Gaza, une étude de cas sur le génocide

Conférence organisée par CRI-Voix des victimes (CH) et Investig'action (Belgique), en partenariat avec la Commission des droits de l'homme islamique (IHRC), la Coordination des organisations islamiques suisses (COIS) et la Fondation islamique culturelle d'Ahl-El-Beit à Genève (FICA).
Elle a été tenue à Genève le 20 janvier 2024, avec Jacques Baud, Rania Madi, Haim Bresheeth, Ilan Pappé, Christophe Oberlin, Gilles Devers et Craig Murray.

INTERVENTIONS :

00:00 Jacques Baud en français

20:32 Rania Madi en anglais / in English

33:47 Haim Bresheeth en anglais / in English

53:50 Ilan Pappé en anglais / in English

1:22:56 Christophe Oberlin en anglais / in English

1:33:00 Gilles Devers en français

2:05:06 Craig Murray en anglais / in English

2:21:27 Questions-réponses, avec Ilan Pappé, Gilles Devers, Rania Madi et Haim Bresheeth.

2:48:40 interventions de Farhad Afshar, président de la COIS, puis du président de l'IHRC.

Vidéo : J. Friedli avec Neyar-prod
Montage : J. Friedli

Toutes les interventions ont été extrêmement pertinentes. Comme aide à la compréhension, je transcris pour l'instant celle —historique, analytique, prospective et de bon conseil— d'Ilan Pappé, qui a parlé en anglais à partir de 53:50. Liens et crochets sont de mon cru. Attention, transcription urgente, elle pourrait contenir des inexactitudes :

"First of all, I want to thank the organizers for inviting me, and it's great to see so many people. And I also want to thank the translator. I don't know who he is, but he's done an incredibly good job so far, so I want to encourage him to continue… and… it's a tough task to follow the fantastic interventions so far without repeating so many important points that had already been made. But I was invited as an historian and I would like to try to give an historical context, although I do think that part of that context was already covered by the excellent interventions that we heard before.

You probably all remember that, when the Secretary General of the United Nation said that although he condemns part of what the Hamas did, nonetheless he wanted to remind people that the actions of the Hamas were not done in a vacuum, and immediately he was branded as an antisemite by the Israeli foreign Ministry. It is not surprising that Israel wants a narrative that has no historical context for the 7th of October, that it should be seen as violence for the sake of violence and unheard of violence of people who have no good reason to do what they did, and therefore Israel is justified, as Rania [Madi] has explained, through their own quotes in doing what it can, because it's faced with this unexplained, unprecedented violence for the sake of violence.

And the fact that Israel wants this narrative to be accepted is not surprising. What is surprising is that the global North, especially the United States, but quite a lot of countries in Europe, are accepting this Israeli idea that you can dehistoricize, decontextualize the events of the Seventh of October and what is even more depressing… is that not only politicians are accepting this idea (that there is no historical context), but also academics, especially heads of universities, in Switzerland, in Germany, in Belgium, in France, in Britain, in the United States… people who are supposed to give us free spaces for expressing our opinions, presenting our research, are telling us not to use the word “context”. I witnessed in the University of Marburg a guidance that was sent to the faculty members of the Marburg University saying to academics there: you cannot use the word “but” after you condemn the Hamas. Unbelievable! They also… the University of Marburg told students not to use my books in the courses. And, as you know, Fayard in France banned my book, as well, on the ethnic cleansing of Palestine… It's just one step before burning books and we know who burned books in the past in Europe.

The fact that intelligent, educated Europeans and Americans are willing to accept that there is no context to the 7th of October can only be explained by one of the two reasons: either they are totally ignorant of what goes on, which I don't believe, or they have no shame and they have no moral backbone, and they are willing to say things that they don't believe in, because they are afraid of someone, someone has paid them, they are… I don't know… Each one of them probably has their own explanation for the most shameful moral position I ever heard in Europe by academics who should… Their job is to give context to everything that you see. So, let us give some context here without being afraid of the University of Marburg.

