On October 14, 2023, in the early days of the War on Gaza, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof posed a question he had raised more than a dozen years earlier: why have the Palestinians not produced a Mahatma Gandhi? The same question was shortly later directed to Egyptian comedian Bassem Yousef by British TV presenter Piers Morgan on his program “Uncensored”.

This is a question that has been raised in different ways, even by those sympathetic with the Palestinian cause, and it is one that I myself have been asked on numerous occasions, with Nelson Mandela sometimes invoked instead of Gandhi. The Israelis, in contrast, are seldom queried about producing a leader—such as Charles de Gaulle, who was elected president of France during Algeria’s war of independence—who can recognize the futility of Israel’s settler-colonial mindset and sue for peace with the Palestinians.

Those who are pro-Palestine may believe that a leader on par with Gandhi or Mandela could force Israel to change its ways. For others, like Kristof and Morgan, the question means to blame Palestinians for their violent resistance—and what they see as Israel’s legitimate response to it—and, by implication, hold the Palestinians responsible for their state of perpetual colonization. The inquirers’ intentions aside, the question of why Palestinians have not yet produced a Palestinian Gandhi/Mandela is a pivotal one and should be unpacked because of what it obscures about Israeli violence: its forms, the context in which it is committed, and therefore who bears the responsibility for perpetrating it, and ultimately bring it to an end.

Three Nations Under the Same Colonial Power
Posed without referencing the historical context, the Gandhi/Mandela question does not consider when the violence started and who started it. The two Asian/African leaders, Gandhi and Mandela, appeared on the political stage because Britain had colonized India and European colonial settlers instituted South African apartheid, or color-based segregation. Both imposed their rule and farcical racial hierarchies through violence. Globally, colonialism in its various forms plagued four continents and was perpetrated by less than a dozen countries from Europe. Let’s not even mention the European genocides of the natives in the Americas and Australia, and the enslavement of black Africans in the United States and elsewhere. All subsequent violence and the historical and moral responsibility for it stems from that fateful moment of colonization.

The Indian struggle had commenced long before Gandhi, and it was not all nonviolent. Even during Gandhi’s time, violence was practiced by other factions. For instance, historian Peter Heehs writes that violent resistance was “preached and practiced throughout the independence movement and had a significant role on its course and outcome”. In South Africa, the African National Congress (ANC) engaged for many years in armed resistance against apartheid. Mandela himself had military training in Algeria during its war of independence from France, and he said bluntly to the judges during the 1964 Rivonia Trial that he engaged in planning “sabotage”, and was one of the founders of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the paramilitary wing of the ANC. He explained that they did it out of pragmatic considerations, for they “felt that without violence there would be no way open to the African people to succeed in their struggle against the principle of white supremacy.” Many other colonized countries, like Algeria, Kenya, Vietnam (twice), and Ireland, violently resisted imperialist powers. The intermittent resort to violence by Palestinians in their struggle for national self-determination, while largely peaceful, is thus of a piece with the practice of other colonized peoples.

The Palestinian experience with colonization has similarities with those of India and South Africa, although it does differ in other ways. In Palestine, as in India, the colonizing power was Britain; but, unlike in India, colonization was of the settler type. Great Britain was the sole colonial power in Palestine from 1917 to1947, with a mandate from the League of Nations, which was controlled by European states, to bear its “White Man’s Burden” and prepare the Palestinian population for self-rule. At the same time, it acted as the chief sponsor of the Zionist project of creating a Jewish state in the country, the idea of which was a response to the European disease of antisemitism, which had spread long before the Holocaust, and which the Palestinians had nothing to do with; to the contrary, they, too, were the object of European self-serving stereotyping.

The realization of the Zionist project was detrimental to the Palestinians, who suffered what has come to be known as the Nakba, or “the catastrophe” in which more than 700,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes in 1948. The long shadow of the Nakba makes Palestinians keenly apprehensive about a mass exodus today in Gaza. The country that used to be Palestine was overnight struck out from the map in 1948, as most of it was transformed into Israel. The new state demolished villages and blocked Palestinian refugees from returning. Thus, instead of gaining self-government per the British Mandate, the Palestinians became threatened with extinction as a nation.

