Israel's savagery, meant to crush any hope of Palestinian salvation, may be what ultimately secures it.
In March 2023, I interviewed the human rights lawyer and author Raja Shehadeh for The Markaz Review. He had recently published We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I. The book traces a son’s heartrending quest to retrieve his intellectual and emotional affinity with a long gone, towering figure. But as the memoir unfolds, so does an extraordinarily fluent history of the Palestinian struggle.
Toward the end of the interview, I asked a very pessimistic but defiant Shehadeh to paint worst- and best-case scenarios for Palestine. He could see another Nakba provoked by a desperate act, say, in Ramallah. But, in the shadow of this Nakba, he could also glimpse a west that would finally grow truly appalled by Israel’s brutalities, apply sustained international pressure, and force an end to the occupation.
Powerful states like Israel can certainly commit genocide, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid: the grammar of Israeli strategy towards the Palestinians. But they cannot neatly repackage them as settlements “to everyone’s satisfaction,” because they can no longer author and control the narrative that justifies and normalizes them.
I don’t know whether Shehadeh meant to enfold his kindest divination within his darkest prediction. But I recall thinking, in the moments after the interview, that there has always been something about Palestine that compels its lovers to twine rebirth with apocalypse. The most tragic element in this twining is that these lovers are two peoples: the conquerors and the conquered, the occupiers and the occupied, the oppressors and the oppressed. We who have witnessed and endured the existential war over this precious piece of land have long understood that, in political Zionism’s lexicon, “rebirth” necessarily meant the death, in one form or another, of the other—the Palestinian native. And hence, the Palestinians’ rebirth as a free people would necessarily spell the end of Zionism itself.
Shehadeh’s greatest fear came to pass in the aftermath of October 7: an Israeli-engineered apocalypse whose fury is at its most catastrophic in Gaza but whose target is all the Palestinians between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea. In Gaza, genocide has continued to devolve into a revolving showcase of horrors; in the West Bank, military operations and state-driven settler pogroms and land theft have acquired a genuinely mad quality and a frenzied cadence. It’s as if Israel is rushing through the very fait accomplis designed to shield its winnings from the reckonings to come; more profoundly, to preempt the salvation Shehadeh envisioned.
In the aftermath of apocalypse, then, death eternal.
Israeli-born Omer Bartov was one of the first genocide scholars to give Gaza’s devastation its proper name. Recently, he warned that Israel may yet weather the legal and political fallout from its war crimes. In his guest essay for the New York Times, entitled “I Am a Scholar of Genocide. We Are Entering a Terrifying New Era,” he writes that genocide ends when “either the perpetrators accomplish their goal, or a military force stops them, and accountability ensues.” Israel has not accomplished its goal, and so genocide and ethnic cleansing shall continue in what is commonly referred to as the Occupied Territories. But a military intervention will not stop Israel, and an international court’s verdict has little chance of being enforced. Israel, though morally diminished and increasingly shunned, is therefore set to evade responsibility for its crimes, clearing the way for future ones. The implications are not only dire for Palestinian emancipation, but for all the present and future victims of genocidaires who are learning from Israel’s example. President Trump’s 20-point Gaza peace plan is designed precisely for this escape, Bartov argues:
It is true that Israel is experiencing increasing global isolation and disapproval among Americans across the political spectrum, but that is precisely what the glossy plans for a new Gaza may attenuate or even reverse: by persuading distracted publics in a troubled world that the issue of Gaza has been settled to everyone’s satisfaction.
I take Bartov’s argument very seriously. But perhaps he is anticipating an Israeli, European, and American whitewashing performance that the three seem utterly incapable of delivering in this chaotic age of lilliputian politicians, spent influence, and extreme exposures. Powerful states like Israel can certainly commit genocide, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid: the grammar of Israeli strategy towards the Palestinians. But they cannot neatly repackage them as settlements “to everyone’s satisfaction,” because they can no longer author and control the narrative that justifies and normalizes them. Nor do Israeli leaders seem to be collectively invested in such an exercise as they simultaneously destroy and boastfully broadcast their destruction. Nor can Israel’s friends, with Western moral authority collapsing and American heft waning, be relied upon to help Israel manage an escape from accountability into a phantasmagorical Gazan Atlantic City. Worse, the lifespan of the Board of Peace is as short as President Trump’s term in office, and the ethnic cleansing of Gaza is a monstrous undertaking of many more years.
This is not to say that Shehadeh’s rebirth is the more obvious end in sight. The Palestinians could languish endlessly in a hellish purgatory. They can also expect Israel to deploy even more brute force in their frustrated campaigns to oust them from the territories. There is nothing to suggest that Israel’s impunity has in any meaningful way been checked in Palestine or anywhere in the surrounding neighborhood, where it has always been free to wreak havoc at will.
And yet! This century has been a graveyard of once ironclad orthodoxies, of colossal belief systems and ideas. We in the region have been witness to the demise of so many of these old grandees: omnipresent regimes, state ideologies, mass parties, colonial architectures… We have in fact become inhabitants of vacuums amid the detritus of grand politics. Since October 7, Israel has become the latest country to see its most cherished self-conceptions and articles of faith undergo the same convulsions. Unquestioned exceptionalism in the eyes of its Western creators and protectors, a once-unshakable sense of impregnability, and long-touted democratic credentials now share a common fate with the patina of respectability that has long surrounded the Zionist project: all have become loci of fierce contestation.
To restore all these touchstones of Israeli power is a herculean task, and Israel is no Hercules.
On Another Note
The conversation between the London Review of Books’ Thomas Jones and Peter Geoghegan, an investigative journalist and author of Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics, about Palantir Technologies, is as educational as it is fascinating.
Palantir was born shortly after September 11, 2001. The timing was no coincidence. Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, two of its founders, saw an opportunity in the emerging American hyper-security environment. Palantir, whose main pitch was to centralize and integrate data across the fragmented US security apparatus, launched with the support of In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm.
The company quickly developed a notorious reputation due in part to the unmistakable weirdness of Thiel and the unalloyed malice of Karp, traits that inevitably shaped the company’s products. Palantir became especially controversial among Israel’s critics because of the role it played during the Jewish state’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, which has yet to cease. As Karp famously put it, “Our weapons software is in every combat situation I’m aware of.”
Have a listen!
Amal Ghandour’s biweekly column, “This Arab Life,” appears in The Markaz Review every other Friday, as well as in her Substack, and is syndicated in Arabic in Al Quds Al Arabi.
Opinions published in The Markaz Review reflect the perspective of their authors and do not necessarily represent TMR.
