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Responses to the current violence in, and from, Gaza vary as follows:

• Israeli leaders, much of the Israeli public, and Zionists in the West, thirsting for vengeance, call for genocidal mass murder and/or wholesale ethnic-cleansing operations against the people of Gaza.
• Many liberal leftists, evidently obsessive to distance themselves from all U.S.-designated “terrorists” and other alleged enemies of “democracy,” always preface any condemnation of Israeli crimes against the Palestinians with an absolute condemnation of the October 7 attack against Israel by resistance forces in Gaza. Thusly, they purvey a false moral equivalence between the violence of the oppressed and that of their oppressor.
• A few partisans of the Palestinian cause have asserted that all Israeli suffering from the October 7 attack by Gaza resistance fighters was deserved, thereby exhibiting a lack of recognition and empathy for the innocent victims thereof. In fact, innocent victims are generally inevitable in war, even in just and necessary wars, but nevertheless deserving of sympathetic recognition.
• Unfortunately, after decades of racist distortions by Zionists and supportive imperial Western states, and given hard-to-avoid reliance upon a dominant and biased Western mainstream media, even consistent supporters of the Palestinian cause sometimes take, as fact, notions which have become generally accepted as “true” (unaware that critical investigation may disprove it). Consequently, mistakes can occur when there is rush to judgment and publication without questioning and scrutinizing so as to ascertain what are the relevant actual facts.

  ROOTS OF THE CONFLICT. The current Gaza War can be fully and accurately understood only when placed in the context of Jewish and Palestinian history.

  Defining Palestine. Prior to the 16^th century BCE, the territory on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean was populated by small Canaanite city-states. In the 10^th and 9^thcenturies BCE, three small kingdoms (Israel, Judah, and Philistia) occupied the territory south of the Lebanon. From the Assyrian conquest (8^th century BCE) until 1917, the territory was nearly always under the rule of a succession of tributary empires, the Ottoman being the last. Throughout those centuries, various episodes of oppression and revolt, as well as opportunities in other places, resulted in a large Judean/Jewish diaspora. After the Roman Empire made trinitarian Christianity the established religion (4^th century CE), the population in Palestine began increasingly to convert (from Judaism, Samaritanism, paganism, other forms of Christianity, etc.) to the established faith. Similarly, following conquest by the first Islamic empire, the population gradually began converting to Islam, until it was more than 80% Muslim by the mid-19^th century. Imperial Britain, which conquered the area in 1917, was given a League of Nations Mandate over Palestine, specifically defined as the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Since then, the term “Palestine,” despite Zionist objections (that a larger expanse of land is rightfully theirs or alternatively that there is no such country as Palestine and no such people as “Palestinians”), has generally meant the Mandate territory “from the river to the sea.”

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  Christian procession in Bethlehem c. 1920. [Source: middleeasteye.net]

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  “Jewish problem”? European Jews had experienced centuries of persecution (segregation into ghettos, abusive impositions, and pogroms) under medieval Christian European autocracies. In the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, Jewish activists responded to the most recent pogroms and other persecutions in two opposing ways: Whereas anti-racist secularists (liberal democrats and socialists) strove, along with like-minded gentiles, for equal rights for Jews in their home countries, Zionists, defining Jewish presence in gentile countries as a “Jewish problem,”^[1] embraced a racial conception of Jews and refused to do so.^[2] They sought instead to remove Europe’s Jews to colonial settlements in Palestine where they intended to eventually displace the indigenous population in order to establish a “Jewish state.”^[3]

  Resistance to Judeophobia? Until World War II (1939-45), Zionist organizations routinely colluded with Judeophobe governments (including Nazi Germany) in facilitating Jewish removal (with preference for emigration to Palestine).^[4] Moreover, in the face of extreme persecution in Nazi Germany (1933-39), the Zionist Organization (formed in 1897) discouraged efforts, as at the Évian Conference (1938), to obtain refuges for persecuted European Jews in countries (United States, Canada, Australia, Latin America, etc.) other than Palestine.

