As Israel reaches its 77th year of existence, its endgame for the Palestinians looks closer than ever.
Unbelievable as it may seem, the Jewish state is moving steadily towards emptying Gaza and the West Bank of their native inhabitants – a Palestinian eradication from the land it has pursued since before its inception.
This horrific prospect, which the world watches without lifting a finger, evokes for me vivid memories of the 1948 Nakba, when Israel carried out the first mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
Then, as now, no one intervened.
I was a child at the time, but I remember thinking the world had come to an end. My fellow Palestinians and I spent the rest of our lives recovering from that cataclysmic shock.
New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch
Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on
Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters
Never did I imagine that, so many decades later, something far worse could happen.
Final ethnic cleansing
If this final ethnic cleansing of Palestinians does take place – through direct killing or mass expulsion – it will not have been the result of Israel’s military capacity alone.
Far more, it will be due to the unstinting and uncritical support of its western backers, and their immoral complicity in this genocide.
If this final ethnic cleansing takes place, it will not be due to Israel’s military power alone – but to the West’s unstinting support and immoral complicity
Many Palestinians are perplexed by this western permissiveness towards Israel’s crimes. But the indulgence shown to Israel over the Gaza genocide goes back a long way.
In 1917, the Balfour Declaration, which introduced Zionism into Palestine, set the stage for a Zionist-centred politics that has dominated the West ever since.
At the time of Balfour, Palestinians were a largely agrarian people living peaceably in a small corner of the Ottoman Empire, before Britain’s conquest in 1918.
They had no knowledge of – or interest in – Europe’s so-called Jewish problem. Their country was a place whose people had no cultural understanding of Zionism or the European Jewish history that created it.
My grandfather, born in 1850, was a farmer in the West Bank town of Tulkarm and a local notable. The only Jews he knew were those he lived with amicably and called “Arab Jews” – native Palestinian Jews who at the time made up 3 percent of Palestine’s population.
Follow Middle East Eye’s live coverage for all the latest on the Israel-Palestine war
How could he have understood the intricacies of European antisemitism, and how it would lead to the creation of Israel in his homeland?
By the time he died in 1935, still uncomprehending, British colonialists ruled Palestine and Zionism had taken hold.
His naivety in the face of this alien ideology has persisted to a large extent among Palestinians to this day. A majority still lack an adequate understanding of the subtleties of European Jewish history, the Nazi Holocaust, and the guilt it has engendered in western people.
Western cover
I grew up knowing that, for the West, we Palestinians were of little importance in the greater enterprise of Israel’s creation and development that they favoured.
It took the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023 to show us just how little we meant – and, by contrast, how precious Israel was to its western supporters.
Following the Hamas operation, the United States and its allies went into overdrive to mobilise their military, political, economic and diplomatic forces to defend Israel as if, for all the world, they themselves had been attacked.
Non-stop western military aid has been supplied to Israel since then, enabling it to destroy Gaza and the West Bank. US diplomatic support at the UN has shielded Israel from censure.
International organisations like the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court have been treated with contempt, and international law undermined to protect Israel.
Palestinians – and anyone who speaks up for them – are increasingly censured and at risk of punishment, as if they, and not Israel, were engaged in genocide.
Today, we see deliberately induced mass starvation take hold in Gaza, while the West Bank is ransacked to create a second Gaza.
Israel’s backers look on passively throughout, and there are plenty of politicians prepared to do business as usual with a state under investigation for genocide.
A ‘problem’ transferred
The message from all this should always have been clear to Palestinians. For the West, the so-called conflict was never about Palestine or its people, but always about Europe’s unresolved relationship with its Jewish communities.
Historically, this expressed itself predominantly as antisemitism, sometimes as philosemitism, or nowadays as both.
Why is Israel so vital to the West?
Read More »
The “Jewish question”, as it was known, was hotly debated and agonised over in Europe throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.
This is where we, Palestinians, were made to come in.
In trying to resolve their Jewish problem, the West quite simply transferred it to us. Although we had no role in Europe’s Jewish question, Israel was created to solve it in our corner of the Arab world.
In what has remained primarily a Jewish story, we have become mere obstacles to be removed. And the irony is that we have become known through the western world’s preoccupation with the Jewish question.
In the words of the renowned Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, “If our war had been with Pakistan, no one would have heard of me.”
Indeed, if our adversaries had not been Jews, who would have heard of us?
Who would have known or cared if people from Pakistan or anywhere else in the Third World had come into our country in 1948 and pushed us out and taken our place?
For western imperialists, it would have gone down as no more than a regional skirmish among backward natives invading each other.
But unhappily for us, the “people from Pakistan” were Jewish Europeans with a troubled history, seeking retribution for their suffering.
If only they had taken their revenge on their European persecutors, not on us. Then we might have remained obscure and unknown, but living in our homeland.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
