The Manipulated Past
BY LAWRENCE DAVIDSON
counterpunch.org
The first thing we can observe is that each believes the other wants to destroy them. Given all that has happened, there is some truth to this. However, whether the Palestinian past has led Hamas to want to wipe Israel off the map or not, they simply haven’t got the military capacity to do so. What they do have is a growing capacity to wage a low level war of resistance against an Israeli state that does have the capacity to wipe the Palestinians off the map.
Since the Nakba of 1948, Israel has not acted to physically eliminate large numbers of Palestinians. This was probably for fear of world opinion. At the end of 2023, however, a combination of particularly ruthless Israeli leaders and the Hamas attack of October 7, triggered an Israeli decision to risk a genocidal attack on Gaza. And, lo and behold, the rest of the world’s nation states allowed them to do it. This passive response has affirmed for Israelis that their understanding of the past is shared by most Western states. That international non-state actors (for instance the IJC) point out the horror of Israeli behavior is dismissed as anti-Semitism.
Indeed, Western leaders immediately accepted the Zionist description of Hamas’s act of resistance as “an unprovoked terrorist act.” They thereby signaled a willingness to disregard decades of Israeli colonial oppression and expropriation. They swallowed whole the Israeli historical narrative. President Biden, who described the Hamas attack as “pure evil,” is an excellent example of this partisan choice of histories. Back in Jewish Israel, “the latest Peace Index survey [January 2024] from Tel Aviv University shows that ninety-four percent of Jews, and 82 percent of the total population in Israel, think the Israeli Defense Force has used the right amount of firepower in Gaza (51 percent among Jews), or not enough (43 percent).” In other words, Jewish Israeli understanding of the past does not allow them to recognize that what took place on 7 October 2023 was a reaction to their own country’s behavior. Within the Israeli narrative, Hamas could only have acted out of hateful anti-Semitism, justifying a response of wanton slaughter.
Let us end with a brief consideration of Israeli President Isaac Herzog. Like Joe Biden, he is a good example of a man living in an historical bubble that dictates his present understanding. Soon after the Hamas attack, Herzog put the blame on the entire Palestinian population of Gaza. “It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true. It is an entire nation out there that is responsible. They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’etat.” Here Herzog shows himself in denial about his own country’s contribution to the October 7 episode as well as the origins of Hamas’s rule in Gaza.
Hamas did not come to power in Gaza through a coup d’etat. It came to power through a legal, internationally supervised election in 2006. Immediately following the vote, Israel and the U.S. sponsored an attempted coup d’etat against Hamas. When this failed they blockaded the territory and escalated a process of enforced de-development. Herzog chose not to know this because it did not fit into Israel’s alternative self-justifying narrative. His dubious assertion that “an entire nation [of Palestinians]…is responsible” for the Hamas attack is even more interesting. In effect, it is a projection of the Israeli situation. For it is the Israelis who know what their leaders (that “evil regime”) have long been doing to the Palestinians. They know of the segregation, the mass arrests, military incursions, settler violence, etc. Indeed, many of them have actively participated in these criminal acts as soldiers and government agents. They know, but they interpret these actions through the filter of the sectarian history that they have been fed since birth.
Unfortunately, the logical outcome of the Israeli/Zionist historical narrative is the deportation of as many Palestinians as possible and the annihilation of those remaining—all in the name of security and divine national destiny. On the one hand, the Palestinians are forced to understand a past that is constantly replicated in the present. On the other, the Israelis have the ability to manipulate their past to support a present of their choosing. No analysis is necessary. For the Israelis, “wisdom has no profit.” |
