Fatuma Karume has seen the future. She has seen, in a decade or two, the CIA will declassify top secret documents implicating Netanyahu in genocide, the New York Times will run an exposé on how far Israel lobbied the US Senate, the then editorial board of the BBC will distance itself from the decision not to broadcast South Africa’s side of the argument, Hollywood will produce a white saviour movie on Piers Morgan, Twitter will run a death clock for war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu as it did for Henry Kissinger, and of course, no reparations will be paid to the Palestinians whatsoever.
She knows that the West needs to commit genocide in Palestine but doesn’t want whiteness to be tied to it. At least, that’s what she tries telling her critics on Twitter.
Anyone familiar with the Israel-Palestine conflict knows that where you start, the story has dire consequences for the conclusion. Western mass media usually start the story from the moment the resistance strikes. This time, the story goes, Hamas, utilizing intelligence and technological failure, with paragliders, bulldozers, and a barrage of projectiles above them, broke free from Gaza and went on a murderous, ‘raping,’ and ‘baby-beheading’ spree that left ‘1400 Israelis dead’ and 240 hostages.
Tales of horror visited upon unsuspecting civilians at a music festival and in cities near the Gaza fence show just how deadly the ‘deadliest massacre against Jews since the Holocaust’ was.
So it was only right for Israel to defend itself, and so it did. Since then, Israel has dropped the equivalent of three nuclear bombs on Gaza and launched a ground offensive that has seen more than 38,000 dead, half of them children, destroyed 70% of all housing units, leaving 1.7 million people displaced, and cut all water, electricity, internet, medical, and food supply into the enclave. Israel is doing what any nation would do to protect its people. Except there’s just one single problem: It cannot be self-defence if you are the occupying power.
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Since the unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005, Israel has held the inhabitants of Gaza in a land, sea, and air blockade. Israel has been maintaining so much power over Gaza that it controls their water, electricity, and communication systems, determines the calories that enter the enclave—giving them just enough not to starve, and how many nautical miles Gazans can fish from in their own internationally recognized waters.
Permanent surveillance by high-tech drones and police in this fenced enclave is a constant feature, so much so that American police take training from the Israel Defense Forces. Movement in and out of Gaza is as per Israel’s will, and Palestinians who leave Gaza have no right to return.
This machine of institutionalized oppression, hate, and fear that comprises a real infrastructure of violence, as described by Ian Lustick, is what prompted Amnesty International and other humanitarian agencies to call Gaza the largest ‘open-air prison.’
The Palestinians, however, are expected to endure all this without so much as showing any grievance. Should they resist, let alone demand their basic rights, that would be anti-Semitic and a call for the death of all Jews. But there’s only so much one can take. As we know, given enough time, a prison subjected to immense, increasing torture from its warden will likely riot.
In this humane and unhypocritical framing, Hamas did not start a war; they launched a prison revolt. This UN-chartered framing thus justifies any Palestinian resistance, provided it doesn’t violate human rights and any Israeli action is just colonial retribution. Appreciating this framing is crucial because it accounts for all events, even those before the declaration of Israel as a state in 1948.
To understand this conflict, you need to understand the circumstances under which Israel was formed. What you shall not do, however, is feign complexity, as most prominent analysts and historians say. An idea—Zionism—was brewing among European Jews in the late 19th century.
Central to the idea was the establishment of a Jewish ethnostate outside Europe, with an eventual focus on the biblical Jewish homeland of Palestine. But by that time, Palestine was a different land, far from what God had given the Israelites. Natural causes had reshaped the demographics of the land to mostly consist of Arabs.
Despite these justifications not holding any ground, seeing as they dwelled in the realm of faith and mythologies of which the Arabs of the land also had theirs, the Zionists went on with their plan nevertheless.
Zionism was an answer to another equally racist idea: Anti-Semitism, which sought to purge Jews from Europe as they ‘killed Jesus’ and ‘controlled the world.’ Anchoring with Christianity in the continent, Anti-Semitism peaked with Hitler and his Nazi party, who murdered six million Jews and put millions of others in concentration camps during the Holocaust.
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Driven out of Europe, most Jews found hospitality among Arabs in Palestine. After the defeat of Hitler, now with a substantial population of Jews in Palestine, Britain gave Palestine to the Jews. Seeing as the rest of the UN was predominantly white, they endorsed Britain when they partitioned Palestine into Arab and Jewish states in 1947. But Palestine wasn’t Britain’s to give away, as Kennedy said.
So, it was only right for its inhabitants to resist. Their resistance, however, came short because now Zionists had empires’ weaponry and diplomatic cover at their disposal.
Perhaps the most notable of such catastrophes happened in 1948, during the Nakba, when the Israelites ethnically cleansed the Palestinians through violent displacement and dispossession of land, property, and belongings, along with the destruction of their society and the suppression of their culture, identity, political rights, and national aspirations.
North of 750,000 Arabs were expelled from their land, their houses looted, and made refugees. A good chunk of those displaced settled in the enclave that is now Gaza. Others, more unfortunate, were murdered in dozens of massacres or raped by either regular or irregular Israeli forces. And then, a year later, the state of Israel was born.
Of course, further resistance—from the six-day war to the great march of return—by the Palestinians and neighbouring Arab states was inevitable, but Israel has only prevailed and seized more land.
Peaceful approaches to solving the conflict have also yielded the same stalemates that favour Israel. From the two-state solution to the Abraham Accords, all treaties brokered by the West treat Israel not as a colonial power but as a victim who does what’s necessary to stop her annihilation.
To know why they do so and both means fail, one only needs to look at race. Jewish people, for the most part, can identify as white, so Palestine was guiltily given to them as a form of reparations for the crime of the Holocaust Europe committed. But when that was done, apart from the fact that it was bigoted, an international rule of conduct had already been established, and this was contrary to it.
Ever since then, that very international law designed by the West has been enforced by the West to exempt Israel so she can get away with literal war crimes such as the blockade they have on Gaza. Calling for accountability from Israel has been portrayed as calling for another Holocaust, and so Israel has been allowed to be judge, jury, and executioner in its conduct.
On the international stage, the West, particularly the US, has vetoed almost every resolution to hold them accountable because, after all, those who die are not blue-eyed, pale blondes.
Even with international law allowing armed struggle by an occupied people, the Palestinians have not been afforded that luxury. When they do, they are branded as terrorists and dehumanized as savages. Without proof, Israel has portrayed all Palestinian resistance as bloodthirsty, rape, and baby-burning sprees. Such semantic gymnastics are then repeated by the West so much so that war crimes are deemed crucial to the existence of the Jews.
We’ve been here before, you and I. We may not be old enough to have lived it, but you can be certain Germany’s retribution after the Maji Maji was portrayed as a fight against evil. You can be certain that Queen Elizabeth called the Mau Mau fighters terrorists as she put them in concentration camps.
Africa was our land, but we were enslaved on her, killed if we dared fight back. We were terrorists for wanting to be free, savages for wearing our hair, and rapists simply because we were colored. We’ve lived, and some still live the Palestine experience. And so we should know better. We should stand with Palestine.
By now, you must have made me a terrorist sympathizer, but I implore you to stop buying into the semantic gymnastics of the West. That land—from the river to the sea—is Palestine, and they are entitled to decolonize her as international law dictates, not how Israel calls acceptable.
Whether Israel funds Hamas is a different matter, but I yearn for the dismantling of the Zionist entity. I yearn for a free Palestine. The empire has to lose in Palestine to lose in the Congo and Sudan.