The dehumanization of Palestinians

 

The dehumanization of Palestinians

Mahatma Gandhi in his article The Jews, published in his weekly magazine Harijan, November 26,1938, wrote:” Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French.” The article has been a subject of intense debate over the years.

 

Gandhi was acutely conscious of the historical persecution of the Jewish people for their religion; he was deeply sympathetic to them: “My sympathies are all with the Jews. They have been the untouchables of Christianity. The parallel between their treatment by Christians and the treatment of untouchables by Hindus is very close. Religious sanction has been invoked in both cases for the justification of the inhuman treatment meted out to them.” He said the German persecution of the Jews had no parallel in history. And “if there ever could be a justifiable war in the name of and for the humanity, a war against Germany, to prevent the wanton persecution of a whole race, would be completely justified.”

 

Yet, he did not support a Zionist state in Palestine. His reasoning: “It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs. 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.”  Palestine was already home to Arab Palestinians and the settlement of Jews, which Britain actively enabled, was fundamentally violent. “A religious act of Jews returning to Palestine cannot be performed with the aid of the bayonet or the bomb”.  And the Jews could settle in Palestine only “with the goodwill of Arabs.”  He felt that the idea of a Jewish homeland was fundamentally antithetical towards their fight for greater rights elsewhere in the world and that the Jewish claim for a national home afforded “a clourable justification for the German expulsion of the Jews.”

 

In 1947, the UN adopted a 'Partition Plan for Palestine', which was a British Mandate. The Plan was accepted by the Jews but rejected by the Arabs. India had voted against the UN Resolution in November 1947 that partitioned Palestine to create a Jewish state of Israel because India was itself a victim of the British Imperialism that partitioned India earlier in August to create an Islamic state of   Pakistan. Before the partition, Jews, Christians and Muslims lived in Palestine in harmony, sharing common history and culture for over a millennium. 

 

Israel was established in 1948, and 14 May was celebrated as its Independence Day. A few days later, neighboring Arab countries invaded it and engaged Israeli forces in the First Arab Israeli War. During the Six-Day War in June 1967, Israel captured the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria. Since then, the state of Palestine, comprising of West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip remained under the occupation of Israel.

 

Palestinians observe 15 May as a day of national mourning-the day of commemoration for the Nakba, known as the Palestinian Catastrophe, in memory of the destruction of Palestinian society and homeland, and the permanent displacement of Palestinians. On this year’s Nakba Day, on completion of 75 years of occupation of the land of Palestine, Rabbi Yisroel David Weiss, an American Jew, activist, and spokesman of the Neturei Karta USA- a Herdi anti-Zionist group- spoke against the existence of state of Israel because it is a Zionist state and not a Jewish, created by heretics. It is the cause of bloodshed of Palestinians. Judaism forbids killing. He feels for the suffering of the Palestinians and wants total end of the occupation. What is being perpetuated against Palestinians is oppression, subjugation and terrible cruelty.

The Israel military forces expelled some 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and lands and captured 78 percent of historic Palestine; the remaining 22 percent divided into what are now the occupied West Bank and the besieged Gaza Strip.  Between 1947 and 1949, the Israel military forces attacked major Palestinian cities, destroyed some 530 villages and uprooted 400 towns. About 15,000 Palestinians were killed in a series of mass atrocities and massacres. And today around six million Palestinian refugees live in some 58 camps located throughout Palestine and neighboring countries.

The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees provides assistance and operates hundreds of schools and health facilities for 2.3 million Palestinian refugees in Jordan, 1.5 million refugees in Gaza, 870,000 refugees in the occupied West Bank, 570,00 refugees in Syria and 480,000 refugees in Lebanon.  About 1.5 million refugees live in eight refugee camps around the Gaza Strip. The plight of Palestinian refugees is the longest unresolved refugee problem in the world.  

Israel’s military control over the Palestinian people affects every aspect of their lives, from what services they can access and where they can travel to whom they can marry and where they can live. The Human Rights Watch accuses Israel of “committing the crimes against humanity.” Every year, Israel demolishes hundreds of Palestinian homes. According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affair (OCHA), between 2009 and 2022, more than 8400 Palestinian-owned structures were demolished by Israeli forces. Israel holds some 4,450 Palestinians as prisoners – including children, women and administrative detainees.

The Israeli settlements are heavily fortified Jewish communities built illegally on Palestinian land. Some 750,000 Israeli settlers live in 250 illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, home to some three million Palestinians. The settlers’ attacks against Palestinians and their property are a regular occurrence.

The Gaza Strip is located on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea. It is a tiny piece of land, 1/4 the size of Delhi, just 365 sq km with a population of 2.3 million,6300 people per sq km- among world’s highest density- an impoverished land with nearly 50% unemployment rate, children making 50% of its population. It is one of the two Palestinian territories, alongside the West Bank. Most people in Gaza are the descendants of refugees who fled or were expelled from the areas that became Israel after the 1948 Arab Israeli War.  Since 2007, Gaza is governed by Hamas- the political and militant group of Palestine.  Gaza is “the world's largest open-air prison.”  Israel restricts movement of Palestinian residents between the West Bank and Gaza Strip; making the Palestinians movement quite difficult, refusing to allow Gaza residents to leave for the West Bank, though they were originally the residents of West Bank.

