Gaza and Beyond

Gaza and Beyond The Statesman November 08-09, 2023 (I) In the six days following Hamas’s dastardly attack on October 7 that killed 1,400 civilians and soldiers in Israel and injured more than 5,000, Israel dropped 6,000 bombs on the Gaza Strip, a thin, 41 kms by 10 kms, strip of land on the Mediterranean coast which is also one of the most densely populated areas in the world with 2.3 million residents. As of October 31, the trail of death and destruction unleashed by Israeli bombs have killed over 8500 people in Gaza including more than 3500 children, and every 15 minutes, a child is dying a painful death. The brutal bombardment has left thousands of civilians, mostly women and children, maimed and injured, destroyed thousands of residential buildings and displaced over 1.4 million people. Many will have no home to return to even if they survive the bombings. If Hamas has been a gang of marauding terrorists, Israel has proved itself to be no less a terrorist state. It has cut off the only sources of water, food, fuel and medicine for 2.3 million residents of the besieged Strip, lest these go to the Hamas, and is not even allowing international aid to help alleviate the suffering of hapless residents, trapped between Hamas terrorists and a terrorist state. If extracting revenge means mindless killing of innocent civilians and children by deploying all the military might of a state, it cannot be supported by any logic regardless of provocations. As the military historian Michael Howard said after the 9/11 carnage, if innocent civilians were hurt in the heat of the response, the original atrocity would be soon forgotten and terrorists would already have achieved an important objective. When the media and the internet carry gory images of children bleeding to death, hospitals and refuge camps being hit, refugees fleeing their destroyed homes – it will only solidify hatred in the hearts of the victims and their children for generations which will supply an unending line of recruits to the ranks of future terrorists. The cycle of violence will never ever stop and October 7 will keep repeating. War does not bring peace in our times – it only begets more wars. Israel was the creation of Brtish foreign secretary Lord Balfour in 1917 expressing support for “the establishment in Palestine, which had a majority of Arabs, of a national home for the Jewish people”. The Jewish author Arthur Koestler had called the Balfour Declaration the “most improbable political documents of all time” in which “one nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third”. The League of Nations, precursor to the UN, legitimised the creation of Palestine and Transjordan (later Jordan in 1922, according to the Sykes-Picot agreement. After the Balfour Declaration, Jewish people fleeing persecution in Europe started arriving in Palestine in large numbers, and the inflow became a deluge after Nazi Holocaust during World War II. Jews had no land of their own and were persecuted throughout history, even before the Nazi Holocaust, and the Zionist movement founded by Theodor Herzl had declared its aim to create a Jewish homeland at its first congress in 1897. As Jews having nowhere to go started settling in Palestine, Arabs living there turned against the growing numbers of Jewish migrants, including German Jews fleeing Nazi persecution. The Arab uprising in 1936 was crushed by the British who were unable to control the Jewish militant groups which had sprung up by then to counter the Arabs. Eventually the British handed the problem over to the UN. In November 1947, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution partitioning Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab, with Jerusalem under a UN administration. The Arab world rejected the plan as unfair. Jewish militias launched attacks against Palestinian villages, forcing thousands to flee. The situation escalated into a full-blown war in 1948, after the British had left with their forces. Jewish leaders announced the creation of the State of Israel and their militias went on a killing rampage that forced 750,000 Palestinians to flee to Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, while the rest got squeezed in the remaining territories in Gaza, West Bank and East Jerusalem. This forced displacement of an entire population of Palestinians, somewhat resembling the Indian partition, is called the Nakba, the Arabic word for catastrophe. Neighbouring Arab countries then invaded Israel, but Israel fought back. In the Armistice of 1949, a “Green Line” served as the borders between Israel and Arab states while the Gaza Strip and the West Bank came respectively under the control of Egypt and Jordan. In 1967, during the six-day war between Israel and its Arab neighbours, Israel defeated three Arab armies, gained territory four times its original size, and became the preeminent military power in the region. It captured the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza Strip, Golan Heights and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, annexed East Jerusalem and part of the West Bank, and started building Jewish settlements in the occupied lands. The Arab armies extracted their revenge in October 1973, on the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur which ended in the Camp David accords in 1978 between Israel and Egypt. Egypt regained Sinai and Israel agreed to grant Palestinians autonomy. While outraged Arab countries threw Egypt out of the Arab league, Palestinian autonomy remained unresolved. In 1987 Palestinians began their first Intifada, the sustained campaign of protests and stone-pelting that led to the 1993 Oslo Accord between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation, which