  Jewish-Arab conflict. Unlike in much of Europe, Palestinian Jews (about 4% of the population in 1880) lived amicably with their Muslim and Christian neighbors until the in-migration of European Zionist colonizers in the early 20^th century. Zionist settlement was sponsored by some European and American Jewish capitalists who provided money for land acquisitions (generally from absentee landlords who owned most of the arable land). The Zionists then evicted the indigenous Arab tenant farmers, thereby violating the traditional rights of the latter. Moreover, the Zionist sponsoring organization (Jewish Agency) and its landholding body (Jewish National Fund) required that Jewish employers hire only Jews and prohibited the sale of any Jewish-owned land to Arabs. Such racial discrimination was standard practice within the Zionist settlements, and it quite predictably provoked Palestinian Arab resentment against the Zionist settlers. [See UNISPAL: The Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem: 1917-1947 (Part I) ~ §§ V and VI]

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  Jews in Jerusalem 1895 (Wiki).  Zionist settlers in Israel during the era of the Ottoman Empire. [Source: en.wikipedia.org]

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  Imperialism. After other colonialist powers had turned down Zionist applications, imperial Britain decided, with its Balfour Declaration (in 1917), to sponsor the Zionist project of establishing a European Jewish colonial settler state in Palestine.^[5] Britain visualized said state as developing into a useful protectorate [UNISPAL: The Origins … (Part I) ~ § II] through which to project British imperial and commercial power over a part of the world in which British capital and empire were already heavily invested (notably in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company [now BP Inc.], Shell Oil, and the Suez Canal).

  Democratic governance denied. Throughout its (1917-48) rule over Palestine, Britain deferred to the Zionists by refusing to meet its obligations (pursuant to Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant), which required the Mandatory power to respect the wishes of the country’s population and to prepare said country for independence by establishing a democratically elected representative governing body [UNISPAL: The Origins … (Part I) ~ §§ IV-IX]. Why? Because such body would undoubtedly have opposed continued moves to transform Palestine into a Zionist nation-state and would have demanded an end to unconstrained Zionist immigration, Zionist land acquisitions, evictions of Arab tenant farmers, and racially discriminatory employment practices.

  killing thousands of Palestinian Arabs. Those militias would, in 1948, be constituted as the Israeli army.

  Partition [UNISPAL: The Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem: 1917-1947 (Part II) ~ §§ I-IV]. The then 57-member United Nations (UN), dominated mostly by European and American states ruled by white and/or Eurocentric* elites, proposed (in 1947) a partition of Palestine (by then with a population 32% Jewish and 68% Arab) such that a “Jewish state” would have 55% of the territory, a Palestinian Arab state would have 42%, and 3% around Jerusalem would be under UN administration. Moreover, the “Jewish state” was to rule over a huge Arab minority (more than 40% of Palestinian Arabs), while the “Arab state” would have almost no Jews. Representative democracy was evidently deemed unacceptable where Arabs were the majority, but acceptable where Jews (mostly recent immigrant colonists from Europe) were the majority. [* Note: Although most Latin American countries’ populations were majority non-white (Indigenous, mestizo, etc.), in most of those, the ruling elites belonged to racial groups (white and/or mestizo) which identified with their European ethnic heritage.]

  forcibly expelled more than 80% of the Palestinians (directly and/or through terrorist threat) from territory which came under Israeli control. Four Arab states intervened militarily, by using mostly ill-trained and poorly equipped military forces in ineffectual defense of the Palestinians. The Zionist state confiscated all of the properties of the expelled Palestinians (whom it barred from returning) and nearly 40% of the landholdings of the Palestinians who remained in its territory. It also subjected the latter to repressive military rule for the next 18 years.^[6]

  Later conquests. Israel launched surprise wars of conquest (1956 and 1967). U.S. pressure forced it to give up its 1956 conquests (Gaza and Sinai) and to abort its planned seizure of the West Bank and parts of Syria and Lebanon. U.S. acquiescence, in 1967, allowed Israel to seize much the same territories which it had wanted to annex in 1956. Subsequent Israeli rule (over Gaza, East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Syria’s Golan, and Lebanon’s Sheba’a Farms) since 1967 has subjected their Arab populations to persistent violations of human rights, continuing to the present day.

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