Image: Fires in Israel and the Gaza strip – 7 October 2023 Image is about 48 kilometers wide. – CC BY 2.0
Last November, on the one-month anniversary of the October 7th assault, President Isaac Herzog of Israel wrote a letter to university and college presidents in the United States, seeking to prevail on them to “condemn the barbarous acts.” Herzog wrote admiringly of the “critical thinking skills” he himself gained during his education at American universities, while aiming to quell debate on campus for fear that an abundance of critical thinking was leading students to criticize Israel for bringing on the anti-colonial violence, instead of accepting it as pure, unadulterated evil that came out of nowhere.
“We are all students of history,” Herzog declared, before indicting the “foul ideologies targeting Jews” that he viewed as the driving force behind the devastating attacks of the month before and now polluting the minds of the US college students he was seeking to silence. Invoking the Holocaust by name, Herzog drew a straight line from the antisemitism of the Nazis to the present, thereby erasing the contingent nature of the history of what Edward Said once described as “two peoples locked in a terrible struggle over the same territory, in which one, bent beneath a horrific past of systematic persecution and extermination, was in the position of an oppressor towards the other people.”
It was interesting to see Herzog recruit history, which he understands as a topic, not a method, to his cause because shortly before he wrote, his own government had slammed secretary-general of the UN, António Guterres for declaring that while nothing could justify the killing and maiming of civilians, it was also important to understand that the assault “did not happen in a vacuum.” In other words, Guterres thought it necessary to specify the historical forces at work and instead chose, not the Nazi Holocaust, but 1967 as the relevant context, noting that Palestinians “have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.” Israeli officials fulminated over Guterres’ remark, while Yad Vashem chairman Dani Dayan claimed that he had spouted a “justifying context” and thus “failed the test” for purportedly not condemning the perpetrators as evil in no uncertain terms.
The Israeli government’s attack on Guterres caused historian Ilan Pappé to weigh in. What Pappé feared the most about Israel’s harsh reaction to Guterres was the prospect that something as fundamental to the search for truth as basic historical practice might now be deemed antisemitic, as the state of Israel and its supporters expanded even further the now already expanded definition of antisemitism far beyond the hatred of Jews as Jews. The brutality of the October 7th attack, Pappé pointed out, “cannot be justified in any way, but that does not mean it cannot be explained and contextualized.”
Pappé then sketched out, in a disciplined fashion, a four-part historical framework applicable to October 7th. He began with the Christian theological roots of Zionism in the nineteenth century organized around the millennial wish for a Jewish return to the Holy Land. Theology evolved into public policy toward the end of the century, as political Zionism emerged to address the European problem of antisemitism by focusing on Palestine, where Jews would assert a superior historical claim over the indigenous residents, a development that eventually gave rise to a settler-colonial project. Context two began in 1948, as the Zionists terrorized, murdered, and expelled the Palestinians based on a systematic plan of ethnic cleansing drawn up prior tothe founding of the state of Israel. Context three referenced the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip since 1967. And context four involved the siege in Gaza. The prehistory of the blockade began after Oslo when Israel, in 1996, finished constructing barbed wire, sensor-equipped fencing around the strip. Completion of the siege occurred shortly after Palestinians voted Hamas into office in a fair election. Beginning in 2007, as Pappé explains, Israel “controlled the exit and entry points to the Gaza ghetto, monitoring even the kind of food that entered—at times limiting it to a certain calorie count.”
A subsequent effort to historicize October 7th, now making the rounds on US college campuses, is being put forth by historian David N. Myers of UCLA, and Hussein Ibish, a scholar of comparative literature, who once collaborated with co-founder of The Electronic Intifada Ali Abunimah, but who has since taken a right turn. In a series of four lectures at Fordham University, Myers and Ibish have turned around Edward Said—who advocated for the Palestinian people with empathy for the genocide suffered by Jews—to acknowledge the trauma experienced by the Palestinians.
Their goal, it would seem, is to replace political scientist Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” model, which Said demolished as abstract, reductive, and ignorant of “complex histories,” with a new framework: call it a clash of traumas. They see trauma, especially as it related to the Jews’ experience of the Holocaust and the Palestinians’ experience of the Nakba, as the essence of the so-called Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As Myers put it, “these two traumas have intersected or clashed with one another to create sparks of conflict, perhaps no more profoundly so than in the wake of October 7th where the trauma of the Holocaust is retriggered for Jews and the trauma of the Nakba is retriggered for Palestinians, especially when we think about the fact that two million Palestinians in Gaza have been displaced.” Calling attention to the collective traumas of Jews and Palestinians is meant to aid us in adopting a more empathic understanding of the “conflict,” a word they employ despite acknowledging its asymmetric nature.
Myers and Ibish divide up the history into three main periods: 1882 to 1948; 1948 to 1967; and 1967 to 2023, which provide the contexts for “October 7th and Its Aftermath,” their crowning fourth lecture, in which they argue that the Abraham Accords, which ignored the Palestinian question, combined with the protests over Benjamin Netanyahu’s gravitation toward illiberalism as expressed in judicial reform (meant to more efficiently ethnically cleanse the Palestinians), and Hamas’ presumed anger at these developments, especially the former, to bring on the attack.
Comparing this periodization with Pappé’s rendering reveals significant overlap. Both historical interpretations agree on the importance of Zionism, which is why Myers and Ibish begin their story in 1882 when the first wave of Jews migrated from Russia to Palestine. And both acknowledge the importance of 1948 and 1967. The main difference is that Pappé emphasizes the siege of Gaza since 2007 and places it on an equal level with these earlier turning points.