set out a five-year period of Palestinian autonomy in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip under a new entity, the Palestinian Authority (PA). This created a very messy situation in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, with the PA getting full control only in a few small areas, while Israel retained ultimate security control over most of the territory. The Second Intifada broke out in 2000 and raged till 2005, but with guns and suicide bombs replacing stones. The Israeli response was to create a ghetto in the occupied territories and keep the Palestinians under constant surveillance and persecution. It is a democracy only for the Jews, not for its 3 million Arab population in the West bank and 2.3 million in the Gaza strip. There are 450,000 Israelis in settlements outside East Jerusalem, which has increased fourfold since the Oslo accords. Gaza is especially vulnerable, under Hamas rule since 2007. Israel is aiming to exterminate them completely, which in an unattainable task. (II) The shadow of the second Intifada still hangs heavy on both Israelis and Palestinians, during which more than 1,000 Israelis and 3000 Palestinians were killed. Israeli forces demolished 4,000 Palestinian homes, jailed thousands of Palestinian youths and repeatedly bombed Palestinian infrastructure to coerce them to end the violence. It was triggered by the deliberately provocative visit of Ariel Sharon, then the leader of opposition, to a site known as the Temple Mount to Jews and Haram al-Sharif to Muslims. This was the same man who was forced to quit as Defence Minister in 1983 for watching over one of the most horrifying massacres in our times – killings of more than 4,000 Palestinian refugees – mostly elderly men, women and children - when pro-Israel Lebanese militias entered Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in besieged Beirut in 1982. The Israeli army under Sharon’s command did nothing to stop the violence. That did not prevent him from becoming the Prime Minister from 2001 to 2006. Now Israel is bombing the Jabalia Refugee camp in Gaza which it says hosts Hamas militants and killed at least 50 people – a mere statistic in the unending saga of violence and bloodbath. The 1993 Oslo Accord led to the PA under Yassar Arafat coming to power in the West Bank and Gaza. It helped Israel crush Hamas, but corruption and human rights abuses became the hallmark of PA administration and little headway was made for Palestinian peace and the creation of two states – neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis were interested in it. The Palestinians wanted the entire land from the Mediterranean to river Jordan for themselves, refusing to recognise the right of Israel to exist, and Israel was loath to withdraw from the occupied territories. As the peace negotiations became stalled, militant groups supported by Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries took to armed ambushes and terrorism to liberate Palestine, leading to the second Intifada. Israel tightened its control and surveillance in the West Bank, jailed and persecuted anybody it suspected and established checkpoints and barriers all over the West Bank. Arafat died in 2004, and his successor, Mahmoud Abbas, renounced violence, and became a de facto puppet in the hands of Israel. Israel finally left Gaza in 2005. Hamas seized power in Gaza 2007 by violently throwing out the Palestinian Authority (PA) which has since ruled the West Bank. It promptly hired some 40000 people with proven ideological loyalty to fill up all administrative posts by replacing the PA bureaucrats. But violence never ended and Israel launched full-scale military operations there from time to time, often in response to Hamas rocket attacks, bombing its infrastructure and often killing civilians, and maintained tight restrictions on all goods going to and from Gaza, thereby strangling its weak economy and plunging its impoverished people into further misery. Israel justifies all its repression to the terrorism of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other militant groups in Gaza it has occupied in 1967. It controls the entire territory stretching from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean, has a monopoly over the use of force, and uses it to sustain a draconian blockade of Gaza. It controls two-thirds of the West Bank with an iron grip through a system of checkpoints and strict policing, while carrying on a relentless expansion of its settlements, and has annexed some of the occupied territories including East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. A besieged, marginalised and disempowered people have been left with no option but to take to arms. Israel’s democracy also has severe limits, with differentiated rights, responsibilities and protections for different classes of people. Its 2018 “nation-state” law defines Israel as “the nation-state of the Jewish People” and holds that “the exercise of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish People”. There is no mention of democracy or equality for non-Jewish citizens. The fullest class of citizenship is reserved only for Israeli Jews who enjoy all the rights. Palestinians who have Israeli citizenship and reside in the pre-1967 Israel have political and civil rights but with limits. Palestinians in the occupied territories constitute the lowest class, and those in Gaza fare the worst with their freedoms and economic opportunities severely limited — a position that has further worsened since Hamas seized control of Gaza. It is nothing but an extremely unequal system – a different kind of apartheid in which people and territories are subject to radically different legal