[Prefatory Note: The post below is the text of foreword to a very special book on the Palestinian Ordeal, written in the form of short pieces from 2009 to the present. Banging on the Walls of the Tank, is especially illuminating by its portrayal of the contrast between the Israeli oppressive occupation before October 7 and after. It underscores a contrast between the earlier Israeli approach as ‘incremental genocide’ as opposed to ‘accelerated’ genocide after the Hamas attack. Copies of this book may be ordered from Amazon, and other booksellers. Eid is in the best traditions of journalism, scholarship, and engaged citizenship].
The Political Is Inevitably Personal
I have read many discerning and moving books on Palestine over the last fifty years but none has spoken to me as forcefully and persuasively as this short volume of opinion pieces written by Haidar Eid from 2009 to the present. The prophetic insight of these dispatches and their cumulative impact offer readers a vivid Palestinian narrative of tragic suffering and the heroic resistance of the Gazan population to Israel’s occupation, settler colonialism, apartheid, and genocide, as well as a pervasive Israeli reliance on collective punishment of Palestinians.
Banging on the Walls of the Tank, a reliable interpretation not filtered and distorted by Western mainstream media,should be read by all those in the West who seek to understand the bitter realities of the Israel/Palestine struggle. Almost every page is enlivened by the author’s uncannily memorable formulations of the true and awful nature of the Palestinian plight, which was desperate long before the horrifying real-time genocide that has unfolded in the form of daily atrocity spectacles ever since October 7. In his readable style and with the skill of a trustworthy storyteller, Eid offers insights rooted in his direct experiences as a Gaza refugee, expositor of Palestinian steadfastness, resistance activist, witness, and survivor.
Contextualizing October 7
These dispatches, written since 2009 in response to the evolving bloody tactics and criminality of the Israeli occupation, are both an anticipation of the October 7 attack and a condemnation of the Israeli genocidal response. An aspect of the originality and significance of Eid’s presentation is ti convincingly demonstrate that Israel has harbored an apartheid ideology and practice from the time of its birth. This is long before the most influential human rights organizations (including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International) dared issue reports, as they did in 2021, that fully documented the allegations that Israel was systematically applying apartheid policies and practices to administer the occupation. Israel also relied upon discriminatory internal regulatory laws to subjugate all Palestinians who were directly subject to Israeli sovereignty, including those living in post-1948 Israel as citizens. These domestic laws were supplemented by exclusionary nationality laws and practices relied upon by Israel to deny Palestinian refugees a right of return as bestowed by international law and confirmed by the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) Resolution 194 (11 Dec 1948) while at the same time granting birthright Jews an unlimited rights of return no matter whether they had any link to Israel or not.
Eid’s dissent from pro-Israeli orthodoxy in Europe and North America extends to his important assessment that Israel’s supposed “disengagement” from Gaza in 2005 was deceptively presented to the world as a move toward peace. What was not told was that this Israeli unilateral initiative was coupled with Israeli administered border control that effectively imprisoned 2.3 million Gazans in their own homeland. Such confinement was later cruelly reinforced by a punitive siege that converted Gaza into what became known as the world’s largest ever concentration camp. The impact over time of these oppressive conditions are characterized by Eid, borrowing from historian Ilan Pappe,[1] as “incremental genocide.” This importantly demarcates the “before” and “after” of October 7 as one of continuity rather than as totally discontinuous, coming out of the blue, as Israel, followed by the West, desperately wants us to believe up to this day. It is obvious that Israel devoted much attention to decontextualizing October 7 to avoid the implications of the pre-October 7 realities of apartheid and incremental genocide so persuasively delineated by Eid being taken into account when evaluating the Hamas attack.
Eid is writing as a victim/survivor/activist as well as a journalist/intellectual of the before and after of the Gaza ordeal. For him, the sixteen months of direct, undisguised genocide that has preoccupied the world to an unprecedented degree was nothing fundamentally new but rather an intensification of what Gazans had been experiencing ever since 1967 in more attenuated forms. There is no doubt that incremental genocide would be virtually impossible to establish in a court of law as a distinct crime because of the difficulty of proving genocidal intent as compared to criminalizing what followed after October 7 as a violation of the Genocide Convention. The numerous undisguised assertions by Israel’s top leaders easily met the rigorous legal standards of genocidal intent insisted upon by objective jurists. These words of genocidal incitement were combined with the crude, often sadistic, Israeli Defense Forces combat tactics relied upon to bring its helpless Palestinian adversary agonizingly close to the brink of extinction.
The Israeli discourse on October 7 also points its finger at Hamas, seeking its complete delegitimation by treating its attack as pure “terrorism,” justifying an exterminist response, and relieving Israel of pressure to obey the laws of war in its response. Eid challenges this Israeli rationalization by regarding the attack as both a justifiable and a legitimate form of resistance, especially in view of the context, which includes the Netanyahu performance at the UNGA a few weeks earlier during which he displayed a map with no Palestinian entity, an erasure of Palestine alongside the presumed establishment of Greater Israel. By taking these factors into account, Eid produces a revisionist view of October 7 that is more realistic and reflective of the values at stake.
