This is a guest opinion
As we approach the anniversary of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, it is worth reflecting on the latter’s historical significance and on the impact the subsequent Israel-Palestine war has had on Americans at home, including here in Birmingham.
The Hamas attack shook Israeli society deeply. Hamas fighters’ ability to slip past Israel’s security systems, kill close to 1,200 people (mostly civilians) and take some 240 hostages of diverse nationalities shocked Israelis out of a comforting belief in their nation’s invulnerability. Israel is, after all, the Middle East’s premier military power, its sole nuclear state and a well-known exporter of modern surveillance technology—what author Anthony Lowenstein calls the “technology of occupation.” The deadly ambush by a Third World guerilla army that, however resourceful, could never confront Israel’s massive conventional forces, sparked outrage and anger toward the Netanyahu government, especially among hostages’ families. Almost a year later, despite a brief November 2023 truce allowing for the release of 24 hostages in exchange for 39 Palestinian political prisoners, Netanyahu has yet to make a deal to bring home the remaining hostage. As he pursues an all-out war on the Gaza Strip, a small (140-square mile) Israeli-controlled Palestinian territory where Hamas won free elections in 2006, he seems unwilling to do so.
Hamas’s surprise attack also brought renewed attention to the plight of the Palestinian people especially residents of besieged Gaza. Since the 1948 founding of Israel—and, expulsion of some 750, 000 of the country’s native, majority-Arab population (known as the “Nakba”)—Palestinians in general have been virtual strangers in the land of their fathers. They have lived for decades under a largely illegal rule: a military occupation that limits their political autonomy and freedom of movement. The occupation regime deepened after Israel’s victory in the preemptive Six Day War (1967) in which the Israeli Army seized and occupied territory of its Arab neighbors including the predominantly Palestinian Gaza Strip, West Bank and East Jerusalem. Deaf to international condemnation of its landgrabs, Israel has tightened its control over these areas. Its army governs all major roads and public spaces; it protects ever-expanding illegal settlements displacing centuries-old Palestinian communities. Not least, its ubiquitous presence underscores a Zionist colonial project that represses and whenever convenient, eliminates Palestinians in the name of a Greater Israel—a cause that echoes the nineteenth-century U.S. notion of Manifest Destiny used to justify the dispossession of America’s native peoples.
Fast-forward to today’s war in Gaza, a place that has been compared to an open-air prison thanks to the blockade Israel first imposed on it in 2007. The war is less about Israeli “self-defense,” as some politicians proclaim, than about collective punishment— payback not just for Hamas’ attack but for the Palestinians’ stubborn efforts to resist Israel’s long-time military occupation. By all accounts, the people of Gaza now face a war of extermination. The war is financed by U.S. taxpayers with over 12 billion dollars in military support for Israel, allowing it unrestricted access to U.S.-made weapons; these include 2,000-lb bombs that have leveled whole city blocks. Defying the International Court of Justice’s warning of “possible genocide,” ignoring repeated international calls by myriad organizations for a ceasefire and restoration of humanitarian aid, Israel is slaughtering civilians en masse. Beyond bombing homes, schools, hospitals, churches and all facilities needed for human existence, it starves them through deliberate obstruction of aid convoys trying to enter Gaza. Officially estimated at around 40,000, the Palestinian death count is likely much greater; as per some expert observers, it may be as high as 300,000.
What can Americans do? First, we must recognize that while the Biden administration continues to feed Israel’s bloodlust— violating not only international law but U.S. law, e.g. the 1976 Arms Export Control Act—the great majority of us favor an immediate, permanent ceasefire and halt to further military support for Israel. This is reflected in nationwide polls, petitions from religious and human rights organizations and mass protests like the uprisings on college campuses this past year. It is reflected in the shifting tide of opinion in Birmingham where rallies in solidarity with the people of Gaza have been organized since last Fall by groups such as Birmingham’s DSA, Young Palestinians of Birmingham, etc.. And, where the City Council, under pressure from local solidarity activists—including members of the city’s newly-formed JVP (Jewish Voice for Peace)–passed a resolution condemning indiscriminate violence against civilians and calling for peace and a restoration of humanitarian aid.
Birminghamians, like other Americans, have been moved and mobilized by the post-October 7 war in Gaza. They have begun rejecting the hollow Zionist narrative that justifies a new genocide in deed, if not in name—and, on the U.S. taxpayers’ dime, They also increasingly see that the Palestinian struggle for freedom, equal rights and dignity resembles freedom struggles elsewhere including that which fell the apartheid system of South Africa in the 1980s and our own African-American civil rights struggle.
Pamela S. Murray is Professor Emerita in the UAB Department of History