There are two historical contexts which I think are important not only because History helps to explain what happened on the 7th of October, unfortunately also helps to explain what is going to happen next year, and hopefully also helps to explain a bit of a better future, in the more distant future. It is important because it helps us to understand the nature of the Zionist movement, the nature of the state of Israel, and this is something that would be very important for us if we want to be engaged, in whatever way we want to be engaged, in changing the reality on the ground. You have to understand the very nature of Zionism, you have to understand the very structure that is called the state of Israel in order to be able to contribute, directly or indirectly, as a Palestinian or as a member of solidarity with a Palestinian, to end the oppression, the colonization and the ethnic cleansing.

So, let's start with a more distant historical context. Not many people remember that before 1948 there was no Gaza Strip. The strip, the strip itself, is an Israeli invention. Gaza was a cosmopolitical town on Via Maris, the road from Alexandria up to Alexandretta, in Turkey, and because it was the main road on the sea, many people from different countries and cultures passed through Gaza and left an impact that turned it into one of the most cosmopolitical towns before 1948. It also had a very good system of coexistence between Muslims, Christians and Jews. Just recently a friend of ours found an interesting declaration in 1905 by the three heads of the religions in the city of Gaza expressing their delight in 1905 and how well are the three communities deal with issues of friction, disagreement, and conflict.

Israel created the Gaza Strip because, unlike other places into which it could push the many Palestinians it expelled during the Nakba, during the 1948 catastrophe, unlike other countries, such as Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, that were willing to receive the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians that Israel expelled, Egypt closed its border, Egypt refused to accept even one Palestinian, and because of that, the leader of Israel, the great architect of the ethnic cleansing of 1948, David Ben Gurion, who ashamedly has a boulevard named after him in Paris, he is a war criminal, and he decided that Israel is willing to give 2% of historical Palestine in order to turn it into the biggest refugee camp in the world. And that's how the Gaza Strip was created, by the Israelis, as a kind of rectangle structure, a geometric kind of structure, into which Israel pushed the Palestinians from the central of Palestine and from the South that Egypt was unwilling to accept. The last group of Palestinians who were pushed into the Gaza Strip were those living in 11 villages on whose ruins, on the ruins of these villages, Israel built the settlements that were attacked on the 7th of October by the Hamas.

So, the Hamas attacked settlements built on the ruins of the last villages of Palestine that were destroyed by the Israeli army and expelled to Gaza. In the Israeli archive, we have a very known document called order number 40 [cf. 1:04:00]. Order number 40 is from the 25th of November 1948 and it was sent by the Israeli Central Command to the Commander in the area of Gaza, and it has the name of the 11 villages, and the order says, and I quote literally what the order says: “Occupy the village, expel all the people to Gaza, burn the houses and demolish the stone houses”, because some of the houses of the Palestinian villages in 1948 were built of hut, of mortar and straw, and therefore it was possible to burn them, but the stone houses had to be blown up by the Israeli army. So, one historical context we have here is a generation of grandfathers and grandmothers, fathers and mothers, grandchildren that live, either directly or indirectly, the Nakba of 1948 in a very vivid way on a daily basis, not only because they are thinking about Jaffa, or they are thinking about Beersheba, or any other place from which they were expelled, but also by watching the Israeli settlements on the other side of the fence from which most of their parents and grandparents came from. And Rania mentioned the March of Return in 2018: this was exactly one of the objectives of the March of Return, to remind the world that the settlements on the other side of the fence, the ones who would be attacked on the 7th of October, were Palestinian villages destroyed through the ethnic cleansing of 1948.

We have of course also a more recent historical context, and that includes 56 years of occupation and it doesn't matter whether you live in Gaza or in the West Bank, whatever the Israeli occupation of 1967 brought with it, it affected you whether you lived in Gaza or in Ramallah, it's one big family, it's one big society, it's one United Nation, and therefore these years of oppression, with all the crimes that were so pedantically recorded by Human Rights organizations, were also part of the history that is relevant to what happened on the 7th of October. More importantly is the last 17 years of Siege, and this was already mentioned, but it's important to mention it again. Most of the young… most of the people who were involved in the operation on the 7th of October were in their early 20s. This generation of Palestinians from Gaza knew only one reality: the reality of Siege. A reality in which Israel decided what food they are having, what medicine they are getting, whether they are allowed to leave, whether they are allowed to return, and they were exposed four times to bombardment from the air, from the sea and from land; even one moment of bombardment by an F-16 on your house can traumatize you for life, but if you are experiencing it four times, you are traumatized on levels that are unimaginable to anyone who has not been through such an experience. When I'm in Israel, I live not far away from an Air Force Base, and even the take-off of an F-16 near the house traumatizes me, and that's just the noise, and I'm not afraid that this noise will turn into a bomb on my house. This will… I know exactly how a bomb would sound when it falls and dropped on a civilian place.

