The mass slaughter unfolding in Gaza today is not a sudden eruption — it is the latest chapter in a brutal, century-long campaign of violence, colonization, and apartheid waged by Israel against the Palestinian people. From the earliest days of Zionist militancy in the 1930s to the genocide of today, Israel has been built on blood, backed by empire, and shielded by silence.
Who Are the Israelis? Foreign Settlers Turned Colonizers
Contrary to the myth of indigenous return, the project that became Israel was overwhelmingly a foreign enterprise. After World War II, European Zionists — many of whom had never set foot in the Middle East — began arriving in large numbers to seize land in Palestine. But their path to statehood was paved not with peace, but with terror.
These settlers didn’t integrate — they organized armed militias like the Irgun, Haganah, and Lehi (Stern Gang), which carried out assassinations, bombings, and massacres to terrorize the native Palestinian population and drive them from their homeland.
Even the British, who facilitated the Zionist project through the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate system, were not spared. In 1946, Zionist militants bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem — the British administrative headquarters — killing 91 people, including 28 British soldiers and officials.
At the time, the British Pathé newsreels and press openly called these groups what they were:
“Jewish terrorists.”
These were the same men who later became leaders of the Israeli state. Men like Menachem Begin, commander of the Irgun, who masterminded the King David Hotel bombing — and went on to become Prime Minister of Israel.
The state of Israel was not founded by peacemakers. It was founded by armed settlers who used terror as a tool of conquest.
The First Massacres: Haifa, Al-Quds, and Balad al-Sheikh (1937–1939)
The earliest massacres by Zionist militias took place under British rule. In 1937, Palestinians in Haifa and Jerusalem (Al-Quds) were slaughtered as they resisted both colonial rule and the rising threat of Zionist violence. In 1938 and 1939, further massacres were carried out in Haifa and Balad al-Sheikh, aimed at breaking Palestinian resistance to the encroaching settler project.
These attacks were the precursor to what would become the Nakba, the catastrophe.
Nakba: Israel’s Birth Through Blood (1947–1948)
As the UN pushed partition in 1947, Zionist forces unleashed a campaign of terror across Palestine. Massacres in Abbasiya, Al-Khisas, Bab al-Amud, Sheikh Bureik, and Al-Quds aimed to clear Palestinians from strategic areas.
Then came Deir Yassin in 1948 — over 100 villagers, including women and children, were executed by the Irgun and Lehi. This terror spread panic, forcing hundreds of thousands to flee. The massacres at Jaffa and Tantura followed, as Zionist forces seized more territory.
The result: over 750,000 Palestinians ethnically cleansed, more than 500 villages destroyed, and a state declared on their ruins.
From Occupation to Apartheid (1953–1967)
In the decades that followed, Israel extended its power through military occupation and racial separation. Massacres continued: in Jerusalem (1953), in Khan Yunis (1956) where hundreds were executed, and again in Al-Quds (1967) during the war that brought the West Bank and Gaza under permanent Israeli control.
The apartheid structure solidified — two sets of laws, two populations, one ruling over the other with guns, walls, and bulldozers.
Massacres Beyond Borders (1982–2002)
Palestinians were not safe even in exile. In 1982, Israeli forces enabled the Sabra and Shatila massacre in Lebanon — over 3,000 refugees butchered. In 1990, the Al-Aqaba massacre. In 1994, a settler opened fire in the Ibrahimi Mosque while Israeli soldiers stood by. In 2002, the invasion of Jenin Refugee Camp resulted in a massacre buried under rubble and censorship.
Each time, Palestinians bled. Each time, Israel claimed “security.”
Gaza: A Caged People Under Fire (2008–2021)
For the past two decades, Israel has treated Gaza as an open-air prison. It bombed and besieged a defenseless population in wave after wave of military operations:
- 2008–2009
- 2012
- 2014
- 2018–2019
- 2021
Thousands died. Children were buried. And the world, for the most part, did nothing.
Gaza Genocide: 2023–Now
Since October 2023, Israel has launched the deadliest campaign in its history — a genocide in real time. Gaza’s hospitals, schools, refugee camps, and entire neighborhoods have been obliterated. Over 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, most of them women and children. Starvation is being used as a weapon. Aid is blocked. Survivors are left to dig through the rubble with their bare hands.
The world once called these acts “terrorism.” Now, because they’re committed by a state — and one backed by the West — it calls them “self-defense.”
Palestine Resists
Through all this, the Palestinian people have remained. From Haifa to Gaza, they resist — not with tanks or jets, but with will, with memory, with courage. Their struggle is not one of terrorism, but of survival.
The truth must be said, again and again: Israel is a settler-colonial project, born of foreign conquest, founded in massacre, maintained through apartheid, and now carrying out genocide.
It is time the world stopped pretending otherwise.
