You have been watching for fifteen months now the annihilation of Gaza? You have witnessed the ceaseless cascade of images of desperate families clawing massacred relatives from under astounding mountains of rubble? You have caught glimpses of people scooping body parts into white plastic bags? You have witnessed the shattered shells of what once were hospitals where desperate doctors and nurses cared for the wounded till they could do so no more. The Gazan schools, universities, mosques, churches, newspaper offices, bakeries, parks and cemeteries reduced to debris have not escaped you? You have, in other words, watched livestream in the twenty-first century a society drawn and quartered and have its living entrails ripped out.
You have listened or half-listened to the testimonies of Francesca Albanese or of the delegation on behalf of South Africa that presented a case to the International Court of Justice that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza? You have paused over the words of some of the many shaken medical staff recently returned from its hospitals describing the conditions of those they tended? Children shot in the head or chest by snipers. Children amputated or orphaned or both. Gaza is a twenty-fist century Carthage.
You have heard and seen all this and what have you done? You have gone on one or two marches, maybe more? You have donated a sum to the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign (IPSC) or UNICEF? You have called your TD or MEP to register your views? You have asked your local community association or church to organise a discussion or event on this fiasco? If you haven’t done even this much, you might conclude that you have a robust immunity to horror, that you live in an iron grip of apathy, that you are a consenting contributor to the iron dome of silence maintained by many leading European Union states on an outrageous campaign of slaughter.
Those who are not indifferent to the Palestinian plight call time and again on the Irish government to do more than it has done. Or to the EU or UN to do more. No doubt far more might be done. Yet, though not without its pathos, this constant appeal to those in high office to bring about change goes hand in hand with, and perhaps even abets, the withering away of civil society’s responsibilities. The democratic wave termed the ‘Arab Spring’ was not led by governments. The World Social Forum that first met in Brazil in 2001 to press for alternative globalisations to the people- and climate-destroying neoliberal versions came from Latin American grassroots activism, not governments. The Occupy Movement that did much to highlight growing wealth inequality in the US – now so blatant that even an outgoing president, pathetically, warns of oligarchy – emerged from civic and not political society. So, while Gazans hunger and scrabble in the toxicity of this extraordinary twenty-first century bombardment, where has Irish civil society been?
Have the Irish medical and nursing unions and associations come out loudly in solidarity with their shelled or imprisoned Palestinian counterparts? Have the journalist unions and high-profile media columnists and presenters campaigned in solidarity with their Palestinian counterparts dying by the dozens? What about the Irish academic and artistic societies as they have watched Gaza’s schools, universities, and art centres razed? And our farming organisations? Most Irish farming families secured ownership of the lands they farm only in the last century: have they nothing to say to the situation of the Palestinian farmers and shepherds whose lands are routinely appropriated by Zionist settlers and their organisations in the illegally occupied West Bank, the same settler organisations that have been campaigning for Gaza’s resettlement? Where are the well-subsidised Irish sporting organisations? Don’t they have clubhouses in every parish on the island that might be used to raise funds, partner with Palestinian sports organisations or challenge the normalisation of atrocity in Palestine and beyond? Where there is no dynamic civil society and spirit of active citizenship, there is no living republicanism worth the name. And where there is no sturdy civil society, political society will never thrive.
Some will not unreasonably object: why should Irish society, civil or otherwise, do more? How have the Palestinians gotten themselves into such a wholly disastrous situation in the first instance? Where are their Charles Stewart Parnells, Martin Luther Kings, Nelson Mandelas, John Humes? Aren’t Palestinians part of a much larger Arab world (comprised of states among the world’s wealthiest, some hugely populous, some with the international leverage that comes with oil or strategic location) that has far more obligation and means to help them than has Ireland? If small impoverished societies like post-Famine Ireland can win independence (or something like it) in a matter of some forty or fifty years – between, say, the Land Wars and the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1920 – why have the Palestinians failed to win their self-determination?
