The constant barrage of bloody, violent images emanating from Gaza are mind-numbing. In particular, the pictures of dazed minors and tiny bodies wrapped in shrouds have shaken people across the world — all except Israel’s staunchest supporters in numerous Western capitals, and the potentates and strongmen of the ‘ummah’.

The latest assault on Gaza has highlighted the plight and victimhood of the Palestinian people, and the righteousness of their cause, while exposing the unmitigated brutality the Israeli state unleashes against the most defenceless and vulnerable of populations.

As various commentators have noted, the conflict — and the decades-old suffering of the Palestinian people — did not begin on October 7, with the Hamas attack on Israel. This sorry tale of subjugation, violence and humiliation goes back over a century.

To understand what the ‘Palestine question’ is all about, we must examine the history of the area from the beginning of the 20th century, which can help explain and put in context the grave injustice the Palestinians have been subjected to for over a 100 years, as well as the Zionist appetite for expansion and destruction, and the slavish Western support for Tel Aviv’s unforgivable actions against innocent civilians.

As per Zionism — Israel’s founding ideology — Israel, as it is known today, is the biblical ‘Promised Land’ of the Jewish people, a land that was reclaimed by the Jews after 2,000 years in 1948 (after displacing the Palestinians). However, the focus of this write-up is not the theological arguments for or against Israel — that is a different subject altogether — but instead the historical and geopolitical developments of this region over the last 100 years.

While many in the Western world are painting the tragedy unfolding in Gaza as a consequence of the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, the history of the Palestinian people’s subjugation at the hands of Israel stretches back decades

A dispassionate analysis along these lines will only strengthen the view that the native population of Palestine was dispossessed of their land thanks to colonial intrigue and Zionist brutality, and that the Jews of Europe built a homeland in Palestine in a land that was not theirs.

Furthermore, the evidence points to the fact that empire, the heirs of empire and the Zionists have formed an unbreakable bond going back a century, which explains the callousness of Western states, particular the US and European nations, which have stood by Israel like a rock, even as it has butchered over 5,500 Palestinian children in just six weeks.

THE GENESIS OF A CONFRONTATION

Perhaps the genesis of the Palestine question can be traced to World War I and the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. The Sublime Porte, once a force to be reckoned with across Asia, Africa and Europe, was now in a terminal phase, uncharitably dubbed the ‘Sick man of Europe’, as Europe’s colonial powers sought to divvy up the remnants of the Sultan’s empire.

Adhering to the dictum of divide et impera — divide and rule — the British urged Hussein bin Ali, Sharif of Makkah and ruler of Hijaz (whose descendants today rule Jordan), to rise up against the Ottomans. What transformed into the Arab Revolt served as a deathblow to Ottoman rule over Arab lands, which would be instrumental in the British occupation of Ottoman Palestine, and the creation of Israel three decades later.

While the British were promising the Arabs lands of their own to rule, they were also assuring Europe’s Jews that Palestine was theirs for the taking, never mind the fact that Britain had no locus standi — it was giving away land it would soon occupy, land that did not belong to it.

In the infamous Balfour Declaration of November 1917, Arthur James Balfour, then British foreign secretary and a former prime minister, told Lord Walter Rothschild, a prominent British Zionist, that, “His Majesty’s Government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this objective”, while adding the quid pro quo that nothing would be done to prejudice the rights of “existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.”

These few lines would change the course of history, and spell the beginning of the long Palestinian nightmare that continues till this day, and which the people of Gaza are living through.

CAPTURING JERUSALEM

Just a month after the Balfour Declaration, Jerusalem would fall out of Ottoman hands, and into British control. Upon entering the holy city, Edmund Allenby, the victorious British general, is reported to have said: “The wars of the Crusades are now complete.”

In an interesting and somewhat related anecdote, when French general Henri Gouraud occupied Damascus in 1920, he reportedly went to Salahuddin Ayyubi’s tomb and remarked “Saladin, we have returned.”

The fall of Ottoman Palestine would result in the formation of Mandatory Palestine, a British-occupied territory under the League of Nations that saw increased Jewish immigration from Europe, aided by the rise of fascism in that continent. However, relations between the native Arabs and the new arrivals were fraught.

As Ahad Ha’am, himself a Zionist, observed of his compatriots, “They treat the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, deprive them of their rights, offend them without cause and even boast of these deeds.” Things would only get worse, as the Zionists, and later Israelis, would do much worse to the Arabs, as the pummelling of Gaza has proved.

AN IMPERIAL OUTPOST

While many of Europe’s elites sought to encourage Jews to immigrate to Palestine so that they could ‘cleanse’ their countries of the community, the Zionists also offered their services to empire in return for support for the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

For example, Chaim Weizmann, who would later become the first president of Israel, had said in 1914: “… Should Palestine fall within the British sphere of influence, and should Britain encourage a Jewish settlement there, as a British dependency, we could have in 20 to 30 years a million Jews out there — perhaps more; they would … form a very effective guard for the Suez Canal.”

