Juan Cole
Informed Comment / October 7, 2024
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Last October 7, the al-Qassam Brigades of the Hamas Party-Militia, joined by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and some other small groups of militants, attacked Israel from Gaza. They took on Israeli troops and briefly occupied an Israeli military base, displaying the skills of a trained army and not just those of a ragtag guerrilla group. Had the al-Qassam Brigades stopped there, international law experts might be debating whether the operation was lawful, given the right of occupied people to defend themselves.
But, possibly influenced by the ISIL (ISIS, Daesh) doctrine of tawahhush or acting like wild beasts (in direct contradiction with the medieval Islamic law of war), Hamas operatives used hang gliders to attack a rave being held near some peacenik kubbutzes in that region. They machine-gunned down hundreds of innocent civilians and chased them to hiding places, murdering them. The musical event was the “Supernova Sukkot Gathering,” held outside during the Jewish holiday of Shemini Atzeret near Kibbutz Re’im. The kibbutzes in that region were known to be peaceniks and favourable to peace with the Palestinians. Some, almost miraculously, still are. They are Menschen.
The militants also invaded kibbutzes and wrought a slaughter. Over 600 innocent, noncombatant Israelis were killed that day, in one of the worst war crimes committed by a non-state actor since the demise of ISIL in 2018. The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel, which did not get the cooperation of the Israeli government, found that it was plausible that some victims were sexually assaulted. Hamas also kidnapped hundreds of people. Some of them were killed by Israeli troops, who had standing orders not to allow military personnel to be kidnapped even if it was necessary to kill them to prevent it. This “Hannibal directive” was, according to Haaretz, extended to Israeli civilians on October 7, so some of the civilian death toll was from the Israeli side. But it was likely a minor contributor to that death toll, given Hamas carnage at the rave.
The Hamas militants injured 14,970 people and displaced 150,000 Israelis from their homes for months on end.
Nothing can excuse or justify the act of terror committed by the al-Qassam Brigades and others that day. They should all have been tried the way war criminals were at the Nuremberg Trials.
However, many observers have pointed out that it is misleading for our historical understanding of this epochal event and its even more horrific aftermath to begin history on October 7. Europeans and Americans see Israel through the lens of 20th century European nationalism, Antisemitism, and the Holocaust, such that Israel comes as a response to this European genocide. But that is a narrative of Zionist nationalists and those persuaded by them.
It was perfectly plausible that surviving European Jews should have been reintegrated into German, Italian, French and Palish society after WW II, and given reparations and aid to recover their previous economic position. Dumping the European Jews in the midst of a Middle Eastern maelstrom only guaranteed more wars and more tragedies. It suited Zionist nationalists, probably a small minority of the Jews who fled for their lives as refugees to British mandatory Palestine. And it suited the racist generation of Germans, French, Italians and others, ridding them of their Jewish populations. It suited the global great powers– Britain, France, the US and the Soviet Union, in planting a Western agent in the midst of a Middle East they wished to dominate.
From a Middle Eastern point of view, the project of Israel looks a great deal like French colonial Algeria or Apartheid South Africa, a project of European settler colonialists. This perspective is flawed and inadequate to a more complex case. But it is their perspective.
So let me just review the Gaza and Middle Eastern background to October 7.
- In 1947-48, the Haganah and other militias of the Jewish community settled in British colonial Palestine against the wishes of the indigenous population declared war both on the British authorities and on the Palestinians, seeking to establish a state. The British White Paper of 1939 instead had envisaged a Palestinian state by 1949, just as the British mandate over Iraq had eventuated in an Iraqi state and the French mandate over Syria had eventuated in a Syrian state. Leaders of the Zionist movement were determined to thwart the 1949 White Paper, and had announced boldly that they would do so as early as . . . 1939. The Zionists waged a war of ethnic cleansing against Palestinian villages, driving 250,000 Palestinians into Gaza, which had had a population of 80,000 prosperous farmers, orchard owners, and artisans. (Some 750,000 Palestinians were chased from their homes over-all).
Once the Palestinian refugees were cooped up in Gaza, the new Israelis declared that they could never return to their homes in cities such as Beersheba and Najd, which became Israeli cities (Najd was left in ruins but nearby Sderot was built on its lands). The Palestinians lost everything. They had no money. Their home equity was gone. They lost title to their farms. Jewish families moved into their houses, used their utensils, stole their livestock, and farmed their land, harvesting the crops the Palestinians had lovingly planted. The Palestinian refugees received no reparations for this immense loss of property, worth billions of dollars today.
- The Israelis also stole the lands of the people of Gaza stretching toward Negev — their orange orchards and date palms. The Israeli conquests created Gaza as a “Strip,” detached from its economic hinterland and cut off from its markets in Akka, Tyre, and Bethlehem. Brides in Bethlehem used to use brightly coloured cloth loomed in Gaza for their wedding gowns. Now Gaza became an economic basket case.
- Egypt jointly administered the Gaza Strip with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, putting the population on welfare since its economy no longer worked because it had been surrounded by Israel and it was burdened with hundreds of thousands of penniless refugees. The Palestinians of Gaza became stateless in 1948. They have had no state for 76 years. No other population on earth has been stateless for 76 years. They had no indigenous government, no control over their own resources.