Here we hit the rub. The fact is that the term ‘Israeli-Palestinian conflict’ is a misleading misnomer because the Palestinians have never simply being struggling with the Zionist movement or the state of Israel. From the outset, they have indeed been struggling with the Zionist movement but they have been hammered also on the anvil of Great Power politics in the Middle East and up against Britain and the United States especially, the two most formidable empires of modern times. These powers have always found it convenient to cast the conflict as a racial war between Jews and Arabs or a religious conflict between Judaism and Islam or as a ‘clash of civilisations’ or a seething confrontation between democracy and terrorism. However, were it not for the backing of the British empire, the Palestinians would long ago have rolled back the Zionist settlements that first began to colonise Palestine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indeed, were it not for the British empire, the Zionist movement might never have selected Palestine as its territory of settlement at all. Like all histories, the history of the current conflict is hugely complex, but nevertheless it is not so complex that it cannot with a little work be understood. Neither is it the case that the history of the current conflict is simply ‘history’ in the sense of water under the bridge. To the contrary, the history of Palestine in the first half of the twentieth century is the nightmare from which the contemporary Israelis and Palestinians more particularly are still trying to awake.
The earliest Zionist settlements in Palestine, beginning in the 1880s, were small agricultural communities (moshavot). By 1903, there were still only twenty-eight such communities in Palestine. The World Zionist Organisation, founded by Theodor Herzl, held its First Zionist Congress in Basle, Switzerland, in 1897, and its first manifesto, the Basle Programme, took as its objective the establishment of a Jewish ‘home’ in Palestine to be achieved by strengthening Jewish national consciousness, by advancing settlement in Palestine, and by securing international support for these ambitions.
The World Zionist Organisation’s first major success, the seed to which all later successes owe something, was the 1917 Balfour Declaration. In that document, issued in the later stages of World War I, the British government, in the person of its foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, announced its support for the establishment of ‘a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine’ at a time when Palestine was an Ottoman-controlled region with a tiny Jewish population. Herbert Samuel, a Liberal party and Zionist member of the British cabinet, encouraged the declaration on the basis that it would advance Zionism and enlist Jewish support internationally for the British side in WWI. For Balfour too, the fact that the declaration would be ‘extremely useful propaganda both in Russia and America’ for the war effort was important.
The term ‘national home’ was deliberately vague, had no legal precedent in international law, and avoided any explicit commitment to the designation of borders or the establishment of a Jewish state. Nevertheless, the Balfour Declaration was the first international recognition of Zionist ambitions in Palestine, rallied wider Jewish support for that movement and became crucially important for the British Mandate of Palestine established when WWI ended. Arab Muslims and Christians, some 90 per cent of the local population, were not consulted and their representatives legitimately protested that the commitment was made by a European power about a non-European territory expressly against the territory’s majority native inhabitants’ wishes.
During WWI, the British and French fought against the Ottoman empire and in 1916 the two powers committed to the Sykes-Picot Agreement, in which they concluded that after the war Palestine would become a joint British-French condominium or shared international zone. The Balfour Declaration overrode that Sykes-Picot Agreement and served the purpose also of keeping the French well-removed from both Egypt and the Suez Canal, the latter a key imperial strategic asset. Following the defeat of the Central Powers, the League of Nations allocated control of Palestine and Transjordan to Britain with Syria and Lebanon coming under French Mandate control. These mandates, which placed much of the post-Ottoman Middle East under French and British jurisdiction, were purportedly to administer the territories involved on behalf of the League of Nations to the benefit of the local populations. In reality, they enabled the British and French to control the region as colonial possessions and to continue to protect their domestic investments and strategic interests there.
As Canadian historian Susan Pedersen has written, the Balfour Declaration was ‘an ambiguous wartime promise made alongside several other ambiguous and competing wartime promises’. Crucially, as Pedersen remarks however, ‘What made the declaration distinctive, and, one might say, actionable, was that it was incorporated word-for-word into the preamble of the Palestine mandate and supplemented therein by specific clauses stipulating Britain’s responsibility for policies aimed at promoting the Jewish National Home. The mandate text was then ratified by the League of Nations, which had been given responsibility for overseeing allied administration of former Ottoman and German territories through the Treaty of Versailles, and which was, for all its limitations, the closest thing to a world government yet established.’ What had started out as an agreement between the British empire and the World Zionist Organisation had now become an international legal instrument. What had started as a Zionist campaign to colonise Palestine and establish a Jewish state was now also a matter of international great power politics.
