“Listen up — there’s no war that will end all wars…War is a perfect, self-contained being.” — Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“On the hill we had been at the start of something: of a new era in which conflict surges, shifts or fades but doesn’t end, in which the most you can hope for is not peace, or the arrival of a better age, but only to remain safe as long as possible…The outpost was the beginning. Its end was still the beginning…The Pumpkin is gone, but nothing is over.”

— Matti Friedman, Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story of a Forgotten War

PREAMBLE

Iran’s missile attack at three military targets in Israel on the night of October 1, 2024 has brought the Middle East close to vertical escalation. Iran’s attack was a response to Israel’s targeted killing of the Chairman of Hamas’ Political Bureau Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran and multiple assassinations of Hezbollah commanders in Lebanon, including the killing of Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah.

For its part, Israel has promised a punishing response at a time and place of its choosing. What that response might be is outside the scope of this article. What I seek to do here is to get to the basic problem that has brought the region to a major violence spiral with the potential to impact global geopolitics. That problem, in one word, is Zionism. It began even before the United Nations’ Partition Plan. Without getting rid of that plague, Middle East’s generational war will surge, shift or fade but never end. It’s an existential war with many battles at multiple fronts.

HOW DID THE REGION GET HERE?

Most Western news, commentary and analyses will have everyone believe that this war and Israel’s response began on October 7, 2023 with Hamas breaching Gaza’s “iron wall” and attacking Israeli military bases and Kibbutzim close to Gaza. What Israel has since done, goes the line, is mere self-defence. Nothing could be further from the truth.

While violence had begun before the British left Palestine, let’s take the Nakba [catastrophe], the expulsion of Palestinians from their land in May 1948, as the starting point. Britain gave up its mandate on May 15 and the war began.

As Israel conducts a genocide in Palestine, bombs Lebanon, Yemen and Syria and seeks to pull Iran into a wider war, the Middle East teeters at the brink of what could potentially morph into a new world war. But the issue at the heart of this dangerous conflagration is neither security nor self-defence but the contradictions in Israel’s founding political ideology

Some 750,000 Palestinian Arabs, at the time nearly half of Mandatory Palestine’s Arab population, were expelled from their homes by Zionist terrorist organisations such as Haganah and Irgun, which then became the Israeli Defence Forces by the end of May. More than 15,000 were killed as part of ethnic cleansing. During this Zionist campaign, up to 600 Palestinian villages were destroyed.

Further, as Israeli historians Benny Morris and Benjamin Kedar show in a paper published online on September 19, 2022, titled, ‘Cast Thy Bread: Israeli Biological Warfare During the 1948 War’, Haganah’s science corps (known by its Hebrew initials HEMED) was instrumental in poisoning village wells in an operation code-named ‘Cast Thy Bread.’ This programme was fully supported by David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann, a Russian Jew trained as a biochemist. Ben-Gurion was to become Israel’s first prime minister while Weizmann became Israel’s first president.

In an essay reviewing Tom Segev’s biography of Ben-Gurion, and titled ’From ‘Virtuous Boy’ to Murderous Fanatic: David Ben-Gurion and the Palestinians’, Dr Jeremy Salt writes: “Ben-Gurion and the man he had grown to despise, Chaim Weizmann, were delighted at the spectacle of deserted villages and towns and rich agricultural farmland. It was all theirs now. Hundreds of villages were destroyed, not as the unavoidable consequence of war but because the Palestinians could not come back to what had been destroyed.”

That this policy of expelling and exterminating the Palestinians was — and remains — a deliberate one is clear from statements by various Zionist leaders, including Ben-Gurion himself. They knew then and they know now that they have stolen a people’s land. As Morris noted in his book, 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War, Ben-Gurion understood clearly that Arabs would not accept this theft:

“Years later, after the establishment of Israel, [Ben-Gurion] expatiated on the Arab perspective in a conversation with the Zionist leader Nahum Goldmann: ‘I don’t understand your optimism… Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural…We come from Israel, it’s true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault?’”

Ben-Gurion is not the only one. Yitzhak Shamir, a former terrorist and later Israel’s prime minister, wrote a letter to the king of Morocco and told His Majesty — quoted by Mohamed Heikal in Illusions of Triumph: An Arab View of the Gulf War — that “We [Israelis] understand their dreams very well, but unfortunately here we have a conflict between two dreams… we agree to the Palestinians having a dream, but they should understand that it is impossible.”

There’s absolute clarity here about the expansionist and exclusionary Zionist approach. There can never be a sovereign Palestinian state. In the best possible scenario, to quote Ami Ayalon, former admiral and later head of the Shabak (intelligence service known as Shin Bet), “Peace was more important than absolute historical justice.”

