This post is based on a presentation at a panel discussion on “Israeli war against Palestinian people in Gaza” organised by Janhastakshep in Delhi on October 20, 2023.

Palestine solidarity protest in Bangalore

But do you condemn…

We are expected to begin every discussion on the latest phase of the ferocious 75 year old war Israel has been waging on the Palestinian people, by answering the question – “But do you condemn the Hamas action?”

Sometimes, because stronger words are needed, they say “dastardly” Hamas action, as a television anchor recently did, trying to push Palestinian writer Susan Abul Hawa to place on Hamas the responsibility for the ongoing “humanitarian crisis”  She did not.  Nor did she accept the banal term humanitarian crisis, terming it instead, an intentional genocidal war.

This belligerent question comes from beginning with “secondly”,  as the Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti  said –

“If you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story, starting with ‘secondly’ “.

“Jerusalem is my city” by the artist Heba Zagout, killed by Israeli bombardment in Gaza along with two of her children, in October 2023

Or to slightly paraphrase  Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg – “In history as in cinema, every close-up (or every still image) implies an ongoing off-screen scene.”

To justify Israeli occupation of Palestine, start with and end with the freeze frame, the close-up. Obliterate the ongoing off screen scene.

As Bassem Youssef, Egyptian comedian and television host, retorted when being pushed to condemn Hamas,

“Imagine a world without Hamas. What would that world look like? Let us give this world a name, and let us call it West Bank. Hamas has no control over West Bank. Here, this August alone, 37 Palestinian kids were killed. No music festival, no paragliding, no Hamas. Since the occupation of the West Bank, 7000 Palestinians have been killed. No music festival, no paragliding, no Hamas.”

In other words, Palestinians and those who support Palestine are continuously called upon to condemn acts of violence by the Palestinian resistance, but nobody is called into television studios to condemn the ongoing acts of violence for over 75 years by the apartheid Israeli state.

But let me, in the words of many Palestinians, reframe what Hamas did on October 7, 2023. It staged a prison break.

As part of my purpose here is to amplify Palestinian voices that we do not see in mainstream media in India, let me now quote a little at length from an article by Mariam Barghouti, Palestinian American based in Ramallah in the West Bank:

“In the early morning hours of Saturday, October 7, Palestinians across the West Bank woke up to the sound of explosions.

No one really knew what was happening until reports started trickling in that fighters from Gaza had taken control of Beit Hanoun crossing – the only one through which Gaza residents may reach the rest of historic Palestine on the extremely rare occasions the occupier allows them to.

Soon information appeared on social media that the wall that Israel had erected around the Gaza Strip to keep its 2.3 million people permanently imprisoned had been breached.

And then came the images and footage of the broken wall. In one video, showing a bulldozer bringing down the wall, a Palestinian man can be heard chanting in exhilaration: “Yes, go! Allahu Akbar [God is the Greatest]! Hit it, guys! Rest in peace, wall!”

It was unbelievable. It felt surreal. We wondered how it was possible that the people of Gaza had broken out of their prison.

Few in the world would understand our feelings in that moment. Perhaps political prisoners might.

The vast majority of the Palestinian population remaining in historic Palestine has been born in prison and only knows prison. Gaza is completely sealed off from the rest of the world by Israel’s apartheid wall and subjected to a debilitating siege, in which its neighbour Egypt happily partakes.

In the occupied West Bank, all entry and exit points of every Palestinian village, town, and city are controlled by the Israeli occupation forces; Palestinians – unlike the Israeli settlers stealing their land – have no freedom of movement…

…As in a real prison, we are also subjected to round-the-clock surveillance through cameras in public places, drones, the tapping of phones and telecommunications, a network of infiltrators and spies, etc.

And of course, just like prisoners, we are “punished” for “misbehaving”. In Gaza, punishment means indiscriminate bombardment of densely populated areas that always results in the mass killing of civilians.

In the West Bank, we are subjected to “search-and-arrest raids” on a nightly basis, where occupiers invade our homes, brutalise our loved ones in front of terrified children and take them away (sometimes the children themselves) to detain them indefinitely without charge. Shooting dead Palestinian civilians in those raids is, of course, a regular occurrence.

In this context, seeing those images and videos of the prison wall torn down in Gaza is liberating. Their symbolic power cannot be overstated.

Of course we knew war broke out the moment Palestinians in Gaza broke out of their Israeli prison. My conversations with peers and friends, my group chats, phone calls – all were dominated by the same dark premonition: “They are going to kill us all.”

We know, from direct experience, what Israel’s policy of revenge means. We also know that no matter what savagery its army commits, the West would “stand by” it and point to “Palestinian crimes”.

Israel had waged five wars on Gaza, each time mass killing Palestinian civilians as Western leaders justified the slaughter with the familiar mantra “Israel has the right to defend itself.”

