Before the flood

Rod Such The Electronic Intifada 17 June 2024

Deluge: Gaza and Israel from Crisis to Cataclysm, edited by Jamie Stern-Weiner, OR Books (2024)

The anthology Deluge: Gaza and Israel from Crisis to Cataclysm is among the first English-language books to cover Hamas’ 7 October 2023 attack in southern Israel.

The volume features a number of impressive and well-credentialed contributors, including Israeli historian Avi Shlaim, Harvard Middle East scholar Sara Roy, co-editor of Jadaliyya Mouin Rabbani and the co-founder of We Are Not Numbers and Gaza-born journalist Ahmed Alnaouq, among others.

Considering that a book’s publication typically has at least a one-year journey, this book’s release in April 2024 is a testimony to the authors and editors recognizing the importance of the moment, especially as the Israeli response to the 7 October operation constitutes a genocide. The aim of the book, Shlaim writes in the forward, “is to place this war in its proper historical context.”

It accomplishes that aim admirably with several contributions showing that 7 October never should have come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the ethnic cleansing of Palestine dating back to 1948, the illegal occupation of Gaza and the West Bank dating to 1967, and the physical and economic blockade of Gaza dating to 2007. Only the ignorant, the indifferent, the propagandist, or the amnesiac ignored what had been happening in all of Palestine in the days and decades before 7 October.

All the writing in Deluge was finalized by early December 2023, but that hardly hampers the content, with the exception that much of the fog of war had not yet been lifted for the contributors, nor had Hamas yet issued an official statement with a full accounting of the 7 October attack.

Hamas later released on 21 January a 16-page explainer in Arabic and English, and eventually several other languages, titled “Our Narrative: Operation Al-Aqsa Flood” (the codename for the 7 October operation has been translated to both Operation Al-Aqsa Flood and Operation Al-Aqsa Deluge).

Several contributions to Deluge seem remarkably prescient in explaining Israel’s horrific response, which unlike previous military offensives in Gaza – the longest lasting 51 days – continues into June 2024.

In the introduction, the book’s editor, Jamie Stern-Weiner, outlines several aspects that distinguish this Israeli response from others. These include the apparent Israeli aim of literally destroying Gaza and rendering it uninhabitable and the refusal to negotiate with Hamas except over prisoner exchanges.

However, Stern-Weiner also notes the almost immediate negative reaction of civil society worldwide to Israel’s slaughter, pointing out that world public opinion overwhelmingly supported a ceasefire early on in contrast to the belligerence of the West’s leading governments and political parties, which hoped for Hamas’ destruction.

Hamas’ motivations

Several essays address what prompted Hamas to carry out the 7 October attack when it did.

Shlaim, the author of The Iron Wall who contributed a chapter as well as the foreword to Deluge, argues that an impending agreement to normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel prompted the attack.

The historian states that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had fashioned what he saw as a convenient divide-and-rule scheme between Hamas in Gaza and the Fatah-run Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. The 7 October attack proved the failure of that strategy, Shlaim argues.

The writer and analyst Mitchell Plitnick similarly situates the context for 7 October in US President Joe Biden’s continuation of the Abraham Accords, the normalization schemes with authoritarian Arab states backed by his predecessor Donald Trump. Plitnick notes that Biden’s national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, bragged eight days before 7 October that the Middle East “is quieter today than it has been in two decades.”

That observation comes closer to Hamas’ explanation provided in “Our Narrative” that just one month before 7 October, Netanyahu presented at the UN General Assembly “a map of a so-called ‘New Middle East,’ depicting ‘Israel’ stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea including the West Bank and Gaza.”

Hamas condemned what they characterized as the world’s silence “towards his speech full of arrogance and ignorance towards the rights of the Palestinian people.”

The attack in October would not be the first time that Palestinian resistance has disrupted attempts to make the Palestine question go away while the rest of the Arab world normalizes relations with Israel. During the 1970s, for example, airline hijackings carried out by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) were largely credited with putting Palestine back on the world’s agenda.

Not every contributor agrees that disrupting Israeli normalization with the Saudis was among the reasons for the 7 October offensive.

Mouin Rabbani directly challenges the notion as problematic, arguing that Saudi Arabia was more motivated by seeking security guarantees from the US and its long-sought goal of having a nuclear reactor, rather than extracting any benefit from Israel. For Rabbani, the 7 October attack was much more a reaction to increased Israeli repression than it was to regional developments.

Khaled Hroub, professor of Middle Eastern studies at Northwestern University in Qatar and the author of two books on Hamas, makes no mention of the Abraham Accords in his chapter, “Nothing Fails Like Success: Hamas and the Gaza Explosion.”

While qualifying that it’s not yet possible to provide a definitive answer on why Hamas attacked on 7 October, he writes that the apparent Hamas failure to notify its allies in the Axis of Resistance – Hizballah in Lebanon and Iran – suggests that 7 October was meant to be a repeat of May 2021. During Operation Jerusalem Sword that month, Hamas fired rockets from Gaza into Israel due to Israeli harassment of Muslim worshippers at al-Aqsa mosque and settler encroachment in Jerusalem. The 7 October operation had the additional aim of freeing Palestinian political prisoners.

Hroub remarks that before the Gaza explosion, Hamas in many ways seemed to be on a new political trajectory, accepting a two-state solution and agreeing to unite with Marxist and secular nationalist forces in Palestine. Without calling it out, his analysis renders the Biden administration’s claims that Hamas was motivated by anti-Semitism and a determination to eliminate Israel as clearly absurd propaganda with an incendiary intent.

Essential

Readers of Deluge will find it essential to read “Our Narrative” and other statements issued by and interviews with Hamas officials to fully grasp the reasons for its armed resistance and its disavowal of claims that it deliberately targeted Israeli civilians. Readers of The Electronic Intifada and other independent outlets will already be familiar with the incendiary propaganda claims made by Israeli and US officials and media that should rightfully earn them a dock at the International Criminal Court for incitement to genocide.

Deluge is notable for its selection of epigraphs and direct quotations from Israeli officials establishing their intent to commit genocide – a precondition for proving a violation of the Genocide Convention adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948.

By the time the reader reaches the final chapter written by Clare Daly, an Irish socialist and former member of the European Parliament, this intent is well established, and Daly amplifies it with the bold and needed warning that “the barbarism of old Europe is coming back into the open … we catch a glimpse of the darkness ahead.”

In this, Daly seems to have anticipated the subsequent warning from Agnès Callamard, the secretary general of Amnesty International, of a watershed moment tipping toward the complete breakdown of international law due to Western governments’ complicity in the genocide.

But there is another sense in which 7 October may prove to be a watershed, one that ultimately leads to the end of the Zionist project in Palestine.

In 1831 the US abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison wrote contemporaneously about the slave rebellion led by Nat Turner, which saw the killing of entire families of enslavers, including women and children:

“The first step of the earthquake, which is ultimately to shake down the fabric of oppression, leaving not one stone upon the other, has been made. The first drops of blood, which are but the prelude to a deluge from the gathering clouds, have fallen.”

That deluge, it could be said, came in the form of the Civil War to follow, resulting in the emancipation of nearly 4 million slaves and the beginnings of a brief experiment in genuine democracy known as Reconstruction.

Rod Such is a writer and activist based in Portland, Oregon.

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