As one watches the photographs of tens of thousands of Palestinians journeying to return to their homeland, to Gaza devastated by Israeli bombardment, it’s impossible to avoid the parallel with Sisyphus. How many times have they built their homes, how many times have these been destroyed, and how many times have they rebuilt them?
Like the mythological Sisyphus, condemned to climb a hill carrying an enormous stone that would fall each time it reached the summit, forcing him to start again, so too appears the Palestinians’ struggle to hold onto their land, forever beginning anew. Will this Sisyphean effort ever end?
Just days after the fragile ceasefire, nearly 400,000 people have passed through a newly opened corridor. According to the Gaza government’s Press Office, approximately 90% of the northern part of the city has been destroyed, and those returning find rubble instead of their homes. Despite this, they refuse to abandon their land. And where else would they go?
The day before yesterday, a book titled “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning” was published. Its author is Peter Beinart, a Jewish intellectual born in South Africa and, until recently, a fervent supporter of Israel. A professor of journalism and political science at City University of New York, editor of Jewish Currents and columnist for The New York Times, he no longer hesitates to characterise what happened in Gaza as genocide. The more brutally Israel behaves, the more brutal the resistance will be, he argues in the book. He says that that is why Israel must end the apartheid it has imposed by denying Palestinians their most basic rights. With its unchecked cruelty and unbearable pain, the destruction of Gaza is a symbol of our times.
Meanwhile, in an opinion piece in the New York Times marking the book’s release, he accuses Israel of committing the deepest desecration of the central idea of human worth. “Asking if Israel has a right to exist is the wrong question,” he maintains. “Does Israel, as a Jewish state, adequately protect the rights of all the individuals under its dominion? The answer is no.” He continues, “roughly half the people under Israeli control are Palestinian. Most of those — the residents of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip — cannot become citizens of the state that wields life-or-death power over them.” Nevertheless, he believes Israeli Jews and Palestinians could live together in complete equality through a process of reconciliation and historical justice. That, at least, is his dream.
