An Uncomplicated History, or Why This Didn’t Start on October 7th
I would like you to imagine, for a moment, your home. Imagine the actual, physical place. Think of the shape of your home as you’re pulling into the driveway, the light flooding the windows from inside. Think of how you’ll walk through the rooms after a long day. What lights will you turn on first? Imagine walking through the living room and seeing your favorite couch or chair. Imagine walking through the kitchen—see the color of the tile. Imagine your favorite mug on the counter. What season is it? Depending on the season, you can imagine your lawn. Did the maple tree shed its leaves for fall? Is there ice on the front porch steps? Maybe it’s spring, and the hydrangeas are in bloom once again. Are you keeping the rabbits at bay? This is your home, and these are the simple things.
Now imagine, if you will, coming home one day to find someone sitting in your favorite chair. “This is my chair now,” the man says. “In fact, this whole house is mine.” You laugh, of course. How silly could that be? This person, this stranger, coming into your home and claiming it’s theirs. You tell them to leave. The man stands from the chair and says no, in fact, you have to leave. There are soldiers outside now, who will happily escort you. They will remove you by force, if they must. No, you can’t pack your things. None of this is yours anymore. You are in disbelief. You’d only just gone to work that morning—and now suddenly, you are homeless. How could this be? You tell the man once more that you refuse.
The man approaches you, more bold this time. “The land this house sits on was promised to me,” he says. “God promised this land to my people and I have come to claim it.” You shake your head. “But I live here,” you say. “My family lives here. And my parents live just down the street.” The man says this doesn’t matter—their homes have been claimed too. You and your entire family must relocate. “Fine,” you say, “I will move to the other side of the neighborhood.” You want your children to remain in school. No, the man says. You must leave the country. And you can never return. It’s his country now, not yours. It doesn’t matter where you go, but it can’t be here.
You’ve never been to another country. In fact, you’ve barely been to another state. You only know this place, this home, this land. You grew up here, you have memories here. You think of the high school, the football field, the mom and pop restaurant on Main Street. You think of the flowers you planted in the backyard with your kids. Anywhere else, you would be a complete stranger. You say no once more. The man pulls a gun from behind his back and says if you don’t go, he will not hesitate to kill you, or your entire family. The soldiers are outside your door now. You hear a plane overhead. You know those planes are stashed with high-powered missiles that could level your whole residential block. You realize your entire family could be crushed beneath that bomb.
This is an extremely simplified example of something called settler-colonialism. The term itself is defined as “a type of colonialism in which the indigenous peoples of a colonized region are displaced by settlers who permanently form a society there.”
The most well-understood real-life example of this is when the English settlers arrived to North America from Britain and claimed America as their own, despite the Native Americans already living there. Even the term “Native American” implies that this population was native to America. It is estimated that at the time the English settlers landed in America, the Native American population was estimated to be anywhere between 5 million to 15 million. By 1900, that population was less than 300,000. The America we live in today was built on stolen land. The land our homes are built on now was once home to an entirely different population of people. And in order to claim that land from them, the English settlers needed to move out or entirely exterminate the population who existed there first.
I understand this is a hard truth, but it is a necessary truth. And this necessary truth is key to understanding the situation that is currently ongoing, and has been ongoing, between Israel and Palestine. While there is debate as to the biblical origins of Israel and Palestine, what we do know is that long before Israel was recognized as a state, which didn’t happen until 1948, Palestine existed. And within Palestine, lived the Palestinians.
The Israel-Palestine conflict has been traced back to 1917 to something called the Balfour Declaration. At this time, the Allies—which included the United Kingdom, France, United States, Japan, and Italy—had just won the first World War. Winning the war meant that all of the land and territories that were previously controlled by the Ottoman Empire were now under British rule, and this included what is now referred to as Historical Palestine. During the war, Britain made several conflicting promises as to what would become of Historical Palestine. Ultimately, though, Britain decided to declare Palestine as “a national home for the Jewish people.” Britain primarily desired control over Palestine for geopolitical strategic reasons, but it is said by some sources that Britain also had antisemitic motivations in wanting to reduce Jewish immigration to Britain.
This call for a “national home for the Jewish people” originated with Theodor Herzl, the founder of the political form of Zionism, which is defined as “a movement to establish a Jewish homeland.” “The Jewish question,” he wrote in 1896 in The Jewish State, “was not a social or religious question but a national question that could be solved only by making it ‘a political world question to be discussed and settled by the civilized nations of the world in council.’” It becomes clear, in Herzl’s own words and writings, that his intention for the Zionist movement was the transformation of the entire land into a Jewish state. As Herzl saw it, there was only room for one people, the Jewish people, in Historical Palestine.
The problem with recognizing Palestine as “a national home for the Jewish people” was that the Palestinians already lived there. And the problem with the Balfour Declaration, issued by a British cabinet and committing Britain to the creation of a national Jewish homeland, was that it never mentioned the Palestinians, who were the great majority of the country’s population.
Prior to securing Britain’s backing, the Zionist movement had been in search of a “great power” to help facilitate the colonization of Historical Palestine. With Britain’s now unstinting support, their aims of sovereignty and complete control of Palestine were all the more plausible. And Herzl, in his own writings, knew this transformation would not be without its challenges. He understood the importance of “disappearing” the native population of Palestine in order for Zionism to succeed.
Herzl’s diary, 1895: “We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our own country. The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.”
He also understood how carefully they needed to do it in order to keep the world’s favor. The Zionist leaders understood that “under no circumstances should they talk as though the Zionist program required the expulsion of the Arabs, because that would cause the Jews to lose the world’s sympathy.”
