(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
On October 28 last year, the UN Secretary General, António, stated Guterres, that the Hamas massacre that killed 1.200 Israelis earlier this month had not taken place in a vacuum. He explained that one cannot disregard 56 years of occupation in our understanding of the tragedy of October 7.
The statement did not go down well everywhere. The Israeli government promptly demanded that Guterres be removed from his post. It was claimed that with his statement he endorsed the massacre on Israeli soil, and from there it was not far from the debate and anti-Zionism to the corresponding discourse on anti-Semitism.
A freedom movement
The controversial Israeli historian Ilan Pappe takes this case as his starting point in the foreword to his new book, which is an updated version of his Ten myths about Israel, which was first published in English in 2017. Now it is available in a new edition in Norwegian, which can only be welcomed, since Pappe tackles a number of the myths which, in the current situation, have come into frequent use during the decontextualization and dehistoricization of Gaza.
Behind these troublesome concepts lies the fact that governments see an occasion to follow a policy they would otherwise avoid for ethical or strategic reasons. The October 7 attack has become a pretext for standing by while Israel inflicts irreparable damage on the Gaza Strip, and for the United States it has been a welcome occasion to significantly step up its military presence in the region. And because the whole thing is often taken out of the larger context, it also becomes a kind of forgiveness for the past Israelabuse occurs.
By bringing the myths out into the clear light of day, the author thus tries to give the reader a greater perspective, and this can be useful, whether you share his view of history or not.
In the current context, it would be natural to look at the myth, or rather the myths, about the Gaza Strip, because there are many. One of them targets Hamas, which the Western world often defines as one terrorist movement, while Ilan Pappe has no doubts when he describes it as a freedom movement. He points out that it arose as a humanitarian organization back in the 1980s, and not least that it gained its legitimacy when it won a democratic and comfortable majority in the 2006 parliamentary elections.
The Israeli withdrawal aimed to strengthen its grip on the West Bank, while Gaza was to be transformed into an open prison.
Two developments are important here. In part, a void arose in the Palestinian national movement with the death of Yasser Arafat in 2004, and a similar void arose the following year when the Israelis evacuated the settlements in the Gaza Strip. Here the myth goes that this step was an act of peace or reconciliation, which was reciprocated with hostilities and violence. Ilan Pappe dispels the myth by claiming that the Israeli withdrawal was aimed at strengthening its grip on the West Bank, while Gaza was to be transformed into an open prison.
It was basically Israel that paved the way for Hamas.
This strategic thinking backfired. In large parts of the Palestinian population came Hamas to stand as an anchor, and not least as a response to the confused signals previously received from socialist and secular forces in the Palestinian environment. It occurred to many Western and Israeli analysts that Islamists could win a victory through democratic means. Ever since the great breakthrough for political Islam with the Iranian revolution in 1979, people had acted as if something like this could not possibly happen so close to Israel. And when, on top of that, Hamas opposed the Oslo Accords' proposals for territorial compromise, which the rival Fatah had signed, confrontation was set up, and the myth is effectively debunked here through the demonstration that it was basically Israel that paved the way for Hamas.
Defensive war?
It is a thought-provoking introduction to the conflict, Ilan Pappe has written, and, for example, the Israeli journalist and analyst Shlomi Eldar, who is far more mainstream than Pappe, gives him a long way to go. Eldar has also updated his book on Hamas himself, where he also tells some truths that are frowned upon by the political parnas.
Cardboard punctures the perception that Palestine was a country empty of people.
And Ilan Pappe continues in the same vein. It is interesting to read, for example, that where the West largely discredited Arafat, they embraced his successor, Mahmoud Abbas, which automatically increased Hamas's popularity among large sections of the Palestinian population.
He gets around a number of the other ingrained myths, which at first seem to have less direct relevance to the tragic situation in 2024. But in reality it is extremely relevant when he pierces the perception that Palestine was a depopulated country, just as his reflections on the Six Day War in 1967 as an 'involuntary war' are interesting. Here he does away with the narrative that the Arab state leaders of the time were not easy to talk to, which made the war and the occupation necessary in order to be able to force the other party to the negotiating table.
This is an obvious prerequisite for understanding the claim that in October 2023 Israel launched a 'defensive war' against the Gaza Strip. In Ilan Pappe's view, it was a Palestinian reaction to long-term confinement, which is an often-heard argument, but more importantly it can be seen as a response to a number of Israeli violations of the ceasefire provisions in the area. Which in the book turns into a showdown with yet another myth.
