The Jerusalem Fund’s Executive Director, Jehad Abusalim, spoke at the ‘Genocide, Gaza, Palestine’ event in New York City, held on Monday, December 4, 2023. This significant event was a collaboration between several notable organizations: Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, and Law for Palestine. Click here to watch the full event. The following is Abusalim’s remarks:
Gaza: From Nakba to Genocide
The Gaza Strip, with its current geographic shape and demographic composition, along with the conditions within it, emerged in the aftermath of the 1948 Nakba (Catastrophe). For Israelis, 1948 marked a year of “independence,” the founding of their state, and the control of a vast majority (78%) of Mandatory Palestine’s territory. Conversely, for Palestinians, the Nakba signified a profound rupture—politically, economically, socially, culturally, and geographically. Thus, the Nakba represented both the culmination of one process and the start of another. It was the endpoint of decades of Zionist colonial activity, leading to the establishment of a Jewish-majority state in Palestine at the expense of the majority Arab population. This was achieved through violence, terrorism, and the support of major colonial and imperialist powers. Regardless of the intentions of Zionist leaders and institutions, militias, and later the nascent state of Israel, the destruction of many facets of Palestinian life, as it was before 1948, was a desired outcome. This outcome, which the Israeli state, supported by various state and non-state actors worldwide, aimed to maintain, sustain, and even replicate and expand, is crucial to understanding Gaza’s current reality. One must grasp the scope of the Nakba, not just as a historical moment, but as a process reflecting the final aims of the Zionist movement and the state of Israel. These aims include the geographic and demographic transformation and re-engineering of Palestine, prioritizing one ethnic and religious group’s language, culture, national symbols, historical narrative, and institutions at the expense of another group, deeply rooted in the land and integral to its past, present, and future.
Without this perspective, comprehending the Gaza Strip or the experiences of any Palestinian area or community is impossible. The Gaza Strip’s emergence, in its current area and demographic makeup, was not only a direct result of the Nakba but also a consequence of its continuation. Today, the conditions in the Gaza Strip can only be understood in this context. The Gaza Strip isn’t merely a territory where Palestinians reside; it also embodies a set of conditions, experiences, and challenges generated by the 1948 catastrophe.
To illustrate practically, due to the 1948 Nakba, the Gaza sub-district was reduced from an area of 1111.5 KM2 to today’s Strip, spanning only 365 KM2. Demographically, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from dozens of cities, towns, and villages in and around the Gaza sub-district were expelled or fled to what became the Gaza Strip post-hostilities. This event entailed more than the displacement of these individuals; it signified the obliteration of their generations-old way of life. These individuals, be they farmers, fishermen, textile workers, or laborers, lost their communities, institutions, shops, trade, homes, orchards, cattle, personal belongings, and bank deposits. Being in Gaza as refugees, after such losses, was intended as a temporary situation. After all, war and conquest were not unfamiliar to the people of Palestine. The residents of Gaza, displaced from their city and neighboring villages during the British conquest of Palestine in WWI, had returned post-war. However, in Gaza, as in other parts of Palestine and neighboring Arab countries, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians faced the harsh reality that their refugee status would become permanent. In the 1950s, especially in the years immediately following the Nakba, conditions in the Gaza Strip were dire, with people suffering from starvation and disease, and the early refugee camps lacked the basic infrastructure necessary for maintaining life, health, and dignity. In response to the permanence of the conditions following the 1948 Nakba, thousands of Palestinian refugees in Gaza, and elsewhere, attempted to return to their homes, only to be met with Israeli violence, murder, arrest, and torture. Israel labeled these attempts at return and repatriation, “infiltration” and responded with severe violence. This response gave rise to the Gazan Question, a decades-long dilemma for Israeli leaders and policymakers on how to manage a region created by their actions, conquests, and the gambling with the lives of millions of Palestinians and Jews to establish their Jewish-majority state in 1948.
