“In the immediate aftermath of that day it became taboo to mention anything that had happened before. History had started, it seemed, on October 7th.”
Part of the narrative of Israel supporters is that “it all began” on October 7, 2023, when Hamas and other Gaza militants staged a brutal incursion into Israel, involving the deaths and captive-taking of hundreds of Israelis and other non-Palestinians.
However, Israel has been brutalizing Palestinians from long before October 7, 2023, not only in Gaza, but in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and, yes, within Israel’s 1948 borders.
Ask yourself: Could you, would you, live under these conditions?
In Gaza, before October 7, 2023
Israeli military actions in Gaza, 2007-2003
- Israel occupied Gaza militarily in 1967 and established Jewish settlements there, both contrary to international law. While Israel withdrew its troops and settlements in 2005, Gaza remained occupied Israeli territory, still contrary to international law.
- This tiny enclave, a bit smaller in area than Winnipeg, with 2.2 million residents, half of them under the age of 19, is one of the world’s most densely populated territories.
- Israel operated a sea, air and land blockade of Gaza, as it had for sixteen years, turning Gaza into what is widely acknowledged as an “open-air prison”
- The late Jewish historian Tony Judt in 2011 called Israel’s treatment of Gaza “a punishment regime comparable to nothing else in the world.”
- Since 2007, but before October 7, 2023, Israel had bombed and/or invaded Gaza seven times, killing almost 4,000 Palestinians and destroying many thousands of homes, as well as schools, universities, hospitals and other community facilities, many of them several times over. Before October 7, 2023, Gaza tried to rebuild several times, only to face more destruction.
- Israel has long used wildly disproportionate force with high collateral damage to target perceived militants, like the 2002 attack on a single combatant, but dropping a one-tonne bomb on a Gaza apartment complex, killing 14 civilians, including at least 10 children. When asked how he felt about the slaughter, the Israeli air force commander who ordered the hit told Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, “I sleep well at night” and “What do I feel when I drop a bomb? – a slight bump to the wing of [the] plane as a result of dropping the bomb.”
Attacks on land, food, and life
- Part of the purpose of these Israeli incursions has been to destroy the ability of Gazans to feed and supply themselves. Israeli weapons deliberately ruined large swaths of agriculture, including prime growing soil, livestock, and farm facilities as well as sequestering other land blocks for no-go security zones. Israel also attacked Gazan infrastructure, like water supply and sanitation systems, as well as impairing the generation of electricity.
- Israel also curtailed Gazans’ fishing capacity. Originally agreeing to a Palestinian fishing range of 20 nautical miles, Israel reduced that to six nautical miles in 2012, and then to three in 2013. Even there, Israelis in gunships regularly attacked Gazan fishers, making the harvest almost impossible.
- With Gaza heavily reliant on food aid from outside its borders, even before October 7, 2023, Israel purposely restricted food intake. In the words of Human Rights Watch:
- “Israeli military authorities…limited the ‘daily humanitarian portion’ of food they calculated that Gaza’s residents need[ed], apparently following a policy to ‘put them on a diet,’ as one senior Israeli official said in 2006. Israel…banned or restricted imports of items that pose no conceivable threat to Israeli security, including, among many others: tea, jam, lentils, and other goods it deemed ‘luxury items’; cooking gas; and radiotherapy equipment and medicines used in cancer treatments. It unjustifiably delayed for months or years imports of spare parts needed to repair Gaza’s damaged and decrepit electricity grid.”
The Great March of Return & Palestinian Resistance
- In 2018 and 2019, Gazans staged the “Great March of Return” wherein unarmed thousands converged at the Israeli border barrier to protest as non-combatants the conditions under which they were forced to live. Israeli soldiers killed 223, including 46 children, and injured 9,204, over 900 of them children, many shot in the legs by Israeli snipers. One of the injured, shot through both legs, was Canadian physician Tarek Loubani, serving as an emergency doctor and clearly wearing his scrubs. His rescuer was later killed by Israeli fire.
- A 2020 Lancet study showed that over 53% of Gazan children had post-traumatic stress disorder, even before the conflict that began on October 7, 2023.
