The War In Gaza (draft updated June 4, 2024; still a long way from done)

open source history & personal interpretive assessments

Here we all are, in the 8th month of the Gaza war. (“We all”…wars were once more local affairs, or at least it seemed that way.) The Israelis are attacking Rafah, as they seem to have been doing since the day after Eastern Orthodox Easter. Today begins the full-scale assault, as today’s headlines appear to indicate. The Israeli government has imposed a press blackout of the Gaza battlefront, of course. (Of late, it’s extended all the way to the Jerusalem offices of Al-Jazeera, which has been officially shut down.) Local ordinary humans like ourselves on the scene do still have cellphones. (Whether it will be possible to tell authentically recorded video from AI deepfaking is a question I can’t answer.) There’s probably no way to impose a proper press blackout on the scene of an increasingly famished and weary civilian population. If the Israeli government does that, they will look really really bad. They’re going to look really bad either way.

The famine predicted over a month ago by UN observers has yet to arrive; that doesn’t mean it won’t get there eventually. UN aid, originally overwhelmed by 1 million refugees, appears to have caught up to about 1/3 of what is required. That’s probably about as much was realistically attainable on short notice in the face of a border blockade by a force hostile to their efforts. The onset of battlefield hostilities in Rafah indicates that the reliability of that flow of goods is considerably disrupted, following the refugees. I'm not clear on exactly where the refugees are fleeing to, at this point.

“Tell me, again, how this all got started”? It’s a long story. Confining matters to recent events, the 2024 Gaza war formally began with the October 7 attacks by Hamas, the Islamist Palestinian group that prevailed in bidding for political power to run Gaza. Hamas prevailed because they’re the group most committed to acting as the frontline of armed resistance to Israel. People like Netanyahu are fine with this. It’s suited their purposes. The extremes justify themselves by the actions of the other. Hamas isn’t even all that popular among Gazans. In terms of that amorphous polling measure known as “voter support” (“support!”), I think peak Hamas popularity has been measured at a peak of 44%. [ref] Part of their ability to prevail apparently rests on the fact that only a plurality is required for victory to political office. I don’t want to get too far into the conflicts between Hamas and their chief rivals, the Palestinian Authority. Hamas apparently apparently won out because their dedication to the cause of using armed force to expel the Israelis is sincere. That’s the only way to explain why Hamas has spent over a decade after the Israelis deeded over Gaza by constructing at least 300 miles of tunnels 100 feet deep with some rooms as large as living rooms and offices. There’s only one plausible reason for an effort that ambitious. It’s intended as a logistical center for a military effort. And not self-defense ones, or they would be air raid shelters. Hamas apparently left that part up to UNRWA:

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) said late Monday its emergency shelters in Gaza are at 90% capacity with more than 137,000 people taking cover from Israeli strikes.

The agency said 83 UNRWA schools have been turned into shelters.

It said that one UN school housing displaced families was "directly hit," without giving further details. It's unknown how many people were in the shelter at the time of the attack.

If a government of armed militants is—at considerable effort—constructing a fortress underground, a military base, under a civilian population, and the civilian population is not provided with shelter for the purpose of defense, then the logical conclusion is that they are building it for the purpose of an attack. Military-minded people know this, even if most people (including many militarists) do not.

This is where it gets deeper: is it okay for a bordering political entity to devote its efforts into preparing an attack on its neighbor? A question to which we’ll return.

When the October 7 attacks began, I couldn’t comprehend the point, from a military standpoint. It wasn’t as if the attacking force—about a brigade, 4000 armed soldiers—- were going to drive to Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. The only explanation I had was that it was meant to be symbolic: a way to strike a blow at the hated intruders (who incidentally controlled most of the water and utilities of Gaza.) That was before I read this story:

As hundreds [sic] of Hamas terrorists crossed the border on the morning of October 7 to carry out massacres across the kibbutzim and communities of the South, one of the more shocking plans of ‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ did not come to fruition.

The terror group that runs Gaza had an ambitious plan on October 7 to storm Ashkelon Central Prison (Shikma Prison) and release hundreds of Palestinian prisoners, Arabic international newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat revealed on Monday.

