The context for October 7 is apartheid, not the Holocaust

Americans for Peace Now has a good piece on the psychology of the two peoples, explaining that both Palestinians and Israeli Jews are traumatized and can only regard the violence of the last 4 months in the context of historical suffering, and indeed feel a need to avenge their grievances. For Palestinians, the Israeli onslaught recalls the Nakba. For Israeli Jews the context is the Holocaust — the number of Jews killed on October 7 was the largest since that horrifying period in Jewish history.

I largely agree with Ori Nir’s description of the traumas, but part of his argument needs to be challenged. Because it is key to the Israel lobby’s support for Israel now, and indeed, the solidarity that the American Jewish community is providing to Israel in its murderous rage. The lobby is seeking to indoctrinate Americans, that the only frame for the war is the October 7 attack, and the context for that attack is the Holocaust, the period of antisemitic genocide in Europe. Israeli leaders and American advocates regularly state that the number of Jews who died on one day last October is the largest since the 1940s.

This is a grave misrepresentation.  The Palestinians had nothing to do with the Holocaust. The context for the atrocities of October 7 is the persecution of Palestinians for the last 75 years and more—ethnic cleansing and apartheid. That is why Hamas rose up, with evident wide support from the Palestinian population.

Of course the response to trauma is not necessarily rational: many Jews may feel that the griefs of the Holocaust are the context for October 7. This belief is even understandable in light of the overwhelming weight of the Holocaust: the industrialized murder of a third of the Jewish population of the world, the destruction of the great civilization of Warsaw and Berlin and Vilnius and Lvov and Kiev. As it is understandable, for instance, that my mother says she was only trying to rebuild the Jewish world when she had six children. The Holocaust is the only historical lens that exists for Jews of her generation.

But it is a great mistake, intellectually and spiritually, too, to view Palestinian violence in that context. Palestinians have very good reason to have violent responses to Israel. Any people with their history would. Zionists have taken their land, 80 percent of it, and more and more every day as we speak. The parents and grandparents of these Zionists ethnically cleansed Palestinians during the Nakba to build a “strong Jewish majority” in Israel — and have never accounted for this in any manner, let alone compensated Palestinians for their stolen property, as Germany did. Nir says that Palestinians are living inside a trauma from the 1940s, but that trauma has been refreshed continually since. Zionists have packed Palestinians into cantons and ghettos in the land that remained to them, including the prison of Gaza, and when Palestinians resisted these humiliations, Zionists have repeatedly massacred whole Palestinian families with complete self-justification.

These conditions have, for several years now, caused leading human rights groups and people of conscience to state that there is apartheid in Israel and Palestine. Those voices include Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International and Jimmy Carter and the late Desmond Tutu — but they do not include liberal Zionists. No, liberal Zionists stand at the cattle grates of Checkpoint 300 in Bethlehem through which long lines of Palestinians — and not their Jewish neighbors — file to go to work across the Green Line and say, “Well, someday there will be a two-state solution.”

American Zionists blind themselves to a persecution of historic character. Writers have compared it to slavery and Jim Crow and likened Jewish rule to colonialism and white supremacy. But whatever you call it, this sort of treatment has historically always resulted in violence. Anyone who thinks that Palestinians will accept such conditions lying down has been right only because Palestinians have largely shown enormous restraint under their subjugation. Though on October 7, some Palestinians did not show restraint. The idea of armed uprising is now very popular in Palestinian society, with an escalation of decentralized resistance in the West Bank.

It is a terrible error to describe that violence as anything but what it is — a response to brutal oppression. No doubt Nir is right, and there is trauma on both sides, and hatred on both sides, and dehumanization (which makes a one-state kumbaya-type like myself despair).

But the Palestinian historical trauma is “accurate,” inasmuch as Zionists were ethnically cleansing them 75 years ago, and Zionists are ethnically cleansing them again today, with the world powers allowing it in both cases. The Jewish trauma is real, but the Holocaust context for events in Israel is grievously inaccurate.