While violence had begun before the British left Palestine, let’s take the Nakba [catastrophe], the expulsion of Palestinians from their land in May 1948, as the starting point. Britain gave up its mandate on May 15 and the war began. Some 750,000 Palestinian Arabs, at the time nearly half of Mandatory Palestine’s Arab population, were expelled from their homes by Zionist terrorist organisations. More than 15,000 were killed as part of ethnic cleansing.

The line, from Ayalon’s 2020 memoir, Friendly Fire: How Israel Became Its Own Worst Enemy, refers to his efforts to find a viable peace framework in collaboration with Palestinian philosopher and academic Sari Nusseibeh, who was then president of Al Quds University in East Jerusalem and Arafat’s top man in Jerusalem before he fell out with Arafat. That was the quid for the quo.

Ayalon’s contradistinction between peace and historical justice in and of itself refers to two facts that inform even peace-seeking Zionists: that historical justice abhors the existence in Palestine of a settler-colonial project, but that Israel being a “reality”, there must be some peace framework which can allow Israel and the Palestinians to live together by allowing the latter agency over their affairs, something the Oslo Agreements failed to do.

Ayalon is also one of those Israelis who believes, as he told Le Monde in an interview on January 24, 2024, “If we refuse peace, what awaits us will be even more violent than October 7.” Recently, as noted by Professor Joseph Massad in an op-ed for Middle East Eye, Ayalon told the Israeli Hebrew-language newspaper Maariv: “As far as the Palestinians are concerned, they lost their land, which is why when people ask me, what would you do if you were Palestinian? I say that if someone came and stole my land, the land of Israel, I would fight him without limits.”

Possibly the best account of the contradiction at the heart of Zionism, which Times of Israel in an article called “defining”, comes through in a speech by Moshe Dayan in April 1956 at Kibbutz Nahal Oz, barely a mile away from Gaza. Dayan was then the chief of the Israel Occupation Forces (IOF). Roi Rutenberg (or Rothberg as some writings name him) was a young officer and in charge of the Kibbutz’s security. He was captured and killed by a group of Palestinians and Egyptians. Dayan spoke at his funeral:

“Yesterday with daybreak, Roi was murdered…Let us not hurl blame at the murderers. Why should we complain of their hatred for us? Eight years have they sat in the refugee camps of Gaza, and seen, with their own eyes, how we have made a homeland of the soil and the villages where they and their forebears once dwelt.”

And what was the lesson Dayan drew from this? That this historical injustice must be reversed? No. And that’s where we constantly bump into the contradiction that lies at the dark heart of Zionism. Dayan went on to speak of “the destiny of our generation in its full cruelty”, which requires that “if the hope of our destruction is to perish, we must be, morning and evening, armed and ready.

“A generation of settlement are we, and without the steel helmet and the maw of the cannon, we shall not plant a tree, nor build a house…and without the barbed wire fence and the machine gun, we shall not pave a path nor drill for water…The gates of Gaza were too heavy for [Roi’s] shoulders, and they crushed him.”

Sixty-seven years later, the gates of Gaza and its “iron wall” — the reference to Revisionist Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s essay, ‘The Iron Wall’ — became too heavy for another set of Roi Rutenbergs, crumbling under the weight and demand of historical justice. The steel helmet and the maw of the cannon, now replaced by terrifying Israeli air power and the munitions it can deliver, continue to fail in the mission of subjugating the Palestinians.

As I have noted in this space before, even Jabotinsky understood this contradiction. Political paterfamilias of right-wing Israeli political party Likud and supreme commander of the terrorist group Irgun, Jabotinsky had no empathy for the Palestinians but, as a pragmatist, was more forthright and unapologetic about “Zionist colonisation.”

Jews must be the majority, he contended; there must be an “iron wall” separating Jews from Arabs and “justice” must be enforced — once the wall has been built and the Jews are strong, Arabs would come and sue for peace and accept the terms of co-existence, as dictated by the Jewish state.

Again, like Dayan, he thought the wall wouldn’t collapse under the weight of injustice. Like Dayan he was wrong. But where both of them were right was in the thinking that, without repression, Dayan’s steel helmets and canons, Israelis “shall not pave a path nor drill for water.” And that brings us to the red-herring called the “two-state solution.”

TWO-STATE SOLUTION WAS DEAD ON ARRIVAL

Statehood in international law is informed by much debate. Scholars of international law have noted that, while legality and laws require a clear explication and codification of norms and concepts in legal instruments, such codification as a prerequisite for statehood escapes objectivity.

