By Ilan Pappe – The Palestine Chronicle  

Similarly to what happened in 1948, the leaders of the Zionist movement believe that history has offered them a rare opportunity to achieve, through one big operation, what they could only achieve over several years, through incremental action.

As many of us had warned, eleven months into the genocide of Gaza, Israel is now focusing on the genocide of the West Bank. 

In this case, it is a more cautious policy, since Israel cannot find easy pretexts as it did to justify its assault and genocide in Gaza. However, the narrative that Israel is using is essentially the same. In fact, it is more than a narrative, it is a myth that Israel’s supporters around the world continue to embrace and repeat. 

The myth is this: Israel’s attack on Gaza was a retaliatory military operation while the current assault on the West Bank is a pre-emptive attack against Iran’s proxies in the region.

There is another layer to the myth, and that is the claim that Iran is motivated by the same objectives that have informed the Nazi genocide of the Jews.  

This is not a new line of propaganda, of course. Israeli academics, diplomats, and politicians attempted to Nazify the Palestinians ever since 1948. The most absurd part of that effort was the claim by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the Mufti had persuaded Hitler to commit the genocide of the Jews in Europe.  

This old-new myth led to the sinister comparison between the soldiers and citizens killed on October 7, 2023, and the six million Jews slaughtered by the Nazis. 

Such a comparison is a total abuse of the Holocaust memory and, more importantly, an attempt to demonize the Palestinian anti-colonialist resistance, which began back in the 1920s – and will continue until Palestine is liberated. 

There is no need to spend too much time refuting this kind of fabrication. What matters is that it still provides immunity in Western media and politics for the continued genocidal policies of Israel in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

Readers of the Palestine Chronicle do not need to be convinced that the Israeli actions in the Gaza Strip constitute genocide.  But what transpired in the last month is that the genocide is not just about mass killings of Palestinians but part of a wider project of erasing the Palestinians from their land.

This erasure strategy led to the total destruction of the universities and libraries in the Gaza Strip in the last eleven months. A barbaric act meant to wipe out the Palestinian identity, cultural heritage, and human capital. 

This is also the motivation behind Israel’s actions in the West Bank, masqueraded as a preventive strike against a possible “terrorist” attack on Israel. 

The current messianic neo-Zionist Israeli government believes it has been provided with a rare historical window, granting it the power to erase the Palestinians from their land. In this context, every means, including genocide, is justified in the eyes of these politicians and their constituency. 

Similarly to what happened in 1948, the leaders of the Zionist movement believe that history has offered them a rare opportunity to achieve, through one big operation, what they could only achieve over several years, through incremental action.

This is a painful reminder of the two clocks of history that are working at a different pace. One clock, which works very slowly, is the one that measures the growing solidarity with the Palestinian people in the West, along with pro-active campaigns of boycotting Israel and divesting from it. 

The other clock, which is unfortunately accelerating at a terrifying pace, measures the destruction on the ground in historical Palestine.

Therefore, the solidarity movement’s main mission is still the same: trying to match the pace and affect the changing global and regional reaction to Israel’s policies in order to make a difference on the ground.

The horror show of the Democratic Party’s convention in Chicago last August – where presidential candidate Kamala Harris reiterated her unashamed and unconditional support to Israel –  was another painful reminder of the American complicity in the genocide. But it also indicated the lack of any meaningful alternative in US politics that could give us some hope for a radical change in the near future. 

Whatever the result of the American elections would be, it is more reasonable to work for limiting American involvement in Palestine, as well as in the Middle East, than expecting the new American administration to adopt a policy that has never been pursued since the very establishment of the state of Israel. 

The less the US is involved, the better the chances are for a better future. Unfortunately, though, there is a caveat. 

In the short run, in order to stop the genocide unfolding in Gaza and the one evolving in the West Bank, the pressure on the future president must increase significantly.

Hopefully, in the next 60 days, the Uncommitted National Movement will persuade Harris that stopping the genocide could help her win the swing states, where the Left and Arab American votes are of great significance. 

Then, there are the European Union and British government, which, until today, have adopted shameful positions towards the genocide. 

So far, the return of Labour to power and the victory of the left alliance in France have not affected a serious change in the policies of both countries. 

And, although the positions of Norway, Spain and Belgium on the recognition of the state of Palestine are encouraging, this is hardly an urgent goal right now, as the genocide in Gaza continues and is expanding to the West Bank and maybe, in the future, to the 1.9 million Palestinian citizens inside Israel. 

I have always been very careful to avoid making doomsday and fear-mongering predictions about the fate of this particular community, in the midst of which I have spent most of my time.

But now I am afraid that they, too, are facing an existential danger as the potential victims of the third phase. 

However, it is never too late to prevent the next step from happening. 

The academic year in the global north and in the US is about to begin and hopefully, the encampments will return to protests with renewed energy and even more invigorating forms of protest.

It is also encouraging to see that more and more unions and companies are divesting from Israel while several universities decided to sever their official ties with Israeli academia. 

There is no need to tell the Palestinians how to strategize and to what end. What is needed is a confident solidarity movement that believes it is doing all it can to pressure the national governments to stop Israel.

The neo-Zionist messianism must be prevented from fulfilling what its gurus regard as a rare historical opportunity to destroy the Palestinian people, something their predecessors have failed to do in more than a century of colonial oppression. 

We know that they will not succeed – the Palestinians will not disappear, and neither will Palestine, but we need to do all we can to limit the carnage and destruction that they are wreaking all over historical Palestine.