Deluge: Gaza  and Israel, from crisis to cataclysm – a review

JVL Introduction

The conflict in Gaza started on October 7th – or so Israel and much western media would still have us believe.

It is so much nonsense as this new publication from OR Books makes abundantly clear in a number of essays by leading Palestinian, Israeli, and international authorities who put the genocidal conflict we are witnessing into an analytical and historical context.

Andrew Hornung reviews it here for JVL.

You can order the book here for immediate shipment or download.

RK

Deluge: Gaza  and Israel, From Crisis to Cataclysm

Edited by Jamie Stern-Weiner, OR books

Reviewed by Andred Hornung

Every day brings news of ongoing horrors from Gaza and dangerous shifts in the very scope of the conflict.  Media reports – even honest ones – revel in the moment, offering confusion and incomprehension.  So it is both challenging and vital to try to contextualise and appraise these events.

From the outset, in the introduction to this valuable collection of essays, editor Jamie Stern-Weiner declares its aim: “to place this war in its proper historical context and to provide a prelim­inary assessment of the many different aspects of the war”.  Issued about three months after October 7^th “Deluge” largely fulfils these important aims.

The Hamas attack of October 7^th profoundly shocked both the supporters of Israel and supporters of the Palestinian struggle.  The vocabulary used to describe these shattering events – a turning point, a paradigm shift, unprecedented, out of the blue – all too easily have the effect of dislocating it from its context, of detaching it from the analytical framework that allows us to understand individual events.  The function of a volume like “Deluge” is to identify what is new in a situation while simultaneously establishing its continuity with the past.

When UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres drew attention to this continuity, saying that Hamas’ deadly attack “did not happen in a vacuum”, Israel’s unsurprising reaction was to demand his immediate resignation.   Unsurprising because Israel justification for its genocidal response to October 7^th rests on its presumed Right to Self-Defence against an unprovoked aggression.  Meanwhile we hear nothing of the Palestinians’ right to resist oppression.

Indeed, it must have seemed so to many Israelis.  They had got used to the irregular rhythm of rocket fire from Gaza followed by disproportionate Israeli military response or popular uprising in Gaza followed again by disproportionate Israeli military response.  Israel’s post 2006 policy on Gaza amounted to a regular military “mowing of the grass” – the blade set high or the blade set low – combined with economic immiseration of Gaza through a combination of destruction and embargo.   Israel had got used to the Quartet of UN, US, EU and Russia repeating their formula for a solution – unchanged for over 50 years – and felt sure that it was meaningless cant.  It could act with impunity.

As Avi Shlaim points out in his introduction and in the first of the 10 contributions that make up the volume, the Oslo Accords and the Sharon government’s 2005 unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip were all intended as a way of turning confrontation into management. Or, as Alon Liel, Israel’s former ambassador to South Africa put it: “we no longer need peace”.

The contributions of Avi Shlaim and Sara Roy (Econocide in Gaza), highlight respectively the diplomatic and economic aspects of this situation as it affected the people of the Gaza Strip.  Both Shlaim and Roy see Israel’s strategy as one freezing the situation, driving a wedge between Gaza and the West Bank and isolating Hamas.  First the crowbar then the grinder.

Sara Roy sums up Israel’s policy as an attempt “to eliminate Palestinian control over the whole of the West Bank and East Jerusalem and sever most ties between these areas and Gaza…(and) to do this primarily by economic cooptation in the West Bank and, in the Gaza Strip, by economic deprivation, demographic isolation, and physical as well as institutional destruction.”

The supportive role of the US in particular in this is exemplified in a November 2008 cable from the US embassy officials in Tel Aviv released by WikiLeaks and quoted by Roy: “As part of their overall embargo plan against Gaza, Israeli officials have confirmed…that they intend to keep the Gazan economy on the brink of collapse without pushing it over the edge.”  The idea was that it should “function at the lowest level possible consistent with avoiding humanitarian crisis.”  (Perhaps Roy means “consistent with avoiding a humanitarian outcry even on the part of Israel’s allies”.)

