By Jeremy Salt
Israel continued to carry out massacres in Gaza. (Photo: via WAFA)
This is the state that the racist ideology of Zionism has produced. The ‘west’ needs to wake up to what it has actually created.
The absolute inhumanity the world has seen in Gaza in the past two years is not an aberration, as if Israel somehow went mad after the resistance attack on military bases and settlements in 2023.
Inhumanity is central to Zionism. It was conceived as the only way Palestine could be taken, from the time Herzl spoke airily of the “penniless population” being spirited across the border.
In his 1946 novel Thieves in the Night, Arthur Koestler turned the Palestinians into thieves. The racism that was to surface in the novels of Leon Uris (Exodus and The Hajj) was expressed by Koestler long before.
In Thieves in the Night, he wrote that ‘the Arabs’ are “slum children in possession of a vast playground where they wallow happily in the dust.” They are a relic of the Middle Ages, “who keep quiet if treated with authority.” His racism was repeated even more grossly in Promise and Fulfilment, his fictionalized account of the 1948 war.
From the beginning, Zionist settlers were protected by the British occupiers. Whereas they were allowed to arm themselves and form paramilitaries to protect their settlements, the Palestinians were disarmed and in the first intifada (1936-39) were liable to be shot if found with a weapon.
In 1937/38, Zionist gangs regularly bombed Palestinian markets in Jerusalem and Haifa, killing or wounding dozens of people each time.
By 1947, they had upgraded to ‘barrel bombs,’ oil drums packed with explosives and rolled into markets from the back of a lorry. With the British now an obstacle to be cleared, bombs and assassinations were directed against them as well.
Like Gaza right now, the first stage of the Nakba was not a war fought against a regular army. The Zionist claim of being surrounded by an Arab ‘ring of steel’ was a lie. Only the Zionists were well prepared for this moment.
Arab intervention was minimal. Apart from units in the Egyptian army fighting in the south, some Iraqi units entering Palestine from the east, and the Arab ‘liberation army’ coming from Syria under the leadership of Fawzi al Kawukji, the Palestinians had to defend themselves as best as they could, mostly with old rifles that villagers had used to shoot birds.
Numerically, the Zionists had double the number of fighting forces at the beginning of their onslaught and doubled at the end. The Arab armed response was undermined by the British control of arms supplies to the countries they controlled through puppet kings or regents (Egypt, Iraq, and Transjordan).
The Nakba was not a “civil war” as Wikipedia would have it, but a war of conquest by a recently arrived settler population. It set the long-planned genocide in motion. The basic facts need no repeating, but what does warrant attention, in the light of the Gaza continuation of the genocide, is the cruelty and wanton massacres of unarmed civilians by the Zionist militias in 1948.
There is a pattern here, repeated from 1948 to the present day. No mercy was shown even to women and children. They were slaughtered just like the men. The Zionists poured into Palestinian towns and villages, killing on sight for the simple reason that everyone was the target and not just the armed men.
Massacres served as a warning to the living to run for their lives. All were to be expelled “without attention to age” ordered the military commander and later prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin.
Knives, swords, hand grenades, and rape before murder were the weapons used at Deir Yassin. The survivors were paraded through Jerusalem on the back of a truck to celebrate the victory. Then they were taken back to Deir Yassin and murdered in a quarry. Two-thirds of the Deir Yassin victims were women and children, the same ratio as the victims of the massacres in Gaza since 2023.
In Lydda, scores of civilians taking refuge in the Dahmash mosque were machine-gunned, before the residents of the town were all driven out on the orders of Rabin. In and around the village of Duwayima, hundreds of men, women and children were killed, the children having their skulls broken with sticks, presumably to save bullets.
None of this was random. It was all part of the plans laid to empty Palestine of its people. Careful attention paid to the detail of how it was to be stolen, down to the infiltration of villages under the guise of friendship so the number and layout of houses could be assessed before the village was attacked.
A ‘naming committee’ was established to superimpose Hebrew names on every part of Palestine. Palestinians driven out were ‘absentee owners’ of property, Palestinians who remained in the Israeli state but not where they had originally lived were ‘present absentee owners’ whose property could still be stolen.
Captured villages and towns were looted of everything worth taking, including furniture, books and carpets. At Deir Yassin, rings and bracelets were ripped from the arms of women. The objective to seize all Palestine was finally blocked by international intervention, but the goal remained the same. ‘Partition’ was only a stepping-stone to the conquest of all Palestine.
The brutality, cruelty and indifference to Arab lives have not changed since 1948 and neither has the racist contempt and hatred expressed by Koestler and Uris. To kill as the Israelis have killed is to be deeply gripped by both.
Their cruelty has been shown on hundreds of occasions now forgotten, including the attacks on Gaza and the raids on Jordanian villages in the 50s and 60s that killed scores of civilians each time, always two-thirds of them women and children. Each attack was a link in a chain of extreme violence planned from the beginning to steal Palestine from its indigenous people.
Only the larger events were sufficient to arouse global outrage. The destruction and ethnic cleansing that followed the 1967 war were overshadowed by gloating in the ‘western’ media over the humiliation of Egypt’s President Nasser. The Israeli claim of a ‘pre-emptive attack’ on June 6 was a lie repeated by politicians and the media as enthusiastically as they retold the lie of Iraq’s WMD in 2003.
Founded in the 12th century, the Mughrabi quarter, adjacent to the Haram al Sharif, and consisting of more than 135 houses and two mosques, was razed to the ground by Israeli bulldozers on June 10/11.
Hundreds of Palestinians were scattered into the streets and given chocolates if they chose to board buses waiting to take them to Amman. Many of the men were ‘detained.’ Everything the Palestinians had possessed was plowed into the rubble, reportedly along with corpses.
