On October 7, 2023, the Palestinian Sunni Islamist Group Hamas led a horrific and well-planned surprise attack on Israel from the Gaza Strip by land, air, and sea. The eight-hour-long rampage resulted in the loss of more than 1,200 Israeli lives and left thousands more injured, including the elderly, infants, toddlers, and many innocent citizens. Around 240 Israelis and foreign nationals, including citizens of other countries were abducted, and taken into the Gaza Strip. According to Israeli authorities, during the attack, Hamas engaged in extremely brutal forms of atrocities such as beheadings, immolation of the elderly and infants, setting entire homes ablaze with their occupants inside, torture, amputations, and rapes. (Hamas’s October 2023 Attack on Israel: The End of the Deterrence Strategy in Gaza: Dr. Omer Dostri: Military Review Online Exclusive: November 2023: Army University Press)

What stands out, and remains unexplained, is the failure of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) and the Israeli Security Agency (ISA, commonly known as Shin Bet) to anticipate the attack. Israeli officers and soldiers were on leave due to a holiday and Shabbat occurring simultaneously. Media reports indicate hundreds of Hamas attackers infiltrated several IDF bases and posts, taking control of the IDF’s Gaza Division headquarters. They dismantled communication, observation, and surveillance equipment in those posts, disrupting the IDF’s command-and-control capabilities. The attackers deployed squadrons of drones equipped with explosive charges and drones equipped with grenades, which targeted surveillance, control, communication, and weapons systems near the border. It was no doubt a terror attack and yet it displayed exceptional military and professional methods like the special forces’ operations of regular armies.

Israel’s response resembled a hammer coming down on the Gaza population. Promising “mighty vengeance for this black day,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu unleashed an all-out attack on Gaza with the intent to wipe out the Hamas. The impact of that ongoing attack on the people of Gaza, however, quickly became even more dramatic. According to United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ December 6, 2023, letter to the President of the UN Security Council Jose Javier de la Gasca Lopez Dominguez: “Since the start of Israel’s military operation, more than 15,000 people have reportedly been killed, over 40 per cent of whom were children. Thousands of others have been injured. More than half of all homes have been destroyed. Some 80 per cent of the population of 2.2 million has been forcibly displaced, into increasingly smaller areas. More than 1.1 million people have sought refuge in UN Relief and Works Agency facilities across Gaza, creating overcrowded, undignified, and unhygienic conditions. Others have nowhere to shelter and find themselves on the street. Explosive remnants of war are rendering areas uninhabitable. There is no effective protection of civilians.” (Israel-Gaza Crisis: Letter by the Secretary-General to the President of Security Council invoking Article 99 of the United Nations Charter: Dec 6: United Nations website)

At the time of writing, daily reports indicate Israel has flattened northern Gaza and is pounding southern Gaza with airstrikes and missiles, while some hand-to-hand combat is in progress in various other parts of Gaza. The death toll is rising, and the threat of disease breaking out in Gaza is imminent. On January 2, 2024, the Palestinian Health Ministry said more than 22,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the war began. More than 55,000 have been injured, and thousands more are missing and presumed dead.

This article will review the fundamentals that have driven the violence and brutality in the area to this point. It will show how, during the post-World War I period, the historically anti-Semitic colonial powers of Europe put in place a process that led to these violent conflicts and the loss of mostly Palestinian lives. It will outline the most prominent of the possible outcomes of the current conflict.

Genesis: The Campaign to Move the Jews Out of Europe

Most observers agree that the process was set in motion in late 1917 when colonial Britain’s Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour sent a letter to Lionel Walter Rothschild (Lord Rothschild), an Ashkenazi Jew, a Zionist, and a figurehead in the British Jewish community. In that short letter of November 2 (see Appendix A), Balfour said: “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object...” He also urged Rothschild to bring the declaration “to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.”