No mention is made by Myers and Ibish in their five and a half hours of lectures of the more than 4,000 people killed by Israeli forces in the six assaults on Gaza between 2006 and 2022, which Ibish refers to as “these little wars.” It is not that they ignore the siege completely. Ibish acknowledges that after Israel removed its settlers from Gaza in 2005 it still “retained control over all means of ingress and egress” though this “different kind of occupation,” as he put it, goes by in the blink of an eye, hiding from view the mass murder and abject sadism that have taken place in the years leading up to October 7th.
Nor do Myers and Ibish mention the 2018–2019 Great March of Return, a year-and-a-half long almost completely peaceful popular protest, dreamt up by people outside of Hamas but ultimately embraced by the group, in which Palestinians marched to the fence separating Gaza and Israel to contest the siege. According to a 2020 UN report, the demonstrations led to the killing of one Israeli and the injury of seven others, and the deaths of 214 Palestinians, mostly unarmed, including 46 children. The number of injured Palestinians is jaw-dropping: more than 36,100. Some 4,903 of those injured, a report by the UN Human Rights Council reveals, suffered life-changing injuries to their lower bodies as the Israeli authorities cleared the way for snipers to aim low to deal with the “key inciters.” “Journalists and health workers who were clearly marked as such were shot,” the Human Rights Council concluded about Israel’s intentional infliction of harm, “as were children, women, and persons with disabilities.”
Selection of evidence is a normal part of historical study. But one wonders how we are supposed to empathize with the Palestinians, much less understand the historical forces that gave rise to the attack on October 7th, if the siege of Gaza and the resistance to it, especially the overwhelmingly nonviolent march to break the chains of colonialism, is swept under the rug.
Moreover, Hamas comes off in their analysis almost as a puppet whose strings are pulled by Israel which, as Ibish notes, funded and supported it to keep Gaza and the West Bank split, thereby preventing a Palestinian state, a plan that “worked beautifully, but it led inevitably to October 7th.” A more plausible theory of Hamas’ actions is put forward by Jeroen Gunning, a scholar of Middle Eastern politics who is the author of Hamas in Politics: Democracy, Religion, Violence (2008). Gunning has pointed out in a recent interview that Hamas had previously turned to wars, political overtures, and “then there’s this march, which is a nonviolent expression of anti-colonial struggle, and none of that leads to anything.” With its tactical arsenal nearing exhaustion, Gunning continues, the groundwork was laid “for the hardliners to come back in and say we have to prepare for a dramatic, violent explosion.”
Equally problematic is how Myers and Ibish handle the development of Zionism, in which they acknowledge the partial legitimacy of the settler-colonial framework while pointing out that “the reduction of Zionism to an ideology of either elimination or control of the land ignores the fact that Zionism was also really an ideology of survival, an ideology of escape.” Their logic is as follows. No matter how brutal and predatory the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians might be, there is a good justification: Zionism was developed to rescue Jews from the vicious antisemitism they experienced in Europe.
It is hard to square this seemingly rational desire for survival with the fact that the Zionists replicated the reasoning of none other than antisemitism itself, justifying the need for a Jewish homeland by arguing that Jews could never be assimilated in Europe and must exit the European stage to found a nation of their own. Not only did the Zionists adopt the logic of antisemitism, they crawled into bed with antisemites who welcomed their Zionism with open arms, including the Nazis, when it suited their colonial ambitions, which were predicated, above all, on the demographic premise of a Jewish majority in Palestine. The fears of dissident Zionists that the concept of a Jewish majority would lay the groundwork for Jews to claim a superior right at the expense of non-Jews in Palestine came true. Zionism has thus been characterized by political scientist Norman Finkelstein as a “radically exclusivist ideology” or, alternatively, in the words of intellectual historian Joseph Massad, as “a religio-racial epistemology of supremacy over the Palestinian Arabs, not unlike that used by European colonialism with its ideology of white supremacy over the natives.”
Another significant problem with how Myers and Ibish handle their discussion of Zionism emerges when they describe its imposition in Palestine without the proper contextualization. They tell us almost nothing about the non-Europeans Jews living in Palestine except that this Jewish community, as Ibish points out, was “not very big.” Yet somehow it seemed to be surviving in the Arab world before the arrival of the Zionists.
As Ussama Makdisi has explained in his Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World (2019), by the latter part of the nineteenth century, Ottoman reformers in the Arab eastern part of the empire had constructed a political framework founded on a secular understanding of equality that sought to incorporate as citizens both Muslims and non-Muslims. This ecumenical frame persisted and is evidenced in a British report on a struggle between Arabs and Jews, which flared up in Jerusalem in 1920. “Up to a very recent date the three sects, Moslem, Christians and Jews,” the report stated, “lived together in a state of complete amity.”
While avoiding any romanticization, Makdisi explains that the ecumenical frame, which “valorized religion and coexistence, and demonized sectarianism,” existed until Zionism led to its destruction by “inserting religion into nationalism in a part of the world already rife with politicized religious difference.” Myers and Ibish, by contrast, paint a picture of clashing traumas—Palestinian and Jewish—that seem inescapable when, in fact, even as late as the 1940s, liberals such as Albert Hourani, rejected the partition of Palestine, and put forward a plan for an Arab state in which, as Makdisi notes, “Jews could very plausibly be incorporated into an ecumenical nationalist Arab polity.”
Given the enormity of the horrors that have unfolded in Israel and Palestine over the last year and the resulting Mississippi River of blood, disciplined thinking about the historical forces that explain why this violence has taken the form that it has is needed now more than ever. Methodical historical thought can liberate us from the debilitating inevitabilities of a clashing traumas chronology, which makes it seem as if sectarianism is human nature. And trauma an inexorable part of the human condition. It can also make it easier to imagine alternatives and possibilities and, above all, can help produce a fuller understanding of why historical actors have done what they have done.
