I

The reader will surely accept that Macdara was once a young man characterised by anger and a wild impatience with the idiocy of others. Now one means by which he was able to control this emotion was by refusing to engage with reporting on apartheid in Palestine; specifically, with the insult that the Settler State of Israel represents to the Palestinian people, Arab peoples, Jewish peoples, and humankind the world over. He was ever unwavering in his dedication to the Palestinian cause, you must understand. But he could not read about Israeli crimes, nor could he handle the sober reporting and discussion in the late capitalist media of the most absurd and cruel lies originating in the Israeli government’s busy press department.

Consider this: a group of people on their land, for countless generations. A horrifically persecuted group of people from elsewhere are awarded this land. The blameless have their land taken from them. Those who were victimised by people on a different continent are awarded this land. One might think that the Jewish people would have been awarded land confiscated from Germany—and however unlikely that might seem (“think of the consequences: revanchism, antisemitism!”), how, Macdara asks, could the consequences have been any worse than the extraordinary theft of Palestinian land, the attempted annihilation of Palestinian existence, from the Nakba, through the constantly expanding settler state, to the present second Nakba?  

Of course to steal Arab land gives rise to a benefit in that the anti-Israel sentiment to which this violence inevitably gives rise can be dismissed as—yet another!—sign of the backwardness of the benighted Arab race. So a European problem is displaced onto Western Asia in a way that allows Europeans to shake their heads in Disappointment: disappointed at being proven right once again. They are always at it over there.  Nothing to be done.  But Israel, they show the best of our common values.  A shining city on a hill!

II

The founding of the State of Israel represented a qualitative break. The Jewish people had been subject to every barbarity and every vicious innuendo for millennia. There was no possible justification for this treatment. The Jewish people were blameless. Turning to the Nakba and its aftermath however, we see the foundation of a settler colonial state in Palestine, the instrumentalisation of violence against the native people for 80 years: this puts the Palestinian resistance in a different space entirely to the pogroms of Europe. When you hear that it is happening again, or that the loss of lives in the Hamas attack is the largest loss of Jewish life in a single day since the Holocaust, recall that this is not that. Israel is undertaking an extraordinary experiment: to control every element of Palestinian life, in preference to total eradication of these lives. Your correspondent finds it hard to believe that Israel will long eschew total annihilation: some pretext on the ground, some distraction abroad—and the future will likely see plenty of distracting wars underway—and the expedient of killing off Palestinians, a people long denied, in the Israeli imaginary, the status of Human Subjects, will be summarily undertaken.  

If Hamas hadn’t attacked, Gaza would be peaceful today, says a popular US podcaster and academic. But there was no peace. That silence was not peace: Gaza represented an experiment in controlling a population so as not to have to exterminate them. And the podcaster was fooled, being willing to be fooled. Gaza was a concentration camp. What Palestinians in Gaza had was not life, being controlled and contingent; they had been left alive. All power was elsewhere. Israel conducted a genocide of the living, believing that lives so controlled are not worth the killing. That changed, as Israel moved to commit an active genocide: the concentration camp became an extermination camp, as the world watched.

III

When Hamas kills civilians, it is not that it is incorrect to say that this is a bad thing. In fact it is easy to say so, and the leaders of the countries of advanced capitalism all hide behind this facile statement. It was easy for them to get from there to we stand with Israel, projecting the Israeli flag on the European Commission, etc. And what a comfortable space it is to be on the same side as Israel!  What a relief.

It is harder to go in the other direction, from the easy condemnation of Hamas violence to a consideration of why it is that a group of people whom we must presume to be as fundamentally anti-murder as the average Irish citizen, say, would take to a militant campaign. But this requires condemning two things at once: the violence of Hamas, and the extraordinary background violence of the Occupation, which, however, has been designed not to rise above the threshold of the remarkable. Of course Israel is capable of spectacular violence, and it retaliated immediately with its habitual mass punishment of the population of Gaza: shutting off food, water and energy: destroying as much as it wished, whole families killed, homes, businesses and public services smashed.  

Israel has learnt from the Europeans: if you are going to do violence, make it massive systematic violence. Tawdry acts of terrorism are no mark of civilisation, but controlling a whole people, that is. Make the violence so large that it thins out, spread over a whole State: it is the backdrop to the natives’ lives, it becomes invisible even, as that which is everywhere may not be seen.

And Israel has also mastered the lie, that emblem of settler colonial arrogance, familiar from European adventurers worldwide. Macdara’s favourite, perhaps the single statement in the world that makes him most angry: Hamas are hiding in Gaza among civilians. Hamas members were squeezed into one of the most densely populated places in the world, an open-air prison—how could they meaningfully occupy a separate space, and why would they, since Israel would seize or flatten any such space? And the cheek of this claim, rendered as ever with a straight face by people in a militarised society, where everyone is trained in weaponry and is ready to fight if necessary to protect their American dreamland: this tiny corner of the world emptied of…of whom?  No, no one, just empty until the settlers arrived.