On November 3rd, Israeli Defense Forces entered the city of Khan Yunis in Gaza and engaged in carnage that has become all-too-familiar. The IDF conducted house-to-house searches for “militants” and proceeded to kill 200-275 Palestinians, most summarily executed in what is known as the “Khan Yunis Massacre.” Roughly one week later, on November 12th, IDF soldiers surrounded Rafah and engaged in a similar rampage this time killing 111 Palestinians. Sadly, the world has become inured to such Israeli atrocities, but these two massacres harbor a far deeper significance.
Alongside their explicitly genocidal utterances since October, 2023, Israeli officials have repeatedly emphasized that the State’s military assault on Gaza is not directed at Gaza’s civilians but is instead a defensive war against Hamas.[1] Gaza’s own journalists, however, have broadcast news of a far different story, one of unprecedented destruction wrought on the territory and shocking imagery of unrelenting slaughter of Palestinian civilians, including tens of thousands of children and women. When juxtaposed to the assurances of Israeli leaders of waging a war on Hamas, this local reportage of untold destruction in Gaza and the killing rampage of its people by the Israeli military renders the narrative proffered by Israel with a single descriptor – “Orwellian.”
During the 16-month siege, with foreign journalists barred by Israel from reporting inside Gaza, Palestinian journalists revealed to the world a picture of an Israeli military obliterating all essentials of bare life in Gaza. The IDF destroyed the health system; shattered water and electricity infrastructure; razed mosques, churches, museums and edifices of cultural heritage to the ground; obliterated schools and all of Gaza’s universities; pulverized Gaza’s farmland; prevented deliveries of food and water to the people of Gaza; and turned almost the entire civilian housing stock to dust. Above all, it perpetrated a murderous slaughter of civilians unlike anything in this century. Indeed, evidence of Israel’s criminal conduct is so overwhelming that mainstream organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International now label what Israel did in Gaza a genocide.
While the facts of the onslaught alone refute Israeli claims about the morality of its carnage in Gaza, there exists evidence on a different level that belies what these officials insist about waging war against Hamas while imbuing Israeli atrocities with an entirely new meaning. The killing spree in Gaza by the IDF described in the opening paragraph above is not from 2023-24. Nor do these two massacres reflect the two most brutal Israeli assaults on Gaza prior to today known as Operation Cast Lead (2008-09) and Operation Protective Edge (2014) that killed thousands of Gazans and rendered tens of thousands homeless. The massacres in Khan Yunis and Rafah depicted in the opening to this essay occurred in 1956, almost seventy years ago -- and more than thirty years before Hamas even came into existence.
Destruction of Shuja'iyya neighborhood, Gaza City during Operation Protective Edge (2014). Photo by author.
Although the scale of these events from 1956 is different from what has occurred in Gaza recently, there is an undeniable continuity in the brutality of Israel toward the people of Gaza, and Palestinians more generally, that mocks Israeli claims to be waging a war against Hamas. This longstanding pattern of savagery raises questions suggestive of a more deeply rooted set of impulses behind Israel’s violent conduct. Are the massacres committed by the State of Israel in Gaza in 1956 related to the genocide perpetrated in Gaza today? And does the recurrence of Israeli brutality provide a deeper level of insight into its recent genocidal conduct that shatters its claim of waging a defensive campaign against Hamas?
This essay seeks answers to these questions by arguing that today’s genocide in Gaza is rooted in the state-building project of Zionism itself, and that this genocidal violence reflects a pattern of atrocities perpetrated by Israel against Palestinians over decades.[2] This pattern of brutality, in turn, is connected to the exclusionary politics that germinated within the Zionist pre-state and became institutionalized after the State of Israel came into being. Such exclusionary politics constitute the core idea of “The Jewish State” in Palestine in which one group of people is privileged and dominates another. Similar to Apartheid South Africa and the Jim Crow South, Israel enlists ongoing exercises of violence over the dominated group to ensure the continuity of its exclusionary regime. In this context, violence has two basic modalities.
There is the everyday violence of maintaining “order” in the system of exclusion, theorized as the “police power” of the modern state; as “lawfare”; as “governmentality;” and “slow violence.”[3] In the case of Israel, such violence consists of the daily routines enlisted by the State to maintain Jewish supremacy over the dominated group of Palestinians. Carrying out these routines are various institutions -- police, military, business firms, government offices -- that adhere to laws, rules, and practices consistent with the exclusionary principles inherent in the meaning of “The Jewish State.” These principles enshrine Jewish supremacy in Israel and throughout the territories under its control and are codified most clearly in the State’s Basic “Nation-State Law” (2018) that designates Israel as the nation-state not of its citizens, but of the Jewish people. Those residing within the Jewish State or within the areas under Israeli control who are non-Jews are subjected to the violence inherent as an institutionalized underclass, violence that is routinized, however, as part of daily life and remains opaque if not concealed.