This is important for our present purpose, unpacking Zionism and the violence that inheres in it. Jewish populations from Europe and North America (later the Middle East too) declared themselves a Jewish nation and came to Palestine in multiple batches to create a Jewish state: a nation of colonial settlers coming to claim a state on the basis of their ancient exile from Canaan. But there already existed a nation in Palestine, the Palestinians. The Jews, however, got a state for themselves on the basis of the United Nations’ acceptance of their “right” to have a state.

While the UN also accepted the right of the Palestinians to have a state alongside the Jewish state, the Palestinians were not prepared to accept an imperial decision that flowed from and was the expression of post-World War II power relationships and the security architecture. This was true of the Jews too. They had not come to Canaan to share the land with the Palestinians. It was theirs. The Bible had promised the “chosen people” the Holy Land.

That led to armed conflict and the Nakba. The Jews got a state under the UN resolution and then expanded it, first in 1948 and then 1967 through wars. After 1967, they began building settlements on occupied Palestinian land, the territory demarcated by the UN for a Palestinian state. The Oslo Agreements, which Palestinian academic Edward Said described as “a Palestinian Versailles”, gave the Palestinians a mere 22 percent of the land they were entitled to under the UN scheme.

Even that truncated territory was to be divided into Areas A, B and C. As Yitzhak Rabin said in his October 5, 1995 speech to the Knesset, this was not a sovereign arrangement, not a “state”: “We would like this [Palestinian Municipal Authority (PA)] to be an entity which is less than a state and which will independently run the lives of the Palestinians under its authority.”

This was to be an administrative arrangement for peace, not a relationship between two sovereign entities.

While debates on the issue of statehood continue to inform international law and comparative politics, the Montevideo Convention of 1933 is often cited as the criteria for statehood, and the Convention now has a place in customary international law. Article 1 of the Montevideo Convention says “The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications — a permanent population, a defined territory, government and capacity to enter into relations with other states.” These are essentially the attributes of sovereignty.

Article 3 of the Montevideo Convention also declares that statehood is not contingent upon recognition by other states. This is also consistent with the current practice of recognition.

This argument essentially flows from the “declarative” school. In contrast, the “constitutive” school stipulates that a state only becomes a state when it is recognised by other states — ie once the Montevideo criteria are met in fact, those facts should be recognised by other states. Since there are no accepted global criteria to determine statehood and recognition becomes a matter of political and geopolitical interests, the constitutive criterion becomes untenable in practice.

This is an important point with reference to recognition of a Palestinian state for two reasons. One, in the absence of a universal standard, individual states can decide the issue of recognition; two, while many states have recognised Palestine as a state, many others, notably the United States and Israel, have refused to do so. This refusal is of course in violation both of the UN Partition Plan (Resolution 181) as well as the spirit of the Oslo Agreements. Yet, it brings into sharp salience the geopolitical factors at play.

Among other reasons, the refusal by the US and Israel to accept Palestinian statehood is related to the concept of self-defence. If Palestine is accepted as a state, then it must exercise its right to self-defence as a sovereign state, a right also enshrined in Article 51 of the UN Charter.

Palestine’s right to self-defence would effectively deprive Israel and its Zionist supporters of the narrative that brands the Palestinian armed resistance as “terrorism”, a characterisation meant to free Israelis of the moral and legal burden of perpetrating and perpetuating violence against them and to present the Palestinians as barbarians, anti-Semites and human animals.

The narrative of terrorism is not just a matter of semantics. Nor is it just a cognitive exercise. It’s about ascribing meanings to words in a particular setting and the effects they can create. They denote power relationships and are about exercising control and power.

Joseph Massad notes in his 2006 book The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: “The Israelis seem to believe that the only way Palestinians can repudiate terrorism is by internalising it as their identity first…If Palestinians refuse the designation as one that is self-chosen, then they will have the same objective power as the Israelis in identifying who the real terrorist is.”

IF NOT TWO-STATE THEN WHAT?

During a recent conference abroad, I had this discussion with a former foreign minister of Pakistan. He said that Israel would never accept a one-state solution. He was right. But the issue is not about Israel’s acceptance. Israel, as noted above, has not accepted a two-state solution either, a Palestinian state which has the attributes of a state, as understood and accepted by International Law.

The core point today, as it was when Zionism’s father Theodore Herzl and others before him spoke of Zionism and the imperial powers helped them achieve that dream, is that Zionism is a settler-colonial project, bio-imperlialism, if you will, to put a variation on Michel Foucault’s term that seeks to control and subjugate the bodies and lives of Palestinians. The issue at the heart of all the violence is not Judaism but Zionism.

