As you probably know, there is a kind of a battle of narratives about what goes on in Gaza, between Israel and its allies and the rest of the world. The Israeli insistence or demand from anyone who is watching the events in Gaza is to look at them as if they have no historical context, no context at all, that this is just a vile act, and the only reason for it is deep anti-Semitism (namely, hatred of Jews) combined with an attempt by the regional power of Iran to wipe out Israel.

The rest of the world, and most reasonable people, which included at the time the General Secretary of the United Nations, understood that what happened on the 7th of October on the border with Gaza can only be properly understood if one knows the historical and moral context for the actions of the Hamas on that day. And you need that kind of historical and moral context also to understand the Israeli reaction, which turned very quickly into a genocide of the people of Gaza.

Probably the most important historical context is the one that goes quite deep into history, and that begins with the very nature of the Zionist movement of the Right in Palestine in the late nineteenth century: a movement of settler colonialism, as we call it, among scholars, to differentiate it from classical colonialism and from the kind of colonialism that ended up in genociding Indigenous people in places such as North America and Australia. Zionism was such a movement, and as is typical of a settler colonialist movement, it was made of refugees themselves: people who were themselves victims of persecution in Europe, were looking for a safe place (or if you want, another Europe), and, typical to other settler colonial movements, chose a place where already someone else lived: an indigenous population.

As the late, great scholar of settler colonialism Patrick Wolfe said, in the encounter between settler colonialist movements – namely these European refugees or people who found that Europe doesn’t want them – and the indigenous people, the logic of the elimination of the native was activated: because the main obstacle to creating New Europe, instead of the Europe that didn’t want them, was the presence of other people in the places they contacted. And the same happened with the Zionists: they came to a place already inhabited, where there was a thriving Palestinian society, and growing modernisation, growing national cohesion processes – and they were the main obstacle to creating an exclusive Jewish state instead of their homeland.

In the case of Palestine, of course, in the beginning we are not talking about genocide as happened in north America, but the aims of the Zionists and the settlers were very clear from the very beginning. They wanted to create an exclusive Jewish space, and until the end of the 20th century, even the beginning of this century, despite all their efforts, they are still only half of the population in the land that they desired, and when they started their ethnic cleansing operations in the 1920s, they were only 15% of the population.

Like all settler colonial movements, these two dimensions are very important: space and population, demography and geography, if you want. And in 1948 there was an historical opportunity (and I don’t have the time to go into all the necessary evidence about it) but there was the opportunity in 1948, because the British rule of Palestine came to an end, to try and change dramatically both the demography and the geography of Palestine.

In the circumstances of ’48, the Zionist movement was much stronger than the Palestinians, and was able to expel half of the Palestinians during the year that the Palestinians call the Nakba, destroy half of the Palestinian villages and towns (most of the towns actually, more than half of the towns) and take over almost 80% of Palestine. No wonder the Palestinians see, until recently, 1948 as the worst year in their history, and the Israelis see 1948 as the miraculous year, the best year, in the history of the Jewish people and in the modern history of Israel.

What happened in ’48 is very relevant to what goes on in Gaza, because most of the people in Gaza are refugees from that ethnic cleansing. The Gaza Strip itself did not exist before 1948. Gaza was a small town on the Via Maris between Egypt and Turkey, a very cosmopolitical place, where Jews, Christians and Muslims coexisted – and in one year, because of the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians during 1948, it became the biggest refugee camp in the world.

The reason Israel created the Strip, which as I said was never there before 1948 – Israel created the Strip because its plan to remove Palestinians by force in 1948 was to move them to the north, to Lebanon and Syria, to the east to Jordan, and to the south to Egypt. But Egypt refused to receive the Palestinian refugees. So Israel decided to give up a small part of Palestine, called the Gaza Strip (it’s 2 percent of Palestine), created this rectangle that you can see on the map, and pushed hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from the centre and south of Palestine into the Gaza Strip.

So the older generation of people in Gaza are people who were pushed by force into the strip, which became the largest refugee camp in the world. There is a particularly interesting group in Gaza, to which the leader of the Hamas, Yahya Sinwar belongs, and these are the people who lived on 11 Palestinian villages very close to what became the Gaza Strip. These particular villages were expelled by the end of 1948 as the last phase of the ethnic cleansing. Their villages were burnt, and the people were forced by shooting to cross over to Gaza. So there is a particular link between the people of Gaza, and people like Yahya Sinwar, and the particular kibbutzim and Jewish settlements that were attacked on the 7th of October. These particular places that the Hamas attacked on the 7th of October are built on the ruins of the Palestinian villages from which the people were expelled into Gaza.


So that’s one historical context, the ’48 context. There is a more recent context: 56–57 years of occupation, since 1967, and it doesn’t matter whether you live in the Gaza Strip or the West Bank, whatever happens in the West Bank happens to you in Gaza as well, 56 years of ruthless, cruel military oppression that left people wounded, arrested without trial, killed, houses demolished, fields burnt, and people expelled. And Gaza was under such occupation until 2007, and people also feel that burden as well, as part of the awful things that happened to them in 1948.