Indeed, Weizmann’s words would prove to be prophetic, as his political descendants lived up to their end of the bargain, by eagerly participating in the Suez War of 1956.

By the end of World War II, Jewish immigration to Palestine had increased considerably, as had tensions between the Arabs and the Jews. The British Empire, weakened by two world wars, decided to wash its hands of the Palestine question and ended the Mandate in 1948 after the matter had gone to the United Nations (UN), and the global body had called for a partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states.

The Arabs rejected the plan, while the Jews declared independence, leading to the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.

ISREALI EXPANSIONISM

‘Greater Israel’ is often dismissed as a concoction of conspiracy theorists and YouTube cranks. Yet the fact is that expansionism, and the occupation of other people’s land, is contained within political Zionism’s DNA.

Theodor Herzl, the father of political Zionism, in his diaries had written that Israel’s boundaries should stretch “from the Brook of Egypt to the Euphrates”, while other Zionist thinkers had also dreamt of including parts of Lebanon, Syria and Transjordan. Certainly, Zionism’s heirs in modern Israel have faithfully stuck to the vision of their elders, whether it is through the establishment of settlements in the occupied territories, considered illegal by the international community, or the continued occupation of Syrian (the Golan Heights) and Lebanese (Shebaa Farms) territory.

Through the various Arab-Israeli conflicts since the establishment of Israel, Tel Aviv has sought to extend its territory through occupation. For example, in the 1948 Nakba (literally ‘Catastrophe’, but meaning the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians) that came with the establishment of Israel, the Zionist state is said to have occupied 80 percent of the territory that was supposed to be divided up between both sides by the UN partition plan.

In 1956, when Gamal Abdel Nasser dared to nationalise the Suez Canal, the UK, France and Israel ganged up to attack Egypt. Just over a decade later, in the 1967 War, Israel would occupy Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem and the Sinai from Egypt, as well as Golan from Syria. In 1982, it invaded Lebanon, an occupation that would be ended by Lebanese armed group Hezbollah in 2000, as the Israelis vacated South Lebanon.

As is illustrated by the aforementioned facts, Israel has a voracious appetite for other people’s land, and has often been aided in its forays by its Western friends. Until the Suez War of 1956, it was principally the UK which was Israel’s chief patron, while France helped Tel Aviv with its clandestine nuclear programme.

But after Suez, America, the heir to the European empires of the old world and the new global hegemon, would be Israel’s principal foreign benefactor, providing tens of billions of dollars in aid to Tel Aviv, and a staunch diplomatic defence of Israel at all global fora.

THE BACKING OF THE WEST

It was not always like this. The Dwight D. Eisenhower administration of the US had actually sponsored a UN resolution denouncing the tripartite attack on Egypt. But perhaps due to Cold War calculus, and the increasing power of the pro-Israel lobby and Christian evangelicals in the US, from the 1967 war onwards, US defence of Israel was “iron-clad”. In fact, in the 1973 War, the US rushed men and weapons there to ensure Israel survived the Arab blitz.

This “iron-clad” support has manifested itself even as Israel has mercilessly butchered over 13,000 Palestinians since October 7. Following the Hamas attack, European and American leaders made a beeline for Israel, warmly embracing Benjamin Netanyahu and assuring the Israelis that ‘we’ stand with ‘you’ against ‘them’.

This theatre of the absurd continued even as hundreds of thousands of people marched in Washington, London and Paris calling for stopping the butchery of civilians. Here, in the reaction of the Western political elite, the pieces of the 100-year-old puzzle seemed to come together, as the Western elite’s unconditional love of Israel, and contempt for the Palestinians, manifested themselves very clearly.

Israel was birthed and nursed by empire. It has been supported and defended by the successors of empire. Of course, this was a two-way affair, as Israel had also provided valuable services to empire, as its loyal outpost in the Middle East. Therefore, after the dust settles, it would be folly of the highest order to expect the West to offer lasting and judicious solutions to the Palestine solution.

If anything, an equitable solution — acceptable to the Palestinian people, all of them, not just the ruling clique in Ramallah — is likely to emerge from the ascendant Global South, members of which have themselves been victims of empire. There is far too much historical baggage that the Western states are unable to shed where Israel is concerned, and this has been proved throughout the Gaza massacre.

Looking back at history, British historian Arnold J. Toynbee’s sharp and succinct analysis of the Palestine question in 1968 offers clues for a possible solution:

“If Palestine had remained under Ottoman Turkish rule, or if it had become an independent Arab state in 1918, Jewish immigrants would never have been admitted into Palestine in large enough numbers to enable them to overwhelm the Palestinian Arabs in this Arab people’s own country.”

History cannot be rewritten. Yet we can learn from it, if we choose to. An unfair and unjust normalisation will not end the Palestinians’ suffering, nor will the brutal violence targeted at Arab men, women and children dull their appetite for freedom and basic dignity.

Only justice for generations of Palestinians will help bring peace to this tortured land.

Header image: The aftermath of Israeli airstrikes on the Jabaliya refugee camp in Northern Gaza | AP

The writer is a member of staff

Published in Dawn, EOS, November 26th, 2023