And of course, that is exactly what is happening now.

We’ve been held hostage by Israel for decades. We’ve been prisoners in our land for generations. BUT this October, the wimpy kid finally got his punch and the bully is now shaken.

As our oppressors are out killing indiscriminately in blind rage, an uncomfortable feeling is creeping in among them that the prison they are holding us in is starting to crumble.”

This view from Gaza of what happened on October 7 and what is happening now, is worth remembering.

The swallowing up of Palestine by Israel

This cannot be stated often enough – the migration of Jews from all over the world into their “homeland” Israel was not into a space that was vacant of people. The Palestinians living there for millennia had to be forcibly evicted. There has been a steady swallowing of Palestinian lands by Jewish settlements and the herding of Palestinian people into the continually shrinking little slivers of West Bank and Gaza. How is Palestinian land taken over? By a variety of strategies. By military force, with guns and bombs, primarily from noncombatant farm families. By demolishing Palestinian homes on flimsy legal grounds, or punitively, and since Palestinians cannot obtain building permits from Israel, many suddenly homeless Palestinians have to vacate their land, which is then taken over for Jewish families. The Knesset passed a draft law in 2011 that would require Palestinians to pay for the demolition costs of their own homes, and now the strategy is to make Palestinians actually self  demolish their own homes, as Israeli authorities did in a neighbourhood of occupied East Jerusalem early last year.

Until 1948 there was no Israel.  Maps showed a country called Palestine.

Map from National Geographic of 1947

From 1948, there is only Israel, and Palestinians are encroachers, criminals and terrorists in their own land, Palestine being rapidly swallowed up by the means described above. This is why the Birzeit University Union statement says unequivocally – “An occupying colonial power cannot claim the right to self-defense against the people under its brutal occupation. There is no moral equivalence between the colonizer and the colonized.”

What about the Israeli hostages with Hamas? Ilan Pappe, the powerful voice of Jewish anti Zionism from within Israel, said recently in a talk held in the current context, that Hamas has emerged as the only Palestinian political group that takes action to combat the ceaseless attacks on Palestinian lives and territory by Israeli settlers in the West Bank, by the Israeli Army and Israeli Border Police. But even more significantly, Pappe said that the issue of Palestinian political prisoners (close to 5000 held without trial in Israeli prisons in April 2022), is one that all Palestinians across political divisions, see as most important and immediate. (Over the course of 2021, the Israeli military arrested nearly 8,000 Palestinians, including more than 1,300 minors and 184 women.) The Palestinian Authority and the PLO have not been able to address this issue with any seriousness, while the Hamas, much before October 7, had declared it would abduct Israeli  soldiers and citizens as hostages for the release of political prisoners.  Hamas, says Pappe, is merely carrying out a programme it had announced well in advance.

This is the Firstly with which we need to begin. This is the ongoing, off screen, long playing scene, in which October 7^th saw the beginning of a prison breakout and the brutal repression that followed on all the remaining prisoners.

Hamas as an Israeli creation

What is the Secondly? That the Hamas is a creation of Israel and its allies. Hamas was launched in 1988 in Gaza at the time of the first intifada with a charter that denied legitimacy to the existence of the Israeli state. But in a pattern familiar with imperialist powers all over the globe, Israel had for a decade or so prior to this, supported the emergence of the Islamist force that became Hamas, as a counter to Yasser Arafat’s Fatah party, which formed the heart of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). Fatah was a secular, leftist guerrilla movement, opposed to Islamic right wing politics, and Israel considered it the main enemy. The idea was for Hamas to deal with Fatah and then Israel would deal with Hamas. (A policy familiar to us from US with regard to Taliban and Al Qaeda).

The question asked by Husam Zumlot  (Palestinian Ambassador to the UK) is why Israel will not negotiate with the PLO – which recognizes Israel, commits to negotiations and non-violence, to international law and resolutions, in return for which all Israel has to do is end occupation and stop its colonial expansion. Why, Zumlot asks, is the international community which was supposed to provide accountablity and guarantees, available only to defend Israel?

After the 1993 Oslo accords, the situation changed. Israel formally recognized the PLO and Hamas became the enemy. Hamas refused to accept Israel or renounce violence and as Ishaan Tharoor puts it, “became perhaps the leading institution of Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation, which, far beyond religious ideology, is the main reason for its continued popularity among Palestinians.”

In 2007, Hamas won the election in Gaza, a development that annoyed both the West and Fatah. Once Hamas took over Gaza, Israel began strict blockades and turned Gaza into the largest open air prison in the world.

Media and disinformation

Meanwhile, the mainstream media is compliant with Zionist propaganda – you would have seen the meme with three different headlines in rapid succession in the New York Times report on the Israeli attack on a hospital in Gaza. Starting with attributing responsibility to an Israeli  “strike”, and ending with an anonymous “blast”.