In The Fall of Jerusalem (1972), Abdullah Schleifer, who was living in the city at the time, describes the theft from the Palestine Archaeological Museum of the Jordanian Dead Sea Scrolls. In fact, the whole eastern half of the city was now being stolen, with looting commonplace.
Seven villages outside the city were destroyed. Buildings were dynamited in Nablus as Jewish looters turned up with suitcases to take away what they could carry, on the evidence of two Catholic ecclesiastics in the town. But looting was everywhere, not just in Jerusalem or Nablus, and not just then, because widespread looting is part of the current genocidal violence on the West Bank,
In 1982, the Israeli military supervised the massacres in the Beirut refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. Thousands were butchered by the Lebanese fascist mercenaries sent into the two camps to do Israel’s dirty work. The bestial slaughter was carried out with knives, not guns, so the next victims would not hear the killers coming.
Even this, and the killing of close to 20,000 Lebanese and Palestinians in four months, was not followed by punishment of Israel in any way, a pattern that only encouraged it to go even further next time. The architect of the slaughter, Ariel Sharon, was soon back in government.
1982 was followed by the 2006 attack on Lebanon, the killing of 1200-1300 civilians, and the widespread destruction of infrastructure (sewage works, power and gas stations, bridges and roads) along with homes, schools, hospitals, and mosques. This was the birth of the ‘Dahiye doctrine’ and the threat to destroy everything in Lebanon next time.
In 2024, Israel waged war on Lebanon again, killing hundreds of civilians in Beirut and villagers in the south. Apart from the missile strikes, thousands of rigged pagers, infiltrated into the country, killed 42 people and wounded thousands. In an especially vicious touch, they were set up to explode when they were raised to the face, thus blinding some of the victims as well as damaging or blowing off their hands.
Netanyahu celebrated this achievement by giving Trump a golden pager. ‘Press with both hands’ was texted on the screen. Thanking Netanyahu, Trump called this mass terror attack a “great operation.”
Lebanon 2006 was followed by a wave of air and land attacks on Gaza, precipitating the Palestinian response on October 7, 2023. Between 2008 and 2023, 7363 Palestinians were killed in Gaza and on the West Bank (641 women, 279 girls, 1358 boys, and 5053 men), compared to 377 Israelis across the occupied territories.
The Zionist leadership set out early in the 20th century to seize all of Palestine, and that remains the goal, explaining why no ‘peace process’ can be allowed to work. Everyone has been doomed, not because peace was unattainable but because Israel does not want it, not yet, and only on its own terms anyway.
No opportunity has been lost in pushing ahead with the historic mission. No borders can be finalized until it is fulfilled. Every response to every peace process is rebuffed or stretched out with the sole purpose of giving Israel more time to fill all of Palestine with settlers.
It never had any intention of sharing Palestine. That was clear in 1948, and it is clear now. The handshakes and smiles are always followed by conditions that Israel knows no Palestinian could accept.
Gaza has outraged the world, but the world has yet to realize that the violence of the present is fully consistent with the violence of the past and almost certainly will be of the future. What the world has yet to recognize is that Israel is attacking humanity at its very roots. Nothing could be more basic to humanity than the lives of the children Israel has routinely massacred ever since 1948.
Because it is never punished for any of its atrocities, it just keeps going. In the past two years, it has massacred at least 25,000 children in Gaza. That is the recognized minimum, with the true number never likely to be known because of the billions of tons of rubble over their bodies. This is one of the most terrible crimes in world history, yet Israel is still not being punished for it.
Israel’s war on Palestine is a war on international law and the structures put in place to make the world a safer place. It is a war on modern civilization by a state reaching back to the barbarities of ancient history to justify it. The enemy – a people, not an army – has to be totally destroyed, ruthlessly and mercilessly.
Israel does not care what international law dictates. It is indifferent to the lives of the Palestinians it kills, including all those thousands of children. How is it even possible that it can mass murder children without causing national trauma? How low has a society sunk for it to reach such a level of indifference?
This is the state that the racist ideology of Zionism has produced. The ‘west’ needs to wake up to what it has actually created, which is not 1950s peace-loving kibbutzniks strumming the guitar around a campfire but a nuclear-armed juggernaut crushing all in its path.
Israel has learnt from the past. The ‘west’ has not. What Israel has learnt is that it can get away with anything. Its ‘allies’ and ‘friends’ have shown themselves to be cowards and fools who can be pushed around.
What has worked in the past will surely work in the future, leaving four possible outcomes:
- Israel will continue expanding in Arab lands, culminating in Israeli domination of the entire region.
- Israel will eventually begin a war it cannot win without direct US military intervention. With military commanders recommending against it, and with public opinion by that time calling for an end to the ‘special relationship,’ the US may refuse.
- Facing defeat, and having backed itself into a corner by deliberately putting any kind of peaceful solution beyond reach, Israel may use its nuclear weapons against its enemies, triggering a global crisis. If its ‘friends’ and ‘allies’ turn on it, Israel may threaten them as well.
- Before any of these points are reached, Israel may implode as a result of its internal hatreds (witness the current uprising by 200,000 ultra-orthodox young men refusing to be conscripted on the advice of their rabbis). Inside Israel, hatred and contempt is hardly confined to the Palestinians.
– Jeremy Salt taught at the University of Melbourne, at Bosporus University in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara for many years, specializing in the modern history of the Middle East. Among his recent publications is his 2008 book, The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press) and The Last Ottoman Wars. The Human Cost 1877-1923 (University of Utah Press, 2019). He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
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