There is a deeper significance to the way Eid establishes the context accounting for October 7. His approach is a necessary antidote to the Western hegemonic discourse, which denounced any assertion that the Palestinian attack was justifiable resistance to the provocative criminality of apartheid, several terrifying militarily inflicted massacres, and sixteen years of a cruelly punitive blockade whose constraints on imports could not be plausibly justified as a security measure while guaranteeing the misery of Palestinian lives in Gaza. Eid’s book should be read as a corrective to the disgraceful performance of a mainstream media in the West that excluded all considerations of context from its evaluation of the events of October 7 and declared justificatory acceptance of Israel’s claimed entitlement to act in self-defence, echoing its coverup of overt recourse to genocide as nothing other than a necessary “security operation.” This is a deliberate attempt to banish the word “genocide” from use in Western public discourse and mainstream media when reporting on Israel’s totally dominant military capabilities in executing its indiscriminate rampage against the completely helpless civilian population of Gaza. Despite this effort to restore the discipline of pro-Israeli discourse, describing the Israeli violence as “genocide” has been gradually normalized in many societal and media venues, but not yet all.
Failures of Implementation: International Law and Universal Moral Standards
This linkage between what daily occurs on the ground in Gaza and the broader issues of toxic dysfunction that have long poisoned the Palestinian experience exposes the willful impotence of what Eid generously terms the “international community,” as if there was one. It is intolerable for Eid that outsiders, whether governments, international institutions, media, or even individuals, remain spectators, or worse, render aid and comfort to the perpetrators and their accomplices in carrying out this “crime of crimes.” Along the way, Eid acknowledges that the Nazi Holocaust against Jews was similarly internationally tolerated, especially by the Western liberal democracies that have, since 1945, alleviated their guilt at the expense of the Palestinians, who pay for moral shortcomings for which they had no responsibility. Two massive wrongs never make things right; rather, as the poet Auden teaches, “those to whom evil is done / do evil in return.”[2]
Israel’s official occupation policy after 1967 stressed putting the people of Gaza “on a diet,” with just enough food to avoid death by starvation but not enough to enable nutritional health. Eid emphasizes the long denial of the right of return enjoyed by refugees after 1948 as affirmed in the UNGA Resolution 194. Any process of satisfying the requirements of international law would also necessitate the dismantling of the apartheid regime of control and ethno-religious claims of a Jewish supremist state.
Eid’s Vision and Its Enemies
As Eid articulates his vision of a benevolent future for the Palestinian people, he sets forth its simple but far-reaching governance implications: A single secular state for both peoples from the river to the sea with equal rights for all resident ethnicities. For Eid, this is the one and only solution, an indirect repudiation of the two-state delusion as well as his complete rejection of an Israeli one-state apartheid Greater Israel.
Eid does far more than relate the horrors of incremental genocide. He condemns not only the Israeli perpetrators but severely incriminates their complicit supporters who supplied weaponry and funding that sustains the mighty military capabilities of Israel and give diplomatic credence to it is flagrant defiance of international law. This is more than critique, it is also a rejection of the only pathway Eid envisions as leading to peace with justice for the Palestinians, and even Jews. Such a solution, which will strike many jaded souls as “utopian” or both unattainable and unacceptable, rests on the simple major premise of fulfilling Palestinian rights under international law. In the Palestinian case, this means, among other policy alterations, lifting the draconian blockade of Gaza that has made the daily existence of inhabitants of Gaza (two-thirds of whom are refugees) a life of misery, one deliberately “engineered” by Israeli tacticians who “mow the lawn,” a term officials in Tel Aviv use to refer to Israel’s massive military attacks that are properly undertaken whenever Gaza seems to pose security threats by the vitality of its resistance activism, regardless of whether by armed struggle or nonviolent civil action.
Eid’s dispatches are written with the passion and experience of someone who has lived as a refugee since 1964, when he was born in Gaza. His parents lived in the Nuseirat Refugee Camp after they were forced, in 1948, to leave their home in the Palestinian village of Zarnouga. As the decades passed, they never gave up their expectation on one day returning to Zarnouga, even knowing it had been demolished. As they faced death, Eid’s parents last wish was that at least their bodies could be returned to their village for burial; a wish that was denied; a wish that, even if granted, would be far from fulfilling the kind of return envisioned by international law.
