In October, The Cascade’s managing editor, Matthew Iddon, published an editorial exploring the uneasy relationship between journalists and world events. “Bad news,” he writes, “often makes for great articles.” He’s not wrong, but occasionally a potato rolls across our desk that feels too hot to touch, let alone report on. The New York Times, we are not. But neither are we ostriches, our heads planted firmly in the sand. It begs the question: How can a university newspaper report on the Israel-Palestine conflict without wading too deeply into troublesome waters?
The situation is beyond complex. On Oct. 19, UFV hosted a talk entitled “Israel and Gaza: Seeing Beyond the Headlines,” in an attempt to better inform the student population. However, even there, attendees noted some fervent and immediate pushback to the speakers, who are far better informed than anyone at The Cascade to discuss the history of the conflict. We cannot claim to advocate for one side, or know the full history of the war better than anyone else. The situation in Gaza, Palestine, and Israel is a true crisis precisely because there is no consensus as to just how we got here, or how to go forward.
But we still have a job to do, and it might be more important than ever that we do it well. In our current society — reactionary, prone to division, and “informed” by memes — nuance matters. In that spirit, we’ve gathered a variety of sources; a collage of differing perspectives all in dispute over what exactly the conflict is and what our response ought to be. Our aim is not to promote one side over the other, but rather to provide a rough explanation of some of the major tensions between Israel and Palestine. Education is an antidote against dogmatic violence, and we must be able to talk about subjects like this one while we have the freedom to do so. Without a clear course of tangible action, it becomes the moral imperative of those of us living in peace to promote the sharing of information and education across cultural lines. It’s crucial that we freely discuss how the tragic events of Oct. 7 happened, debate why they happened, and work together towards some kind of solution, regardless of how scarce those appear to be right now.
“Victory or Martyrdom”
Graeme Wood is a staff writer at The Atlantic. On October 23, 2023, officials in Israel screened gruesome footage taken of the Hamas attack of Oct.7 for members of the press. Wood found himself most disturbed by an audio recording taken amidst the violence:
The clip is just a phone call — placed by a terrorist to his family back in Gaza. He tells his father that he is calling from a Jewish woman’s phone. (The phone recorded the call). He tells his father that his son is now a “hero” and that “I killed 10 Jews with my own hands.” And he tells his family, about a dozen times, that they should open up WhatsApp on his phone, because he has sent photographs to prove what he has done. “Put on Mom!” he says. “Your son is a hero!”
His parents, I noticed, are not nearly as enthusiastic as he is. I believe that the mom says “praise be to God” at one point, which could be gratitude for her son’s crimes or pure reflex, indicating her loss for words to match her son’s unspeakable acts. They do not question what their son has done; they do not scold him. They tell him to come back to Gaza. They fear for his safety. He says, amid rounds of “Allahu akbar,” that he intends “victory or martyrdom” — which the parents must understand means that he will never come home. From their muted replies I wonder whether they also understand that even if he did come home, he would do so as a disgusting and degraded creature, and that it might be better for him not to.
Earlier that month, Wood had discussed Israel’s collective response to the attack with his colleague Hanna Rosin on the Atlantic Radio podcast:
Israel is still reeling from the trauma of the attack of Oct. 7, that manifests in a number of ways. And one is that there’s a certain amount of Israeli policy that is driven right now by wrath.
It’s vengeance. It’s an understanding that we have to do something. We have to get rid of Hamas …
I was, the other day, in Sderot, which is one of the fairly large communities that was attacked. There were 30,000 people in it, as of a week and a half ago. Right now, they’ve all been transferred elsewhere. The Israeli government has let some journalists in and has brought out politicians, members of these communities. And there was one guy, who was from Kibbutz Be’eri, which lost on the order of 100 people, I think. And seemed like a nice guy. He described himself as being in favor of peace. He described his community as being one that welcomed cooperation with Gazans before, and he said, “I’m still in favor of peace, but that place needs to be leveled.” …
Both sides in this zero-sum game seem to agree that there are only two outcomes: total victory, or a martyr’s defeat that will continue to fuel the ever-raging fire of war.
