1960 was a momentous year for decolonisation. Not only did 17 colonies become independent on the African continent, Mauritania being the only Arab state among them, but the United Nations General Assembly (GA) passed resolution 1514 (XV). This resolution unequivocally affirmed the right of liberation and sovereignty of colonised peoples. The mood of the United Nations had become resolutely anti-colonial with talk of self-determination from an increasing number of newly post-colonial states that managed to dominate the GA. Jumping forward to 2023, despite over half a century passing, while the majority of “Trust and Non-Self-Governing Territories” obtained independence, the anti-colonial struggle waged by Palestinians still continues and has failed to elicit the respect and recognition of the rights enshrined in resolution 1514 reiterated by GA resolution 1654 (XVI). In 1974, these resolutions were followed by resolution 3236 (XXIX) stating that the “question of Palestine” is one of self-determination for the Palestinians as well as their “inalienable right” of return. With the Palestinians constituting a “people,” no less a nation even without a state for Rashid Khalidi, there exists the expectation reflected by these resolutions of their right to self-determination (paragraph 2, 1514) and with an acute urgency of a right not to fall victim to “all armed action or repressive measures of all kinds” (paragraph 4, 1514) at the hands of an Israeli military occupation.
Although colonialism may appear to be an anachronism in the twenty-first century, the experiences of the Palestinians manifest the thwarting of statehood for a nation. Ilan Pappe has suggested replacing the paradigm of war with that of ethnic cleansing. War was simply the consequence or means to achieve the ethnic cleansing needed to uproot the Palestinians. Such a perspective can helpfully find a way out of the cul-de-sac of the simplistic contrast between Israeli sovereignty and Palestinian terrorism. The current Israeli domination of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip has been described as the “Occupied Palestinian Territory” by governments and organisations such as the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and Amnesty International.
Israel’s control of the Occupied Palestinian Territory has acquired the unmistakeable character of turning Palestinians into colonial subjects. Haim Bresheeth-Žabner alerts us to the change of purpose of the Israeli army in the post-1967 period from war against states to being a colonial force more or less exclusively aimed at unarmed civilians. While two events distinguish the forcible expulsion of Palestinians in the Nakba (Catastrophe) of 1948 and their control under a quasi-colonial government after the Naksa (Setback) of 1967, the nucleus of what would later become the Israeli army and its developed institutions were pivotal in spearheading and executing both plans.
Since 1967, the people of Gaza have experienced a disastrous chain of events from Israeli settlements to intolerable sieges. One constant, however, has been the subjection to Israeli military occupation of a largely civilian population made up of refugees. For the majority of Gaza’s inhabitants are descendants of Palestinians who fled their homes in present-day Israel in a large-scale operation to push them out in 1948. Historians researching the Nakba have reached a consensus that the force of arms proved to be essential in this project of ethnic cleansing. Far from incidental or an instance of “collateral damage,” the destruction of entire villages was deliberate and designed to prevent any future return of Palestinian families. These refugees fled and were settled in refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza, and in neighbouring states with no real prospect of seeing their homes ever again.
What is the relevance of the preceding narrative of historical events of decolonisation and refugees to Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza in 2023? In the previous paragraph, it was briefly mentioned that Palestinian refugees found themselves in Gaza and this observation can enable us to connect a gradual project of ethnic cleansing with the Israeli demand that the people of northern and central Gaza move to the south of the 141 square mile-region. The current conflict can be considered simply a resumption of the tactic of large-scale dispossession of a civilian population. A longstanding policy of ethnic cleansing is experiencing renewed brutal vigour. Netanyahu’s ‘war cabinet’ has given itself an opportunity to wage this current war to impose a collective punishment yet again, but UN experts have felt it necessary to collectively describe this war as a looming genocide, on 2.3 million Palestinians while meting out apparent retribution for the 1,200 people killed in Hamas’s October 7th raid and the hostages they seized. It seems to be aiming to push away even farther the Palestinians from Israel through a more or less one-sided war that has killed mostly civilians, in the thousands, and destroyed Gaza’s civilian infrastructure and entire neighbourhoods.
The biblical language that “we are the children of light, they are the children of darkness” used by Netanyahu in a national speech and repeated at the Israeli Knesset after October 7 betrays traces of the binary of the heroic coloniser and barbaric colonised. However, it must be noted that most Gazans are refugees, victims of colonial dispossession, who form about 70% of a population of 2.3 million according to UNRWA. They have attempted in a variety of ways to resist Israeli military occupation that has continued even after the dismantling of the last Israeli settlements in 2005. From the launching of Hamas in the late 1980s to the nonviolent protests of the “Great March of Return” between 2018 and 2019, anti-colonial struggles among Palestinians have been a dependent process involving coloniser as soldier and settler and colonised as refugee. And despite Hamas being labelled a terrorist group in the United States and Great Britain, joined by other states around the world, for its violent activities targeting both soldiers and unarmed civilians, its anti-colonial militancy is not unprecedented in the history of anti-colonialism. And this militancy is, in an important respect, both an immediate response and a historic culmination of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. For many of Hamas’s members and leaders are descendants of the victims of the ethnic cleansing that swept across Mandatory Palestine over eighty years ago such as Yahya Sinwar and Ismail Haniyeh, whose families were both forced out from Ashkelon (Asqalan).
A description of colonialism by the Martinican poet and thinker Aimé Césaire as “relations of domination and submission” can be applied to the fundamental character of Israel’s domination of the Palestinians through which the “colonizing man” adopts the roles of a classroom monitor, an army sergeant, a prison guard and a slave driver. A paradigm of ethnic cleansing can thus enable the filtering of the overwhelming (dis)information about the Arab-Israeli conflict and to understand, rather than to automatically condone or condemn, the various violent and nonviolent methods of resistance Palestinians have employed for a century to survive and to keep alive their dreams of nationhood. Reinhold Niebuhr, America’s foremost theologian of the twentieth century, allowed himself a very moral position in the ostensibly amoral Moral Man and Immoral Society. He acknowledged in his 1932 book the moral superiority of both a “war of emancipation” against the privilege ensuing from imperialism and class, and the oppressed challenging the force used by their oppressors – a recognition either seldom or equivocally granted to Palestinians in their struggle for self-determination.
By Dr. Mohammed Moussa
- The author is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Istanbul Sabahattin Zaim University.