At various moments, such quotidian exercises of force are insufficient in maintaining “order” in the exclusionary system and require more severe forms of brutality that might aptly be labeled, “atrocity violence.” In Apartheid South Africa, the “Sharpeville Massacre” of 1960 stands out as a decisive example of such violence. In the Jim Crow South the lynching of thousands of Blacks was a defining practice of this type. The State of Israel relies on atrocity violence in a similar manner.
The fact that violence was inherent in the Zionist project of colonization and state-building in Palestine was openly admitted by one of Zionism’s most ruthless early purveyors, Ze’ev Jabotinsky when he wrote The Iron Wall (1923). Jabotinsky likened Palestinians to Amerindians and believed Zionists to be the counterparts of American colonists. No indigenous population allows itself to be colonized and gives up its land, Jabotinsky wrote in his polemic. An ‘Iron Wall’ – Jabotinsky’s prescient metaphor for the use of force – was necessary if the Zionists were to fulfill their colonizing mission and create a Jewish State in a land overwhelmingly non-Jewish. Denigrated at the time by most Zionists as distasteful, Jabotinsky’s violent prescriptions eventually became ascendant within Zionism by the late 1930s, as Zionist leaders began to speak openly of the need to remove the Palestinian “other” from Palestine, through force if necessary, as a prerequisite for establishing the Jewish State.[4]
This essay reveals how atrocity violence came to be an integral part of Israeli State practice against people designated as “other,” who have steadfastly refused to give up the rights to their homeland. As Jabotinsky predicted, as long as Palestinians refuse to submit to their Zionist masters, Zionism either has to relinquish its exclusionary project, or force its dominated subjects into submission. Such is the meaning of the ongoing atrocities committed by the Zionist movement and the State of Israel against the Palestinians.
What this essay argues is that the genocidal violence of 2023-25 is part of a deeply rooted pattern perpetrated by the Zionist regime against Palestinian civilians. The recent atrocities committed by the State of Israel in Gaza were already inscribed in the Israeli arsenal during the Nakba of 1947-49 and continued shortly thereafter, most notably in the massacres committed in places such as Qibya and Kufr Qasim. It was the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, however, where the Israeli State engaged in the kind of brutality that became hallmarks of subsequent Israeli criminality unleashed against the people of Gaza, including the recent carnage. Moreover, when the Israeli justification for the 1982 invasion is replayed now – the Government claimed to be waging a campaign not against Palestinians but against the PLO – the resonance with the Israeli rationale to be engaged in a war against on Hamas is unmistakable. This look at the parallels of past Israel practice admits to an undeniable truth: the pronouncements of the State of Israel about its war against Hamas are fictions. The aim of the State of Israel has been and remains committed to the removal and eradication of the Palestinians from Palestine.
The Exclusionary Ethos of Zionism
Early Zionism exhibited an eclectic mix of different perspectives but by the Second Wave of Jewish immigration to Palestine (1904-14), a decidedly exclusionary vision appeared within the movement that signaled what the future state might be. This period witnessed efforts by the Zionist community to develop Jewish colonies in Palestine based on the idea of “Hebrew Land, Hebrew Labor.” The motivation behind this slogan was to exclude non-Jews from laboring on land in the Jewish settlements of Palestine with the practical aim of maintaining Jewish-only spaces as the backbone of an eventual Jewish state.[5]
One of the earliest critiques of what this exclusionary policy entailed in practice comes from the Zionist educator, Yitzhak Epstein, in a speech before the 7th Zionist Congress of 1905, later published as “The Hidden Question” (1907). “We buy lands from the owners of large estates,” he writes, “but when we buy such a property, we evict the former tillers from it.” He goes on to comment forcefully about the injustice of these evictions, writing “if we do not want to deceive ourselves…we must admit that we have driven impoverished people from their humble abode and taken bread out of their mouths.” Epstein then warns his fellow Zionists of the dire consequences of this policy by posing a prescient question: “Will those evicted really hold their peace and calmly accept what was done to them?”[6]
Despite Epstein’s critique, the exclusionary ethos of Hebrew land, Hebrew Labor gradually became ascendant within the Zionist movement. By 1919, even the League of Nations took notice of this outlook within Zionism in its King-Crane Commission Report on the disposition of lands formerly under Ottoman authority. In this document, the League observed how “the Zionists looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine.”[7]
By the late 1930s, following the largest mass uprising in Palestinian history known as the Arab Revolt (1936-39), and a Report of the British Peel Commission (1937) which endorsed population transfers to accommodate the creation of Jewish and Arab States, Zionist leaders began openly discussing the transfer of the Palestinian “other” from Palestine to realize the Jewish State.[8] In this way, the vexing dilemma confounding Zionism from the beginning -- how could a Jewish minority gain control of a territory populated overwhelmingly by non-Jews? – could be resolved. The vision of the state-to-be as homogenous and exclusionary had merged with the imperative of using force to drive out the Palestinian population from Palestine in order to establish the Jewish State in the image and likenss of its creators.
