Helga Baumgarten, No Peace for Palestine: The Long War Against Gaza, translated from German into Arabic by Mohamed Abou Zeid, Cairo: Arab Centre for Research and Policy Studies, 2023, pp 239
On 13 November 1974, Yasser Arafat, then leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) established 10 years earlier, addressed the UN General Assembly, making one of his most famous statements: “I come bearing an olive branch in one hand and the freedom fighter’s gun in the other. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.”
According to the most recent book by the German political scientist and professor at Birzeit University, Hegla Baumgarten, this was one of the most significant moments of transformation on the still unending road of the struggle for Palestinian liberation, which started with the Palestinian Nakba in 1948.
Subtitled “Occupation and Resistance”, No peace for Palestine: The Long War against Gaza was first published in the original German online in November 2021, and later translated into English. In December 2023, the Arab Centre for Research and Policy Studies published the present Arabic translation. The book is part of the broader project by Baumgarten, who was born in Stuttgart in 1947, to inform German-speaking people about the story of the Palestinian “catastrophe”, and how Palestinians were forced from their houses and villages at gunpoint to enable the establishment of Israel on most of the land of historic Palestine. It was, Baumgarten never tires of saying, one of the most obvious colonial settlement and ethnic cleansing projects of all time. In the present book Baumgarten makes obvious comparisons between the apartheid system of South Africa, in place from 1948 to 1994, and that of Israel, in place from 1948 and until now.
According to the book, 1948 was one of the early stops on the Palestinians’ legitimate journey of trying to resist being thrown out of their land and killed if they came back to reclaim their houses. Subsequent stops were inspired by two points: the longing to live in their homes, and the realisation that this would never happen without some form of resistance. Long before the rise of the Islamic resistance movements like Hamas and Jihad, all political Palestinian groups were anchored to the resistance. “It was just called revolution,” she writes, adding that it was quite diverse, including every Palestinian political orientation: communists and pan-Arab nationalists as well as Islamists.
In the decades following the Nakba and even after the 1967 war, in which all of historic Palestine was occupied by Israel, along with other Arab lands in Egypt, Jordan and Syria, the Arab regimes were all in favour of armed resistance – until things started to take a different turn, first in Jordan with the confrontation between King Hussein and the Palestinians, and then in Egypt with Anwar Sadat’s decision to make peace with Israel, and finally in Lebanon with the ouster of the PLO in 1982 following an Israeli invasion partially supported by some Lebanese political groups.
Contrary to current Western disinformation promulgating the narrative that armed resistance is strictly a Hamas choice, Baumgarten’s book recalls that it was a concept shared by everyone, down to every individual, almost. Likewise the idea, spread by Israel, that Palestinians chose to leave their homes behind: the book documents the circumstances of defeat, pain and fear of forced exile as of 1948.
The Nakba was particularly consequential because it was then and there that the “seeds of sorrow and fury” were planted. The author quotes the recollection of leading political figures in the history of Palestinian politics — George Habash and Abou Eyyad, from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Fatah, respectively — on their forced expulsion from their homes as children and young.
Baumgarten’s book reviews the continued agony of Palestinians as Israeli aggression unfolded, always in the context of ethnic cleansing, whereby Palestinians had to be forced out of the land or eliminated to make way for “Israelis” arriving from all over the world. In 1956, during the Tripartite Aggression against Egypt by France, England and Israel, Abdel-Aziz Al-Rantissi, later a prominent leader in Hamas, witnessed the Israeli army attacking and brutalising Palestinians in Gaza at the age of nine. He saw his own paternal uncle being killed and his father swept into a wave of tears.
It is impossible for Palestinians, Baumgarten argues, to drop or overlook this collective body of memories of their people being killed over by Israel, again and again. The memories are inevitably passed from one generation to the next, as the Israeli wars on Gaza continue with no end in sight and ever more brutality. But, 1948 notwithstanding, the significance of 1967 cannot be overlooked either. It was then that all of Palestine was lost and all of the Arab armies defeated. This stop on the journey was significant in introducing the question of the one- or two-state solution, although these terms had not been invented in the early 1970s. As early as 1968, however, some revolutionary and progressive Palestinians proposed the idea of a single secular and democratic country where everybody could live together outside the zero-sum equation.
Later, in 1972, King Hussein of Jordan proposed a Palestinian-Jordanian confederation that could later make a peace deal with Israel. This approach, Baumgarten wrote, continued even after the 1973 October war, and was certainly accentuated by the first ever Arab-Israeli peace deal signed in March 1979 between Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem. But, for Baumgarten, one thing is clear: no matter what the possible roads to a negotiated arrangement were, Israel was determined to continue with its aggressive war on the Palestinians, especially in Gaza. For Israel, she wrote, there was no going back on the ethnic cleansing scheme nor the racial segregation choice. There was no going back on what the Israeli military calls “Al-Dia’ah creed”, an ultra-aggressive military policy developed during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon whereby any residential area that could possibly house a resistance is carpet-bombed, just as Israel has been doing in the current war on Gaza.
Israeli choices sabotaged all attempts to move away from the zero-sum equation, including the attempt of the Oslo Accords signed in Washington by Arafat and both Itzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, then prime minister and foreign minister of Israel, in September 1993. It took Israel less than a year to restart its aggression and consequently set off the second Palestinian Intifada of 2000, less than ten years after the end of the first Intifada, which had gone on till Oslo since December 1987. The failure of the Oslo Accords, the conspicuous death of Arafat in November 2004, only a few months after the Israeli assassination of Hamas leader Ahmed Yassine, and the failure of the PLO to live up to the its challenges post-Arafat made it inevitable for the people to support Hamas, especially in Gaza where Israeli aggression caused the people to support Hamas, leading to a massive legislative victory in 2006, a tendency that would continue through Israeli wars of total destruction.
Baumgarten completed this book shortly after the 11-day war that Israel launched against Gaza in May 2021, rightly foreseeing more Israeli wars on Gaza and more Palestinian resistance. It is something she mentions in the introduction to the Arabic edition of this book, which appeared while the current Israeli war was entering its third month.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 4 July, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
Short link: