A timeline for a genocide

By Elizabeth Dangerfield

A way to understand the unconscionable

Introduction

Genocide comes in many forms but Oxford Languages defines it as the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group. It has happened many times in history. On the 31st ofOctober 2024, in keeping with the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, Francesca Albanese, United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territory Occupied Since 1967 released a briefing recognising that genocide was being committed against Palestinians in Gaza by Israel. Like many people, I wondered how it came to this given the terrible genocide of Jewish people by the NAZIs in the last century.

Ancient history

I think the timeline for this tragedy started thousands of years ago. The concept of a promised land appears in the Old Testament and the Torah. In the book of Genesis, it is reported that the god of the Jews says to Abraham: leave your country, your people, and father’s household and go to the land I will show you. This promise was repeated to Abraham’s son Isaac and his son Jacob who takes the name Israel.

This land is described in the book of Genesis as a land flowing with milk and honey. Historically, it lay between what is now known as Türkiye and Egypt and between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. It was known as the land of Canaan and was inhabited by various settled and nomadic Indigenous people who lived there in the later part of the second millennium BCE and spoke an ancient Semitic language. There is evidence that the Israelites were originally Canaanites. Writing in fifth century BCE the Greek Herodotus was the first to refer to the area in writing as Palestine (Palaistine).

The book of Exodus describes the Children of Israel escaping from ancient Egypt. It is written that the Jewish god advises the Israelites on how to treat the people living in the land.

I will give into your hands the people who live in the land, and you will drive them out before you. Do not make a covenant with them or with their gods. Do not let them live in your land or they will cause you to sin against me, because the worship of their gods will certainly be a snare to you.

Jewish kingdoms are established then lost

Around 1000 BCE Jewish people settled in two kingdoms, Israel in the north with Samaria as its capital, Judah in the south with Jerusalem as its capital. They controlled most of Palestine except for where the Philistines lived along the south coast area. Unfortunately, Palestine was a very desirable land, being a conduit between Europe and Africa and from East Asia to the sea.

In 701 BCE the Assyrians invaded. They were utterly ruthless. Israel was conquered and many of its people were deported. King Sennacherib unsuccessfully laid siege to Jerusalem. In 601 BCE the Babylonians conquered Judah destroyed Jerusalem and the first temple built by King Solomon around 10th century BCE. They carried off a large portion of the Judean population to Babylon between 597 and 586 BCE. 

The Persians under Cyrus the Great then conquered the Babylonians. Cyrus released the Israelites from Babylon in 539 BCE. Then Alexander the Great conquered the Persian Empire and he passed through Judah on his way to other lands to conquer. All this conquering was very unsettling to the populace of Judah and Israel, and Jewish people began leaving the area and settling elsewhere.

The Roman Empire conquered the region in 63 BCE. It introduced direct rule in 6 CE and established the Roman province of Judaea. The Romans were ruthless in quashing any dissent. A rebellion between 66–70 CE resulted in a Jewish victory at first but was eventually crushed in 70 CE when Jerusalem was destroyed and the second Jewish temple burnt down. In 132-136 CE there was a revolt lead by Bar Kokhba. The Romans responded brutally, as a result, hundreds of thousands of Jewish people were killed. Many were enslaved or exiled. Judaea was depopulated. The Romans banned Jewish people from practising their religion and renamed the region Syria Palaestina.

Leaving Palestine

Most Jewish people who survived left Palestine. This Jewish diaspora resulted in Jewssettling far afield. Those living in Europe during the Middle Ages were subject to severe restrictions in where they lived, the work they did and even the clothing they wore. Life was insecure, they were sometimes expelled from where they lived. They were also vulnerable to violent attacks by the local populations (pogroms) throughout history.

However, the Jewish people remained a distinct group no matter where they lived. This was partly because of the restrictions placed on them but also because of their cohesiveness due to their religion and culture and marriage practices. Jerusalem and the Land of Israel were central to Jewish religious practices, faith and culture, no matter where Jewish people lived.

In the meantime, Palestine remained the homeland for many non-Jewish people for almost two thousand years. The majority of the population in Palestine were Semitic Arabs, both Muslim and Christian. Various Arab dynasties ruled over parts of Palestine, including the Nabataean kingdom (3rd C BCE), the Ghassanid kingdom, the Umayyad and Abbasid Arab dynasties. And of course there were a series of Christian crusades to free Jerusalem from Muslim rule. Finally, the Ottoman Turks ruled the area for four hundred years until the end of World War 1. They allowed what remained of Jewish communities to continue their religious practices. 