The Aim of Hamas
Of course, it’s necessary to make a crucial distinction between Hamas and the Palestinian people at large. This is how the Council on Foreign Relations defines Hamas:
Hamas is an Islamist militant movement and one of the Palestinian territories’ two major political parties. It governs more than two million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, but the group is best known for its armed resistance to Israel …
Dozens of countries have designated Hamas a terrorist organization, though some apply this label only to its military wing. Iran provides it with material and financial support, and Turkey reportedly harbors some of its top leaders. Its rival party, Fatah, which dominates the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and rules in the West Bank, has renounced violence. The split in Palestinian leadership and Hamas’s unwavering hostility toward Israel have diminished prospects for stability in Gaza …
Bruce Hoffman, a professor at Georgetown University who specializes in terrorism and insurgency, boiled-down Hamas’ founding charter into four general themes:
- The complete destruction of Israel as an essential condition for the liberation of Palestine and the establishment of a theocratic state based on Islamic law (Sharia),
- The need for both unrestrained and unceasing holy war (jihad) to attain the above objective,
- The deliberate disdain for, and dismissal of, any negotiated resolution or political settlement of Jewish and Muslim claims to the Holy Land, and
- The reinforcement of historical anti-Semitic tropes and calumnies married to sinister conspiracy theories …
Historian and author of “Jerusalem: The Biography,” Simon Sebag Montefiore outlines in The Atlantic, the chaotic and disruptive force Hamas has proven to be since its inception:
Since its founding in 1987, Hamas has used the murder of civilians to spoil any chance of a two-state solution. In 1993, its suicide bombings of Israeli civilians were designed to destroy the two-state Oslo Accords that recognized Israel and Palestine. This month, the Hamas terrorists unleashed their slaughter in part to undermine a peace with Saudi Arabia that would have improved Palestinian politics and standard of life, and reinvigorated Hamas’s sclerotic rival, the Palestinian Authority. In part, they served Iran to prevent the empowering of Saudi Arabia, and their atrocities were of course a spectacular trap to provoke Israeli overreaction. They are most probably getting their wish, but to do this they are cynically exploiting innocent Palestinian people as a sacrifice to political means, a second crime against civilians …
Defining Zionism
However, opposition to a two-state solution can also be found throughout Israel’s history. On Nov. 4, 1995, a young Israeli assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to derail the ongoing peace process. Radical Jewish and Palestinian factions opposed to any compromise have influenced the course of the region for over a century.
One of the primary drivers of discord in the region is the notion of Zionism, which emerged in earnest at the end of the 19th century as a response to a rising trend of nationalist movements in Europe and Russia fueling waves of antisemitic persecution. In 1921, American historian Albert T. Clay outlined the practical differences among the several conceptions of zionism, and why they were proving tumultuous, even then:
Economic Labour Zionism, so-called, has as its object the amelioration of the deplorable conditions in which Jews have lived in certain lands, where they have been outrageously persecuted, and in many instances foully murdered. Since the governments concerned could not be induced to alleviate their sufferings, the Jews, in recent years, have been urged to emancipate themselves by seeking a new home, where they might live in security, and carry on their activities as free citizens. About fifty years ago organizations sprang up which encouraged colonization in Palestine. However, most Jews preferred to go to South and North America, with the result that some thousands went to Palestine and two millions moved westward. About forty colonies, some large and others containing only a few houses, have been established in Palestine, numbering about 13,000 souls. The entire Jewish population, including those who are indigenous, numbers 65,300. For comparison, it may be stated that there are also about 62,500 Christians and over a half million Moslems in the land …
Political Zionism was launched by Herzl, in 1896, in a monograph on “The Jewish State”; and since that time this has become the dominant note in the whole movement. He and others have claimed that the establishment of a Jewish commonwealth would become an active force, by bringing diplomatic pressure to bear upon the nations, to secure protection for Jews in all lands. A clannish sense of pride in the Jewish race, however, seems to be uppermost in their minds. They apparently think that their status in society will be enhanced everywhere if a Jewish nation exists in Palestine. This phase of Zionism is the crux of the whole Palestine problem.
