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Raja Shehadeh is a lawyer, writer and human rights activist who lives in Ramallah, on the West Bank. His book Palestinian Walks won the Orwell Prize in 2008. In 1979 he helped to found the Palestinian human rights organisation Al-Haq. In October 2021, Benny Gantz, then Israel's Defence Minister, declared Al-Haq to be a terrorist association along with other similar organisations. He provided no evidence whatsoever, an increasingly common occurrence with Israeli claims. Unsurprisingly, Gantz's charge was condemned by—among others—Amnesty International and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and ignored by most countries.
The first (and longest) part of Shehadeh's short book is entitled ‘How did we get there?’; the second deals with the ongoing (as I write) Gaza war—which the BBC and other Western media such as the Financial Times insist on calling it the Israel-Hamas war (and not the Israel-Gaza war) as if Hamas had not been elected as the legitimate government of Gaza—we may not like it, but then we may not like the democratically elected government of Israel either.
The book starts with a depressing note: while the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of apartheid in South Africa showed that matters could change for the better, in the Middle East the situation got worse. One could also point out that the end of communism in the USSR was the work of the communists themselves and that in South Africa the white minority eventually realised that their oppression of the black majority could not last forever. But in Israel the majority thinks that their illegal occupation can last forever and behave accordingly, supported by many Western leaders. The communists in the USSR had not succeeded in establishing a thriving economy. Their regime was a failure. In South Africa the economy could not function at all without black labour. This is not the case in Israel where, even before the creation of the state, one of the key slogans of Zionists and their leader David Ben-Gurion was ‘Jewish Labour Only’. It was never applied in Israel, though the more extreme Zionists wanted Arab labour to be boycotted. Nevertheless, the difference between apartheid in Israel and apartheid in South Africa is obvious: Israel does not depend on Arab labour.
Shehadeh examines the lexicon used by Zionism. The 1948 war is called a ‘war of independence’ as if it had been fought against the British when it was the British who, with the Balfour Declaration of 1917 (Balfour was an antisemite), promised the land, with its majority of Palestinian Arabs, to be a ‘home’ for the Jews. As the author points out, the new country proceeded without delay to reinvent its history in such a way as to avoid recognising the presence of the original non-Jewish inhabitants. Re-writing history is common for nationalists. For Israeli nationalists 1948 was the ‘year zero’. Over 700,000 Palestinians were expelled and never allowed to return. They were not to be regarded as refugees, while any Jew, anywhere in the world, could ‘return’ to the land God allegedly gave them thousands of years ago.
It is difficult to come up with a more absurd justification. According to Genesis (15:18–21) God ‘gave’ the Jews all land from the Euphrates to the River of Egypt. Assuming that the ‘river of Egypt’ is the Nile a claim could be made, on the basis of the Bible, that God promised the Jews not only present-day Israel and the occupied territories, but also Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, most of Turkey and perhaps even Saudi Arabia, the Emirates and bits of Egypt. Imagine a bunch of armed religious fanatics arriving in Cornwall, holding their holy book, and claiming the entire region for themselves because it was promised by ‘their’ god. At least Catholics no longer abide by Pope Urban II's appeal in 1095 to start a crusade to ‘liberate’ the Holy Land…
The author notes the creation of different types of citizenship, similar to those of apartheid South Africa. The Jews between the River Jordan and the sea are the ‘white’ citizens, the Arab citizens of Israel have ‘coloured’ status and the Palestinians in the occupied territories are ‘black’ and have no political rights. Real peace would mean ditching the nationalist myths on which Israel was established and possibly being required, in Shehadeh's words, to pay ‘huge compensation for the dispossessed Palestinians.’ Right now, this is extremely unlikely.
The Palestinians who remained in what had become Israel were forced to live in a state where they were second class citizens, where they were forced to celebrate Independence Day in a country which has made it clear that they have no right to statehood, while accepting as a historic reality that Jerusalem has been the capital of Israel for 3,000 years. Israel, claiming sovereignty over the entirety of Jerusalem, describes the city as its ‘eternal’ and ‘undivided capital’. Netanyahu's party, the Likud, claimed in its 1977 platform that ‘between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty’, while describing the PLO as ‘an organisation of assassins’. In an embrace of the illegal occupation, Trump moved the US embassy to Jerusalem, a move upheld by the Biden-Harris administration. And all this in spite of the fact that, as recently as February 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) reaffirmed the illegality of the occupation of all the territories seized by Israel in 1967, including eastern Jerusalem. The respected international lawyer, Philippe Sands, counsel for Palestine in the ICJ case, declared that ‘This is as clear and far-reaching a ruling as I have come across from this court … Its legal consequences are entirely without ambiguity, its political consequences far-reaching … Among the many practical consequences, the court has made clear its view, by an overwhelming majority, that the US and other embassies in Jerusalem are illegal and must be removed for international law to be respected.’
