Why does only the historical claim to Palestine by European Jews matter and not Arab people who are descendants of the people who lived on the land?

Originally written as a response to: Gurwinder on Israel from 26 Oct 2023.

After Gurwinder starts his essay with, “I didn’t want to comment on Israel and Palestine, because it’s a topic I don’t feel I understand well enough,” someone in the comments recommends him to "check out Jewish Voice for Peace, Chris Hedges, Ilan Pappe, Norm Finkelstein, Democracy Now, and Caitlin Johnstone, many of whom are here on Substack."

Gurwinder replies: "I feel I understand this topic better than all the people you mentioned […] The others you mentioned I have little time for," and then also accuses the commenter of naivety.

Gurwinder wrote a lot about how Palestine didn't exist as a conventional state, etc., in his essay, so here is my response.

My response

Right, he sure does understand better than Prof Norman Finkelstein! Sorry but wow, his naive arrogance there is just absolutely astounding and unexpectedly brash! I'm wincing for him because he just so obviously and easily gave himself away — so it seems he is clearly not the humble seeker of knowledge that he likes to portray himself as.

Prof Norman Finkelstein in his book "Gaza: An Inquest into its Martyrdom" carefully attended to the history of the Israeli blockade upon Gaza and Israeli wars upon it. Prof Noam Chomsky described it as thus: "In its comprehensive sweep, deep probing and acute critical analysis, Finkelstein's study stands alone." Could Chomsky say that about Gurwinder's work? Absolutely not.

Israel may have technically withdrawn its military from Gaza in 2005 but maintained an air, sea and land blockade, strictly limiting what resources could be brought in and out of Gaza as well as limiting who can go in or out, in addition to launching killing sprees of people in Gaza. Even before 2023, 70% of people living in Gaza were refugees or descendants of the refugees from the Nakba – the survivors of those forced from their homes and massacred. 97% of the water in Gaza was already undrinkable. In 2012, the Israeli Supreme Court revealed that Israeli government wanted to keep Gaza on a diet that was barely above starvation levels, even going to lengths of calculating how many calories each person would be able to consume in order to avoid a humanitarian crisis [1] (link below) and delivering much less than that. And Gaza was effectively a concentration camp – half of Gaza's population are children under the age of 18, born and raised inside there. Gaza is more densely populated than Tokyo - in 2023, over 2 million people were squeezed to live in a strip of land 25 miles long by 5 miles wide. You can also read Norman Finkelstein discussing these statistics too and they are widely known. [2]

[1] This was widely reported but for example, from Mondeweiss in 2012:

While the [Israeli] health ministry determined that Gazans needed daily an average of 2,279 calories each to avoid malnutrition – requiring 170 trucks a day – military officials then found a host of pretexts to whittle down the trucks to a fraction of the original figure. The reality was that, in this period, an average of only 67 trucks – much less than half of the minimum requirement – entered Gaza daily. This compared to more than 400 trucks before the blockade began.

[2] Finkelstein discussing Gaza on 10 Oct 2023, preserved in the Internet Archive and also available as a PDF file below:

226.7 KB file on MEGA

First of all, and those of you who are familiar with the basic facts, you will forgive me for giving a kind of encyclopedia entry, but it seems to me that unless you know those basic facts, you really can't understand what's happened. Number one, 70 percent of Gaza's population comprises refugees from the 1948 war and their descendants. That is, 70 percent of Gaza's population comprises people who were expelled from their homeland in 1948 and the descendants, (and at this point the descendants of the descendants), of those who were expelled. Under international law, 70 percent of the population, as refugees. Number two, half the population of Gaza – its population is 2.1 million – half of it consists of children. We're talking, and I don't think it should ever be forgotten, we're talking about children. Younger than probably anybody currently listening to this podcast. Number three, Gaza is among the most densely populated places on God's earth. It's more densely populated than Tokyo and that population is confined to a strip that's five miles wide and 25 miles long. What does that mean in practical terms? Well, I was looking around this morning for an analogy or a way to picture what that means. What that means is, I jog every morning along the Coney Island seashore. That's five miles. That's how wide Gaza is – my morning jog – and its length is less than the length of a marathon. It's 25 miles. That's Gaza. Five miles – my morning jog – by 25 miles – a marathon.

