Foreword to Haidar Eid, Banging on the Walls of the Tank: Dispatches from Gaza

PALESTINE - ISRAEL, 19 May 2025

Richard Falk | Global Justice in the 21st Century – TRANSCEND Media Service

16 May 2025 – The post below is the text of foreword to a very special book on the Palestinian Ordeal, written in the form of short pieces from 2009 to the present. Banging on the Walls of the Tank, is especially illuminating by its portrayal of the contrast between the Israeli oppressive occupation before October 7 and after. It underscores a contrast between the earlier Israeli approach as ‘incremental genocide’ as opposed to ‘accelerated’ genocide after the Hamas attack. Copies of this book may be ordered from Amazon, and other booksellers. Eid is in the best traditions of journalism, scholarship, and engaged citizenship.

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The Political Is Inevitably Personal

I have read many discerning and moving books on Palestine over the last fifty years but none has spoken to me as forcefully and persuasively as this short volume of opinion pieces written by Haidar Eid from 2009 to the present. The prophetic insight of these dispatches and their cumulative impact offer readers a vivid Palestinian narrative of tragic suffering and the heroic resistance of the Gazan population to Israel’s occupation, settler colonialism, apartheid, and genocide, as well as a pervasive Israeli reliance on collective punishment of Palestinians.

Banging on the Walls of the Tank, a reliable interpretation not filtered and distorted by Western mainstream media,should be read by all those in the West who seek to understand the bitter realities of the Israel/Palestine struggle. Almost every page is enlivened by the author’s uncannily memorable formulations of the true and awful nature of the Palestinian plight, which was desperate long before the horrifying real-time genocide that has unfolded in the form of daily atrocity spectacles ever since October 7. In his readable style and with the skill of a trustworthy storyteller, Eid offers insights rooted in his direct experiences as a Gaza refugee, expositor of Palestinian steadfastness, resistance activist, witness, and survivor.

Contextualizing October 7

These dispatches, written since 2009 in response to the evolving bloody tactics and criminality of the Israeli occupation, are both an anticipation of the October 7 attack and a condemnation of the Israeli genocidal response. An aspect of the originality and significance of Eid’s presentation is ti convincingly demonstrate that Israel has harbored an apartheid ideology and practice from the time of its birth. This is long before the most influential human rights organizations (including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International) dared issue reports, as they did in 2021, that fully documented the allegations that Israel was systematically applying apartheid policies and practices to administer the occupation. Israel also relied upon discriminatory internal regulatory laws to subjugate all Palestinians who were directly subject to Israeli sovereignty, including those living in post-1948 Israel as citizens. These domestic laws were supplemented by exclusionary nationality laws and practices relied upon by Israel to deny Palestinian refugees a right of return as bestowed by international law and confirmed by the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) Resolution 194 (11 Dec 1948) while at the same time granting birthright Jews an unlimited rights of return no matter whether they had any link to Israel or not.

Eid’s dissent from pro-Israeli orthodoxy in Europe and North America extends to his important assessment that Israel’s supposed “disengagement” from Gaza in 2005 was deceptively presented to the world as a move toward peace. What was not told was that this Israeli unilateral initiative was coupled with Israeli administered border control that effectively imprisoned 2.3 million Gazans in their own homeland. Such confinement was later cruelly reinforced by a punitive siege that converted Gaza into what became known as the world’s largest ever concentration camp. The impact over time of these oppressive conditions are characterized by Eid, borrowing from historian Ilan Pappe,[1] as “incremental genocide.” This importantly demarcates the “before” and “after” of October 7 as one of continuity rather than as totally discontinuous, coming out of the blue, as Israel, followed by the West, desperately wants us to believe up to this day. It is obvious that Israel devoted much attention to decontextualizing October 7 to avoid the implications of the pre-October 7 realities of apartheid and incremental genocide so persuasively delineated by Eid being taken into account when evaluating the Hamas attack.

Eid is writing as a victim/survivor/activist as well as a journalist/intellectual of the before and after of the Gaza ordeal. For him, the sixteen months of direct, undisguised genocide that has preoccupied the world to an unprecedented degree was nothing fundamentally new but rather an intensification of what Gazans had been experiencing ever since 1967 in more attenuated forms. There is no doubt that incremental genocide would be virtually impossible to establish in a court of law as a distinct crime because of the difficulty of proving genocidal intent as compared to criminalizing what followed after October 7 as a violation of the Genocide Convention. The numerous undisguised assertions by Israel’s top leaders easily met the rigorous legal standards of genocidal intent insisted upon by objective jurists. These words of genocidal incitement were combined with the crude, often sadistic, Israeli Defense Forces combat tactics relied upon to bring its helpless Palestinian adversary agonizingly close to the brink of extinction.

