FOR A ONE STATE SOLUTION (MULTI-ETHNIC, SECULAR AND DEMOCRATIC) IN PALESTINE

by Michele Nobile

 

1. Hamas' action: a barbaric and terrorist operation

Commentators have compared Operation Al-Aqsa Flood to several historical events, for example Pearl Harbor (in terms of surprise and impact) and the Tet Offensive (the 1968 North Vietnamese offensive pushed the US administration to begin peace negotiations). By choosing October 7 as the date of the attack, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and allied organizations obviously evoke the surprise attack by Egypt and Syria on Israel on Yom Kippur in 1973, the 50th anniversary of which was the previous day.

By type of attacking force, psychological impact and ferocity of the assault I am among those for which the most pertinent comparison is with the Al Qaeda terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The vast majority of the at least 1,300 Israelis killed in the incursion were civilians, Jews of both sexes and of all ages, including many dozens of Israeli Arabs, to which must be added the wounded and approximately 200 kidnapped hostages. Overall, the number of Israelis killed in just a few hours in Operation Al-Aqsa flood is more than four times the total killed in the fifteen years between 2008 and September 2023.

In evaluating the political and military consequences of the complex and surprising Hamas operation, one cannot ignore its terrorist rather than warlike character in the usual sense, that is, it was not aimed at striking the enemy armed force and/or taking control of territory. Although full of negative connotations and often used in a more instrumentally moralistic than rationally ethical-political way, I use the term «terrorism» here in a descriptive way: as an action of an individual or an organized group, whose value does not reside primarily in material damage inflicted on the enemy, but in the symbolic importance of the gesture itself; real objective is to affect the will to fight and the orientation of the political and/or social adversary, therefore with the aim of revenge and deterrent intimidation, or as an exemplary gesture which has the intention of arousing consensus and indicating - to the people or to the reference class - the right path to follow: purposes that can be combined. It is also necessary to distinguish terrorism carried out in the name of an oppressed people or a class dominated by state terrorism as the practice of a dominant caste or class. The distinction is politically relevant because the coherence between the means employed and the purpose can be very different in the two cases, 

This is especially true for oppressed peoples and the dominated class: terrorism can produce effects far from those desired or declared, it tends to replace apparatus warfare for the struggle, organization and self-defense of social movements.

The operation launched by Hamas and other organizations aspires to achieve the indicated terrorist objectives: intimidation against Israeli state terrorism and Zionist extremism, revenge for the deaths and suffering of the Palestinians, an «exemplary» gesture for Palestinians, Arab peoples and states against Zionist and Western domination.

What is horribly «ordinary» for Gaza is instead extraordinary for Israel and therefore psychologically and politically traumatic. However, trauma does not necessarily equate to paralysis. If before October the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu was in serious difficulty, now a government of national unity has been formed; a state of war was declared for the first time since 1973; the reservists - in August more than 10,000 had declared that they did not intend to serve if Netanyahu did not give up his reform of the judicial system - are mobilised: 360,000.

It is not possible that, however fanatical and optimistically hopeful of external help, the leaders of Hamas and other organizations underestimated the destructiveness of Israel’s retaliation in the face of an action of this magnitude. It was absolutely obvious that the attack by Hamas and other organizations would condemn the Palestinians of Gaza to terrible and unnecessary suffering: as of October 18, 3,478 Palestinians had already been killed in the Gaza Strip, including 853 children (on the 17th) and 64 in West Bank, the injured in the two regions are 12,500 and 1,284 respectively (United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs data). If the bombings do not cease and if the Israeli army invades Gaza, the Palestinian victims, mostly civilians, will be between ten and twenty times more numerous than the victims of the Hamas incursion. We cannot have any illusions about this, we can only hope that as many Gazans as possible will be allowed to reach safety, instead of remaining under siege to act as «human shields» for Hamas and «collateral damage» for the Israelis. And whatever their real motivations and objectives, discussed later in the article, Palestinian leaders cannot fail to have taken into account the possibility - if not the certainty - of military annihilation. The orography of Gaza is not that of southern Lebanon, favorable for defense, where Hezbollah is present in force; the Gaza Strip does not allow for defense in depth; it has no contiguity with countries - Syria and Iran - which could support it with arms supplies; Gaza Strip can be completely blocked: Hamas has no logistical background; the military capabilities and quality of the arsenal of Hamas and Islamic Jihad are much inferior to those of Hezbollah and, presumably, they have already discharged the mass of rockets available.

Operation Al-Aqsa flood was the exact opposite of a spontaneous popular uprising (which may result from and involve the action of an organization but is not determined by it) and of the first Intifada, which was the moment of maximum sympathy for the Palestinian cause. Then it was truly a challenge between David’s sling and the brute strength of the colossus Goliath. Instead, 2023 is a coldly deliberate terrorist operation, not an explosion of popular anger.

This said, I move from the description to the ethical-political evaluation, the reasons for which I will explore further below.

For the Palestinian people, Operation Al-Aqsa flood is a human catastrophe, which does not result from an error of evaluation or from unintentional and unpredictable effects on the part of those who decided it. The material agent of the catastrophe is the Israeli armed force, but Hamas and its allies share political responsibility with the Israeli government and its supporters.

