23 June,2025 11:09 AM IST | Mumbai | Ajaz Ashraf
Israeli security forces and first responders gather at the site of an Iranian strike that hit a residential neighbourhood in the Ramat Aviv area in Tel Aviv yesterday. Pic/AFP
The Israeli State is designed to tirelessly kill, and kill. It has killed over 55,000 Palestinians in Gaza. Its theatre of violence now encompasses Iran, upon which it rains death and destruction, along with, from yesterday, the United States. Israel will emerge relatively unscathed and likely triumphant, as it has on many occasions in the past, not least because of America's assistance to it. Yet its victory, as in the past, will be Pyrrhic. Israel will never have the peace and security it wishes for.
This is because Israel suffers from acute security anxieties, which emanate from the pathological vision of its destiny. The Jews view themselves as God's chosen people, who were promised by him in biblical times the sacred land of Israel. The creation of Israel in Palestine is interpreted as evidence of God fulfilling his promise. This belief, as late Israeli scholar Uriel Tal pointed out, implies the sacred land can't be shared with non-Jews, who are to be exterminated, expelled or enslaved, actions that have, yes, God's approval.
Israel's foundational vision has spawned a State that's forever doomed to be paranoid. It must engage in interminable violence even after notching up victories, for Israel can't rest until the sacred land has been rid of all defiling presences, with possibilities of their return crushed. This is a spectacularly tragic story, given that the Jews, in the 1880s, were just three per cent of Palestine's population.
The biblical lore of the Promised Land had the Zionist movement, anchored in Europe, bankroll the immigration of Jews to Palestine. Around 40,000 of them came just between 1909 and 1911. They purchased land from absentee landlords and established settlements. The Jewish immigration received a fillip with the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which said the British government viewed favourably the "establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people."
Placed under the British mandate after World War I, Palestine saw Jews grow to 18 per cent in 1926. The fear of the Nazis saw as many as 65,000 Jews migrate in 1935 alone. The Arabs protested, most notably in 1937, only to be brutally crushed by the British mandatory administration, with an estimated 10 per cent of their population killed, wounded, imprisoned or exiled. In 1947, 32 per cent Jews owned 5.6 per cent of Palestine's land. Yet, on November 29, 1947, the United Nations, led by the United States, now the paramount power, partitioned Palestine and gave 56 per cent of its territory to the Jews.
An armed conflict broke out between the indigenous (Palestinians) and the immigrants (Jews). After Israel announced its birth on May 14, 1948, it went on to vanquish the combined army of Arab regimes and acquired 78 per cent of Palestine. From 1947 onwards, Jewish militias engaged in what historian Ilan Pappe calls the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Around 800,000 Palestinians fled to the remaining 22 per cent of Palestine - that is, the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza, which were under the control of Jordan and Egypt, respectively - and to other Arab countries.
Israel became an independent country, but it was and remains a settler colony, which had exercised the God-approved options to exterminate or expel a majority of Palestinians from their land. The third option of enslavement was exercised in 1967, when Israel occupied Gaza and the West Bank after neutralising the air power of Egypt, Jordan and Syria, as it has of Iran now. Another 300,000 Palestinians were expelled.
Gaza and the West Bank constitute the Occupied Palestine Territories (OPT), whose residents are exposed to discriminatory laws, suffer brutal oppression, and languish in poverty. The OPT symbolises enslavement in an open prison; its "apartness" from the rest of Israel reminiscent of South Africa's infamous Bantustans, segregated homelands created for Blacks under the Apartheid regime there. In 2018, a law was passed that said the right to "exercise national self-determination" in Israel is "unique to the Jewish people," effectively reducing even Palestinians living in Israel proper - that is, outside the OPT - to second-class citizens, a defining feature of an apartheid regime.
Israel's foundational vision impedes it from sharing the sacred land with non-Jews. The Oslo Accords raised hopes of a two-state solution, with the West Bank and Gaza clubbed into an independent Palestine. Yet the OPT was divided into three distinct pockets, with Area C, or 61 per cent of the West Bank, under Israel's direct civilian and security control. Israel continues to settle Jews in settlements there, with walls built to isolate them from Palestinian habitats. There are now 6,30,000 Jews, or 11 per cent of the country's population, living there. It was never Israel's intent to facilitate a viable, coherent Palestinian State.
A settler colony, practising apartheid, can't but invite the fury of Palestinians, reduced as they are to abject helplessness by Israel. For instance, after Hamas won the elections in 2006 in Gaza, it was blockaded by Israel and Egypt, with America's support, ultimately culminating in the October 7, 2023, attack. In its search of security, Israel, under America's patronage, has now targeted Iran, seen as Hamas's sponsor. A new register of injustices and cruelties will have the Furies, the goddesses of vengeance, mount unseen challenges to the vision Israel has of itself - and its destiny.
The writer is a senior journalist and author of Bhima Koregaon: Challenging Caste.
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