The Oct. 7 Hamas attack has led Western countries to send billions in military aid to Israel and express unequivocal solidarity with Israel and its right to self-defense, as they have been for decades. To be clear, Hamas’ killing of innocent, noncombatant people is horrible. However, in the words of Secretary-General Anthony Guterres, the attack “did not happen in a vacuum.” There are 75 years of brutal ethnic cleansing—the violent removal of a particular ethnic group from a geographic area, according to the United Nations (UN)—and Israeli occupation—the effective control of foreign land by a hostile army, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross— that give much-needed context to what’s happening in the Middle East.
Zionism is a nationalist movement calling for the establishment of a Jewish state in the Holy Land, which was dubbed “a land without a people for a people without a land.” According to Vox’s article “A Timeline of Israel and Palestine’s Complicated History,” Britain took control of Palestine following World War I and promised Palestine as “a national home for the Jewish people” in The Balfour Declaration without any input from Palestinians themselves.
The Declaration also stated “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine,” but didn’t enforce it. Soon after, Jews immigrated in large numbers to Palestine; British militia crushed Palestinian uprisings, killed Arab leaders, and trained Zionist militia to suppress further uprisings.
After Britain gave control of Palestine over to the United Nations (UN), the UN proposed a partition plan in 1947 that gave 52% of the land to the minority Jewish population—even though most were recent immigrants to Palestine—45% to the majority Palestinian population, and 3% for international control. Palestinians rejected the plan, the Zionists accepted it, and the Palestinians were ultimately ignored when the UN voted in favor of the partition.
Zionists then proceeded to take over even more land than the partition called for during what Palestinians call the Nakba (Catastrophe) of 1948 and others call the Israeli War for Independence or Arab-Israeli War of 1948, which involved other Arab countries. According to Al-Jazeera’s feature article titled “The Nakba did not start or end in 1948,” more than 750,000 out of the then 1.3 million Palestinians were displaced, around 530 villages and cities were ethnically cleansed, approximately 15,000 Palestinians were killed in more than 70 massacres, and more than 78 percent of Palestinian land was seized by the Zionist regime.
The treatment of Palestinians only worsened in the years following, with the U.S. and Europe backing Israel through funding, arms deals, and their legislative power in the UN as Israel commits war crimes with impunity. For example, Israel facilitates illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank and imprisoned more than 2,200 Palestinians since Oct. 7—without charge or trial—and inflicted torture and humiliation, according to a Nov. 8 Amnesty International news press release.
Palestinian suffering has been effectively ignored by the overwhelming majority of our politicians who say nothing about the war crimes Israel is committing; these crimes have killed over 10,000 Palestinians in less than a month, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
Gaza, a strip of land that is half the size of New York City, has been under an Israeli-controlled siege by land, air, and sea for the past 16 years; it has been described as an “open-air prison” by former President Jimmy Carter and is one of the most densely overpopulated places in the world, with 650,000 inhabitants packed into the 18 square miles of Gaza City.
According to the Human Rights Watch news article titled “Gaza’s Blocked Relief,” after Oct. 7, Israel blocked off water, electricity, fuel, and humanitarian aid and restricted food from entering Gaza via Israel and even through Egypt; as of Oct. 30, humanitarian aid is still restricted, the news article said.
As documented in previous years and recently in Human Rights Watch’s news press releases but denied by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), Israel has fired illegal white phosphorus over civilian areas like Gaza City port; this incendiary weapon ignites when exposed to oxygen and causes severe, life-altering burns that have led to “respiratory damage and organ failure” and tends to burn everything it comes in contact with.
Despite how about half of the 2.3 million Gazans are children, the bombing of apartment buildings, schools, mosques, churches, media centers, refugee camps, and hospitals is passed off as the human cost of war. When asked about mounting civilian casualties, President Joseph Biden had “no confidence” in the death toll from the Gaza Health Ministry and passed it off as the “price of waging a war,” according to a White House press conference on Oct. 25.
Israel’s actions are sickening, but not surprising. According to the Times of Israel, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said that Israel imposed a “complete siege” on the entire Gazan population because Israel is “fighting human animals” and “are acting accordingly,” Gallant said. Collective punishment is a war crime, according to the Geneva Convention. What is surprising is the Western world’s indifference to what the Center for Constitutional Rights, a nonprofit legal advocacy organization, calls an “unfolding genocide.” Even Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem and others like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch call this an apartheid regime.
To take action, we need to inform ourselves. When we become equipped with the knowledge of what is truly happening in Palestine, we then need to pressure our government not only to call for an immediate ceasefire in the region, but to also stop sending military aid to Israel, impose sanctions on their government, call for an end to Israel’s illegal occupation, and condemn the terrorism the Israeli government is inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank on a daily basis.
Correction: A previous version of this article misattributed a statement from the Geneva Convention to the Times of Israel, stating, “According to the Times of Israel, Israel is imposing collective punishment—an international war crime—on the entire Gazan population because, in the words of the Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, Israel is ’fighting human animals” and “are acting accordingly.’” The correct text should be, “According to the Times of Israel, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said that Israel imposed a ’complete siege’ on the entire Gazan population because Israel is ‘fighting human animals’ and ‘are acting accordingly.’ Collective punishment is a war crime, according to the Geneva Convention.”