When the Mandate text was published in December 1920, Arab organisations mounted sustained opposition. This resistance took the form of protests, international petitions, and the dispatch of a joint Muslim-Christian delegation to London. The Palestinian cause won considerable sympathy in Britain but the Arab representatives were never afforded the same hearing that had been accorded to Chaim Weizmann and the Zionist leadership. As Pederson observes, the British commitment to Zionist aspirations overrode their commitments to safeguard Arab rights and to establish local representative institutions – which would certainly have ended Jewish immigration. Moreover, the British persisted with this policy despite their growing awareness – and despite the opposition of some British military leaders and statesmen – that this would lead to aggravated conflict in Palestine and the wider region. Why did they do so? Pederson concludes: ‘British politics worked within a particular cultural milieu and according to agreed norms, with policies set through confidential discussions among a small handful of trusted interlocutors. The single most important fact about policymaking on Palestine is that that trusted inner circle excluded any representative of Arab interests but included Chaim Weizmann.’
A great deal has changed in the century between 1920 and 2020 and between the transfer of ultimate power over the Middle East from Britain and France to the United States after World War II. What has not changed in that century, what may in fact be even truer now than then, is the Western prioritisation of Zionist over Palestinian interests, indeed almost always at the expense of Palestinian interests. In other words, what Pedersen calls the cultural milieu and agreed norms of Western policy towards Palestinians in the early twentieth century still operate in Whitehall and Washington, and in much of the international media also, and still relegate the Palestinian community’s needs and interests to secondary and subordinate status.
The Great Arab Revolt of 1936-39 represented the most concerted Palestinian resistance to Zionist settlement expansion and British Mandate authority since Zionism’s foundation. There were Arab delegations, local Palestinian riots, and other resistances before the 1930s, but the Great Arab Revolt mobilised Palestinians from every social stratum, rural and urban, all across Mandate Palestine and its tenacity forced the British to move tens of thousands of troops into Palestine as World War II was becoming imminent in Europe. Like all such revolts, its causes were numerous, but the European sidelining of the earlier Arab leadership drawn from Palestinian elite classes, increasing Jewish immigration under Mandate authority, and peasant discontent with their own notable class and with Zionist land appropriations were major contributors. In its early stages, the revolt took the form of riots, attacks on Jews, the destruction of forests which were symbols of Zionist settlement supported by the Jewish National Fund, and the sabotage of railroads, symbols of imperial rule, and, above all, a major general strike. The British responded by declaring a state of emergency and then martial law.
In its second phase, the revolt’s focus shifted from urban to rural Palestine, where peasant bands, under local commanders, seized control over much of the Palestinian interior for eighteen months. Faced with a collapse of the Mandate’s authority, the British responded with crushing brutality. Their counterinsurgency tactics included house demolitions in villages supporting rebel bands, hangings, collective punishments, including fines and the confiscation of property and livestock, the placement of prisoners in front of trains to deter the sabotage of railway lines (human shields), and the brutalisation of prisoners (including by the Royal Ulster Rifles). Much of the Palestinian leadership was killed or deported. Captain Orde Wingate unofficially conducted British and Jewish commandos – the latter all Haganah members, including Moshe Dayan and Yigal Allon, future Israeli generals – in ‘Special Night Squads’ that raided deep into Arab strongholds.
While the Great Revolt marked the emergence of a determined national popular Palestinian movement, it also accelerated Zionist militarisation – just as the Ulster and Irish Volunteer movements had militarised both sides on the eve of WWI – and further increased British militarisation of the region. Paradoxically then, while the revolt consolidated a new Palestinian national identity and spirit of resistance, the British response crippled that nation’s emerging political capacity, and this exacted a huge toll on Palestinian society over the next crucial decade as World War II dramatically changed the international world order and local political landscape.