That he grew up in a refugee household helps explain Eid’s preoccupation with the exercise of the right of return of the five or six million Palestinians living as refugees as a necessary feature of any sustainable and acceptable peace process. And as such, it undoubtedly informs why he shows such contempt for the Oslo diplomacy initiated in 1993, a diplomacy that totally ignored, and implicitly rejected, this basic right embodied in international law. On other grounds, as well, Oslo justifiably reinforced his rejection of a Palestinian leadership that failed to insist on affirming the Palestinian entitlement to the most fundamental of human rights in the post-colonial era, the inalienable right of self-determination possessed by all peoples and claimed on behalf of every nation on the planet. Eid adopts a cynical view of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which, by accepting the Oslo framework, sacrificed the future of Palestine for a seat at the far end of the negotiating table and the dubious ‘reward’ of a photo op on the White House lawn; the photo was used by the West to show the world the much celebrated, but deeply misleading Arafat/Rabin handshake as a historic reconciliation that was never to be implenmented . What followed the publicized initiation of Oslo diplomacy was, at best, a charade that dragged on long enough for Israel to expand its settler population to a politically irreversible level. Throughout, Israel has benefited from a ‘peace process’ that was never about peace, and which while running its course seriously harmed the Palestinians. The supervision of the negotiations by the overtly partisan US government should never have been accepted by the designated representatives of the Palestinian people who defied reason by not insisting on neutral auspices. As Rashid Khalidi, among others, have shown, the United States never even pretended to be an honest broker of the Oslo Process, but made no secret of situating itself in Israel’s corner.[3]
Eid’s perspective is formed by a blend of his multiple identities as victim, witness, survivor, activist, humanist, writer and journalist, university teacher, and public intellectual. This rare combination of experience and commitment contributes to making Eid an exemplary interpreter of the ongoing Palestinian ordeal. He is decidedly not a neutral observer; he is an undisguised and fully engaged “honest partisan” who develops a compelling Palestinian account of why the Palestinian ordeal came about and was allowed to happen. While his observations are avowedly one-sided, this lack of balance, oddly, provides a more objective approach because it is congruent with the realities of Gaza if tested by the evidence, regulative norms of law and morality, and proclaimed values at stake. As such, it presents readers with a happy contrast to the brainwashing pretensions of such influential media platforms as the New York Times or The Economist, which claim balance but, when it comes to reporting on Israel/Palestine, are more accurately perceived as sophisticated instruments of state propaganda.
Even without the benefit of being confronted by the pre-October 7 historical, legal, and ethical context, public protest began to mount, including in the centers of Israeli support in North America and Western Europe, as Israel continued the genocide unabated, refusing to heed growing public calls for ceasefires and constraint. Pro-Palestinian protests erupted on many university campuses but were quickly countered by Israeli donor leverage and governmental pressures, especially in the US. With the advent of Trump in 2025, pro-Palestinian activism on campuses and elsewhere faced renewed challenges, and not only in the US but also throughout Europe, reflecting a political swing to the ultraright.
Valuing and Learning from the Eid Perspective
What also makes Eid’s commentary exceptional is the authenticity of his voice, shaped by his intense experiences since his birth in 1964. His work is further informed by channeling the wisdom of profound and enraged Palestinian cultural icons, referencing the insights of Ghassan Kanafani, Mahmoud Darwish, and Edward Said, as well as making good use of anti-colonial writings drawn from authors in the Global South. It should be instructive for all readers that Eid derives his inspirational political guidance from these cultural sources rather than from the Palestinian political leaders that he holds co-responsible for misleading their own people in various self-destructive ways. Eid is appalled by the willingness of the Palestinian leaders anointed by the West to accept what he calls “bread crumbs” rather than insisting on liberation and basic rights as conferred by international law; law that is never acknowledged by Israel or enforced by either the UN or responsible geopolitical statecraft as ineptly overseen by the United States since the end of the Cold War that tended to favor geopolitical and strategic interests to legal, moral, and even prudent restraint. The most tainted bread crumb, in Eid’s reflections, is the idea of the acceptance of a permanently demilitarized Palestinian statehood on 22 percent of historic Palestine, especially considering that, in 1947, Palestinians rejected the dubious UN partition resolution that split the country – but at least awarded Palestinian with 45 percent of the land.
Eid is deeply influenced by the successful, analogous struggle against the hegemonic racism and settler colonialism of apartheid South Africa. He believes that the lessons of this earlier struggle can be adapted and applied to Palestinian circumstances, embracing the famous dictum, often attributed to Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci, “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will,” which distinguishes the rational understanding of political injustices from an emotional reassurance that a just outcome will emerge from the struggle of the Palestinian people. In addressing this tension from my outlook, my rational self is less confident than Eid about the sufficiency of the South African model of liberation. I believe that Palestinian liberation will remain impossible unless it overcomes the primacy of adverse geopolitics (shaped by strategic interests rather than by a willingness to respect the rule of law and universally affirmed moral notms). These currently unregulated forces empower the Islamophobic complicity of the white West and are currently aligned with the Zionist networks in the West that have exerted an unhealthy influence over policy formation at national, regional, and global levels.
Giving equal attention to matters of political will, I am also encouraged by anti-colonial success stories. This reading of the recent historical record echoes Eid’s interpretations and, before him, Said’s. Both thinkers deeply theorized a belief that the side that controls “the high moral ground” in the end prevails politically over the side that dominates the battlefield due to its military superiority. In my terminology, and in keeping with Eid’s assessments, Palestine is winning this Legitimacy War and is on its way to an emancipatory future, although with much suffering and devastation on the road to such a political outcome. This guardedly hopeful outlook assumes Palestinian perseverance for as long as it takes, which Israel is ceaselessly working to undermine and weaken by its recourse to the most extreme methods of violence in the combat zones and to dirty tricks overseas, including “weaponizing antisemitism” as a policy tool of combat.
