-Analysis-
CAIRO — It is not a true story. It’s just a fictional scene of a huge elephant in a room with many fragile ceramic pieces. The elephant is moving and destroying all its contents. His movements may be deliberate, intended to cause the greatest amount of destruction. Or they may be spontaneous and innocent. In any case, his strength and size mean there is no escape for the ceramics.
But the scene does not tell us the fate of the elephant, how he got out of the room — if he got out at all. A similar scene is happening before our eyes in Gaza, where Israel is entangled. The elephant may be able to leave the room alive, but he will certainly not emerge unscathed.
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There are other possibilities: the ceiling could collapse, killing him; someone could rescue him and treat his wounds; or he could stay in the room, which has been completely destroyed and its residents killed and displaced. Perhaps the potters would kill him.
Late last year, Al-Manassa published an opinion piece I wrote, The Israelis we want among us, on communist labor activist Michelle Schwarz and filmmaker Eyal Sivan: two Jewish figures who belonged to Israel before gradually separating from its Zionist project and taking hostile positions against it. At that time, I did not discuss historian and critic Ella Habiba Shohat and prominent historian and academic Ilan Pappé.
Complex aspects
Writing about Shohat is necessary due to her complex aspects: her identity as an Arab woman and as the daughter of Iraqi Jews who immigrated to Israel; her rejection of Israel’s project; her intersection with Edward Said and how she reads his books; Israel’s racism toward its Eastern Jewish citizens; and the marginalization of their bodies in favor of the white and blond European aesthetic model.
The impacts of this war are far beyond its direct causes and effects.
The same applies to Pappé due to not only to his profound influence on a broad sector of European and North American intellectuals and academics who are on the side of the Palestinian right, but also to his important writings about the future of Israel after its war on Hamas in Gaza.
The impacts of this war are far beyond its direct causes and effects, and far from the questions of the “day after.” He agrees with all of us that the most urgent task is to exert the greatest possible global pressure to stop the genocide and hold the war criminals, who manage and implement it, accountable.
The collapsing wall
Pappé’s detention was probably linked to his vision of the end of the State of Israel, which he began developing in February in a lecture before the Islamic Human Rights Committee in the United Kingdom. His lecture began on a frightening note: “We are in my mind in the first three months of a period of two years that will witness the worst kind of horrors that Israel can inflict on the Palestinians.”
Later he said that the Zionist project will collapse, and that the apartheid regime in Israel will resort to the most brutal and violent methods to survive: “On the basis of sober professional examination, I am stating that we are witnessing the end of the Zionist project, there’s no doubt about it.”
These include the day after in Gaza; the dilemma of the Palestinian state; the existence of Israel …
Pappé likens Israel, as a state and a project that will collapse in the foreseeable future, to a wall in which cracks are beginning to appear. We may see some of the cracks but cannot see the rest, but it will collapse suddenly. And in its collapse it will cause a lot of destruction and victims, not only the Palestinians, who have always been the first victims of the Zionist project, but also the Jews, as they are victims of Zionism.
“This historical project has come to an end and it is a violent end. It is like a wall that is slowly eroded by cracks in it but then it collapses in one short moment,” he said. But if fulfilled, Pappé’s prophecy is not only terrifying for Israel, but also for its allies — beginning with the United States — and the regimes of the Middle East. The shockwaves of the collapse may affect them.
Aside from the metaphors of the elephant and the collapsing wall, endless questions are sparked over the Palestinian issue, in very direct and diverse forms. These include the “day after” in Gaza; the dilemma of the Palestinian state; the existence of Israel; the end or continuation of the autonomous authority in the West Bank; Fatah and Hamas; reviving and developing the Palestine Liberation Organization; the right of return and self-determination for the Palestinian people.
If the future Palestine we want — once we have immobilized the elephant in the room — can absorb everyone like Pappé, as citizens of a democratic and secular state from the river to the sea, and absorb the Jewish victims of Zionism, it also deserves that we pay attention to practical questions of the present and the future. Those impose an immediate task: stop the genocide.