I don’t know how reliable that claim is, because I can’t access the original Asharq Al-Aswat story; there’s an English version, but it apparently wasn’t published there. For what it’s worth, all of the republishers of the claim are Israeli media.

I have to admit, it makes at least strategic sense for Hamas to have had such a purpose with the attack. A mass jailbreak of Palestinian prisoners might have been able to escalate the level of hostilities. But the attack on the prison (if it occurred) was most likely deterred by Israeli counterintelligence hijacking their GPS signal (ahem) to feed the attackers incorrect coordinates:

However, the plan reportedly failed due to a technical mistake that led the group of terrorists to attack another settlement instead of the prison.

Sources close to Palestinian terror organizations that spoke with the newspaper reported that one of the first groups of terrorists who infiltrated Israeli territory had a mission to reach Ashkelon Prison and release the hundreds of detained Palestinians there. Sources close to the command of Hamas’s military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, claimed that one of Hamas’s elite Nukhba units, consisting of 23 terrorists, was supposed to arrive at the prison to release the prisoners, while another group’s mission was to infiltrate a military base in the Ashkelon area before moving on to assist those already at the prison.

I don’t know. Maybe that’s just more Israeli propaganda. I don’t know how handful of Hamas commandos could have been successful at that mission, even if they’d found the prison and the military base. As with a lot of other military specifics ate this point, I have no details. It just happens to make strategic sense as an objective.

To return to the wider scope of Hamas-IDF hostilities: how could the Israelis not have known about the impending attacks in advance? At least a few of them? But maybe they all really were that enthralled with their digital surveillance system (inherently vulnerable at the antenna repeaters), because Expensive, and Modern. I’m amazed that the Israelis had no infantry DMZ patrollers; what’s a defense force for, in a country the size of Vermont facing a hostile population that’s intent on building out an underground fortress to plan and carryout attacks across their border? The Israelis had a nice, neat, tall, and very unwelcoming Wall, I realize. (But “something there is that doesn’t love a wall”, and that isn’t mere sentiment, for some of us.)

I’ll take a break here and say that I support the idea of dissolving borders, whenever possible. But people have to start from where they are. Dissolving borders by tearing them down and attacking the people on the other side is not the way to get along.

That does not, however, excuse Binyamin Netanyahu and his War Cabinet from sending a 21st century supersonic air force against an undefended civilian population.

Before I return to that event, I need to note how unnecessary it probably was, by pointing out an alternative course that could have been taken by several Israeli administrations: Israel could have brought the issue of the Hamas tunnels to the Security Council of the United Nations, and demanded that they be destroyed, convincingly and with open inspections. It’s ironic that the Israelis government has chosen unilateral nationalism for its prerogative without any prior consultation with the United Nations, in fact, given that the nation of Israel owes its international legitimacy to the affirmation of the UN.

More importantly, the Israelis have a valid case, and they’ve had it for years. The Hamas tunnels are a military fortress structure. Tunnels present some of the most intractable problems for an opposing military to overcome. (Unless gas is used, which is arguably preferable to the ghastliness of tunnel warfare using explosives, shrapnel, and bullets. An argument I’ll set aside for now, to allow the emotivists clam down.) The humane thing to do is to peaceably demand their abandonment, and then destroy them. (Air strikes are not nearly as effective at getting that result.)

Especially cynical readers out there probably already think they’re way ahead of me: “The UN would never have authorized an international military mission to dismantle the tunnels of Gaza contructed by Hamas.” I agree that it would probably have been the likely case that the Security Council/General Assembly of the UN probably would have declined to approve that action. But maybe not. Maybe we cynics are wrong, and the Hamas tunnel structure would have been destroyed following UN approval (and perhaps even participation. But the question of whether Israel would have won their grievance case in the UN is much less important than the fact that it’s the right thing to do to properly insist. To get it on the record in the most authoritatively officially recognized international assembly that this activity is happening in Gaza, that a nation just across its borders is being treated as a target for aggression, and that the most rational and peaceable course of action would be to dismantle the underground territorial logistical base that’s maintaining the aggressive intent.