The role of the Zionist movement, established by Theodor Herzl, an Austro-Hungarian Jew, in aiding Britain to set up the Jewish homeland has been well documented. In his book Der Judenstaat (1897), Herzl declared the objective of his World Zionist Organization - to establish “a national home for the Jewish people secured by public law.” The politics of Zionism was influenced by nationalist ideology, as well as by colonial ideology of Europeans’ rights to claim and settle other parts of the world (University of Michigan: Isa.umich.edu).

Years before Balfour sent his letter to Rothschild, Zionists were active in Britain. According to the Rothschild Archive, the origins of the letter can be traced to the early 1900s, when Chaim Weizmann settled in Manchester in 1904 and began to solicit support from the British people. It is interesting to note that the phrase “a national home for the Jewish people,” coined first by the Zionists, showed up in the same form in the Balfour Declaration.

The Zionist movement initially did not attract many Jews from Europe. Jewish liberals, committed to the idea of integration, thought that conceding to the existence of antisemitism would lead to more antisemitism. And orthodox Jews, who believed that only God should reunite Jews in the Promised Land, regarded Zionism as a violation of God’s will. According to the Haredim (ultra-Orthodox Jews), the new characteristics of the Zionist Jewish identity - national pride, the Hebrew national language, and militant activism - represented a complete break with Jewish tradition.

Although orthodox Jews continued to oppose the creation of a Jewish state for several decades, they supported the mass settlement of Jews in Palestine as a means of strengthening and protecting the community. Following the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, most orthodox Jews adopted the belief that Israel’s overwhelming victory in the war was a sign of God’s support.

Division of Empires

The Balfour Declaration was part and parcel of the post-World War I European colonial rearrangement and expansion. Britain had finally conquered Palestine, an erstwhile part of Ottoman Syria, in late October 1917. Among other things, Balfour hoped that the Jewish homeland proposal would elicit Jewish and Zionist financial support for Britain’s World War I effort. The British Mandate for Palestine, which incorporated the Balfour Declaration, was established in April 1920 to codify Britain’s authority over Palestine, and in 1922 the Mandate was approved by the League of Nations.

As the American lawyer Sol Linowitz has pointed out, by itself the Balfour Declaration was “… legally impotent. For Great Britain had no sovereign rights over Palestine; it had no proprietary interest; it had no authority to dispose of the land.” In other words, here is Britain, who did not own Palestine, handing over Palestine to a group of people who did not live there while ignoring the landowners who have lived there for centuries. Only the approval of the Allied powers, whose consensus then constituted the only source of international legitimacy, to incorporate the declaration into the British Mandate for Palestine, gave it legitimacy. As Linowitz notes, it was only in the League of Nations mandate that “the victorious Allies in solemn proclamation recognized the prior Jewish rights to Palestine,” and did so in “a formal international document of unquestionable legal validity.”

Ultimately the Balfour Declaration was subsumed under the Council of the League of Nations mandate for British administration of the territories of Palestine and Transjordan, which had been conceded by the Ottoman Empire following the end of World War I. That mandate, the Palestine Mandate (see Appendix B), stated the following:

“Whereas the Principal Allied Powers have agreed, for the purpose of giving effect to the provisions of Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, to entrust to a Mandatory selected by the said Powers the administration of the territory of Palestine, which formerly belonged to the Turkish Empire, within such boundaries as may be fixed by them; and,

“Whereas the Principal Allied Powers have also agreed that the Mandatory should be responsible for putting into effect the declaration originally made on November 2nd, 1917, by the Government of His Britannic Majesty, and adopted by the said Powers, in favour of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, it being clearly understood that nothing should be done which might prejudice the civil and religious rights [emphasis added] of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country; and...” (The Avalon Project: Yale: Lillian Goldman Law Library). Note: The “civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine in Palestine” are not to be prejudiced, but their national and political rights receive no such protection.

Zionist literature’s slogan for the quest for a national homeland was: “A land without a people for a people without a land.” The fact that in 1925 Palestine had an existing population of more than 700,000, of which almost 590,000 were Muslims, was certainly inconvenient. Yet the story that Palestine is and was an empty land “without people” has continued to hold.

(To be continued…)