If the Great Arab Revolt of the late 1930s represented the high point of Palestinian national consolidation and resistance, the UN Partition Plan and the Nakba (Catastrophe) of the late 1940s represented that nation’s darkest hour. In 1947 the United Kingdom ceded control of Palestine to the United Nations. Though the British government ultimately abstained in the UN General Assembly vote on partition, plans for Palestine’s partition had first been devised, in the heat of the Arab Revolt, by the British in the Peel Commission in 1937. That commission proposed to divide Mandate Palestine into three entities: an Arab state and a Jewish state, with Jerusalem remaining as a neutral international trusteeship. The UN Partition plan followed similar proposals for division, though the proposed Jewish state’s designated area was much greater than the Peel Commission Plan had envisaged.
The common conception of the 1947 UN Partition Plan, still widely promoted, is that it was a just compromise and that the Zionist leadership pragmatically accepted it whereas the Arab and Palestinian leaderships dogmatically rejected it to their own cost. The overriding imperative on the international side after WWII, it is assumed, was to provide some solution to the appalling plight of the desperate Jewish survivors of the Holocaust in Europe. However, as Palestinian scholars have pointed out, though to little avail, this ignores all sorts of things.
First, as Walid Khalidi has remarked, the United Nations General Assembly (then dominated by Western states) failed to engage the Arab delegations’ challenges to the plan when they requested that the International Court of Justice be asked to assess the following matters before a vote for partition was taken: ‘(a) whether or not Palestine was included in the Arab territories promised independence by Britain under the terms of the Mandate after WWI; (b) whether partition was consistent with the provisions of the Mandate; (c) whether partition was consistent with the principles of the UN Charter; (d) whether its adoption and forcible execution were within the competence and jurisdiction of the UN; and (e) whether it lay within the power of any UN member or group of members to implement partition without the majority consent of the people living within the country.’ These were hardly extreme requests. Indeed, when a resolution was passed that decided that the UN did have the authority to do so, the resolution was carried by only twenty-one votes to twenty in an ad hoc committee whose total membership was fifty-seven.
Second, the contention that the UN Partition Plan was pragmatic and fair-minded fails to inspect the actual terms of the resolution, which awarded 55:5 per cent of the total Mandate Palestinian area to the Zionist settlers and immigrants (most recently arrived in the region), who at the time owned less than 7 per cent of the land, and who were less than a third of the total population. The Palestinians, comprising over two-thirds of the population and owning the vast bulk of the land, were awarded 45:5 per cent of their own country. Furthermore, the proposed Palestinian state would have 818,000 Palestinians and less than 10,000 Jews whereas, astonishingly, the Jewish state would have 499,000 Jewish population and 438,000 Palestinians. If it was unfair to the Zionists in Palestine that they should be a minority in a Palestinian-majority state in all of the Mandate area, why was it not unfair to this large Palestinian population that they should be a large minority in a Jewish state? Were Vladimir Putin to propose some ‘peace plan’ today with like conditions for a resolution to the Ukraine conflict, would it be greeted in the US, EU or UN as pragmatic and reasonable?
The argument that on the international side the UN partition plan was overwhelmingly motivated by the need to find a compassionate response to the wretched plight of European Jewish communities after WWII also merits scrutiny. As Walid Khalidi has pointed out, the Truman administration’s claim to be acting on this basis would appear more plausible had earlier US administrations arranged for the admission of these desperate refugees into the United States. However, ‘In the years 1932-1943, the vast continent of the United States had received 170,883 Jews, while the minuscule Palestine had received 232,524 during the same period.’ These were the years when the European Jewish population might, with the help of such a US outlet, have been spared some fraction of its horrific suffering under Nazi rule. When a United Nations Special Commission on Palestine (UNSCOP) delegation was sent to the Middle East in 1947, before the General Assembly partition resolution was passed, it unanimously recommended that the Jewish refugee plight be considered ‘an international responsibility’. Likewise, the Arab delegation to the UN proposed that ‘Jewish refugees and displaced persons … should be absorbed into the territories of members of the UN in proportion to their area, resources, per capita income, population, and other relevant factors’. The UN ad hoc committee voting on this proposal was sixteen for and sixteen against, with twenty-five abstentions. The Palestinian claim that the victors in WWII loaded the predicament of the Jewish survivors and refugees onto their shoulders, and morally and politically abrogated their own responsibilities and those of the Holocaust perpetrators, namely Germany and its allies, still falls on stony silence.
