As the front pages of news sites start to drift back to stories of inadequate bus routes and the goings-on in sport, the full horror of what Israel is visiting on Gaza is starting to fade from public consciousness.
What is occurring is on par with the worst of colonial civilian massacres from the high age of imperialism — French mass killings to pacify Algeria, the Spanish depredation of Cuba, the British use of uncontrolled typhus in its Boer War concentration camps, US mass bombings with Agent Orange in Vietnam, and the USSR’s destruction of mountain villages in Afghanistan. These are all precursors to what is happening now, as we write and read. In the hours between this being written and published, a full ground offensive may begin. As the presence of Israeli troops on the ground will lessen the bombing, this may well be less atrocious than what is going on now.
The politics of talking about what should and should not be done here are complicated. Gaza is technically an area under Israeli statehood — it certainly has no official statehood of its own — a sequestered reserve for the descendants of 200,000 Palestinian Arabs from the surrounding areas who took refuge there, when, in 1948, Zionist insurgent forces adopted the practice of ethnic cleansing through the violent destruction and selective massacre of Palestinian villages.
The comparison is frequently made between that form of colonialism and the colonialism said to still operate in Australia. That is in some ways unhelpful to the Palestinian cause, because the colonialism there is more explicit and legalised. First Nations peoples who survived initial colonial conflicts were forced into reserves from the 1840s onwards. But those conditions were relaxed in the 1920s (yay, us), and Indigenous peoples began to return to the cities — which is why the Aboriginal Advancement League could make its fabled 1938 march from Footscray to the German embassy in Melbourne to protest against Kristallnacht (a march on which William Cooper may or may not have been present). However threadbare our “right of return” — there was no actual return of land or capital grants, and legal control of Indigenous movement did not cease until the 1960s (yay, us) — it was exercised.
The situation of the Gaza Palestinians needs to be seen as clearly as possible. They are in the situation Indigenous peoples in Australia were in a century ago. They cannot return to lands taken in living memory — even if they accepted Israel’s conditions of legitimising it through recognition.
There’s no point ignoring the realpolitik in any of this. (Some) state governments let First Nations peoples back into wider society because by the 1920s there were so few of them that they couldn’t make any difference to politics — and the vote and full citizenship was only further extended very slowly. Any full right of return in Israel will transform it into a roughly equal European-descended Jewish/Palestinian Arab Muslim-Christian state. The current Israeli state will quite literally use nuclear and chemical weapons against its enemies before it permits that — and Western governments would give their support to these “ultimate defences”.
The Israeli formula remains that conceived by revisionist Zionism in 1922 — that the Palestinian Arabs would be expelled to other lands, with at most a permanent minority remaining. The model when this strategy was conceived was the large (and violent) population movements that occurred after World War I — the destruction of the Greek diaspora, for example, which saw the driving out of hundreds of thousands of Greek communities from Turkey, Egypt and elsewhere, as ethnic nation-states were carved out of the old empires.
But by the time that came around after World War II, notions of human rights had been promulgated, and the legitimacy of race as a positive category discredited. The mandate carve-up of post-Ottoman Palestine proposed in the 1920s had worked off this assumption — that Arabs were something of a mass, and a whole section of them could simply be absorbed elsewhere without complaint.
When this carve-up was presented in 1947, it was done so in a period when notions of abstract rights had got off the ground. It was thus an anomaly, instituting an asymmetry necessary to legitimise the carve-out of a homeland for a people who had settled it, through a mix of land purchase and land grabs. The Jewish people’s identity — based in part on the persecution of the Holocaust — could be affirmed as distinct, special, the basis for an ethno-religious state. The Palestine Arabs’ identity was downgraded, such that they would accept being merged into surrounding Arab populations.
Yet even some form of this crappy colonial deal might have been done — for better or worse — if one pre-World War II principle had been stuck to: the status of Jerusalem as an international city, governed as a self-contained entity, a principle accepted by all parties up to 1948. The Zionist uprising that created Israel made that impossible. Now the increasing fundamentalisation of Zionism has made the Jewish takeover of Jerusalem a main and principal cause of violent Palestinian resistance.
Now the possibility of full expulsion has become live again. It was made impossible by Arab resistance to it, and active support of the Palestinian cause from 1967 onwards. Now that commitment is coming apart. It was set within a wider concept of post-imperial uprising, connected to a global vision of socialism and national liberation. That has now died away. The “Abraham Accords”, made initially between Israel and the UAE and auspiced by the Trump administration, were about to be added to by a Saudi-Israel accord, which the October 7 Hamas massacre stopped in its tracks.
For Palestinians, this may have been a sign that expulsion was back on the agenda. As the recent Armenian exodus from Nagorno-Karabakh has shown, we have returned to the collective ethno-politics of the post-World War I period. The discourse of human rights is being retired by the West, and notions of unlimited repression are now being mobilised — witness Defence Minister Richard Marles’ rubber-stamping of any and all Israeli action. With these post-modern Arab city-states and petrostates — with their nowhere globo-cities and bizarre futurisms replacing any notion of pan-Arabism — willing to deal with an equally high-tech global boutique Israel, have Arab rulers secretly acquiesced to the completion of the 1948 process?
