“Hear me out: there is no war that will end all wars…War is a perfect, independent entity.” — Kafka’s On the Shore by Haruki Murakami: “On the hill we had been at the beginning of something:” of another time wherein struggle floods, moves or blurs yet doesn’t end, in which the most you can expect isn’t harmony, or the appearance of a superior age, yet just to stay protected as far as might be feasible… The station was the start. Its end was as yet the start… The Pumpkin is gone, however nothing is finished.”
— Pumpkinflowers: Matti Friedman Prelude Iran’s missile attack on three Israeli military targets on October 1, 2024, has brought the Middle East close to vertical escalation. A Soldier’s Story of a Forgotten War Iran’s attack was in response to Israel’s targeted killing of Hamas Political Bureau Chairman Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran and multiple killings of Hezbollah commanders in Lebanon, including Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah.
Israel, on the other hand, has promised to punish at a time and place of its choosing. What that reaction may be is outside the extent of this article. This is my attempt to address the fundamental issue that has propelled the region into a significant cycle of violence that has the potential to affect geopolitics worldwide. That issue, in single word, is Zionism. It began prior to the Partition Plan of the United Nations. The generational war in the Middle East will continue indefinitely if that plague is not eradicated. It’s an existential conflict with many fights at various fronts.
How did the region get to this point?
Everyone will be led to believe by the majority of Western news, commentary, and analyses that this war and Israel’s response began on October 7, 2023, when Hamas broke through Gaza’s “iron wall” and attacked Israeli military bases and kibbutzim near Gaza. The argument goes that Israel’s actions since then are merely self-defense. Nothing could be further from reality.
Let’s start with the Nakba—the expulsion of Palestinians from their land in May 1948—despite the fact that violence had begun before the British left Palestine. On May 15, Britain gave up its mandate, and the war began.
The Middle East is on the verge of what could turn into a new world war as Israel commits genocide in Palestine, bombs Lebanon, Yemen, and Syria, and attempts to involve Iran in a larger conflict. However, the issue at the heart of this dangerous conflict is not self-defense or security, but rather the contradictions in Israel’s founding political ideology. Around 750,000 Palestinian Arabs, or nearly half of Mandatory Palestine’s Arab population at the time, were driven from their homes by Zionist terrorist organizations like Haganah and Irgun, which later became the Israeli Defense Forces at the end of May. As part of the ethnic cleansing, over 15,000 people were killed. During this Zionist mission, up to 600 Palestinian towns were annihilated.
Additionally, Israeli historians Benny Morris and Benjamin Kedar demonstrate in a September 19, 2022 online publication titled “Cast Thy Bread: In an operation codenamed “Cast Thy Bread,” Haganah’s science corps, which was known by its Hebrew initials HEMED, was responsible for poisoning village wells. This program was completely upheld by David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann, a Russian Jew prepared as an organic chemist. Weizmann would become Israel’s first president, and Ben-Gurion would serve as Israel’s first prime minister.
Ben-Gurion’s biography was reviewed in an essay titled “From “Virtuous Boy” to Murderous Fanatic” by Tom Segev. Dr. Jeremy Salt’s essay on David Ben-Gurion and the Palestinians reads: The sight of deserted towns and vast agricultural farmland delighted Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann, the man he had come to despise. All of it was now theirs. Not because war was inevitable, but rather because Palestinians were unable to return to what had been destroyed, hundreds of villages were destroyed.
That this strategy of ousting and eradicating the Palestinians was — and remains — a conscious one is obvious from explanations by different Zionist pioneers, including Ben-Gurion himself. They were aware, then as well as now, that they had taken a people’s land. According to Morris’s 1948 book: Ben-Gurion had a clear understanding, according to A History of the First Arab-Israeli War, that Arabs would not accept this theft:
“Years later, shortly after Israel’s establishment, Ben-Gurion elaborated on the Arab perspective during a conversation with Zionist leader Nahum Goldmann: I don’t figure out your confidence… For what reason should the Middle Easterners bury the hatchet? I would never reconcile with Israel if I were a leader of the Arab world. That makes sense; we are, in fact, from Israel, but that was two thousand years ago, so what does that mean to them? There has been hostile to Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, yet was that their issue?'”
Ben-Gurion is just one of many. Yitzhak Shamir, a previous fear monger and later Israel’s state head, composed a letter to the ruler of Morocco and told His Highness — cited by Mohamed Heikal in Deceptions of Win: “We [Israelis] understand their dreams very well, but unfortunately here we have a conflict between two dreams… we agree to the Palestinians having a dream, but they should understand that it is impossible,” according to an Arab perspective on the Gulf War.
There’s outright lucidity here about the expansionist and exclusionary Zionist methodology. A Palestinian state that is self-governing will never exist. Ami Ayalon, a former admiral who later served as the head of the Shabak, also known as Shin Bet, stated, “Peace was more important than absolute historical justice” in the best possible scenario.
