[Tee tiong huat]

‘A new abyss’: Gaza and the hundred years’ war on Palestine. For people everywhere, myself included, the awful images that have come out of Gaza and Israel since 7 October 2023 have been inescapable. This war hangs over us like a motionless black cloud that gets darker and more ominous with the passage of endless weeks of horror unspooling before our eyes. Having friends and family there makes this much harder to bear for many of us living far away. Some have argued that these events represent a rupture, an upheaval, that this was “Israel’s 9/11” or that it is a new Nakba, an unprecedented genocide. Certainly, the scale of these events, the almost real-time footage of atrocities and unbearable devastation – much of it captured on phones and spread on social media – and the intensity of the global response, are unprecedented. We do seem to be in a new phase, where the execrable “Oslo process” is dead and buried, where occupation, colonisation and violence are intensifying, where international law is trampled on, and where long-fixed tectonic plates are slowly moving.

while much has changed in the past six months, the horrors we witness can only be truly comprehended as a cataclysmic new phase in a war that has been going on for several generations. This is the thesis of my book The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: that events in Palestine since 1917 resulted from a multi-stage war waged on the indigenous Palestinian population by great power patrons of the Zionist movement – a movement that was both settler colonialist and nationalist, and which aimed to replace the Palestinian people in their ancestral homeland. These powers later allied with the Israeli nation-state that grew out of that movement. Throughout this long war, the Palestinians have fiercely resisted the usurpation of their country. This framework is indispensable in explaining not only the history of the past century and more, but also the brutality that we have witnessed since 7 October.

Seen in this light, it is clear that this is not an age-old struggle between Arabs and Jews that has been going on since time immemorial, and it is not simply a conflict between two peoples. It is a recent product of the irruption of imperialism into the Middle East and of the rise of modern nation-state nationalisms, both Arab and Jewish; it is a product of the violent European settler-colonial methods employed by Zionism to “transform Palestine into the land of Israel”, in the words of an early Zionist leader, Ze’ev Jabotinsky; and it is a product of Palestinian resistance to these methods.

This war has never been one just between Zionism and Israel on one side and the Palestinians on the other, occasionally supported by Arab and other actors. It has always involved the massive intervention of the greatest powers of the age on the side of the Zionist movement and Israel: Britain until the 2nd world war, US & others since then. These great powers were never neutral or honest brokers, have always been active participants in war in support of Israel. In this war between coloniser and colonised, oppressor and oppressed, there has been nothing remotely approaching equivalence between two sides, but instead a vast imbalance in favour of Zionism and Israel. This thesis has been starkly confirmed by the events that followed 7 October, the imbalance of power evident in disproportionate levels of death, destruction and displacement: the ratio of Palestinians to Israelis killed so far is about 25-1. 

It is further reinforced by overwhelming level of US political, diplomatic and military support for Israel, combined with that of UK and other western countries, in contrast relatively limited military and financial backing Palestinians by Iran and several non-state actors, much has changed since 7 Oct, the events of the past 6-mths are not unique, and do not stand outside history. We can only properly understand them within the context of the century-long war waged on Palestine, notwithstanding efforts by Israel to deny the relevance of context, and to explain them in terms of the “barbarity” characteristic of its enemies. 

While the actions of Hamas and Israel since 7 October might appear to represent a change or a departure, they are consistent with decades of Israeli ethnic cleansing, military occupation and theft of Palestinian land, with years of siege and deprivation of the Gaza Strip, and with an often violent Palestinian response to these actions.

This episode long war on Palestine ends has clearly had a profound traumatic impact on both Palestinians & Israelis.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/a...-palestine