Sympathy for Israel after Hamas abducted 253 hostages, including women, children and the elderly and killed over 1,200 Israelis on October 7, 2023 has dissipated into revulsion at the genocide against the Palestinian people. Just two days after the Hamas attack, Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant referred to Palestinians and Hamas-on record - as "human animals". Such statements could be dismissed as bluster from a representative of the most right-wing government in Israel's history.
Read Israeli historian Avi Shlaim's memoir Three Worlds to understand why Mr Gallant's comment is not a new normal for Israeli society but a foundational plinth.
Dr Shlaim, a respected Israeli historian of Zionism, is a Jew of Arab origin from Baghdad. In the 1950s, his family, like hundreds of other Iraqi Jews, was forced to flee to the new state of Israel. With this "Big Aliyah" to the Promised Land, a prosperous family of merchants was reduced to penury and humiliation.
At the bottom of this misfortune lay a truth that is often suppressed under the heroic myth of Israeli statehood. Far from being an egalitarian safe harbour, the Israeli state is a construct of Ashkenazi or European Jews who looked down on and discriminated against Sephardic, Jews from Africa and Asia. If the Palestinians were the primary casualties "victims of victims" as Edward Said eloquently described them-of the Israel project, the Arab-Jews, Dr Shlaim maintains, were another category of victims of racism.
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