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VICTORS’ HISTORY  
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Raymond Geuss
November 7, 2025
New Left Review SideCar
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_ There is a commonplace saying that history is written by the
victors. Still, it may be useful to reflect on the situation as it
currently exists and pose the question: if this were the end, which
side won? _

Trump's plan to "clean out Gaza" wins backing from Israeli right.
(Here, people walk past the rubble of collapsed buildings along
Saftawi street in Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip on January 20,
2025.), Photo credit: Omar Al-Qattaa/Agence France-Presse (AFP) // CNN


 

At the time of writing, there is a ceasefire in effect in Gaza,
although it is one-sided, because as usual in such cases, Israel
continues occasionally to bomb the Strip. The experience of previous
such ceasefires does not inspire confidence that this one will hold
for long. Still, it may be useful to reflect on the situation as it
currently exists and pose the question: if this were the end, which
side won? One way of determining that is to look at the war aims of
each of the two parties and see which were realised and which were
not. If one side attained the most important of their aims, it
‘won’; if it did not, it ‘lost’.

There are, of course, tremendous differences in the resources and
capacities of the two sides: Israel has a large and carefully trained
military with a virtually unlimited supply of the most modern,
high-tech weapons in the world, including fighter jets, tanks and
helicopters, whereas the Palestinian side is a coalition of militias
comprising a few fighters equipped with small arms, home-made rockets
and some improvised devices (mostly constructed, it seems, from
salvaged, unexploded Israeli ordnance). This means that the possible
aims which the two sides could envisage are also systematically
different.

The Israelis did succeed in causing massive destruction, but they
attained none of their official (or semi-official) war aims. They did
not exterminate the population in Gaza or drive it from the Strip,
despite two years of total war; they did not defeat, disarm and
disband Hamas, and they did not retrieve their hostages by direct
military means – virtually all were recovered through negotiation
with Hamas, although negotiation was the last thing Israel said it
wanted.

If the Israelis lost, does that mean that the Palestinians won? A case
could be made for this. After all, the stated aim of Hamas was to
acquire the means to engage in an exchange of prisoners. The Israelis
hold thousands of Palestinian prisoners, including many children, and
many detained long-term without charge. Since under international law
Israel is illegally occupying East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza
and an occupied population has a right to armed resistance against the
occupying power, taking Israeli military personnel prisoner is in
principle perfectly legal. Since Israeli governments have in the past
been willing to exchange prisoners, acquiring some Israeli military
prisoners could have seemed a good way to free detained Palestinians.
That turned out to be a correct calculation, in that a mutually agreed
exchange of prisoners did eventually take place.

Moreover, it is perhaps not fanciful to discern an ulterior aim,
namely, to put Israel in a position in which it dropped its mask of
being a liberal, rational society, and revealed its true nature as a
lawless and bloodthirsty predator. If indeed Hamas had that as one of
its goals on 7 October, they seem to have attained it beyond what
anyone could have imagined. No one who watched the gleefully
live-streamed genocide which the IDF was carrying out could ever think
about the State of Israel, or Zionism, in the same way again. Once the
mask fell, it became hard to unsee Zionism’s true face. The events
in Gaza have transformed, perhaps permanently, not just attitudes
toward the current government in Israel and Israeli society as a whole
– which has overwhelmingly and enthusiastically supported the
genocide – but also the way people think about the whole history of
Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Seeing the destruction in Gaza play out in real time has, in other
words, irrevocably changed the commonly accepted view of Israel’s
past. Fewer and fewer people now think of this as a desperate attempt
to construct a safe refuge for a persecuted group; increasingly it is
viewed as just another instance of the old European colonialist story,
that is, like the British settlements in Ireland, Australia and North
America, French Algeria, apartheid South Africa, and so on. This idea
of Israel as a settler-colonial state has been around since the
beginning of Zionism, many of whose early leaders described their
project in these terms. It got a momentary boost in the West when the
distinguished scholar Maxime Rodinson published his essay ‘Israel,
fait colonial’ in _Les Temps Modernes_ in 1967, but it remained a
niche view until the horrors in Gaza became too blatant to ignore. Now
it is mainstream, and it will not easily be dislodged.

Was Hamas’s action on 7 October an unmitigated ‘success’? That
seems hard to accept because of the immense price that was paid:
70,000 documented civilian deaths (including over 20,000 children)
with many still buried under the ruins, an artificially induced
famine, untold deaths from long-term, but direct, effects of the war,
thousands of child amputees (many of whose limbs had to be amputated
without anaesthetic because Israel blocked medical supplies),
hospitals, schools and civilian infrastructure bombed to rubble.

That the cost of ‘success’ may be too great to bear was noted by
King Pyrrhus of Epirus in 279 BC, when he remarked about the Battle of
Asculum: ‘One more victory like that, and we’re done for.’ Was
the price for 7 October worth paying? Any attempt to answer this would
have to consider various things, including what the alternative was.
Was the status quo pre-7 October (a decade-long siege of Gaza by
Israel) tolerable in the long run? Who is to say? If the majority of
Palestinians think what they have had to suffer was worth it, is it
for observers from afar to contradict them? If what is at issue is a
general evaluation of the events of 7 October and their consequences,
presumably Israelis, too, may claim to have a voice in discussing
this. To ‘have a voice’ does not of course mean to be able to
dictate the terms of discussion or to have any kind of veto. And we
should not expect unanimity.

Losing control of the narrative of a conflict is not the worst thing
that can happen to a group, just as simple military defeat is arguably
not the worst possible outcome of a war. In the American Civil War,
the Unionist forces of the North triumphed and it is their version of
events that we now read, but though the American South was devastated
and the political structure of the Confederacy dismantled, the
population continued to exist and there are plenty of accounts of the
war from a pro-Confederacy perspective. The fate of the ancient city
of Carthage is grimmer in both respects: it was not just defeated but
obliterated by the Romans at the end of the Third Punic War. In
addition, we have no idea how the Carthaginians viewed the war because
all Carthaginian accounts disappeared completely. Until the advent of
modern archaeology all we knew about Carthage, its people and their
beliefs was what we were told by their enemies, the Greeks and
Romans.

Many Israelis do not merely wish to expel or exterminate the
Palestinians, they wish to convince people that they never existed at
all. It is a simple fact, however, that ample documentation of the
atrocities in Gaza now exists in the public domain. The Palestinian
cause has come to resemble opposition to the war in Vietnam or to
apartheid in South Africa, something which has been taken up all over
the world, by many people who are not directly involved and by many
more than the usual suspects; this is to a large extent the result of
Israel’s own actions. The efforts of Israel and its Western allies
to control the narrative have been more or less completely
ineffectual. The future is unknown, but we can be reasonably sure that
whoever eventually writes the history, the Israeli wish to expunge the
very name ‘Palestinian’ from the record will not be fulfilled.

 

_[This is __Sidecar_
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blog. Launching in December 2020, Sidecar aims to provide a space on
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* Israel
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* Palestine
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* Gaza
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* Israel-Gaza War
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* Gaza ceasefire
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* Genocide
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* war crimes
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* IDF
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* Benjamin Netanyahu
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* West Bank
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* Trump Gaza Plan
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