Last but not least, the idea that the Zionist leadership, under David Ben Gurion, pragmatically accepted the partition plan has been refuted by historians. A fundamental Zionist goal had long been the creation of a Jewish majority state in all of Mandate Palestine. When the Arab Revolt made it impossible to ignore the strength of Palestinian resistance to this objective, Ben Gurion increasingly militarised the Zionist movement, determined to remove the British administration as a buffer between it and the Palestinians, and was fully conscious of the fact that a Jewish state of whatever size would never be achieved without the force of arms and a forcible expulsion of a large section of the Palestinian population. Once the UN Partition Plan was endorsed, and passed without any means to hand to supervise its implementation, the state of Israel proclaimed its independence and the proximate Arab states declared war on it, in the course of which over 750,000 Palestinians exited Palestine – a matter to which we will return. In the course of that war, the Israeli state expanded to take over 77 per cent of Mandate Palestine and Jordan annexed the West Bank and Egypt Gaza. The dismemberment of Palestine was now complete.
The standard Zionist account of the events of 1947-48 is that the displaced Palestinians were not expelled but ‘fled’ either in the tumult and panic of war or because the displaced refugees heeded the invading Arab armies’ evacuation orders. Palestinian scholars and Israeli ‘New Historians’ (including Walid Khalidi, Benny Morris, Ilan Pappé, Avi Shlaim and others) have scotched such claims. Walid Khalidi was one of the earliest scholars to challenge the Zionist version and his take was independently backed up by Ireland’s Erskine Childers in his article ‘The Other Exodus’ published in The Spectator in May 1961. Neither Khalidi nor Childers found any evidence of Arab broadcasts of such an evacuation order nor any account of such an order in the files of British and American listening posts in the Middle East.
Rather, Khalidi and others have shown that the Zionist movement had a plan, Plan Dalet, to establish the continuity of the Jewish territories in Palestine, to penetrate into the areas allocated to the proposed Arab state, and, if possible, to secure control of the whole of Mandate Palestine. The intervention of the Arab armies foiled the Zionists’ maximalist ambitions, but during the conflict Zionist militias destroyed more than 350 Arab villages, Jaffa’s population was reduced from some 70,00-80,000 to 3,000-4,000, and roughly three-quarters of a million Palestinians became refugees.
The fate of the Palestinian village of Dayr Yassin assumed a particular symbolic importance. In the words of two Israeli scholars, Kimmerling and Migdal: ‘The sequence of events in Dayr Yassin is now scarcely disputed. The village’s nonbelligerency pact with local Jewish forces did not spare it being swept into the Jewish offensive to break the Arab stranglehold on Jerusalem. Following an intense battle between Palestinian militiamen and Irgun forces with some Hagannah mortar support, Palestinian forces departed and the Irgun entered the village on April 9 [1948]. In brutal acts of revenge for their losses, the Jewish fighters killed many of the remaining men, women, and children and raped and mutilated others. Those not killed immediately were ignominiously paraded through Jerusalem and sent to the city’s Arab sector.’ At the massacre’s end, all of the Dayr Yassin villagers were expelled and in the following year the location was resettled by Israelis and renamed Givat Shaul, now a West Jerusalem neighbourhood.
The 1948 Nakba led to the social and territorial shattering of the Palestinian people and there can be no proper understanding of their nearly three-quarters century struggle since then that does not take proper account of that defining event. Before the partition, Palestinians were the majority population in Mandate Palestine. After the Nakba, Palestine disappeared from the map. But Palestinians didn’t. Those living within the Israeli state – some 200,000 in 1948, now two million – were reduced to the status of second-class citizens in what was and is constitutionally a Jewish supremacist state. That population remained under military rule from 1948 to 1966, and was treated more as a dangerous fifth column than as citizens, this in blatant contradiction to Israel’s image as a liberal democratic or even socialist society. The Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza were separated from each other and from their country-people inside Israel. The Palestinian population that had been displaced into the bordering states of Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Egypt lived in varying conditions of hardship, some extreme indeed. As an outcast population, their presence risked tipping the host states’ fragile domestic ethnic or religious balances one way or another, so the refugee communities were regarded as a volatile security threat.