Let’s start with the Nakba—the expulsion of Palestinians from their land in May 1948—despite the fact that violence had begun before the British left Palestine. England surrendered its command on May 15 and the conflict started. Zionist terrorist groups drove 750,000 Palestinian Arabs, or nearly half of the Arab population of Mandatory Palestine at the time, from their homes. Ethnic cleansing resulted in the deaths of more than 15,000 people.
The line comes from Friendly Fire, Ayalon’s 2020 memoir: In his book “How Israel Became Its Own Worst Enemy,” he talks about how he worked with Palestinian philosopher and academic Sari Nusseibeh, who was Arafat’s top man in Jerusalem at the time and president of Al Quds University in East Jerusalem at the time. That was the trade-off.
In and of itself, Ayalon’s distinction between peace and historical justice refers to two facts that even peace-seeking Zionists are informed by: that verifiable equity detests the presence in Palestine of a pioneer frontier project, however that Israel being a “reality”, there should be some harmony structure which can permit Israel and the Palestinians to live respectively by permitting the last organization over their undertakings, something the Oslo Arrangements neglected to do.
Ayalon is additionally one of those Israelis who accepts, as he told Le Monde in a meeting on January 24, 2024, “On the off chance that we reject harmony, what looks for us will be considerably more savage than October 7.” According to Professor Joseph Massad’s op-ed for Middle East Eye, Ayalon recently told the Israeli newspaper Maariv, which is written in Hebrew: Because the Palestinians have lost their land, I am frequently asked, “What would you do if you were a Palestinian?” I declare that I would fight him without restraint if someone came and stole my land, the land of Israel.
Perhaps the best record of the inconsistency at the core of Zionism, which Seasons of Israel in an article called “characterizing”, follows through in a discourse by Moshe Dayan in April 1956 at Kibbutz Nahal Oz, scarcely a pretty far from Gaza. The head of the Israel Occupation Forces (IOF) at the time was Dayan. Young officer Roi Rutenberg (or Rothberg, as some writings refer to him) was in charge of the Kibbutz’s security. A group of Egyptians and Palestinians took him into captivity and killed him. Dayan addressed the funeral:
“Recently with dawn, return on initial capital investment was killed… Let us not throw fault at the killers. Why should we lament their animosity toward us? They have been sitting in Gaza’s refugee camps for eight years and have seen firsthand how we have turned the land and the villages where they and their ancestors once lived into a homeland.
And what was Dayan’s takeaway from this? That this wrongdoing in history must be rectified? No. Additionally, the contradiction that is at the dark core of Zionism is constantly encountered there. Dayan proceeded to discuss “the predetermination of our age in its full savagery”, which requires that “assuming the expectation of our obliteration is to die, we should be, morning and night, furnished and prepared.
“We are a generation of settlement, and without the steel helmet and the cannon’s maw, we will not plant a tree, build a house, or drill for water.” “We will not pave a path or drill for water.” “The gates of Gaza were too heavy for [Roi’s] shoulders, and they crushed him.”
Sixty-seven years later, the gates of Gaza and its “iron wall” — a reference to Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s essay “The Iron Wall” about revisionist Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky — became too much for another set of Roi Rutenbergs, crumbling under the weight of historical justice’s demands. The mission of subjugating the Palestinians continues to fail, as the steel helmet and cannon’s maw have been replaced by terrifying Israeli air power and its munitions.
As I have noted here previously, even Jabotinsky figured out this inconsistency. Jabotinsky, a political paterfamilias of the right-wing Israeli political party Likud and supreme commander of the terrorist organization Irgun, lacked empathy for Palestinians but was more forthright and unapologetic about “Zionist colonization” as a pragmatic.
He argued that Jews must constitute the majority; Jews and Arabs must be separated by an “iron wall” and “justice” must be enforced. Once the wall is built and the Jews are strong, Arabs will come to the Jewish state to ask for peace and accept the terms of coexistence.
Again, like Dayan, he believed that injustice would not cause the wall to collapse. He was wrong, as was Dayan. However, they were both correct to believe that Israelis “shall not pave a path nor drill for water” without Dayan’s steel helmets and cannons of repression. This brings us to the ruse known as the “two-state solution,” which is a red herring.
Three weeks after the Israeli takeover of the Palestinian village of Tantura in 1948, women and children were “deported” there: According to statements made by a number of Zionist leaders, this policy of evicting and annihilating Palestinians was and still is deliberate. Benno Rothenberg Collection TWO-STATE SOLUTION WAS DEAD ON ARRIVAL A great deal of debate surrounds statehood in international law. International law scholars have observed that, despite the fact that legality and laws require a clear explanation and codification of norms and concepts in legal instruments, this codification as a requirement for statehood evades objectivity.
