Israel’s ‘settler logic of elimination’

How do they do it? How do they maintain their insatiable appetite for red meat, day after remorseless day? 

This is one dark enigma. 

The Israeli Defence Forces’ apparent indifference to the lives of non-combatants is another.

Do they not suffer at least occasional pangs of shame over the 16  000 children blown apart or buried beneath houses collapsed by their US-made bombs?

What of the 200 journalists, mostly Palestinian, killed in the worst media holocaust in recent history? The more than a thousand murdered doctors, nurses and other health carers? The slaughtered aid workers, most of them United Nations staff?

The Zionist project has been a never-ending nakba (calamity) not just for the Palestinians, but for the entire Middle East. 

Its scatter-gun approach has now been turned on Lebanon, and may soon be unleashed on Iran. 

Booby-trapped pagers and walkie-talkies have been remotely detonated in Lebanese homes, offices and the hands of children, killing, maiming and blinding hundreds of random victims, while bombing raids on packed civilian areas have driven more than a million from their homes.

Amid the continued genocidal onslaught on Gaza, Israeli soldiers were recently recorded kicking dead Palestinians from the roof of a building for collection by bulldozers.

In Ten Myths about Israel, revisionist Israeli historian Ilan Pappe has a phrase for this blunting of normal human feeling — “the logic of dehumanisation”.

It is bolstered by what revisionist historian Shlomo Sand describes as the racism pervasive in Israeli society and its decades of abusive baasskap and legal licence: checkpoint humiliations, punitive house demolitions, land seizures, collective reprisals, arbitrary imprisonment, torture and assassination, all catalogued by Amnesty International and other rights monitors.

At its root is a dizzying inversion of historical reality: Israelis have persuaded themselves, and much of the Western world, that they are natives, while the Palestinian are violent interlopers bent on denying Jewish Israelis their rights. 

Hence the endlessly repeated canard that Israel is merely defending itself and that resistance to its righteous sway amounts to anti-Semitic terrorism.

Of relevance is Australian historian Patrick Wolfe’s notion of “the logic of elimination” — that settler-colonialism demands the killing of indigenous people and ever-expanding seizure of their territory.

In classical colonialism, the metropole’s main interest lies in stripping the colony’s assets. Settler-colonialism, throwing off its metropolitan hinterland or never having one, aims to invade, displace and permanently occupy.

Zionists in the mould of the American Jewish Committee trumpet the alleged ancestral link between Jews and Palestine, as it was known from the ancient Greeks until 1948.

Alas, a century of biblical archaeology has shown that like the Iliad or Ireland’s Book of Invasions, the Hebrew Bible is not history, but a much later set of colourful foundation myths composed with a theological agenda.

In “Deconstructing Jericho”, a famous 1990 article in the Haaretz newspaper, archaeologist Ze’ev Herzog reminded “stubborn” Israelis that although this lesson has long been clear, they had failed to learn it.

There is no reference in Egyptian records to the rebellion and flight of Israelite slaves, nor any archaeological trace of the alleged 40-year wanderings of 600 000 warriors (and, presumably, their families) through the desert under Moses.

The Book of Joshua recounts the sack of Jericho after trumpets toppled the walls. Archaeology finds no evidence of a walled city in the relevant period, the late Bronze Age.

In the standard Israeli narrative, the Romans exiled the Jewish people after the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132 CE.

Roman records make no mention of this vast exercise in social engineering, which was never Roman practice, while archaeology finds no sign of resettlement on Palestine’s borders.

Sand has spoken of his inability to find a single historical account of this supposedly seminal event.

Similarly, archaeologist Israel Finkelstein rejects biblical claims of a “glamorous” united monarchy of David and Solomon, centred on Jerusalem, as a myth, writing that “10th-century Jerusalem was no more than a small, remote highlands village, not the exquisitely decked-out capital of a great empire”.

The mind-boggling Zionist claim is that Jews everywhere are one people with an unbreakable title to the land stretching back to the Patriarchs, despite being a tiny demographic splinter in Palestine for 2 000 years. 

Throughout that period there was an almost invisible Jewish presence and no hint of a Jewish state — or desire for one. 

