Palestine

Despotisms can exist long after their past due date. But they are terminal. You don’t have to be a Biblical scholar to see that Israel’s lust for rivers of blood is antithetical to the core values of Judaism. The cynical weaponization of the Holocaust, including branding Palestinians as Nazis, has little efficacy when you carry out a live streamed genocide against 2.3 million people trapped in a concentration camp.

Nations need more than force to survive. They need a mystique. This mystique provides purpose, civility and even nobility to inspire citizens to sacrifice for the nation. The mystique offers hope for the future. It provides meaning. It provides national identity.

When mystiques implode, when they are exposed as lies, a central foundation of state power collapses. I reported on the death of the communist mystiques in 1989 during the revolutions in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania. The police and the military decided there was nothing left to defend. Israel’s decay will engender the same lassitude and apathy. It will not be able to recruit indigenous collaborators, such as Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority — reviled by most Palestinians — to do the bidding of the colonizers. The historian Ronald Robinson cites the inability to recruit indigenous allies by the British Empire as the point at which collaboration inverted into noncooperation, a defining moment for the start of decolonization. Once noncooperation by native elites morphs into active opposition, Robinson explains, the Empire’s “rapid retreat” is assured.

The key declaration was buried in the penultimate paragraph of an article by Yoav Zitun, the military correspondent of Israeli outlet Ynet.

It is the first known official army admission that a significant number of the hundreds of Israelis who died on 7 October were killed by Israel itself, and not by Hamas or other Palestinian resistance factions.

An Israeli police source last month appeared to admit that some of the Israelis at the Supernova rave taking place near Gaza that day were hit by Israeli helicopters. A second police source later partially walked back the admission.

Citing new data released by the Israeli military, Zitun wrote that: “Casualties fell as a result of friendly fire on October 7, but the IDF [Israeli military] believes that … it would not be morally sound to investigate” them. 

He reported that this was “due to the immense and complex quantity of them that took place in the kibbutzim and southern Israeli communities.”

On Monday, MPs will mark the UDHR’s anniversary by gathering for a candlelight vigil, under the title ‘Parliamentarians for Peace.’ How ironic that the majority have given the green light to some of the most appalling levels of death and destruction we have witnessed in decades.

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Across the board, our political representatives are showing monstrous hypocrisy in their commitment to a document they show no signs of respecting. As we speak, our government is attempting to circumvent international law in order to implement its assault on the rights of refugees. And they are emboldened by an opposition front bench that refuses to make the moral case for the right to asylum. The Tories have not ‘failed’ on immigration because they have ‘lost control of the borders’. They have failed because they have proven incapable of protecting the human rights of those seeking a place of safety. Refugees are not political pawns to be debated and disempowered. They are human beings, whose hopes and dreams should not be sacrificed to appease the right-wing press. 

Recently, an Australian-Palestinian friend of mine was invited to appear on Australia’s national television network to discuss the situation in and around Gaza. His white interviewers posed all the usual questions: Can you defend what we’ve seen from Hamas militants? How has the Palestinian cause been helped by this violence? How can anyone defend the slaughter of young music lovers at a music festival? Do you defend Hamas? They probably expected a defensive reaction from him, but calmly, in his smooth Australian-accented English, my friend had already turned the interview on its head. “I want to know why I’m here today, and why I haven’t been here for the past year,” he said gently. By the eve of October 7, he pointed out, Israeli forces had already killed more than two hundred Palestinians in 2023. The siege in Gaza was more than sixteen years old, and Israel had been operating outside international law for seventy-five years. “Normal” in Palestine was a killing a day—yet a killing a day in a decades-old occupation was hardly news; it certainly wasn’t justification for a live interview on a national television network. Palestinians were being given the opportunity to speak now because the Western media suddenly cared, and they cared (“as we should care,” my friend added) because, this time, the victims included Israeli civilians. In the days after October 7, Australia made a strong show of support for Israel: Parliament and the Sydney Opera House were lit up in the colors of the Israeli flag; the Prime Minister said pro-Palestinian rallies should be called off out of respect for the Israeli dead; the foreign minister was lambasted for saying Israel should endeavor to minimize civilian deaths in Gaza. “Well, what about our lives?” my friend asked.