Zionism and the return to Palestine

In the Hebrew Bible, the Land of Israel and the city of Jerusalem are both referred to as Zion.

Zionism was based firmly on the belief that the Jews had an historical right to Palestine, and this outweighed any claim that the Arabs may have had to the land. This is still the case for conservative Jews today.

No one on earth has a claim to Israel more than the Jews. There is no second place nor runner up. We are the natural heirs and our unshakable title to this holy geography is evidenced irrefutably by archaeology, linguistics, language, literature, history, liturgy, culture and 3500 years of absolute fidelity and longing. Even when in exile and even when others ruled the land, it belonged to the Jews. The revisionists of today are motivated not by facts but by hateful mythology and a counterfeit history. Shalom Lewis, Conservative, Congregation Etz Chaim 2017.

Zionism emerged as a secular movement in the last two decades of the 19th C when only 24,000 Jews were living in Palestine. In 1914, the population of Palestine was estimated at 657,000 Muslim Arabs, 81,000 Christian Arabs, and 59,000 Jews. Zionism was already changing the population balance.

In 1917 Britain issued the Balfour Declaration supporting a national homeland for Jewish people in Palestine. However, it had already promised Palestine to Arabs as an independent state and had secretly promised the French government that it would be an internationally administered zone. When the First World War finished the victors set about dividing up the world according to their preferences and ignoring the wishes of inhabitants. Britain was given a Mandate over Palestine. It supported Jewish immigration to Palestine. By 1947 many survivors of the Holocaust had migrated to Palestine and the Jewish population reached 630,000.

The Jewish people had much to gain by moving to Palestine, Arabs living there had much to lose. As a result there was growing violence between Jews and Arabs over land, borders and rights. This led to the Arab Revolt between 1936 and 1939. A British White Paper was published in 1939 which called for the establishment of a Jewish national home in an independent Palestinian state within 10 years. This led to the Jewish insurgency with a number of acts of sabotage and terrorism. In 1946 the militant right-wing Zionist underground organization Irgun blew up the offices of the British Mandatory authorities in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. This act of terrorism killed ninety-sixpeople.

The establishment of an Israeli State and loss of Palestinian territory

In 1947 the United Nations voted for Palestine to be split into separate Jewish and Arab states. The Arabs did not support this and a civil war broke out in Palestine. Britain gave up its Mandate on 14 May 1948. The State of Israel was self-proclaimed the next day. Armies from five nearby Arab states attacked Israel. Israel won the war and was left in control ofmost of Palestine and West Jerusalem, Egypt occupied the Gaza Strip, Jordan occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Israel was recognised by the United Nations the following year.

The 1948 Arab-Israel War resulted in over 700,000 Palestinians fleeing or being forced from, their homes. They ended up as refugees in their own country. Around 13,000 Palestinians were killed or presumed dead. About 6,400 Israelis were killed in the war. Atrocities were committed by both sides. However, the massacres of unarmed men, women and children that took place in a number of Palestinian villages by Israeli forces seemed to be a deliberate act of getting rid of Arabs from the area. Zionism ultimately meant the transference of Arab land to Jewish ownership, using violence if necessary, and even genocide.

In 1967 Israel made a pre-emptive strike on Egypt’s air force. Fighting broke out between Israel and Egypt, Syria and Jordan. This Six Day War saw Israel capture the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza from Egypt, most of the Golan Heights from Syria, and East Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan. About a million Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem came under Israel’s control.

At this point, the Palestinians had lost everything. The question was then whether they were prepared to go quietly into the night. The Palestinians did not have the same capacity as the Israelis to defend themselves and regain their land. Since Israel has been established far more Palestinians have been killed in state sanctioned violence than Israelis have been killed by Palestinians. From 2008 to 2020 5590 Palestinians were killed compared to 251 Israelis killed. Furthermore, Israel imprisons many Palestinians, often without charge, who are subjected to horrific treatment including widespread torture. Escalating violence seems to be the only outcome from such a hopeless situation. If you can’t form an army, and if you get shot for throwing rocks, the only option left seems to be terrorism.

There is now such a long history of conflict, so much violence and suffering, that it is hard to see how peace can ever be achieved. Many attempts have been made over the decades. An incredible opportunity came in 1993, when Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin agreed to the Oslo peace deal with his longtime enemy, PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, in which the PLO recognized Israel’s right to exist and Israel committed to withdrawing from much of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank and granting the Palestinians limited self-rule. Both Palestinian and Israeli extremists attempted to derail the peace process. Following a mass peace rally on November 4, 1995, in Tel Aviv, Rabin was shot dead by a Jewish extremist.