But the most important context is the most recent one, and this is 17 years, almost 17 years of siege that was imposed by Israel on Gaza in 2007: a siege that Israel imposed on Gaza because the people of Gaza democratically elected a government Israel didn’t like, the Hamas government, and the siege closed Gaza as not just the biggest refugee camp in the world, now it became the biggest prison in the world. People could not get in, cannot get out, without Israel’s permission, Israel decided how much food goes in, how much medicine goes in, and so on.

And whenever the resistance reacted to this inhuman siege, Israel attacked the people of Gaza from the air and the land and the sea: four times. The attacks from the air are particularly devastating because these are huge bombs which are dropped on cities and villages, and even if you are not killed or wounded by such a bombing you are scarred for life, traumatised by a one-ton bomb that falls on your head. So anyone who is below 23–24 in Gaza knows only the reality of siege, and the reality of the four bombings. And 60 per cent of the population in Gaza are below 23. 100 per cent of the people who did the attack on the 7th of October, 100 per cent, are people who were born into the reality of the siege and the bombing. They knew no other reality.

These are important historical and moral contexts. The moral context is also important. I mean beyond… I think there is already a morality in what I was talking about. The moral context is that unless you understand that the Palestinian struggle is an anti-colonialist struggle, you will not understand that yes, there are moments when the anti-colonial struggle crosses international law, violates international law, commits actions that should not be committed, no doubt, but there is not one anti-colonial struggle that did not have its moments of frustration, of violence, of just an outburst of people who were dehumanised, treated as animals, for 17 years… and no wonder that at a moment of relative victory, for a very short while, there are things that are being done that should not be done, and that this does not invalidate in any way the justified liberation struggle of the Palestinians, the justified demand for the end of the siege, the end of the occupation, the release of the political prisoners, all these things which the Hamas demanded for many years and other Palestinian factions in the liberation movement were asking for.

We all remember instances in history such as the rebellion of slaves in America that murdered their slave-owner families, the rebellion of the FLN in Algeria, that targeted sometimes the families of French settlers – these things happen, but in no way do they invalidate the justification for the struggle for decolonisation, liberation, and freedom. So we should not lose our moral compass, as Israel wants us to do. And we don’t know exactly still what happened, one should say – I think we should still wait, I don’t believe the Israelis, it is very difficult to have an independent inquiry into exactly what happened – so this also should be said. But even if half of what we know is true, this is a point to be made.

What is very clear, and for this we don’t need an international investigation, is what Israel did after the 7th of October. A genocidal operation that at first was presented as a reaction to what the Hamas did, but very soon, as always happens in Israeli actions against the Palestinians, the pretext that they are using is not important – what is important was, what is the real aim behind it?

Israel never knew what to do with the Gaza Strip. It has a very clear strategy for the rest of Palestine. Inside Israel, Israel operates a system which is democratic for the Jews, but not democratic for the Palestinian citizens of Israel. And in the West Bank, Israel has a clear strategy of incrementally Judaising the West Bank, getting more and more Jews into the West Bank, hoping that this will force more and more Palestinians to leave the West Bank. So the Israeli endgame in the West Bank is eventually to have only a small Palestinian presence there and the rest should be annexed to Israel, and for some reason the Israelis think that this could hold water.

But with Gaza it wasn’t very clear how to do this. Again because while you can push Palestinians from the West Bank to Jordan it seems you cannot push Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to Egypt. And the Palestinians are steadfast in Gaza. They will also not leave, even if you try to force them. So this opportunity came after the 7th of October to try something else. If you cannot ethnically cleanse people, you can try and genocide them. Now, it’s not easy to genocide people in the 21st century, with the watchful eyes of the world. So you make sure it doesn’t seem like a genocide: you talk about collateral damage to civilian citizens because of the nature of the reistance and the nature of the hamas and Islamic Jihad. Israel proudly says through lawyers, such as Alan Dershowitz who represents it in the world, very proudly saying that we have a ratio of 2:1: on every Hamas person we kill, we only kill two citizens. Even if this is true, which is not true, by the way, but even if that is true, it means that they killed 20,000 citizens, almost all of them children and women.

Why do the Israelis think that this would sound reasonable, legitimate, is beyond our comprehension, unless we understand the exceptional impunity that Israel enjoys in international judicial systems and in the global laws. But I think the ratio is far worse, actually – I think Israel killed about, as the American Secretary of State for Defense said yesterday, and I think this is the right figure – he said 5,000 Hamas fighters were killed, 25,000 women and children were slaughtered by Israel in the last four months. The amount of TNT is thrice more, three times more, than the amount of the bombs that were dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in the Second World War. It is just unbelievable the kind of inferno that Israel has created in the Gaza Strip.


