Gaza Yet Stands

By: Juan Cole

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

The Gaza War is often reported in a historical vacuum, but Juan Cole has been following events in Gaza for a quarter of a century. This book collects his public commentary about Gaza since 2006 and through the fall of 2024, for Salon, the Nation Institute’s Tomdispatch and The Nation, Truthdig, and Informed Comment. Since for all its virtues, journalism generally does a poor job of providing the historical background and deep context for current events, the author therefore made a choice of pieces that shed light on the background and significance of the hot war that began in October 2023. Key inflection points, such as the fateful 2006 elections, which Hamas won, and the Israeli military campaigns of 2008-2009, 2012, 2014, and subsequent years are discussed. The lawfare of the Palestinians with the United Nations and the International Criminal Court are traced over more than a decade, an issue that reemerged powerfully in 2023-2024. The health and economic impact of Israel’s cruel and illegal blockade of the Gaza civilian population is detailed. The Israeli sniping at unarmed protesters during the Great March of Return in 2018-2019 is considered.

The rise of the extremist Israeli far right to power in Israel, which set the stage for the Gaza genocide, is traced, from the declaration that sovereignty is invested only in Israel’s Jews (79 percent of the population) to increasingly racialist pronouncements in 2023. Some of this writing was informed by his visits to Israel and East Jerusalem, and conversations with Israeli and Palestinian interlocutors. Cole is an academic scholar of the Middle East, and despite the current events focus of these analyses, they inevitably reflect his training and practice as a historian, including his extensive work on colonialism and Arab nationalism. They underline his conviction that the internet is itself a sort of postmodern archive, and that historians cannot afford to avoid commenting on an increasingly rapid news cycle. His treatment is distinctive in that he takes into account the impact of these events on the wider Middle East, and the importance of Iran and its allies, one of the focuses of his scholarship. These essays reflect his decades of involvement in the Middle East, giving them a perspective different from North American and European observers with a more North Atlantic set of concerns.