In the West Bank and East Jerusalem
Israel’s oppression of the West Bank and East Jerusalem
- Israel maintained the 1967 occupation, even annexing parts of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, all contrary to international law
- The West Bank land available to Palestinians has shrunk to only 18% of its area, in small, isolated cantons separated by Israeli roads, Israeli settlements and roadblocks which make inter-canton travel exceedingly difficult.
- A separation barrier, deemed illegal in 2004 by the International Court of Justice, separates the West Bank and parts of East Jerusalem from Israel proper, and carves out chunks of the West Bank as well.
- Even though under the Oslo Accords Palestinians have some minimal control over some land, Israeli armed forces regularly staged armed incursions into all of the West Bank territories, sometimes snatching, sometimes assaulting, sometimes killing, Palestinians.
- Many West Bank and East Jerusalem residents are subject to administrative detention, wherein they can be held for long periods of time in Israeli jails without charge and without trial. Many of these detainees are children. All of this is against international law.
- From the start of the occupation, Israeli Jewish settlers took over Palestinian-owned land for residence, also against international law, and in some cases, Israeli law (which is never enforced).
- By October 7, 2023, Israeli Jewish settlers numbered approximately 700,000.
- Many of these settlers acted as a renegade irregular army, humiliating, assaulting, and often killing Palestinian residents, and destroying agricultural and personal assets, often with the connivance of Israeli troops and police. The courts were lenient, if not permissive, to the perpetrators and dismissive of the victims. One infamous 2015 case involved settlers firebombing a Palestinian family home in the village of Duma, killing three people: an 18-month-old baby burnt alive, with both parents succumbing within weeks, and a four-year-old suffering second- and third-degree burns to more than 60 percent of his body. A few months later, at a wedding of settlers, guests ritually stabbed a photo of the toddler who had died in the attack.
- Palestinian residents of the West Bank are not citizens of Israel and are subject to Israeli military law, while Jewish settlers are Israeli citizens and live under Israeli law.
- Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem pay taxes to Israel, but are not citizens, have no vote, and are deprived of services (like sanitation, education and heath care) that other Israeli taxpayers receive.
- As their population grows, West Bankers and East Jerusalemites must obtain permits from Israeli authorities to build. Housing permits are often withheld, sometimes pending collaboration by the applicants with the Israeli authorities. Building without a permit risks demolition, at the expense of the builders.
Within Israel’s 1948 borders: discrimination and segregation
- Between 1947-49, Israel ethnically cleansed itself of more than 700,000 Palestinians, and those exiled and their descendants have never been allowed to return, despite international law and United Nations resolutions to the contrary.
- Israel placed those Palestinians left within its borders under martial law for 18 years, until 1966, when they were finally deemed citizens. Despite Palestinians voting for parliamentary parties supporting their interests, those parties have almost never been included in any political coalition with governmental power. As the Israeli political mainstream moves steadily rightward, this kind of coalition is increasingly unlikely.
- In 2018, Israel’s new Jewish nation-state law made Jewish settlement a national value. In practice, this makes it possible to legally eliminate the last vestiges of any claim to rights by the Palestinians.
- Palestinian citizens are subject to suspicion among many Israelis, who see them as a fifth column, a threat to Jewish Israelis.
- Twenty percent of Israeli citizens are Palestinian Arabs. They live under 65 different Israeli laws that discriminate against them on account of their ethnicity. They are subjected to second- or third-class status in their own country, deprived of anything approaching the service levels enjoyed by their Jewish compatriots, and suffering discrimination in education, housing, health care, public health and municipal amenities. Their rates of incarceration and unemployment are far higher than the Israeli norms.
- Several human rights organizations (including B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International) use the term “apartheid” to describe the Israeli political regime and include in the term the Israeli treatment of Palestinians within Israel’s 1948 borders.
- Palestinian citizens of Israel are treated extremely harshly whenever they protest their situation or express solidarity with their cousins in Gaza, East Jerusalem or the West Bank. In 1976 Israeli forces killed six unarmed Palestinians and injured more than 100 during protests.
