The Israeli Genocide in Palestine And Lessons For The Igbos In Palestinian Resistance -By Chibuike Obi

For those who may neither have the time nor the inclination to read through the article, I have assembled a collection of GIFs and screenshots of pages of articles and books that support most of the arguments in this article.

This article draws from my response to a post in a WhatsApp book club group. A member of the group made a post forwarded from another group, the substance of which was the Palestinians were not indigenous to the land violently occupied by Israel on the irrelevant and nonsensical ground that since the Arabic language does not have the letter “P” in its alphabet, there are no such people as the Palestinians!

Those interested in a detailed and objective history of Israeli-Palestine relations can read the numerous books, articles, documentaries and other works written and produced by both Israelis and Palestinians. There are also many other reputable works by scholars and activists of different nationalities.

I will list only some of those written by ISRAELIS and JEWS on the history of Israel-Palestine relations.

(1)The “Ethnic Cleansing Of Palestine” by Ilan Pappe, an Israeli historian born in Haifa, Israel, formerly a senior lecturer at the Middle Eastern History Department and the Political Science Department of the University of Haifa between 1984 and 2006 and now a professor at the University of Exeter in the UK.

(2) “The Invention of The Jewish People” by Shlomo Sand, emeritus professor of History at Tel Aviv University since 2014

(3) “War And Peace In The Middle East” by Avi Shlaim, a former lecturer at the University of Reading in the UK.

There are many others, but I will mention only Omer Shatz, a lecturer in international law, B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization; international human rights institutions like Amnesty International, Medecins Sans Frontieres, and Human Rights Watch. There is, of course, South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, with at least 10 other countries joining South Africa.

From this point forward in this article was my response to the WhatsApp post, now slightly amended and enlarged:

This Zionist Hasbara propaganda that Palestinians are not indigenous to Palestine because of the absence of the letter “P” in Arabic is one of the most deranged propaganda trash ever produced by the Zionists. An Israeli member of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, made this statement in a Kneseet meeting and was promptly ridiculed by both Israeli and Arab members of the Knesset.

Hasbara, a Hebrew word which roughly translates as “explaining” in English, is Israeli state-sponsored propaganda, the purpose of which is to lie, obfuscate, distort, fabricate and gaslight the reality of Israel’s oppression, ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinians. Genocide, ethnic cleansing and oppression of Palestinians being already perpetrated by Israeli Jews even before 1948, the year of the founding of Israel, and the year they massacred and displaced over 750,000 Palestinians and forced the remainder into beleaguered enclaves in Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem. In the process, the Israelis forcefully acquired about 78% of Palestinian land, leaving the Palestinians with only 22% of the land. To put the scale of dispossession in context, the Jewish population in Palestine had been about 6% in 1917 when the British conquered and replaced the Ottoman Turks as the colonial overlords of Palestine. This population of Jews steadily increased with immigration from Europe, where they had faced pogroms and discrimination, till they were 33% of the population in 1948. As they arrived in Palestine from countries where they were so horrifically oppressed and pogromed, their experience didn’t teach them the virtues of appreciating the humanity of the Palestinians they met there; instead, they meted out worse treatment to the indigenous Palestinians. A practice that a few prominent Jews of conscience, like Ahad Ha’am, deplored and presciently warned was going to cause much trouble for the Jews in Palestinian resistance and blowback.

One of the cruellest ironies of ethnic-nationalism is that most of the Indigenous Palestinians were genetically ethnic ancient Jews and Canaanites who had been converted to Islam after Islam gained ascendancy in the region. One 2022 genetic study by the New York Genome Center affirming the ancient lineage of modern-day Palestinians is shown in one of the screenshots at the end of this article.

There’s a long line of Israeli Jews who have been harsh and vociferous critics of colonial and genocidal Zionism before and after the founding of the Israeli state in 1948. For example:-

(1) Asher Zvi Hirsh Ginsberg,1856-1927, a Hebrew journalist better known by his pen name Ahad Ha’am, continually excoriated Jewish settlers for their brutal treatment of the native Palestinians.

(2) Isaac Einstein declined the offer to be Israel’s second president and also excoriated Zionist terrorist groups like the Haganah and the Irgun for their massacres of Palestinians. These terrorist groups were later incorporated into the Israeli army known as the IDF, or more properly, the Israeli Occupation Forces.

