My Heart Weeps for the Palestinians -- Thoughts on the 2023 Israel-Gaza War

On 7 October 2023, Hamas launched coordinated attacks on Israel from Gaza on the 50th “aniversary” of the Yom Kippur War. Israel is cutting off water, electricity, food, medicine, etc. to the Gazans (who basically live in an open-air prison) and indiscriminately bombing Gaza. It is a horrifying shit show and we will understand the full scope of the hellscape in the coming days and months.

I spent some time as a 14-15 year old reading about reading about the nature of wars between Israelis and Palestinians, but was always daunted by the seeming need to parse through 2000 years of history to seriously justify having much of an opinion. This was fair enough, since I had a tremendous amount of other parts of the world to learn about . Now I realize that it’s not that complicated. Anyone who watches an hour or so of what it looks like to live in the West Bank, and another hour watching what Gaza is like today will understand that this is settler-colonialism and apartheid ^{1 2 3 4}. And all the homies hate apartheid.

Everyone knows this is colonization. Even Zionists, such as Vladimir Jabotinsky are/were frequently upfront about this.

Emotionally, my attitude to the Arabs is the same as to all other nations – polite indifference. Politically, my attitude is determined by two principles. First of all, I consider it utterly impossible to eject the Arabs from Palestine. There will always be two nations in Palestine – which is good enough for me, provided the Jews become the majority. And secondly, I belong to the group that once drew up the Helsingfors Programme, the programme of national rights for all nationalities living in the same State. In drawing up that programme, we had in mind not only the Jews, but all nations everywhere, and its basis is equality of rights. I am prepared to take an oath binding ourselves and our descendants that we shall never do anything contrary to the principle of equal rights, and that we shall never try to eject anyone. This seems to me a fairly peaceful credo.

My readers have a general idea of the history of colonisation in other countries. I suggest that they consider all the precedents with which they are acquainted, and see whether there is one solitary instance of any colonisation being carried on with the consent of the native population. There is no such precedent… Every native population, civilised or not, regards its lands as its national home, of which it is the sole master, and it wants to retain that mastery always; it will refuse to admit not only new masters but, even new partners or collaborators. This is equally true of the Arabs. Colonisation carries its own explanation, the only possible explanation, unalterable and as clear as daylight to every ordinary Jew and every ordinary Arab. Colonisation can have only one aim, and Palestine Arabs cannot accept this aim…We cannot offer any adequate compensation to the Palestinian Arabs in return for Palestine. And therefore, there is no likelihood of any voluntary agreement being reached. So that all those who regard such an agreement as a condition sine qua non for Zionism may as well say “non” and withdraw from Zionism…In this matter there is no difference between our “militarists” and our “vegetarians”. Except that the first prefer that the iron wall should consist of Jewish soldiers, and the others are content that they should be British. We all demand that there should be an iron wall

Part of me is quite mad that this ongoing apartheid is the direct result of lobbying the British government and using their treachery, racism (including that of anti-semites who would have loved to yeet as many Jews out of Europe as possible), and warmongering to oppress others. Of course, all the homies hate the British empire. This is slightly tempered by the understanding that sometimes, one must work with horrible people for a “bigger picture” (E.x. Subash Chandra Bose helped to kick the British out of India with help from the Imperial Japanese, after getting limited help from the USSR and Nazi Germany, though not as much as he would have liked).

0. It takes a true idealist to imagine a nonviolent route to peace between Israelis and Palestinians. The West Bank is what happens when one “works with” Israel, while Gaza shows more active resistance. The choice is between a ghetto and a concentration camp/open-air prison. Few have that kind of faith in Ahimsa. I’m not sure that I do, and I certainly can’t expect 100% of Palestinians to have that kind of faith for 100+ years.

1. It terrifies me that all of the major powers of the world, for the past hundred years, support the genocidal apartheid state of Israel, including the United States, the UK, France, and Germany. Other settler colonialist societies, such as the US, Canada, and Australia have a truly scary amount of solidarity on this.

2. I truly resent the fact that India/Modi is supporting Israel in this ? How much has Bharat fallen that it will side with a colonizer?? Many of Bharat’s initial leaders rejected a “Jewish state” for the same reason they rejected a Hindu state or a Muslim state.

   What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct. The mandates have no sanction but that of the last war. Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home… And now a word to the Jews in Palestine. I have no doubt that they are going about it in the wrong way. The Palestine of the Biblical conception is not a geographical tract. It is in their hearts. But if they must look to the Palestine of geography as their national home, it is wrong to enter it under the shadow of the British gun. A religious act cannot be performed with the aid of the bayonet or the bomb. They can settle in Palestine only by the goodwill of the Arabs. They should seek to convert the Arab heart. ⁵

   Since the Nehru days, Bharat used to have a shared anti-colonial understanding with the Palestinians, but all of that has melted away since the bilateral relationship between Bharat and Israel involves weapons. I can’t help but think of Modiji as a wanabee colonizer himself. Is he so cheap as to be bought for only a couple billion of dollars of weapons? Truly awful.

3. The British have completely fucked up the world. Israel and Palestine today live with the scars of imperialist hubris, bloodlust, and greed, in the same way that Indians and Pakistanis do. Atleast 70% of the current war is the fault of the British. (In my estimation, 20% is the fault of the Israeli government and 10% is the fault of the American government, but who’s counting?) I do not consider any of their colonialism as “legitimate” in the world and it surely shouldn’t be used a justification for ongoing apartheid. Atleast Arthur Balfour was honest about treating the Palestinians as subhuman.

   For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country, though the American Commission has been going through the form of asking what they are. The four Great Powers are committed to Zionism. And Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.⁶

   How can something like this be the basis for a state? From the beginning, the British and Zionists treated the Palestinians as subhuman in the early 20th century. Many (most?) do the same today.

   The Israeli government learned from the British that they can piss on the floor, leave the UN, Red Cross, MSF, etc. to do what little they can to pick up the pieces, and in ~20 years, no one will remember/care. Absolutely disgusting. These ghouls will beat the war drum from > 1000 kilometres away, encourage another Nakba and expect the UN and neighboring countries to do…something about the purposeful ethnic cleansing. That has been the goal of the Israeli government since atleat 1947, and more cynically, has been the goal of Zionists since atleast 1917. That is the legacy of colonialism. Fuck the British. Any of those knuckle-draggers who still stands by the legacy of their empire can eat shit.

4. The British collectively wanted to be colonizers and held on to that as long as they could. The American confederates wanted to live in a slave society until it was ripped away from them. The South African whites wanted to live in an apartheid state until that was forcefully removed as an option. I seriously wonder whether the Israeli people fundamentally want to live in a genocidal, settler-colonial apartheid state until that is forcefully ripped away from them. It can’t be just B’Tselem or Haaretz; only transformation of the Israeli consciousness beyond something that is merely “jewish” can end the desire for apartheid.

The only “answer” here must be something like a single state, that we may call Israel, that permits equal political, social, civil, and economic rights to all in its borders, welcomes back all displaced Palestinians and Israelis with sufficient reparations and truth and reconciliation. The extent of illegal Israeli settlements has made a 2-state solution impossible. Find me the two states. I don’t see them . This certainly means that Israel cannot exist as a Jewish state. The people of a state/nation can, of course, have a certain religious character, but we must leave religious states back in the 1600s. It won’t be pretty. Anti-colonial struggles never are.