The death toll in Israel and Gaza continues to rise, as Israeli armed forces unleash what the nation’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, described as an assault that “will reverberate with them for generations.”
Israel’s military ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip on Monday, halting deliveries of food, fuel and supplies to its 2.3 million people as it pounded the Hamas-ruled territory with waves of airstrikes in retaliation for the militants’ bloody weekend incursion.
Israel and its supporters are calling the Saturday attacks unprecedented, which given the history of the region is hyperbole. The attacks — gruesome, immoral, and unwise — are of a piece with others that have take place over the years, and sadly consistent with the kind of brutality inflicted by the Israeli military on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
I don’t intend this as victim-blaming. I’m just trying to relate the facts as I understand them. Hamas, while providing needed services in Gaza, also is a theocratic organization and non-state military force. It’s goal, when it comes to Israel, is genocidal, as encapsulated in the demand “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” a battle cry that denies Israel’s right to exist. Israel’s right-wing government, however, has enforced an apartheid-like regime on its Palestinian citizens and something much worse on Gaza.
The Israeli daily, Haaretz, made this clear in an editorial, arguing that Netanyahu shares the blame for what has unfolded.
The prime minister, who has prided himself on his vast political experience and irreplaceable wisdom in security matters, completely failed to identify the dangers he was consciously leading Israel into when establishing a government of annexation and dispossession, when appointing Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir to key positions, while embracing a foreign policy that openly ignored the existence and rights of Palestinians.
Much of the commentary here has ignored this, framing this as a war on Israel, similar to the war being waged by Russia against Ukraine. The differences seem obvious — one was precipitated by a powerful state actor (Russia), with massive army and nuclear weapons, against a smaller and theoretically weaker neighbor; the other was instigated by a smaller terrorist organization that is only tangentially connected to governance in Gaza against a larger occupying state that owns its own cache of nuclear weapons.
Some commentary — mostly on the right — has gone so far as to call for what essentially is genocide against Palestinians, echoing the language used by the Israeli defense minister. Gil Troy, writing from Israel in The Wall Street Journal, declared that “Israel needs to fight this latest battle with a clarity that its many previous conflicts with Gaza lacked,” that it “needs to do what it takes to protect its citizens.”
Hamas doesn’t care about Israeli life—or Palestinian life for that matter. Palestinian culture, however, worships land. This round of fighting mustn’t end until Israel has created an extended buffer zone protecting every Israeli, even if it requires bulldozing houses and evacuating Gazans.
He preemptively dismisses critics who “will call it ‘ethnic cleansing,’” arguing that “it is wholly justified self-defense.” And it is exactly what the right-wing Israeli government has been seeking for years, and the kind of provocation hostile actors in the region have hoped would lead to wider war.
He compares the attack to 9/11, which is a stretch but probably fair. His suggested response would mirror our own in the months following the demolition of the World Trade Center and the murder of nearly 3,000 civilians mostly in New York. President Bush at the time promised retribution, all-out war against terror, and led us into two decade-long wars that did little more than enflame the region.
I am a Jew. I was raised to support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, and in my earlier years viewed Israel as a kind of democratic island in a see of hostile autocracies. There was a moment when that may have been true, though the blood spilled by Palestinians and the Jewish Zionists meant that there was a limit to this idea. But I get the urge to respond in a knee-jerk way to the attacks. I have family in Israel, and friends. My dad’s cousin lives in Haifa, distant from the main fighting but near the Lebanese border. The war feels real, is real, despite my living an ocean and sea away.
My mind goes back to Hebrew school in the early 1970s, to the story of Samson, hair shorn by Delilah, robbed of his great strength through his love of a woman. Blinded. Enslaved. In the end, God returns to him his power and Samson wreaks revenge on his enemies.
I think of the Passover story, Jews enslaved, freed by their own efforts under God’s watchful eye. With God’s aid, as God’s chosen. Next year in Jerusalem. Hanukkah relates the story of the Maccabees, the muscular Jewish family that led Jews to independence against the Assyrians, a battle that culminated with the Miracle of the Lights.
These are stories of Jewish power in the face of existential threat, but they also are stories of victimhood, stories of vulnerability. The long history of antisemitism, of conspiratorial anti-Jewish belief punctuated by violence — the Russian pogroms, the Holocaust, lynchings, Communist witch hunts — only underscores these feelings.