In Conclusion
The title of Eid’s book, borrowed from a poignant line in Kanafani’s novel Men in the Sun, would strike most international readers as enigmatic and obscure. Eid informs us that these words have become a popular slogan of Palestinian resistance fighters, conveying the vital message, “If you want to live, make noise”; that is, resist, but if ready to die in body or spirit, stay quiet. Such is Eid’s fighting spirit. His noise is a challenge to all everywhere to act on behalf of the Palestinian struggle within our respective spaces before it is too late. And as a fitting indictment, Eid’s last words in the epilogue again echo those of Kanafani: “Gazans have been banging on the walls of the Gaza concentration camp since 1948,” and still nothing happens by way of rescue, much less liberation. Silence almost everywhere, especially shameful among Arab regimes neighbouring besieged Gaza is reinforced by the timidities of the Arab League.
For Eid, Arab silence is not broken by uttering words of condemnation unless accompanied by coercive actions. In this sense, Eid’s own journey has led him and his family to take refuge in South Africa in recent months, the country that has acted more substantively than any other against Israel since October 7E by submitting a graphic complaint to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) alleging Israeli violations of the Genocide Convention. Unsurprisingly, Eid in exile insists that Palestinian liberation must take the form of a single secular constitutional and democratic state with recognized borders encompassing the whole of mandate Palestine. This affirmation is coupled with a total rejection of the dangerous fiction of co-existence and accommodation that is based on the mutual acceptance of a neutered Palestinian mini state that would be permanently demilitarized and otherwise left at the mercy of a highly militarized and racist Israel. [AC1]
Secondly for Eid, a present grounding of realistic hope in this particular liberation struggle must be predominantly based on the activation of people rather than the good will and energies of governments and their institutions. This leads Eid to stress the role of solidarity initiatives to be with a sense of urgency throughout the world as typified by the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions campaign. He strongly endorses BDS as a principal modality of Palestinian prospects ever since its initiation in 2005, when it began as a collective action with the backing of 170 Palestinian civil society organizations. In effect, liberation from settler colonialism in the historical presence can move toward victory only when people in strategic countries around the world are sufficiently mobilized to exert transformative pressures on governments and the international community to undo the political and economic ties that bind them to the oppressor.
Eid is lucidly persuasive in his refusal to accept the common refrain that there are “two sides” in recent debates about Israeli tactics and goals. Zionist liberals especially would have us so believe, evading the central reality that this a classic struggle, with distinctive features of the oppressed against the oppressor and its complicit allies. Eid is seeking a crucial rectification of the asymmetrical nature of the struggle. Suc continues to be highly controversial in the West, but seems vital to act upon if non-Palestinians are to support a genuinely just and sustainable peace. This view expresses a radical challenge to the status quo as its realization requires the rejection of the Zionist Project of Jewish supremist prerogatives in a distinct state as the essential precondition could enable the two peoples to live together as equals. Eid’s vision of liberation does not include the forced departure (in effect, an ethnic cleansing) of Jews or the destruction of Israel as a state, but it does require major adhustments: a fundamental reconstruction of its internal race relations; an abandonment of Zionist ideology; ethnic equality of treatment in nationality and citizenship laws; and quite likely the naming of the emergent one-state entity to signify the rejection of an ethnic statehood for either people.
Gruesome patterns of Israeli abuses over the years are further confirmed by Eid’s own existential encounters with Israel’s prolonged dehumanizing and sadistic treatment of the people of Gaza, especially its children. His prose is written not with ink but with the blood of the innocents, undoubtedly a tearful recounting of very concrete incidents involving family members, close friends, neighbours. Eid is unflinching in his determination to bring Israel’s brutalizing behaviour out into the open by bearing anguished witness to targeted killings of innocent children by Israeli snipers, as well high tech weapons of war that killed whole families trapped in their homes and devastated entire residential neighbourhoods during Israel’s massive incursions, characterized as “massacres,” in 2008–09, 2012, 2014, 2018, and frequently, on a smaller scale, in the leadup to the full-scale genocidal response to October 7. In a significant conceptual move, Eid follows Pappe in presenting these years preceding that pivotal day as “incremental genocide.” This reality posed for every Palestinian an ultimate choice between the dangers of resistance and the humiliations of submission to the harsh apartheid constraints of Israeli control.
What makes this book truly groundbreaking, aside from its chronicling of witnessing in ways that impressively counteract the propagandistic decontextualization of October 7, is its clarity when it comes to a critique of the mainstream diagnosis of the Palestinian struggle and accompanying positive prescriptions about the path to a Palestinian victory emerging from the piles of rubble signifying Gaza after enduring these months of genocide.
Even though the provisional rulings of the ICJ on January 26, 2024, did nothing to change the facts on the ground, it should be read as an authoritative affirmation of the legitimacy of the Palestinian struggle and a heartfelt juridical lament for the accompanying humanitarian catastrophe still befalling Gaza. It undoubtedly helped motivate Eid to express the optimism of his will by the dramatic assertion in the epilogue that “Israel is now on the verge of collapse.”
Richard Falk
Santa Barbara, California
30 January 2025
[1] Ilan Pappe, The Biggest Prison on Earth (Oneworld Publications, 2019). [the ‘e’ in Pappe is written with an accent over it)
[2] W. H. Auden, ‘September 1, 1939,’ published in Poetry of the Thirties , Penguin, 1964
[3] Rashid Khalidi, Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S. Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East,” Beacon Press, 2013, https://harpers.org/2013/03/brokers-of-deceit-how-the-u-s-has-undermined-peace-in-the-middle-east/.