Political Zionism is strongly opposed by many orthodox Jews in Palestine; especially because they recognize that, through the fanaticism of the Zionist leaders, it has become most difficult for them to maintain their former amicable relations with the other natives. It is opposed also by many of the leading Jews throughout the world, especially, as the Political Zionists themselves admit, by the upper circles of Jewish society …
Two Homes in One House
Nearly a decade later, in 1930, the author and journalist Owen Tweedy remarked that since the end of the First World War, hostilities between Jews and Palestinians had only increased:
The war gave to both Arab and Jew fresh titles and fresh claims. In 1915, the Arabs obtained Allied recognition of the independence of all Arab Provinces within the then Ottoman Empire …
Jewish titles and claims are based on the Balfour Declaration and its confirmation in the terms of the Mandate: “The Allies viewed with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” The tragedy of Palestine is that up to the present all attempts to blend these various promises into a Palestinian policy, acceptable to Arab and Jew alike, have failed. It would have been marvelous had they succeeded. For the war, in fact, made Palestine bi-national, in the sense that two National Homes were set up in one house. Both tenants had what they considered and claimed to be impeccable title to possession; and for the past twelve years they have lived together in a house of discord, each going his own way regardless of the feelings of the other …
The Balfour Declaration had stirred the Arab to faint apprehension which had quickened into fear when it was confirmed in the Mandate; but when he saw Zionist penetration biting ever deeper into the country, a deep and at times a violent hostility arose against this newcomer who was forever talking in Hebrew of a Jewish State in Palestine…
Jewish immigration to Palestine continued throughout the 1930s, partly as a result of fears instilled by Hitler, and partly because emigration to many other countries was restricted in response to The Great Depression. After the horrors of The Holocaust, several hundred thousand Jews remained in European displaced persons camps. Many feared to return home, as antisemitic violence persisted. Stalin loosed an anti-Jewish campaign beginning in the late 1940s among the nations of Eastern Europe that now resided behind the Iron Curtain. Returning to Sebag Montefiore, he outlines the international response:
In 1947, the United Nations devised the partition of the British mandate of Palestine into two states, Arab and Jewish.
The carving of such states out of these mandates was not exceptional, either. At the end of World War II, France granted independence to Syria and Lebanon, newly conceived nation-states. Britain created Iraq and Jordan in a similar way. Imperial powers designed most of the countries in the region, except Egypt.
Nor was the imperial promise of separate homelands for different ethnicities or sects unique. The French had promised independent states for the Druze, Alawites, Sunnis, and Maronites but in the end combined them into Syria and Lebanon. All of these states had been “vilayets” and “sanjaks” (provinces) of the Turkish Ottoman empire, ruled from Constantinople, from 1517 until 1918.
The concept of “partition” is, in the decolonization narrative, regarded as a wicked imperial trick. But it was entirely normal in the creation of 20th-century nation-states, which were typically fashioned out of fallen empires. And sadly, the creation of nation-states was frequently marked by population swaps, huge refugee migrations, ethnic violence, and full-scale wars …
Nakba
The proposal was accepted by the Jewish leadership, but rejected by the Palestinian authorities. Civil war broke out on Nov. 30, 1947, the day after the partition plan was approved by the UN. Britain intervened moderately, but finally terminated its mandate in May 1948, removing the last of its troops. Palestinian Jews (who had gained the upper-hand in the fighting) declared the formation of the State of Israel, and were invaded the following day by forces from Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) resisted, and pushed back the Arab forces. In the conflict, roughly 700,000 Palestinians lost their homes in what is referred to as the “Nakba” (catastrophe). The founder of the American Task Force on Palestine, Ziad Asali, discusses the fallout:
Our family lost everything in Jerusalem in 1948. We survived and even thrived, but this loss is a core truth of my family’s history. Yet even as I have lived Palestinian pain, I have made an effort to study and understand Jewish pain, which is primordial and deep.
Palestinians — almost unanimously — view Zionism not as a triumph, as so many Jews view it, but as a historical tragedy. What is today the nation of Israel began in the late 19th century as a quasi-messianic Western movement to transform historic Palestine into a Jewish state, which had not existed for 2,000 years. The story from our perspective is one of relentless, systematic dispossession of the indigenous Arab population, sponsored by Western colonial powers who were at best cavalier toward Arab rights and aspirations, and at worst brutal and racist.