From Ben-Gurion down, the Zionist leadership embraced this transfer thinking. “With the evacuation of the Arab community” writes Ben-Gurionin July, 1937, “we achieve, for the first time in our history, a real Jewish state.”
Any doubt about the necessity of this transfer, any doubt we cast about the possibility
of its implementation, any hesitancy on our part about its justice may lose us an historic
opportunity that may not recur….This thing must be done now – and the first
step – perhaps the crucial step – is conditioning ourselves for its implementation.[9]
Others in the Zionist leadership were equally supportive of transfer as the path to Jewish statehood. Menachem Ussishkin, leader of the Jewish National Fund responsible for buying land in Palestine, was emphatic in embracing the idea. “We must continually raise the demand that our land be returned to our possession,” he writes. “If there are other inhabitants there, they must be transferred to some other place.” Even more brazen was Yosef Weitz, successor to Ussishkin at the JNF. “There is no room for both peoples in this country,” Weitz writes. “After the Arabs are transferred, the country will be wide open for us. Not a single village or a single tribe must be left…. there is no other solution.”
By the beginning of World War II, what had once been discussed only in secret by Zionist leaders had emerged as a consensus. If the Jewish State was to be a state of, and for Jews, then the most logical alternative for creating that state was the forceful transfer of what was non-Jewish in that space, meaning Palestinian presence. If any doubt existed on the part of Zionist leaders about the type of force needed to carry out such a project, Ben-Gurion himself admitted that transferring the population could only be carried out by “ruthless compulsion and that Zionists would have to prepare themselves to pull it off.”[10] In this way, overt brutality was baked into the Zionist state-building project.
Nakba: Violence as a Vocation
Following the partition plan for Palestine announced by the United Nations in November 1947, the “historic opportunity” that Ben-Gurion and Zionist leaders previously only imagined, actually descended upon the movement. Because of Zionist pronouncements about transfer during the 1930s, there is debate about the Nakba as a premeditated crime for which Benny Morris, perhaps surprisingly, provides ample evidence. Nevertheless, the debate is arguably secondary to the basic facts of the Nakba itself in which the Zionist movement, and its incarnation as the State Israel did violently evict 750,000 Palestinians from their homes, sent them into exile, and prevented them from returning.[11] Perhaps the single area most affected by this refugee wave was Gaza as the enclave became home for 200,000 of the 750,00 Palestinians evicted from what became the State of Israel. Not surprisingly, this huge concentration of people of refugees sharing such a violent fate made Gaza a center of Palestinian resistance to Israel and a repeated target of Israeli atrocity violence against Palestinians.
Strewn along this pathway of the Nakba encompassing the uprooting and eviction of 750,000 Palestinians is a complementary kind of atrocity violence perpetrated by Zionist militias and Israeli Defense Forces. From 1947-49, as hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were being evicted from their homes and sent into exile, the same Zionist forces involved in the evictions were perpetrating innumerable massacres against Palestinian civilians. The most infamous of these atrocities occurred in the village of Deir Yassin, but killing of civilians in Palestinian villages became a routine occurrence from 1947-49. Massacres in Balad al-Sheikh, Sa’asaa, Saliha, Safsaf, Lydda, al-Dawayima, Eilaboun, al-Kabri, Abu Shusha, Tantura, Beit Daras, and many others, testify to a pattern of savagery that cannot be explained away as the unintended collateral damage resulting from war.[12]
Related to these atrocities during the Nakba was the “Shoot to Kill” policy adopted by the Jewish State to prevent refugees from seeking to return to their homes and farms for food, possessions, and even money.[13] Those seeking to return was most common among the refugees from Gaza who were suffering from acute hunger. The Israeli military ordered soldiers on patrols at the lines of control to shoot Palestinians who transgressed these lines. “We got an order,” explains Uri Avneri in reference to this policy, “to spread out and shoot every Arab we saw coming in or going back. And that is what happened.” The result was 2500-5000 deaths over half of which occurred on the lines of control with Gaza.