The connection between all these historical contexts is that already in 1948, and even before that, because of the nature of Zionism, which is a settler Colonial movement, namely a movement of Europeans who were not wanted in Europe, but wanted to create a new Europe somewhere else, but always sought places where other people lived, and whenever they encountered the native people, they decided to remove them either by genocide, as happened in North America, or by ethnic cleansing, that recently has turned into a genocide in Palestine. And this kind of project of displacement of the local people and replacing them with the immigrants or settlers from Europe has to include the total dehumanization of the native people. And if you look at the Israeli documentation and, before that, of the Zionist documentation, and not just documents that are in the archives: if you look at fiction, folklore, memoirs, paintings, plays, early movies of the Israelis, every Palestinian village, every Palestinian neighbourhood is a military outpost, it's not a civilian space. And therefore, the babies, the women, the old people are the enemy in the military outpost. And this was very important for me, because I never understood why my Israeli friends, who are historians like I do and have seen the same documents as I did, said oh, no, come on, this is self-defence in 1948, we attacked the village of that, the village of that, but I said they attacked a village, they did not attack a military outpost, and then, you understand that the same happened in Lebanon when Dahiya, the southern part of Beirut, was treated as a military outpost and wiped out. And then, Gaza was treated as a military outpost and wiped out, as was Janine in April 2002. So, this dehumanization is a very important structure feature of the way Israel prepares its attacks, its military operations; this is how the soldiers are being indoctrinated and this is how we can understand what happened on the 7th of October.

If I have another 3 or 4 minutes, I would like to leave something optimistic, because we are depressing ourselves and I think this is exactly because Israel is a settler colonial state, we have to be very worried about the next three, four or five years, and because Israel is a settler colonial state, it committed these crimes against humanity we were talking about, that's the bad news. The good news is, and this is really good news, a settler colonial movement, a project that tries to create a nation out of a religion is not going to work in the 21st century. We are witnessing the beginning of the end of Zionism, there is no doubt about it. I'm not saying it as a prophecy, I'm not saying it out of a wishful thinking, I'm saying it as an expert on Israel, as an academic expert on Israel, and I'm building my thesis here on research, not on wishful thinking. There are clear indications that the state of Israel is going to, first of all, implode from within. We already saw the struggle before the 7th of October: the secular Israelis, most of them of European origin, have nothing in common with the settlers who come from the West Bank and a lot of other people who stick to Judaism as a religion or a tradition. The cement does not keep these two groups together. The only thing that keeps them together is war, violence, existential danger. A vision of the next 50 years for the children of Israel, for the grandchildren of Israel, that you would live from one war to the other —even if you win all the wars—, from one war to the other, one cycle of violence to the other, is a vision that most young Israeli Jews, who have a different passport, who have known other places, would not remain in Israel. You don't stay for 50 years in a place that is going from one war to the others, even if you think that you are on the winning side, because, as we know, nobody is on the winning side when it comes to wars. So, that's one indication, and very important one, of the implosion from within the Israeli society. Economically, Israel is playing a very interesting game with economists in the world. It only points to the macroeconomic performance of Israel. Macroeconomic performance of Israel is impressive. It is impressive. However, what matters in life is microeconomics, not macroeconomics. Microeconomics is the gap between those who have and those who don't have. Microeconomics is the number of people who are finding themselves below the poverty line in Israel. And the numbers are growing: most Israelis cannot afford to buy a house, even a flat. Many of them cannot afford to rent a place, and the unemployment is rising, and there is this idea that the American Financial Aid, which is huge, will continue forever. Well, listen to Mr Trump and you will understand that the Republicans, who are on the ascendants in America, are going to adopt an isolationist policy in the future and would not like to spend money even on the state of Israel. So, it's very important also to see the economic erosion of Israel as part of the indicator of the disintegration of the Zionist project. To this, we can add a new generation of Palestinians who, I think, are far more united, are far more consensual, are far less fragmented than the present leadership of the Palestinians, partly because it's easier for them to communicate in this age of Internet and partly because they had enough of Party politics that divide and weaken the Palestinian people. And anybody who knows young Palestinians know that there is a vision there, that there is a consensus there, there is a determination there, and it is the youngest society on Earth; the Palestinian society is the youngest society.