[AC1]Something missing here.
Global Justice in the 21st Century 
A Gaza Centric History of Palestine: Past, Present, and Future
24 Sep[Prefatory Note: The review below was initially published in the Journal of the Contemporary Thought and the Islamicate World (SCITIW REVIEW). http://sctiw.org/sctiwreviewarchives/archives/74 It is one of three remarkable books dealing with Gaza that I read this past summer. The other two are Mohammed Omer’s Shell Shocked: On the Ground Under Israel’s Gaza Assault (2015) (see my July 8, 2015 post, “Wartime Journalism: Mohammed Omer on Gaza”) and Max Blumenthal’s The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza (2015). Both of these books are accounts of the 2014 Israeli attack on Gaza by normatively engaged journalists. Omer giving an insider account that stresses the day by day experience of those exposed to such an onslaught that allows one to almost feel the excruciating pain, fear, and loss that Gazans felt during the attacks. Blumenthal also gives readers the benefit of his presence in Gaza and exposure to its courageous population, but he also includes valuable interpretative material. Their normative engagement is evident from their empathy with the Gaza ordeal of the Palestinians and understandable antipathy to Israel’s tactics and overall behavior. While discarding the liberal posture of neutrality, this high quality journalism under the most difficult and dangerous conditions in the sense of conveying the unfolding reality of important events in ways that deepen awareness and understanding beyond what mainstream media reports.
What makes Filiu’s book so important, beyond its extraordinary historical depth that allows readers to better grasp the tragedy that has befallen the Gazan people, is its persuasive insistence of the centrality played by Gaza throughout the experience of Palestinian resistance to Israeli dispossession and annexation, including the originality of the uprising known as the first intifada in 1987, and even more so an insistence that the Gaza holds the key to any kind of sustainable peace between Israel and Palestine. This is a striking view, given the extent to which both Israel and the world treat Ramallah and the Palestinian Authority as central, and Gaza as marginal if not altogether dispensable in the context of diplomatic negotiations and the outcome of the conflict.]
A Gaza-Centric View of the Palestine National Movement
Jean-Pierre Filiu, Gaza: A History, trans. John King, Oxford University Press, 2014, 440 pp., $29.95 US (hbk), ISBN 9780190201890.
The distinguished French historian, Jean-Pierre Filiu has produced a magisterial overview that recounts the ebb and flow of Gaza’s fortunes from ancient times up through the present. Although a member of the faculty of Sciences Po in Paris, Filiu is not a typical academic historian, having earlier served as a diplomat in Jordan, Syria, and Tunisia, published two novels, and even written popular songs, including one devoted to Gaza. Filiu’s pedigree training and scholarly contribution have earned him a deserved reputation as one of the world’s leading Arabists, and someone particularly expert on political trends in contemporary Islam. He has published several well-regarded books on the Middle East including The Arab Revolution: Ten Lessons from the Democratic Uprising (2011) and From Deep State to Islamic State: The Arab Counter-Revolution and its Jihadist Legacy (2015). The latter book poses the haunting question as to whether the political destiny of the peoples in the Middle East is to remain entrapped in the ongoing struggle between tyrannical leaders and Muslim fanatics. More than most commentators on the regional developments, Filiu perceptively realized that the democratizing hopes of the “Arab Spring” in 2011 would be short lived, and likely would be soon overwhelmed by a variety of counterrevolutionary forces intent on restoring an authoritarian status quo ante, however high the costs of doing so. The main motive of these counterrevolutionary elites was to avoid the twin fates of secular democracy and radical Islam.
Filiu’s authoritative treatment of Gaza starts with a useful background summary of its role as a trading center in the ancient world of the Middle East with a past traced back to the Hyksos people of the eighteenth century BCE. Readers are helpfully informed that Gaza, situated between Sinai and Negev Deserts and the Mediterranean Sea, became a major site of struggle for warring neighbors over the long arc of history, including Egyptian pharaohs, Persian kings, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Fatimids, Mamluks, Crusaders, and Ottomans. Filiu emphasizes the rivalry between Baghdad and Cairo with respect to Gaza as contributing to the frequent changes of fortune confronted by the city and region. A second chapter is informative about the generally unappreciated relationship of Gaza to hallowed figures in Islamic tradition. For instance, one principal mosque in Gaza is built to honor the memory of the great grandfather of the Prophet and another is dedicated to one of Muhammad’s close followers who accompanied him on his sacred journey from Mecca to Medina. Both of these men were prosperous traders who brought caravans of goods from Arabia for sale in
September 22, 2015
2
the markets of Gaza. After presenting this early history, Filiu devotes the remainder of Gaza to Gaza’s experience in the continuing struggle over Palestine’s future that began in a serious way with the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the British Mandate established after World War I under the auspices of the League of Nations lasting until 1947 when Britain turned over responsibility for Gaza’s future to the United Nations.
The remaining fifteen chapters of Gaza narrate the tortured and tormented experience of Gaza, the scene of many dreams of liberation and peace, but also a place of frequent carnage and a continuing ordeal of massive suffering. Gaza, which covers 140 square miles, the size of several middle sized American cities, still plays a central role in the unfolding Israel/Palestine conflict. In this fundamental respect, Gaza is a detailed historical narrative of past and present, which also underscores the totally unresolved future of Palestine as a whole, leaving readers free to contemplate Gaza’s future through the sophisticated optic that Filiu provides.
