Israeli Invasion in Historical Perspective

By Ben Cohen

The U.S media has assiduously avoided giving any historical reference to the Israeli assault on Gaza, portraying it as a response to Hamas aggression. The truth, of course, is far more complex and far reaching than our sound byte culture would like to admit. The truth is that the Palestinians were dealt a grave historic injustice when their land was taken away during the creation of Israel in 1948, and they have been fighting to get it back ever since. Chris Hedges of Truthdig.com was a personal friend of Hamas leader Nizar Rayan, who was killed last week in a targeted assassination by Israel, and has an interesting take on events that takes into account the fragile and very volatile history of the region:

Rayan’s grandfather and great-uncle were killed in the 1948 war that led to the establishment of Israel. His grandmother died shortly after she and her son, Rayan’s father, were driven from their village by Jewish fighters. His father was passed among relatives and grew up with the bitterness of the dispossessed—a bitterness the father passed on to the son and the son passed on to his own children. 

Israeli militias in 1948 drove some 800,000 Palestinians from their homes, farms, towns and villages into exile in the West Bank, Gaza and neighboring countries. Israeli historian Ilan Pappe’s book “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine” details the deliberate Israeli policy of removing Palestinians from their land. 

“There was not a single night that we did not think and talk about Palestine,” Rayan said the last time I saw him, his eyes growing moist. “We were taught that our lives must be devoted to reclaiming our land.”

To understand this conflict, there needs to be an understanding of why Palestinians are fighting. Blanket phrases like 'terrorism' do not explain Palestinian violence, it merely reduces it to black and white logic that serves no one and exacerbates the problem.