David Stairs
In June of 1967 I was a freshman in high school. My family was staunchly Republican and, in those days, I didn’t know any better. When Egypt and Syria attacked Israel, precipitating the Six Day War, I made a cartoon of Gamal Abdel Nasser that I thought was pretty clever. Had I known anything about the formation of the State of Israel I might have thought differently.
Israel is a nation formed by and from terrorism. Palestine was a sparsely populated League of Nations Mandatatory Territory overseen by the British after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, between 1920 and 1948. At that time the land was primarily owned by its Arab population as well as absentee landlords in Egypt and elsewhere. Modern Jewish settlers, the New Yishuv, had been emigrating to Palestine since the 1870s. These Jewish settlers paid high sums for poor land, sometimes as much as $1000/acre, but Jewish migration was seen as improving the land. Jewish immigration resulted in Arab migration to Palestine, and the population exploded.
Britain tried to control Jewish emigration to Palestine, even after it became obvious what was happening in Germany in the 1930s under the Nazi regime. Despite British restrictions, illegal settlement, or Aliyah Bet, continued. In reaction to apparent British support of Zionism, the Jewish drive to create a Jewish state, in 1936 the Arab Liberation Army began attacking Jews in what became known as the Arab Uprising. This was violently suppressed by the British.
With the outbreak of WWII, both Jews and Arabs volunteered to assist the British, especially when it appeared for a time that Germany’s Afrika Corps might conquer Palestine. In spite of such apparent solidarity, there was extreme sectarian violence during the war. The Haganah, or paramilitary arm of the Yishuv, spawned an even more radical militant Jewish group, the Irgun. This organization carried out acts of terrorism during and after the war, especially the assassination of Lord Moyne, the British governor of the Middle East, in Cairo in 1943, and the King David Hotel bombing in Jerusalem in 1946, which killed 92.
With violence spiralling out of control, the British had had enough. They announced their intent to end their Mandate in spring of 1948. A committee of the UN recommended partition of Palestine between Jews and Arabs, a solution that satisfied no one and resulted in the first Mideast War of 1948-49. The result of hostilities was the formation of the State of Israel, with the West Bank overseen by the new state of Jordan, and Gaza administered by Egypt. Many of those Arab Palestinians forced to settle in Gaza lost their land in the partition that formed Israel, what Palestinians refer to as the nakba, or catastrophe.
The Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in Jerusalem in 1964 in an effort to subsume several Palestinian groups under one recognizable head. Since then several wars have been fought in the region, including in 1967, 1973, and 1982. Hamas was founded in the 1980s in opposition to the Zionist state of Israel, and won political control of Gaza in a 2007 election. There have been at least three Arab Intifadas or uprisings since 1987. Given the history of Jewish immigration and recent violent settler activity encouraged by the right wing Israeli government, the current outbreak of Arab violence launched from Gaza, while unacceptable, is understandable. Frustration breeds resentment.
Gaza has been described as “the world’s largest prison,” a scrap of land 140 miles square, roughly the size of metro Philadelphia. It is occupied by 2.3 million people, 40% of whom are under the age of 15. Unemployment is rampant, and access from both land and sea is controlled by Israel, as well as access to water, fuel, electricity, and the internet.
The knee-jerk responses of Western leaders in support of Israel, and the Western media’s insistence on referring to the Hamas uprisings as “terrorist attacks” betrays extreme ignorance of the history of violence perpetrated by many Israeli leaders including the war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, or the founder of Likud and one-time Irgun leader Menachem Begin. The world’s guilty conscience over the European Holocaust should not avail Israel of a carte blanche to do the same things to Gazans. Israel is a global exporter of arms, surveillance tech, and cyber warfare software, all of which it has honed and developed in its unsolvable conflict with Gaza.
When Israel launches what will most likely be a disproportionate scorched earth reprisal on the densely packed urban infrastructure of Gaza in repayment for the attacks on rural Jewish kibbutzes, the world will understand why people like me no longer support the Zionist enterprise. Ethnic cleansing is considered immoral in Ukraine, but in Palestine the world’s democracies look the other way. The descendants of David may once have been worthy of my adolescent sympathy, before I knew or understood their troubling history. But Israel has long since ceased to be the “good guy” in this long-running unholy war over the so-called Holy Land.
Update 10/25/23 Everyone with a conscience should watch Abby Martin’s documentary Gaza Fights for Freedom. It is freely available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnZSaKYmP2s
David Stairs is the founding editor of the Design-Altruism-Project.
