The pattern is familiar. Israel tightens the screws. Palestinians resist. Israel, under the pretext of self-defence, massacres Palestinians, steals their land to add to its ever expanding fluid borders, and rewrites history.
I listen to Trump’s shameless call for Jordan and Egypt to take the Palestinians of Gaza. It could be temporary, he says, and I think ‘And pigs might fly.’ I listen to him describe the beauty of Gaza with its mild weather and location by the sea, and I think ‘Gaza is not yours. It is not a piece of real estate Daddy left you’. I listen to his brazen talk of Gaza’s wonderful prospects once it has been ‘cleaned’, and I think ‘The Palestinians are today’s untermensch’. I turn the television off and I reflect on the familiar pattern, on a process that has always worked like clockwork. Provocation, resistance, ethnic cleansing, land theft and rewriting of history. Repeat.
Dahlia Scheindlin writes about Israel’s well-established pattern of leveraging wars for annexation Hypothetical, but Plausible: How to End the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict for Good, Right Now – Israel News – Haaretz.com ‘If Israel maintains its current path, it will soon complete the de facto annexation of the West Bank. The cease-fire arrangement in Gaza will collapse after the first stage, the hostages will die, fighting resumes and Israel establishes a military government to occupy Gaza, with settlements to follow. The Palestinian national movement is smashed, Israel becomes a theocratic imperial actor ruling through subjugation of noncitizens mounting permanent insurgency, while suppressing residual dissent and opposition among its citizens forever.’
‘This option should no longer sound shocking – and certainly not to readers of this column. Until recently, no global force proved willing or capable of halting this process as it has taken shape during the war. And over decades, Israel has a well-established pattern of leveraging wars, even defensive wars, to conquer, hold, historicise and annex territory. This pattern is so successful, it has become a paradigm for Israeli policy.’
Daniela Weiss said ‘They’ll leave’. The confidence in her voice was a punch in the gut to every Palestinian and to everyone of us who had believed in justice, the International Order and that ‘Never Again’ meant never again for anyone. Arabs Will Not Stay in Gaza: Daniella Weiss Interview | TikTok
The pattern has been crystal clear to the Palestinians for decades. Over the past 15 months, it has also become clear to millions around the world. Now they can see for themselves, in real time, the process as it is implemented by Israel. Before mobile phones, social media and substacks, this process had been either ignored or whitewashed by a complicit media. And even today, as it is happening before our eyes, it is still ignored or whitewashed by mainstream media.
So if the pattern is so familiar and predictable, why do Palestinians resist? Occupation for those who have not experienced it can be a theoretical concept. For the occupied it is anything but. Even in the periods of so-called ‘peace’ between massacres, the occupier has numerous ways of devastating the occupied, driving some to leave and others to rise up. The life of the occupied can be made hell simply by a system of administrative orders. Occupation is murder by a thousand cuts. One of the best books I have read on the subject is Saree Makdisi’s ‘Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation’. Makdisi writes ‘..Tending one’s fields, visiting a relative, going to the hospital: for ordinary Palestinians, such everyday activities require negotiating permits and passes, curfews and closures, “sterile roads” and “seem zones”- bureaucratic hurdles ultimately as deadly as outright military incursion. These are the important facts of the occupation, even if they are the quietest.’ The late historian and human rights activist Howard Zinn wrote of Makdisi’s book “If you want to understand both the fury and the silent resentments of millions of Palestinians inside the Israeli occupation, read this book. It will compel you to see occupation not as an abstraction but as a day-to-day horror that should arouse the conscience of the world.”
Nathan Thrall’s ‘A Day in the Life of Abed Salama’ paints a heartbreaking picture of Palestinians’ life under Israeli occupation. Of Thrall’s book, Arundhati Roy wrote ‘I found myself pacing around between the chapters, paragraphs and sometimes even sentences just in order to be able to absorb the brutality, the pathos, the steely tenderness, and the sheer cunning and complex ways in which a state can hammer down a people and yet earn the applause and adulation of the civilised world for its actions.’
In West Bank Traffic Jams Are Smotrich’s Victory – Opinion – Haaretz.com Gideon Levy recounts his experience travelling the way Palestinians are made to travel inside Israel. He writes ‘This week I was a subhuman. Only for one (long) evening, but still, a subhuman experience.’ It took him and photographer Alex Levac six hours to drive from Ramallah and Tel Aviv, a distance of some 60km. He describes the procedures and soldiers’ behaviour at checkpoints, and concludes ”We were there six hours, longer than it takes to fly to London. If the rage that night at that checkpoint doesn’t lead one of the drivers there to terrorism, then the Palestinians are among the most restrained, tolerant and non-violent of nations.’
Despite the Orwellian language, the disingenuous statements and the euphemisms of population transfer and voluntary emigration, people see the process for what it is; ‘ethnic cleansing’ followed by land theft. Some speak up against the injustice of it all. Some defend Israel because they fear the fallout from not doing so. A complicit media echoes Israel’s claims and narratives. And the majority remain silent because ‘..even if people don’t fully believe these harmful narratives, their pervasiveness increases the perceived risks of disagreeing with these views, effectively silencing any opposition. The normalisation of these perspectives creates a societal environment where dehumanising attitudes become acceptable.‘By dehumanising Palestinians, media enabled genocide in Gaza | The Electronic Intifada
Israel’s familiar pattern in dealing with Palestinians does not only harm Palestinians, it threatens our fragile planet. In the morning, as I diligently separate the rubbish for recycling, I think of the bombs that Israel will be dropping on Gaza that day and the native olive trees that will be chopped down by the West Bank settlers. Israel’s familiar pattern also weakens the International Order and entrenches ‘might is right’. And a world in which the rules are made by the bully, the thug and the psychopath should terrify us all.
This evening, as I stood with Jewish friends on the steps of Sydney Town Hall to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day, I reflected on the road from dehumanisation to extermination. Dehumanisation has rules that are studied by psychologists and implemented by political leaders. The end result is always unimaginable horrors and unthinkable evil.
The dehumanisation of Palestinians can be applied to any group of people. We remain silent at the dehumanisation of any humans, at our peril.
Sawsan Madina
Sawsan Madina is former Head of SBS Television