Guys in white shirts and ties in Washington and their counterparts in Israel are sitting around tables making plans for what they want to see after Israel ends its genocidal assault on Gaza (if they ever end it). From what I’ve read, their plans are either cruelly insensitive or downright delusional because they fail to consider that at issue here isn’t who runs what and how it will be run. What must be understood is that the wounds inflicted by this war will last and will define reality for a generation or more.
These are the personal, not the political, consequences of this war. The loss and trauma inflicted in so many ways on millions of Palestinian victims are never factored into the calculations by the Israelis or their enablers in Washington. To them Palestinians have always been mere pawns on a chessboard, objects to be moved or cast off, at will.
In a real sense, herein lies the root of the entire conflict. From the beginning, neither the British nor the early Zionist leaders saw the indigenous Arab population as full human beings. When learning of the British plans to secure a Mandate and turn it over to the Zionist movement for a Jewish colony in Palestine, the Americans sent a team to survey the opinions of the Arabs. What they found was a near total Arab rejection of both the Mandate and the Zionist enterprise. On hearing of the results, the British Lord Balfour was quoted saying, “In Palestine, we do not propose…consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country…Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is…of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.”
The founders of the Zionist movement shared this sentiment. At first, they said they sought “a land without a people…for a people without a land.” When they found natives there, Herzl wrote that they would be used to clear the area exterminating any dangerous animals, and then evacuated to other lands.
These early Zionists wrote that the Jewish people were “more industrious and more able than the average European, not to speak at all of the inert Asiatic and African.” And they believed that the colony they would build would be a “rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.”
This deeply racist mindset found its best expression in the 1960 film “The Exodus” that transposed the American “cowboys and Indians” storyline onto the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—with Israelis as pioneers seeking freedom for themselves and their families, facing hordes of savages who sought only to kill them. The conflict was thus reduced to “Israeli humanity versus the Palestinian problem.” And what was needed........