The Israeli discourse on October 7 also points its finger at Hamas, seeking its complete delegitimation by treating its attack as pure “terrorism,” justifying an exterminist response, and relieving Israel of pressure to obey the laws of war in its response. Eid challenges this Israeli rationalization by regarding the attack as both a justifiable and a legitimate form of resistance, especially in view of the context, which includes the Netanyahu performance at the UNGA a few weeks earlier during which he displayed a map with no Palestinian entity, an erasure of Palestine alongside the presumed establishment of Greater Israel. By taking these factors into account, Eid produces a revisionist view of October 7 that is more realistic and reflective of the values at stake.

There is a deeper significance to the way Eid establishes the context accounting for October 7. His approach is a necessary antidote to the Western hegemonic discourse, which denounced any assertion that the Palestinian attack was justifiable resistance to the provocative criminality of apartheid, several terrifying militarily inflicted massacres, and sixteen years of a cruelly punitive blockade whose constraints on imports could not be plausibly justified as a security measure while guaranteeing the misery of Palestinian lives in Gaza. Eid’s book should be read as a corrective to the disgraceful performance of a mainstream media in the West that excluded all considerations of context from its evaluation of the events of October 7 and declared justificatory acceptance of Israel’s claimed entitlement to act in self-defence, echoing its coverup of overt recourse to genocide as nothing other than a necessary “security operation.” This is a deliberate attempt to banish the word “genocide” from use in Western public discourse and mainstream media when reporting on Israel’s totally dominant military capabilities in executing its indiscriminate rampage against the completely helpless civilian population of Gaza. Despite this effort to restore the discipline of pro-Israeli discourse, describing the Israeli violence as “genocide” has been gradually normalized in many societal and media venues, but not yet all.

Failures of Implementation: International Law and Universal Moral Standards

This linkage between what daily occurs on the ground in Gaza and the broader issues of toxic dysfunction that have long poisoned the Palestinian experience exposes the willful impotence of what Eid generously terms the “international community,” as if there was one.  It is intolerable for Eid that outsiders, whether governments, international institutions, media, or even individuals, remain spectators, or worse, render aid and comfort to the perpetrators and their accomplices in carrying out this “crime of crimes.”  Along the way, Eid acknowledges that the Nazi Holocaust against Jews was similarly internationally tolerated, especially by the Western liberal democracies that have, since 1945, alleviated their guilt at the expense of the Palestinians, who pay for moral shortcomings for which they had no responsibility. Two massive wrongs never make things right; rather, as the poet Auden teaches, “those to whom evil is done / do evil in return.”[2]

Israel’s official occupation policy after 1967 stressed putting the people of Gaza “on a diet,” with just enough food to avoid death by starvation but not enough to enable nutritional health. Eid emphasizes the long denial of the right of return enjoyed by refugees after 1948 as affirmed in the UNGA Resolution 194. Any process of satisfying the requirements of international law would also necessitate the dismantling of the apartheid regime of control and ethno-religious claims of a Jewish supremist state.

Eid’s Vision and Its Enemies

As Eid articulates his vision of a benevolent future for the Palestinian people, he sets forth its simple but far-reaching governance implications: A single secular state for both peoples from the river to the sea with equal rights for all resident ethnicities. For Eid, this is the one and only solution, an indirect repudiation of the two-state delusion as well as his complete rejection of an Israeli one-state apartheid Greater Israel.

Eid does far more than relate the horrors of incremental genocide. He condemns not only the Israeli perpetrators but severely incriminates their complicit supporters who supplied weaponry and funding that sustains the mighty military capabilities of Israel and give diplomatic credence to it is flagrant defiance of international law. This is more than critique, it is also a rejection of the only pathway Eid envisions as leading to peace with justice for the Palestinians, and even Jews. Such a solution, which will strike many jaded souls as “utopian” or both unattainable and unacceptable, rests on the simple major premise of fulfilling Palestinian rights under international law. In the Palestinian case, this means, among other policy alterations, lifting the draconian blockade of Gaza that has made the daily existence of inhabitants of Gaza (two-thirds of whom are refugees) a life of misery, one deliberately “engineered” by Israeli tacticians who “mow the lawn,” a term officials in Tel Aviv use to refer to Israel’s massive military attacks that are properly undertaken whenever Gaza seems to pose security threats by the vitality of its resistance activism, regardless of whether by armed struggle or nonviolent civil action.