Viewed this way, one sees that the Zionist project would have faced fierce resistance regardless of whether it comprised Jews, Danes, Samoans, or any other group or sect. And what continues to the present day in Israel/Palestine — an occupation and settlement enterprise that deprives all Palestinians of any form of political or civic rights — would engender hostility in any similar context. The psychology of the prisoner toward his jailer or the subordinate to his master is a far more apposite basis for Palestinian attitudes toward Israel than the paradigm of European-style anti-Semitism, which for centuries otherized Jews as disloyal and untrustworthy, unworthy of equal status with Christian citizens. Despite a common misperception, we Palestinians understand the terrible crimes that were committed against Jews by European Christianity, and we know that, while not nearly so dire, the experience of Jews living as minorities in Muslim-majority countries had its acute challenges and dangers. But this doesn’t change the essential fact that the Palestinians are bystanders to history, and victims of it …
When the war ended in 1949, the territory controlled by Israel had expanded significantly, with Gaza annexed by Egypt, and the West Bank annexed by Jordan. According to the Anti-Defamation League:
A Jewish refugee problem was also created with the establishment of the State of Israel. From 1948-1951 as many as 800,000 Jews were expelled from their native Arab and Muslim nations or forced to flee as a result of state-sponsored anti-Zionist violence. They left behind their property and the lives they had built in these lands over hundreds of years. As many as 500,000 of these refugees fled from Iraq, Tunisia, Syria, Egypt, Yemen, Algeria, Libya and Morocco and were absorbed into the new State of Israel. Others fled to Europe and North and South America …
A Culture of Carnage
The region, marred by violence and conflict, would repeatedly struggle and fail to find peace. Attacks, reprisals, and escalation have become embedded in the cultures. In 2014, journalist Jeff Moskowitz reported in The Atlantic:
In recent weeks, the all-too-common elements of Israeli-Palestinian violence — rocks, rockets, and rubber bullets, Molotov cocktails and missile strikes — have included more unusual tactics: kidnappings and murders, remarkable not only for their viciousness but also for the youth of the victims and perpetrators.
Gilad Shaar, Eyal Yifrach, and Naftali Fraenkel, the three Jewish teens who were abducted and murdered three weeks ago while hitchhiking in the West Bank, were between the ages of 16 and 19. Muhammad Abu Khdeir, the Palestinian boy snatched from outside his home two weeks later and burned to death in a Jerusalem forest, was 16. The Jewish suspects being held in connection with Abu Khdeir’s killing are reportedly between the ages of 16 and 25. The prime suspects in the murder of the Israeli teens are 29 and 32.
Israeli and Palestinian leaders have denounced the murders. But with Jewish teenagers marching through Jerusalem and calling for revenge, and Palestinian teenagers rioting in West Bank villages, the condemnations have so far felt impotent …
Idan Maor, the 25-year-old chairman of the Hebrew University Student Union at the school’s Givat Ram campus, attributed these generational differences to the security situation in which young Israelis have grown up, and their disenchantment with the peace process following the successful but ultimately stalled Oslo Accords in the 1990s.
“All my childhood I was afraid to walk by buses,” Maor recalled, in reference to experiencing the Second Intifada, an armed Palestinian uprising that raged from 2000 to 2005, as a young person in Jerusalem. “Almost every day you would see horrifying pictures of people exploding inside buses … Even today, every time I hear an ambulance, I think there was a terrorist attack.”
“And the Intifada happened at the exact time when the Israeli peace movement was the biggest,” added Maor, who identifies politically as center-left. “I remember as a child, I believed that everything was going to end and everyone was going to be happy. A lot of people see those days and remember the hope and look at where we are today, and then they become more right-wing.”
“They say we tried to go left once,” Maor continued. “And it looks like it wasn’t the right way. There aren’t many attacks today but it’s only because our intelligence and military became stronger.” …
Self-Defence?
Human Rights Watch recognizes that Israel needs to protect itself and its citizens from random attacks. In 2012, they announced:
Palestinian armed groups in Gaza violated the laws of war during the November 2012 fighting by launching hundreds of rockets toward population centers in Israel.
About 1,500 rockets were fired at Israel between November 14 and 21, the Israel Defense Forces reported. At least 800 struck Israel, including 60 that hit populated areas.
