Israel’s dilemma

Three weeks have quickly passed since commandos of the Palestinian extremist group Hamas raided Israel’s border communities and launched what amounts to a coordinated killing rampage. Most of the 1,400 victims were innocent civilians—children, women, and the elderly. They also included young people who had just attended a nearby music festival.

As the bonnet-hooded militants headed back to their underground tunnels in Gaza, they took with them more than 200 hostages, most of them also civilians. It took several hours before Israel’s vaunted defense forces could reach the multiple sites of this horrific carnage and rescue those who had survived it. Global condemnation was swift. Political analysts struggled to comprehend the objectives and motives behind it even at the risk of appearing to rationalize what appears as a senseless and unprovoked display of violence.

In hindsight, Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack no longer seems pointless. It has exposed the vulnerability of Israel’s defenses. It has provoked the Israeli military to launch retaliatory airstrikes and artillery bombardment against Gaza that have killed more than 7,000 of its Palestinian population, at least 40 percent of whom are children. The scale of the Israeli response and its brutal sacrifice of civilian lives, even at this point, has been such that public opinion all over the world is dramatically shifting in favor of the Palestinian people. In the meantime, the long-anticipated ground assault into Gaza for the purpose of destroying Hamas and its military infrastructure remains on hold. As there seems to be no way of achieving this without killing more civilians, Israel is under pressure to exercise restraint lest it be accused of punishing an entire people for the deeds committed by a few. By the same token, the Israeli government is being pressed, not least by the United Nations, to end its blockade of Gaza and to allow fuel and humanitarian aid to reach its more than two million residents.

Even as Israel seethes in righteous anger over its inability to fully carry out what it regards as a just and necessary act of retaliation because of global objections, Hamas has gained some approval for its recent release of four hostages, including two Israeli American citizens. The Hamas move, facilitated by the government of Qatar, refocuses attention on the need to prioritize the safety of the hostages and secure their eventual release. This portends a period of protracted negotiation, which could further delay the planned assault on Gaza. Hamas clearly anticipated that the hostages they took would form a vital part of their negotiation for a ceasefire. But it is doubtful if the Israel Defense Forces would relent in their determination to destroy all of Hamas, even if that would mean sacrificing the hostages. Since Oct. 7, they have not allowed a day to pass without hitting parts of Gaza that they suspect to be lairs of Hamas.

The need to listen to pleas for a ceasefire might be felt more by the Israeli political leadership. It is they who are expected to be sensitive to global public opinion. As the world sees daily images of the mangled bodies of children being pulled out of the rubble of buildings hit by Israeli bombardment, anti-Israel sentiments have flared up—awakening a dormant anti-Semitism not just in the Middle East but in major European capitals. As expected, the most vehement reactions to Israel’s counterattack have come from the Arab world itself. The people of the region are standing up to their governments and challenging their leaders for signing agreements with Israel that effectively sideline the Palestinian cause.

It would be naïve to think that Hamas did not anticipate this. They have long known that other more pressing global issues have pushed the Palestinian issue to the margins and that the world hardly remembers or cares how they have been dispossessed of their lands or how they live today. Their problem has always been that compared to the Israeli image of a disciplined, progressive, and technologically superior people, the Palestinians have tended to be seen as a nation of losers led by incompetent, corrupt, and self-serving leaders.

Hamas’ first goal was clearly to redeem Palestinian dignity in the eyes of the world, and, in the process, to rekindle the Arab community’s passion for the Palestinian cause. A corollary objective, it now appears, is to regain the world’s sympathy for their struggle, which is only possible if Israel begins to be seen not as a heroic nation fighting for its right to exist, but as an oppressive and arrogant power that is determined to annihilate its Palestinian neighbors.

As I see it, Israel has been so blinded by rage after being caught flat-footed by the Hamas attack that it cannot see any good reason for a ceasefire. Oct. 7 happened because, as the great Israeli soldier-politician Moshe Dayan once put it, they had felt so secure that they “did not see those waiting in ambush … awaiting the day when serenity will dull our path.” In this frame of mind, Israel can hardly be expected to “heed the ambassadors of malevolent hypocrisy who call upon us to lay down our arms.”

Alas, this is probably where Hamas expects Israel to be.

