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<h1 class="entry-title">The Historical Perspective of the 2014
Gaza Massacre</h1>
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<p align="left">By Ilan Pappé</p>
<p align="left">21 August, 2014<br>
<b><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.pipr.co.uk/all/the-historical-perspective-of-the-2014-gaza-massacre/">http://www.pipr.co.uk/all/the-historical-perspective-of-the-2014-gaza-massacre/</a></small></small></b><br>
</p>
<p align="left">People in Gaza and elsewhere in Palestine feel
disappointed at the lack of any significant international reaction
to the carnage and destruction the Israeli assault has so far left
behind it in the Strip. The inability, or unwillingness, to act
seems to be first and foremost an acceptance of the Israeli
narrative and argumentation for the crisis in Gaza. Israel has
developed a very clear narrative about the present carnage in
Gaza.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" align="left">It is a tragedy caused
by an unprovoked Hamas missile attack on the Jewish State, to
which Israel had to react in self-defence. While mainstream
western media, academia and politicians may have reservations
about the proportionality of the force used by Israel, they accept
the gist of this argument. This Israeli narrative is totally
rejected in the world of cyber activism and alternative media.
There it seems the condemnation of the Israeli action as a war
crime is widespread and consensual.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" align="left">The main difference
between the two analyses from above and from below is the
willingness of activists to study deeper and in a more profound
way the ideological and historical context of the present Israeli
action in Gaza. This tendency should be enhanced even further and
this piece is just a modest attempt to contribute towards this
direction.
</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" align="left">AD HOC SLAUGHTER?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" align="left">An historical
evaluation and contextualization of the present Israeli assault on
Gaza and that of the previous three ones since 2006 expose clearly
the Israeli genocidal policy there. An incremental policy of
massive killing that is less a product of a callous intention as
it is the inevitable outcome of Israel’s overall strategy towards
Palestine in general and the areas it occupied in 1967, in
particular.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" align="left">This context should be
insisted upon, since the Israeli propaganda machine attempts again
and again to narrate its policies as out of context and turns the
pretext it found for every new wave of destruction into the main
justification for another spree of indiscriminate slaughter in the
killing fields of Palestine.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" align="left">The Israeli strategy of
branding its brutal policies as an <em>ad hoc</em> response to
this or that Palestinian action is as old as the Zionist presence
in Palestine itself. It was used repeatedly as a justification for
implementing the Zionist vision of a future Palestine that has in
it very few, if any, native Palestinians. The means for achieving
this goal changed with the years, but the formula has remained the
same: whatever the Zionist vision of a Jewish State might be, it
can only materialize without any significant number of
Palestinians in it. And nowadays the vision is of an Israel
stretching over almost the whole of historic Palestine where
millions of Palestinians still live.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" align="left">This vision ran into
trouble once territorial greed led Israel to try and keep the West
Bank and the Gaza Strip within its rule and control ever since
June 1967. Israel searched for a way to keep the territories it
occupied that year without incorporating their population into its
rights-bearing citizenry. All the while it participated in a
‘peace process’ charade to cover up or buy time for its unilateral
colonization policies on the ground.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" align="left">With the decades,
Israel differentiated between areas it wished to control directly
and those it would manage indirectly, with the aim in the long run
of downsizing the Palestinian population to a minimum with, among
other means, ethnic cleansing and economic and geographic
strangulation. Thus the West Bank was in effect divided into a
‘Jewish’ and a ‘Palestinian’ zones – a reality most Israelis can
live with provided the Palestinian Bantustans are content with
their incarceration within these mega prisons. The geopolitical
location of the West Bank creates the impression in Israel, at
least, that it is possible to achieve this without anticipating a
third uprising or too much international condemnation.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" align="left">The Gaza Strip, due to
its unique geopolitical location, did not lend itself that easily
to such a strategy. Ever since 1994, and even more so when Ariel
Sharon came to power as prime minister in the early 2000s, the
strategy there was to ghettoize Gaza and somehow hope that the
people there — 1.8 million as of today — would be dropped into
eternal oblivion.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" align="left">But the Ghetto proved
to be rebellious and unwilling to live under conditions of
strangulation, isolation, starvation and economic collapse. There
was no way it would be annexed to Egypt, neither in 1948 nor in
2014. In 1948, Israel pushed into the Gaza area (before it became
a strip) hundreds of thousands of refugees it expelled from the
northern Naqab and southern coast who, so they hoped, would move
even farther away from Palestine.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" align="left">For a while after 1967,
it wanted to keep as a township which provided unskilled labour
but without any human and civil rights. When the occupied people
resisted the continued oppression in two intifadas, the West Bank
was bisected into small Bantustans encircled by Jewish colonies,
but it did not work in the too small and too dense Gaza Strip. The
Israelis were unable to ‘West Bank’ the Strip, so to speak. So
they cordoned it as a Ghetto and when it resisted the army was
allowed to use its most formidable and lethal weapons to crash it.