The rocket attacks, including the first from Gaza to strike the Tel Aviv and Jerusalem areas, killed three Israeli civilians, wounded at least 38, several seriously, and destroyed civilian property. Rockets that fell short of their intended targets in Israel apparently killed at least two Palestinians in Gaza and wounded others …
Human Rights Watch research in Gaza found that armed groups repeatedly fired rockets from densely populated areas, near homes, businesses, and a hotel, unnecessarily placing civilians in the vicinity at grave risk from Israeli counter-fire …
Such attacks spurred the development of Israel’s sophisticated missile defence system, the Iron Dome. However, according to the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise (AICE), from Oct. 7 to Oct. 31, Israel has been attacked with over 8,500 rockets — enough to overwhelm the dome. Israel’s strengthening and security has come at the expense of Palestinian freedoms. The organization reached this conclusion in 2021:
About 6.8 million Jewish Israelis and 6.8 million Palestinians live today between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River, an area encompassing Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), the latter made up of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. Throughout most of this area, Israel is the sole governing power; in the remainder, it exercises primary authority alongside limited Palestinian self-rule. Across these areas and in most aspects of life, Israeli authorities methodically privilege Jewish Israelis and discriminate against Palestinians. Laws, policies, and statements by leading Israeli officials make plain that the objective of maintaining Jewish Israeli control over demographics, political power, and land has long guided government policy. In pursuit of this goal, authorities have dispossessed, confined, forcibly separated, and subjugated Palestinians by virtue of their identity to varying degrees of intensity. In certain areas, as described in this report, these deprivations are so severe that they amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution …
Yossi Klein Halevi is a senior fellow of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, and author of Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor. He warns that retributive justice fuels violence.
Israel’s critics cite the siege of Gaza as an explanation for Palestinian desperation. Yet in 2005, Israel dismantled all of its settlements in Gaza and withdrew to the internationally recognized border. Where might we be today if, instead of immediately launching rockets on Israeli neighborhoods across that border, the Palestinian national movement had attempted to create a different dynamic in the first territory it truly controlled?
Israel’s critics are right to link the slaughter carried out by Hamas with the occupation of the West Bank, but not in the way they suppose. The atrocities have provided Israelis with a visceral reminder of why so many dread the prospect of a full withdrawal from the West Bank, risking the creation of another Gaza minutes from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. To say that the occupation causes terrorism misses the larger point: Terrorism has all along reinforced the occupation, convincing Israelis like me who believe that a two-state solution is essential to also fear that a two-state solution is impossible.
Israel is hardly blameless. Understandably but disastrously, many Israelis have conflated security fears, which justify a military presence in the West Bank, with historical and religious longings for the biblical land we call Judea and Samaria. Those longings are the basis for the settlement enterprise, whose political goal is to preclude any solution to the Palestinian tragedy. And in recent months we have seen an outrageous rise in settler violence against innocent Palestinians. Even as we protect ourselves from Hamas, we need to oppose those among us who would emulate Hamas.
“Mr. Security”
Both sides have had their agitators — those who see anything but a complete exodus of their enemy as a capitulation — but over time, those forces have come to increase their presence in the leadership. This is true not only of Hamas, but also of Israel’s far-right government. Yair Rosenberg, a staff writer at The Atlantic illustrates the failures of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu:
Seen in hindsight, the litany of Netanyahu’s failures is long. By his own admission, he purposely propped up Hamas as a counterbalance to the more moderate Palestinian Authority in order to keep the Palestinian public divided and prevent a negotiated two-state solution. In partnership with Washington, Netanyahu facilitated the transfer of hundreds of millions of dollars from Qatar into Gaza in an attempt to buy quiet from Hamas. Intelligence officials now believe that some of this money was used to fund the group’s terrorism. Netanyahu also increased permits for Gazans to work in Israel; some of the permit holders may have provided intelligence used to plan the attacks. In 2011, the prime minister released more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners — including convicted mass murderers — in return for one Israeli soldier held hostage by Hamas. This decision encouraged further kidnapping attempts, culminating in the successful abduction of some 200 Israelis this month. One of the prisoners released in 2011 was Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza today.
And the rot runs deeper. Since returning to power in December, Netanyahu has spent months shredding Israel’s social solidarity and projecting weakness to its foes. He provoked unprecedented domestic unrest with his coalition’s deeply unpopular attempt to gut Israel’s judiciary, pitting the country’s people against one another. He fired and then unfired his defense minister for warning that the plan was causing divisions that were undermining Israel’s security. And when the prime minister wasn’t hobbling his more competent officials over their internal dissent, he was empowering incompetent ones. He spent years driving out career civil servants and replacing them with ideological cronies. To maintain his tenuous hold on power while on trial for corruption, he personally facilitated the entry of a far-right alliance into Parliament, then gave its inept and inexperienced members key positions. This is how Israel ended up with Itamar Ben-Gvir, an anti-Arab demagogue who was rejected by the Israeli army because of his radicalism, as national-security minister.