Half the population of Gaza is currently unemployed. I was looking back at a book I wrote a few years ago, which goes through the history, that figure has stayed constant. About half the population has been unemployed since about, at least since 2010, but probably longer. 60% of the youth are unemployed. About half the population is classified by relief agencies as suffering from severe food insecurity. Barring the rarest of exceptions, no one can go in Gaza and no one can go out of Gaza. So, if you imagine a society on a starvation diet confined in an area that's among the most densely populated in the world, and in which half the population is below the age of 18, that is classified as children, then you won't be surprised when you hear that the former conservative British Prime Minister, David Cameron, he described Gaza as an “open-air prison.” You might not like to hear it, but Baruch Kimmerling, who was one of Israel's leading sociologists before he prematurely passed, he described Gaza as far back as 2003 – now bear in mind, that's before Israel ratcheted up the blockade of Gaza, to which I'll get – in 2003, he described Gaza as “the largest concentration camp ever to exist.” That's Gaza.

Israel had its heel on Gaza — breaking international law — and has now reportedly killed at least 40,000+ (Gazan Health Ministry) or above 100,000+ (likely estimates from The Lancet).

Of course sure Gurwinder thinks he would understand better than Norman Finkelstein, in the top 5 most influential political scientists, who has dedicated a lot of his life's work to carefully examining what has happened in Palestine. Finkelstein's family is Jewish and his parents were both direct survivors of concentration camps during the Holocaust. He speaks out because he does not want anyone else to suffer the genocide that his parents and people did – including the Palestinians. Prof Finkelstein wrote the book "Holocaust Industry" also documenting how various Jewish people even those who were not in concentration camps profiteered from the mass suffering that Jews experienced. He's written other books too and his upcoming book is Gaza's Gravediggers.

My point is to Gurwinder: Try to actually be a humble thinker before you tell everyone else to be. You are the naive one here.

Because reading his comment felt like seeing an amateur starting off his essay with, "I didn’t want to comment on theoretical physics, because it’s a topic I don’t feel I understand well enough," and then in the comments he says that he feels that he understands physics better than Richard Feynman (multiple Nobel Prize winner) whom he's never heard of before and says he has too little time for 😂

Also the claim that Palestine didn't exist as a conventional state is not an excuse to go and murder thousands of people and steal the land upon which they are living. Just like a man murdering his wife because he got mad at her for deciding to leave him is not ok. Getting angry about a situation in which you feel that someone has wronged you doesn't make it alright to kill them, lock them up and control them. So Israelis killing thousands and thousands of Palestinians during the Nakba is not ok, just as people like to say it is not ok for Hamas to kidnap and kill hundreds of Israelis (though a number of Israelis were killed by Israel itself on Oct 7 following the Hannibal directive as reported by Israeli newspaper Haaretz). And just as those cases, it is not ok for Israel to kill hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, most of whom haven't done any wrong to anyone in Israel — in fact it has been the total opposite. Israel has been the one arbitrarily detaining and torturing Palestinians, raiding and demolishing their homes, murdering them and their children, stealing their land, destroying their wells and more.

And regarding the Jewish claim to the land: MANY people are descended from the ancestors who lived on the land, INCLUDING the Arab people and Muslim people who are currently there, having lived there for thousands of years. If you say that historical claims matter, then why do you just uphold and value only the European Jewish claim of the land and say that only that claim matters, while ignoring all the other people who are also descendants of the people who live on the land? If you really care about human beings coexisting peacefully, then isn't it totally possible for Israelis to live alongside Palestinian Arabs (who gave refuge to the Jews fleeing persecution from Europe) instead of waging war with all their neighbours (including Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt)? But instead Israel has been stealing land off its neighbours (e.g. Golan Heights from Syria) and waging war with them. THAT is the core of the problem here.

Israel could have had peace, but born of the racist assumption that Arabs would not resist, it chose conquest. That was the problem then, and it seems to me, as I think Mouin will get to, it's the problem today. It's not fundamentally an “intelligence failure,” it's fundamentally a political failure because the political calculus of the Israelis was, and is, that you can so humiliate, so subdue the Arabs, and they’re so inherently incompetent, that at the end of the day, force will prevail and the Arabs in general – or the Palestinians in particular – will acquiesce.
— Norman Finkelstein on 10 Oct 2023

It is still at the core of the problem today, with Israel's invasion again of Lebanon (after it already invaded between 1982 and 2000) and the overthrow of the Syrian government (happily backed by Israel) and Israel's subsequent invasion of Syria again.