Considered as a counterfactual—and this happens to be one that’s easy to construct—considered solely as a matter of national defense, there was no downside for Israel taking that case to the United Nations. And they could have done it years ago, after only 100 miles of tunnel had been built. Because the worst case scenario would only have been the one that we’re presently witnessing. The UN could have voted against dismantling the tunnel networks, and then the Israeli government could have ignored them and taken unilateral action to destroy them. (We cynics realize that international law is a joke; the present-day UN doesn’t even seem up to tasks like policing international waters against poaching and dredging, or closing loopholes like the “flag of convenience” dodge of commercial shipping interests.) A vote in the UN against destroying the tunnels would have been no worse than the general assembly votes on the record in the aftermath of the unilateral Israeli retaliation attacks: 180-2 opposed to Israel.

The most important difference is not a function of how successful the Israelis might have been at persuading the UN General Assembly about their request. We’ll never know that number for sure.

The crucially important difference is that the consideration of the question and the ensuing debate would have been written into the official record of the United Nations prior to the Israelis taking matters into their own hands. And we do know that for sure.

It would have made for some debate, is all I can say.

[continued]

We all know what happened instead. Hamas somehow got a pass—it was an open secret—to build a network of underground tunnels that eventually extended an estimated 300-500 miles of tunnels. The low estimate is the equivalent of the distance from Washington, DC to New York City- oops, I mean New Haven, Connecticut. The middle of the estimate, 400 miles, is approximately equal to the distance from Washington, DC to Providence, RI.

It’s difficult to know exactly when construction began on the tunnels themselves- Gazans were using them for tax evasion purposes (against taxes levied by both the PA Hamas) even before Israel withdrew from the territory in 2007. In the years since then, many of the original smuggling entrances from Egypt—some large enough for livestock to travel through—were bulldozed or collapsed by the Morsi government of Egypt as part of an anti-smuggling effort. The rest of what’s been built since then has evidently turned into Fortress Hamas. It includes corridors wide enough to drive automobiles through.

I’m still trying to find news reportage prior to 2023 that offers an estimate of the total mileage of the tunnels….Okay, found some! more later.

A matter to ponder: how dedicated must the Islamic armed guerrilla movement Hamas have been, to pursuit such a gargantuan project over the years since Israelis ceded them back the territory?

Not to discount the role of the tunnels for the smuggling of goods, a practice of long standing not only in the Gaza of today but elsewhere in Middle Eastern history. I’ve read that up to 50% of the goods economy of Gaza was estimated to be smuggled in to avoid import duties exacted by the government of Gaza, i.e., Hamas. Those tunnels alone are extensive, and it’s my impression that there are dozens of them- mostly just doing short border hops, but some large enough for livestock and small vehicle traffic.

I’ve heard Gaza described as “an open-air prison”, and it has to be said that Gaza “independence” partook of some prison aspects in regard to surveillance measures and the visible presence of a walled off territory in some respects. But no prison I know of allows a network of tunnels underneaths its residential compounds. Firearms have been known to get to the prison inmate population at times. But not by the crateload. And certainly not rockets.

I’ve heard Gaza described as a polity, like a province or state, also. That definitions runs into the conundrums such as overall Israeli control of Gaza’s power and water. But, if Gaza can actually be called a “state”, it should be considered a failed one.

I keep hearing references to the “right of armed resistance” as a “group human right” (although in the case of Hamas, the motivation appears to be framed more like a “sacred duty”.) Some UN resolution or another; why anyone would write a default bias toward the resort to warfare into law as a universal right, I can’t imagine…okay, I can imagine. But only very cynically. First, I just want to concentrate on the practical implications of that abstractly encoded precept in terms of the history of Gaza.

In this case, that’s meant that Israel has been keeping the lights, power, and water going for the 1.2-2 million residents of Gaza over the years; and in return, the provisional government of Hamas has built an underground fortress, and escalating their attacks from salvos across the border to launching an armed brigade level attack over the borders of Israel (that state that the Hamas “armed resistance” doesn’t recognize, even though it runs the water and utilities of Gaza.)

I can’t stand the instantaneous retaliation ordered by Netanyahu, or the frequently indiscriminate bombing, especially at the outset. But retaliation was bound to happen sooner or later. The UN recognizes a right of self-defense for nation-states, too, and Israel has been officially recognized by the UN Security Council and General Assembly as a nation since 1948.