Randy David

@inquirerdotnet

• Philippine Daily Inquirer / 12:02 AM October 29, 2023
https://opinion.inquirer.net/167608/israels-dilemma

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 The Palestinian question

It is safe to say that much of the world sympathizes with the State of Israel’s right to defend its existence. But Israel cannot hope to continue enjoying that sympathy if, in its fight for survival, it resorts to the same genocidal atrocities that it condemns in its enemies. Moreover, as recent events have shown, it will never feel secure so long as it denies the equal rights of Palestinians to self-determination. Succeeding generations of Palestinians are bound to carry on their elders’ struggle, no matter the cost, until their people can live in freedom. It is unfortunate that the various groups that have carried on this struggle through the years have been uniformly tagged as “terrorist” because of the methods some have used, thus stripping their cause of the legitimacy it deserves. Palestinians need to accept that they cannot gain much global support for their cause for as long as they premise their liberation on the destruction of Israel.The two-state solution that has been proposed by many, and most recently by United Nations Secretary General António Guterres, seems the most reasonable approach to this long-festering conflict. But it is not as easy to implement it as it may seem. Nor is it necessarily as just as it may appear at first blush.

The delineation of boundaries is perhaps the most contentious part, for we are talking of the same territory that is currently occupied by Israel, from which almost a million Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. At the minimum, Israel has to agree to withdraw from the Arab territories it captured during the 1967 Six-Day War—the Golan Heights on the Syrian border, the West Bank and East Jerusalem along the Jordanian border, and the Gaza Strip on the Egyptian border. (The Sinai Peninsula was returned by Israel to Egypt in 1979 as part of the peace treaty between the two countries).

Together, these are called the “Green Line” or the “pre-1967 borders,” a demarcation line resulting from the 1949 Armistice Agreements. Withdrawal from the territories beyond the “Green Line” would mean that Israel must agree to remove the Jewish settlements it established south and east of the Green Line in the aftermath of the Six-Day War.

Israel undertook a similar dismantling of Israeli settlements in 2005 as part of its “unilateral disengagement plan” from the Gaza Strip, evacuating about 8,000 Jewish settlers, and leaving that heavily fenced narrow strip of land to serve as a home (some say prison) for more than two million Palestinian inhabitants. Far from being an Israeli concession to a Palestinian state, the Israeli disengagement from Gaza was intended primarily to consolidate Israeli territory under a Jewish majority population, while confining the Palestinians to their enclaves. Today, Israel retains control over Gaza’s air and maritime space, and six out of seven land crossings. It also controls the latter’s water, electricity, and other utilities. It keeps a tight watch on the Palestinian population registry and maintains heavily patrolled no-go zones within the West Bank. There is no other term for this but apartheid. Without the appropriate guarantees and commitments ensuring the enjoyment of fundamental rights, a two-state solution would not be any different from what already exists today. Palestinians in Gaza are isolated from other Palestinians in the West Bank. In Gaza, the Hamas controls what semblance of government there is inside the Strip; but for nearly everything else, Gaza residents are at the mercy of Israel. In the West Bank, the Israeli government shares administrative control with a notoriously inept and corrupt Palestinian Authority.

It seemed an extremely clever move. Under the guise of giving Palestinians autonomy in their own territory, while keeping much of historic Palestine for itself, Israel enforces what amounts to an apartheid policy not unlike that which existed in South Africa. But rather than a negotiated partition of South Africa along racial lines, Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress consistently called for a unitary South African state that would give every citizen one vote irrespective of race.

Toward the end of his life, the late Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said, who had earlier pushed for a two-state solution, came to realize that a single-state solution, where Arabs and Jews alike would share the land and where equal rights were guaranteed to all citizens, might be a better option. This, as it turned out, was what the Israeli leadership feared more. In a one-man-one-vote polity, the Israelis would be easily outnumbered. As the former prime minister Ariel Sharon put it, in explaining the rationale for his 2004 disengagement plan for Gaza: “We cannot hold on to Gaza forever. More than a million Palestinians live there and double their number with each generation.” Shimon Peres, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and former prime minister, offered the same thought more succinctly: “We are disengaging from Gaza because of demography.”

The problem is that Israel did not merely disengage from Gaza. It proceeded to lock up the Palestinians in their ghettos, perhaps in the vain hope that, in their impoverished condition and in their inability to agree among themselves, they would cease to be a threat to Israel.

