⬆️ #EcstasyAndAmnesia #GazaStrip

This is also as good a time as any to highlight the excellent in-depth essay by #ShanyMor titled “Ecstasy and Amnesia in the #Gaza Strip”

[Paywall-free archive ➡️ https://archive.ph/G5rAX#selection-769.417-769.630]

“What is unusual about the #Palestinian cause starts from the observation that many of those other nations built states on parts of historic homelands out of the ruins of collapsed multi-national, multi-linguistic, multi-confessional empires, and the #Palestinians have not”

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⬆️ #EcstasyAndAmnesia #GazaStrip

“The principal grievance of the #Palestinian cause, one revealed in those rejections of sovereignty and by rhetoric spanning generations, is not the absence of a desired nation-state but the existence of another one” #Israel

What is that predicament? It is defined by five dire properties:
1. #nationhood
2. #statelessness
3. #displacement.
4. #occupation.
5. #fragmentation

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⬆️ #EcstasyAndAmnesia #GazaStrip

#PalestinianPredicament is the direct or indirect outcome of three #Arab-#Israeli wars, each about a generation apart. These are the wars that started in 1947, 1967, and 2000. Each war was a complex event with vast, unforeseen, and contested consequences for a host of actors, but the consequences for the Palestinian people were uniquely catastrophic: the first brought #displacement, the second brought #occupation, the third brought #fragmentation.

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⬆️ #EcstasyAndAmnesia #GazaStrip

“It has been clear to me since about 2020 that a fourth war would probably soon be added to them; and clear that, as before, the shape such a war would take would not resemble the others; and clear that, as before, the result for the #Palestinian people and the Palestinian cause would be catastrophic.”

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⬆️ #EcstasyAndAmnesia #GazaStrip

#WarOfndependence that began in 1947 was first a #civilWar between #Arabs and #Jews in #Palestine, and then a multi-state war… from at least five sovereign countries—#Egypt, #Transjordan, #Syria, #Iraq, and #Israel—as well as small contingents from others. It was a war fought village by village and town by town, and it resulted in massive population displacements on both sides.

No Jews remained anywhere in parts of Palestine that fell under #Arab control

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⬆️ #EcstasyAndAmnesia #GazaStrip

The #ethnicSorting was most pronounced in the center of the land [where] more land was conquered by the #Arab Legion than by #IDF.

This territory included many sites with religious and symbolic importance to both sides.

It became known then as the #WestBank and it sits on a smaller patch of land that what had been allocated to a future #Palestinian Arab state in the rejected #UN #partitionProposal that preceded the war.

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⬆️ #EcstasyAndAmnesia #GazaStrip

Almost no #Arab population remained west of the #GreenLine.

With few exceptions, the few places in central #Israel today with a significant Arab population were not actually conquered by the #IDF in the war; they were largely territories that were held by the invading #Iraqi army and that were ceded to Israel in the #armistice.

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⬆️ #EcstasyAndAmnesia #GazaStrip

For the #Arabs, the defeat in this war was and remains a searing trauma.

Not only had the goal that had united the Arabs in 1948—preventing the establishment of a Jewish state in the heart of the #Arab #MiddleEast—been thwarted, but hundreds of thousands of Arabs living in #Palestine had been displaced by war.

In time, their #displacement became the enduring image of that defeat and humiliation.

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⬆️ #EcstasyAndAmnesia #GazaStrip

The war in 1967 was a 3-front war fought by 4 different armies belonging to #Egypt, #Jordan, #Syria, and #israel.

But it wasn’t those conquests that upended the #Palestinian situation. Rather it was the conquest of the #Gaza Strip from #Egypt and #WestBank from #Jordan that put millions of Palestinian #Arabs under #Israeli rule.

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⬆️ #EcstasyAndAmnesia #GazaStrip

The #Palestinians went from being a people defined by their dispossession at the hands of a hated enemy across a sealed border to being a people defined by their dispossession at the hands of a hated enemy that now also ruled them as an occupier.

Unlike the larger #Arab trauma of defeat, which was mostly bookended in time by the end of actual combat, for Palestinians, this remains a continuous trauma right up into the present.

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⬆️ #EcstasyAndAmnesia #GazaStrip

A generation after 1967, the #SecondIntifada involved no armies on distant fronts. There was a campaign of #terrorist attacks against #Israeli civilians… together with a campaign of #suicideBombings in Israeli cities.

In the #WestBank it looked less like either a #civilWar or a conventional war and more like an #asymmetricWar or a #counterinsurgency campaign by an occupying army that took years to settle down into a victory on the Israeli side.

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⬆️ #EcstasyAndAmnesia #GazaStrip

These 3 wars are as different in form as any wars could be. Yet in several crucial ways they are quite similar.

For one, all 3 of these wars were preceded by months of excitement in the #Arab world & heated rhetoric that was simultaneously righteous & violent.

Righteous in that the cause of attacking #Jews was held to be an absolute good and a moral exigency infused with theological overtones. Violent in that the rhetoric was often openly #eliminationist

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⬆️ #EcstasyAndAmnesia #GazaStrip

This pattern was set in motion by the first of the wars. The vote by the #UN General Assembly in 1947 to partition #BritishPalestine into two states, one #Jewish and one #Arab, set off an explosion of violence against local Jewish communities almost immediately in #Palestine itself.

If there were doubts about the justice of the cause being fought for—preventing the establishment of a Jewish state—there is little record for that.

#Arabism #ArabNationalism

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⬆️ #EcstasyAndAmnesia #GazaStrip

If there were doubts about the morality of the methods employed—sieges that blocked food & water and attacks on Jewish civilians of all ages wherever they could be found in cities, towns, and villages—there is no record of that.

If there were doubts not even about the morality but about the wisdom of a total war against the new Jewish state—concern, for example, that the Arab side might lose and end up worse off as a result—there is little record of that too

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