The more I think about a “right of armed resistance” encoded by a global assembly of nations, the more it sounds as if it was legislated on the basis of Luxury Belief Abstraction. Because self-ordained armed resistance groups do what they do in a Nietzschean realm, and they don’t care about your lofty proclamations. Unless they can find ways to work them, that is. “The right of armed resistance” is a cause justification that requires no obligations by the armed guerrilla movements. It opens space for unending argument and interpretation, while not demandinging anything in return.

When I think of the implacability of the Palestinian anti-Zionists, the conflict that appears most similar to me is the Irish Catholics vs. the English and their Protestant Irish proxies. The original Western “anticolonial struggle.” (Yes, I think anticolonialist interpretations have value. One with more value in the case of Ireland than Palestine in my opinion, for reasons I’ll explain in detail soon.) The overarching similarity I find is in the group psychology shared by the militant extremists of both sides. How dug in they are. How much the aspects of it turn intimate and up close and personal, more like an unending blood feud than the imagined Revolution Resolution of Marxist idealists. P. J. O’Rourke visited Ireland as a travel journalist, ironic political observer, and humorist. I think he caught the emotional tone of it well, with a telling eye for detail. About how so much of it is simply about…wanting to hit back. Not reform, or justice- revenge. That mission that so often extends beyond the lifetime of any of the combatants- while also, weirdly enough, single-mindedly dwelling on that last thing that happened. Payback. Death before dishonor (the battlefield code of every combat infantry in history.)

Now, without getting too far into Colonial Studies 101c, or what have you, here my objections to the equation of Zionism with Settler Colonialism:

The Settler Colonialist hypothesis is not a good fit for the Jews of Europe. It makes no rational sense to me that the Jews- treated as foreigners everywhere they went in Europe for centuries, a population expelled multiple times by various European national regimes, often restricted in their ability to settle outsize of reserved zones- somehow began qualifying as the tip of the spear of “White European” imperialist colonialism. I realize that it’s handy for the Marxist “anticolonialist” gloss. I recognize that some of those aspects have relevance. But others are drastically different.

Most notably, the Irish anticolonialists were an indigenous movement fighting a foreign empire. Whereas the Palestinians are an indigenous movement fighting against another indigenous ethnic movement- the Jewish Zionists, asserting a return to the only ancestral homeland they’ve ever historically had. (I’ll get to the Khazars later.)

Yep, I buy that story. For all of the complications and individual exceptions, the Jewish populations of Europe were never accepted by the indigenous nationalities as Locals. As just plain homefolks. There were valid reasons for acknowledging the difference- after all, it’s valid. But not having a home territory for “your people” to be “your people”- and instead, put in the position of residing on someone else’s home territory- is a situation with a lot of attendant burdensome conditions.

My take on why the Jews have such a controversial history in Europe is that they don’t stay in the circumscribed roles (and physical realms) carved out for them by the local regimes that played host to their presence. If the Jews were more like the Gypsy population- the other population residing in Europe with no ancestral homeland in Europe- they wouldn’t incite so many allegations of conspiracy. Much more powerless, but they wouldn’t be jacketed as a conspiracy to undermine the locals. But Jews were a literate and numerate culture that occasionally produced individuals of exceptional literacy and numeracy, and those are genuine multipliers of intellectual force that enable the accumulation of power, both in terms of material wealth and social influence.

That’s all that’s required to induce a lot of ethnic tension: the presence of a foreign population of relative newcomers who begin to achieve a level of success that’s deemed to be inordinate and unfairly outsized by the locals, original indigenous groups. The Jews of Europe didn’t assert their presence through military conquest or the force of arms, so they didn’t really meet the definition of “imperialists”, or “colonialists.” But they were foreigners who increasing share of power and waxing fortunes had a way of being regarded with similar hostility by the host European nationalities. Instead of their presence being characterized as Colonial- a relatively straightforward condition of overtly asserted superiority, maintained by force of arms- the local (“indigenous”) antipathy toward the presence of Jews and Jewish populations in Europe took on a shadowy and more allusive form: the Jews were viewed as Parasites.

