To the editor,
What do you think of the recently approved peace plan for Gaza? I’m skeptical, because it was drafted by Trump’s team and he has openly discussed ethnically cleansing the strip in the past. However, I just want the genocide to end. Does this new resolution have a chance to do that?
Thank you,
Serena.
Hi Serena,
If the history of the colonization of Palestine is any guide, it does not bode well for Gaza. So many waves of diplomacy have broken along the Mediterranean shores of Palestine, mainly owing to international under-appreciation of one fact concerning Israel: its existence is predicated on the erasure of Palestine. This is why hundreds of historic Palestinian villages under Israeli jurisdiction have been razed and planted over, bulldozed and repopulated by settlers. This is why thousands of ancient olive trees in the West Bank are either set on fire or uprooted by the occupying military every year. This is why militant settlers run pogroms on Palestinian communities. To recognize a Palestinian state would be to recognize a people they’d rather not exist, and face the cold mirror of claims to ethnically cleansed, illegally acquired territory.
The international failure to comprehend the nature of Zionism can be attributed to the general failure to comprehend the nature of the dialectic: “an extreme of one state or action suddenly shifting into its opposite.”1 While the idea of a bi-national, multi-religious state in Palestine was popular in Zionism’s early history, the fires of Nazism in Europe had so-brutalized the Ashkenazi population that creating a radical ethnostate of their own suddenly appeared as a violent necessity.
The pursuit of this ethnostate has walked Israel into a permanent state of warfare since its inception. The monstrous timeline that we find ourselves in only captures the adage: war makes fascists of us all. While Israeli leadership had erstwhile attempted to make normalcy with recognized Arab nations, the 2023 thrust of Hamas attackers into the motherland caused “the bubble to burst and the monster to leap forth before our eyes.”2 The resulting genocide in Gaza at the hands of the fascist state is one of the the gravest horrors in human history, making shameful witnesses of all the world’s nations.
The tempo of death may slow but it is important to understand that fascist societies cannot be negotiated with. They can only be brought into submission. In this case, nothing short of withering sanctions against Israel and foreign protection of highly-endangered Palestinian lives in the West Bank and Gaza Strip has a chance of tempering Israeli aggression, rolling back illegal settlements and bringing peace. Sun Tzu cautioned that one must know the enemy to avoid defeat. Western leadership cannot even identify the enemy of this colonial struggle, let alone understand them. The intention underwriting Trump’s 20-point plan may be sound; its knowledge of the enemy is not.
In sols,
Your editor.
Send your questions to the Reclamation: editor@thereclamation.co
Footnotes:
G.W.F. Hegel, The Science of Logic (Hythloday Press, 2014): 96. ↩︎
Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. ↩︎