisition), just as many Arabs have internalised the anti-semitism that led to the Holocaust (also a European creation). Yet they remain brethren - the Jews claiming descent from Isaac, the Palestinians from Ishmael, both sons of Abraham.