by Christine Harb, DO, MPH

The history of Palestine and Israel has long been labelled as complex. Its alleged “complexity” deters the average person from speaking up and out about the ongoing injustices towards Palestinians.

As the Israeli assault on Gaza displaces nearly 1.9 million refugees and kills an estimated 25,000 Palestinians in just over two months, it goes without saying that the world is watching. While leaders of many African and Latin American countries have condemned Israel’s disproportionate attacks on the civilian infrastructure of Gaza, democracies across Europe and North America are wholly and unconditionally supportive of the unabated ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinian people. But where did this story begin, and why is this happening?

In the 1800s, antisemitism raged throughout Europe in the form of pogroms. The Russian translation of the word pogrom is “to wreak havoc, to demolish violently” and that is exactly what was done to Ashkenazi Jewish communities across the Russian empire and beyond. They experienced rape, murder, and destruction of property. This fuelled the desire for a Jewish homeland in Zion (the Hebrew translation of Jerusalem). Thousands of European Jews began to slowly move to Palestine in the late 1800s as tensions between Jews and Europeans worsened. Thus, the cruel circumstances of European antisemitism birthed the Zionist movement.

Modern Zionism is a political ideology founded by an Austrian Jew named Theodor Herzl in 1897. Despite the religious foundations of Zionism, Herzl himself was an atheist. His Zionism was not grounded on the premise that God promised the “land of Israel” to His “chosen people”, but rather in the belief that Jews could not survive the violence of antisemitism unless they had a nation of their own. While it may seem like Herzl’s Zionism was a well-intentioned attempt to protect Jews, it was deeply entrenched in the colonial ideologies of Europe. In 1902, Herzl wrote a letter to Cecil Rhodes, a British Prime Minister of a Cape Colony in South Africa, to garner his support for the Jewish settlement of Palestine. He wrote, “you are being invited to make history…it doesn’t involve Africa, but a piece of Asia Minor, not Englishmen but Jews.” Herzl’s explanation for why Rhodes should throw his authority behind the Zionist movement was “because it is something colonial.” 

As Zionism evolved, the Zionist motto was that Jews were a people without a land, and Palestine was a land without a people. However, in the 20th century, Palestine and its inhabitants had been under the rule of the Ottoman Empire for over 400 years. During this period, Palestinian Christians, Muslims, and Jews lived peacefully together and made up the fabric of each other’s communities. Jews comprised the smallest portion of the indigenous population and owned 3.2% of the land. 

In 1914, when World War I (WWI) began to weaken the Ottoman Empire, France and Britain decided to split up and colonise the region. Britain occupied Palestine, Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq), and Transjordan. The Zionist movement was already seeking to appeal to British colonisers for support, and in 1917, they received it. The British issued the Balfour Declaration, stating that their government supported “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”

Soon after the end of WWI, an intergovernmental organisation called the League of Nations was created “to achieve international peace and security.” The permanent members of this new organisation included the British Empire and France, and one of their responsibilities was supervising the “mandated territories” of their new colonies in the former Ottoman Empire. These “mandates” gave Britain and France permission and power to govern land that did not belong to them. When Britain officially established its Mandate of Palestine in 1922, Jewish immigration increased exponentially, and with each migration, indigenous Palestinians were displaced. 

As Nazi persecution of Jews swelled in the 1930s, immigration to Palestine understandably skyrocketed. A quarter of a million Jews settled on Palestinian land in their attempts to flee European antisemitism once again. Tensions naturally grew between Palestinians and their European Jewish colonisers. In 1936, Palestinians rose up to resist Jewish settlement of their land and demand independence from the British in “The Great Palestinian Revolt”. However, when World War II (WWII) officially began in 1939, Jewish immigration could not be stopped as Jews were forcibly funnelled into concentration camps, gas chambers, and mass graves across Europe. 

At the end of WWII in 1945, the United Nations (UN) was formed to prevent another world war and, with it, another holocaust. It absorbed the League of Nations one year later, and its permanent members now included the United States of America. As violence continued in Palestine with the rise of Zionist terrorist groups that were now on the offensive, the British decided to present the “problem of Palestine” to the newly created UN in 1947. 

The UN’s solution, as a product of its colonial foundations, was to partition the land, giving 56% of Palestine to the Jewish minority that made up less than one-third of the total population and owned less than 8% of the land. On the other hand, Palestinians were given 43% of their own land, even though they owned 92% of it and made up 69% of the total population. Palestinians wholeheartedly rejected this plan, saying that it was created by a “foreign power regime” (i.e. the UN) that was arbitrarily trying to give most of their land away to European Jewish colonisers. Despite their efforts, the resolution passed in November of 1947 after a period of intense lobbying by Zionist groups. 

