End the violence and save Israel from itself

HAMAS's violent incursion into Israel on October 7, 2023, and Israel's horrific response are widely regarded as a game-changer. But what exactly has changed besides the enormous loss of lives, limbs, safety, infrastructure and human dignity?

Israel's total oppression of the Palestinians could not continue without resistance forever. Something had to give. After all, on October 6, 2023, no peace was in sight. Nor was there any absence of violence.

In the 1940s, Israeli leader David Ben-Gurion's plans for the Palestinians involved ethnic cleansing from the beginning. Israel's New Historians themselves explain this step by step using declassified military documents. On the evening of March 10, 1948, Ben-Gurion and his 10 associates, in the then Red House in Tel Aviv, ordered armed Zionist groups the Irgun, Hagana, and Stern to get rid of the Palestinians. They also had to destroy their infrastructure and confiscate assets.

A reign of terror followed with several massacres. Just over two months later, Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders unilaterally declared the state of Israel on 78% of Palestine's land. By that time, 85% of the Palestinians were refugees, more than 530 villages were destroyed, and urban areas, banks, export businesses, agricultural land, water sources, and other assets were in the hands of the new Jewish state. The world largely watched in silence. To this day, the Palestinians are paying the price for Europe's anti-Semitism.

Eight decades more of war and further land grabs, oppression, displacements, failed peace processes and broken promises followed. Israel's state violence against Palestinians – regardless of where they live – takes the form of settler-colonialism, occupation, apartheid and ethnic cleansing. It involves every form of violence: Injury, death, psychological harm, neglect, deprivation, dehumanisation, systematic oppression, discrimination, confinement, torture, humiliation, collective punishment, exploitation and an overall restriction of basic and universal civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights as defined in international human rights law.

Descendants of refugees

Most of the 2,3 million people in the Gaza Strip are descendants of refugees. Already in 2012, the UN said that living conditions in Gaza would be unviable by 2020. At the time, Gaza was already known as the largest open-air prison in the world. Israel is still in total control of Gaza’s borders by land and sea, airspace, population registry, currency, customs, internet, mail and communication networks, fuel, electricity, water, food and medical supplies, natural resources and all else that makes life possible.

Until 2023, the systemic nature of injustice against Palestinians had no part in mainstream conversation. The general public readily accepted propagandistic claims that discredited Palestinians. Millions of Christians, with their backs turned on the Palestinians and fellow Christians in Bethlehem, East Jerusalem, and Gaza confused biblical Israel with the modern state and elevated Zionist imperialism to a divine miracle.

Early in 2024, however, the formal finding of the highest court in the world that Israel is likely to be complicit in genocide began to shift perceptions. Today it is much more difficult to dismiss the systemic, structural nature of Israel's violence as a misrepresentation. It is now also increasingly clear that what is at stake is not merely a “conflict” between equal parties. Rather it is an unequal struggle in which the Palestinians are trying to liberate themselves from long-term and systematic oppression.

Yet many people still believe Israel has the right to self-defence. In international law, however, there is no right where the threat is located within a territory controlled by a state. Israel occupies and controls Palestine. Israel can therefore not claim “self-defence" as a justification for military attacks on Gaza, the rest of Palestine and the Golan Heights. Israel, from within its own territory, may indeed repel any attack to protect its civilians, but under no circumstances might it claim “self-defence" to wage war against the territories it occupies. As an occupier, Israel may implement the necessary law enforcement but no military operations. In fact, under international law, as the occupier Israel is obligated to protect the occupied population and use their assets for their benefit.

Getting away with murder

And yet Israel literally gets away with murder. The US has protected Israel from accountability for its repeated wrongdoings against the Palestinians since 1948. The UN Security Council is the only body that can enforce a decision. But the US, as one of five permanent members with veto power, is not living up to its responsibilities in the Security Council.

America is supposed to act in the international interest and ensure that human rights are upheld in all contexts. However, they favour their own national interest and protect Israel not for moral but for military and economic reasons.

It is becoming increasingly clear that there is an urgent need to critically rethink the world community's institutions, which are supposed to look after the safety and peace of all people. How is it possible that a country deviating from an international contract cannot be stopped?

On October 6, 2023, the situation in Gaza and elsewhere in Palestine was humiliating, unbearable, and hopeless. It seemed that the world was not listening or caring. Since 2005, the Palestinians have repeatedly asked the world to support their campaign of peaceful protest against Israel in the form of boycotts, sanctions and divestment. The world – governments, businesses, the public, churches – has failed the Palestinians.

So, what remains?

On the one hand, the Palestinians' survival is at stake. On the other hand, Israel's behaviour has become self-destructive. All the South African Jews and the Jewish Israelis I interviewed for my book 21 Voices talk about this: “You really love and you really care about Israel? Then press the Israeli government to stop the occupation. This is the only way to save this country from itself – to save us from ourselves.” None of these Jews are Zionists, and all argue that the world was not only negligent toward the Palestinians – there is also no pressure on Israel to act within the law. The world community's unwillingness to apply the lessons of the Second World War shortly after 1948, including that there will never again be discrimination against any group, is also a form of violence.

Diplomacy did not work

I am by no means an advocate of armed resistance as a strategy or as a solution, and there are many reasons to criticise Hamas. But perhaps it was inevitable that something had to give to challenge the multiple layers of violence against the Palestinians. Diplomatic processes and peaceful protest did not work.

According to the UN Charter and international humanitarian and human rights laws, and various UN resolutions, Palestinians have a legal right to armed resistance against occupation, colonial domination and apartheid as long as they do not target civilians. This right to armed resistance, as long as civilians are not targeted, has also been confirmed by the General Assembly of the International Court of Justice.

Unfortunately, Hamas did target civilians on October 7. Yet it is deeply ironic and tragic that Hamas's violence has put the Palestinian cause back on the world's agenda. It comes at a tremendous price. But along with the indescribable suffering, there is a growing awareness of the injustice.

The Israeli historian Ilan Pappé writes that the cracks in Israel's Zionism have been there for some time, but now they are visible to the very foundations. It is now crystal clear that Zionism, nearly 130 years after Theodor Herzl introduced the ideology in Europe in 1897, has reached a crisis point.

The disintegration of Jewish society in Israel is one sign of this. Half a million liberal Zionists have already left the country, and the number of immigrants is drastically decreasing. Investors and the financial elite are shifting their capital out of the state, and the country's economy is reeling under the burden of the war.

Israel is also becoming increasingly isolated after the 2024 rulings of the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court on possible genocide and war crimes. Another sign that Israel is losing ground is visible in the erosion of Zionist pressure groups, especially among younger Jews in the US who are increasingly breaking ties with Israel and Zionism and even joining Palestinian solidarity movements.

Younger Palestinians

In Palestine, there is currently greater unity among younger Palestinians than among the politicians. They strive for a democratic system and, in contrast to the Palestinian Authority’s support for a two-state model, prefer one democratic state for Jews and Palestinians. It is possible that this generation could have a significant influence on the course of the liberation struggle.

However, Pappé warns that the exposure of Israel’s wrongdoings poses a great danger to the Palestinians. When Israel realises the extent of its legitimacy crisis in the global community of nations, it may unleash unbridled cruelty. We are already seeing signs of this. Nevertheless, the end of Israel’s injustice against the Palestinians, and the end of a Zionist state, is now a realistic possibility. It is no longer a question of whether it will happen, but when.

• Marthie Momberg is the author of 21 Voices: Why the Palestinian Struggle is a Global Matter, published by Naledi.

♦ VWB ♦

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