How does a scattered people organise itself in conditions of territorial fragmentation of this extremity? The Palestinian situation was no longer akin to that of Ireland, Algeria, Cuba or South Africa where, whatever the local population’s ethnic or religious divisions, ideological differences, and other fractures, national movements mobilised within a common territory. Every people has its own internal class, gender, religious and ideological divisions and conflicting interests, matters with which any concerted popular mobilisation has to contend, but in conditions of territorial disaggregation these become exponentially more acute and difficult to overcome. When the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) mobilised in the diaspora communities in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, it provoked not only Israel and the United States but also the host Arab states whenever Palestinian insurgency threatened domestic regime priorities. When Israel took control of the West Bank and Gaza after the 1967 War (‘Six-Day War’), it is estimated that some 350,000 more Palestinians became refugees, most in Jordan. Thereafter, those remaining in the Israeli-controlled Occupied Territories were forced to live under military rule and have had ever since to confront the constant creep of Israeli settlements or colonies.
Subsidised and militarily supported by the Israeli state, there are currently nearly half a million Zionist settlers in the West Bank and approximately 220,000 more in East Jerusalem (with an additional 25,000 in Syria’s Golan Heights). Because the prevailing conditions at any historical moment for Palestinians inside Israel proper, or in the West Bank or Gaza, or in the various Diaspora communities differ so much, the co-ordinating task of the Palestinian national organisations is enormous. None of the several major population sectors – Israeli Palestinians, West Bankers, Gazans, Diaspora Palestinians – was or is on its own sufficiently powerful to pose a systemic challenge to Israeli domination. This constitutive weakness no doubt accounts for the more ‘spectacular’ but essentially desperation tactics sometimes deployed in the Palestinian struggle: the 1970s and 1980s plane hijackings by Palestinian militia factions, the 1971 Black September Munich Massacre, the Hamas and Fatah suicide bombings during the Second Intifada. These have achieved little or nothing and for much of the world’s media they have eclipsed the more remarkable if less dramatic forms of community struggles and civic and popular resistances that have sustained Palestinian society against great odds since the 1930s.
In some respects then, the Palestinian situation now is nearer to that of the Kurds than to that of most decolonising societies. How can a society of this kind achieve self-determination? The task would already be enormous were the Israeli state the only obstacle to Palestinian self-determination. But when the Israeli state enjoys so much US and EU backing, including downright impunity as the constant expansion of illegal settlements since 1967 shows, and when it can appeal at every turn to its sense of existential jeopardy by invoking the Holocaust – a monstrous European-inflicted genocide still within living memory – while also ignoring at every turn the Palestinians’ current existential jeopardy, the enormity of the challenge can be grasped.
Isn’t this just dredging up old history? What purpose does it serve to rehearse it in 2025? The point here is that ‘the nightmare of history’, to paraphrase James Joyce’s famous line in Ulysses, cannot be overcome until the root traumas that condition that nightmare are on all sides squarely and fairly confronted.
If the 1947 UN Partition plan was intended to solve the Palestine problem, it has spectacularly failed to do so. As the Oslo Accords I and II, of 1993 and 1995, have displayed, disastrously for Palestinians but also for regional harmony, returning to some even more unjust and fundamentally duplicitous territorial carve-up of the land of Mandate Palestine is even less likely to yield a lasting ‘solution’. Unless the many circumstances that contributed to the initial partition’s wholesale failure are honestly acknowledged and openly debated on the international stage, and a new internationally supervised settlement based on sounder, fairer, more farsighted foundations are worked out, the conflict seems destined to continue for another century with an ever costlier toll on future Palestinian generations. Today, American or European Union appeals to the ‘Two State Solution’ ring as meaningless ritualistic platitudes, though any ‘One State Solution’ will also remain a worthlessly abstract slogan until there is some steely resolve by the international community of nations to make such a proposal work in the context of a wider regional settlement. The challenge of a wider regional settlement, one that would provide for genuine Palestinian self-determination, might seem forbidding, but were there the international will to reach such a settlement, it is well within human compass.