The Israeli Jewish society is totally behind this genocide. Very few voices against it. We should say it, it’s important: more than 90% of the Israeli Jews support the genocide in Gaza. You have no hope for change in Israel if you want to stop the genocide or you want to stop future genocides. However, I think that this is also part of the wider picture we should have to take into account, which is the kind of the light at the end of the tunnel. The way Israel is now built, mentally, culturally and politically, is a society that does not evolve, would not evolve in any different way in the near future: namely that it would support the use of power in order to deal with this issue that has faced Zionism from the very beginning: that in Palestine lives a Palestinian people. They have no new ideas what to do with this, and what happens throughout the years is they use more and more force to solve the problem, and the Palestinians use more and more resistance to stop their extinction.

So why is there a light at the end of the tunnel? Because, this particular process shows the weakness of the Israeli society. You cannot really create a state that is just based on constant policing, oppressing and fighting another people, especially people who live with you. If this is the only vision for the future for Israel, not a lot of Israelis will remain in Israel. You cannot see your children and grandchildren involved all the time in wars, bloodshed and violence, even if you have the upper hand, and the 7th of October raised a big question whether Israel would always have the upper hand. If a small army of guerillas nearly defeated the Israeli army, imagine what would happen if two armies or guerillas would attack Israel at the same time, or if regional armies would attack Israel? I mean, this Israeli hope that they would always be invincible is not a vision for a future state that wants to be democratic, liberal, pluralist, part of the global North, regardless of whether they are successful in it or not.

Now, this is not the only process that shows us that Israel is going through a process that would eventually lead to its disintegration, or if you want, to the end of the Zionist project. The second problem that Israel has is that of the lack of any social cohesion. The idea that Judaism is religion is not working. I think also in India one day some people would realise it. You cannot make a state out of a religion. You cannot make nationalism out of religion. If you want a proper nationalism, it has to be without a religious identity. But we’ll put that aside.

In Israel, for the first time, Israel is understanding, and this has nothing to do with the Palestinians, that secular Jews and religious Jews have nothing in common. The only thing they have in common is their hatred of the Palestinians, and the need to survive in an alien region. They are alienating the region, of course, but without any connection. It’s not working. They are two different people who have nothing in common, and they were already on the verge of a civil war on the 7th of October. In many ways, the 7th of October saved Israel from a civil war, but only temporarily. This will come back. It’s already coming back, by the way, it’s already coming back.

Another process that leads to the end of Zionism in my mind is the international community. There is a huge support for the Palestinians, there is a huge pressure on governments to define Israel as a pariah state. It hasn’t happened yet, in a governmental level, but there are indications that this would happen very soon, because the way Israel behaves (and is going to behave) will make it very difficult for its friends in the governments and the international community to continue to support it. Even the cynical friends of Israel, such as India and the United States, who want Israel as a military partner, are finding actually that the Israeli military industry is not the only one that exists, and there are cheaper and better partners even for that market. So the Israeli security and military industry that holds the Israeli colony together is weakening, and altogether the Israeli colony goes under a huge crisis that was only accentuated by the war.

There is also a change in the Jewish communities in the world’s attitude towards Israel. The young generation of Jews does not see themselves as Zionists, and without the Jewish community’s support it will be very difficult to sustain Israel. They will always have the support of the Christian Zionists, fundamentalists, evangelical Christians, because they see it as a religious imperative: but this is not enough to sustain Israel. And the Palestinian resistance will continue. And there might be change in the Arab world that will make the region even more hostile to Israel, so all in all, I can see processes that show the beginning of the end of the Zionist project.

It’s a very dangerous period, because (I am talking about 20-25 years, or 20 years) because this is a period where, like in South Africa, the regime is fighting for its life and has no inhibitions, so it’s a very dangerous moment, very dangerous, for the Palestinians, the next 10-15 years, I really dread to think what is going to happen. There is also a question, who will fill the void after the disintegration? The Palestinian national movement is not ready yet to make such a move, it’s disunited, fragmented, doesn’t have a proper leadership, doesn’t have a proper representative organisation. They have to really prepare themselves, because a void is always filled, and a void that isn’t filled becomes chaotic and dangerous.

But I think all in all, in the long run, there is a dawn after this dark night of ours – and it is a dark night, it’s a very dark night we are living in in Palestine – but I think there is a dawn, a dawn that would lead to a different kind of political structure. Not only in Palestine: in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, I think people there understand that the nation-state, European nation-state that was imposed on them at the end of the First World War is not fitting the realities where they live. I think that they will invent a new political system that will reflect better the communal identities, the needs of the people: and Palestine could be a leading beacon in this effort.


Photographs Ibrahim Nofal

Ilan Pappé is an Israeli historian, political scientist and former politician. He is a professor with the College of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, director of the university's European Centre for Palestine Studies, and co-director of the Exeter Centre for Ethno-Political Studies.

These are excerpts from The Citizen Annual Lecture delivered by Prof Pappe online. He took several questions as well from the audience at the end.

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