"What about lighting up a building for us? When our government lights up every building blue and white, how are we [Australian Palestinians] supposed to feel? Are we not Australian? Should nobody care about us? A 14-year-old boy was set on fire in the West Bank by Israeli settlers. What about us?"

The news anchors were caught off guard. This isn’t how these interviews are supposed to go.

"What is the message we are sending Palestinians if we cannot unite behind a call to halt the relentless bombardment of Gaza?" Deputy UAE U.N. Ambassador Mohamed Abushahab asked the council. "Indeed, what is the message we are sending civilians across the world who may find themselves in similar situations?"

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Deputy U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Robert Wood told the council that the draft resolution was a rushed, imbalanced text "that was divorced from reality, that would not move the needle forward on the ground in any concrete way."

"We do not support this resolution's call for an unsustainable ceasefire that will only plant the seeds for the next war," said Wood.

The U.S. had offered substantial amendments to the draft, including a condemnation of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks that Israel says killed 1,200 people and in which 240 people were taken hostage.

Britain's U.N. Ambassador Barbara Woodward said her country abstained because there was no condemnation of Hamas.

"Israel needs to be able to address the threat posed by Hamas and it needs to do so in a manner that abides by international humanitarian law so that such an attack can never be carried out again," she told the council.

 Sen. Bernie Sanders was the lone member of the Senate Democratic caucus to oppose advancing a $110.5 billion supplemental foreign aid measure on Wednesday, expressing opposition to the bill's unconditional military assistance for the Israeli government.

"I voted NO on the foreign aid supplemental bill today for one reason," Sanders (I-Vt.) said in a statement. "I do not believe that we should give the right-wing extremist Netanyahu government an additional $10.1 billion with no strings attached to continue their inhumane war against the Palestinian people."

"Israel has the absolute right to defend itself against the Hamas terrorists who attacked them on October 7," Sanders added. "They do not have the legal or moral right to kill thousands of innocent Palestinian men, women, and children." 

Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University and the author of several books focussing on the Middle East including 'The Hundred Years' War On Palestine'. He explains some of the basic facts of the struggle for Palestinian independence and the creation of the Zionist project of Israel.

The reported cancellation of Hasan’s show has similarly caused outrage, with left-wing commentators saying that Hasan was both a unique on screen talent and a critical voice on the left and on the topic of Gaza in the sphere of corporate media.

“[MSNBC], make this make sense,” wrote human rights lawyer Noura Erakat. “[Mehdir Hasan]’s program has felt like an oasis on air and more needed than ever. His program with Mark Regev was a whole class on journalistic method. He should be amplified, not shut down.”

“It is bad optics for MSNBC to cancel [Mehdi Hasan]’s show right at a time when he is vocal for human rights in Gaza with the war ongoing,” wrote Rep. Ro Khanna (D-California). “MSNBC owes the public an explanation for this decision. Why would they choose to do this now?”

The privileging of Israeli sources and perspectives is hardly new. An internal report by the BBC into its news coverage of Israel and Palestine that was commissioned by the corporation’s governors in 2006 remarked on “how little history or context is routinely offered”.

It also noted “the failure to convey adequately the disparity in the Israeli and Palestinian experience, reflecting the fact that one side is in control and other lives under occupation”.

For evidence of this today, just consider the difference between the BBC’s “explainer” of what it calls the “Israel-Gaza war” whose chronology starts on 7 October 2023 and Al-Jazeera’s own version which argues that the current conflict “has its roots in a colonial act carried out more than a century ago”.

Municipal authorities in Gaza have accused the Israeli army of deliberately destroying thousands of books and historical documents. They have also called for the intervention of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to “intervene and protect cultural centers and condemn the occupation’s targeting of these humanitarian facilities protected under international humanitarian law.”

As was the case in Sarajevo in 1992—when Bosnian Serb forces, stationed in the hills above the city, razed the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina to the ground—the targeted destruction of Gaza’s primary public library is a stark reminder that genocide is about more than just the premeditated mass extinguishing of human life; it’s also about the calculated, and often vindictive, destruction of a people’s culture, language, history, and shared sites of community.