The Grand Illusion
Over two million Palestinians live, and are effectively trapped, in the Gaza strip. Among them are thousands, if not more, members of Hamas. Most of the Palestinians now living in Gaza either left Israel for Gaza or are the descendants of those who did. Gaza was controlled by Egypt, but later occupied by Israel in the 1967 war. The Oslo Accords of 1993 provided for local control by the Palestinian Authority, and in 2005 Israel withdrew from Gaza. By 2007, Hamas vanquished Fatah and taken control of local government, after which Hamas cancelled elections.
After all its difficulties with Islamic terrorists, Israel clearly doesn’t want to govern the Palestinians, or to integrate them into Israel, and neither do any of the other nations in the regions bordering Israel want to accept the Palestinians, despite the fact that all of those nations have cultures not dissimilar to that of the Palestinians.
Since it declared itself an independent nation in 1948, Israel has been under attack, at times in all-out war, and the rest of the time from terrorist attacks. As the latest incarnation of those who have attacked, Hamas has declared that Israel must be destroyed. Although Israel removed its internal military presence in Gaza more than fifteen years ago, terrorist attacks against Israel have continued, with the latest being the most devastating in years.
Yet protests against the Israelis are growing in the United States, especially among “liberals,” claiming that the sad situation in Gaza is all the fault of the Israelis and that the Israelis shouldn’t attack Gaza because of the harm that will cause to “innocent” Palestinians.
But how innocent are the Palestinians? Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t see them stopping the attacks by Hamas.
It’s both a truism and a truth, that no government can stand against its people – if they truly oppose it. Of course, the problem arises when a population is divided, and a true civil war is a disaster. But in the case of the Palestinians, they don’t seem to be repudiating their support for the destruction of Israel or for Hamas. Nor does saying nothing make them innocent. Here, as in many cases, an old saying applies — all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing. And that’s assuming a population that wishes to destroy Israel is “good.”
Are the Iraelis angels? Hardly, but when you’re the only Jewish nation in the world with a land area of a mere 8,000 square miles surrounded by nations that have never stopped attacking and who have advocated for your destruction for more than 75 years, being a peaceful angel will only result in another holocaust, something that the Jews cannot forget and that all the Palestinian “supporters” seem to have conveniently forgotten.
And then there’s the other question. At what point does a people or a nation have to take responsibility for the acts of their leaders? Certainly, some peoples never have. It took World War II to hold the Germans responsible for the acts of Hitler and the Nazis. It took a Civil War for the U.S. to deal with slavery, and there are still unfinished issues. No one ever held Stalin responsible, or Mao, or the Turks for the Armenian genocide.
All of that points out that most extremists have to be stopped by force, because that’s all they respect. Unfortunately, that makes whoever effectively stops them an extremist as well. And, in the case of Gaza, there’s a great deal of talk, but no one in the entire region seems to be willing to truly deal with the issues raised by Islamic extremists, except Israel, because it has no choice if it wishes to survive.
The problem that is never addressed is the fact of a lack of sufficient water and resources to support the current and future population of Israel and Palestine (Jewish or Muslim). The liberals are right that founding Israel in that area was a blindingly idiotic error, motivated by the anti-Semetism of powerful nations that didn’t want a Jewish nation in their backyard and vague religious nonsense. But the Israelis certainly should not be punished for their ancestors taking what they could get after the tragedy of the Holocaust. I just don’t think there is an answer. I wish I could believe that Israelis and Palestinians will sit down wisely talk out an ecological management plan for the area. But it would be laughably naive to expect that to actually happen. I don’t think there is a solution, but I am irked by both sides making claims of evil or claiming that some other party should be doing more. If the violence were the root cause of the problem, then changes of attitudes and governments could help. But if the best case scenario is that Israelis and Palestinians find it in their hearts to hold hands and sing together while they starve and dehydrate to death I really don’t see the point of throwing around moral judgements.
There are no ‘tit for tat’, ‘they deserved it’ or ‘I just don’t like them’ exceptions to the laws of war. Full stop.
Who is responsible, and what can you do? Collective punishment is de jure (in law) an illegal war crime under the Geneva Conventions. So even if you hold the Palestinians responsible for not booting Hamas, you cannot abuse civilians in response. Careful also when you start talking about Palestinian ‘responsibility’ and implying ‘they have it coming’ – that’s Hamas’ argument for attacking Israeli civilians: nearly all Israeli adults are conscript soldiers, even if not in uniform, and they elected the governments that promised and enacted harsh conditions for the Palestinians. Of course while collective punishment is de jure illegal, both Israeli and Palestinian civilians are de facto (in fact) suffering the consequences for decisions by their nation’s governments.
As an aside, Palestine is a member state party to the International Criminal Court, so Israel’s military actions in Gaza subject them to its jurisdiction, and potentially arrest, in the 123 member countries. But read up on ‘necessity’ and ‘proportionality’, and you will be disappointed. Many, many civilians can and will be killed ‘legally’ under the laws of war, but don’t discount the fact that individual Israeli soldiers and commanders would like to be able to travel outside the country again without the risk of rotting in The Hague.
As in your last post, Israel is much like the Democratic Party in the US: The bad faith of its opponents is baked in, and it takes the blame if it does not sacrifice itself for the good of order. The Democrats were supposed to ‘save’ Kevin McCarthy’s speakership, and the Israelis are criticized by people for attacking Hamas, but who offer no other solutions to the problem of Hamas terrorism.
Calling what happened last weekend a terrorist attack lessens it – it was a division-level combined arms operation, with paratroopers, a drone air force, a naval landing, rocket artillery support, electronic warfare, and thousands of mounted and foot infantry, all attacking what turned out to be undefended civilians. Hamas is now hiding amongst civilians and actively working to prevent them from leaving to use them as human shields.