Sand argues that as the future messiah’s expected place of appearance, Jerusalem was seen as somewhere to be buried in, rather than settle and rule.

The demographics reflect this. From the first century CE until the 1920s, Christians continuously outnumbered Jews in Palestine. 

In the Ottoman headcount of 1533, they are thought to have numbered just 5  000 (3% of total) compared to 6  000 Christians and 156 000 Muslims. In 1690 their niche status had contracted further to 2 000 (0.9%). At the dawn of our age the numbers were largely unchanged — in 1885 there were 16 000 Jewish inhabitants (3.2%), compared to 48 000 Christians (9.6%) and 432 000 Muslims (87%).

It is surmised that many Jews who survived the crushing of anti-Roman rebellions converted to Christianity and later Islam.

Only after World War I, in response to Zionist mobilisation aided and abetted by the British mandatory authorities, did the floodgates open. 

The Zionist movement, obsessed with building an exclusively Jewish state, sought to shift the demographic balance through mass immigration, legal and illegal. 

One report-back to European fellow ideologues candidly remarked: “The bride is beautiful, but already married.”

By 1945, prior to Israeli independence, the proportions had shifted to 553  000 Jews (32%) and a million Arabs (58%).

The decisive change, however, came in 1948-50, when up to 750  000 Arabs fled or were expelled from the new state of Israel and refused the right of return, while Jewish settlers, half of them European survivors of Nazi persecution, poured in. 

Another of the Israeli myths exploded by Pappe is the stock claim that the Palestinians decamped voluntarily in compliance with calls from Arab leaders. No such call was ever made.

Following the 1948 exercise in ethnic cleansing and replacement, Jewish Israelis controlled 80% of historic Palestine and comprised a slim majority for the first time in almost two millennia.

In 2024, overall Jewish and Palestinian numbers are roughly equal, at six million each.

The implication is clear: the Israelis are not an indigenous people; they imposed themselves on the indigenous Palestinians during the 20th century in waves of settlement and expansion, often through violent land grabbing. 

The process continued, Pappe argues, as proponents of “Greater Israel”, such as Moshe Dayan, came to regret not seizing the West Bank in 1948.

The hard-liners’ longed-for opportunity came in 1967, when Israel defeated Egypt, Jordan and Syria in a blitzkrieg contrived, Pappe believes, by the Israeli warmongers.

After overrunning the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem, Israel has cocked a snoot at the Geneva conventions by holding most of the conquered territory under one of the world’s longest military dictatorships.

With neither citizenship nor independence, the Palestinians have suffered, and still suffer, countless human rights crimes.

The dispossession of the natives through what Pappe calls “incremental genocide” is ongoing. 

In early 2023 there were 144 illegal Israeli settlements on the West Bank — 12 in East Jerusalem — housing half a million settlers. 

Palestinians increasingly live in a “Swiss cheese” of territorial islands. 

More than two million dunams of Palestinian territory (one dunam = 900 square metres) have been confiscated, of which a quarter has been designated state land. 

Less than 2% of Palestinian building permit applications were approved in 2016-18, a hundred times fewer than the demolition orders.

This is the crooked context for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s insistence that there can be no Palestinian state because “there is no space”.

All the vaunted post-1967 “accords” and “roadmaps” have ignored the principal Palestinian grievances: the occupation of Jerusalem, an Islamic sacred city; Israel’s continued erosion and military dominance of the West Bank; and the unresolved exile of six million refugees.

The Lebanese incursion serves several Israeli purposes. Behind the distracting smoke and uproar, it enables Israel to flaunt its military prowess, assassinations and dirty tricks before the Palestinians and the wider Middle East. And it serves to depopulate the once densely packed Gaza Strip and reduce it to an unlivable wasteland.

But each monstrosity pours petrol on the inferno of hatred. 

The question is: will future generations not see the founder of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, and his legatee, Netanyahu, as the world now sees Hendrik Verwoerd? 

And is even the Israeli ultra-right soulless enough to go on killing for all posterity? 

Drew Forrest is a former deputy editor of the Mail & Guardian.