Put another way, the disaster of October 7 was the overdetermined outcome of years of Netanyahu’s poor choices. In the end, the man known as “Mr. Security” failed by his own standard, and he failed to fulfill the fundamental expectation of his fellow citizens …
Walking into a Trap
Senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, Hussein Ibish, sees a deeper reason for Hamas’ actions against Israel. In The Atlantic, he argues that “Israel is Walking Into a Trap”:
Israel and the Palestinians have a long history of brutality against each other, but the Hamas killing spree outdoes anything since Israeli-controlled Christian militias massacred unarmed Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps outside of Beirut in 1982. It may even have been the single most brutal act by either side in the 100-year-old conflict. But above all, it was intended as a trap — one that Israel appears about to fall into…
The Israeli military will likely encounter a determined insurgency in Gaza. After all, Israel has had control of the land strip from the outside, but not on the inside. Israeli dominion over Gaza’s coastal waters, airspace, electromagnetic spectrum, and all but one of its crossings, including the only one capable of handling goods, has made Gaza a virtual open-air prison — run by particularly vicious inmates but surrounded and contained on all sides by the guards…
The Islamist group also hopes to seize control of the Palestinian national movement from its secular Fatah rivals, who dominate the Palestinian Authority and, more important, the Palestine Liberation Organization, which is the internationally recognized representative of the Palestinian people. Hamas has never been a part of the PLO, in large measure because it is unwilling to accept the PLO’s treaty agreements with Israel.
Israel appears prepared to inflict many thousands of civilian casualties, if not more. It has adhered to a doctrine of disproportionality for deterrence predating the founding of the state: Jewish militias embraced it when dealing with the Arabs in Mandatory Palestine, and at no stage since have more Jewish civilians been killed than Palestinian ones, with the ratio usually closer to 10 to 1 than 2 to 1.
Israel appears poised to fulfill Hamas’s intentions. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed retaliation that will “reverberate for generations” among Israel’s adversaries. The Israeli general Ghassan Aliyan warned, “You wanted hell — you will get hell.” Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declared, “We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly.” None of these speakers made any effort to distinguish between Hamas militants and the 2 million Palestinian civilians in Gaza. The “human animals” comment is telling. For decades, and especially in recent years, the people of Gaza have indeed been treated like animals. Perhaps not surprisingly, guerrillas emerging from their ranks indeed acted like animals when they attacked southern Israel. So now Israel will triple down on the dehumanization and collective punishment of all of these “human animals.”…
Gaza Ground Zero
This is just another in a long line of atrocities in the Gaza strip. Alice Su, a journalist based in Amman, Jordan, wrote about the conditions in Gaza in 2015 for The Atlantic:
Eight months after last summer’s war between Israel and Palestinian militant groups, Gaza remains in ruins. Drive five minutes into the territory from the crossing point in southwestern Israel and you reach Beit Hanoun, one of the areas hit most severely by land and air during the conflict. Bright blue sky spreads over buildings with big bites taken out of them. Half-eaten bedrooms and kitchens yawn open to reveal tangled wires, broken rock, and household goods: a slipper, a pack of sanitary pads, a ripped-up schoolbook. People peek over mounds of rubble from tents behind their former homes, like aliens come to settle an abandoned planet.
In Gaza City, the flags and slogans of Hamas, the Islamic militant group that governs Gaza, cover the street corners: “Resist, O Palestinian people, your perseverance is our only hope for freedom.” Driving through the city, you see murals of doves and children holding hands, UNRWA cartoons about saving water and picking up trash, and then a stick figure blowing up an Israeli tank. Across the street, someone has scrawled a Star of David on a garbage bin.
But ask what people are doing, and they say, “Sitting. Waiting.” Hamas’s rhetoric is all about resistance, but most people I met in Gaza were not so much defiant as desolate, not so much resisting as resigned. Those who survived last summer’s war are trapped in 360 square kilometers of trauma and contradiction, choking on war and blockade, disillusioned with the Palestinian leadership and disempowered by the aid community. They sit without jobs, relief, or means of rebuilding, waiting for things to change.