What is Israel supposed to do? Good question. Thankfully Biden seems to be using full-throated US support as a lever to impose adherence to the laws of war, and also (we are hearing now) to ensure Israel has a plan that doesn’t involve occupying Gaza.
Oh, and please don’t blanket Israel’s detractors here as “liberals” – it’s only a small fraction of left wingers. Source: Me, a liberal progressive that lives in San Francisco.)
I don’t recall making the statements you’re saying I said. As far as I can tell, I didn’t even imply them. I merely pointed out the situation in which Israel finds itself, and I did point out that no one is offering a solution besides what Israel is attempting.
As for liberals… while you rightly point out that the detractors are a small minority of liberals, so far as I can tell, pretty much all of the detractors are in fact liberals.
To clarify: other than your discussion in the last post about the similarities between Israel and US politics (and “liberals”), I am in my reply, using “you” and directing the post at / to mean the generic reader. I only had about 30 minutes put this together, so it wasn’t as finely edited as it could’ve been.
I wouldn’t expect much of the US right wing to come down on criticizing Israel and that detractors will be predominantly liberals – just not all (much less most) liberals, much in the way that neo-Nazis and white supremacists in the US are always conservatives, even though not all conservatives have those views.
As things are going here, the right wing will presumably wait for Biden to pick a course of action and then be against that. Most likely it will be performance art that he isn’t doing enough to aid and abet war crimes or is otherwise handcuffing Israel’s response.
Two things. First, Gaza’s median age is just 18, meaning well over two thirds of the inhabitants were born after the end of the First Intifada. Almost all have lived their entire lives in the occupied territories and know nothing else.
Second, while Israel signed the Oslo Accords and pulled their direct military forces out of the occupied territories back in 93, they’ve been steadily and continuously encroaching on that land ever since. The illegal settlements occupy the high ground, and large barriers divide up the remainder such that it is extremely difficult for the Palestinian inhabitants to move around. While there are fewer settlements in Gaza, Israel now strictly limits the ability of the inhabitants to go out to sea to fish, enforcing a 3 mile limit for fishing offshore rather than the 20 agreed in the Accords or even the 12 you’d expect for domestic waters, and outright sinking any boats that exceed it. Retaliatory air strikes do catastrophic damage to any large buildings, because they’re the visible targets.
That’s a pressure cooker. You have young people with no prospects and no hope, no way to make a living or source their own food, and constant oppression from their neighbours. An explosion is inevitable.
Hamas is the equivalent of the radical wings of the IRA, the old and embittered saw how the Oslo Accords were routinely ignored, and the young and angry have no experience of the hell that the country is about to become. And they probably don’t care any more, they just want to smash anything they can at this point.
Egypt doesn’t want to get involved, they have their own issues. Jordan has long kept a lid on issues on the West Bank, which is also probably why only Gaza has exploded but there are limits.
Israel absolutely has the right to exist and to manage its own security, they’ve forged a modern nation out of the ruins of empires, but they’ve also done themselves very few favours over the past thirty years. They have squandered the chances that Oslo brought to the region and their hardliners have caused this with their own actions.
Palestinian attacks are deeply wrong, and the actions of the militants are abhorrent. But they are also understandable.
The biggest issue with Israel is it’s been behaving like a spoiled child with a powerful big brother, stealing and taunting and hiding whenever it gets called on it.
The US has almost never wavered in constantly supporting and therefore endorsing their behaviour, no matter who is in power. At least China reins in North Korea every so often.
Netanyahu’s government is at least as corrupt as Trump’s was, indeed their close friendship makes me think the corruption likely came the other way, and has made significant efforts of late to remove any judicial independence. It’s a military dictatorship in nature if not in name.
Israel will need to come to terms with itself as to what sort of county it really wants to be before there’s any real chance of change in the region. And it’s a high stakes game – while they’d still easily win any defensive war, infighting spilling out from within Israel’s establishment will have a terrible cost.
I wonder about the timing and the scale of this escalation.
The Hamas attack on Israel was so large, coordinated and unexpected, so different from their usual method of operation.
It was also guaranteed to bring heavy retribution and destruction down on everyone living in Gaza, creating a strong anti-Israel momentum in surrounding muslim populations,and potentially kicking off a very destructive regional war, that could pull in Israel’s allies in Europe and the US.
Hamas has links to Iran, which has links to Putin, who would like to see Europe and the US retreat from supporting Ukraine. Involving them in a war around Israel would mean they need their weapons for that, instead of sending them to Ukraine.
Pushing the agressive elements in Iran and Hamas, that with NATO distracted by Ukraine this might be their best chance to break Israel’s hold on Palestinian territories could prod them into action that will end in disastrous destruction and losses for the Gaza Palestinians, maybe for many more (depending on who gets sucked into this), but it would give Russia a freeer hand annexing their old Soviet dependencies without the neighbors actively aiding any resistance.
Hanneke, that’s an interesting point about Russia’s potential benefits from egging on the conflict, one I hadn’t previously considered. I’d assumed the timing and scale of the attack was incited by Iran who is desperate to keep Israel from reaching any further diplomatic reconciliation with their Arab neighbors.
And I agree with Mayhem that the Hamas attack was somewhat predictable given the ‘pressure cooker’ that Gaza had become. Though while there are certain similarities between Netanyahu and Trump, I don’t buy that the two of them fed off each other in either direction. I think it’s more a matter of professional respect between power-hungry gangsters.
Israel’s biggest problem over the years since its founding is that it is pursuing two mutually incompatible goals, and it is hard to see how, under their present policies, they can remain both Jewish and democratic. Which is why they have been slipping further and further into being a totalitarian state implementing systematic apartheid, since they have been absolutely unwilling to sacrifice anything that would threaten the Jewish nature of the state.