While these atrocities affected thousands of victims from 1947-56, the case of a single rape and murder of a Bedouin girl in 1949 by an Israeli combat platoon in the Naqab desert is especially revealing of the violently exclusionary mindset of the Zionist state-building enterprise. A document in this case dated August 15, 1949 and signed by the Israeli platoon commander, reports on how the platoon encountered four Arabs in the Naqab, three men and the young girl. They killed one of the men while taking the young girl prisoner. “On the first night, the soldiers abused her,” the commander writes in the report that would inform his superiors of the incident, “the next day I saw fit to remove her from the world.” [14] The word, “remove” in this report, is poignant. Such terminology harkens back to the Indian Removal Act of 1830 of the Andrew Jackson Administration for transferring Amerindians from the American Southeast; colonizing efforts so admired by Ze’ev Jabotinsky.
Lebanon, 1982: Violence as Apocalypse
The June, 1967 War and its aftermath witnessed a new reality in the region as the State of Israel extended its rule over Palestinians in all of Mandate Palestine. What remained unchanged, however, in this expanding space of Israeli control was the brutality meted out against Palestinians by the Israeli State, reflected most decisively in its 1982 invasion of Lebanon. In some ways, Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon marked a scale of violence against Palestinians never before seen as 19,000 Palestinians and Lebanese were killed by Israel during the onslaught. Waged almost forty-five years ago, the 1982 assault is a striking historical echo of what the world has witnessed over the last sixteen months in Gaza.
After launching its invasion on June 6, 1982, Israel declared its aim to be the eradication of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in Lebanon, but added that “it was not bound by international law since it was dealing with terrorists, criminals, and beasts with two legs.”[15] Similar to the assaults over the past sixteen months on Gaza’s Refugee Camps, Israel pursued its aim in 1982 by focusing its destructive arsenal on the Palestinian refugee Camps of Lebanon. The first of these targets in the 1982 invasion was the Palestinian refugee camp of Rashidiyeh near Tyre in the South of Lebanon much of which was destroyed after two days of bombardment. In what would become standard Israeli practice during the invasion, the IDF brought bulldozers into the Camp and demolished what had not been decimated by aerial and tank bombardments.[16] Other Palestinian refugee camps in South Lebanon soon followed the fate of Rashidiyeh, most notably Ain al-Hilweh in Sidon which was bombed even more destructively with at least 1500 residents killed. “Since the beginning of the war in June 1982,” notes an Israeli author of that time, Amnon Kapeliouk, “refugee camps of south Lebanon were bombarded and destroyed…In Israel, this operation was known as ‘the destruction of the terrorist infrastructure.’”[17] Although Israel barred reporters from these areas, some journalists did gain access to these sites, among them David Shipler of the New York Times who described the carnage in these terms:
In the densely populated Palestinian refugee camps of southern Lebanon…the Israeli Army has systematically destroyed many of the Palestinians' houses... almost all of the houses in Ein Khalweh [sic] had been destroyed…. Although Defense Minister Ariel Sharon has said the Israel's struggle was not against the Palestinians, but against the PLO, ordinary Palestinians in the camps have generally been seen as hostile and deserving of rough treatment. ''They are all terrorists,'' an army officer said, when asked why bulldozers were knocking down houses in which women and children were living.[18]
Undoubtedly, the most vivid first-hand testimony of Israeli assaults on Palestinian life and infrastructure in refugee camps comes from a Canadian surgeon, Dr. Christopher Giannou, who was working in a Lebanese Government hospital in Sidon across the road from the Ain al-Helweh Camp. Testifying on August 15-16, 1982 before the United Nations International Commission of Inquiry on Lebanon, Dr. Giannou described scenes of Israeli destruction inside Palestinian refugee camps that are mirror images of the recent destruction in Gaza. “I have been a witness to the total, utter devastation of residential areas, and the blind, savage, indiscriminate destruction of refugee camps by simultaneous shelling and carpet bombing” says the Doctor. “The scene in the refugee camp of Ain Al-Helweh,…was one of an apocalypse. Not a single dwelling was left intact…All that remained were large, blackened craters filled with rubble and debris, broken concrete slabs, twisted iron bars and corpses.”[19]
Dr. Giannou also testified to the use by Israel of cluster munitions and phosphorous bombs in its assault on refugee camps in Lebanon, weapons also used recently Gaza.[20] “The sound of the [cluster] bombs exploding in the middle of the refugees, camp, is unmistakable;” Giannou testified, with “hundreds of little detonations…resembling a pitched battle of small fire.” He goes on the describe the victims of phosphorous munitions, distinguished by their “calcinated, carbonized bodies” that are “frozen in their position at the time of death.”[21]
What has become one of Israel’s signature atrocities, the bombing of civilian hospitals, was also witnessed by Giannou. From his experience in the hospital in Sidon across from the Ain al Helweh Refugee Camp, Dr. Giannou testified that the facility was bombed “on five or six separate occasions.” One of these bombings “hit the reception area on June 9th,” Giannou recounts, “and killed 40-50 people who had taken refuge there.” By that date, 3000-4000 civilians had sought refuge in the hospital and despite the presence of these civilians inside, “the shelling of the hospital continued.”