This, arguably, has already begun. The true character of the IDF’s instruction to Palestinians to evacuate “north Gaza” has once again been obscured by unhelpful pro-Palestinian construction of the situation. The Gaza Strip is not a wholly built-up indistinguishable sprawl, but a half-dozen cities and refugee camps, now flowing into each other, but distinct to a degree. The instruction to evacuate the “north of Gaza” is really an expulsion from Gaza City. There will be no great right of return there either. The Gazan Palestinians are being further sequestered.
Will this occur in the West Bank too? If the Netanyahu government announces that it is re-annexing the West Bank and dissolving the Palestinian authority, will there be any demur from the world? That would be a prelude to herding the West Bank Palestinians into a very limited area of the West Bank — a new reserve — and guaranteeing some minimal rights to Palestinians in Jerusalem, and the Al-Aqsa Mosque there.
Were that to be accomplished, Israel would then do a deal with the Arab states for a final population transfer, and rely on the possibility that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians would simply give up and take whatever was on offer. In an era in which linear cities are being built from scratch, using global migrant labour, such a de-territorialisation of the concept of Palestine would be acceded to by the petro-state monarchies. “Virtual Palestine” would allow for a claim that the co-ethnic and co-religionist faith had been preserved, and a deal with Israel done. The petro-states would then have even greater access to Israel’s military-commercial-tech complex, with its fusion of surveillance, sequestration, robotics and AI technologies, for the permanent sequestration of its own populations.
In that scenario, the Palestinians who resistantly remained would be a shrunken minority of a minority, penned like cattle, and even more a test population for new regimes of AI-powered surveillance and human control.
Some of this has already come to pass in the past fortnight, with the internal Gaza expulsion and the heightened attacks by West Bank settlers on Palestinian populations. It comes after years in which the Israeli government actively assisted Hamas in retaining power in Gaza — and after a still-unexplained security lapse, in which IDF personnel strength at the Gaza “border” was not augmented, and possibly under-strength, on the 50th anniversary of an Arab victory which occurred because… the IDF was under-strength.
The full complexity of the situation is measured in the paradox that, in realpolitik terms, Israel might have a casus belli if Hamas’ missiles were to reach a strength and power that they could reach deeper into Israeli territory and deliver more lethal payloads. Hence the suggestion that dead Hamas fighters had USBs with instructions for cyanide preparation (taken from Al-Qaeda sources) found on their bodies. This may be true, or it may be one stray file (alarming enough in any case), or it may turn out to be a total fabrication by the IDF, which has no compunction about the manufacture of total propaganda, the noble lie to higher ends.
But what Israel has used as a casus belli — the Hamas incursion — does not reach the standard. Hideous as the event was, its possibility depended on easily fixed (or deliberately degraded) security conditions, and its form — guns, knives and bikes — never threatened the Israeli state for a second. The security lapses that made it possible are easily fixed. The suggestion that its destruction of Hamas (which it will never achieve) would remove the possibility of repeat terrorism in that form is not serious. So taking hugely lethal indiscriminate action in its name can be counted only as reprisal and vengeance.
And the reports of early warning to the IDF and suggestions of deliberate laxness cannot be ignored. It’s a horrible phrase in context, but the Hamas attack has been, for both parties, convenient. Hamas’ missile attacks are not much more than a continuing nuisance to Israel’s Iron Dome system. That such an attack could have been “waved through” seems beyond imagining. But so too does lax security on the 50th anniversary of an Arab victory gained due to… lax security. The right-wing foreign policy mavens who usually crow over Israel’s resolute toughness compared with the decadent West are now spruiking the line that the country’s entire military system is dysfunctional. That seems unlikely. It is a doubly strange and disturbing event.
The everyday horror of this colonial state terror is now being normalised — the pictures of families on X who have been vaporised or crushed under rubble, the adults and children dying in unequipped hospitals from stagnant water, and soon, from actual thirst. The rage this is building may well result in a return to attacks on Zionist institutions in the global diaspora, and then simply to secular attacks on Jews and Jewish targets themselves. Hamas has never attacked outside Palestine — it specifically renounced such globalised tactics as part of its foundation in ethno-religious, rather than political, principles.
But it would not need to, or have any control over what now be done, in reaction. Such expanded mayhem would be a self-fulfilling prophecy for the right, since it has been trying to actively encourage Jewish immigration to Israel for many years, arguing that the world is unsafe for Jews.
I don’t even feel like calling that chutzpah. A cloud of sick nihilism hangs over the region. If all the above seems a set of hideous and unprecedented events, then it is the very opposite, the continuation of earlier horrors. If all of it is too much to contemplate, then you may want to, and probably will, turn to the section on sports.