At the same time, Israel defined itself as a Jewish state, an ethnocracy, which it codified seventy years later in 2018 in the Jewish Nation-State Basic Law, despite the fact that about 20 percent of its citizens are descendants of Palestinians who remained after 1948, mostly Muslims and Christians. One of the principal manifestations of Jewish supremacy is that the state grants any Jewish person anywhere in the world the right to make Aliyah (“ascend”) by becoming a citizen of Israel; meanwhile, refugees like myself, and their offspring, continue to be denied the universal human right to return to their homeland. Israel completed its control over the entire territory of Palestine when it seized the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the June 1967 war, once more causing the dispossession of about half a million people. From the outset, the Palestinians resisted British colonialism and Zionist settlers, and subsequently Israel, in myriad forms, as I had written in an earlier article,

…peacefully (overwhelmingly so), and violently; publicly and in disguise; spectacularly (like plane hijacking) and subtly; individually and collectively…. [in] courts, and prisons, and school and college campuses…at checkpoints and international ports….against land seizure and house demolition; against uprooting their orchards and trees; in funerals, memorials, and celebrations; in short and long mobilizations; discursively in books, newspapers, films, poetry, and fiction; in posters hung on the walls of their public buildings and in murals on the Segregation Wall; by participation and boycotts, especially the international Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (B.D.S.); in material space and cyberspace. They have learned from others and others were inspired by them; they won and lost; they have multiplied and survived as a people.

Having lived through and led the fight against colonialism, it should not be surprising that both Gandhi and Mandela strongly backed the Palestinians. Gandhi opposed the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine because, he said, the country belonged to the Arabs. And firm Indian support for Palestinian rights lasted until the election of Hindu nationalist, Narendra Modi, as prime minister.

Likewise, Mandela made many unequivocal statements in support of Palestinian rights and struggle, including, “[Yasser] Arafat is our brother in arms”, and he described Israel as a terrorist state. Perhaps because of this legacy, South Africa has stayed the course as a staunch supporter of Palestine and an outspoken critic of Israel. And in this last round of confrontation between the Palestinian resistance and the Israeli army, the South Africa’s parliament voted to suspend diplomatic ties with Israel. The government also recalled the country’s ambassador from Israel. And, most crucially, South Africa eventually charged Israel with perpetrating genocide in Gaza before the International Court of Justice in the Hague, a charge the Court found plausible and, although stopped short of ordering a ceasefire, it ruled in favor of provisional measures in South Africa’s genocide case against Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip.

And, yet, if we were to compare the histories of resistance of all three countries, we would notice how one is singled out over the others for delegitimization. Take, for example, the international B.D.S. campaign, a grassroots movement initiated internationally at the request of Palestinian civil society organizations, and which gained substantial support. B.D.S was modeled after similar campaigns in India and South Africa, which were instrumental in eventually leading to India’s independence and pushing White South Africa to dismantle the apartheid system and accept the principle of one person one vote. Instead of encouraging this form of peaceful resistance, which is supported by some leading Jewish activists and intellectuals, Israel’s lobbies and Western governments have tried to satanize and outlaw the movement by readily stamping it as antisemitic, speciously conflating B.D.S. with European antisemitism.

Pacifist Abbas and Israel’s Slow Violence
Palestine, after the death of Yasser Arafat and the ascendance of Mahmoud Abbas, fell short in leadership quality compared to both India and South Africa. Abbas has been the president of the Palestinian Authority (PA) for the last twenty years. The PA was created after the 1994 Oslo Accords, signed at the White House in the presence of former President Bill Clinton, between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Israel.

While Gandhi and Mandela were activists and visionaries, Abbas may be characterized as a rigid pacifist, wanting for charisma, vision, and political agility. His only method has been to appeal to a hard-of-hearing “international community” to help the Palestinians establish their own state on a limited territory in the West Bank and Gaza, with East Jerusalem as its capital city, or on about 22 percent of British-mandated Palestine. Although the PA provides internal security and municipal services for the population, it is seen today by many Palestinians as more of an Israeli rather than Palestinian asset, especially because of its security coordination with the occupying power, pacification of the Palestinian population, and inability to protect them from settler—not to speak of Israeli army—violence. And amid the death and devastation in Gaza, which has spread to the West Bank, Abbas has made lackluster appearances losing even more credibility. He is remembered only when there is a wave of violent resistance against the occupation, as evidenced by the stream of American and European emissaries meeting with him in Ramallah after the start of Israel’s current war on Gaza.