Filiu has produced, in a manner that I find extraordinary, a study of Gaza’s history over this incredible sweep of time that manages to exhibit at each phase of the narrative an astonishing mastery of detail. Filiu presents us with the dizzying interplay of dominant personalities interweaved with accurate depictions of the many defining incidents that give substance to the complex history and experience of Gaza. Such a tours de force of scholarly achievement does not make for easy reading given the density of the material. As a whole, Gaza is somewhat overwhelming in its cumulative impact as a result of its long succession of unfamiliar names and recitation of one detail after another that are difficult for a normal reader to keep in mind. At the same time, beyond the weight of Filiu’s facticity is a wealth of interpretative knowledge that imparts an unprecedented understanding of the contemporary experience of Gaza and the part it has played for both Israelis and Palestinians in the unfolding conflict.
Despite this challenge posed by this seeming surfeit of names and events, a kind of pre- digital example of information overload, Filiu facilitates comprehension of the main narrative motifs by framing his central interpretative analysis through reference to illuminating conceptual themes. He proceeds chronologically assessing the unfolding Palestinian ordeal in three clusters of four chapters each: “1947-1967: The Generation of Mourning,” “1967-1987: The Generation of Dispossession,” “1987-2007: The Generation of the Intifadas.” The book concludes with a final chapter entitled “The Generation of the Impasse?” as if the currently blocked situation in the underlying conflict between Israel and Palestine that has dominated the lives of the Gazan people for several generations seems likely to continue to be their fate for the indefinite future. Filiu ever so slightly lightens this gloomy prospect by putting a question mark at the end of the chapter title, perhaps acknowledging that not even a master historian should pretend to foretell Gaza’s future with confidence or indicate with confidence hopes and fears that the impasse will be broken at some point.
With this framework Filiu brilliantly portrays the Palestinian ordeal as it has tragically played out during the 67 plus years since Israel came into existence as a sovereign state. There is no attempt by Filiu to write this contemporary history of Gaza from a detached point of view, that is, by suspending empathetic feelings and ethical judgments. The tone of the narrative and the spirit of Filiu’s personal engagement with the Palestinian tragedy is clearly conveyed on the dedication page: “To the memory of the thousands of anonymous who died in Gaza before their time though they had a life to live en famille and in peace.” In effect, without sparing Palestinians and their leaders harsh criticism for failures of competence in the course of his narrative, including their embrace of brutality and
corruption, Filiu laments Palestinian victimization and decries Israeli oppression. With such a perspective it is not surprising that Filiu is generally sympathetic with Palestinian resistance activities over the years.
In discussing partition, the plan proposed by the UN General Assembly to overcome the tensions between Jews and Arabs in Palestine, Filiu makes clear that the Zionist movement was pushing the British hard to endorse such a division during the latter stages of the mandatory period. For Zionist leaders partition seemed at the time the only available path leading to the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, thereby achieving the basic Zionist project in accord with the Balfour undertaking. In angry contrast, the most representative Arab voices in Palestine were early united in their fervent opposition to partition ever since it began to be seriously considered by the British government, increasingly aware of rising tensions between the resident Arab population of Palestine and the successive waves of Jewish immigration. Already in 1937 Fahmi al-Husseini, the mayor of Gaza, warned British authorities against partition and any related attempt to promote the emergence of Jewish statehood. Filiu quotes al-Husseini to illustrate this depth of opposition: “It would be better for the British government to consign the inhabitants of Palestine to death and destruction, or even to envelop them in poison gas, than to inflict upon them any such plan” (46). As we know, such Palestinian wishes were ignored not only by the British, but also by the organized international community acting under the auspices of the United Nations. In response to the mounting tension in Palestine between Jews and Arabs, Britain went ahead and proposed partition, which was consistent with their typical colonial endgame and legacy in many other parts of their collapsing empire (for instance, Ireland, India, Malaya, and Cyprus). When the UN in 1947 did finally propose partition in General Assembly Resolution 181, the British surprisingly abstained, perhaps feeling that there was nothing to be gained at that point by further antagonizing the Arab world, especially given the persistence of British interests in the region, epitomized by the retention of the Suez Canal.
The focus on the complex dialectics of victimization and resistance in Gaza is at the core of Filiu’s interpretative standpoint. This emphasis likely represents the most enduring contribution of the book to our appreciation of both the scholarship and policy relevance of the Gaza Strip to the overall story of the Israel/Palestine struggle. What Filiu does convincingly is to challenge the mainstream view that Gaza is but an ugly sideshow of the main Palestinian dramas, generally regarded by both sides to be the West Bank and Jerusalem. Of course, the centrality of Gaza’s victimization has become internationally recognized, especially after the imposition of a blockade in 2007 when Hamas took over the government in Gaza and during the last seven years when Israel launched savage attacks in 2008-2009, 2012, and 2014 that eroded the carefully orchestrated public image of Israel as a benevolent political actor. What Filiu significantly adds to this image of Gazan victimization is the understanding that the broader movement of Palestinian national resistance has been centered in Gaza since the onset of the conflict with the Zionist project, and that this pattern of resistance continues in Gaza more than elsewhere in Palestine despite the severe and prolonged forms of collective punishment imposed by Israel on the Strip over the course of decades.