(3) Israel Shahak, 1933-2001, a Holocaust survivor and professor of organic chemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, was a severe and relentless critic of Israeli oppression of the Palestinians. Shahak wrote “Jewish History, Jewish Religion”, which traces the sources of bigotry and intolerance in Jewish holy traditions and books which account for their barbaric treatment of Palestinians. This bigotry and intolerance were inherited and incorporated into the successor religions of Christianity and Islam in their holy books of the Bible and the Quran.

(4) Shlomo Ben-Ami, a former Israeli foreign and security minister, has also witheringly censured the Israeli oppression of Palestinians.

(5) Miko Peled, an Israeli author (his grandfather Avraham Katznelson, after whom he was named, signed Israel’s Declaration of Independence.[1][3] His father, Mattityahu Peled, who fought in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War and served as a general in the Six-Day War of 1967, became an advocate for an Israeli dialogue with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) after the Israeli cabinet ignored his investigation of a 1967 alleged Israeli war crime. He condemned the Israeli military for seizing the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai and the Golan Heights, calling the war a “cynical campaign of territorial expansion”-This is from Wikipedia, in many cases not a reliable source)

said this of Israel:- “Israel has been on a mission to destroy the Palestinian people for over six decades. Why would anyone not give solidarity to the Palestinian people?”[14] He has said that Israel’s actions in the Six-Day War of 1967 were not a response to a real threat but acts of bald aggression. [15] And also that “every single Israeli city is a settlement” and that “expressing solidarity with Palestinians is the most important thing people can do.“[15](source: Wikipedia)

(6) Ze’ev Herzog, a sitting professor of archaeology at Tel-Aviv University, has exploded many of the myths of Israeli presence in historic Palestine.

These are just a few of the numerous principled and morally upright secular and non-secular Israeli and non-Israeli Jews who have roundly condemned the genocidal Israeli state’s occupation and oppression of Palestinians.

This is in addition to Israeli historians like Ilan Pappe and other members of the Israeli group of New Historians who have shown from Israeli government files declassified in the 1980s, the ethnic cleansing and displacement of Palestinians in the 1948 war that led to Israel’s creation.

The remainder of this article deals with the lessons Nigerians, most especially the Igbos, can learn from the Israeli-Palestine conflict.

I will start by talking about the exasperating tendency of most Nigerians to regard the continued existence of Nigeria as an unequivocally good thing. This tendency cuts across leftists, liberals, conservatives, and reactionaries in Nigerian society. It’s arguably the British colonialists’ most destructively pernicious legacy that they convinced most Nigerians that the extremely artificial contraption they put together in 1914 to plunder the resources and labour of the over 250 ethnic nations enclosed by the contraption, would inevitably fail if any of the ethnic nationalities broke away to chart an independent course. The British convinced the ethnic nationalities that there were mere “tribes”, which conditioned them into believing themselves less worthy of being autonomous nation-states than other ethnic nations that exist as independent nation-states in the modern world. One of the screenshots at the end of the article is of pages of the book “The West And The Rest Of Us” by the famous writer Chinweizu that highlights the absurdity of the persistence in calling “tribes” ethnic nations like the Igbo, Yoruba, Bini, Hausa, Bornu which have as much as right to be nation-states as any Western European nations.

It is a given that all nations are “artificial”; or “imagined communities”, according to the political theorist Benedict Anderson. But the artificiality of Nigeria is so extreme, as attested by even the British creators, that it is only extremely naive or vested interests that insist on its continued existence, especially given the oppression, exploitation, immiseration, massacres, and depredation of the Nigerian peoples, first by the British and later on by their chosen successors the Northern Nigerian oligarchy and junior Southern Nigerian collaborators in a neocolonial arrangement set up the British. These travails have been the enduring characteristics of the Nigerian experiment from its creation in 1914 to date.

I tweeted recently that Modern History is the nexus between capitalism, industrialization, and ethno-nationalist statism. And this history has proven largely detrimental to humanity. But as long as ethnic, cultural, and linguistic communities are organized according to the logic of nation-states, it makes no sense to decry the right of any ethnic nationality, feeling trapped and mistreated in any larger multi-ethnic nation-state, to self-determination. It goes beyond making sense to outright callousness when decrying the right of any of the constituent ethnic nations in large multi-ethnic nations like Nigeria that has been an unmitigated disaster for its peoples since its creation.