“Gaza is hell,” 20-year-old Ahmad told me in Shejaiya, one of the worst-hit neighborhoods in Gaza City. He and his 19-year-old brother were picking over the leftovers of their home. Sometimes they sell salvaged iron and rubble for recycling; other days they search for their old photos, papers, and clothes. “Gazans have Israel on one side, Hamas on the other, and here we are just eating shit,” he said. “People are only living because they are not dying. If death was nicer, we’d go for it.” …
Israel initially responded to Oct. 7 with a sustained bombardment of Gaza ahead of a ground invasion that began on Oct. 28. The situation is a humanitarian crisis. On Oct. 26, executive director of UNICEF, Catherine Russell, wrote:
War not only kills people; it kills possibility, slamming the door shut on what might have been. Children who have lost their lives will not grow up to be the people their communities needed them to become.
Children who survive could see their lives irrevocably altered through repeated exposure to traumatic events. Violence and upheaval can induce toxic stress, which can interfere with physical and cognitive development and cause mental-health problems in both the short and long term. Even before this latest escalation, more than 816,000 children in Gaza — three-quarters of its entire child population — were identified as needing mental-health and psychosocial support …
Today, a 15-year-old child in Palestine or Israel has already lived through six major rounds of conflict and countless other violent incidents. She may have lost loved ones or friends. She may have been physically injured herself. She may have tried to take shelter as rockets and bombs flew overhead. And she may have lived most of her young life in a near-constant state of stress and fear. Even if she came through it all without a scratch, she will never be a child again.
As of Nov. 1, According to Gaza’s health ministry, 8,796 Palestinians have been killed in more than three weeks of Israeli air raids, including 3,648 children. Hospitals, overwhelmed by the sheer number of casualties and running out of fuel as a result of Israel’s “total siege” of the strip, are in a state of collapse. At least 16 of the territory’s 35 hospitals have been forced to shut down, as have 51 of its 72 primary healthcare clinics.
Morality in Wartime
The month of conflict has been deeply polarizing far beyond the Middle East. Staff writer at The Atlantic Conor Friedersdorf reported the “stunning” reaction on college campuses in response to the initial attack:
At the University of Virginia, the chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine declared that it “unequivocally supports Palestinian liberation and the right of colonized people everywhere to resist the occupation of their land by whatever means they deem necessary.” How depraved a response to Hamas war criminals who just demonstrated that they deem murder of civilians, including children, necessary.
George Washington University’s Students for Justice in Palestine joined the swell of extremists who reject the Geneva Conventions on noncombatants. “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” the group stated. “It is not an abstract theory to be discussed and debated in classrooms and papers. It is a tangible, material event in which the colonized rise up against the colonizer … We reject the distinction between ‘civilian’ and ‘militant.’ We reject the distinction between ‘settler’ and ‘soldier.’ Every Palestinian is a civilian even if they hold arms. A settler is an aggressor, a soldier, and an occupier even if they are lounging on our occupied beaches.”…
The American author and neuroscientist Sam Harris warns of what he refers to as “The Sin of Moral Equivalence:”
Jihadists use their own people as human shields routinely. Hamas fires rockets from hospitals and mosques and schools and other sites calculated to create carnage if the Israelis return fire. There were cases in the war in Iraq where jihadists literally rested the barrels of their guns on the shoulders of children. They blew up crowds of their own children in order to kill US soldiers who were passing out candy to them. Conversely, the Israeli army routinely warns people to evacuate buildings before it bombs them…
Imagine the Jews of Israel using their own women and children as human shields. And then imagine how Hamas, or Hezbollah, or al-Qaeda, or ISIS, or any other jihadist group would respond. The image you should now have in your mind is a masterpiece of moral surrealism. It is preposterous. It is a Monty Python sketch where all the Jews die …
Michael Ignatieff, the former leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, wrote to The Atlantic, arguing the importance of holding to the Geneva Conventions, even when your enemies do not:
The Geneva Conventions are law made for hell, the work of Swiss and European lawyers who’d watched the worst that human beings had done in World War II. Their conventions — especially the fourth, on the protection of civilians — command combatants to observe the principle of distinction, which confines fighting to soldiers and keeps civilians out of it. That means keeping violence proportional to a military objective. And it prohibits starving civilians or depriving them of water; attacking hospitals or civilian medical workers; taking hostages; raping women; expelling populations from conquered territory; destroying homes, churches, synagogues, mosques, and schools without an overriding military purpose. To do any of these things is to commit a war crime …
A Palestinian may argue that Israel’s unjust blockade of Gaza and previous military actions, which give grounds for armed resistance, also justify the massacre of civilians at a music festival and in their homes and the taking of hostages. An Israeli may argue that Hamas’s atrocities in the October 7 attack justify the flattening of Gaza, despite the inevitable civilian deaths this entails. The Geneva Conventions say both positions are wrong. Nothing justifies the infliction of violence on noncombatants, neither a gruesome massacre in the desert nor the cruel confinement of civilians in Gaza …
Besides discrimination in targeting, the conventions demand proportionality, which requires Israelis to minimize collateral damage to hospitals, schools, and civilian infrastructure. But because Hamas is likely to co-locate its men and matériel near what the conventions call “protected” objects, the conventions do allow Israel to strike civilian targets — but only when there is no other way to achieve a necessary military objective.