From the 1950s onwards, the Nakba persisted in Gaza through the mere existence of the Gaza Strip and its permanence. Israel, in the 1950s, began to grapple with the fact that the Gaza Strip, like other parts of Palestine that weren’t subjugated in 1948, wouldn’t become a black hole into which Palestinian national aspirations and claims would disappear. Instead, the Gaza Strip, despite its impoverishment, isolation, and lack of resources, became a stage for the reemergence of Palestinian national aspirations post-1948. This put the Gaza Strip at odds with Israel’s project for maximal Palestinian land with minimal Palestinians. And from the 1950s, Israel began to devise strategies to address the Gaza Question. This included recurring raids and incursions, a bloody occupation in 1956 that lasted for months until it ended in 1957 under international pressure, and a reconquest in 1967 that placed Gaza under direct Israeli military rule for decades. The re-occupation of the Gaza Strip in 1967 represented a critical moment in deepening the pain caused by the 1948 Nakba. While Israel gradually allowed Palestinians to work in the Israeli market, its policies in the Gaza Strip suppressed expressions of Palestinian political speech, restricted cultural life, and embarked on a colonization project within the Strip. This project involved taking over land, building settlements, and allowing Jewish settlers to move into the Strip, taking over about 25 percent of Gaza’s territory, 40 percent of its fertile land, and most of its scarce water resources. By 2005, 1.4 million Palestinians lived on 75 percent of the Gaza Strip; 8,000 Jewish settlers occupied the remaining 25 percent. The settlements in Gaza made life untenable, creating infrastructures of abuse and control, dividing the Strip into smaller regions, severed by checkpoints and walls. In this environment, if Gaza was a refugee camp where people’s lives were suspended due to the Nakba, Israel interfered there as well.
When Gaza rebelled, whether through armed or unarmed means, Israel always responded with confusion and extreme violence. For Israeli leaders and policymakers, Gaza’s reality, as it emerged from 1948 onwards, was supposed to become an eternal status quo. They seemed indifferent to the fact that Gaza housed people who are part of a nation, with unresolved questions of liberation, independence, and the right to live with dignity and reclaim their rights. Every rebellion in Gaza was met with severe violence, in the late 1960s, the 1970s, the late 1980s (the period known as the first Intifada), and the early 2000s. Between periods of what Israelis refer to as “sheket” (or quiet) and explosions of violence, the unresolved Gaza Question, part of a broader Palestinian Question, persisted. Israel’s approach has varied, including violence, restrictions on freedom of movement, isolation, fragmentation, blockade, the “Mowing the Lawn” strategy, colonization, closures, incursions, destruction of economic life, assassinations, mass bombardment, and the killing of civilians and destruction of vital institutions.
The sophisticated—and sadistic—Israeli experiment of besieging and occasionally bombing Gaza has woven violence into every aspect of life there for decades. Violence has been a constant in people’s daily lives (and deaths). Living in Gaza has meant being engulfed by explicit (spectacular) violence from bombardment and incursions, as well as more subtle forms of violence that have led people to use the term مخنوق (I’m suffocating) to describe their daily psychological and emotional state.
Explaining the complexities of life in Gaza is a significant challenge, particularly to those outside of it. As someone who has written and spoken about Gaza for years, I recognize the difficulty in conveying the details, as most, especially in the West, cannot relate to them. Simple aspects of life, often taken for granted, are sources of daily struggle and anxiety in Gaza. These struggles are exhausting, depressing, and time-consuming, all due to Israel’s abuse. Access to clean water, travel for medical treatment or education, electricity, lighting homes, treating sewage, exporting fruits and flowers, importing basic necessities, watching TV (disrupted by drone signal interference), fishing, and harvesting crops – each aspect is an exhausting ordeal.
Every day in Gaza is another chapter in a story full of pain and dread. Finding work, securing aid – these are continuous struggles. Imagine generations born and raised amidst this dread, this violence that infiltrates every aspect of life, fostering a constant feeling of being on the verge of explosion.
One day, the scale, depth, and cruelty of Israel’s experiment in Gaza might be fully grasped. Until then, atop the years of dread and suffocation, people in Gaza continue to be killed in droves. This is because Israel’s approach to managing the lives of two million people through regulated violence has failed, and now, they seek to reassert control through extreme violence and mass murder.
