My pledge to defeat Zionism without spilling blood
A letter to the family of the one thousandth victim of Israel’s military action in Gaza, from Ilan Pappé
IDO not know yet who your loved one was. She might have been a baby a few months old, or a young boy, a grandfather or one of your children or parents. I heard about your loved one’s death from Chico Menashe, a political commentator on Reshet Bet, Israel’s main radio station.
He explained that the killing of your loved one in Gaza, as well as the turning of neighbourhoods on the strip to rubble and driving 150 000 people from their homes, is part of a calculated Israeli strategy: this carnage will destroy the impulse of Palestinians in Gaza to resist Israeli policies.
I heard this while reading in the July 25 edition of the supposedly respectable Haaretz newspaper the words of the notso-respectable historian Benny Morris that even this is not enough.
He calls the genocidal policies so far “refisut ” — feebleness of mind and spirit.
He demands far more massive destruction in the future with the knowledge that this is how you behave if you want to defend your “villa in the jungle,” as former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak described Israel.
Yes, I am afraid to say the Israeli media and academia are fully behind the massacre, apart from a few, hardly audible, voices in this inhuman wilderness. I am not writing this to tell you that I am ashamed — I long ago dissociated myself from this state ideology and do all I can as an individual to confront and defeat it. Probably it has not been enough. We are all inhibited by moments of cowardice, egotism and maybe a natural impulse to take care of our family and loved ones.
And yet I feel the urge today to make a pledge to you, the Palestinians, which none of the Germans my father knew in the Nazi regime was willing to make to him when the thugs committed genocide against his family.
This is not much of a pledge at your moment of grief, but it is the best I can offer — and saying nothing is not an option. Doing nothing is less than an option.
This is 2014 — the destruction of Gaza is well documented. This is not 1948 when Palestinians had to struggle hard to tell their story of horror; so many of the crimes Zionists committed then were hidden and never came to light. So my first and simple pledge is to record, inform and insist on the truth.
My old employer, the University of Haifa, has recruited its students to disseminate Israel’s lies all over the world on the internet, but this is 2014 and propaganda of this kind will not hold water.
But surely this is not enough. I pledge to continue the effort to boycott a state that commits such crimes. Only when the European football union, Uefa, throws Israel out; when the academic community refuses to have any institutional ties with Israel; when airlines hesitate to fly there; when every outfit that may lose money because of an ethical stance in the short term understands that in the long run it will gain both morally and financially — only then will we begin to honour your loss.
The boycott, divestment and sanctions movement has achieved much and continues its tireless work. The obstacles still include the false allegation of anti-Semitism and the cynicism of politicians. This is how an honorable initiative by British architects to force their colleagues in Israel to take a moral stand rather than be accomplices in the criminal coloni- sation of the land, was blocked at the last moment.
Similar initiatives were sabotaged by spineless politicians in Europe and the US. But my pledge is to be part of the effort to overcome these hurdles. The memory of your loved one will be the driving force, together with the vivid memory of the suffering of the Palestinians since 1948.
I do it all egotistically. I pray and hope that, when Palestinians stand in Shujaiya, Deir alBalah or Gaza City, gazing at the slaughterhouses created by Israeli warplanes, tanks and artillery, you do not lose hope in humanity.
This humanity even includes Israelis, those who do not have the courage to speak but who express their horror in private, as my overflowing e-mail and Facebook in-boxes attest, as well as the handful who demonstrate publicly against the incremental genocide in Gaza.
It also includes those not born yet who perhaps will be able to escape a Zionist indoctrination machine that teaches them to dehumanise the Palestinians to such a level that the burning alive of a 16-year-old Palestinian boy fails to move them or shatter their belief in their government, army or religion.
For all our sakes, I wish we could also dream of the day after — when Zionism is defeated as the ideology that governs our lives between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean and we all have the normal life we crave.
So I pledge today not to be distracted even by friends and Palestinian leaders who still foolishly pin their hopes on the long-gone “two-state solution”. If one has the impulse to be involved in bringing regime change in Palestine, the only reason to do so is to ensure equal human and civil rights and full restitution for all those victimised by Zionism.
May your loved one rest in peace knowing that their death was not in vain — but not because it will be avenged. We do not need more bloodshed. I still believe there is a way of bringing evil systems to an end with the power of humanity and morality.
Justice means bringing the murderers who killed your loved one and so many others to court, and we must pursue the goal of bringing Israel’s war criminals to trial before international tribunals.
It is a far longer way and, at times, even I feel the impulse to be part of a force that uses hard power to end the inhumanity. But I pledge myself to work for justice, restorative justice.
This is what I can pledge — to work to prevent the next stage in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
Pappé is professor of history and director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter. This is an edited version of what was first published on The Electronic Intifada