Randy David

@inquirerdotnet

• Philippine Daily Inquirer / 05:02 AM October 22, 2023
https://opinion.inquirer.net/167370/the-palestinian-question

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 The Israeli-Palestinian conflict: Why we care

At a meeting in Malacañang last Thursday, the murderous attack by the Palestinian militant group Hamas on Israeli communities a week ago was on the agenda. The first concern was to ascertain if any Filipinos were killed or injured, and whether they needed to be evacuated. The second item was to determine how this massive Palestinian assault and the retaliatory response it is expected to unleash might affect our economy and political relations.

It is a selfish and parochial view. But it’s understandable in the light of our pressing domestic problems. The wildly fluctuating price of oil has been uppermost in the minds of our economic managers. We are dependent on Middle East oil. If the conflict engulfs the whole region, it will compound our economic troubles in more ways than one. But the impact has so far been negligible, Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Arsenio Balisacan assured reporters.

Philippine exposure to Israel and Palestine in the form of labor, trade, and investment is “very little,” he said. Israel hosts around 30,000 Filipinos working mainly as caregivers, and even Hamas-run Gaza, now facing a total Israeli siege, has 131 overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) in its employ. I guess that’s “little” compared to the more than one million in the rest of the Middle East. But it gives us an idea of the scale and breadth of the OFW phenomenon, and how it implicates the Filipino nation in nearly every major calamity or catastrophe that hits any place beyond our shores.

For this reason alone—that the Filipino diaspora has intimately threaded our lives into those of other nations—we must care, over and above our narrow concerns, about what is happening today in Israel and Palestine. To care is to understand the complex history of this conflict—the colonial forces and motives that were at work at its inception, the powerful quest for a homeland, and the tangled past that has led generations of Israelis and Palestinians to where they are today.

To care is also to learn to recognize ourselves in the lives and experiences of other peoples that were similarly subjugated by colonialism, in the hope that we may understand ourselves better. To care is to go beyond the language of war and help find realistic paths to peace. To care is to offer meaningful assistance and solidarity to the unfortunate victims on both sides of this conflict, especially the innocent civilians who are usually the first to bear the deadly consequences of their leaders’ miscalculations.

Beyond the popular movies (e.g., “Lawrence of Arabia”) and TV shows (e.g., “Fauda”) that have been made of the events and characters in this conflict, there are many excellent documentaries on the internet that try to shed light on the background events leading to the current Israeli-Palestinian impasse. Two of the recent ones I have watched, for example, are on YouTube. “Whose land is it? Palestine or Israel?” was made by Amram Nowak and presented by David Hoffman. As gripping and as informative is “Palestine 1920: The Other Side of the Palestinian Story,” a documentary by Ashraf Mashharawi and featured by Al Jazeera, the Qatar-owned media organization.

As might be expected, none of these documentaries can claim to be free of bias. It is best to view them with a set of questions in mind and to crosscheck intriguing statements against other sources. That is how one learns the truth and its many representations.

To see the events of the past week in the eyes of Israelis, for instance, is to understand what the charismatic and iconic Israeli military leader and politician Moshe Dayan was trying to tell his people in his powerful eulogy for Roi Rotberg, a kibbutz security officer who was killed near the Gaza Strip in 1956.

“Early yesterday morning Roi was murdered. The quiet of the spring morning dazzled him and he did not see those waiting in ambush for him at the edge of the furrow. Let us not cast the blame on the murderers today … We will make our reckoning with ourselves today; we are a generation that settles the land, and, without the steel helmet and the cannon’s maw, we will not be able to plant a tree and build a home … This is the fate of our generation. This is our life’s choice—to be prepared and armed, strong and determined, lest the sword be stricken from our fist and our lives cut down.” [1]

To read this pithy funeral oration hand in hand with the declarations of the 1988 Hamas Covenant or its revised 2017 version—is to begin to understand the opposing raw emotions that drive this conflict, and why finding the way to peace is both extremely difficult and urgent [2]. The recurrent themes of the Hamas document include the following: 1. The State of Israel is illegal, and dismantling it is a basic condition for Palestinian liberation. 2. Armed resistance is the only way to protect the rights of the Palestinian people. 3. All previous negotiated political settlements, including the Oslo Accords, contravene international law and are to be rejected.

Amid this gloom, there are Israelis and Arabs who are capable of viewing this conflict with the eyes of the other, and it is they who may be able to tell the world where to find that elusive middle ground.

Randy David

@inquirerdotnet

• Philippine Daily Inquirer / 05:05 AM October 15, 2023
https://opinion.inquirer.net/167163/the-israeli-palestinian-conflict-why-we-care

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