Finally, Giannou’s testimony also included explosive revelations about Israeli torture of Palestinian detainees that he had described earlier to a U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Subcommittee.[22] By July 9th, the Israeli military had detained roughly 9000 Palestinian prisoners and had constructed a detention camp for these detainees near the town of Al-Ansar in South Lebanon along with makeshift detention camps in other locations.[23] One of the individuals arrested by Israel was Dr. Giannou. “I have been a witness to the entire male staff of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society medical team in Sidon and Nabatiah being taken into custody,” Giannou reports in testimony echoing what the Israeli military did recently to doctors and hospital staff across Gaza. While imprisoned in a makeshift detention camp in a convent schoolyard from June 13-16, the Canadian surgeon witnessed two Palestinian prisoners beaten to death by Israeli soldiers along with what he described as “savage and indiscriminate beatings” by Israeli soldiers.[24] The abuse ranged from punching and kicking to beatings with wooden sticks and even ropes with nuts and bolts tied to each end and used as whips, described by Giannou as “a sort of modern cat-o-nine tails.” Hazem Rajab, a detainee from Gaza arrested in December 2023 and freed during the prisoner exchange on February 15, 2025, reveals just how similar the treatment of Palestinian prisoners is by Israel across decades. “The day of my arrest,” Rajab says, “they told me and all of us, ‘Welcome to Hell’ – and it truly was hell! The first day and every day, they beat us with their batons and rifles all over our bodies. The beatings were brutal, tough and unbearable.”[25]
Arguably, the best summation of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon comes from a Report by an International Commission composed of five international lawyers and a Professor of Semitic Languages and Islamic Studies, known as the McBride Commission (1983).[26] The Commission’s Report describes the invasion as “one of the most serious breaches of the international order in recent years” that “violated the rights of the Palestinian people” and “was contrary to international law” (129). It goes on to mention the “systematic bombardment of towns, cities, villages and refugee camps” along with the “deliberate and intentional bombardment of hospitals, schools and dwellings” (129). Additionally, the Report observes how the underlying Israeli objective in the onslaught “seems clearly directed at making the Palestinian refugee camps uninhabitable…as well as terrorizing the inhabitants and thereby breaking the will of the Palestinian national movement…” (121). One of the principal aims of the invasion” the Report concludes, “was to ensure the dispersal of the Palestinian population which was pursued through the destruction of refugee camps” (130). With respect to Palestinian prisoners, the McBride Report reads much like the reporting about detainees from Gaza abused by Israel during the last 16 months. McBride Commisioners write that Israel violated international laws of war by denying detainees prisoner-of-war status under the Geneva Convention, and “by subjecting these prisoners to unlawful treatment which included degrading treatment and brutality on occasion leading to death,… Detainees were intentionally deprived of medical care…and have been kept in degrading conditions” (129).