A key historical moment – on this nearly all contributors agree – was Israel’s refusal to recognise Hamas’s unexpected victory in the election that followed the Sharon government’s 2005 withdrawal of Israel’s settlements from the Gaza Strip.  “The only democracy in the Middle East” – as the saying goes – refused to accept the results of a democratic election when they didn’t suit them.  That election victory could have provided an opportunity for diplomatic engagement between Hamas and Israel but as Coulter Louwerse (Is Hamas to Blame for the Failure to Resolve the Israel-Palestine Conflict?) points out: Israel and its allies responded to evidence of Hamas’s political moderation not as an opportunity to pursue but a dire threat to avert.”

True to form, Israel denounced these elected representatives of the Gazan Palestinian  as unfit to be negotiating partners.

Indeed, Hamas’s electoral victory was interpreted as meaning that all Gazans were terrorists and thus implicitly terrorists.  As Avigdor Lieberman, twice Deputy Prime Minister of Israel, put it “There are no innocent people in the Gaza Strip.”  R.J.’s contribution, Rule Number One of Nonviolent Resistance:  It Can’t Work if It’s Misrepresented as Violent, from which this quote is taken, looks at the way mobilisations like the “Great March of Return” were incriminated in the Western press and represented as essentially violent.  A similar point is made in a later contribution by Mitchell Plitnick who focusses on the representation in the US of the BDS movement as anti-semitic.  Non violent mobilisations are presented as implicitly genocidal while actual genocidal actions are represented as “self-defence”.

Israel’s genocidal approach finds its sharpest expression in the a-Dahiya doctrine.  This approach, analysed in Yaniv Cogan’s piece (Targeting Civilians: Its Logic in Gaza and Israel) is not interested in guilt or innocence.  Its champions demand overkill on principle, taking the destruction in the a-Dahiya district of Beirut in 2006 as a model: “We will subject [every village from which Israel is shot at] to disproportionate force and cause enormous damage and destruction.  We don’t consider them to be civilian villages but military bases.”   Wisely the editor follows this with a moving reflection on the human implications of this brutality, Just Like That: Life and Death in Gaza by the Gazan journalist Ahmed Alnouaq.

With Khaled Hroub’s Nothing Fails Like Success: Hamas and the Gaza Explosion we return to the question of the evolution of Hamas.  Hroub focuses on the war on Hamas following its election victory, the tightening of the embargo, the campaign to designate Hamas as a terrorist organisation and thereby isolate it.  “The US,” he writes, “collaborated with certain PA (Palestine Authority) security officials to paralyze the Hamas government and ultimately foment a coup against it.”

The PA, for its part, understood that integration with Hamas would put in jeopardy the aid it receives from the US, EU as well as tax revenues controlled by Israel, without which the PA would collapse.  Again Israel’s divide and rule policy determined the course of events.

Hroub sees Hamas’s policy as one aimed at unifying the Palestinian resistance and, as far as Gaza itself was concerned, “appeasing public opinion (by) gradually relaxing its grip on Fatah and other groups in the Strip, becoming more tolerant of public criticism, and abandoning early attempts to impose its conservative religious mores on women.”

Certainly Israel was not interested in any positive evolution of Hamas.  And both the US and EU were ready to back the crushing embargo that Israel imposed.  But was it this rejection that led Hamas to the conclusion that no amount of appeasement would bring results – that such a line led only to humiliation?  Is that what led to the October 7^th attack?  Or is it that Hamas’s military wing acted independently of its political organisation?  Or was there some other factional dynamic?

Whatever the answer, the attack, while it appears from news reports to have made Hamas more popular on the West Bank, was also a setback to any possibility of unifying the resistance.  In his essay The Quiet Front: Reflections from the West Bank Abuhashhash discusses this failure.

