Piotr Zychowicz "Israel at War"

It's the Jewish topic again, but this time the story is very brutal. The pretext for the book is Israel's war with Hamas, which by September 2024 had claimed the lives of 40,000 Palestinians (to compare, two and a half years of war had claimed the lives of 11,500 Ukrainian civilians). I say "pretext" because the author takes us back to the end of the nineteenth century, when the idea of Zionism emerged, and then tells the story of the State of Israel up to the present day. At the root of the constantly tense situation in the Middle East was the Zionist slogan "a land without a people for a people without a land" — that is, Palestine for the Jews. Yet this land was not without a people: it was inhabited by Palestinian Arabs, while the Jews themselves can be regarded as... colonizers. Even the organization founded in 1891 to facilitate the emigration of Jews from Russia was called the Jewish Colonization Society.

In the early stages of this immigration, which was relatively small in scale, Palestine was a "far-away province of the Ottoman Empire." During the First World War, it was conquered by the British, who established the British Mandate for Palestine. The new authorities favored the Jews, whose numbers continued to grow — on the eve of the Second World War, following the brutal suppression of an Arab uprising, they already accounted for about a quarter of the Mandate's population. Then, however, a surprising twist took place: Britain began restricting Jewish immigration in order to win Arab support. Even ships with the Jews fleeing the Holocaust were being turned back. After the war, exhausted by Jewish terrorism, the Mandate authorities withdrew, and the fate of Palestine was to be decided by the United Nations. Resolution 181 divided it into a Jewish state and an Arab state, which led first to civil war and then to war between Israel and Syria, Egypt, Transjordan, and Iraq. During this conflict, the State of Israel was established and defended itself, while at the same time carrying out ethnic cleansing and the mass expulsion of Palestinians.

The book then goes on to describe the brutal policies towards the latter, both in Israel and in the territories occupied since 1967: the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. This policy is, among other things, a response to Arab terrorism, which makes Jews feel unsafe in their own country. However, in its fight against terrorism, Israel also attacks civilians, killing a few times more people than Arab terrorists. Palestine is the scene of a never-ending conflict, and the current war is exceptional only in terms of its scale. This book provides an opportunity to understand what this conflict is really about.