Eid’s dispatches are written with the passion and experience of someone who has lived as a refugee since 1964, when he was born in Gaza. His parents lived in the Nuseirat Refugee Camp after they were forced, in 1948, to leave their home in the Palestinian village of Zarnouga. As the decades passed, they never gave up their expectation on one day returning to Zarnouga, even knowing it had been demolished. As they faced death, Eid’s parents last wish was that at least their bodies could be returned to their village for burial; a wish that was denied; a wish that, even if granted, would be far from fulfilling the kind of return envisioned by international law.

That he grew up in a refugee household helps explain Eid’s preoccupation with the exercise of the right of return of the five or six million Palestinians living as refugees as a necessary feature of any sustainable and acceptable peace process. And as such, it undoubtedly informs why he shows such contempt for the Oslo diplomacy initiated in 1993, a diplomacy that totally ignored, and implicitly rejected, this basic right embodied in international law. On other grounds, as well, Oslo justifiably reinforced his rejection of a Palestinian leadership that failed to insist on affirming the Palestinian entitlement to the most fundamental of human rights in the post-colonial era, the inalienable right of self-determination possessed by all peoples and claimed on behalf of every nation on the planet. Eid adopts a cynical view of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which, by accepting the Oslo framework, sacrificed the future of Palestine for a seat at the far end of the negotiating table and the dubious ‘reward’ of a photo op on the White House lawn; the photo was used by the West to show the world the much celebrated, but deeply misleading Arafat/Rabin handshake as a historic reconciliation that was never to be implenmented . What followed the publicized initiation of Oslo diplomacy was, at best, a charade that dragged on long enough for Israel to expand its settler population to a politically irreversible level. Throughout, Israel has benefited from a ‘peace process’ that was never about peace, and which while running its course seriously harmed the Palestinians. The supervision of the negotiations by the overtly partisan US government should never have been accepted by the designated representatives of the Palestinian people who defied reason by not insisting on neutral auspices. As Rashid Khalidi, among others, have shown, the United States never even pretended to be an honest broker of the Oslo Process, but made no secret of situating itself in Israel’s corner.[3]

Eid’s perspective is formed by a blend of his multiple identities as victim, witness, survivor, activist, humanist, writer and journalist, university teacher, and public intellectual. This rare combination of experience and commitment contributes to making Eid an exemplary interpreter of the ongoing Palestinian ordeal. He is decidedly not a neutral observer; he is an undisguised and fully engaged “honest partisan” who develops a compelling Palestinian account of why the Palestinian ordeal came about and was allowed to happen. While his observations are avowedly one-sided, this lack of balance, oddly, provides a more objective approach because it is congruent with the realities of Gaza if tested by the evidence, regulative norms of law and morality, and proclaimed values at stake. As such, it presents readers with a happy contrast to the brainwashing pretensions of such influential media platforms as the New York Times or The Economist, which claim balance but, when it comes to reporting on Israel/Palestine, are more accurately perceived as sophisticated instruments of state propaganda.

Even without the benefit of being confronted by the pre-October 7 historical, legal, and ethical context, public protest began to mount, including in the centers of Israeli support in North America and Western Europe, as Israel continued the genocide unabated, refusing to heed growing public calls for ceasefires and constraint. Pro-Palestinian protests erupted on many university campuses but were quickly countered by Israeli donor leverage and governmental pressures, especially in the US. With the advent of Trump in 2025, pro-Palestinian activism on campuses and elsewhere faced renewed challenges, and not only in the US but also throughout Europe, reflecting a political swing to the ultraright.

Valuing and Learning from the Eid Perspective

What also makes Eid’s commentary exceptional is the authenticity of his voice, shaped by his intense experiences since his birth in 1964. His work is further informed by channeling the wisdom of profound and enraged Palestinian cultural icons, referencing the insights of Ghassan Kanafani, Mahmoud Darwish, and Edward Said, as well as making good use of anti-colonial writings drawn from authors in the Global South. It should be instructive for all readers that Eid derives his inspirational political guidance from these cultural sources rather than from the Palestinian political leaders that he holds co-responsible for misleading their own people in various self-destructive ways. Eid is appalled by the willingness of the Palestinian leaders anointed by the West to accept what he calls “bread crumbs” rather than insisting on liberation and basic rights as conferred by international law; law that is never acknowledged by Israel or enforced by either the UN or responsible geopolitical statecraft as ineptly overseen by the United States since the end of the Cold War that tended to favor geopolitical and strategic interests to legal, moral, and even prudent restraint. The most tainted bread crumb, in Eid’s reflections, is the idea of the acceptance of a permanently demilitarized Palestinian statehood on 22 percent of historic Palestine, especially considering that, in 1947, Palestinians rejected the dubious UN partition resolution that split the country – but at least awarded Palestinian with 45 percent of the land.