Israel continues to be the sovereign power in the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, where the Palestinians today number more than 7 million, surpassing the number of Jews. It has cut off the West Bank from Gaza, which has been governed by Hamas since 2007 after it was denied its election victory by the PA, Israel and the United States. The Strip has since been subjected to a tight blockade by Israel and periodic bombardment varying in scale, the most violent of which was carried out in 2014 when more than 2,200 Palestinians were killed and a large number of residential buildings leveled.

At the same time, the West Bank has been shredded into spatially and legally isolated cantons within what are elliptically-named by the Oslo Agreement as areas A, B, C. The last, comprising more than 60 percent of the West Bank, hermetically seals the other two areas and is entirely under Israeli jurisdiction. Only 40 percent of the West Bank, or about 8 percent of historic Palestine, is under limited control by the PA. In brief, the West Bank and Gaza have become a series of open prisons guarded by walls and fences, and checkpoints manned 24/7 by Israeli security forces. Israel controls the entrance and exit of Palestinians and their goods, not only into and out of the country, but also within. Even diplomatically, instead of isolating Israel, the PA has been left out in the cold, including by Arab states, like the United Arab Emirates and Morocco, which have recently normalized relations with Israel.

Ever since Israel occupied Gaza and the West Bank in 1967, the Palestinians have been living under conditions which writer Teju Cole—after his visit to Palestine—called “slow violence,” that

…is in fact extremely refined, and involves a dizzying assemblage of laws and bylaws, contracts, ancient documents, force, amendments, customs, religion, conventions and sudden irrational moves, all mixed together and imposed with the greatest care.

This slow violence has textured Palestinian everyday life, and put them, according to Cole, “into deep uncertainty about the fundamentals of life” for more than forty-five years of occupation. Palestinian daily existence is menaced by relentless land grabs to expand Jewish settlements in the West Bank, which now are inhabited by more than 700,000 settlers. Israel, according to the Israeli NGO B`tselem, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International, has established an apartheid regime, manifested in a deleterious system of spatial, legal, economic, and political segregation. But it is more than South Africa’s apartheid. In Palestine, there is also the ever-present Israeli threat of a forced mass exodus, as happened in 1948. And it is precisely such “radical contingency,” as the scholar May Jayyusi explained in the context of the second uprising (2000-2005), that pushes the Palestinians—not unlike the reasons Mandela said compelled the ANC to engage in sabotage—to occasionally resort to spectacular acts of counter-violence, like the recent raid by Hamas guerrillas in Israel on October 7.

Israel’s response has been an all-out war with unprecedented firepower and much wider goals, including genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians to other countries. This last objective had already become more palpable through the acts and statements of extreme-right, fundamentalist coalition cabinet members about inflicting another Nakba, arming settlers and other Israelis, and wrecking the village of Hawwara in the West Bank in ways reminiscent of anti-Jewish pogroms in Europe. It was, moreover, confirmed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in his address to the UN General Assembly last September, when he made it clear that he would pursue normalization of relations with Arab states without first forging peace with the Palestinians. Netanyahu underlined his intention by displaying a map of the Middle East in which Israel covers the entire area from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. And on more than one occasion during the assault on Gaza, he and other officials made threats to drive Gazans out, either to Egypt or elsewhere.

These goals have been concretized by turning Gaza into a killing field with indiscriminate destruction of residential buildings and public institutions, mutilation of the landscape, cutting off food and water, fuel and medicine, and allowing in meager quantities of international aid. Close to half of the population have ended up in a shrunken area near Rafah, in a terrible transit zone close to the Mediterranean and the Egyptian border. The specter of ethnic cleansing of the Strip today haunts tens of thousands of Gazan families. The much-cited Zionist epithet of Palestine as “a land without a people for a people without a land”—itself an extreme variation of the well-known British doctrine of terra-nullius (“empty-land,”) applied in Australia, the Americas, and parts of Africa by European settlers—is being pursued now through a colossal war.

