Beyond Oct 7

IF it is considered impolitic to denounce Israel’s mass slaughter in Gaza over the past year without condemning the inhumane crimes committed by Hamas and its associates on Oct 7, 2023, perhaps the reverse should also apply. Surely, it’s equally unreasonable to focus on the events of that traumatic day while ignoring the depth and breadth of the retributive injustice unleashed in its wake.
Nor, for that matter, does it make much sense to decontextualise Oct 7 from the Palestinian experience of dispossession, dehumanisation, arbitrary incarceration and bloodshed across the preceding 75 years, let alone from the 18-year siege of Gaza after direct occupation was replaced with a chokehold regularly supplemented by destructive attacks. As Israeli journalist Gideon Levy put it: “It’s 2.3 million people just closed in a cage. And you wonder what will come out of this experiment in human beings, and you got it on the 7th of October.”
The residents of the kibbutzim and towns close to Gaza obviously did not deserve to be murdered or abducted, let alone sexually violated, any more than inmates confined to Gaza deserve their daily dose of death, disease or starvation. Some Israeli propagandists deemed it appropriate to exaggerate the atrocities of Oct 7, with Western media and politicians amplifying untruths. Even Joe Biden claimed to have seen pictures of beheaded babies, until the Israeli military clarified that there weren’t any. Last month, the Gaza health ministry released information about 34,344 Palestinians killed in the territory, almost a third of them identified as children. Among the latter, 710 were victims of what can only be classified as Zionist infanticide. They never got to celebrate their first birthday.
And we live in a world where this level of genocide is considered sad, but acceptable. Israel, after all, has the divinely ordained right to self-defence. Even against infants. Who might otherwise grow up to challenge the unrelenting brutality their forebears endured.
When the history of these times is written, the US will be in the dock, alongside other Western powers that have striven to wash off their guilt over their failure to forestall the Holocaust. Jewish refugees were turned away from many a shore, and many ended up in Auschwitz, Treblinka or one of the other extermination camps.
Since last October, the ongoing ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the West Bank — which was always the primary motive of the 2005 ‘withdrawal’ from Gaza — has been stepped up, with military backing for settler violence morphing into direct attacks by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). The all-out assault against Lebanon, following the decapitation of Hezbollah, preceded by the technological coup of detonating the explosives placed in Israeli-assembled pagers and walkie-talkies, has helped to restore Benjamin Netanyahu’s domestic political status.
After Tehran responded to the assassinations of Ismail Haniyeh and Hassan Nasrallah with a largely token missile barrage, Israel has been negotiating the extent of its retaliation with the US. The latter seems to think that any attempt to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities could prove counterproductive, but igniting Iran’s petroleum infrastructure might be acceptable. Ayatollah Khamenei hasn’t helped matters by endorsing the Oct 7 travesty and reinforcing Iran’s backing for Hezbollah and Hamas.
Israel’s response to Iran will help to determine where the Middle East goes next. The wider war that the US was supposedly seeking to prevent is already proceeding, largely courtesy of its chief proxy in the region, which appears to have little interest in lame-duck ‘warnings’ from an American president who has proclaimed himself to be Israel’s biggest White House supporter. As the Israeli genocide sch­­olar Raz Segal reflected in The Guardian, “Biden’s words constitute … a textbook use of the Holocaust not in order to stand with powerless people facing the prospect of genocidal violence, but to support and justify an extremely violent attack by a powerful state and … distort this reality.”
Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, meanwhile, sees this moment as a precursor to the demise of the Zionist project dating back to the 19th century. He argues that “the original Zionist idea of planting a European Zionist state at the heart of the Arab world through the dispossession of the Palestin­ians was illogical, immoral and impractical”, and that it has survived as a consequence of serving “the ideological or strategic objectives” of a “very powerful … religious, imperialist and economic” alliance.
Emmanuel Macron has switched sides after a year. Biden or Kamala Harris are unlikely to follow suit. ‘Is this really it?!’ asks Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha. “Is our only job to report on our deaths,/ film our cut-off bodies/ and ask you for help? When do YOU wake up?”
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Published in Dawn, October 9th, 2024