It is often claimed that we, we in the West, must defend a ‘rules-based international order’, but the rules are usually defined by a country, the USA, which is not even a party to the main protocols of the Geneva Convention (protecting civilians), nor to the International Criminal Court.
As Shehadeh notes, the Israeli version of what happened in 1948 and afterwards has become the dominant narrative, supported not only by the Bible but, above all, by the understandable sympathy for the victims of one of the worst atrocities in modern history, the Nazi genocide. As Shulamit Aloni, the late left-wing Israeli politician, once remarked ‘It's a trick, we always use it. When from Europe somebody is criticising Israel then we bring up the Holocaust. When in the US people are criticising Israel then they are antisemitic.’
What the Nazis did, of course, hardly justifies the continuing settlements by Jews in the West Bank. Shehadeh reminds us that in 1976 Yitzhak Rabin, who served as Israel's defence minister during the First Intifada and as its prime minister during the negotiations and signing of the Oslo Accords, gave an interview in which he described the then existing sixty settlements as ‘a cancer in the social and democratic tissue of the state of Israel’. Rabin was assassinated in 1995 by a far-right Israeli who opposed the Oslo Accords. Rabin was not always so dovish: during the first intifada, as minister of defence, he instructed Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers to break the arms and legs of protesters.
The number of illegal settlements made possible, at least in part, by a massive influx of funds from the USA, have multiplied to over 160 and those who vociferously support them are in the Israeli government, which is armed to the teeth by the USA and Germany—which purges its guilt for the sins of the past by enabling the persecution of Palestinians. The United Kingdom has a minor role in arming Israel, but a role nevertheless. The 700,000 Jewish settlers on the West Bank now constitute an electoral bloc which would make it politically extremely difficult, if not impossible (as Begin had predicted as early as 1980), for any Israeli government to withdraw from the Occupied Territories. On 23 February 2024 Anthony Blinken, then US secretary of state, declared that ‘It's been long-standing US policy under Republican and Democratic administrations alike that new settlements are counterproductive to reaching an enduring peace. They're also inconsistent with international law.’ But, of course, nothing is done. Blinken is likely to go down in history as the US secretary of state who never achieved anything. Not a mean feat.
Dissent among Israelis is minimal. The images of the destruction and killing in Gaza are not shown on Israeli television, though it is perfectly possible to tune in to foreign broadcasters, but most Israelis prefer to remain blissfully ignorant of what their army—‘the most moral army in the world’ to use a now trite cliché—is doing to their Palestinian neighbours. While in 1982 many Israelis protested against the massacre of Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon, today, as the Israeli historian Omer Bartov had written, ‘the scale of what is being perpetrated in Gaza right now by the IDF is as unprecedented as the complete indifference of most Israelis to what is being done in their name.’ (The Guardian, 13 August 2024.)
Israelis have demonstrated against Netanyahu, objected to his attempt to establish full control over the Supreme Court and demanded a ceasefire to obtain the return of the Israeli hostages, but there is very little sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians. Anyway, in August 2024, Netanyahu was topping the polls (see Haaretz, 19 August 2024). One of the many examples Shehadeh uses, in a text that tries to eschew anger, is that of the 18-year-old Israeli Sergeant Elor Azaria, who, instead of administering first aid (he was a medic) to a bleeding Palestinian on the ground, cocked his rifle and shot him in the head. The Palestinian had stabbed a soldier. Azaria was convicted for manslaughter (and not homicide), sentenced to serve eighteen months, but was out after only nine. Azaria, who came from a low-income Mizrahi family, was an open supporter of the explicitly fascist and racist Kahanist movement. A petition backing Azaria's actions was signed by 50,000 people. Supporters of the soldier posted a video online of the moments before the shooting.
Since 7 October the Palestinian prison population in Israel has increased exponentially, doubling within two weeks from just over 5,000 to just under 10,000. At the end of July, the UN Human Rights Office published a report on arbitrary detention by Israeli authorities, affecting thousands of Palestinians. The report also covers allegations of torture and other forms of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, including sexual abuse of women and men. They have generally been held without being given a reason for their detention, access to a lawyer or effective judicial review, the report states. In August 2024 the Israeli human rights NGO B'Tselem released a report confirming such allegations.
Haaretz reported (17 August 2024) that IDF reservists stood by as over 100 Jewish settlers in the West Bank attacked residents and set fire to buildings and vehicles in the town of Jit and killed a 23-year-old Palestinian. Usually, such rioters are arrested. But the backlash from the USA was such that some arrests were made. In the twelve months after 7 October more than 600 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank, including eleven killed by armed Jewish settlers and the rest by the Israeli military, according to UN data.
