That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.
–Aldous Huxley
In junior high school, I found history lessons to be uninteresting, and this was made doubly so by the most uninspiring teachers imaginable. History fell by the wayside as I opted for a science-based curriculum in senior high, and it was only decades later that I redeveloped a keen interest in the subject.
It’s one of the reasons I don’t know as much about the history of other countries as I should. Another reason is that the history of some countries has been deliberately concealed or maliciously altered.
Take Israel, for instance. There’s so much I didn’t know about this country. But it’s not just me. It’s by design that the vast majority of people worldwide were deliberately deceived about Israel’s dark history. But that’s all changing.
As Israel conducts an increasingly vicious campaign of indiscriminate killing of Palestinians since October 7th, 2023, the veil on their shameful history has been peeled back. Their current conduct is inextricably tied to their past history. Worse, the utter depravity with which they are pursuing the current act of vengeful retribution against the Palestinian nation is almost entirely to justify the false narrative that was manufactured about their existence and sold to the world.
My ignorance about Israeli history and the plight of the long-suffering Palestinians was nearly absolute and admittedly inexcusable. The causes of the current spate of violence do not go back to October 7th, 2023, as apologists for Israel frequently and disingenuously attempt to point out. It goes back over a hundred years as the gears of a Zionist yearning to create a Jewish ethnostate were put into motion, as a response to growing antisemitism in greater Europe and elsewhere.
Coincidentally, months before October 7th, I had already purchased the book In Search of Fatima by Ghada Karmi in a second-hand bookshop. It’s a memoir of her early life in Palestine and the expulsion of her family, along with others, from their homes in 1948, during what is known as the Nakba (catastrophe). It lay unread until a month after the events of October 7th, when it became imperative to enlighten myself about the horrors my poor eyes were witnessing on screens of every description.
Thus began my education about Israel and the Palestinian people. It did not stop there, however. As much as Israel was revealing about its inhumanity with every killing of civilians, primarily women and children, and every bomb they dropped indiscriminately, the need to find out what lay behind this insanity became more earnest.
To that end, I recently purchased a couple of books to supplement the many excellent documentaries available on YouTube, one of which goes into the sordid history of the oppression of the Palestinian people. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, written by Ilan Pappe, a Jewish historian, has been an eye-opener in just the first few chapters. It’s a chronicle of colonisation taken to absurd levels of expropriation, dehumanisation and oppression.
It came as a complete shock to me that while Hitler was rounding up Jews to be sent to Nazi extermination camps during WW2, Zionists elsewhere were putting into motion plans to do something similar to Palestinians. The culmination of these plans, as revealed by Ilan Pappe, was the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs known as the Nakba. It involved violent displacement, dispossession of land and homes, destruction of entire villages, massacres of its inhabitants, and the suppression of a whole culture, including all human and other rights.
Incidentally, if anyone else is interested in Pappe’s book, try to get a copy with a larger font size. The font used in this book is the smallest I have ever encountered in a published work. Coupled with the harrowing subject matter, which already makes for heavy reading, my poor eyes are taking strain.
It is not the purpose of this essay to reveal detailed information about Israel-Palestine history. It’s to relate a personal journey into my education about one of the worst chapters in human history. It’s also meant to counteract the narrative that Israel is a perennial victim. They are, in fact, the aggressor. They have always been the aggressor.
Antisemitism drove them into occupying Palestine, oppressing the Palestinian people, and constantly lying to the world to cover for their multitude of war crimes and crimes against humanity. And they have been abusing the antisemitism narrative ever since. As comedian Bassem Youssef recently quipped on a panel discussion with a former Israeli Defence Force spokesperson, “… Jonathan like overuses the word antisemitism so much it’s like a used condom at this point, you know, completely stretched out, lost all its protection, and nobody wants to touch it anymore…”
I sincerely believe that Israeli politicians and spokespersons know that we don’t believe their propaganda any longer, but they’re in it for the long haul and don’t really care. Their disdain is based on the knowledge that they still have unfettered protection and support from the United States, England and a handful of other collaborators.
The tide, however, is turning, slowly but surely. The signs are there. The only question is whether the Palestinians will survive this egregious genocidal attack on them until then, and live to enjoy their long-awaited freedom.
lenny unencumbered 