The final area investigated by the Commission involves the single most heinous crime of the Israeli invasion, the massacres of September 16-18 in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla in Beirut.[27] During this grisly event, Israeli armed forces had surrounded the Camps and made use of their Lebanese allies, the fascist Phalange and related Christian militias, as proxies to find and kill any PLO fighters in the Camps. PLO fighters, however, had already left the Camp and only civilians remained. Under the supervision of the Israeli army, Phalangist and Christian militias were assembled at the Beirut Airport and transported in IDF jeeps to the Sabra and Shatila where they awaited orders from the IDF to enter. Estimates of the number of civilians slaughtered during this rampage range from 2000-3500. “From the evidence disclosed,” write the McBride Commissioners, “Israel was involved in the planning and the preparation of the massacres and played a facilitative role in the actual killings” which the Commission concluded “were low-technology sequels to earlier high technology saturation bombardment by Israel from land, sea, and air of every major Palestinian refugee camp situated throughout Southern Lebanon.”
Coda
In Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film, Dr. Strangelove, the character featured in the film’s title is an ex-Nazi scientist advising the U.S. military and government leaders on the use of nuclear weaponry in a possible conflict with the USSR. Speaking in a distinctly German accent, Dr. Strangelove is unable to control the urge of his right arm to swing upward in a Nazi-like sieg heil salute and is prone to utterances of “mein fuhrer” when addressing high ranking officials of the U.S. military and government. Kubrick uses the gesture and Strangelove’s German-inflected English utterances as comedic parodies to suggest that the Nazi impulses in this character are still seared unwaveringly into his identity.
On January 14, 2025 Israel finally assented to terms of a ceasefire in Gaza that would end the 16-month assault, but sadly the pact was set to begin not immediately, but four days hence. At that moment, the official death toll in Gaza had reached 47,000 including 18,000 children.[28] In the next four days, as the carnage was poised to end, the State of Israel would provide a window to the world into its unrestrained violent character. During this 4-day period, the Israeli military continued its bombardment, day and night, and despite there being no military objective to this 4-day assault, killed an additional 141 Palestinians in Gaza.
When the ceasefire did take hold, on the very next day, the Israeli military launched attacks in the Palestinian West Bank Governorate of Jenin, killing ten civilians and wounding more than thirty-five.[29] The Israeli Prime Minister described the aim of this assault in Jenin as “eradicating terrorism” while the Israeli military, paying homage to one of Israel’s patron saints of violence, dubbed this operation, “the Iron Wall.” Two weeks into Operation Iron Wall, Israel has killed fifty Palestinians mostly from refugee camps in the North. At the same time, Israel has bombed the Jenin Refugee Camp along with camps of Tulkarem forcing 40,000 Camp residents to flee, rendering them once again dispossessed homeless refugees. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich described this carnage in the West Bank as the “Gazafication” of Judea and Samaria. “Tulkarem and Jenin will look like Jabalia and Shuja’iyya. Nablus and Ramallah will resemble Rafah and Khan Yunis” Smotrich said condescendingly. “They will also be turned into uninhabitable ruins, and their residents will be forced to migrate and seek a new life in other countries.” In the days between the signing of the ceasefire agreement and its implementation, as Israel continued its senseless slaughter, and subsequently with the Israeli military rampaging in the West Bank while the precarious ceasefire in Gaza took hold, there is a macabre echo in this Israeli violence that harkens back to the uncontrollable impulses of Dr. Strangelove.
From its inception, the state-building project of the Zionist movement, as Ze’ev Jabotinsky insisted, had to incorporate violence on a mass scale to create a territorial container defined by Jewish supremacy in a space overwhelmingly non-Jewish. Zionists themselves, from Ben-Gurion to Yosef Weitz and many others, conceded the merits of Jabotinsky’s argument when they embraced the idea of emptying Palestine of Palestinians as the best and most logical path to make way for this exclusionary vision. Not surprisingly, the birth of the State of Israel itself was a crime of violence on a colossal scale as Zionist militias and Israeli Defense Forces carried out what Zionists had envisioned in the previous decade and evicted 750,000 Palestinians from their homes. This was not some unforeseen tragedy that occurred owing to what is often euphemistically labeled as “the fog of war.” The evictions were codified by a decree of the Israeli cabinet in June, 1948 that said those evicted would never be allowed to return.
Since that time, the defining attribute of the Jewish State is the unrelenting violence it has unleashed against the Palestinian “other” as a means of preserving the State’s exclusionary ethos. This brutality reached new heights in Lebanon in 1982 but has been a regular feature of Israel’s longstanding mayhem against Gaza with the assault of the last sixteen months being but the latest episode in this ongoing pattern. The recurrence of this violence over decades, alongside the genocidal carnage in plain sight, renders hollow Israeli claims of waging war against Hamas. Israel is following the logic of its exclusionary project in a relentless campaign of brutality against Palestinians in holding sacred the idea of Jewish supremacy in Palestine. In the end, however, this effort to hold onto the exclusionary ethos of Zionism will not likely withstand the longue durée. In the impassioned and defiant words of the celebrated Palestinian novelist, Susan Abulhawa at the Oxford Union: “You have crossed all lines and nurtured the most vile of human impulses, but the world is finally glimpsing the terror we have endured at your hands for so long, and they are seeing the reality of who you are, who you’ve always been.”