That reaction grows out of a practically universal human tendency: Locals Only. My Beach. It doesn’t require any more motivation than that. Although, guaranteed, the locals keep tally of every incident of unfairness, theft, and preferential loyalty by the Outsiders. Along with viewing any increase in social or material prominence by the Outsiders as a zero-sum game, with the Locals suffering a net loss with every increase in Outsider fortunes. This is a natural primate territorial impulse. But just because some programming in humans is “natural animal”, that doesn’t make it all the wisest or most productive governor of human conduct. consider that the requirement to drink water and the xenophobic reflex are both “natural animal” programs, but one situation is non-negotiable, and the other instinctual program is optional and can be overridden by the human capacity of self-awareness and the ability to conceptualize a flexible array of decision paths. Including those that lead to more favorable outcomes than simply reacting to any novel or foreign influence as intolerably disruptive and an existential threat requiring eradication at the first opportunity.

But we get it, don’t we? “The appearance of strangers in our midst on our home turf is an automatic guaranteed win” is NOT the default setting of humans. Most of us in this highly mobile society know what it’s like to Move, to change residences. And even the most rootless of us often develop enough attachment to an abode that those who arrive even later elicit the same level of unease- who are these new people? Do they know how to act? Can they get along with us? Are they upsetting the previously satisfactory equilibrium of the neighborhood, with too much wealth, or not enough of it? Do they lean too hard for strangers? Are they going to treat us as prey, or as peons?

At minimum, an additional population always brings with it the downside that there’s more crowding. Population increase in a given locale is a stress factor, for whoever is already living there. Always. Indisputably. So the practical question at hand for the locals is: what makes the newcomers a net win? What are they bringing to the table that justifies their, well, territorial encroachment? Thankfully, there are examples of human population shifts where the newcomers add benefits and elevate conditions, bringing more to the table than they take away from it.

(Even imperialist colonialism has been known to bring benefits to the table for the indigenous locals. Whether it’s been worth the undeniably penalties of being colonized and subordinated in ones own land is something to be assessed on a case by case basis. The historical record of colonizers is tipped in the direction of ghastliness. But there have often been benefits that are real- technological, educational, medical- and there’s no benefit to denying that. Particularly for postcolonial societies; it’s possible to despise colonial imperialism and negative colonial legacies without despising the benefits that might have been brought in the process. Not that this is an easy task to assess in terms of detailed specifics; for the colonized, the emotivism of resentment and status insecurity needs to be winnowed out in favor of sober analyis. Whereas the colonizers- present and former- need to not be so smug and superior toward the colonized, and also not surprised that they aren’t universally loved just because, say, they built railroads that offer benefits to the colonized inhabitants. Most colonies were established on the basis of a superior invasion force. The British and US managed to use more subtle means at times, by establishing franchise partnerships with friendly (or frenemy) leadership elites in the colonized territory. (Then there are other relationships that can’t really be considered colonial; it’s worth pointing out that the Saudi Arabian peninsula was never really a British or American colony.)

Such comprador arrangements and the like from the colonial era are seldom all that simple; they need to be viewed specifically and in detail, in terms of locality, local leadership, and changes over time. After all, as of the second half of the 20th century, the post-colonial order has now arrived. Part of the new order includes the rise of a wealthy indigenous class in former colonies- up to and including the billionaire level- from West Africa, East Africa, North Africa, the Middle East, SW Asia, and South Asia. (19th-20th century China was a comprador arrangement with terms often dictated by European foreigners, but the roots of Chinese mercantile economy are much deeper, including clans and dynastic wealth legacies- some going back for many centuries. The Chinese developed trading networks of sailing shops over a thousand years ago; in terms of a cosmopolitan mercantile class, they’re at least as experienced as Greeks, Arabs, or Jews. The difference between the Jews and the other groups mentioned is that for long stretches of time, the Jews existed as diaspora population. They had no home port under their own control. None of them.)

So colonialism is not what it used to be- and, for that matter, “globalism”1 hasn’t led to a worsening of indigenous repression under foreign rule. (1“Globalism” is a funny word; it isn’t any one ideological construct. Globalism is a feature of modern technological Reality. It could be gotten rid of, but project success would require the collapse and destruction of our uh global civilization. I don’t think it’s worth it.)