There are similarities and lessons from Jewish and Palestinian nationalism in Palestine by Igbo nationalists in Nigeria. The two-state solution (which the Palestinians find extremely problematic, to say the least), for the conflict in Palestine may no longer be tenable due to repeated Israeli annexation of Palestinian land. But it shows the necessity of recognizing the right of peoples to seek self-determination, more so in the case of Nigeria where there are more compelling historical, political, and cultural reasons for the different ethnic nationalities to pursue their separate national development paths and later come back together as equals in a supra-national union. Something like and possibly even better than the Western European countries which used to be Roman colonies that separated, became independent nations, and later came back together as the EU.

In Nigeria, leftists and liberals pay lip service to the recognition of the right of self-determination for different reasons.

Liberals cannot pretend not to acknowledge what even the colonialists themselves and virtually every other student of Nigerian and African history have recognized: the extreme artificiality of Nigeria’s borders, which had inescapably attendant negative implications and consequences for cohesion and peaceful co-existence between historically contiguous communities spread both within and across Nigeria. But liberals ignore or minimize these consequences and proclaim the farcical notion that the numerous ethnic nationalities in Nigeria would have inevitably come together as Nigerians without the intervention of the British!

Nigerian leftists, traditionally inveterate doctrinaire Marxist class-reductionists, whom Chinweizu aptly called the “leftist school of thoughtlessness”, ignore the debates within the Marxist tradition of the dialectics of class, state and nationalism. Their class-reductionist tunnel vision makes them remarkably obtuse and clueless in making any reasoned trajectory of the history and politics of Nigeria.

Interestingly enough, the left-liberal space in Nigeria follows the traditional North-South divide in ethnic relations, perceptions and attitudes. Northern Nigerian left-liberal types like the late Professor Bala Usman and Professor Farouk Kperoogi are the most brazenly dishonest interlocutors in the nationalism debate in Nigeria. Bala Usman, a supposed leftist, shared the entitlement attitudes and prerogatives of his fellow Northern Nigerian feudal aristocrats whom the British appointed as compradors and collaborators in ruling Nigeria as a colony and neo-colony. That’s why he claimed that all the ethnic nationalities in Nigeria would have voluntarily come together to form the union in the same form that the British had, in his opinion, serendipitously created. This claim is so deranged that it’s difficult to believe that a university-trained historian made it. Usman was so unhinged in hyper-Nigerian nationalism that he invented bizarre geological theories, which do not even rise to the level of pseudoscience, to justify the claims of Northern Nigeria to the resources of Southern Nigeria. It is then completely unsurprising that true to his Northern Nigerian supremacist beliefs and attitudes, which he hid under universalistic leftist rhetoric, he eulogized the genocidal war criminal Murtala Mohammed; and in addition, his blind dogmatic devotion to the British criminal enterprise, Nigeria, made him a remarkably poor analyst of the country. For example, he was daft enough to believe that the kleptomaniac Obasanjo’s 1999 anti-corruption drive was genuine when even I, a young secondary school leaver that year, knew, based on Obasango’s antecedents and the power group which rigged him into power, that the drive was a sham.

Farouk Kperoogi is similar to Usman but is trickier and less brazen than Usman in falsifying history to defend the Nigeria project. Professor Douglas Anele exposed and devasted Kperoogi’s duplicitous and bad faith arguments for Nigerian nationalism in his 2021 “The Possible Impossibility of Nigeria” series in the Vanguard newspaper. Anele also analyzed why it’s untenable to compare Nigeria to China and India as reasonably functional large multi-ethnic nation states by outlining China’s and India’s very different and much longer historical, political, and colonial experiences and most crucially, the existence of one numerically dominant ethnic, linguistic, and cultural group in both countries which made managing their ethnic diversities much easier.

Southern Nigerian leftists were and are the true doctrinaire Marxists. Chinweizu and Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe have already adequately exposed their emptiness so much won’t be said about them here. I’ll say that their Marxism was and is so formulaic and shallow that they barely had any influence on intellectual and political life in southern Nigeria. That the quality of intellectual leftism in Nigeria was abysmal at that time and is much worse now, was conclusively proven, at least for 1960s South-Eastern Nigeria, when the Nigerian civil war began. Biafra probably became the only conflict zone during the Cold War where the US/UK and the Soviet Union joined together to arm the side committing genocide. Of course, Odumuegwu Ojukwu, the leader of Biafra, being a megalomaniac playboy, without any of the leadership or intellectual capacities of Fidel Castro or Ho Chi Minh, contributed significantly to the lack of ideological clarity and focus that cost Biafra the support of the Soviet Union. This Biafran experience was in contrast to other unjustly beleaguered nations during the Cold War period, like Cuba, Vietnam, and Angola, that were greatly supported by the Soviets which enabled them to succeed in their resistance to Western imperialism and their local puppet regimes.