However, it remains the case that if in the early twentieth century Palestinians had to contend not only with a well-organised expanding Zionist settler movement and with regional British and French great power rivalries, in the early twenty-first century they still have to contend with the former but now too with the increasingly acute great power rivalries of our moment, namely those between the US, Iran, Russia and China. The Hamas Al-Aqsa Flood attack on Israel on October 7th 2023 was the immediate cause of the current devastation of Gaza, and the Hamas leadership must bear its share of responsibility not only for the conduct of that attack but for its long-term consequences. But since the Balfour Declaration, it is the combined force of Zionist expansionism and the ongoing cycles of Great Power rivalries that has sustained the Palestinian nightmare of history. For the last year and more, that nightmare has rained American bombs delivered by the Israeli military like thunderbolts on Gaza. When its global hegemony was at its most secure in the decades after WWII, the US did little to help and much to hinder the Palestinian national movement. Today, when a weakened US global hegemony is seriously challenged by an economically powerful China, a resurgent Russia, by the new BRICS alliances, and by an accelerating climate crisis, the Middle East remains a tinderbox of great power competition, this with dire implications for any Palestinian future.
Is there then nothing to be done? There is, but the challenges are obviously huge. Revulsion at the sickening slaughter in Gaza, at the brazen brutality of settler expansionism in the West Bank, and at the current far-right Israeli regime have stirred waves of protest across the world, though it is also the case that much of the Western populace has remained effectively indifferent. The remarkable student protests in the US were especially important in opening a break in the Western laissez faire consensus that has allowed for the steady attrition of Palestinian life and territory since 1967 and for which the Oslo Accords have merely provided sanctimonious cover. However, while outrage at the obliteration of Gaza can stimulate international protest, it cannot do much else unless it is married to some sense of an attainable future and it is this which is currently most lacking.
Thus, the onus after Gaza will be on the Palestinian leadership across its many disaggregated constituencies to articulate an imagined Palestinian future, a transformative and realistic programme to lead towards that future, and a principled strategy that can secure and sustain national and international support. And for those who are not Palestinians? If there is one thing that Gaza’s nightmare has demonstrated beyond doubt it is how little metropolitan Western mindsets, in Europe at least as much as in the United States, have changed since the colonial era and how much culturally and politically remains to be changed. The British and French carved up the Middle East in their own interests in the early twentieth century. During the current conflict, the British and French governments and administrations have made no meaningful reckoning whatever with their own historical roles in creating the conditions of the current conflict. As for the Germans, their willingness to have the Palestinians continue to atone forever it seems for Germany’s orchestration of the Holocaust shows that the real lesson they have learned from history is how to substitute one weak and politically compromised population for another on the altar of their national interest and putative good conscience. Champions of the European Union like to promote that project as the construction of a brand new post-imperial, post-fascist, progressive and democratic Europe, but the disposition of most of the leading EU states during the recent annihilation of Gaza has severely tarnished that image, perhaps mortally so.
In the era of the Balfour Declaration, the Peel Commission, and the establishment of the Mandate of Palestine, the British, as already mentioned, consulted with Zionist leaderships and prioritised Zionist interests at the expense of Palestinian interests. Over a century later, the British political establishment, security elites and media elites continue to do precisely the same. The scale of destruction inflicted on Gaza over the last year and more is worse than the worst that happened under British rule in Mandate Palestine, but the IDF and settler militia tactics deployed in the illegally Occupied Territories since 1967 have precedent in those practised by the British in Galilee during the Great Arab revolt in the 1930s. When the Israeli army blows up the houses of those in the West Bank who resist settlement expansion, when the Israeli state imprisons or expels Palestinian leaders, when the IDF use Palestinian prisoners as human shields, and so on, they are following British military tactics in the Mandate period.
Now, as a fragile and probably temporary ceasefire takes hold in Israel and Gaza, the most immediate casualties of the conflict are obvious. As usual, the Israeli and Palestinian death counts, each horrific, are massively asymmetrical. The counts of the maimed, wounded, and mentally traumatised must be staggering. The task of rebuilding Gaza, if it is still inhabitable after the devastation of its infrastructure and the toxicity of the weaponry unleashed on its landscape and water-supply, is equally astounding. The jubilation of the displaced Gazans returning to the dust and mortar of what were once their homes is a sight astonishing to behold – a reminder if one were needed of every people’s attachment to ‘home’. But for how long can that resilience be sustained even if a militarized peace takes hold? And as Gazans return for now to their homes, Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem continue to be terrorised and dispossessed.
