Ceasefires in the Gaza Genocide: A Historical Perspective by Eve Spangler

 Since  October 10, 2025, the official beginning of a mangled ceasefire in Gaza, there has been both a fading interest on the part of mainstream media in covering the disaster and, simultaneously,  much commentary on the effectiveness of ceasefires as contexts for humanitarian aid and for the development of a robust, sustainable peace. Perhaps the most succinct analyses of the Gaza situation is  offered by Palestinian poet, Dr. Rafaat Alareer. Alareer, since a casualty of the genocide, suggests that for Israelis addressing Palestinians, the real meaning of ceasefire is “we fire, you  cease.”

But even Alareer does not emphasize how Israeli violence is spreading from Gaza to the West Bank, to its own prisons, and to the region, with bombings in Lebanon, Syria, Iran, and Yemen.

To understand any specific ceasefire, especially this one in Gaza, which has optimistically been called “fragile” from the moment of its inception, we must first understand the particular violence it is trying to pause.

In the case of Israeli violence against Palestinians, the short answer is that ceasefires have minimal effect because they are  often brief and, when violated, the violation occurs, predictably,  by the more powerful party continuing to injure the less powerful. Even before the current genocide in Gaza, Israelis were the ones to re-ignite violence 79% of the time. The frequency of ceasefire violations, the speed with which they occur within days of being announced, and  the one-sidedness of their violation, necessarily raises the question of whether they were ever, for Israelis, a real option or merely performative.  For example, during the current ceasefire which nominally began about two months ago, close to 400 Palestinians  have been killed in Gaza alone.  One might call this situation, at best, ceasefire-lite.

The longer answer requires us to understand the roots of  Israel’s war against the Palestinians, its fierce, unrelenting  commitment to  Jewish exclusivity or, at the very least, Jewish supremacy over its Palestinian population, land, and water resources. The ideology that drives the Israeli position is now commonly called Zionism.

But Zionism was not, at its inception, monolithic.  There were many strands, including a labor Zionism that focused on class relations and allowed for Arab-Jewish working-class solidarity, and a cultural Zionism that sought a homeland  – that is,  the acceptance of Jewish immigrants into a multi-ethnic host society irrespective of its governing structure – and the current prevailing nationalist Zionism that  finds its expression in a highly militarized state.

Whatever Biblical claims they may make for propaganda purposes,[1] Israeli leaders, almost exclusively of white, European ancestry, generally recognize  the European context of their political project. Their preoccupation with their unsafe standing in Christian societies is embedded in the gene code of their political consciousness, and can be dated back  at least to  the expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290, under King Edward the 1^st.  This king and date might be the earliest to put forth the idea that the solution to Europe’s “Jewish problem” (the “problem” being the presence of Jews in Christendom) was to remove the Jews. It is easy, then, to understand why at least some Jews in some places would begin a conversation of “if we cannot stay here,  where should we go?” This striving for a safer, more permanent place soon became  the North Star of their political thinking.

And then there were the interests of empires.  While there was a time in the 19^th century when England favored the integrity of the Ottoman Empire, largely against expansive Russian interests, that time was gone by the era in which a Zionism began to take root. At that point, the British made a series of commitments whose cumulative effect can only be described as disingenuous. In 1915-1916 the McMahon-Hussein (Husayn) correspondence saw England promising to advance national autonomy for Arab countries in return for Arab attacks opening a second front against the Ottoman Empire in WWI. The boundaries of such countries were left deliberately vague.  In 1916 the Anglo-French Sykes-Picot Treaty promised Palestine to England as part of a successful Allied war effort that intended  to dismember the Ottoman Empire and divide its borderlands among European powers.  In 1917, the British Balfour Declaration promised part of that same land to the Zionist movement as a Jewish home in Palestine. Even a contemporary British foreign minister, Jack Straw,  describes these duplicitous agreements as “an interesting history for us, but not an entirely honorable one.”[2]

British machinations soon converged with  the demands for a Jewish state articulated by Theodore Herzl, the leader of the early Zionist movement. Because European Zionists were seen as a fundamentally modern extension of Europe,[3] the British acquiesced to a Jewish  homeland in Palestine, but not in Uganda or in Argentina, as the early Zionist movement was also open to accepting.

What both sides agreed on was that Palestine, since the  Sykes-Picot agreement, was for the British to dispose of and for the Zionists to covet. As Israeli journalist Gideon Levy has written about the  Balfour Declaration “There was never anything like it: an empire promising a land that it had not yet conquered to a people not living there, without asking the inhabitants. This “original sin” created a discursive terra nullius in Palestine, “a land without people for a people without land,” which erased the Palestinians who were stripped of the permission to exist as the inhabitants of the place where they actually lived.  Their rights as individuals, as religious and ethnic communities, as potential citizens of an emerging state were simply to be disregarded.  The language of the Balfour Declaration, which fleetingly acknowledges the rights of the others (non-Jewish people) living in Palestine, provided no mechanism for accountability on their behalf.