They watch in utter astonishment the sadism, the glee, the joy, and pleasure with which you conduct, watch, and cheer the daily details of breaking our bodies, our minds, our future, our past….you are depraved violent colonizers…. You can change your names to sound more relevant to the region and you can pretend falafel and hummus and zaatar are your ancient cuisines, but in the recesses of your being, you will always feel the sting of this epic forgery…you will not erase us, no matter how many of us you kill, and kill, and kill, day after day, every day. We are not the rocks that Chaim Weizman thought you could clear from the land. We are its very soil….we will put an end to the Zionist American war machine of domination,… And you will either leave, or you will finally learn to live with others as equals.
Notes
[1]See Chris McGreal, “The Language Being Used to Describe Palestinians is Genocidal,” The Guardian (October 16, 2023; https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/16/the-language-being-used-to-describe-palestinians-is-genocidal. For the “official” discourse, see especially IDF spokesperson Daniel Hagari https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo-vyNQ57eI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFijIRmoXHU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63vRt1eNPS8 https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=942340870947802 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPjzH2ben2Y
[2]A similar argument appears in Rabea Eghbariah, “Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept,” Columbia Law Review, Vol 124, no 4 (May, 2024), pp. 887 – 991; Rabea Eghbariah, “The Harvard Law Review Refused to Run this Piece on Genocide in Gaza,” The Nation (November 21, 2023), https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/harvard-law-review-gaza-israel-genocide/
[3]Max Weber, Politics as a Vocation, London: Hassel Press (2021) [1919]; John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, Law and Disorder in the Postcolony: An Introduction, Law and Disorder in the Postcolony, John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff , eds., Chicago: University of Chicago Press (2006); Michel Foucault, On the Government of the Living: Lectures at the College de France, 1979-80, Michel Senellart, ed. New York: Picador (2012); Zinaida Milleer, “In Gaza, Catastrophic Violence of War and Slow Violence of Oppression Collide,” Just Security (November 8, 2023), https://www.justsecurity.org/89998/gaza-catastrophic-violence-slow-violence-collide/
[4]Benny Morris, Revisiting the Palestinian Exodus of 1948. The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948. Eugene L. Rogan and Avi Shlaim, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 37-59, pp. 39-48; Anita Shapira, Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force. Oxford: Oxford University Press (1992).
[5]See Gershon Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli/Palestinian Conflict, 1882-1914, Berkeley: University of California Press (1996).
[6] Yitzhak Epstein, “A Hidden Question,” Translated by Alan Dowty, Israel Studies, Vol 6, no 1, pp. 34-54, pp. 41-42. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/3/article/14458/pdf
[7] King-Crane Commission Report, August 28, 1919. https://content.ecf.org.il/files/M00708_KingCraneReportTextEnglish.pdf
[8]Benny Morris, Revisiting the Palestinian Exodus, op. cit., pp 39-48.
[9] David Ben-Gurion, Diary, 12 July 1937 quoted from Morris, Revisiting, op. cit., pp 42-43.
[10] From Morris, “Revisiting the Palestinian Exodus,” op. cit., pp 45, 43.
[11] See Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, London: Oneworld (2006); also the interview with Pappe by Steven Sacher on BBC Hardtalk, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WLFQojwdTE That Palestinians were “evicted” is acknowledged by the former Israeli Foreign Minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami, Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy, Oxford: Oxford University press (2006), pp. 42-43.
[12] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/5/15/the-nakba-five-palestinian-towns-massacred-75-years-ago
https://badil.org/publications/al-majdal/issues/items/489.html
[13] For this paragraph, see Benny Morris, Israel’s Border Wars. See also the testimony of Uri Avneri in the documentary film, 1948: Creation and Catastrophe (1:05:48 – 1:06:10).
[14]Aviv Lavie and Moshe Gorali, “I Saw Fit to Remove Her from the World,” Haartez (October 29, 2003). https://www.haaretz.com/2003-10-29/ty-article/i-saw-fit-to-remove-her-from-the-world/0000017f-db62-d856-a37f-ffe2fa5b0000. See also Adania, Shibli, Minor Detail, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette, New York: New Directions Books (2020).