Eid is deeply influenced by the successful, analogous struggle against the hegemonic racism and settler colonialism of apartheid South Africa. He believes that the lessons of this earlier struggle can be adapted and applied to Palestinian circumstances, embracing the famous dictum, often attributed to Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci, “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will,” which distinguishes the rational understanding of political injustices from an emotional reassurance that a just outcome will emerge from the struggle of the Palestinian people. In addressing this tension from my outlook, my rational self is less confident than Eid about the sufficiency of the South African model of liberation. I believe that Palestinian liberation will remain impossible unless it overcomes the primacy of adverse geopolitics (shaped by strategic interests rather than by a willingness to respect the rule of law and universally affirmed moral notms). These currently unregulated forces empower the Islamophobic complicity of the white West and are currently aligned with the Zionist networks in the West that have exerted an unhealthy influence over policy formation at national, regional, and global levels.

Giving equal attention to matters of political will, I am also encouraged by anti-colonial success stories. This reading of the recent historical record echoes Eid’s interpretations and, before him, Said’s. Both thinkers deeply theorized a belief that the side that controls “the high moral ground” in the end prevails politically over the side that dominates the battlefield due to its military superiority. In my terminology, and in keeping with Eid’s assessments, Palestine is winning this Legitimacy War and is on its way to an emancipatory future, although with much suffering and devastation on the road to such a political outcome. This guardedly hopeful outlook assumes Palestinian perseverance for as long as it takes, which Israel is ceaselessly working to undermine and weaken by its recourse to the most extreme methods of violence in the combat zones and to dirty tricks overseas, including “weaponizing antisemitism” as a policy tool of combat.

In Conclusion

The title of Eid’s book, borrowed from a poignant line in Kanafani’s novel Men in the Sun, would strike most international readers as enigmatic and obscure. Eid informs us that these words have become a popular slogan of Palestinian resistance fighters, conveying the vital message, “If you want to live, make noise”; that is, resist, but if ready to die in body or spirit, stay quiet. Such is Eid’s fighting spirit. His noise is a challenge to all everywhere to act on behalf of the Palestinian struggle within our respective spaces before it is too late. And as a fitting indictment, Eid’s last words in the epilogue again echo those of Kanafani: “Gazans have been banging on the walls of the Gaza concentration camp since 1948,” and still nothing happens by way of rescue, much less liberation. Silence almost everywhere, especially shameful among Arab regimes neighbouring besieged Gaza is reinforced by the timidities of the Arab League.

For Eid, Arab silence is not broken by uttering words of condemnation unless accompanied by coercive actions. In this sense, Eid’s own journey has led him and his family to take refuge in South Africa in recent months, the country that has acted more substantively than any other against Israel since October 7E by submitting a graphic complaint to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) alleging Israeli violations of the Genocide Convention. Unsurprisingly, Eid in exile insists that Palestinian liberation must take the form of a single secular constitutional and democratic state with recognized borders encompassing the whole of mandate Palestine. This affirmation is coupled with a total rejection of the dangerous fiction of co-existence and accommodation that is based on the mutual acceptance of a neutered Palestinian mini state that would be permanently demilitarized and otherwise left at the mercy of a highly militarized and racist Israel. [AC1]

Secondly for Eid, a present grounding of realistic hope in this particular liberation struggle must be predominantly based on the activation of people rather than the good will and energies of governments and their institutions. This leads Eid to stress the role of solidarity initiatives to be with a sense of urgency throughout the world as typified by the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions campaign. He strongly endorses BDS as a principal modality of Palestinian prospects ever since its initiation in 2005, when it began as a collective action with the backing of 170 Palestinian civil society organizations. In effect, liberation from settler colonialism in the historical presence can move toward victory only when people in strategic countries around the world are sufficiently mobilized to exert transformative pressures on governments and the international community to undo the political and economic ties that bind them to the oppressor.

