From the Age of Catastrophe to the Age of Hope: Why a Free Palestine Matters to the World

"Zionism exported to Palestine the age of catastrophe, disrupting a very different trajectory unravelling in Palestine at that very age." Ilan Pappé. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons, EuroMed Monitor. Design: Palestine Chronicle)

This piece is written on International Holocaust Remembrance Day. My parents, German Jews, lost members of their families in that terrible chapter of Nazi genocide. From that position, I found Tony Blair’s initiative in launching this date a cunning and dishonest approach to endorsing the Zionist manipulation of Holocaust memorialization.

But interestingly, in Israel, there is very little reference to this day, apart from repeating the allegation that opposing the genocide of the Palestinians is a new form of antisemitism.

Israel prefers a day of remembrance that it controls exclusively, and which conveys the twin messages that Zionism is the only guarantee against another Holocaust, and that the Palestinians and their allies are the new Nazis threatening Western civilization. Moreover, Israel refuses to universalize the Holocaust, claiming it cannot be compared to genocides that preceded it and those that followed it.

Today, however, anti-Zionist Jews all over the world offer an alternative Jewish remembrance of the Holocaust. They remember all genocides and boldly point to a much wider context in which mass killings of any group in modern history should be discussed. They insist that all genocides should be analyzed as equally crucial for better understanding the human-made catastrophes that plagued the world, ironically, in the age of enlightenment, modernization, and progress—the age we are still living in.

Holocaust Memory, Zionism, and the Age of Catastrophe

The recent violence of the West and its allies, spreading now from the killing fields of Gaza to the American threats against Venezuela and Cuba, brings to mind Eric Hobsbawm’s seminal book, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century (1914–1991).

This book begins with the Age of Catastrophe (1914–1945) and ends with a very pessimistic view of the ability of the world to extract itself from the awful years of catastrophe that were Western-made and raged mainly in the West.

Hobsbawm concluded his book with the following warning:

“If humanity is to have a recognizable future, it cannot be by prolonging the past or the present. If we try to build the third millennium on that basis, we shall fail. And the price of failure, that is to say, the alternative to a changed society, is darkness (585).”

Indeed, if the Age of Catastrophe is re-emerging globally, or in Palestine, Hobsbawm’s gloom will be validated, and “the price of failure,” as he calls it, will be paid by the Palestinians.

Only in a very short reference does Hobsbawm include Zionism as one of the extreme phenomena of that age. The worst phenomenon of that age was Nazism. Jewish activists such as the late John Rose paid attention to the fact that Zionism was born in an age of extremes, as was Nazism.

Rose wrote:

“Zionism is not the same as Nazism. It did not have an exterminationist intention at its core, though, as we shall see, Zionism has been, and is, capable of genocidal outbursts. But Zionism is rooted in the traditions of European imperialism. That truth alone is sufficient to serve urgent warnings about the implications of Zionism’s ruthless colonial ambitions in Palestine.”

Looking at Zionism as a product of the Age of Catastrophe shows how Zionism, instead of being a panacea for that age, is rather a product of it—one that made the short twentieth century so violent.

But it is much more than that. Zionism exported the Age of Catastrophe to Palestine, disrupting a very different trajectory that was unfolding there at the same time. When the catastrophe ended in Europe, it began to unfold in Palestine.

Palestine: A Catastrophe Imported

Until the 1948 Nakba, Palestinian society actually enjoyed an age of hope and prosperity. A new professional elite emerged in the cities of Palestine, balancing the influence of Arab-Ottoman notables. In rural areas, despite a hostile British colonial policy, new schools appeared, built and funded by the villagers themselves, while old feuds were settled after the troubled years of the 1936 revolt.

Despite a British ban on establishing a Palestinian university (while allowing the Zionist community to open two universities), educated young Palestinians were able to continue their academic careers in Beirut and Cairo, and further afield. For them, the hope was that the Western Age of Catastrophe would bypass them—but then came the Nakba, a catastrophe born out of the ideology and praxis of the Western Age of Catastrophe.

The disruption of this positive leap forward can best be seen through demographic catastrophes. A local, mostly pastoral and rural society had to endure an influx of refugees without any institutional help or proper infrastructure.

Small towns all over historical Palestine had to absorb, within a few months, refugees in numbers double and in some cases triple their original population. Without adequate infrastructure, a society rooted for centuries in its homeland was flooded, at a time of ethnic cleansing, with an influx of refugees. West Gaza and North Gaza are now experiencing this in a far worse situation than that which existed in 1948, if this is at all possible.

Imagine how, in a few days in 1948, the 80,000 residents of the Gaza Strip had to absorb and cater for 200,000 refugees, with no government or institutional help, and how the 400,000 in the West Bank received, within a few months, another 300,000 refugees, while chaos still prevailed and no real government existed. All these refugees were robbed by Israel of all their possessions and arrived in these two areas with nothing.

This was when the Age of Catastrophe reached the shores of Palestine, imported by the Zionist movement. It took time for Palestinians to realize what Europe had exported to their homeland. They did not close their homes to the early poor Zionists who arrived in 1882, nor did they fight the British when they occupied Palestine.

Palestine and the Possibility of an Age of Hope

In all their negotiations, first with the British and later with the international community, the Palestinian leadership asked for the two principles meant to help the world extract itself from the Age of Catastrophe: democracy and self-determination. Both were denied to the Palestinians by the British and later by UN pro-Zionist policies.

Very late in the day, when dispossession from both land and workplaces became widespread, Palestinians responded with violence. Yet they continued to share the hope of the post-1945 world, which promised a new era of peace and prosperity, led by a global order that would put an end to colonialism and the violation of the basic rights of colonized peoples.

But the West did not consult the colonized world when it unilaterally decided the fate of Palestine at the end of the Mandate. Palestine was not the only place betrayed in the post-1945 era. The colonial empires, as well as the new American empire, clung violently to old and new possessions, mass-killing people in their efforts to maintain economic and strategic domination.

Getting out of the Age of Extremes today is not only, as the West would have it, about confronting Islamist extremist groups or rogue states in the Global South. Much more urgent is facing the root causes that allowed such organizations and states to emerge, which are symptoms rather than causes of the present and new Age of Catastrophe.

One of these root causes—by no means the only one, but an important one—is Western immunity to the Zionist project, which brought the European Age of Catastrophe to Palestine and has perpetuated it to this day.

A democratic, free Palestine is the only way to avoid the danger so astutely identified by Hobsbawm in the concluding words of his seminal work. This will require a new understanding of where this age emanated from and where effective antidotes can be found.

It would end a chain that began with the genocide of millions through Western colonialism and imperialism, which generated the genocide of millions of Europeans, including six million Jews, and spread genocide as a political tool in many parts of the world, including Palestine.

A different world does not have to emerge from Palestine, but its sacredness to all three major religions shows that there is something very unique about this place—something that was lost with the spilling over of European catastrophe and extremes onto its soil.

A liberated Palestine will mark the dawn of a new age; otherwise, the Age of Extremes and Catastrophe will linger on, bringing with it economic, ecological, and nuclear holocausts.

An age of hope, launched in Palestine, would make the world a better place—a notion fully understood by the millions of people who demonstrate daily for Palestine all over the globe.

– Ilan Pappé is a professor at the University of Exeter. He was formerly a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Haifa. He is the author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, The Modern Middle East, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples, and Ten Myths about Israel. He is the co-editor, with Ramzy Baroud of ‘Our Vision for Liberation.’ Pappé is described as one of Israel’s ‘New Historians’ who, since the release of pertinent British and Israeli government documents in the early 1980s, have been rewriting the history of Israel’s creation in 1948. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.