Gaza Faces History by Enzo Traverso

translated from the original Italian by Willard Wood. This review is going to require a lot of background on me as a reviewer so buckle up, or feel free to scroll down till you get to the parts that are primarily about this book, around six paragraphs down.

When I was a girl growing up in Malaysia, I didn’t understand the conflict in the Middle East, due in large part to the contrary and muddled tales I heard from grown-ups and media about it. What I knew for certain is that after World War II, in order to atone for their awful treatment of Jewish people, Europeans gave Jews the land now known as Israel in compensation. The Arab people who were already there weren’t thrilled about it, and war broke out. Muslims worldwide decried the Israeli occupation, often using terrible anti-Semitic language to denounce it.

Being a well-read kid who’d already absorbed The Diary Of Anne Frank and similar, I felt a lot of sympathy for the Jewish people, and wondered why they couldn’t all just share. The Jews wanted a safe homeland, and Muslims already had Mecca and Medina and entire countries where we’re in the majority. Muslims are supposed to be hospitable. And historically, Muslim civilizations and governance had always been much more welcoming of Jewish citizens than their Christian counterparts. So what had changed?

In a word: colonialism. Looking back on my younger self, I can forgive her for not understanding the evils of European empire because I and everyone around me was still trying to come to terms with it. Back then, it never occurred to me that the British did not have the right to take Palestinian land and give it away to foreigners. I had no idea the scale of displacement or ethnic cleansing of the native Palestinians, much less the fact that the Israeli government had basically said that those Palestinians who wanted to return to their ancestral lands could go fuck themselves.

What I did note was that hardliners kept killing moderates who were working towards peace, and that even while paying lip service to a two-state solution, Israeli governments kept encouraging the building of illegal settlements that pushed Palestinians into smaller and smaller spaces. But genuinely and for the longest time, I bought into the idea that the Israeli government was only defending itself against anti-Semites: goodness knows, I’d encountered enough of those awful people to understand that Jews absolutely have a right to be wary of others.

And then the terrorist attack of October 7 and the genocide in Gaza got me to learn more. While I continue to believe that Israel has a right to exist as a nation, I do think that it’s currently enacting an apartheid and genocide against Palestinians, and that any hope for a “separate but equal” two-state solution is long gone. A binational or federal country with equal rights for all its citizenry is the only humane way forward that recognizes the dignity of all individual human beings. Some Zionists will argue that doing so will dilute Israel’s status as a Jewish state, but they’re just pulling a page from the white supremacist playbook. A healthy identity has never been a static snapshot in time, so fragile that exposure to other’s ideas and customs will “corrupt” it. Identities — of individuals, of groups, of states — grow and change and progress, hopefully for the better. I promise you, Judaism and Jewishness are much more resilient than white fragility would deem them.

Much of this is discussed in much smarter, sharper terms in historian and academic Enzo Traverso’s short but urgent monograph on the state of Palestine and particularly Gaza today. While he doesn’t go into an entire treatise on the historical sources of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — that would take pages and pages, and is already well-covered elsewhere — he does provide a clear-eyed explanation of current affairs, as well as the moral and legal argument for an immediate ceasefire, followed by the adoption of a single, binational state. He draws from the thinking of intellectuals and philosophers before him, including well-respected Jewish icons like Hannah Arendt and Judah Magnes. His writing really helped me to clarify my thinking on both the suffering of the Palestinians and the moral imperative that Israel and its most fervent supporters have to ask themselves if they’re being the bad guys here. They are, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t see the error of their ways and begin the process of atonement — genuine atonement as in post-apartheid South Africa, not the pushing off of their sins onto other people like Europe did post-WWII.

Ta-Nehisi Coates memorably said recently that nothing justifies apartheid or genocide. As a member of a historically repressed minority, he is both correct and not alone in his thinking. That’s something that supremacists don’t understand about the people they oppress. The vast majority of us do not want revenge: we want rights. Israel cannot pretend to be a bulwark of democracy in the Middle East if it constantly violates the rights of the Palestinians at its mercy, out of some mistaken belief that only by abusing others will they ensure that they’re never abused again.

I am planning to give this book to a tenderhearted Jewish friend of mine who has been bullied by Zionists when she stands against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, in hopes that it will help her sharpen and strengthen some of her arguments (this article by an American rabbi is also really great at elucidating the case for a ceasefire.) While my Harris-Walz lawn sign disagrees with my friend’s desire to boycott the Democratic nominee for president until an equitable peace is found — as if 45 would be better on anything leftists purport to care about. To quote the great Cher Horowitz, “As if!” — I do think that peace in the Middle East is a goal we can work towards together, with books like Sig Traverso’s to help reinforce our idea of shared humanity and actively progressing to make life better for everyone.

Gaza Faces History by Enzo Traverso was published October 1 2024 by Other Press and is available from all good booksellers, including