The Holy Land
Israel and Palestine Find Themselves, Swords Drawn, Under A Great Cloak of Mourning
Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today?
-Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
My apologies for the radio silence. I have been processing some very heavy personal news which I may or may not choose to share here at some point and, in the meantime, the world has continued to burst into flames.
On 7 October, the Palestinian organization Hamas, which has ruled in Gaza since winning January 2006 legislative elections (it never stood for elections again) and ousting the rival political group Fatah from the strip during a brief, violent civil war in June 2007, launched a multi-pronged cross-border attack on Israel that resulted in the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
Documents found on the bodies of Hamas terrorists by Israeli first responders showed that the group created detailed plans to target elementary schools and a youth center to “kill as many people as possible,” seize hostages and quickly move them into Gaza. Gunmen targeted a music festival in the desert, slaughtering at least 260 people in a ghastly echo of the November 2015 terrorist attack by ISIS gunmen on the Bataclan in Paris. In the Be'eri kibbutz, founded two years before the state of Israel, Hamas murdered over 100 people. In the kibbutz of Kfar Az, the terrorists murdered entire families, including small children and babies. Some bodies were so badly mutilated or burned, the wait for identification has delayed the mourning of the aggrieved families.
As this atrocity occurred, the leaders of Hamas were not even in Gaza, but more than 1,000 miles away in Qatar, living lives of luxury that they have grown accustomed to and built for their families, profiteering from multimillion dollar land deals, real estate and black market fuel. Israel’s corrupt Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, on the political backfoot for months at home and who undercut Israel’s security in his drive to stay out of prison, sought, as usual, to blame everyone but himself for his government’s failures. On cue, the Isralies began bombing Gaza, killing well over a thousand people, many of them civilians, in a matter of days.
But the attacks on Israel, as shocking as they were, did not come out of a vacuum.
In August and September 2005, under the premiership of Ariel Sharon (who, as an Israeli general, had been deeply implicated in war crimes committed by Christian militias during Israel's 1982 war in Lebanon) and more than a decade after many hoped the Oslo Accords would pave the way for a Palestinian state, Israel “disengaged” from Gaza, tearing down settlements and evacuating Israeli settlers and the army from the 25 mile long and 7 mile wide strip of land. Dov Weissglass, Sharon's senior adviser at the time, said plainly in October 2004 that the purpose of disengagement from Gaza was not Palestinian self-sufficiency (let alone independence) but rather to “the freezing of the peace process” to “prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state [and] prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda.”
[Though it is not often commented upon in the Western media, as has been reported in The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere, in the 1980s the state of Israel actually provided some early support for Hamas, seeing it as a useful counterweight to Yasser Arafat’s more secular Palestinian Liberation Organization, itself dominated by Fatah.]
The election of Hamas less than a year later and subsequent expulsion of Fatah from Gaza played adroitly into the hands of this plan, resulting in two statelets, one in Gaza governed by the nihilistic Islamism of Hamas, and one ostensibly ruled by Fatah in the West Bank, where the Israeli government still exercises ultimate control and where illegal Israeli settlements and their violent, fanatic residents are sometimes protected by the Israeli security apparatus as they target Palestinians.
The grim ballet between Hamas and the Israeli state has continued ever since, with Hamas lobbing rockets towards Israel and successive Israeli governments subjecting the civilian population of Gaza to ghastly forms of blanket collective punishment.
The Israeli military unquestionably committed war crimes during its operations in Gaza in 2014, blowing up schools and hospitals and killing thousands of civilians. Soldiers who served during the campaign described “reducing Gaza neighborhoods to sand, firing artillery at random houses to avenge fallen comrades, shooting at innocent civilians because they were bored and watching armed drones attack a pair of women talking on cellular phones because they were assumed to be Hamas scouts." In 2017, during the so-called Great Return protests at the border with Israel, Israeli forces killed dozens of unarmed protesters, including journalists.
That terrible despair should grow in such a milieu should surprise no one. Though it is not an exact parallel, I can say from my experiences working in some of the most deprived and disenfranchised neighborhoods in Port-au-Prince Haiti, that the more excluded, the more despairing and the more seemingly drowning in violence communities are, the more susceptible they are to the lure of the kind of violent rejectionism that both Haiti’s gangs and groups like Hamas perpetuate.
All of this context is important. I myself have been a long-time and fierce critic of the abuses that successive Israeli governments have heaped on Palestinian civilians. The fact that Israel is currently run by a quasi-criminal regime led by a man who the Israeli daily Haaretz noted, “has no problem joining forces with the Holocaust deniers, antisemites and their enablers who pose a threat to the safety of Jews, as long as it serves his political interests” and whose governing ethos the Israeli magazine 972 described as “messianic coalition partners [demanding] a complete legal overhaul in order to see through their grand plans for this country: entrenching apartheid, advancing annexation, and expelling Palestinian representatives from the Knesset” makes matters even worse.
But it is also important to state that the actions of Hamas - targeting defenseless civilians - were not resistance, they were a hideous anti-Jewish pogrom reminiscent of 1941’s Farhud in Baghdad or the slaughter in Kishinev (present-day Chișinău,) in 1903 that targeted and killed Jews as Jews. They were barbaric, indefensible, gloating and sadistic.
Shortly after the attack, Iran’s foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian - whose bosses have been ruling Syria as a virtual colony and helping its dictator ethnically cleanse and massacre his opponents for a decade - met with Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Qatar, the representatives of two genocidal, dictatorial, reactionary regimes commiserating in a state that is little more than the private playground of yet another dictator, Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani. These criminals aren't liberating anyone, folks.