[15] William W. Haddad, “International Opinion and the Second War in Lebanon,” Arab Studies Quarterly, Vol. 7, no. 4 (Fall, 1985), pp. 102-110, p. 105. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/41857795.pdf?refreqid=fastly-default%3A0d964e3eb11f95af25919e8840901bdd&ab_segments=&initiator=&acceptTC=1 The word “beasts” used for those in the PLO is the same characterization used by Yoav Gallant two days after October 7th in describing Hamas. By 1970-71, after the PLO was evicted from Jordan, Lebanon became the main base for the organization.
[16]Trudy Rubin, “South Lebanon’s Palestinians Ask Again: Where Can We Go?” Christian Science Monitor (August 16, 1982). https://www.csmonitor.com/1982/0816/081644.html
[17]From Linda Butler, Introduction to Leila Shahid, “The Sabra and Shatilla Massacres: Eye Witness Reports,” Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 32 no. 2 (Autumn, 2002), pp. 36-58, p. 44.
[18]David K. Shipler, “Piles of Rubble were the Homes of Palestinians,” New York Times (July 3, 1982), pp. 1, 4. https://www.nytimes.com/1982/07/03/world/piles-of-rubble-were-the-homes-of-palestinians.html
[19]United Nations, Testimony of Dr. Chris Giannou at the International Commission of Inquiry into Israeli Crimes Against the Lebanese and Palestinian People, Nicosia (August 15-16). https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-188927/
[20]Human Rights Watch, “Israel: White Phosphorus Used in Gaza, Lebanon,” (October 12, 2023). https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/10/12/israel-white-phosphorus-used-gaza-lebanon Human Right Watch, “Beyond Burning: The Ripple Effects of Incendiary Weapons and Increasing Calls for International Action, (November 7, 2024), (https://www.hrw.org/report/2024/11/07/beyond-burning/ripple-effects-incendiary-weapons-and-increasing-calls
[21]United Nations, Testimony of Dr. Chris Giannou, op. cit. https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-188927/
[22]Judith Miller, “Surgeon Accuses Israel of Mistreating Prisoners,” New York Times (July 14, 1982), p. A10. https://www.nytimes.com/1982/07/14/world/surgeon-accuses-israel-of-mistreating-prisoners.html
[23]David Lennon, “Israelis Prepare Camp for Prisoners,” Financial Times (July 9, 1982), p. 3. https://archive.org/details/FinancialTimes1982UKEnglish/Jul%2009%201982%2C%20Financial%20Times%2C%20%2328820%2C%20UK%20%28en%29/page/n1/mode/2up?view=theater
[24]For the rest of this paragraph see Judith Miller, “Surgeon Accuses Israel of Mistreating Prisoners,” op. cit. and Judith Miller, “War with Words on this Front,” New York Times, (August 7, 1982), p.7. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1982/08/07/068731.html?pageNumber=7
[25]Aljazeera (February 15, 2025). https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/2/15/it-was-hell-released-palestinian-prisoners-in-poor-health-conditions
[26] “Israel in Lebanon: Report of the International Commission to Enquire into Reported Violations of International Law by Israel during its Invasion of Lebanon.” Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 12, No. 3 (Spring, 1983), pp. 117-133. Numbers in parentheses that follow refer to the page numbers in this article.
[27] For an excellent overview of the Sabra and Shatilla Massacre see Linda Butler, Introduction to Leila Shahid, “The Sabra and ShatilaMassacres: Eye-Witness Reports,” Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Autumn, 2002), pp. 36-58, pp. 36-45.
[28] “The Human Toll of Israel’s War on Gaza – By the Numbers. Aljazeera (January 15, 2025). https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/1/15/the-human-toll-of-israels-war-on-gaza-by-the-numbers
[29] For this paragraph, see “At Least Ten Killed, Dozens Wounded Across Jenin,” Aljazeera (January 21, 2025). https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/1/21/israeli-army-launches-deadly-attack-on-jenin-refugee-camp-in-west-bank United Nations, (Feburary 10, 2025), https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/02/1159971; “Israel’s Smotrich Vows Escalation against Palestinians in West Bank, Threatens Gaza-like Fate,” Middle East Monitor (February 10, 2025), https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20250210-israels-smotrich-vows-escalation-against-palestinians-in-west-bank-threatens-gaza-like-fate/