Amjad Iraqi · After the Flood · LRB 21 October 2023
▻https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n20/amjad-iraqi/after-the-flood
Referring to the hospital attack, Rishi Sunak, who also made a publicity visit to Israel, told Parliament: ‘If we don’t treat what comes out of the Kremlin as the gospel truth, we should not do the same with Hamas.’ The West’s distorted notion of the powerful and the powerless in Israel-Palestine has never been clearer.
It is in part because of that response that many Palestinians, to the frustration of some of their supporters, have been unable to contend, at least publicly, with the moral travesty of Hamas’s massacres. As they see it, Hamas inverted the violence of the occupation, inflicting on the oppressor a taste of the suffering it metes out routinely. On the streets and online, many Palestinian activists have dropped the language of diplomacy and stopped appealing to international laws that have failed them. They are no longer willing to accept the amnesiac narrative that says their grievances date to 1967 rather than 1948, and that their future lies in a quasi-state on only a fifth of their former homeland. Many are tired of apologising for violent resistance, as if violence were not inherent to all anti-colonial struggles. They are tired of Western governments and media that treat their resistance as more egregious than the Israeli occupation, while non-violent acts are deemed antisemitic or decried as ‘terrorism’. For Palestinians, the enemy is and has always been a settler colonial project intent on their erasure. And they fear that Gaza is at this moment on the verge of annihilation.
Hamas’s brutal attack demolished a psychological barrier more surely than it could any physical one. Since the end of the Second Intifada, Israeli society has tried to insulate itself from the military occupation it has imposed for more than half a century, maintaining a bubble punctured only occasionally by rocket barrages from Gaza or shootings in Israeli cities. It is telling that the mass protest movement which has been agitating since January against the government’s plans to overhaul the judiciary has kept the Palestinian question off its agenda. Apart from a small bloc of anti-occupation protesters, most Israelis have seemed to believe that the current system could bring them lasting safety.
That bubble has now burst. But the Palestinians are now the objects of the wrath of an Israeli government prepared to destroy Gaza and, if possible, expel its population. The recent – and unprecedented – pro-Palestine demonstrations in Cairo, Baghdad, Beirut, London, Paris, Washington and elsewhere make clear that millions recognise this moment for what it is and are ready to challenge their governments’ complicity in apartheid and its gruesome logic. But it will take much more than flags waved many miles away to help Palestinians fend off the ghost of Sharon in Gaza.
21 October