regimes. The world has many examples of one country occupying the territory of another, but ultimately assimilating it by granting its people full democratic rights at par with everyone else. Not so in Israel. Palestinians face discriminations every hour of their existence – for many of them, their movement, travel, civil status, economic activities, property rights, and access to public services are severely restricted. All these differentiations are legitimised and enforced through legal, political, and security measures imposed and enforced by only a section of the population – the Jews who control the State apparatus. This is the one-state reality of Israel today. Mr. Benyamin Netanyahu’s current extreme right-wing coalition government and their bellicose statements have destroyed even the vanishing illusions of a two-state reality. Mr Netanyahu wrote that “Israel is not a state of all its citizens” but rather “of the Jewish people—and only it." His Minister for national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir who was convicted in 2007 of inciting racism and supporting a Jewish terrorist organization, has declared that Gaza should be “ours” and that “the Palestinians can go to . . . Saudi Arabia or other places, like Iraq or Iran.” The Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich led an extremist settler movement. Its members have rather been demanding a Greater Israel defined not just as a Jewish state but one in which the law enshrines Jewish supremacy over all Palestinians who remain there as a lower caste. Its occupation is a permanent condition in which one state ruled by one group of people rules also over another group of people. This is the one-state reality that Israel wants, and such a reality, obviously, will be doomed to failure. The government has already promised to expand settlements and the encouraged settlers are attacking Palestinians with greater frequency while Israeli forces just look on. As long as hope for two states living side by side in peace existed – that is half a century now – the sham of a peace process has allowed Western countries to overlook Israel’s occupation in the hope of that aspirational future. They overlooked Israel’s systematic abuses of Palestinian human rights and their discriminatory system of graded democracy in which ethnicity and residence defined the rights of people. But that two-state solution has long been a non-starter and it is hardly likely now to be an alternative for peace. It is virtually impossible to avoid confronting a one-state reality, which has long been embedded in Israeli law, politics, and society. No alternative to that exists, and there has no meaningful political process to create one during the last half century. The Abraham Accords of 2020 which established Israel’s relations with Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan and the UAE again demonstrated that resolving the Palestinian issue is no prerequisite to normalisation with Arab states. The USA and Israel’s Western friends are committed to the status-quo of one state, but Arab people will remain tethered to the Palestinian issue and their rulers would not want another Arab spiring on their streets. The normalisation process has already met with roadblocks from Saudi Arabia and Jordan, and more will likely follow. Many enduring global problems are never resolved, but governments do find workable and sustainable solutions. Neither Jews nor Palestinians like to live by the sword - ordinary people only like to go along with their normal lives. Israel may pulverise Gaza with their bombs and tanks while sacrificing the lives of hundreds of its own solders and claiming thousands of Palestinian lives. Even supposing it is able to decapitate the present Hamas leadership and decimate its infrastructure completely, can it prevent its future leaders rising from the ranks of those who are today digging the rubbles from its bombings for near relatives and friends? What will it do – it cannot reoccupy Gaza, that will be too costly; neither can it leave the territory like it did in 2005 because then another radical group like the Hamas will spring up easily in an ungoverned territory. A corrupt PA rule will be unacceptable to Gaza people, and the unpopular PA may itself be loath to the idea, given its earlier bloody fights with Hamas. Understandably, Israel currently is in no mood to listen to any talk of ceasefire. It will continue its war whatever the cost and consequences. The past three weeks have seen the most devastating civilian toll in 75 years of Israel’s existence, and more Palestinians were killed in the first 15 days since October 7 than during the second Intifada and all the rounds of violence combined. Many more thousands of Palestinian civilians and children will perish and Israel may become increasingly isolated. Killings of innocents are not very easily forgotten, and spiral of violence will continue to mark life in the Middle East. But once the war dusts settle and river of blood gets frozen, Israel will be forced to choose between the alternatives of an even more violent third intifada, or people living within one binational Israeli-Palestinian state with equal rights and representations. If Israel chooses to remain locked in its current system of Jewish supremacy, it will live in the dangerous delusions of never-ending conflicts. Palestinians, on their part, also must accept the reality of Israel and give up their idea about the dissolution of a Jewish state in their homeland. They will have to forget Jihad and cooperate with the Israeli state to claim their rights and build a state that assures everyone equal rights and opportunities. The world must facilitate this transition, however long it takes.