He attributes the silence on the West Bank to three factors: Fatah was – predictably – opposed to the creation of a unified emergency command and “from the first day, the Israeli army pre-emptively implemented a policy of suppression and terrorism.”  Another factor – here he confirms Sara Roy’s analysis – was the “class of Palestinian investors and merchants (who) have been granted permits to import goods and commodities from Israel and through Israeli ports.”  To these he adds “employees of the PA, the major traders, and the workers in Israel who have built enviable lives based on their higher incomes.”  These “conservative elements comprise,” in the author’s view, “a majority of the West Bank population”.

In the light of these last two contributions, the idea that the October 7^th attack might unify the Palestinian resistance or ignite a mass opposition to Israeli occupation seems delusory.    The next essay, All Shook Up: Regional dynamics of the Gaza War by Mouin Rabbani, considers that incursion in a wider context, that of the Axis of Resistance in which Iran is a central player.  The author dismisses the view that the purpose of Hamas’s attack was to disrupt the growing entente between Israel of Saudi Arabia.  He believes that “the repaired relations with the Axis of Resistance were central to Hamas’s ability to successfully confront Israel’s military and intelligence services on October 7^th,” and that this led it to imagine that “the scale of its October 7 attacks would embolden its allies to throw caution to the wind and seek to match their efforts”.  If that was Hamas’s reasoning then surely “they miscalculated.”

Of course, these essays offer a “preliminary assessment”.  And – who knows? – Netanyahu’s bombing of the Iranian embassy in Damascus might yet boost the credentials of the Axis of Resistance.

A similar conclusion to Rabani’s is drawn by Nathan J Brown in Into the Abyss, which ends with the bleak forecast that “When the dust settles, the people of Israel-Palestine will be left facing each other with more bitterness, but with no more tools to craft a less violent future.”

The third and last section of this collection rightly looks at the solidarity movements outside the region, in the US (Breakthrough and Backlash in the Belly of the Beast by Mitchell Plitnick), in Britain (Palestine Solidarity in Britain by Talal Hangari) and in the European Union (Sins of Commission: How Europe Was Bounced Into Supporting Israel’s War Crimes in Gaza by Clare Daly MEP).

Talal Hangari’s contribution gives a brief account of the Britain’s slavish adherence to US foreign policy on the Israel-Palestine conflict from the 1960s to the present and the current government’s attempts to delegitimise Palestine solidarity – attempts aided by an overwhelmingly hostile press and a rigidly pro-Israel Labour Party.  However, this depiction of the establishment’s reaction to rise of Palestine solidarity in the current conflict, while accurate and necessary, fails to give sufficient weight to the long-term campaign – above all that in support of the IHRA definition of antisemitism – to delegitimise all criticism of Israel by labelling it antisemitic.  Perhaps this contribution was written too early to give an account of the effect of pressure from the Muslim communities in the US and UK, Plitnik does reference this important dimension.

There is a clear parallel between Plitnik’s account of the pro-Israel ideological campaign in the US and Hangari’s account of the same in the UK.  Plitnik in particular offers some important reflections on the subjective interpretation of “offense” – if Jews say they are fearful or feel offended by criticism of Israel – then the critics (usually labelled as hate-mongers) should be silenced.

Finally Clare Daly gives an astute insider analysis of the EU’s policy on the current conflict.  As points out that “if Israel can hoodwink international public opinion into viewing this situation as a conventional war rather than the policing of an occupation, then Israel’s onslaught will seem less out of place, and the standards to which Israel is held will be lowered.”

Thus Israel portrays Gaza as an independent state-like actor to justify the notion of “self-defence” while at the same time denying it that very status internationally.  And the EU repeats this line.

Daly points also to the particular role of Ursula von der Leyen and those around her and the ultra-pro-Israel positions of Germany and Hungary.  A separate contribution focussing on this point would have been appropriate.

This final section is labelled “Solidarities”.  It is predominantly concerned, however, not with solidarity movements but with the actions by state and other agents opposed to such solidarity.

The importance of this collection lies above all in giving historical and analytical context to the rapidly changing situation, where horror and sudden shifts of focus all to easily capture our attention.