The inevitable result of an accumulative reaction of this kind was
genocidal.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" align="left">INCREMENTAL GENOCIDE </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" align="left">The killing of three
Israeli teenagers, two of them minors, abducted in the occupied
West Bank in June, which was mainly a reprisal for killings of
Palestinian children in May, provided the pretext first and
foremost for destroying the delicate unity Hamas and Fatah have
formed in that month. A unity that followed a decision by the
Palestinian Authority to forsake the ‘peace process’ and appeal to
international organizations to judge Israel according to a human
and civil rights’ yardstick. Both developments were viewed as
alarming in Israel.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" align="left">The pretext determined
the timing – but the viciousness of the assault was the outcome of
Israel’s inability to formulate a clear policy towards the Strip
it created in 1948. The only clear feature of that policy is the
deep conviction that wiping out the Hamas from the Gaza Strip
would domicile the Ghetto there.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" align="left">Since 1994, even before
the rise of Hamas to power in the Gaza Strip, the very particular
geopolitical location of the Strip made it clear that any
collective punitive action, such as the one inflicted now, could
only be an operation of massive killings and destruction. In other
words: an incremental genocide.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" align="left">This recognition never
inhibited the generals who give the orders to bomb the people from
the air, the sea and the ground. Downsizing the number of
Palestinians all over historic Palestine is still the Zionist
vision; an ideal that requires the dehumanisation of the
Palestinians. In Gaza, this attitude and vision takes its most
inhuman form.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" align="left">The particular timing
of this wave is determined, as in the past, by additional
considerations. The domestic social unrest of 2011 is still
simmering and for a while there was a public demand to cut
military expenditures and move money from the inflated ‘defence’
budget to social services. The army branded this possibility as
suicidal. There is nothing like a military operation to stifle any
voices calling on the government to cut its military expenses.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" align="left">Typical hallmarks of
the previous stages in this incremental genocide reappear in this
wave as well. As in the first operation against Gaza, ‘First
Rains’ in 2006, and those which followed in 2009, ‘Cast Lead’, and
2012, ‘Pillar of Smoke’, one can witness again consensual Israeli
Jewish support for the massacre of civilians in the Gaza Strip,
without one significant voice of dissent. The Academia, as always,
becomes part of the machinery. Various universities offered the
state its student bodies to help and battle for the Israeli
narrative in the cyberspace and alternative media.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" align="left">The Israeli media, as
well, toed loyally the government’s line, showing no pictures of
the human catastrophe Israel has wreaked and informing its public
that this time, ‘the world understands us and is behind us’. That
statement is valid to a point as the political elites in the West
continue to provide the old immunity to the Jewish state. The
recent appeal by Western governments to the prosecutor in the
international court of Justice in The Hague not to look into
Israel’s crimes in Gaza is a case in point. Wide sections of the
Western media followed suit and justified by and large Israel’s
actions.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" align="left">This distorted coverage
is also fed by a sense among Western journalist that what happens
in Gaza pales in comparison to the atrocities in Iraq and Syria.
Comparisons like this are usually provided without a wider
historical perspective. A longer view on the history of the
Palestinians would be a much more appropriate way to evaluate
their suffering vis-à-vis the carnage elsewhere.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" align="left">CONCLUSION: CONFRONTING
DOUBLE-STANDARDS</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" align="left">But not only historical
view is needed for a better understanding of the massacre in Gaza.
A dialectical approach that identifies the connection between
Israel’s immunity and the horrific developments elsewhere is
required as well. The dehumanization in Iraq and Syria is
widespread and terrifying, as it is in Gaza. But there is one
crucial difference between these cases and the Israeli brutality:
the former are condemned as barbarous and inhuman worldwide, while
those committed by Israel are still publicly licensed and approved
by the president of the United States, the leaders of the EU and
Israel’s other friends in the world.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" align="left">The only chance for a
successful struggle against Zionism in Palestine is the one based
on a human and civil rights agenda that does not differentiate
between one violation and the other and yet identifies clearly the
victim and the victimizers. Those who commit atrocities in the
Arab world against oppressed minorities and helpless communities,
as well as the Israelis who commit these crimes against the
Palestinian people, should all be judged by the same moral and
ethical standards. They are all war criminals, though in the case
of Palestine they have been at work longer than anyone else. It
does not really matter what the religious identity is of the
people who commit the atrocities or in the name of which religion
they purport to speak. Whether they call themselves jihadists,
Judaists or Zionists, they should be treated in the same way.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" align="left">A world that would stop
employing double standards in its dealings with Israel is a world
that could be far more effective in its response to war crimes
elsewhere in the world. Cessation of the incremental genocide in
Gaza and the restitution of the basic human and civil rights of
Palestinians wherever they are, including the right of return, is
the only way to open a new vista for a productive international
intervention in the Middle East as a whole.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" align="left"><em>Ilan Pappé is
an Israeli historian at the University of Exeter, UK.</em> <em>His
books include</em> The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine <em>(2007)
and</em> The Idea of Israel<em> (2014).</em></p>
<div class="moz-signature" align="left">-- <br>
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