The December 2008 Gaza Massacre
We are part of an increasing number of people around
the world of Jewish descent who are sickened by the
coldly calculated massacre of the Palestinians of
Gaza and who utterly repudiate Israel's claim that
it acts in the name of Jews the world over.
Like Antony Loewenstein we deplore the 'myth of
Israel' as perpetual victim and rational peace
seeker, and its stranglehold over media reportage of the
Israel-Palestine conflict.
The massacre in Gaza cries out not only for
immediate condemnation but for historical
explanation. As scholars working in the fields of
genocide studies and research into the long history of
European colonization, it seems clear to us that Israel
as in the history of white Australia since 1788 - is a
genocidal settler colonial society that since its founding
in 1948 continually seeks to destroy the foundations of life
of the indigenous Palestinians, their health, dignity,
livelihood, personal security, access to education, and
political organization, so that the Palestinians can be
replaced by colonizing Zionist settlers.
Recent genocide scholarship has highlighted how
much the original definition of genocide
(by Raphael Lemkin in chapter nine of his 1944
book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe)
linked genocide and colonization as a two
stage process of destruction of the home society
(not necessarily by physical annihilation qua Nazism)
and replacement by the incoming colonizers.
Such has been the continuing historical pattern
of Israel in relation to the indigenous people
of the land. In 1948 the Zionist forces violently
drove out over 700,000 Palestinians by deploying
'admonitory massacres', as the Israeli historian
Ilan Pappé has evoked in horrific detail in his recent
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006). Pappé
details the continuous series of massacres
in 1948-49 and sporadically thereafter that
the Zionists perpetrated against the Palestinians
in order to 'Judaize' ethnically-cleansed Palestinian
lands. In 1967 the Israeli state conquered the
West Bank and Gaza and has aggressively continued
a genocidal pattern of replacement and destruction,
creating and expanding Jewish settlements, stealing
Palestinian land and ghettoizing remaining Palestinian
communities, attempting, through a brutal military
occupation, to make life humiliating and unbearable
for the Palestinians.
What we are now witnessing is a form of settler
colonization reminiscent of nineteenth century
Australia, in which a settler colonial 'logic of
elimination' (to quote historian of settler
colonialism, Patrick Wolfe)
combines massacre and population sequestration
(reserves) to incapacitate the sovereign self
determination of an indigenous people.
Yet indigenous peoples have always resisted
the genocidal processes of destruction
and replacement that settler colonialism enacts.
The indigenous peoples of Australia have
magnificently resisted and still do, despite all their
historical sufferings. The indigenous Palestinians as a
people are also resisting the disaster that Zionism and
Israel have brought upon them, thereby providing the
continuing possibility of a future coexistence between
Israeli Jews and Palestinians.
The Decemb 2008 - 2009
Gaza massacre by Zionist Israel poses an intense
dilemma for Israel's organized Jewish supporters and
much of the Jewish diaspora, who have for
decades cooperated with and been complicit
in the ongoing, incremental Israeli genocide
of the Palestinians. Israel is guilty under article
II, part C of the UN Genocide Convention,
in that it intends to destroy, in whole or in part,
an ethnic group by 'deliberately inflicting on
the group conditions of life calculated to bring
about its physical destruction in whole or in part'.
Will the Jews of the world continue to be so supportive,
or will they historically disavow genocidal settler
colonialism in the Middle East and question their
own previous support? Historically,
Israel is the imposition of a European
nation state, founded on the notion of one
people, one religion, one ethnicity, in an area of the
world, the Levant, which through the centuries
has been a space where Jews, Muslims and
Christians have lived together
in the same societies.
The very idea so precious to Zionism, of Israel as
a Jewish state, is absurd, as the great Jewish jurist
and Australian governor-general Isaac Isaacs pointed
out in the 1940s.
What if Australia called itself a Protestant state,
immediately making all non-Protestants
second class citizens systematically facing abuse,
discrimination, and state violence, as
Palestinian Israelis do to the present day?
Israel/Palestine should become a democratic state,
a democracy where all who live in that land are
full citizens whatever their religion or ethnicity.
The Australian government not that long ago
in its apology over the Stolen Generations extended
sympathy and understanding to the
indigenous people of Australia.
Why doesn't it extend a similar sympathy to
the indigenous people of Palestine?
John Docker Ned Curthoys
Committee for the Dismantling of Zionism
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