Killing Palestinians has become a common occurrence, but this never attracted the widespread condemnation which the massacre of 7 October 2023 generated. Neither Trump nor Biden have expressed the slightest sympathy for the thousands of Palestinian children who have been killed by American bombs or the estimated 19,000 children in Gaza who have lost one or both of their parents during months of bitter conflict (as UNICEF reported). Meanwhile, aid to Israel continued regardless. The dimension of the Israeli massacre is huge, but the actual killing is not new.
During the so-called 2008 Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, over 1,300 Palestinians were killed. In 2014 the Operation Protective Edge led to the death of over 2,300 Palestinians. Shehadeh quotes the Israeli historian Benny Morris writing in Haaretz on 30 July 2014: ‘What should we do next time? The answer is clear and well known. We're talking about reoccupying the entire Gaza Strip and destroying Hamas as a military organisation, and perhaps also as a political one. This will require months of combat, during which the Strip will be cleansed, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, of Hamas and Islamic Jihad operatives.’
So, it should not be surprising that, after 7 October, the defence minister Yoav Gallant declared that in Gaza there should be ‘no electricity, no food, no fuel’. This was seen, at least initially, as quite legitimate self-defence by Keir Starmer, a self-declared Zionist. Shortly afterwards Rishi Sunak, then prime minister, declared at a news conference with Netanyahu. ‘I am proud to stand here with you in Israel's darkest hour … We will stand with you in solidarity. We will stand with you and your people. And we also want you to win.’
Shehadeh asks what will be the effect of what Israel has become on Israelis and their position in the world, and what will it mean for the future of Palestinians and Israelis, living as they do in such close proximity. Between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea, there are 9.7 million Israelis of whom two million are Arab citizens of Israel, as well as 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza and 3.2 million in the West Bank.
Israel has consistently refused to accept a fully sovereign Palestinian state. In July 2024, the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, overwhelmingly reaffirmed its longstanding rejection of a two-state solution. And it was not just the position of the frenzied far right (the minister for National Security Itamar Ben Gvir, or the finance minister Bezalel Smotrichs), not just the position of Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud Party, but also that of allegedly ‘moderate’ politicians, such as the leader of the ‘opposition’ Benny Gantz—the left has virtually disappeared. As of June 2024, Palestine has been recognised as a sovereign state by 145 of the 193 member states of the UN—but not by the UK or the US.
The continuation of this state of affairs, claims Shehadeh, would not just be an increase in the political isolation of Israel, but its transformation ‘into an openly fascist, racist state that has to go from war to war.’ The religious right is dominant in Israel while Palestinians lacks a coherent vision. The author thinks that the likelihood that change could come from within ‘in the absence of outside pressure is minimal’. For some reason he remains hopeful asserting that ‘the only future is for the two peoples to live together’ and that ‘it is only after great upheavals that hopeful consequences follow.’ Yet, witnessing the ridiculous scenes in the American Congress when, on 24 July 2024, Netanyahu, on his fourth visit, received more than twenty standing ovations (some have reported over fifty) for a string of tired clichés, one might think Shehadeh to be too optimistic. Members of the joint meeting of the US Congress even applauded and stood for this absurd statement in which he attacked those who called Israel a colonialist state: ‘Don't they know that the Land of Israel is where Abraham, Isaac and Jacob prayed, where Isaiah and Jeremiah preached and where David and Solomon ruled? For nearly four thousand years, the land of Israel has been the homeland of the Jewish people. It's always been our home; it will always be our home.’ Of course, many members congress did not attend, including more than one hundred Democrats—and, outside, there were thousands of demonstrators. In the streets of London and in many American universities, protestors countervailed the increasingly isolated voices of Israel's supporters.
Meanwhile the Israeli economy is not doing well. The Times of Israel (2 July 2024) noted that economists are warning of a deep economic crisis, some international credit rating companies have lowered the country's rating, exports fell by 18 per cent in the last quarter of 2023 and tourism has almost stopped. Only the armaments industry is booming.
In fact, the Zionist project has failed in everything. Israel is not and never was ‘a safe haven’ for the Jews and it did little or nothing to quell antisemitism—quite the contrary. The majority of the Jewish population of Israel, is, for now, accepting that they are in a state of permanent war. They live their own hate-filled myths while they are losing support among diaspora Jews—especially the younger generation of Jews—while maintaining the support of right-wing Zionist and evangelical Christians. Even within Israel, dissent is growing. The ultra-right has succeeded in upsetting even Yoav Gallant—the defence minister and the head of Shin Bet (the security service)—who is alarmed at the international repercussions of their actions and statements. Eventually, the price to be paid by Israel might become excessive and matters might change for the better. Perhaps Raja Shehadeh's optimism may turn out not to be so misplaced. Let us hope so.
What Does Israel Fear from Palestine? by Raja Shehadeh. Profile Books. 113 pp. £7.99.