From that debased starting point, campaigns of expulsion, expropriation and resistance became all but inevitable since subordination or, preferably, expulsion of the Palestinians, were the only two outcomes Zionists would countenance.  The aspirations of Labor Zionism and cultural Zionism were disregarded.  Warnings  from  such Jewish thought leaders as the theologian  Martin Buber,  the political philosopher Hannah Arendt, and Albert Einstein were ignored.  Buber famously argued that if the more aggressive variants of Zionism prevailed, excessive nationalism would lead only to “a tiny state of Jews, completely militarized and unsustainable.”[4] Arendt warned that a Jewish homeland should never be sacrificed to the “pseudo-sovereignty of a Jewish state built on Arab suppression.”[5] Nevertheless, Labor Zionism and Cultural Zionism became the roads not taken.

Einstein was more generally skeptical about all nationalisms. While Zionists ignored his doubts, another well-known part of his thinking seemed to anticipate their behavior: his definition that insanity can be understood as doing the same thing over and over, hoping for better results.

Unfortunately, the most aggressive variant of Zionism, the nationalist version that blended the “monopoly over legitimate violence” (which is the essence of a state apparatus) with a largely fictive vision of Jewish peoplehood[6] prevailed. Quickly thereafter, the pattern of repeated wars,  followed by repeated massacres became a reality.

Each period of Israeli history ended in warfare between the Zionist state and its Palestinian inhabitants. First, the pre-state period led to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 producing the Nakba (the Catastrophe) in which some 750,000 Palestinians (about ¾ of the population) were expelled and most of the rest were internally displaced within the new state. Second,  the early state period (1948-1967)  ended in a regional war which left historic Palestine entirely occupied by Israel, under varying political conditions from inferior rights (compared to Jewish Israelis) to military rule with, de facto, no rights at all.   Third, the years between the full occupation of multiple  but divided  Palestinian communities and militant pushback from Palestinians (the Intifadas of 1987and 2000) again ended in sustained bloodshed. And finally, fourth, the time since then has been marked by recurring massacres, uprisings, repressions, and a failed, deceptive peace process down to the present.

What is new in the current situation and particularly ominous, is that, formerly, even the most exclusivist version of Zionism did not rely on genocide as a tool: generations of Zionists have tried to buy land from Palestinians, to expel them through bureaucratic means, to use violent Apartheid and ethnic cleansing strategies, or to engage in what Palestinian political scientist Saleh Abdel Jawad calls “sociocide” – to make life so legally, financially, psychologically, and physically difficult that Palestinians themselves would choose to leave. In previous writing, I have argued that, while Zionism before 2023 has certainly produced many dead Palestinians, it did not intrinsically require their death. Their departure might have sufficed.

As this much-wished-for departure failed to materialize, over the course of this century,  Israeli efforts to rid themselves of  (or entirely subdue) Palestinians have narrowed to a series of brutal, recurring  military massacres they call “mowing the lawn.”  This program has proven to be both increasingly lethal and simultaneously Einsteinian in its repetitive cruelty that never yields the desired results, only impotent ceasefires, always leaving an oil slick of mutual enmity and the seeds for the next massacre in its wake.

Thus, a Palestinian born in Gaza in 2003 has already experienced at least 12 of these “lawn mowing” massacres, witnessed many more random cross-border shootings, knows of similar depredations in the West Bank, in Israeli prisons, and, even extra-judicial assassinations with military forays into other countries.

Consider the following history of “mowing the lawn”:

Operation Rainbow,  May, 2004

Casualties: Israeli: 13, Palestinian 59.

Alleged Purpose: Razing Rafah, home demolitions, to suppress resistance in Gaza

Operation Day of Penitence, Sept-Oct., 2004

Casualties: Israeli 8, Palestinian 107

Alleged Purpose: To suppress rocket and mortar fire from Gaza

Operation Summer Rain, June – November, 2006

Casualties: Israeli 11, Palestinian 402

Alleged purpose: To suppress rocket fire from Gaza

Operation Autumn Clouds, October-November, 2006

Casualties: Israeli 1 , Palestinian 50

Alleged Purpose: To suppress rocket fire from Gaza

Operation Hot Winter 2008

Casualties: Israeli: 3, Palestinian 107

Alleged Purpose: to suppress rocket fire from Gaza

Operation Cast Lead 2008/09

Casualties: Israeli: 13 (3 from friendly fire), Palestinian: 1,166-1440

Alleged Purpose: To suppress rocket fire from Gaza

Operation Returning Echo 2012

Casualties: Israeli: 0, Palestinian 23

Alleged Purpose: destruction of weapons caches, weapons manufacturing, and rocket launching sites in Gaza

Operation Pillar of Defense 2012

Casualties: Israeli: 6, Palestinian: 105

Alleged purpose: To suppress rocket fire from Gaza, enforce limits on Palestinian fishing more stringent than those protected by international standards, erode Hamas’ popularity in Gaza

Operation Protective Edge 2014

Casualties: Israeli: 73, Palestinian: 2,125-2,310

Alleged Purpose: Continuation of Operation Brother’s Keeper to avenge the killing of 3 Israeli teenagers in the West Bank.

Operation Guardian of the Walls, 2021

Casualties:  Israeli: 12, Palestinian: 253

Alleged Purpose: To suppress rocket fire from Gaza

 Operation Breaking Dawn, 2022

Casualties: Israeli: 0, Palestinian: 49

Alleged Purpose: Arrests and assassination of Islamic Jihad leaders

Operation Shield and Arrow, May, 2023

Casualties: Israeli 1, Palestinian 33.

Alleged Purpose: To suppress Islamic Jihad rockets from Gaza.

 Given the failure of these efforts to achieve Zionist desires, the logical endpoint is the  turn toward genocide: not an aberration, but a culmination.[7]  Why else would the Israeli leadership use language that names Palestinians as Amalek, destroy an overwhelming number of civilian targets like schools, hospitals, and refugee tent camps, damage almost 90% of the housing stock of Gaza, impose a regimen of starvation on more than 2 million people, and announce their encouragement of re-colonization by illegal Israeli settlers?  Moreover, an experienced army–though not necessarily a civilian leadership committed to performative toughness–knows better than to set unattainable military objectives, like the total destruction of Hamas, unless it is actually giving itself carte blanche to commit genocide.  Israeli lawyers have done their best  to promote a new military doctrine of “the lesser evil”, that allows  their forces  to violate the Geneva conventions at will,  in the name of the country’s best interests. But even with this piece of cynical enabling,  the goal of total destruction is over-reaching. If only one emaciated teenager crawls out of the rubble in Gaza waving a Hamas flag, the vaunted IDF has not succeeded in pounding the Gaza strip into submission by its own metric.

In the face of this appalling preferential option for genocide, the many killings that preceded it, the intentionally ineffective ceasefires meant to distract from it, what should people of good will be demanding?

First, we need an expanded understanding of who needs protecting: certainly the beleaguered, victimized people of Gaza, but not only them. The potential for genocide is rapidly expanding into the West Bank (although the presence of extensive illegal Jewish settlements makes carpet bombing more difficult there) and is already engulfing the thousands of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.  All of these Palestinians deserve human rights equal to those of their Israeli oppressors. So do others in the region: the Lebanese, Syrians, Iranians, and Yemenis who also suffer from Israeli state violence and bombings.

Second, we need to consider the possibility that Israel does not want peace and will not self-correct and that only pressure from the outside–pressures that we can create in what remains of our freedoms to speak out, our democratic processes–will move the needle toward a decent and sustainable peace. Again, our understanding of which institutions have been complicit in the genocide and should become targets of pressuring include everything from American media, old and new, to both of our most prominent political parties, to most of our universities and churches,  to almost all European countries, to global institutions such as the United Nations. “Genocide is not the Lesser Evil,” “Equal Rights for Equal People”[8] are possible slogans.

And finally, we need to remember that when we do speak out, we will be faced with invocations of Holocaust memory to silence criticism of Israel. Without compromising our compassion for the victims of that horrible episode of human history,  we have a duty to insist that no people, no country, no alliance, no matter their history of suffering, can ever earn the right to commit genocide.  There simply is no such right, there can never be a right to genocide.

Notes.

[1]Prominent Israeli “New  Historian”  Ilan Pappe is credited with recognizing the contradiction at the heart of Zionism: that largely secular Ashkenazi Jews used a Biblical claim to justify the nature of their political project.  He summarizes this contradiction succinctly as: “Most Zionists do not believe in the existence of God, but they believe that He promised them Palestine.”

[2] Eve Spangler, 2019. Understanding Israel/Palestine: Race, Nation and Human Rights in the Conflict, 2^nd edition. (Boston: Brill/Sense) p. 138

[3] Spangler, 2019, op. cit., p.108

[4]Spangler, 2019, op. cit. p.225.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Shlomo Sand, 2020. The Invention of the Jewish People. New York: Verso Books.

[7] Anne Irfan, 2025. A Short History of the Gaza Strip. New York: Norton & Co. I am indebted to Irfan’s succinct and elegant formulation of the current moment.

[8] I am indebted to Palestine-facing political activist Stephen Low for the suggestion of “Equal Rights for Equal People.”