All in all, it is not difficult to see how the intentionally genocidal war against Gaza is not a mere response to Hamas’s violent incursion on 7 October 2023, but a “part of a continuum,” characterized by an enduring occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, an apartheid system, land grabs, a sixteen-year blockade of Gaza, and threats of expulsion. It is the persistence of these violent practices that engender Palestinian counter-violence and for which Israel must in the first place be held both morally and politically accountable.

The United States: Guarantor of Israeli Violence
Israel could not have embarked on a massive military campaign against Gaza that by the day 112 had taken more than twenty-six thousand lives, apart from uncounted thousands of others under the rubble, without the active participation and encouragement of the United States. Washington saw Hamas’s incursion into the Naqab (Negev) region as an attempt to undermine its advancing diplomatic effort to forge a strong alliance with Saudi Arabia and normalize the kingdom’s relations with Israel. These aims were part of a larger plan to prevent the Arab Gulf states from developing closer relations with China, the incipient American arch enemy.

To preempt this threat, the United States rushed to provide Israel with an unprecedented stream of military assistance and to shield it diplomatically, demonstrating its support for the war with a prompt visit by President Joe Biden to boost the sunken morale of Israeli leaders. It is the U.S.-supplied weapons arsenal—like the advanced F-35 fighter jets, F-16 Apache helicopters, 2,000-lb bombs, smart and dumb (half of the airstrikes’ munition) bunker buster bombs, white phosphorous, and others—that have caused most of the killing, mutilation, and ruin in Gaza.

One of the explicit purposes of such combined aggression is “regime change,” a long-standing practice of American foreign interventions, expressed this time in the vow to dismantle Hamas. In addition to the direct military supplies to Israel, the United States dispatched an armada of naval vessels and two aircraft carriers to the Eastern Mediterranean, and re-enforced these with a nuclear submarine. Once it expanded the war by joining it, the United States has not ceased warning other parties, especially the Lebanese Hezbollah and the Houthis in Yemen, against expanding the fighting in support of the Palestinians. Isn’t this a classic case of gunboat diplomacy?

But as the ceaseless rallies across the globe in support of the Palestinians demonstrate, Israel and the United States have lost in the court of public opinion. With his zealous backing of Israel and his inherently racist rhetoric, parroting Israel’s fake news, such as that of Hamas beheading babies, while discrediting Palestinian statistics about the numbers of the dead, Biden is personally losing.

The world’s hegemonic power and the Middle East region’s strongest state could convince only ten other, primarily small states, to vote against the UN General Assembly resolution, passed by 153 votes on December 12, 2023, calling for an immediate ceasefire. Israel’s supporters were even fewer than in an earlier vote in October.

Likewise, the United States found itself alone when—piling on its previous vetoes to protect Israel from international sanctions—it repeated an earlier move and cast a veto against UN Security Council resolution on December 22, 2023 which had called for an “immediate humanitarian ceasefire”.

The resolution was presented after UN Secretary General António Gutteres triggered the seldom-invoked Article 99 of the UN Charter, expressing his alarm at the danger of “a collapse of the humanitarian system” in Gaza. The United States cast its veto against the endorsement of thirteen Council members and the abstention of Britain. What else could such isolation be called but the moral pit of a pariah state?

With the prospect of normalization with Saudi Arabia gaining momentum, Israel thought it had relegated the Palestinian Question to a case of economic betterment. When the fighters from Gaza broke through its high-tech barriers, effectively declaring that the political death of Palestine had been greatly exaggerated, Israel suffered a severe blow to its self-image and prestige—damaged further from the lives it lost and the large number of hostages captured. These losses pale now compared to the subsequent World War II-scale of death and destruction its army and American-supplied armaments visited on Gaza.

An Israeli de Gaulle?
Since its inception following the June 1967 war, the Palestinian National Movement has made historic peace offers, whether in the form of a single democratic secular state for all its citizens, confederation of two binational states, or two separate states. Israel has always and propagandistically dismissed these as mere means to its destruction, and clung to an ethnocentric, exclusivist vision of the land, as summed up in the Jewish Nation-State Basic Law, cited earlier. This nihilistic “either-us-or-them” binary mindset is what drives the state to wage the current scorched-earth military campaign in Gaza, that the Jewish-American journalist Masha Gessen likened to the Nazi liquidation of Jewish ghettos in Europe. She stressed that the comparison is necessary because we…have to constantly be asking ourselves, are we laying the foundations for the mass murder of millions of people? Are we employing or as part of the world employing the same kinds of tactics that were employed by the Nazis?

Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire, in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, wrote of this “duality” of the oppressed, “to be is to be like, and to be like is to be like the oppressor” (Emphasis in the original). The only way out of this tragic road to nowhere is for the Israeli Jews, who seem to be caught in the grip of a pathological bloodlust, to look at themselves in the mirror, and see what kind of people they have become after turning genocidal. This is evidenced by all the ruination, the forced displacement, and the “banality of evil” that is exhibited in Israeli soldiers’ and civilians’ posts on social media, not the least of which is the repeated “Abu Ghraibing” of the hundreds of abducted men. They must decide whether they want to be a copy of their racist, European exterminators. Countless Jews around the world have answered with a resounding no. But not the majority of Jews in Israel, who evince no signs of shifting their outlook any time in the meaningful future.

A less radical but perhaps not impossible turn is the emergence of a pragmatic leadership that understands that there is no way out of this conflict except by meeting the Palestinians half way. The relevant figure for such an Israeli leader, is not a Gandhi or a Mandela, but a Charles de Gaulle.

De Gaulle became President of France in 1958, four years after his country’s defeat in Vietnam and the start of the Algerian War of Independence in 1954. At first, de Gaulle promised Algerians better economic and educational opportunities (not unlike what the Israelis and Western backers have been dangling for the Palestinians). The confrontation quickly became quite bloody—a glimpse of which can be seen in the film “The Battle of Algiers”— eventually claiming hundreds of thousands of Algerian lives. And reminiscent of what Israel is doing today in Gaza and did with the Palestinian Bedouin in the Naqab after 1948, it involved forcing at gunpoint about 2.5 million Algerians out of their villages and hamlets and eventually concentrating them in “centers,” in an operation euphemistically called regroupment in French.

It took de Gaulle a year, and much domestic and international opposition to the conduct of the war, including from a United States that was on its way to becoming a “hegemon” in the post-WWII international order, to realize the impossibility of a military resolution for the conflict. And in 1959 he uttered the word, “self-determination” for Algerians, which produced a violent backlash among the French settlers, the pied-noir. Nonetheless, in 1962 and following three more years of fighting and negotiations, Algeria won its independence after 132 years of colonial rule, and most of the pied-noir exited to France and elsewhere.

Europe and the United States never produced the likes of the Indian and South African leaders, neither in their fight to keep their colonies or former colonies, nor in the wars amongst themselves. Some of their most celebrated Western political figures owed their prominence to their bellicosity, whether as soldiers or civilians. The list includes George Washington, at once a slave owner and army chief in the war of independence from Britain; Abraham Lincoln, the president during the Civil War that led to emancipation; and Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, and Dwight Eisenhower—the latter three being of WWII fame. Then President Harry Truman declared the end of that war not in a Gandhian or Mandelian humanist gesture, but with the apocalypse of two nuclear explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Martin Luther King, an exception, emerged from among the internally-colonized Blacks, and was inspired by Gandhi, not by a Euro-American precedent; the Black liberation movement as whole, before and after him, witnessed mass bursts of “disturbances” and “uprisings.”

Zionism and Israel have been on a winning streak for the last one hundred years against the Palestinians. The Palestinians have always ended up on the losing side, even if there were moments when it looked as if it could be otherwise. Throughout, the Israelis tried to sear into Palestinian consciousness that resistance was pointless; but, as Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish said, directing his words to the Israelis, “You are steadfast in your victory/ and I in my defeat”. Although the analogy may be imperfect, the enduring Israeli-Palestinian encounter of war-resistance could be brought to an end, through arrangements parallel to those of Algeria/ France, with West Bank settlers relocating to Israel. The first prerequisite is a new leadership in Israel that understands this and is capable of translating it into policy; the sooner the arms fall silent in Gaza, the better the chance of this happening.