Even more challenging is Filiu’s controversial insistence that a sustainable peace between Israel and Palestine can only be achieved if Gaza will be accorded a decisive role in the process. Filiu underscores this belief in his drastic revision of thinking surrounding the peace process in the closing sentences of Gaza: “It is in Gaza that the foundations of a durable peace should be laid…The Gaza Strip, the womb of the fedayin and the cradle of the
3
4
intifada, lies at the heart of the nation-building of contemporary Palestine. It is vain to imagine that a territory so replete with foundational experiences can be ignored or marginalized. Peace between Israel and Palestine can assume neither meaning nor substance except in Gaza, which will be both the foundation and the keystone” (340).
Filiu’s view of a peaceful solution challenges the view of most Israelis that Gaza, without figuring in Israeli biblical claims, and containing 1.8 million Palestinians hostile to Israel’s very existence, has no place in Israel’s conception of its own final borders or of an acceptable outcome of the conflict. Israelis generally regard Gaza as nothing more than a bargaining chip in any future peace negotiations. From Israel’s perspective Gaza is the one unwanted part of occupied Palestine (in sharp contrast, with Jerusalem and the West Bank), an assessment provisionally expressed by Israel’s “disengagement” from Gaza in 2005, which involved the withdrawal of IDF forces and the removal of Israeli settlers in a plan conceived and implemented by the Israeli hardline leader Ariel Sharon. Gaza continues to be viewed as a threat to Israeli security if ever allowed to become consolidated with the West Bank in a future Palestinian state and is viewed as a threat to Israel’s ethnocratic and democratic claims if incorporated into a single Israeli state encompassing the whole of historic Palestine.
With respect to Gaza, Israelis seem now to prefer either retaining control over a subjugated and devastated Gaza or inducing Egypt to resume responsibility for administering Gaza. The Egyptian government has made clear its unwillingness to accept responsibility for governing Gaza, which makes the unfortunate present situation the most likely scenario for the foreseeable future. In this sense, the whole burden of Filiu’s assessment is at odds with the manner in which Washington framed the “peace process,” which, as might be expected, seems based on an acceptance of Israel’s view of the marginality of Gaza with respect to the final resolution of the conflict.
Filiu’s mode of highlighting Gaza also challenges the views of the Palestinian Authority, with its capital in Ramallah, that gives its highest priority to ending Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, getting rid of as many Israeli settlements as possible. The Palestinian Authority seems to care little about the fate of Gaza, especially since Gaza fell under the control of Hamas in 2007, although its formal position continues to include Gaza as an integral part of a Palestinian state.
In this respect, Filiu’s Gaza-centric interpretation of the conflict between Israel and Palestine is by far the most original and controversial part of his historical account. It rests on a carefully documented narrative of Gaza’s role as the true center of Palestinian resistance and resilience throughout more than six decades of struggle. As Filiu mentions, the most perceptive of Israeli leaders, notably David Ben-Gurion, were nervous about the developing situation in Gaza from the earliest period of Israel’s existence, especially as Gaza became the default option for many Palestinians displaced during the nakba, the occasions of massive expulsion and dispossession that caused so many Palestinians to be driven from their homes, and to seek sanctuary in Gaza, the West Bank, and neighboring Arab countries. In Filiu’s view, throughout the war that produced the establishment of Israel as a sovereign state, “…Israeli units were systematically driving the Arab population out of the combat zone even when their villages offered no resistance to the advance of the Zionists” (62). The sadness and desolation of dispossession resulted in Gaza becoming early in the conflict dominated and radicalized by refugees and their profoundly alienating experiences. In the late 1940s Palestinian refugees amounted to more than 75% of Gaza’s total population.
The large refugee camps spread throughout tiny Gaza became focal points of ferment and eventually resistance, taking the initial form of the fedayin insurgent activities from the
1950s on. It was the fedayin fighters that found ways to penetrate Israel and inflict casualties particularly on soldiers and police, and later, on Israeli settlers in Gaza. This type of armed struggle inevitably prompted Israeli reprisal raids that were from their outset deliberately disproportionate. As Filiu observes, “[i]t was in Gaza that the fedayin were moulded, and the Hebrew State would soon make Gaza pay for it dearly” (94). This prediction was fulfilled in 1956, Egypt being displaced from Gaza, and Israel occupying the Strip for four months as an aspect of the Suez War, with accompanying massacres of Palestinian civilians being carried out by the Israeli military prior to a UN protective force being inserted to monitor the border. Filiu asks this provocative question: “Is there any doubt that the history of Gaza would have taken a different turn had a Palestinian entity been established there, under UN protection, in defiance of Israel, while maintaining special ties with Egypt” (105-106)? Although Filiu seems to have meant the question to be rhetorical, I am skeptical of any supposition that Gaza might have been spared Israeli fury even if the UN had agreed to sponsor and protect Gazan self-determination and sovereignty within the less crystalized climate of opinion in 1956. The political will to confront Israel has never existed on a global level or within the United Nations except to the extent of adopting a public discourse sharply challenging Israel’s policies and practices that is reinforced by periodic censure moves that were generally softened or opposed by the West.
