In homes, on the streets across Gaza, Palestinians are sat, drained and disillusioned, and collecting their lives from the rubble and ruins – mute from sensory shock, loss of life, separation and dislocation. Their lives have been changed, fundamentally, in the way that Walter Benjamin described the trauma and poverty experience of the First World War among Europeans.
For the Palestinians in Gaza this is not the end, it’s another phase in their fight against complete erasure. They have suffered a totalitarian terror, that ultimate weapon of war. Much of which will happen next is open to speculation. One or two things are probable. Transformation of the social and cultural landscape of Palestine into a waterfront complex, and a continuation of struggle for the right to exist.
Entering the latest break in their seven decade-long struggle, the Palestinians in Gaza are overwhelmed by what Benjamin described as a poverty of experience which, “should not be understood to mean people are yearning for new experience”. The Palestinians have to continue enduring what he described as “an inner poverty” and “an outer poverty” from which they want to be unshackled. They are not ignorant or inexperienced; they want, as Benjamin might have said, “something respectable”.
In a letter to his colleague Theodor Adorno, marked as he was as a Jew by the Nazis, Benjamin wrote: “The total uncertainty as to what the next days, the next hours will bring has dominated my existence for many weeks. I am condemned to read every newspaper (they appear here on only one page) as a writ published against me and to hear every radio report the voice of bad tidings.”
This is not unlike what the Palestinians of Gaza are going through….
The world’s attention has been focused on deals, on the exchange of prisoners and hostages, while the next phase of destruction of the Palestinian landscape gets underway, and the place is turned into something from the imagination of Donald Trump and his son in law, Jared Kushner – property developers. The real-estate brokers have in their sights, the destruction of the Palestinian landscape, the built-environment of homes, schools, places of worship, libraries, and roads, cemeteries, with their gaze fixed on “redevelopment” of Gaza, as a “waterfront property,” Kushner has said.
All of what happened when the guns went quiet are reminders of the idea that wars end whether their or not their ends have been met. It is this war, which, for the Palestinians started when the first boatloads of Europeans arrived on their shores bearing banners begging to be let onto the land during and after the Second World War. The Hungarian writer, Arthur Koestler wrote, sardonically, about “skirmishes” between “Zionists” and “Arabs” in his Book Thieves in the Night, set in the late 1930s. In the book, Koestler considers the Zionists as impatient in their quest for colonisation and settlement, and turned to terrorism against the British and Palestinians.
Terrorism as a Tactic in Warfare
Since then terrorism has been delegitimised and stripped as an option (in warfare) for disaffected people who might have been “reasonable” towards aggressors, invaders or settlers. In a post-war world of chemical warfare, “herbicidal warfare,” deployed in Vietnam; targeted assassinations by drone strikes (by the United States); extrajudicial killing (in Suharto’s Indonesia, Augusto Pinochet’s Chile, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, or Argentina’s Dirty War); human-made famines in Ethiopia and China, and structural violence against women in Afghanistan (all terror-inducing, mind you) the individual terrorist, or the “non-state actor” provokes a global war, and inspires war against “savages,” or “evil” and against “non-humans”.
Such wars, “against savages… terrible and inhuman” as it may be, Theodore Roosevelt said in 1896, was “the most righteous of all wars”. This righteousness is a definitive segue that runs from the exhortation by Pope Urban II at the Council of Clermont to “take back Jerusalem” (in 1095 CE), to Benjamin Netanyahu, today. At the base of this is a belief that the people of Jerusalem had no right to fight back, to act reasonably, and anyway, Urban II and Netanyahu insisted that God was on their side. They will retake Jerusalem, Urban II said, because God wills it (Deus Vult). Reason, or reasonableness, have no place in wars of conquest.
“I am through with reasonableness,” said Koestler’s protagonist, Joseph, in Thieves in the Night, and joins the Zionist terrorists.
Joseph urges that in response to Palestinian tribal wars (Koestler referred to ‘Arabs’) against Zionists, “if we want to survive we have to retaliate according to their accepted rules. By throwing bombs into Arab markets the Bauman gang [a fictional militant Zionist group] performs exactly the same inhuman military duty as the crew of a bomber plane. . . . To throw a handmade bomb in a crowded bazaar needs at least as much courage as to press a button opening a bomb-trap”.
We get, then, to the turn to terrorism, a tactic in war. A turn from “reasonableness” to terrorism. Koestler may have drawn from what J Bowyer Bell would describe as the “Terror of Zion,” activities of the Irgun, the Zvai, Leumi and LEHI (the Stern Gang) in “the Palestine underground” between 1929 and 1949. In Koestler’s imagination, Zionist terrorism was pure, and a natural outcome of impatience. In the life world of Palestinians, Zionist terrorism caused the Deir Yassin massacre of 1948.
“We fight, therefore we are,” Menachem Begin, the Polish leader of the Irgun terrorist group said. This is not plucked from the imagination, Time Magazine carried this statement in an essay in September 1982, under the headline, “A Past That is Certain”.