The process of removing Palestinians from their land was immediate and unrelenting. Zionist paramilitary forces began systematically massacring Palestinians and destroying their villages. On May 15th, 1948, Great Britain formally terminated its Mandate over Palestine, and Israel declared its independence with the full support of the United States and the imperial west. The survival of this new state was wholly dependent on the willingness of its citizens to kill, uproot, and displace. Palestinians and surrounding Arab nations attempted to thwart the establishment of the nascent settler-colony but were no match for the well-armed Zionist army, who inherited the armaments of Britain when they departed Palestine. 

But anything less than everything will never satiate a coloniser’s appetite. In 1967, Israel carried out a “pre-emptive strike” against surrounding Arab nations in what is now known as the Six Day War, or the Naksah (in Arabic: “setback”). During this war, Israel displaced approximately 430,000 Palestinians, many of whom became refugees for the second time. They captured the West Bank from Jordan and the Gaza Strip from Egypt, enforcing a military occupation over the Palestinians who lived there. They also stole the Golan Heights from Syria. While publicly claiming to support a “two-state solution” (i.e. an Israeli state and a Palestinian state), Israel began building illegal settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. These settlements and their network of roads were, and still are, protected by the Israeli military and function to undermine Palestinian sovereignty by fragmenting what is left of Palestinian land into disconnected blocs, cantons, and ghettos.

After one “peace treaty” failed after another between the Zionist regime and the corrupt Palestinian Authority, Palestinians revolted against the Israeli military in 1988, and again, in 2000, in what are called Intifada (in Arabic: “shaking off”). Yet once again, civilians with stones were no match for the military grade weapons gifted to Israel by the United States. In 2005, Israel shut down its settlements in the Gaza Strip as a minor step towards honouring international law. But distaste for the Palestinian Authority and its complicity with the occupation was growing. 

One year later, Hamas was democratically elected to office in Gaza. In response, Israel enforced a military blockade of the Gaza Strip in 2008, where it assumed full control of the land, air, and sea. Gaza is now considered one of the most densely populated places on earth, with over 2 million people inhabiting a strip that is 25 miles long and about 5 miles wide. Over 70% of Gazans are refugees from the surrounding Palestinian villages that were depopulated and destroyed in 1948 and 1967. Movement is severely restricted, and few people have been allowed to enter or leave since 2008. Israel then subjected Gazans to multiple airstrikes, killing thousands and destroying the public health infrastructure of the strip. The United Nations declared that Gaza’s healthcare system collapsed in 2018 and labelled the conditions in the Gaza Strip as “unlivable”. This was the landscape of Gaza before Israel dropped the equivalent of over three nuclear bombs on this trapped population since October 7th. 

 Zionists have appropriated Palestinian foods, placing the word “Israeli” in front of hummus, couscous, falafel, shawarma, and more. The 2021 Miss Universe celebration showed Israelis dancing in Palestinian thobes in what is now Eilat, Israel, formerly known as the port city of Umm al-Rashrash, which was emptied of its indigenous inhabitants during the Nakba. While loudly proclaiming that Palestinians do not exist, Zionists are eating, dressing, dancing, and singing like Palestinians. Zionist culture is as devoid of originality and creativity as it is of humanity. Its imagination is too invested in finding new and gruesome ways to kill Palestinians while simultaneously replacing modern-day history with a 3,000-year-old mythology.

While Zionists internalize European sociopathy to place themselves in proximity to white power, Palestinians are not only paying the price for European antisemitism but are simultaneously inheriting Jewish trauma. They are subjected to the very same pogroms and tactics that Europeans used on Jews one century prior. The Gaza Strip has been called an “open-air prison” by multiple organisations, including the Human Rights Watch. The West Bank, on the other hand, has been fragmented into 68 ghettos by illegal Israeli settlements and a massive concrete Separation Wall that is twice the height of the Berlin Wall and four times as long. The military occupation of Palestinians, which has lasted over half a century, is now considered one of the longest military occupations in human history. Israel has been accused of creating the only apartheid regime in the world and is the only existing “developed” country that regularly tries children in military courts.

The Zionist regime has repeatedly violated international humanitarian laws, Geneva Conventions, and UN resolutions under the protection of the United States’ veto power in the UN Security Council. And now, we face the tragic irony that descendants of Holocaust survivors are committing a genocide that the United Nations was formed to prevent but inadvertently created. Unlike the Holocaust, this genocide is fully supported by the United States and the imperial West, who are ravenously pursuing the $524 billion worth of oil on the coasts of Gaza and in the soil of the West Bank.

It is inarguably true that Israel represents the final and dying remnants of settler-colonialism in the post-WWII era. The concept of a Jewish ethno-state in Palestine is as artificial as the colonial borders that define it, for one cannot build a homeland on the restless bones of its keepers. Despite Zionist claims, a people cannot be native to a land they have come to settle. As the Palestinian death toll continues to climb and the Zionist regime claims more indigenous land, it must be made clear that as long as a single Palestinian remains, Palestine will live on. 

And so will the resistance.