Chinweizu and Ekwe-Ekwe, though, should have more forcefully pushed back on Chinua Achebe’s incredibly moronic claims of Nigeria’s problems being almost solely due to mis-leadership. That empty intellectual tradition pioneered by Achebe, Soyinka and the older generation of Nigerian liberals is carried on by contemporary liberals like Omoyele Sowore and Fisaya Soyombo who seldom foreground the role of Western imperialism, neo-colonialism and capitalism in Nigeria’s travails.

Coming back to the ongoing Israeli genocide in Palestine, most Nigerian Christians and Muslims view the Palestine-Israel conflict through the lens of their antagonistic relationship in Nigeria and that’s why both sides have extremely wrong-headed views about the conflict.

Most Nigerian Muslims, especially the Northern Muslims, given their supremacist and fundamentalist Islamic ideology and their deeply entrenched culture of entitlement, have appropriated the just Palestinian cause as a solely Muslim cause which not only greatly distorts the history of Israeli oppression of the Palestinians but entirely erases the existence of the significant and historic Christian indigenous minorities in Palestine.

Most Nigerian Christians, traumatized by Islamic terrorism in Nigeria, and seeing Palestine as a Muslim-majority nation have accepted the Nigerian Muslims’ framing of the affair. The framing has been amplified by Western mainstream media backed by their governments, especially that of the US, UK, Germany, and France, who are partners with Israel in committing the genocide in Palestine.

I have also tweeted before that most Nigerian Muslims are unforgivably ignorant about how the West instrumentalizes Islamic extremism to manage the neocolonies and the global South countries in the periphery of the world capitalist system. So, for example, the West supports and props up Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states reactionary regimes. The Saudis and the Gulf States fund Islamic extremism in Nigeria, which encourages most Nigerian Muslims to see themselves as Wahhabi Arabs who detest the West! A particularly stark example of this instrumentalization is the West simultaneously funding and putting on its most wanted Islamic terrorist list, the current head-chopper president of Syria, al-Jolani, whom the West rebranded and used to successfully topple Bashar al-Asad, who despite being extremely brutal and corrupt, provided limited succour to the Palestinians alongside Hezbollah in Lebanon. These Nigerian Muslims, true to their extremist conditioning, have failed to note that al-Jolani has worked quite hard not to notice, let alone, fight the Israelis that are bombing and conquering more parts of Syria and Lebanon than they had already conquered. These Nigerian Muslims are just happy to know that al-Jolani is an extremist like them who’s busy repressing non-Muslims and destroying Syria’s secularism which Asad, despite all his brutality, managed to maintain. The degree of mental and religious enslavement of most Nigerian Muslims who regard themselves as Wahhabi Arabs is worse than that of the many Nigerian Christians who regard themselves as American or English Christians.

So both the majority of Nigerian Christians and Muslims, like the Hasbarist who parroted the propaganda trash inspired by the lunatic Israeli lawmaker, have made it look like every single Palestinian resident in Palestine and resisting Israeli oppression is a Muslim. This stupendous piece of historical illiteracy ignores the continuous existence of Christian communities in Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem that are thousands of years old.

For example, Beit Jala is a Christian village in the West Bank of Palestine with some of the oldest Christian communities in the world. (Much older than any Nigerian Christian community who try to be more Christian than the Europeans who brought them the religion. Just like the Nigerian Muslims who try to be more Muslim than the Arabs who brought them the religion. In other words, both groups of black Africans think and behave like children incapable of doing any original thinking for themselves, unlike the Chinese and Japanese who retained their cultures and religions and still modernized successfully.)

Churches in Palestine like the St Porphyrius church in Gaza in continuous existence from AD 425 till date and whose bombing by the Israelis elicited Pope Francis’s strong condemnation simply counter the fallacious narrative that the conflict is just about Islamic terrorism.

Nigerians whether Secular, Traditionalist, Christian or Muslim should realize the transnational systems, networks, and patterns of exploitation, resource expropriation, and oppression by the US-led Western hegemon which is directly and indirectly responsible for the travails of Nigeria and other countries in the global South. The Christians and the Secularists especially should also realize that Israel is simply a settler-colonial genocidal outpost of the US empire in the Middle East and seek to deprogram themselves from the brainwashing and conditioning of sophisticated Western propaganda that the West and the Israelis are flawed but essentially well-intentioned actors.