Let us turn, at this half-way point, to tolerance of terrorism, to terrorism as a tactic of war, the delegitimisation of terrorism, and what may come if, or when Gaza is turned into a waterfront property with luxury housing estates, glitzy shopping centres, golf courses and amusement parks.
It helps to understand terror. Terrorism is a tactic used during war is (precisely) to instil fear and terror in opponents through violent and non-violent means, and varies over time and place. In this respect war is a protean activity” that “mutates over time, and mutates fastest in the face of efforts to control or eliminate it,” wrote the British military historian John Keegan in 1998.
It mutates in application and in acceptability or legitimacy. So, what is considered to be terrorism at one place in time, changes depending on prevailing constellation of power. You can instil terror with violence or otherwise; simply by lending support for oppression and injustice.
For example, the New York Times referred in 1985 to a “pro-Nazi terrorist group, Die Ossewabrandwag,” which carried out terror attacks by the European settler colonists in 1940s South Africa who were driven by “Christian Nationalism … an ally of German Nazism”.
The New York Times reported that the European, Hendrik Verwoerd, (he was born in the Netherlands) who was South African Prime Minister between 1958 and 1966, turned Die Transvaler newspaper into “a tool of the Nazis in South Africa, and he knew it”.
Terror was permissible in Palestine and in South Africa during the 1930s and 1940s, until African nationalists and Palestinians employed terror as a tactic in their fight back against European settlers. In Palestine, terror was sanctified, as it were, by the Europeans who had, in the words of Koestler’s protagonist, “run out of patience”. In pretty much the same way that Afrikaners were “Christian Nationalists” the European settlers in Palestine were “Jewish Nationalists”.
As the Begin said, the Zionists became terror – we fight therefore we are. Adolf Hitler, too, had tied the actual being of the German people to war. Early in 1945, Hitler told Albert Speer, “if the war is lost then the people will be lost too”.
With this expression we can pause and consider a future for Palestinians (with much caution) and what is, probably, a cessation of hot exchanges, like any of the pauses in the hot wars of the past seven decades.
In 1940, Martin Heidegger said that France had not been defeated by Germany, the French had lost the will to survive. Never mind that they have been scattered around the world over seven decades, and the masses of dead over the same period, it’s not easy make the same statement about the Palestinians. Exile and displacement does not necessarily create docility or disinvestment from one’s culture and heritage. A lesson from South Africa may be useful. When the African nationalist movements were outlawed, banned and exiled, after the creation of the apartheid state, the African National Congress and Pan Africanist congress started guerrilla wars, tactics of terror from outside the country.
It’s difficult to imagine that after Gaza has been turned into a waterfront estate, and converted into a terrain of Jewish idealism (Walter Benjamin referred to German idealism), where “every barbed wire fence [was] a representation of autonomy,” the Palestinians will walk away from their culture and heritage, twisting and turning between remembrance and forgetting. The epigenetic inheritance may turn out to be definitive, and cause for continuing their fightback. This is true if we can extend to Palestinians the belief that their existence is tied to war against the people who have forced them from their land.
The Palestinians have experienced what Benjamin described, during Second World War, as a unique violence, a set of “devastating currents and explosions,” a war against all the aspects of their presence directed at pushing them into obsolescence, and towards a “new beginning” – as long as it’s not in their homeland, according to the Israeli government and people.
Here we find echoes of European conduct in Africa, especially during the “administrative massacres’ in the Congo. In a letter to Robert Casement, the Irishman who was executed for treason by the British, Joseph Conrad wrote: “It is an extraordinary thing that the conscience of Europe, which seventy years ago put down the slave trade on humanitarian grounds, tolerates the Congo state today. It is as if the moral clock has been put back.”
Between Jewish idealism and Zionism, the pecuniary interests and paralysing fear among states outside the influence of the west, European loyalty and material support for the state of Israel – in an arc that bends from Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington to Orchid Road in Singapore, and onward to Canberra, in Australia – there is now a feint glow of light for Palestinians on the Levant. Palestinians in exile may keep that light glowing.
If we turn, briefly, again, to Roosevelt’s insistence that the “war against savages” waged by European settlers in North America, we see the way that it is easy to kill someone, after you have labelled them as savage. Labels of “savage” and of “terrorist” become licence to kill. The Palestinians don’t have any of those rights. They have no right to be anger. They have no right to resist. They do have their culture and heritage, thing for which people have gone to war to protect.
As for the Israelis, they are captives of their own imagination and their psychological disposition. They seem to suffer a Prospero complex, a paternalistic sense of superiority and exceptionalism with an irrational fear of the people they have (effectively) colonised and sought to from history. When Benjamin Natanyahu told the world that a swath of land in Western Asia was a curse and that the Greater Israel was the saviour, he tapped into Prospero’s saviour complex, which Octavio Mannoni described in Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonisation in 1956.
It is hard to see a way back for the Israelis. It is harder still to see a way back for the Palestinians. The terror, as a tactic of the war against the Palestinians has been violent and destructive. This terror has been somatic, financial, sexual, cultural, spiritual and symbolic. Homes, churches, cemeteries, schools streets, cafés and hospitals have been destroyed, as have most of their economic resources. This is the nature of the totalitarian terror.