Eid is lucidly persuasive in his refusal to accept the common refrain that there are “two sides” in recent debates about Israeli tactics and goals. Zionist liberals especially would have us so believe, evading the central reality that this a classic struggle, with distinctive features of the oppressed against the oppressor and its complicit allies. Eid is seeking a crucial rectification of the asymmetrical nature of the struggle. Suc continues to be highly controversial in the West, but seems vital to act upon if non-Palestinians are to support a genuinely just and sustainable peace. This view expresses a radical challenge to the status quo as its realization requires the rejection of the Zionist Project of Jewish supremist prerogatives in a distinct state as the essential precondition could enable the two peoples to live together as equals. Eid’s vision of liberation does not include the forced departure (in effect, an ethnic cleansing) of Jews or the destruction of Israel as a state, but it does require major adhustments: a fundamental reconstruction of its internal race relations; an abandonment of Zionist ideology; ethnic equality of treatment in nationality and citizenship laws; and quite likely the naming of the emergent one-state entity to signify the rejection of an ethnic statehood for either people.

Gruesome patterns of Israeli abuses over the years are further confirmed by Eid’s own existential encounters with Israel’s prolonged dehumanizing and sadistic treatment of the people of Gaza, especially its children. His prose is written not with ink but with the blood of the innocents, undoubtedly a tearful recounting of very concrete incidents involving family members, close friends, neighbours. Eid is unflinching in his determination to bring Israel’s brutalizing behaviour out into the open by bearing anguished witness to targeted killings of innocent children by Israeli snipers, as well high tech weapons of war that killed whole families trapped in their homes and devastated entire residential neighbourhoods during Israel’s massive incursions, characterized as “massacres,” in 2008–09, 2012, 2014, 2018, and frequently, on a smaller scale, in the leadup to the full-scale genocidal response to October 7. In a significant conceptual move, Eid follows Pappe in presenting these years preceding that pivotal day as “incremental genocide.” This reality posed for every Palestinian an ultimate choice between the dangers of resistance and the humiliations of submission to the harsh apartheid constraints of Israeli control.

What makes this book truly groundbreaking, aside from its chronicling of witnessing in ways that impressively counteract the propagandistic decontextualization of October 7, is its clarity when it comes to a critique of the mainstream diagnosis of the Palestinian struggle and accompanying positive prescriptions about the path to a Palestinian victory emerging from the piles of rubble signifying Gaza after enduring these months of genocide.

Even though the provisional rulings of the ICJ on January 26, 2024, did nothing to change the facts on the ground, it should be read as an authoritative affirmation of the legitimacy of the Palestinian struggle and a heartfelt juridical lament for the accompanying humanitarian catastrophe still befalling Gaza. It undoubtedly helped motivate Eid to express the optimism of his will by the dramatic assertion in the epilogue that “Israel is now on the verge of collapse.”

30 January 2025

NOTES:

[1] Ilan Pappe, The Biggest Prison on Earth (Oneworld Publications, 2019). [the ‘e’ in Pappe is written with an accent over it)

[2] W. H. Auden, ‘September 1, 1939,’ published in Poetry of the Thirties , Penguin, 1964

[3] Rashid Khalidi, Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S. Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East,” Beacon Press, 2013, https://harpers.org/2013/03/brokers-of-deceit-how-the-u-s-has-undermined-peace-in-the-middle-east/.

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Prof. Richard Falk is a member of the TRANSCEND Network, Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, Chair of Global Law, Faculty of Law, at Queen Mary University London, Research Associate the Orfalea Center of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Fellow of the Tellus Institute. He directed the project on Global Climate Change, Human Security, and Democracy at UCSB and formerly served as director the North American group in the World Order Models Project. Between 2008 and 2014, Falk served as UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Occupied Palestine. His book, (Re)Imagining Humane Global Governance (2014), proposes a value-oriented assessment of world order and future trends. His most recent books are Power Shift (2016); Revisiting the Vietnam War (2017); On Nuclear Weapons: Denuclearization, Demilitarization and Disarmament (2019); and On Public Imagination: A Political & Ethical Imperative, ed. with Victor Faessel & Michael Curtin (2019). He is the author or coauthor of other books, including Religion and Humane Global Governance (2001), Explorations at the Edge of Time (1993), Revolutionaries and Functionaries (1988), The Promise of World Order (1988), Indefensible Weapons (with Robert Jay Lifton, 1983), A Study of Future Worlds (1975), and This Endangered Planet (1972). His memoir, Public Intellectual: The Life of a Citizen Pilgrim was published in March 2021 and received an award from Global Policy Institute at Loyala Marymount University as ‘the best book of 2021.’ He has been nominated frequently for the Nobel Peace Prize since 2009.

Go to Original – richardfalk.org

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