For my Igbo people who are justly seeking self-determination and escape from the Islamic supremacist Nigerian state, we should not learn too late like the historically illiterate late Akanu Ibiam who thought the British would support the just cause of Biafra. Instead the British, the US, and the Israelis, who only opportunistically supported Biafra to deflect global condemnation of their oppression of the Palestinians in the 1960s (while knowing fully well that the preponderance of arms was on the Nigerian side), armed, funded and supported the genocide of the Igbos by the Nigerian state during the civil war.

Akanu Ibiam foolishly thought because he and virtually all Igbos were Christian like the British, that the British would support them against the Muslim Northerners. How sadly was he mistaken.

Akanu Ibiam later dropped the knighthood he’d proudly received from the Queen; he also dropped his English name, Francis, in protest against the British support of the Nigerian government’s genocide of the Igbos.

He’d realized too late that the British and the West in general only seek to exploit Africa and the world and they will use any means from fundamentalist Islamic sects in Africa and the Middle East to Israeli Zionism in the Middle East to achieve their aims.

The Palestinians have been resisting fiercely their oppression by the Israelis who have been backed by the West for over 77 years and the Igbos can learn a lot from their strategies, alliances, and mistakes.

The Palestinians have been fighting doggedly without respite all these decades even when Western and Hasbara propaganda convinced the entire world that the Palestinians were simply blood-thirsty Islamic savages bent on wiping out a plucky little nation called Israel. It was in the months after October 7th 2023, that the world began to understand the true situation and see Israel for the psychopathic genocidal nation that it is. Like all colonizers, the savagery of Israel is hidden while the response to the incomparably greater Israeli savagery by the Palestinian resistance is amplified out of proportion. Israel, again like the West tries to instrumentalize Islamic extremism by destroying secular resistance movements like the PLO and promoting Islamist movements. Hama was supposed to be an Islamist movement whose savagery would not elicit pity from the world when Israel would claim to use all the means at its disposal to crush it. The means at Israel’s disposal invariably involve wanton and indiscriminate slaughter of non-combatant men, women, and children. Wanton and indiscriminate slaughter of hospitals, schools, refugee centres, churches, and mosques with Israel claiming that every single target, including babies, was Hamas.

But Hamas, even if initially Islamist, has sensibly softened their earlier attitudes, and now may be more moderate Islamic than Islamist. Hopefully, they will continue further shedding their conservative attitudes; adopting a more secular and inclusive approach to other resistance movements in Palestine. There may be reason to hope this will happen because China brokered a unity deal between Hamas and other resistance groups last July.

The October 7th attack was a prison break out of the open-air prison that is Gaza; by Hamas, to capture some of their guards as prisoners to use as bargaining chips, to free the thousands of their innocent folks, including children, tortured, raped, and starved in Israeli dungeons.

Israel, in response, activated the Hannibal doctrine, which their Air Force has recently admitted to, which killed most of their citizens on that day. Every other claim by the Israelis on what happened that day, from the 40 beheaded babies to the raped women, has been proven to be a complete lie by even the Israelis themselves. The genocidal onslaught that Israel, fully backed by the West, unleashed on the Palestinians and which the Palestinians live-streamed for the world to watch finally ripped off the mask from Israel and the West and revealed that evil of the West and Israel is the most unspeakably bottomless evil that the world had ever seen since the recording of human history began. This revelation may be a reason for cautious optimism because the world is beginning to take notice of the forces and structures running the world and may start to take action towards freeing itself from these forces and structures. It’s unconscionably tragic that this awakening came with the cost of genocide.

The world cannot unsee and forget what it has seen and that may be the first step forward of the world towards freeing itself from the tyranny of Western hegemony and Zionism.

The Igbos can join this movement and that would entail dropping all the colonial and neocolonial mental baggage we had acquired since the British colonized us. That would mean rigorous thinking and dispassionate analysis of reality and not the kind of unserious thinking, to paraphrase Chinweizu, that ” made some of us (Igbos) dope ourselves silly on the fantasy that we are Israelites”. Maybe then we can raise leaders and thinkers like Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, James Baldwin, and the Black Panthers, all of whom it may be noted, supported Palestine.

May, we the Igbos, fighting to escape Nigeria, successfully drop our baggage before it is too late.

Chibuike Obi is a freelance journalist resident in Niger state. He can be reached via email at ojionu@yahoomail.com, on Twitter at @chibuikeobi19, and Facebook as Chibuike Obi.

Here is the collection of GIFs and screenshots: