From 1882 to October 7, 2023, Israel’s long march

When and how did the conflict in Palestine begin? The question that many have asked themselves after 7 October 2023 with the massacre of Jews by Hamas and the extremely violent and unstoppable reaction of Israel which has already caused over 40 thousand deaths in the Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip and in the West Bank has an answer distant in time. It does not date back to 1948 when, to comply with the UN resolution, the State of Israel was officially born. And not even in 1967 when, after the ‘six day war’, Israel conquered a large part of Palestine, relegating the Arab inhabitants to limited areas: the Gaza Strip, defined as the “largest refugee camp in the world”, and the West Bank.

It all began in 1882, when the first Zionist settlers arrived in what was Ottoman Palestine, Jews fleeing from the pogroms and persecutions in the Russian Empire of the years 1881-1882 and then of the years 1903-1906 and finding refuge in Palestine, welcomed by the local inhabitants and helped to settle in those lands under the rule of the Ottoman Empire.

To understand exactly what is happening in the Middle East, to understand, beyond ideologies, the reasons of Jews and Arabs, a precious little book written by the famous Israeli historian Ilan Pappè, ‘A very short history of the conflict between Israel and Palestine’, arrives in bookstores today.From 1882 to today’ (Fazi editore, translated from English by Valentina Nicoli’; 140 pages – Price: 15 euros), in which the author reconstructs the story of two peoples who now share a single land. From the origins of Zionism as a colonial movement to the ethnic cleansing of 1948, from Palestinian resistance to the occupation, to the failure of the two-state solution, to October 7, 2023 and the genocidal policies in the Gaza Strip.

Left-wing intellectual, candidate in the 1999 elections with the Jewish Communist Party, here Pappè however wears the role most congenial to him as a historian, trying to shed light with clarity and competence on the main events, characters and historical processes to explain why this long bloody conflict over a century has become so insoluble. Ilan Pappè, born in Haifa in 1954, is one of the most famous Israeli historians who defines himself as anti-Zionist and with a cultural base that ranges from Karl Marx to new history scholars. In his ‘Very short history of the conflict between Israel and Palestine, in just a few pages he manages to give a broad and clear picture of what has happened in the last century and a half of history.

Debunking various narratives of the Israeli Zionist right, starting from the commonly accepted one that Palestine was an inhospitable desert and with the arrival of the Jews it became a flowery refuge. In reality, Pappè writes, Palestine was a fertile land and the Arab populations who lived in the villages cultivated the land before being driven out by the new arrivals.

In the book the historian then recalls that Israel’s ‘conquest’ of most of Palestine began already with the Ottoman Empire: then the lands inhabited by the Arabs were owned by private individuals who could not, by law, send away the occupants. The Jews began to buy the lands and subsequently, with the arrival of the English who from 1918 governed that geographical area which had belonged to the disintegrated Ottoman Empire, thanks to the powerful influence of the Zionist lobby, they changed the law: whoever owned the lands could send away the inhabitants of the places they own. Thus began, well before 1948, a sort of expropriation which over the decades became a real – at times very violent – ethnic cleansing which led to the Palestinian inhabitants being relegated only to some areas and, after 1967, to the Strip. of Gaza and the West Bank. The Zionist lobby is behind the birth of the State of Israel.

But it is wrong to think that Zionism is a purely Jewish movement. The movement that supported the idea of ​​the “return” of the Jewish people to the land of Israel, from which they had been expelled in 70 AD by Titus, also has a strong non-Jewish support component and is linked to anti-Semitism widespread in many countries not only in Eastern Europe, but also in England and France. A part of the Western population espoused the ideas of the Zionist movement eager to bring the ‘chosen people’ back to Palestine because they wanted to drive the Jewish communities away from their states. Pappè explains that it was precisely the strength of this movement and its supporters that made it possible for the new arrivals in the land of Palestine to expel millions of people without there being a reaction.

In reality this happened. While the Zionist Jews had high-level political contacts and gained advantage from the British, the Palestinian Arabs, failing to make themselves heard despite demonstrations and conferences in London, decided to turn to armed revolt. For three years, from 1936 to 1939, His Majesty’s forces faced the revolt with unprecedented violence and in the end destroyed all forms of opposition with methods that later became sadly known in Gaza and the West Bank: they razed buildings to the ground and massacred thousands of Palestinians. Just as many were injured or imprisoned. In the end the Arab opposition in Palestine no longer existed and so, in 1948 the State of Israel was proclaimed without there being any internal reaction despite the fact that since 1947 a real ‘ethnic cleansing’ by the Israelis against the Arabs had been taking place Palestinians.

In his essay, Pappè then retraces the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict up to the present day, a conflict which, as he writes in the introduction, has meant that the perception of Israel has changed even in other countries and not because we no longer remember of the concentration camps, but because it is the common feeling that has changed. And so in January 2024, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to take immediate measures to protect the Palestinians of Gaza from the risk of genocide. It had never come to this, in fact Israel replied that the word genocide is legitimate only if it concerns the six million Jews killed by the Nazis.

The criminal court responded with arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. “I believe that anyone who opposes oppression and injustice can understand the basic issues of what is now known as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This book is my attempt to make it intelligible,” explains Ilan Pappè.