Benjamin Netanyahu and the Gaza War

The current Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is Israel’s longest serving Prime Minister having held office six times. According to a BBC article his unrivalled success was due to the image he cultivated as Mr Security. Of course that reputation was shattered when Hamas and others killed about 1,200 people and took 251 others back to Gaza as hostages on 7th October 2023. Netanyahu launched a war to destroy Hamas in response. He threatened to turn all the places where Hamas is organized and hiding into cities of ruins, and called Gaza the city of evil.

This is ironic because for years Netanyahu backed Qatari transfers of hundreds of millions of dollars to Hamas, in the hope that it would pacify Gaza, turn Hamas into an effective counterweight to the Palestinian Authority and prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state. In 2019, Netanyahu said at a private Likud party meeting:

Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas. This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.

Outcome – genocide

Unfortunately, obliterating Hamas has meant also obliterating innocent Palestinians. Research suggests that 80% of Palestinians killed are civilians and that 70% of the Palestinians killed in residential buildings or similar housing were women and children, who were unlikely to be militant members of Hamas. Furthermore, the system for identifying Hamas targets allowed for very high collateral damage, and overestimated those people who were actually active members of Hamas.

In January 2025, a peer-reviewed analysis of deaths in the Gaza war between October 2023 and 30 June 2024 was published in The Lancet. The paper estimated 64,260 deaths from traumatic injury during this period, and likely exceeding 70,000 by October 2024, with 59.1% of them being women, children and the elderly (definitely not Hamas). It concluded that the Gaza Health Ministry undercounted trauma-related deaths by 41%.

It also noted that it underestimated:

… the full impact of the military operation in Gaza, as they do not account for non-trauma-related deaths resulting from health service disruption, food insecurity, and inadequate water and sanitation.

As of January 2025, a comparable estimate for traumatic injury deaths would be around 80,000.

A survey showed that over 60% of Gazans have lost family members since the war began. Thousands of more dead bodies are thought to be under the rubble of destroyed buildings. The number of injured is greater than 100,000; Gaza has the most amputated children per capita in the world. Because of Israeli actions innocent people are dying from injury, disease and starvation because they can’t get the help they need.

The press and humanitarian organisations were targeted right from the start even though they were easily identifiable. This meant that there were fewer outside people to report back to the world on the destruction that was occurring in Gaza and less help was available for Palestinians. 217 journalists and media workers; and 120 academics have been killed.According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East 408 aid workers including more than 280 UNRWA staff have been killed in Gaza since the war began on 7 October 2023. Hospitals and medical staff were also targeted. Aljazeera reported that journalists are being deliberately targeted and starved.

The United Nations recently reported that fifteen colleagues who were first responders and in their uniforms, driving clearly marked vehicles, were killed when they came under fire by Israeli forces on 23 March 2025 near Rafah, southern Gaza. Available information indicated that the first team had been killed by Israeli forces but then the other emergency and aid crews were struck one after another over several hours as they searched for their missing colleagues. OCHA, the UN aid coordination office released video footage taken from within a UN vehicle near the site of the incident. It showed two people walking and then running to escape sniper fire. According to OCHA, a woman was shot in the back of the head and a young man trying to retrieve her was also shot. The OCHA team managed to recover her body in the UN vehicle. The bodies, and a crushed UN vehicle, ambulances and a fire truck that had been flattened were buried in the sand by the Israelis.

If this is not unconscionable, I don’t know what is.

The Guardian reported recently that Israel’s security cabinet has authorised the full occupation of Gaza, beginning with Gaza City and quotes the far-right finance minister Bezalel Smotrich’s comment in response: We are erasing the Palestinian state. First in action and then officially. Occupation means the end of any real sovereignty for the Palestinians and the end of any real representation. That combined with all the deaths and injuries, the appalling treatment of civilians by the Israeli defence force and in prisons, the lack of all facilities including water and food, the destruction and damage of most of the accommodation and infrastructure essential to health and welfare, the loss of homes and possessions and means to obtain sustenance, and the loss of rights, the physical trauma faced by many of the injured, not to mention the mental trauma of going through such a frightful experience, has destroyed the future of the people of Gaza and Palestinians in general.

This genocide basically achieves Israeli hegemony over the entire Palestine area because resistance seems futile. It seems that extremists on both sides, a lack of commitment to a Palestinian state, a belief that Israel has the right to the whole of Palestine, and the absence of any empathy, has led to this calamity.

 

Also by Elizabeth Dangerfield:

America is vanishing

 

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