Hamas uses the Palestinians of Gaza as cannon fodder for its own power purposes. Hamas is an enemy of the Palestinian cause. The Palestinians are the first interested in eliminating Hamas and its associates.

For the Israelis and for the world, the Hamas Operation is an act of barbarism worthy of the pogroms of the Russian Black Hundreds at the time of the Tsar or the Nazi Kristallnacht. It is a horror that Jews are still killed because they are Jews. It is a crime on par with the massacre in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. It is a war crime and a crime against humanity, a shame that tarnishes the Palestinian cause. This fact cannot be reduced by listing Israeli war crimes, nor can it be justified by the daily barbarity that the Palestinians have suffered for many decades. There is no justification for horror wherever it comes from, otherwise all horrors, especially those of the powerful, will always find their justification in the name of the end that justifies the means. 

For for the protests against the war and for Palestinian rights to have political and moral credibility and therefore consensus, the atrocity of Hamas and its partners must be condemned in the clearest and most unequivocal way.

Whatever the expectations of the Hamas leaders, the terrorist characteristics and the consequent effects of Operation Flood objectively demonstrate the impossibility of militarily defeating Israel, whose destructive potential, including nuclear weapons, remains intact. Knowing history, one can understand that the prospect of winning the State of Israel through armed struggle died at least more than forty years ago, when Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in June 1982 led to the expulsion of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from that country. Operation Flood is the last barbaric but desperate coup that marks its definitive failure. 

It is proven that on the path of armed struggle and terrorism the Palestinian people will never be able to obtain justice. It has become a politically useless path and a morally unacceptable waste of lives.

The rise of Hamas was the result of another failure: that of al-Fatah, of the Oslo accords and of the aspiration for an independent Palestinian state alongside that of Israel. On the other hand, as long as Israel remains constitutionally an ethnocentric and Zionist state, the Palestinians will not be able to have justice. At this point, the only pursuable objective is therefore that of a single multi-ethnic Israeli-Palestinian state, obviously secular so that the feud between Judaism and Islam does not survive.

 

A PARIAH PEOPLE: A PLEA FOR HYAM MACCOBY AND HIS CRITICISM OF ANTI-SEMITISM, by Peter Gorenflos (in cooperation with Emanuel Rund)

IN DUE LINGUE (Inglese, Tedesco)
IN TWO LANGUAGES (English, German)

Barnes & Noble, 1998

The Disputation

Hyam Maccoby (1924–2004) became known to a wider audience in the US and the UK above all through his play The Disputation. This is about one of the publicly led disputations that took place in the Middle Ages between a rabbi and a Catholic priest with the purpose of moving the Jewish people to convert to Christianity. In the historically proven disputation of 1263 in Barcelona between Rabbi Moses ben Nahman and Catholic priest Pablo Christiani, which took place under the liberal regency of King James of Aragon, the Christian had no chance against the rabbi’s logically stringent line of argument. After this, the Dominicans propagated a distortion of what really happened and thereby forced Moses ben Nahman to reply. Despite promises to the contrary, he then, under pressure from the Pope, had to go into exile. Other, similar disputations often ended with a bloodbath carried out against the Jews and public burnings of the Talmud. The Inquisition was at the ready, supported by the Pope, who would soon gain considerable political influence. The play, directed by Bob Kalfin and starring well-known actor Theodore Bikel as the rabbi, was a great success and was subsequently adapted as a film by the BBC, with Christopher Lee as King James.

Only on the predominantly Catholic European mainland, the “continent”, is the ancient history expert, Talmud philologist and former librarian at the Leo Baeck College in London, Hyam Maccoby, almost unknown. His most recent position was a professorship Jewish Studies at the University of Leeds.

The Mythmaker

His central work, The Mythmaker (1986), did not appear in Germany until 20 years later. As a historian of the school called “the Jewish view of Jesus”, he documents and substantiates the proof, hardly new, that Jesus could not have been the founder of Christianity but was firmly anchored in Jewish society, which regarded the Torah and took on a leading role in the Pharisee movement. He had the Messianic aim of re-establishing the Jewish monarchy, freeing his land from the yoke of Roman occupation and then doing away with all military rule worldwide. This claim to be the King of the Jews – an open provocation to the Roman occupiers – landed him in prison and after sentencing by the Roman governor Pontius Pilate on the cross, where he and numerous other Jewish freedom fighters died a martyr’s death. Had he simply been one of the many unsuccessful aspiring Messiahs, he would soon have been forgotten, if it had not been for his direct adherents, the Nazarenes, who believed in his resurrection by means of a divine miracle and began to establish themselves as a Jewish sect within the Pharisee movement, led by their Jewish leaders Peter and James. Here, Maccoby develops the whole panorama of a society under the rule of the world power of Rome, he shows the various groups, the compromising sect of the Sadducees, one of whom was the high priest who acted as a chief of police for Rome, the Herodians as Quisling and titular kings, the militant Zealots and above all the Pharisees, well regarded among the people, who were the real leaders of the oppressed Jewish majority and guaranteed the spiritual survival of the Jews after the destruction of the Temple.