Israel has allowed aid convoys into Gaza; it has warned civilians of impending air strikes and urged mass evacuation from combat zones. Despite these gestures of compliance, the watching world can see on their screens, every hour of the day, the flattened streets and houses, the rescue workers and ambulances, the bloodied civilians borne into overcrowded hospitals. What we do not know is the extent and degree to which Israel is successfully targeting Hamas military personnel and assets …
Diplomats, politicians, and military commanders around the world are urging Israel to be focused and strategic. General David Petraeus has warned that Gaza could become “Mogadishu on steroids.” Despite the high casualties in the dense and challenging urban combat of Gaza, calls for restraint persist. The logic is that Israel needs to offer a better alternative to Hamas: open up humanitarian corridors, evacuate civilians, ensure the availability of aid, and limit collateral damage. This is complicated by history. The Nakba is as fresh in the minds of the Gazans as the Holocaust is for the Israelis. Many fear that should they flee, they will never be allowed to return.
Trust: A Rare Commodity
Since the attack on Oct. 7, violence outside Gaza has increased, and cases of antisemitism and Islamophobia are skyrocketing around the world. With so much distrust and animosity, it’s hard to envision a way out. We’ll leave off with Graeme Wood’s recent experience in the West Bank, as reported in The Atlantic on Oct. 25:
About five minutes later, a battered pickup intercepted me. I gave the driver a shalom, and watched him dig around the cab of the truck. I wondered if he was looking for a gun, and if he would shoot a guy who had just wished him peace.
In fact he produced a phone, from a door compartment that contained nothing else but a prayer book. He handed the phone to me, impatiently, and pointed at it. A woman’s voice came on. “Who are you? What are you doing here? What are you writing in your notebook?” I told her I was a journalist, and I wanted to meet the settlers and learn about their lives, and I had parked my car back by the Bedouin camp.
He talked with her for a few minutes, agitated, then put me back on. “He will drive you back to your car,” she said, with a note of genuine concern, not menace. “You should be so careful. The Palestinian people are very terrorist.” Then I got into her comrade’s truck, and he drove me back to the Palestinian community. (I could see from the look on his face that the lift was not a favor but a forced transfer in miniature: They wanted me gone).
Half a dozen Arab men came to the edge of the road to witness my arrival in a settler truck. When I stepped out, they eyed me carefully. I’m not sure they had ever seen someone who was not a settler emerge from a settler truck. When I got out, the settler drove off, spraying dirt and dust on us all.
I asked one of the men there if they recognized the guy who’d given me a lift. His answer contained the one word everyone at Wadi al-Siq, Israeli or Palestinian, seemed to know in English. “He is a fucking terrorist,” he said …
Long ago, when DeLoreans roamed the earth, Brad was born. In accordance with the times, he was raised in the wild every afternoon and weekend until dusk, never becoming so feral that he neglected to rewind his VHS rentals. His historical focus has assured him that civilization peaked with The Simpsons in the mid 90s. When not disappointing his parents, Brad spends his time with his dogs, regretting he didn’t learn typing in high school.