Yusuf Diya, a prominent Ottoman politician who served three times as mayor of Jerusalem, seemed to understand better than most the real consequence of the Zionist movement. He wrote a seven-page letter to be passed on to Herzl which read: “Palestine is an integral part of the Ottoman Empire, and more gravely, it is inhabited by others.” He continued: “Nothing could be more just and equitable” than for “the unhappy Jewish nation” to find a refuge elsewhere. Diya ended his letter with a plea to Herzl: “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.” Yusuf Diya knew there was no way to reconcile Zionism’s claims on Palestine and its explicit aim of Jewish statehood and sovereignty there with the rights and well-being of the country’s indigenous inhabitants.
In early 1947, the British government announced it would be handing over the disaster it had created in Palestine to the United Nations and ending its colonial project. On November 29, 1947, the UN adopted Resolution 181, recommending the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. This is one of many “deals” the Palestinians are criticized for rejecting—but they have legitimate reasons for doing so. At the time, Jews in Palestine constituted one third of the population and owned less than six percent of the total land area. Under the UN partition plan, Jews were allocated 55 percent of the land, encompassing many of the main cities with Palestinian Arab majorities and the important coastline from Haifa to Jaffa. The Arab state would be deprived of key agricultural lands and seaports, which led to the Palestinians to rejecting the proposal. Shortly following the UN Resolution 181, war broke out between the Palestinian Arabs and Zionist armed groups, who, unlike the Palestinians, had gained extensive training and arms from fighting alongside Britain in World War II.
This led to one of the most notable moments in this history, called the Nakba. Zionist paramilitary groups launched a vicious process of ethnic cleansing (defined as: “the mass expulsion or killing of members of an unwanted ethnic or religious group in a society”) in the form of large-scale attacks aimed at expelling Palestinians from their towns and villages. Between 1947 and 1949, at least 750,000 Palestinians (from a 1.9 million population) were displaced and made refugees. Zionist forces secured more than 78 percent of historic Palestine during this time by ethnically cleansing and destroying ~530 villages and cities, and killing around 15,000 Palestinians in a series of mass atrocities, including more than 70 massacres. Following this, Israel was established as a state on May 14, 1948, by David Ben-Gurion, the head of the Jewish Agency. This means anyone who was born before the year 1948 is older than the state of Israel. This means that there are Palestinians alive today who actively watched their homeland of Palestine be stolen, and renamed as Israel.
The other very notable moment of this history is Israel’s occupation of Palestine, which officially began in 1967. What does life look like for Palestinians under Israel’s occupation? According to Amnesty International, “Israel’s military rule disrupts every aspect of daily life in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. It continues to affect whether, when and how Palestinians can travel to work or school, go abroad, visit their relatives, earn a living, attend a protest, access their farmland, or even access electricity or a clean water supply. It means daily humiliation, fear and oppression. People’s entire lives are effectively held hostage by Israel.”
This means that anyone who is 56 years old this year, in 2023, would never have known a day without Israel’s occupation. You know what else comes with Israel’s occupation? Bombardments—or a continuous attack with bombs, shells, or other missiles. Imagine living your entire life held hostage, only to be bombed by the people holding you hostage. Imagine not only having to worry about your home being stolen by armed settlers or bulldozed, but also having to worry about bombs dropping on your head, on your family’s head, courtesy of the people holding you hostage. This is also why Gaza is often referred to as an “open air prison.”
As we know, from a hundred years of history and siege, the entire aim of these bombardments, and of this occupation, is to get Palestinians off the land that Israel feels it has a claim to. From the earliest days of modern Zionism, the goal has always been controlling what used to be Historical Palestine. And the founder of modern Zionism understood, from the very beginning, what this would mean for the indigenous population.
While I am hugely oversimplifying this history, which spans over a hundred years at this point, it can be stated pretty simply. In his book The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, which I’ve been quoting from, Rashid Khalidi writes, “the modern history of Palestine can best be understood in these terms: as a colonial war waged against the indigenous population, by a variety of parties, to force them to relinquish their homeland to another people against their will.”
We don’t have to imagine what settler-colonialism might have looked like throughout history because we are watching it play out on our social media screens. And since the Hamas attack on October 7th, we have watched Israel escalate their occupation on Palestine ten-fold. I write this because it is important to understand the the Israel-Palestine conflict began long before October 7th; that there was over a hundred years of siege, and over 75 years of military occupation, that led us to this moment.
So now I ask, once more, for you to imagine your home. Imagine the actual, physical place. Imagine your house, your yard, your street, your neighborhood, your community. And then, imagine someone coming in to take all of that away. And not only do they want to take your home, they want to cast you out of your home and your neighborhood forever. Not great, right? If you can understand this, my hope is that you will be able to understand why so many people around the world—literally millions—are standing behind Palestine at this moment.
I also want to say, very clearly and specifically, that being in favor of Palestinians having their freedom from Israel’s military occupation is in no way, shape, or form antisemitic. The issue here is not with Jews or Judaism, the issue is with the ideology of Zionism. And for anyone to equate those two things, for anyone to say that being Pro-Palestine is being against Jews or is antisemitic, is completely and purposefully false. The leaders of Zionism have purposefully tried to make this conflict seem as complex as possible, again, with the understanding that carrying out the goals of Zionism needed to be discreet in order to maintain the world’s favor, but at the end of the day, it’s not so. The Palestinians have lived in Palestine for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, and they should be allowed to remain there without the threat and rule of a military occupation. Palestinians should finally know peace, and should no longer be held hostage on their own land. Full stop.
