IT started, as does so much colonial mass murder, with a bureaucrat from the British Empire.

“In Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country,” wrote British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour in 1919, “… And Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is … of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.”

Freedom came cheap to Balfour; he’d become prime minister in the aftermath of his generals driving thousands of Boers into concentration camps in South Africa — the barbarism of which would disgust his own voters, and be replicated with greater efficiency by Nazi Germany. Today, his dour face graces Israeli postage stamps, while the Balfour Declaration is hailed as the start of a ‘Jewish homeland’.

Even back then, Zionism fed on antisemitism as fire feeds on oxygen. “The antisemites will become our most dependable friends,” founding father Theodore Herzl wrote, “the antisemitic countries our allies.” Because, as both Zionists and antisemites believed, the Jews were an alien race among European nations — the latter’s Nazi atrocities cushioning Zionist émigrés in Palestine with a layer of white guilt. (Herzl’s Jewish critics, surprise-surprise, favoured just staying put and integrating.)

The logic of Eretz Israel, a greater Israel, fails.

But it was also a passing of the torch, if from one coloniser to another: amid the empire’s dying sighs, a ferocious new ethno-state was murdering its way into existence in 1948. Calling this what it is, however — a textbook bout of settler-colonialism — is still met with fury.

“The decolonisation narrative has dehumanised Israelis,’ writes Simon Sebag Montefiore in the Atlantic, “to the extent that otherwise rational people excuse, deny, or support barbarity.”

As a rational person excusing, denying, or supporting barbarity, Simon downplays how the idea of Israel could only happen via the screams of the displaced: how children were shot on sight in Lydda (now the bustling Israeli city of Lod), or how entire villages were depopulated, like Saliha (now a kibbutz named Yiron). “Many families fled their homes,” writes a Gaza journalist, “in part due to their concerns over their women being raped by Zionist forces.”

Yet for all of Zion’s current apologists — Sunak, von der Leyen, and that vilest of neoliberal hypocrites, Barack Obama — the beauty and integrity of the Jewish spirit is to be found elsewhere. As Israeli filmmaker Hadar Morag said of her grandmother, late of Auschwitz, whose entire family had been exterminated by the Holocaust, and who was allotted a nice beach-house in Jaffa: “She saw that on the table there were still the plates of the Palestinians who had lived there, and who had been driven away. She returned to the agency and said, ‘Take me back to my tent, I’ll never do to someone else that which has been done to me’.”

Others felt differently. Over the next half-century, as the Israeli war machine gobbled up more and more land, and the Gulf sheikhdoms shook their fists at the sky, Tel Aviv was defeated by its own extraordinary success: when Ariel Sharon enabled genocide in Sabra and Shatila in 1982 — declared the g-word by a resolution of the UN General Assembly, no less — it was Hezbollah that was born in Beirut’s ashes.

Hamas, too, was long thought a crew of useful cutthroats (before Oct 7’s spree-shooting paragliders shattered that complacency for good): Netanyahu enjoyed affording them room as a spoiler for the peace process. “Those who want to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state should support the streng­thening of Hamas,” he told his party in 2019. “… This is part of our strategy, to differentiate bet­ween the Pales­tinians in Gaza and the Pal­estinians in Judea and Samaria.”

But by spilling rivers of blood as routinised policy, the logic of Eretz Israel, a greater Israel, fails: a gross fantasy that, by definition, must be pursued by ever worse monsters.

As this contributor wrote nearly a decade ago, even a butcher like Sharon considered Netanyahu an aberration: a far-right huckster who would upend the general’s carefully laid plans for apartheid. As Sharon put it, “It is impossible to have a Jewish, democratic state and at the same time to control all of Eretz Israel. If we insist on fulfilling the dream in its entirety, we are liable to lose it all. Everything.”

That is now happening: at no other time has the idea of Eretz Israel seemed so intellectually bankrupt and plainly murderous — a haze of bombed-out hospitals, dead children, and plans for ethnic cleansing all the way to the sands of the Sinai — backed by the slack-jawed Joe Biden and Lockheed Martin’s soaring stocks. With each day that passes without a ceasefire, that idea will continue to seep poison.

Because until Palestine is free, ‘never again’ is now.

The writer is a barrister.

Published in Dawn, November 9th, 2023