On Gaza
In August, the Guardian published a piece which revealed that, according to the Israeli military’s own data, the overall death toll had reached 53,000 with 83 percent of those being civilians. Just over a week ago, PBS reported that the Palestinian death toll had surpassed 64,000. The rates of civilian casualties in recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were 68 percent and 26 percent, respectively. Indeed, even in wartime, the civilian casualties in Gaza are a unique tragedy.
As Israel continues to perpetuate a genocide against the Palestinian people, we must remember that the Israeli state itself has waged war on the Palestinians for more than a century. Beginning with the Balfour Declaration of 1917 which declared a Jewish homeland in Palestine without mentioning the indigenous population and reaching its brutal climax in the 1948 Nakba, the systematic expulsion and assassination of Palestinians has been a constant force throughout the twentieth century. I would invite readers to consider Rahshid Khalidi’s The Hundred Year’s War On Palestine for an in-depth look at the six major declarations of war asserted against Palestine from 1917 until 2017.
Since 2017, the violence has only escalated as settler-colonialism has proliferated in the West Bank while Gaza has remained an open-air prison. As Walter Benjamin writes in his Towards A Critique Of Violence: “For the function of violence in law-making is twofold, in the sense that law-making pursues, as its end, with violence as the means, what is to be established as law, but at the moment of instatement does not dismiss violence; rather, at this very moment of law-making, it specifically establishes as law not an end unalloyed by violence but one necessarily and intimately bound to it, under the title of power.” Indeed, this perpetual infliction of violence against the Palestinians, whether it be in reinforcing the gains made after the Six Day War or in reinforcing the legitimacy of recent settlements, proves Benjamin’s point that nations can only be forged through the use of violence.
The Israeli regime is, indeed, a regime founded upon the exercise of violence against the Palestinians. The only possible recourse for this harrowing dilemma is a fully operational and sovereign Palestinian state. Though a two-state solution has often been scoffed at as idealistic and irrational, it is the only path forward for peace if these two nations wish to survive.
