Understanding the State of Israel as a System
Over the weekend, the largest escalation between Hamas and Israel occurred: Hamas militants, backed by a barrage of rockets fired from Gaza, attacked around 22 Israeli towns off of the Gaza-Israel border, killing at least 800 people and taking 100 hostages. This was the worst attack that Israel has ever incurred since its founding. Israel’s response was to create more violence – as of the writing of this article, they have cut electricity, water, and food from the Palestinians in Gaza and they have been continuously bombing everything. So far, at least 1,100 people in Gaza have been killed, but that number is sure to increase in the coming weeks.
A lot of the rhetoric coming out of the media establishment has revolved around this idea of Israel being a heroic victim, rising up to “defend itself” from the terrorist threat in Gaza. Many media outlets have claimed that this attack was “unprovoked”, but a quick glance at recent history creates some vulnerabilities in this framing.
Ilan Pappe, in a paper titled “The 1948 Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine”, describes this history. The Zionist movement, the movement for the establishment of a Jewish nation, wanted to establish their state in the land that is considered to be Israel. There were a few problems with this idea. First, the land that they wanted was mainly inhabited by the local Palestinian population, who were mostly unwilling to give up their land to the Zionists (the Zionist movement was settled on only 3% of the land). Second, the area was under British control at the time, and there was no way the Zionist movement could contest the British there. But soon after World War II, the British decided to abandon their colonialism in Palestine, and the Zionists saw a way in. They realized that, because the Palestinians would not want to leave their homes, the creation of the state of Israel would require military force.
The 1948 ethnic cleansing that followed is known to Palestinians as the “Nakba”, or catastrophe. During the Nakba, Zionist forces, using weapons and technology left behind by the British, rapidly colonized 78% of Palestine, destroying a bit less than 400 Palestinian villages in the process and conducted at least 10 massacres (that we know of). They killed around 15,000 Palestinians, wiping out entire families and sometimes even entire villages. In the following years, when the Palestinians dared to return to their homes, the Zionist forces killed 2,700-5,000 more people.
This is a massive oversimplification of the history of Palestine – the Arab revolt against the British from 1936-39 and the 1948 Arab-Israeli War that followed the Nakba are crucial portions of the Zionist rewriting of history that should be examined on their own, but that is outside of the scope of this article. But the pieces that have been discussed, specifically the discussion around the Nakba puts into context everything that is happening in Palestine right now because a majority of the population in Gaza consists of descendants of the Palestinian refugees from the Nakba.
An understanding of this horrific history is the key to breaking down the standard narratives surrounding the creation of Israel. For example, many liberals love to skirt the issue of settler colonialism by casting the current government of Israel as the problem, either directly or implicitly through the language they use. Of course Israel (as a Jewish ethnostate) should exist, they say, but that doesn’t mean that Palestinians should suffer like this. Obviously, as the Zionists understood in 1948, the creation of a Jewish ethnostate on land that is inhabited by a population that is mostly not Jewish requires violence. While the fact that fascists are the ones at the head of the Israeli government today is certainly terrifying, we must discuss the issue of colonialism from a systemic perspective. The other issue with the liberal ideas on this issue comes from the proposal for a “two-state solution.” At a glance, creating one state for Palestinians and one state for Israelis seems like a fair compromise, but when we account for the history of the plight of the Palestinian population, we realize that all of the land that Israel is on (save for the 3%) is stolen. Any solution that does not involve every Palestinian family being back in their homeland is an injustice – the two-state solution fails in this respect.
The sad irony of this entire situation is that Israel isn’t even a safe place for Jewish people anymore. But even worse, it is clear that the creation of a Jewish ethnostate is fundamentally incompatible with Jewish peace – colonialism creates violence and violence creates more violence, as the recent attack by Hamas has shown.
The reason why this issue is so important to those who seek to dismantle all systems of oppression is because the Zionist institution that is Israel demonstrates parallels to how other similar systems around the world twist narratives in their favor. Israel wants to pretend that its genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people is merely in “self-defense”, just as the white settlers in colonial America did to justify murdering indigenous tribes. The Zionists label the Hamas militants as “terrorists”, even though the only difference between them in terms of crimes that they committed is that one side is Muslim and the other is not, just as the white supremacists did in the United States, referring to Black people as “thugs” and “criminals” and the homophobes did when they referred to gay people as “sexual predators”. They shift the narrative by decrying that every “good” Palestinian should condemn the actions of Hamas, just as the white people did when they called on every “good” Black activist to condemn the “rioters” and “looters” in other BLM protests. The language of oppression is universal – the survival of the violent state that is Israel is based on misinformation and impressive narrative-shifting footwork, but a clear understanding of the history of the Palestinian people will allow us to take down their racist narrative.
