From Orient XXI.
Israel describes the ongoing genocide in Gaza as a response to October 7 and a “defense” to which a sovereign state would have the right. Such rhetoric, tirelessly relayed by complicit French media, has ignored, for more than a year, implacable evidence: the war against Gaza did not begin on October 7, 2023. The current genocide is indeed the culmination of a long-conceived plan of ethnic cleansing, carried out by increasingly extremist Israeli leaders.
This necessary re-contextualization is skilfully carried out in Palestine-Israel. A visual story. With this work as precise as it is educational, the two authors – Dominique Vidal, former journalist and historian, and Philippe Rekacewicz, cartographer – go back to the Ottoman 19th century and manage to shed light with finesse on more than a century of history of the Zionist colonial project and of its establishment in Palestinian territory.
A map of disappearance
Anyone who has ever been interested in the Palestinian question has surely seen these successive maps from 1948 to the 2010s, the juxtaposition of which shows the progressive erosion of Palestinian territory by Israeli colonization. From the Nakba (“catastrophe” in Arabic), the bloody founding of Israel, to today, a host of dates mark the stages of the annexation of the Palestinian territory by the Israeli army, in defiance of international law and resolutions. UN organizations.
The use of cartography is therefore not new to expose colonization. But Rekacewicz and Vidal offer a work compiling more than 80 statistical maps and graphs based on various international sources. Supported by historical explanations, archives and period quotes, this “visual history” draws on the work of recognized Israeli historians and manages to make a dizzying chronology accessible without ever simplifying it. It results in previously unpublished maps detailing the situation in Gaza in 2024, made richer and more poignant by the presentation of the century of colonial oppression that precedes it.
From the birth of Zionism to ethnic cleansing
From the birth of Zionism in a colonialist and anti-Semitic Europe to the carving up of the Middle East by the winning powers of the First World War, we follow European complacency towards the first Zionist congregations, and in particular that of the United Kingdom. Then came the 1930s, with Arab and Jewish revolts in Palestine, then the Second World War and the Shoah. Assailed from all sides and feeling guilty for the genocide of the Jews of Europe, the British withdrew from Palestine, already partially colonized in 1948 by what became the State of Israel. Palestinian sovereignty has never been taken into account either in the imperialist negotiations of the European powers or in the partition plan, approved by the UN General Assembly in 1947, which denies the demographic and political realities of the territory.
Violent decades followed during which Arab states gradually turned away from a Palestinian question that no longer served them. At the same time, the resistance was organized and ended up winning, in 1993, the peace agreements – Oslo – acclaimed by the whole world. But under the pretext of strengthening Palestinian sovereignty, these agreements severely condition it. Furthermore, they are repeatedly ignored by an Israeli state which ignores international law and the UN.
The 2000s saw the birth of an uprising repressed with violence – the second intifada -, the construction of a separation wall deemed illegal by the United Nations, and, since 2007, a blockade of the Gaza Strip which found itself completely landlocked. The work simultaneously traces the radicalization of Israeli politics, the acceleration of colonization throughout the territory and ends with a brief presentation on the current war.
At a time when colonial propaganda seeks to make the Palestinian experience invisible, such an educational enterprise is beneficial. It allows us to identify not only the contours of colonialism in Palestine, but also to identify those responsible. The historical realities that the authors recall will not be a discovery for many readers. On the other hand, their presentation in a precise and deliberately long story makes it possible to reiterate, with evidence in hand, the multiple responsibilities in the oppression of the Palestinian people, without omitting the guilt of its leaders.
With such a comprehensive timeline, this visual history reveals the deeply imperialist character of Zionist settler colonialism in Palestine. Encouraged in turn by the United Kingdom, France and the United States according to the profit that these powers think they will derive from it, the Zionist enterprise takes root in European colonialism and has never hidden its supremacist ambitions towards the Arab population. .
The conclusion of such a reading is unequivocal: the evolution of the Zionist colonial project into genocidal state policy was ignored, even facilitated, by the West. The racist and extremist political currents which flourish there today are also at the origin of the devastation of a Palestinian territory reduced to nothing.
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