In 1974, the UN adopted a resolution calling for "Peaceful settlement of the question of Palestine", and advocated negotiations for establishing a sovereign, independent and viable state of Palestine living side--by-side at peace with Israel.  The two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict envisions an independent State of Palestine alongside the State of Israel, west of the Jordan River. The boundary between the two states is subject to dispute, with Palestinian and Arab leadership demanding full Israeli withdrawal from the territories it occupied in 1967, which is rejected by Israel. 

Gaza, a financially strained Palestine territory, has been under Israeli blockade since 2007. It has been under the governance of Hamas, which engaged in war with Israel in 2008,2012,2014 and 2021. And each time, air strikes from Israel have flattened buildings, killing hundreds of civilians. Israel repeated striking the Gaza Strip during the past 15 years has stifled Gaza's growth, turning it into a most impoverished perpetual war zone.

 

It is this background that we should understand the Hamas attack on Israel ,7 October 2023. It is important to recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinians have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. However, nothing justifies the brutal attack by Hamas that killed hundreds of civilians, women and children. The Hamas - the Islamic Resistance Movement was- founded in 1987, as a political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood after the First Intifada- a Palestinian uprising against the Israel occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Hamas opposed the Israel-Egypt treaty of 1979 and disapproves normalization of relation between Israel and other Arab countries, such as UEA, Bahrain, Morocco, which were parties to the US brokered Abraham Accords signed in 2020.  It wants a Palestine state based on the 1967 borders.

 

What triggered the Hamas attack on Israel? Mohammad Deif, Commander of Hamam’s military wing, said: “We have decided to put an end to all of the occupation’s crimes. The time is over for them to continue to act without accountability.” There is no progress on the stalled Israel-Palestinian peace talks; no serious efforts were made to resolve the long-standing dispute.  And with some Arab countries trying to normalize relation with Israel, by putting the Palestine issue on the backburner, Hamas has brought the issue into the center-stage once again. The Benjamin Netanyahu government is considered the most regressive and hard-liner in the history of Israel.  Netanyahu doesn’t want any peaceful settlement of the Palestinian issue. His deal with the Jewish ultra-nationalists helped him form the ruling coalition, which is expansionist. Hamas is opposed to the Israel-Saudi Arabia accord, brokered by the US.

If we condemn the Hamas brutal killing of hundreds of civilians in Israel, we should equally condemn the brutal massacre of hundreds of innocent people in Gaza, including woman and children, by Israel indoctrinating bombing of the civilian areas, and the US unconditional support to it.  Israel declared total blockade of Gaza- cutting food, water, fuel and power-demanding release of the hostages held by the Hamas.

Israeli armed forces have deployed 3,60000 reservists (4% of population) – the largest mobilization in the world-for ground invasion of Gaza to cripple the Hamas. They gave ultimatum to some 1.3 million people in northern Gaza to evacuate and relocate to southern part. So many people fleeing en masse- almost half of the Gaza population- would be calamitous. The UN chief Antonio Guterres warned: "Moving more than one million people across a densely populated warzone to a place with no flood water, or accommodation, when the entire territory is under siege, is extremely dangerous"(FPJ 15/10/23).         

Israel – a small nation of 22,000 km with less than a million population- born out of hatred and violence, is sustained by military power and use of brute force. Its exclusive identity defies its own history. Professor Sanjay Srivastava of University of London makes a telling observation: “For the descendants of Prophet Abraham-whose special relationship with god is at the heart of Jewish ideas about the Promised Land- are also those the Muslims claim as their own. How then to claim that a particular piece of land earlier attributed clear ownership such that all others -with equally strong proof of their connection- must be excluded? This is where the story of Zionism, colonialism and the self-serving role of western powers come in.  Religious texts are not historical documents, but their use as such can convert them into instruments of historical injustice and contribute to human suffering” (IE 13/10/23).

And “the modern idea of the Promised Land required the making of an exclusive identity which could, in turn, lay exclusive claim to this imagined territory...The establishment of the Israel state was a direct result of the ideology of the zero-sum game: Occupants of hundreds of Arab villages fled their homes, their dwellings razed to the ground. A large-scale influx of Jewish immigrants into the new country ensued and this population started its life in Israel as the new owner of Arab property.” It is inconceivable that the Arabs had to pay heavy price and suffer for the holocaust that massacred some six million Jews, and the Jews who fled to escape the persecution in Europe and elsewhere settled in Palestine and occupied it, only to deny the very Palestinians their own homeland, transforming them into a colonial people. 

The dehumanization of Palestinians by Israel is an unpardonable crime against humanity, so threatening and frightening. Millions of Palestinians, denied of basic human rights, are living in occupied territories in miserable conditions. This dehumanising is shocking coming from the very descendants of those who themselves were the victims of the Holocaust.