You know about the Israeli Defence Forces claim  which went viral that “Women, children, toddlers, and elderly were brutally butchered in an ISIS way of action and we are aware of the heinous acts Hamas is capable of,” but at the same time, IDF formally refused to confirm it officially, saying to a publication – ““We cannot confirm it officially, but you can assume it happened and believe the report.”

But an Israeli woman, survivor of the Hamas assault on settlements near the Gaza boundary on October 7, went viral in an interview in which she said that Israeli civilians were “undoubtedly” killed by indiscriminate firing by Israeli forces themselves. “They eliminated everyone, including the hostages”, Yasmin Porat, who had been at the rave, told Israeli radio, and later Israeli TV. She said that prior to this, she and other civilians held by Hamas for several hours, and had been treated humanely. “Luckily nothing happened to me like what I heard in the media”, she said. What she “heard in the media” was a lot of disinformation, much of it, Al Jazeera says, “produced or spread by right-leaning accounts based out of India.”

Naturally, she has been denounced by Israeli media as a Hamas propagandist.

Suppression of Palestine solidarity protests across the globe

We know that in the UK, students of SOAS have been suspended for a protest in solidarity with Palestine, and a former UK diplomat Craig Murray was detained under counter terrorism laws for declaring support for Palestine and its people at a protest in Iceland.

In India, protests in support of Palestine in many cities have faced police action, reprimands, and detentions.

Palestine solidarity protest in Delhi

In Uttar Pradesh, the Yogi government arrested a Muslim cleric for expressing support for Palestine on a FB post. The Chief Minister had warned against “any activity contrary to the views of the Centre” on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Quite apart from the fact that people have the right to hold opinions contrary to that of the Centre on any issue whatsoever, the Centre has in fact expressed views that carefully do not alienate its West Asian allies by condemning both the violation of humanitarian law and terrorism (indicating both Israel and Hamas). In addition, the Ministry of External Affairs has a few days ago, reiterated that India supports the establishment of a “sovereign, independent and viable state of Palestine”. So the UP CM will have to explain which view of the Centre we should not go against before jailing people indiscriminately.

These contradictory statements reflect geopolitical considerations , keeping in mind the sentiments of West Asian countries and their benefits for Indian labour and Indian investors.  At the same time,  the compatibility of the Zionist agenda with the Hindutva agenda is self evident, and the current regime is definitely trying to sharpen polarization and Islamophobia in the run up to 2024. And of course, Israel is the second top arms exporter to India.  So a Zionist Hindutva alliance is win-win for fascism.

What does it mean that those showing solidarity with Palestinians are being criminalized by state authorities in many parts of the world, while in many European countries Israelis and Jews more generally, are being portrayed as victims? This conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism is most pronounced in Germany with its load of historical guilt, which it has conveniently pushed on to Palestinians to bear. The flip side of this conflation is the conflation of Palestinians with “terrorism”  – the Frankfurt Book Fair cancelled the award for Palestinian author, Adania Shibli’s novel, Minor Detail, which juxtaposes the true story of the rape and murder of a Bedouin girl by an Israel army unit in 1949 with the fictional story of a female journalist investigating the crime in Ramallah, decades later.

What possible ethical justification can there be for holding an independent Palestinian writer accountable for the actions of a political group?

Who benefits most if war and violence continues indefinitely? The international arms industry most of all. It’s boom time for weapons makers and a chance for the USA to build military ties in a network of alliances, in which India is very much a potential partner (junior partner of course), aiding in the US ambition of stretching across the Indo Pacific.

The way forward?

In the emerging political configurations what is the long-term solution? The conventional one-state solution has been rendered impossible by Israel, for Israel has, by its own settlement policies that have infiltrated Palestinian land, knocked out the basis for a sovereign Israeli state clearly separated from Palestine.

The two-state solution, an independent Palestine and independent Israel, is still advocated by many including Noam Chomsky.  However, as Edward Said put it in 1999, “short of ethnic cleansing or ‘mass transfer’, as in 1948, there is no way for Israel to get rid of the Palestinians or for Palestinians to wish Israelis away.”

In this scenario, some voices in the Palestinian resistance to the Zionist occupation advocate a binational state of Palestine-Israel or Israel-Palestine. Similar views are held by some anti-Occupation Israelis, too, including Ilan Pappe. This would mean one state for Israelis and Palestinians, with equal citizenship rights for all, including the generations who have been forced to leave, based on as Ilan Pappe puts it, “the principles of justice, reconciliation and coexistence.”

History will tell us what lies ahead, but one thing is for sure.  People’s will to freedom is intransigent, it will triumph again and again.