[On a side note, it is extraordinary how in so many terrible things happening over such a wide expanse of the world - from Israel/Palestine to Lebanon to Syria to Yemen to Ukraine to Tigray - one finds a thread leading back to Tehran. Iranians deserve better.]
The collective global response to the attacks and subsequent violence has been almost enough to make one despair of humanity. Social media was full of relentless incitement blaming all Jews for the actions of the Israeli government. Pro-Hamas demonstrators in London attacked and assaulted an Iranian trying to protest in solidarity with Israel. A resolution by U.S. congressional representatives Cori Bush, Rashida Tlaib, Andre Carson, Summer Lee and Delia Ramirez omitted any condemnation of the atrocities of Hamas. In a joint declaration with the the Arab League, which welcomed Bashar al-Assad back to its fold after he murdered thousands of Palestinians in places like Yarmouk, the African Union proved again that it’s a useless club of dictators and dictators-to-be releasing a statement on the situation that omitted even a word about the Hamas massacre. A Cornell University history professor, Russell Rickford, said that he found the atrocities Hamas committed “exhilarating.” As progressive academics refused to condemn Hamas' crimes, Israeli leftist intellectuals signed a letter saying “now more than ever we need support & solidarity from the global left in the form of an unequivocal call against indiscriminate violence.”
[On the other extreme, the relentless incitement of far-right media in the United States resulted in the murder of an innocent 6 year-old Palestinian-American boy in Illinois.]
Unlike many of Latin America’s underwhelming leaders, Chilean president Gabriel Boric spoke with admirable moral clarity when he tweeted “Our solidarity is and will always be with the victims of violence, without distinction ... .We condemn without any qualifications the brutal attacks, murders and kidnappings by Hamas. Nothing can justify them or relativize their most energetic rejection. We also condemn the indiscriminate attacks against civilians carried out by the Israeli army in Gaza and the decades-long illegal occupation of Palestinian territory in violation of international law.”
The hypocrisy of the world has also been on full display. If you are the Chinese Communist Party committing crimes against humanity against the Uyghurs, the Assad dictatorship dropping over 80,000 barrel bombs on civilians, the House of Said raining airstrikes on the defenseless inhabitants of Yemen, the so-called Islamic Republic of Iran unlawfully murdering, torturing and detaining your own citizens or Vladmir Putin blowing up Syrian hospitals, don't worry. There will be no global protests against you.
And as the killing went on in the Middle East, nihilist Islamism raised its head elsewhere in the world, as well. In Brussels, a 45-year-old Tunisian - who had submitted an asylum application in November 2019, was rejected but never deported despite the fact "he was known to the police for human trafficking, illegal residence and endangering state security” - pledged allegiance to ISIS and shot two Swedish sports fans before being slain by police. In the northern French city of Arras, teacher Dominique Bernard was murdered by an Islamist terrorist almost three years to the day of the killing of teacher Samuel Paty. Their lives had value. And as we must with any totalitarian ideology, we must speak plainly about the ideology that led to their deaths and denounce it, not make excuses for it. Interviewed in Le Figaro, the Algerian author Boualem Sansal - someone who knows something about Islamist violence - observed “useful idiots and opportunists come running from all sides to betray themselves and serve [nihilistic Islamism]...But idiots and opportunists will be killed like the others at the end of their service.”
In his 1996 book Rue des pas perdus, the Haitian author Lyonel Trouillot wrote that “Bloodshed isn't a virtue or a miracle, it's just plain bloodshed.” As hard as it may be to believe, if one wants to see lucidity and sanity in the analysis of the events of recent days, the place to look is not abroad, but among the Israelis and Palstinians themselves.
“I am going to defend my country from our enemies,” wrote Israeli reservist Nir Cohen on Twitter. “Our enemies are murderous terrorist organizations controlled by Islamic extremists. The massacre of innocent Israelis must not be answered by the massacre of innocent Palestinians.” In an essay in 972, the feminist Palestinian activist and writer Samah Salaime wrote that “I am surrounded by these thoughts about this cursed and complex place we were born into, and about the wretched leadership on both sides that is leading us — a human fabric so rich, so sad and so vital at the same time — to nowhere.”
“Hamas’ horrific crimes against innocent civilians - including children, women, and the elderly - have shaken us all, and we are struggling to recover from the unbearable sights and sounds,” wrote a coalition of more than 20 Israeli human rights organizations. “[But] even now – especially now – we must maintain our moral and humane position and refuse to give in to despair or the urge for vengeance…Having always opposed the harming of innocent civilians, it remains our duty in these terrible times - as we count our dead on the Israeli side and worry about wounded, missing, and abducted loved ones, and as bombs are being dropped on residential neighborhoods in Gaza, wiping out entire families with no possibility of burying the dead – to raise our voices loud and clear against the harming of all innocent civilians, both in Israel and Gaza.”
There is a lesson of common human decency in these sentiments that those of us abroad, especially, should all be receptive to.
Murdering Israeli civilians in 2023 will not bring back the villages and olive groves someone lost in 1948. Killing Palestinian civilians in Gaza in 2023 will not make Israel safer when the terrorist masterminds sit safely far away and the man who oversaw the security failure remains Prime Minister. Those abroad who want to express solidarity with Israeli or Palestinian civilians should not put their souls at hazard arguing the indefensible out of base tribalism or ideology. There were no more "occupying" infants and civilians in Be'eri or Kfar Aza than there were "terrorist" infants and civilians in Gaza. Don't throw your basic humanity into the gutter for any cause.
To all the Israelis and Palestinians living in mourning and in great fear, I hold you in my thoughts, for all your lives are valuable. May your leaders demonstrate greater wisdom than they have thus far, and may you be kept safe until tomorrow and beyond.