As dramatic as the fedayin phenomenon, the outbreak of the intifada in 1987 that witnessed an unexpected mobilization of Palestinian civil society in Gaza, later spreading to the West Bank, challenged Israel’s capacity to maintain order in occupied Palestine. As Filiu persuasively argues, it was the fedayin and intifada that finally lent credibility and inspiration to the Palestinian national struggle, somewhat overcoming the humiliating failure of the pathetic international efforts by neighboring Arab states to challenge the existence of Israel. The failure of these several regional wars, culminating in the disastrous Arab defeat in the 1967 War, which greatly expanded Israel’s territorial identity, resulted in a second and permanent occupation of Gaza, with the war having the geopolitical effect of transforming Israel in American strategic thinking from being a heavy burden on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East to becoming a major strategic asset. Unfortunately for the Palestinians, “the rest is history.”
Filiu gives a fascinating portrayal of the rise of Islamism in Gaza, including a depiction of the charismatic leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who was assassinated by an Israeli missile in 2004. What Filiu’s discussion shows it that the early Islamic efforts in Gaza, inspired by and derivative of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, were devoted on principle to resistance activities within the law, focusing on a long range view of liberation by way of family values and education. It was only as a result of Israeli oppression in Gaza and a growing rivalry for popular allegiance with the secular coalition, the Palestine Liberation Organization under the leadership of Yasser Arafat, that led to the formation of the militant Hamas, and with this development, to extreme violence, highlighted by suicide bombing attacks within Israel in the late 1990s, often directed at the civilian population. Israel, at first, actually encouraged the political emergence of Islam, supposing that it would weaken what was perceived to be its principal adversary, the PLO, but as time passed, and Hamas tactics shifted to suicidal violence, Israel treated Hamas as a terrorist organization, and remains unwilling to back off such a view despite Hamas’ effort to pursue a political track for reaching its national goals since it took part in Palestinian elections in 2006.
Arafat is duly presented as the leading Palestinian liberation figure and international diplomat, but also deeply criticized by Filiu for the political innocence of his deferential approach to the United States and accompanying naïve hopes that Washington would deliver
5
6
a just peace to the Palestinians after the Oslo Framework of Principles had been agreed upon in 1993. Filiu draws our attention to Arafat’s reaction to the 1995 assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, which brought tears to his eyes and the tormenting cry “It’s over, it’s over” (234)—meaning the prospect of a negotiated peace died with Rabin. Although Filiu does not evaluate Arafat’s reaction, it seems exaggerated, given Rabin’s acquiescence in expanding the settlement movement in the West Bank and Jerusalem and his “iron fist” policies in reaction to the first intifada.
One of the several virtues of Filiu’s historical approach is his willingness to employ evaluative language to describe Palestinian experience of victimization and Israeli tactics of oppression. He repeatedly refers to Israeli practices as imposing “collective punishment,” and as resulting in “massacres” of innocent Gazans, and of the experience endured by Gaza’s population as trauma, including “collective trauma.” At the same time, despite being highly critical of Israel’s approach, Filiu avoids any condemnations based on international humanitarian law or international criminal law. Filiu does not, unlike Ilan Pappé and other critics of Israel’s behavior in Gaza, speak of “genocide” or even “crimes against humanity.” In general, I conclude that Filiu’s sense of critical history with respect to Gaza does not accord significant relevance to international law.
In conclusion, Filiu provides a reader with a wealth of information, an historical perspective that greatly deepens our appreciation of the importance achieved by Gaza in the past, and above all, depicts the brutality of Israel’s behavior toward the people of Gaza and its failure to quell the spirit of Palestinian resistance. At the center of Filiu’s argument, beyond his assessment that the present period is best characterized as one of “impasse,” is the claim that Gaza remains the keystone for a sustainable peace between Israelis and Palestinians, a view shared by neither the formal Palestinian leadership nor by any influential Israeli, American, or European leaders, past or present. However this issue is resolved, Filiu is highly successful in making a reader appreciate Gaza’s illustrious past and the crucial role that recent generations of its people have played in keeping the fires of Palestinian resistance burning even in the face of Israel’s cruel, domineering, and oppressive behavior.
A few final comments on Filiu’s historiography. First of all, I wonder whether it was necessary to provide so much factual detail in narrating the history of Gaza; it seems to me that the main interpretative lines of assessment could have been developed as authoritatively, and with a gentler reading experience. Secondly, I think that the ethical forthrightness of Filiu’s approach lent added clarity to his interpretive perspectives, and was valuable as a matter of “full disclosure” of author to reader. If hidden from view, it would have raised questions about integrity and trust. And thirdly, the inclusion of prescriptive ideas in a work of contemporary history gives greater practical relevance to the understanding of the past being set forth. Policymakers on all sides would gain much from Filiu’s deeply considered argument for the centrality of Gaza to the Palestinian national struggle and to hopes for a sustainable peace that protects the rights of both peoples on the basis of equality.
Tags: Gaza, Gaza History, Gaza Ordeal, Intifada, Israeli Occupation, Massacres, Peace Diplomacy, war crimes