Except, as the anti-Zionists would have it, in the case of the “settler colony” of Israel, fashioned over the previous century and a half from Jewish settlements on the shores of the eastern Mediterranean Sea, in a territory of (square miles/hectares), about the size of the US state of Vermont. I’ll get to the conspiracy material in a little bit, but first, here’s the Western Establishment narrative of Zionism- the one that Theodor Herzl outlined in his writings. Herzl basically reviewed the preceding centuries of Jewish history in their existence as a diaspora people living among European national populations- the “indigenous”, the locals- and he threw up his hands. He figured that the Jews would always be vulnerable to persecution- including restriction, discrimination, forced relocation, massacres- as long as they were viewed as foreign interlopers. Even adopting local customs and converting to the Christian religion was unsatisfactory- because even if an individual Jew sincerely sought even the means to submerge their ancestral ethnic ancestry, some Local somewhere could be counted on to show up and to not let them forget it. (And as for the success of a concerted program of assimilation of entire groups- like the Jewish quarters in any city, or any rural shetl- into local customs and cultural practices: well, forget it. Humans don’t operate that way.) The only thing required to incite hostility against Jews: the human-instinct default to Locals Only. (An attitude that also applied to other foreigners, but the Jews were the only numerous population that qualified as maintaining that distinction.)

So Herzl’s answer is that Jews needed to have one place where they could be Locals, instead of always someone else’s Guests. A place to be Jews together, as homefolks. Think about it. Almost all of us can trace our ancestry to a national homeland of that sort. The mobility of auto-age, jet-age modernity has done a lot to confuse that; nowadays, many of us can trace our ancestry to two homelands, or even more. But in the 19th century, things were a lot simpler. The intramural wars of Europe over the centuries had made things weird nonetheless, but most Europeans lived on the land where their forefathers lived. But the European Jews- or the European Jewish legacy of someone- had nowhere.

Herzl’s idea is that the Jews needed somewhere to call a homeland. And that there wasn’t anything Jewishly peculiar about that desire for a center in physical territory. According to his writings and historical record, he wasn’t even picky about where it might be located. But I think it should be said that there’s a sound historical argument to be made that the Jewish people’s story shows a Middle Eastern origin. In point of fact, in the vicinity of where Jews who agreed with Herzl eventually began to settle in the late 19th century. Or perhaps the more accurate term is “resettle.” A controversial word choice, with critical implications that depend on which choice is accepted. If the European Jews are Settlers, that’s Settler Colonialism. But if European Jews are Resettlers, they’re reclaiming a “national” autonomy- even though they hadn’t reigned independently over any part of the Middle East since before the era of the Roman Empire. Nonetheless, that’s where the Jews are from. They have to be from someplace, eh? The Jews lived in their territorial homeland under Roman rule, until the end of the 1st century- when the Romans expelled the entire population, or as many as they could round up to evict. And some of them hid, and some “assimilated”, and some of them trickled back into the region over the centuries later on, after the Romans left. Replaced by Arab imperialism, and then Turkish imperialism. Some Jews managed to wander back to Jerusalem and other cities in the region, and they didn’t have to wander any more. Not for a while, anyway. When the Crusaders showed up from European countries like England and France and took Jerusalem at the end of the 11th century, there was enough of a Jewish population that many of them fought side by side with the Muslim Arabs and Turks against the nominally Roman Catholic Christian Europeans. The European Crusaders won that fight; reading the accounts of the leaders, the writers really did at times insinuate that they were had enacted the very Apocalypse of Revelations itself, with their actions. If the Crusaders were actually thinking in those terms, it would not be to much to say that they imagined that they had wrought the New Jerusalem of Christian Supremacy by Superior Firepower. (The Crusaders had the Cross. Who needed Jesus? Other than as Pretext, that is. Pretext being indispensable to the con.) At any rate, the Crusaders solidified their newfound rulership of the Realm by offering terms of surrender to the Muslim leaders that were remarkably fair and lenient, by the standards of the day. To further underscore the rule of the Crusaders, their most elite military order, the Knights Templar, set up their headquarters in the Al Aqsa Mosque.

Oh yeah, the victorious Crusaders also expelled the Jews from Jerusalem. Again. Not simply given their walking papers. There was a lot of bloodshed involved. But there had been so much of that already that…my words fail me. This is what the mental set cultivated by the setting of Endless War does to human beings. It’s a race to the bottom by continually raising the stakes. I don’t think we can afford the syndrome any more.