There were Arab and Iberian Jews (Mizrahi and Sephardi) in Arab lands much before the imperial powers decided to resolve Europe’s Jewish problem by foisting it on the Palestinians. The most important point that is constantly evaded is simple: peace and Zionism do not go together. Peace requires syncretism and assimilation; Zionism, to go back to Dayan’s words, “steel helmet and maw of the cannon.”

Just days ago I heard a professor on Al Jazeera argue that, while the French, despite the pieds noirs [Europeans born in French-ruled Algeria], could go back to France, Israelis cannot and therefore it is politically and morally incorrect to take that approach. The argument seems to ignore that Israelis are quite candid in suggesting that the Palestinians should leave and be subsumed in the various Arab states. But even leaving that aside, the professor’s argument did not offer statistics on how many Israelis hold dual nationality and how Israel has populated the illegal settlements through state incentives.

The argument for one state is not about pushing the Jews out of Palestine but establishing a normal, democratic state without the racist and supremacist toxicity of Zionism. It is a measure of entrenched power interests that a solution that would be considered perfectly normal in any other setting should become a non-starter in the context of a Jewish state that also claims to be a democracy but refuses to grant equal citizenship rights to Palestinian citizens of Israel.

Even before the 2018 basic law defining Israel as a Jewish nation-state, Palestinian citizens of Israel — distinct from Palestinians in Occupied Territories — have been agitating the point about equal citizenship. The second intifada began in 2000 after demonstrations broke out in the wake of Ariel Sharon’s visit to Al-Aqsa Mosque. About a month after that visit, during one of the protests, Israeli police opened fire and killed 13 Palestinian boys. Twelve of the killed were Israeli citizens.

Israel set up a Commission under Justice Theodor Or to inquire into what had happened. Despite obvious biases, the Or Commission could not evade certain facts, such as discrimination against Arab Israelis, noting that “Arab citizens live in a reality in which they are discriminated against” by the state.

The task of implementing the recommendations of the Or Commission was given to an inter-ministerial committee headed by justice minister Yosef Lapid. As Professor Mahmood Mamdani notes in his book Neither Settler Nor Native: “The refusal to take seriously the Or Commission’s seemingly modest proposal that Israel actually do what it claims it does — treat Jewish and Palestinian citizens equally — demonstrates just how radical that idea really is.

“Equal citizenship threatens fundamentally the Zionist foundation of the state of Israel. A state in which non-Jews have the same rights as Jews would still be a home for Jews, even a majority population of Jews. But it would not be a Jewish state.”

Once again, we are thrown back to the central problem: Zionism. The only solution to that problem, as noted by multiple discerning scholars and observers, including the Jewish ones: de-Zionisation. And de-Zionisation, as Mamdani notes, has to be along the lines of the end of apartheid in South Africa. Everything else, on the pretext of the sublime and high diplomacy, is just a lie, regardless of which high pedestal it might be mouthed from.

How scared the Israelis are of that model is evidenced by what Ayalon writes in his memoir: [Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s] explanation for his urgency sounded like something straight from a People’s Voice pamphlet: “If the day comes when the two- state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights (also for the Palestinians in the territories), then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished.”

EPILOGUE

Israel has tried many strategies. It has fought wars, tried to keep the Palestinians under the jackboot, discriminated against them, subjected them to daily humiliations, killed them, hampered innocent movement, destroyed their properties, businesses and dreams, arrested, tortured and jailed them, put collaborators in their midst, reached out to criminal Middle East rulers to prescind the Palestinians from the equation of a grand, overarching peace. None of that has worked.

As Ayalon has noted, if Israel cannot find peace with the Palestinians, Israel won’t find peace. The steel helmet and the maw of the cannon can only go this far and no more. Violence cannot beget deterrence in a generational, attritional war.

With each iteration, even when losing in statistical terms, the resistance gets stronger and learns. Technology has a way of getting cheaper through commodification and lateral diffusion. Every round, instead of deterrence, steels the resolve of the resistance to come back and challenge the Zionist oppression. This is not a linear war. This war is a perfect, self-contained being.

This is what the late Palestinian psychiatrist Eyad El-Sarraj meant when he told Ami Ayelon at a conference in London, “In our mutual experience of collective trauma, we are at long last equals.” But unlike Jabotinsky and Dayan, Shamir, Begin, Sharon and now Netanyahu, Ami Ayalon got it right:

“The more I thought about it, however, the more I had to acknowledge that we Israelis had never felt more defeated. How could we call ourselves winners if we were afraid to board a bus or sit in a bar? I can’t say how long I remained lost in thought but, in that interlude, all my assumptions of war crumbled.”

The writer is a journalist interested in security and foreign policies. X: @ejazhaider

Published in Dawn, EOS, October 13th, 2024