So, this will also contribute to the disintegration.

And finally, and we talked about it, the big move in the civil society in support of Palestine, what I call Global Palestine. Global Palestine is this amazing alliance of people who believe that their own struggle against Injustice is the same as the Palestinian struggle against Injustice, and they will begin to have an influence on the governments —and I think the ICJ is one of these places to watch. So many of those of us who are involved in solidarity are part of the BDS movement, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions; boycott and divestment is actions of civil society. That's not enough to stop the oppression, the colonization, and the ethnic cleansing. We need to move to the S, to the sanctions, but this also happened in the solidarity movement against Apartheid in South Africa, it took time to move from the B and D to the S, and I'm sure that this is also going to happen.

Let me finish by saying that what is really worrying is that from history we know that the disintegration of regimes like Israel is usually the most dangerous period for everyone concerned, because the regime is fighting for its life. This is true about South Vietnam; this is true about Apartheid South Africa… So, I'm warning us all, and we know that, I'm sure, we know that, that we are into five or six years of particular existential danger for the Palestinians, that's why we have to double and triple whatever we do legally, politically, economically to try and limit the destruction that Israel plans for Palestine and the Palestinians. However, we should not forget that this is not the end of the story, that the end of the story is what will happen afterwards, and the disintegration of a project like Zionism that is not valid morally, conceptually, ideologically, philosophically, economically, and politically, this project is going to disappear: there's no doubt about it, like the Crusaders disappeared from Palestine. The question is who would fill the void? Because once a certain structure disappears, there is a void. And if you are not ready as a Palestinian national movement to take over the space, the chaos continues, and we can see it in Syria, we can see it in Iraq, we can see it in Libya, and I would send…, and by saying this… Palestine is not just a problem of Britain, Zionism, Christianism and so on. We keep forgetting the more regional context. One of the reasons you could create a racist settler colonial state in Palestine is the Sykes-Picot agreement after the First World War. The colonialist idea that you can take the Westphalian European idea of a nation state and impose it on a place that was blessed by being a mosaic of coexistence under the Ottoman Empire, by believing that instead of having this respect for collective identities that know how to coexist, you replace them with nation states, this is the big project that is going to collapse; it's already collapsing. Syria is gone; Lebanon is the next; Iraq is hardly keeping together itself; Libya… look at this… All these places are disintegrating because they are based on an European model of nation state that is not relevant for the Eastern Mediterranean, the Mashreq. It should be replaced by things that we have from the past in the Middle East, in the Arab world. There are excellent models for building a coexistence that respects collective identity, tradition, religion, modernity… a very difficult mix to navigate, but one that is the only dialogue that is worth having in all order for people to live as much as possible in peace and in prosperity. And the Arab world deserves the prosperity. And there's one human capital that has the potential to help the rest of the Arab world, to move into a non-European, non-Western model of political structures, of social structure, and these are the Palestinians: they have a huge human capital for one reason, because they've never had a state. So, they're not corrupted by state. I know some people in Ramallah think that they have a state, but we can send them the bad news that they don't have a state in Ramallah. So, the Palestinians never had state and because of that, so many of us believe that they have the potential to provide us with a postcolonial reality that gives decolonization a good name, because so many decolonizing projects in Africa, in Latin America, in the Arab world, were not something to write home about, as the British say; they were not really a Humane successive successful replacement of the colonialist structures. Palestine can learn from the mistakes, including the ones that are made in South Africa, and create a postcolonial free Palestine from the river to the sea that would have a huge positive influence on the Arab world as a whole.

Thank you."