Enough has been said about the horror of Gaza, the atrocious disproportion of the Israeli reaction: we are now at “30 to one” in the ratio of violent deaths on both sides. And that’s without forgetting that more than 98% of Israeli deaths occurred on October 7 — and October 7 alone. (There are also, of course, hostage-taking, and this drama continues.)
What we have been witnessing since October 8 looks less like a “war” than like revenge, a 99% unilateral massacre. It is Gaza, and not Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, which today resembles Warsaw in 1945.
The dehumanization of the “other”, the Palestinian seen as an insect or an animal, and the whole operation as a sanitary “cleaning” as much as a security one: all this is real, widely shared in Israel, where an immense complex of moral superiority over the Palestinian people. Eradicative desires – such as the temptation to send the Palestinians to the sea or to Egypt – are explicit, for example in the fascistic remarks of certain members of the Israeli government.
Faced with the planned devastation of Gaza, it is not surprising that a trial for genocide has been brought against Israel before the International Court of Justice, even if it is doubtful whether it will succeed.
* * * * *
This radicalism of the strongest, with its procession of atrocities, must not make us forget that its mirror – the radicalism of the weakest, the desire to exterminate the other – also exists opposite. But in this case, because of the overwhelming inequality of the forces present, it is a fantasy without means to achieve it… even if the horror of October 7 gave a concrete and bloody image of the content of this fantasy, s it could be achieved on a large scale.
A poll conducted in early March by the Palestinian Center for Survey and Policy Research, released last week, found that most Palestinians do not believe Hamas carried out atrocities during the attack. This denial pushes some 71% of those surveyed in Gaza to declare that the decision to attack on October 7 was “correct”: an increase compared to a similar poll in December.
No, the desperate Palestinians are not breaking away from Hamas… even if this radical, dictatorial and violent Islamist movement has objectively unleashed “fire from Heaven” on their heads, and even if it without qualms uses civilians as shields humans. However, the Palestinian Authority does not appear today as a credible solution in the eyes of this abandoned people, crushed on all sides.
The most terrible thing in this drama is that the perception, shared by the two enemies, that “the other wants to exterminate me”, this perception is not absurd. On the contrary, it is rationally based, as much on facts as on declarations or texts.
* * * * *
Even if the Israeli occupation represents the primary cause of Palestinian misfortune, it is far from the only one. These people have regularly suffered from abandonment, contempt, violence and betrayals from their so-called “Arab brothers”, from pro-Russian Syria to Trump-friendly Gulf countries, eager for “normalization”. Without forgetting the occasional intra-Palestinian violence.
In 1970 and 1971, the Kingdom of Jordan, under King Hussein, crushed a Palestinian revolt — briefly supported by Syria, before Hafez al-Assad abandoned the Palestinians. Thousands of civilians and Palestine Liberation Organization fighters are killed. There are also Palestinians in the Jordanian army, which adds a fratricidal dimension to the drama.
In 2006 and 2007, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority waged war for control of Gaza, with a Hamas victory as a result. Hundreds of dead, including civilians, and a thousand seriously injured.
In 2007, the Lebanese army, in an operation against Islamists, razed the Palestinian camp of Nahr al-Bared and starved the approximately 40,000 Palestinians there, left without water or electricity for an entire summer. The bombings killed hundreds of Palestinian civilians and ultimately forced the displacement of some 30,000 people.
Between 2012 and 2014, in the midst of the Syrian war, Bashar al-Assad’s forces besieged the huge Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmouk, on the outskirts of Damascus, before it fell into the hands of the Islamic State group. Two years without running water or electricity, which earned the camp the nickname “worst place in the world”. Another unnoticed tragedy.
* * * * *
For what ? To put it bluntly, the death of a Palestinian is much more newsworthy when the Israelis are responsible. But when violence occurs between Arabs and Palestinians, or between Palestinians… almost not a word, in the newspapers, on social networks, in the streets of cities. No one to go and denounce, keffiyeh on their heads, “the genocide of the Palestinians by Bashar Al-Assad”.
The idealized Palestinian makes an exemplary symbolic victim, especially when the torturer is Israeli or Jewish. He takes beautiful photos of massacres, which we brandish at demonstrations. The concrete Palestinian, who would like concrete, pragmatic solutions to his problems rather than an endless, millenarian and apocalyptic war, with “global solidarity” in the streets (without advancing the cause an inch)… he there will generally be ignored, even despised.
To finish, three quotes from the Algerian writer Kamel Daoud, the impious who, every week in Point, puts his finger on Arab hypocrisies:
“The Palestinian cause? A collective story of Arab heroism where, in the end, only Palestinians and Jews are killed. »
“In so-called Arab countries, liberating Palestine often means staying at home and attacking […] and excommunicate anyone who steps aside from orthodoxies. »
“To those who hasten to mobilize on the flying carpet of “Arab” nationalist mythologies, we must remember their selective solidarity, their contempt for all the lives lost elsewhere (Syrian, Algerian, Yemeni), their Judeophobia disguised as indignation against war (just one war, not the thousand others). »
To contact the author: [email protected]