If these are the immediate casualties of Gaza’s annihilation, they will not be the only ones. Whether or not Zionism has moved closer to creating a Greater Israel, its abiding long-term ambition, remains to be seen. In a moment when political impunity and open disdain for even a pretence to international law is increasingly the way of the world, the Netanyahu regime’s impunity is hardly anomalous. Nevertheless, Zionism’s claim to popular international support, which has in any case been peeling away generationally, is now more severely compromised than ever before. On the one hand, the Israeli state has been reduced to smearing all of its critics, including anti-Zionist American and European Jews, and the ICI, UNRWA and the UN generally, as effectively antisemites; on the other, it increasingly looks to receive support from the authoritarian far-right parties in Europe, the US and beyond.
The European Union too is a casualty: the contrast between its loud outrage at Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and its pusillanimous apologetics for Netanyahu’s expansionism is far too blatant to be rationalised away or easily forgotten. As low voter turnout across Europe for EU elections show, the EU’s popular legitimacy is weak and its leadership’s sanctimonious ineptitude at best and cavalier brutality at worst when dealing with the Palestinian situation erodes what remaining legitimacy it possesses. Western media institutions, print and broadcasting, have also suffered a probably generational loss of authority. In an age of alternative social media, that authority too was already in trouble anyway, but Gaza has exposed the inability or unwillingness of national media services to host historically-informed and principled debates about the causes of conflict in the Middle East and many other regions. The casualties and consequences of war always extend far beyond war’s immediate battlefields and the collateral damage may not be of the kind that those now admonishing Ireland and Europe to take a more ‘cautious’ stance on Palestine have in mind.
Throughout the course of the most recent bombardment of Gaza many have complained that Palestinians command more world attention than they warrant. Why the massive protests in European capitals and on US campuses about Gaza but so few equivalent rallies for the peoples of Sudan, the Congo, Haiti, Ethiopia, or so many other places? The inference is that there is something sinister about international support for Palestinians, something suspect about the corollary criticism of Israel. Sometimes loudly voiced, sometimes quietly insinuated, this accusation has been effectively weaponised for decades and is sure to be intensified in the years to come. There are many responses to this campaign to impose silence, but one response is that for reasons historical and political the Palestinians, a small and scattered people bereft of powerful allies, have become associated in international consciousness with a wider desire for a more equitable international world order than the one that now prevails: one that has shown itself so disastrously unable to meet the many challenges of the moment. When people campaign for Palestine, they campaign not only for Palestinians but also for themselves and for their hopes – resolute or faint, despairing or determined – for a truly post-imperial, more fair-dealing and more forward-looking world order. The massive bombardment inflicted on Gaza and Gazans in recent months is meant to assert to all that the current world order will not be changed and that it will long outlast those with the temerity to protest against it.
Perhaps the current order will prevail. But don’t count on it.
WORKS CITED:
Hurewitz, J. C., The Middle East and North Africa in World Politics: A Documentary Record (Yale University Press, 1979)
Khalidi, Rashid, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 (Metropolitan Books, 2020)
Khalidi, Walid, ‘Plan Dalet: Master Plan for the Conquest of Palestine,’ Journal of Palestine Studies, 18:1 (Special Issue: ‘Palestine 1948,’ Autumn 1988): 4-33.
Khalidi, Walid, ‘Revisiting the UNGA Partition Resolution,’ Journal of Palestine Studies, 27: 1 (Autumn 1997), 5-21.
Kimmerling, Baruch, and Joel Migdal, Palestinians: The Making of a People (Harvard University Press, 1993)
Norris, Jacob, ‘Repression and Rebellion: Britain’s Response to the Arab Revolt in Palestine of 1936-39,’ The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 36:1 (March 2008), 25-45.
Pedersen, Susan, ‘Writing the Balfour Declaration into the Mandate for Palestine,’ The International History Review, 45:2 (2023), 279-291.
1/2/2025
Joe Cleary’s most recent books are Modernism, Empire, World Literature (2021) and The Irish Expatriate Novel and Late Capitalist Globalisation (2021).