- Ben Gurion and some other Israeli leaders were ambitious to expand Israeli territory at the expense of neighbours, eyeing southern Lebanon, Egypt’s Sinai, and the Palestinian occupied territories. The British and the US had planted and were backing an aggressive rogue state in the heart of the Middle East. Israel came after the Palestinians of Gaza in 1956 and briefly tried to occupy them, but President Ike Eisenhower, furious at Tel Aviv for launching a war of aggression on Egypt on the eve of the U.S. presidential election, which could have cost Eisenhower the White House, made them get right back out. The Israelis had not bothered to read Eisenhower into the plot they got up with Britain and France.
- The Israeli military plotted all through the 1960s to find a way to occupy the Palestinian territories and the Golan Heights. In 1967, under the pretext of some flights of rhetoric on the part of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Israeli high command overruled General Yitzhak Rabin and launched a wide-ranging war on Egypt, taking out its air force and occupying the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, Gaza and the Palestinian West Bank. The Palestinians had played no role in the 1967 War, but they were its main victims. Now the Palestinians of the West Bank became stateless and occupied by a foreign power with which they had no common identity.
- Through the rest of the 20th century, the Israelis de-developed the Gaza economy and planted 9,000 Israeli squatters on the best land in Gaza, crowding the Palestinian refugees into even a narrower part of the Strip, from which they took resources. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon unilaterally removed those squatters in 2005, in a bid to permanently split Gaza from the West Bank and prevent the emergence of the Palestinian state promised by Bill Clinton in the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords.
- In 2006, the Bush administration insisted on Palestinian elections. The fundamentalist party-militia Hamas barely won in Gaza, where many people voted for the secular nationalist Palestine Liberation Organization. It won over-all, getting more support in the West Bank than expected. This outcome was unacceptable to Israel, which arrested the Palestinian MPs and crippled the new government. In 2007, the US and Israel cooperated with the PLO in staging a coup against Hamas, which succeeded in the West Bank but failed in Gaza. Because the elected Hamas government remained in place in Gaza, Israel slapped a severe economic boycott on the Strip, limiting the calories allowed in to what would keep people alive but barely. It was called putting them on a diet. I swear it is the creepiest colonial policy I know about in the 21st century. Children were not allowed to have chocolate. No fat should be on anyone’s body.
- In 2008-2009, 20012, 2014 and 2021 Israel launched bombing raids on densely populated Gaza, killing women and children. The Israelis, outdoing themselves in creepiness, referred to this periodic bombardment of residences and civilian infrastructure “mowing the lawn.” Thousands of Palestinians were killed or wounded in these bombardment campaigns. The Israeli bombardment came in response to Hamas firing small home-made rockets toward Israel, which sometimes did property damage or killed an innocent Israeli. It is a war crime to fire unguided munitions toward a civilian settlement. However, all but a handful of Hamas rockets landed uselessly in the desert and the “mowing the lawn” Israeli campaigns were vastly disproportionate as a response.
- In 2018-2019, Palestinians in Gaza staged weekly protests at the barbed wire fence the Israelis had built around the world’s largest open air concentration camp. Dubbed “the Great March of Return,” the demonstrations aimed to call attention to the refugees’ proximity to their indigenous lands, which in some cases are walking distance from Gaza. The Israeli military mounted professional snipers and shot dead 214 Palestinians, including 46 children. The snipers used live fire to injure 8,000 demonstrators, often deliberately blowing out their knees and leaving them crippled the rest of their lives. The demonstrators almost never got to the barbed wire fence, and one Israeli soldier died in the events. Most of those shot were out in the open on Gaza soil, and some were wearing clothing indicating they were medics or journalists. Many were children who came out for the carnival-like atmosphere. That Israeli snipers could shoot 8,000 mostly noncombatant Palestinians with impunity signalled to Benjamin Netanyahu that he could get away with anything.
- In 2020, the US peeled the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco away from the Arab League consensus on no new treaties with Israel until there is a Palestinian state. Israeli tech start-ups did big business with Dubai. It was being demonstrated that the path to Israel’s acceptance in the region depended not on its treatment of the Palestinians but on its high tech economy and start-ups. The Palestinians could be sidelined and left in their squalid refugee settlements forever.
Late in 2022, the most extreme right wing government in Israel’s history came to power, which began openly speaking of ethnically cleansing the Palestinians.
In April 2023 the Israelis on several occasions attacked Palestinian worshipers at al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest shrine in the world for 2 billion Muslims. This was during the holy month of Ramadan. It would be like a military occupation force storming the Basilica of St. Peter in Rome on Easter. Israeli extremists began openly speaking of tearing down the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock and replacing them with a Jewish temple, though archaeologists maintain that al-Aqsa is not on the site of the second temple. For religious fundamentalists in Gaza (a minority), this threat to al-Aqsa seemed dire.
Israeli squatters, emboldened by their fascist government, began staging numerous and repeated attacks on indigenous Palestinian hamlets in the West Bank, shooting them up and setting fires to residences, cars and crops.
Hamas militants of the al-Qassam Brigades, some apparently influenced by the tactics of the ISIL terrorist group, begin plotting an apocalyptic action that in their view might put the Palestine issue back on the Great Power map and forestall its permanent marginalization.
Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment; he is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan and the author of, among others, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