To return to the point of what makes the Jewish return to the region of Palestine different than Settler Colonialism: it’s established that the region is the original homeland of the Jewish people. That’s historical reality, not a fake post hoc propter hoc confabulation to cover for Western Imperialism. Neither is it a ghastly fraud perpetrated by a sinister conspiracy of ethnic imposters. Jewish ethnic identity can very often be traced genetically; the proportion can vary widely, but Jewishness isn’t something that’s assessed in terms of admixture; it’s reinforced by the teachings of the culture and the common social experience of the populations. It’s a common confusion to treat treat ethnicity as a determination of biological ancestry, but “ethnicity” is actually a much larger category. Ethnicity is derived on the basis of sharing the same group culture complex, and the people who make the determinations of in-group membership are those already within the ethnic group, not DNA blood quantum results. Most European Jews have a genetic heritage that indicates that they’ve been away from the Middle East for a very long time (and to a large extent, that extended absence has not been a result of choice or preference.) But that does not mean that European Jews can no longer lay claim to Middle Eastern origin. The Jews put a lot of time and energy into preserving their historical memory, and the accumulated evidence shows that they share a lot of regional and cultural overlaps with Arabs and Druse and Turks. In contrast, to, say, the English Pilgrim population that began a Settler Colony at Plymouth Rock, on an entirely new continent than the land of their ancestral origin.

Really. Unlike the Jews who began resettling Palestine in the late 19th century, none of the Pilgrims showed up in the territory that came to be referred to as “Massachusetts” with a Native American tribal lexicon of their own, that they had been hauling around for centuries on end as vital to their cultural identity and origin story. Factual points like those deserve more attention than they’ve gotten.

Another point worth pondering is that the English and Spanish colonists of the Western hemisphere laid a much more ambitious claim to the territories where they settled than the Jewish Zionists of the late 19th century and early 20th century. The European colonizers of the Americas basically ended up taking all of it. By contrast, a century and a half after the first immigration of European Jews to the region of the Turkish Ottoman Empire known as Palestine and/or Trans-Jordan (i.e., the vicinity of the Jordan River), in terms of physical geography, the nation-state of Israel is presently still the smallest country in the Middle East.

That said, it’s indisputable that the territory of Israel has expanded considerably since the date of its recognition by the UN in 1948. But only to an extent relative to its originally outlined national borders. At the date of its national recognition, the territory of Israel was designated by light tan part of the map below:

For those of the Anticolonialist contingent who haven’t already bailed on this little rumination—perhaps while sputtering about “hasbara trolling” on account of my recurrent referencing of incontrovertible facts—be forewarned that before I get around to cracking on the excesses and crimes of Zionist militarist chauvinists in the decades since the inauguration of the state of Israel, I’m going to continue with my history lecture, with all of its not-so-simple implications. And I’m about to add an especially nettlesome interpretation of the information conveyed by the map above: the territorial borders of Israel as outlined by the 1947 partition agreement were practically impossible to defend from outside attacks by a foreign military power.

The Arab nations surrounding Israel that opposed the partition plan apparently arrived at the same conclusion; the new nation was attacked after only a week after achieving national sovereignty. Somehow, the Israelis managed to defeat the assault. (I don’t know what would have happened had the invading armies been victorious, but it’s difficult for me to imagine a benign outcome for the millions of Jews residing there.) The Israelis concluded that the second time around, they might not be as fortunate, so in the aftermath of their defeat of the invaders they annexed enough territory to at least provide the semblance of a contiguous state. As opposed to the polity gerrymander of the territory shown on the map above, which looks to me as if it was designed to collapse in a matter of days if it was ever forced to confront an attack by any reasonably sized hostile armed force.

(to be continued)

I don’t know when I’ll get back to this essay, but in the meantime, I need to make clear that what the Israeli armed forces have done in Gaza is a ghastly overkill. Inexcusable. At one point I supported the US arms shipments to Israel, because I wasn’t up on the ongoing level of munitions supplied by the US. I changed my position from there to favoring stopping arms shipments months ago. The testimony of people like emergency doctors and surgeons in Gaza—people with years of experience in combat zones—has reinforced my opinion that it was the right decision.