Israel, for the Jews of my generation, was the bulwark against this. I remember the Yom Kippur of 1973, the war in the Sinai, the Golan Heights. Israel beset on all sides. We donated coins to the effort in Hebrew School. We watched the news when we got home. We said “Never Forget.” It seemed a simple equation, Israel as both powerful and vulnerable. An equation that has shifted over the last several decades as the nation fell prey to darker instincts, electing leaders with dark hearts who encouraged a rhetoric of permanent victimhood as cover. It’s a frame that provides convenient cover to remove Palestinians from all areas of Israeli life, to impose apartheid-like rules within its borders and the Occupied Territories.
The frame applied by groups like the ADL, that this was an unprovoked act, elides context, turning what is another battle in a larger deadly conflict into a singular event. The attack comes, as Haaretz writes, after “overt steps (were) taken to annex the West Bank, to carry out ethnic cleansing in parts of the Oslo-defined Area C, including the Hebron Hills and the Jordan Valley.”
This also included a massive expansion of settlements and bolstering of the Jewish presence on Temple Mount, near the Al-Aqsa Mosque, as well as boasts of an impending peace deal with the Saudis in which the Palestinians would get nothing, with open talk of a “second Nakba” in his governing coalition. As expected, signs of an outbreak of hostilities began in the West Bank, where Palestinians started feeling the heavier hand of the Israeli occupier. Hamas exploited the opportunity in order to launch its surprise attack on Saturday.
Matt Druss, executive vice president of the Center for International Policy a former top foreign policy aide to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), condemned the attack, saying “what Hamas has done is awful. We condemn it unequivocally.” But, like the Haaretz editorial board, he argued that we have to look at what is now unfolding within a larger context. The Palestinians, he said,
have continued to suffer under an occupation and blockade that is decades old. That is absolutely necessary context. That does not excuse what Hamas has done. There is no excuse for that. But there is an important context of understanding where this violence grows from.
This is the context ignored by the ADL, when it argues that Israel “has the indisputable right to defend itself against the Iran-backed Hamas terror organization.” ADL describes the Hamas attacks — rightly — as war crimes, but the occupation, the internal apartheid, and now the response, also qualify as immoral and criminal.
We can view the missile strikes along the border of the Gaza Strip through the lens of victimhood. We can point to the growing death toll of Israeli citizens, allow Netanyahu and his government to use their deaths to justify an all-out war. We can do all of this, but we do this in a vacuum. The attack by Hamas forces killed hundreds of Israelis, but the response by Israel killed hundreds, as well. And the victims on both sides appear to be mostly civilians. Innocents.
There can be no justification for an attack on civilians. That should not have to be said, but many will see any attempt to move beyond the simple binaries we have grown accustomed to on this issue as appeasement. So I’ll say it again: There is no justification for an attack on civilians — not by Hamas, certainly, and not as a response by Israel.
I don’t know what the answer is here, but I do know we cannot continue along the same rocky path we have been treading. We have to get past the tribalism that infects both sides, recognize that both sides have legitimate complaints, and find ways to address them.
By saying a colonial state has a right to exist basically justifies its founding on top of the indigenous population. People have a right to exist, but not states. Especially those founded on the displacement of indigenous population.
I see lots of hand-wringing about everyday Israelis killed while ignoring the daily killings of everyday Palestinians by the IDF, emboldened settlers, and the fascists in govt. How can you expect Palestinians not to want to be free from the river to sea when they once were? They have been under the boot of colonizers and occupation for over 100 years.
The occupation is solely to blame for the abhorrent violence we’re seeing. And it’s a coalition of Palestinian groups, not just Hamas—an easy western target to dehumanize all Palestinians and essentially excuse the calls for outright genocide we’re seeing now.
You simply cannot expect the oppressed, the occupied, the subjugated, the displaced to resist in ways white westerns find acceptable. Hamas does not enjoy widespread Palestinian support but who else fights for the people’s right to exist? Who but these groups attempt to at least defend the populations in Gaza and the West Bank. What other means exist to break free?
Peaceful marchers are gunned down by the IDF. One of the most revolutionary grassroots nonviolent movements, BDS, is being actively criminalized across the US and EU. Social media accounts banned.
No one wants it this way but what other way is there? Paraphrasing a tweet I read, decolonization is, indeed, violent. But it pales in comparison to the violence of the initial colonization.