The Israel-Hamas war: some thoughts

"We now have to cry bitterly for the Israeli victims, but we should also cry for Gaza"

As everyone I’ve been following with anguish and despair the news coming out of Israel and Gaza: first the barbarous terrorist acts committed by Hamas against Israeli civilians, followed by Israel’s equally barbarous terrorist reprisal against the civilian population of Gaza. I here want to share with you what I consider to be some articles and bits of information that may help shed some insight into what is happening.

Let’s start with Hamas itself. As I posted the other day, it’s important to keep in mind that Hamas — Israel’s sworn enemy — is largely a creation of the Israel itself:

For years, Israel encouraged Gaza’s Islamists as a counterweight to the secular nationalists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat’s Fatah, helping to turn a bunch of fringe Palestinian Islamists in the late 1970s into one of the world’s most notorious militant groups, which has killed far more Israeli civilians than any secular Palestinian militant group.

Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, who was the Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s, later told the New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief that he was giving money to the Muslim Brotherhood, the precursor of Hamas, on the instruction of the Israeli authorities. The funding was intended to tilt power away from both Communist and Palestinian nationalist movements in Gaza, and especially from Arafat (who himself referred to Hamas as “a creature of Israel”), which Israel considered more threatening than the fundamentalists. “The Israeli government gave me a budget”, the retired brigadier general confessed, “and the military government gives to the mosques”.

“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation”, Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, told the Wall Street Journal in 2009. Back in the mid-1980s, Cohen even wrote an official report to his superiors warning them not to play divide-and-rule in the Occupied Territories, by backing Palestinian Islamists against Palestinian secularists. “I… suggest focusing our efforts on finding ways to break up this monster before this reality jumps in our face”, he wrote. They didn’t listen to him. What we’re witnessing is a classic case of blowback.

This was corroborated even by an article published in Haaretz, which underscored Netanyahu’s role in bolstering Hamas, for the very reasons I explained above:

He was convinced that he could make deals with corrupt Arab tyrants while ignoring the cornerstone of the Arab-Jewish conflict, the Palestinians. His life’s work was to turn the ship of state from the course steered by his predecessors, from Yitzhak Rabin to Ehud Olmert, and make the two-state solution impossible. En route to this goal, he found a partner in Hamas. “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas”, [Netanyahu] told a meeting of his Likud party’s Knesset members in March 2019. “This is part of our strategy — to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank”.

Keep this in mind next time you hear Netanyahu frame this as war one between “civilisation and barbarism”. But Netanyahu’s responsibility for the tragic events underway goes well beyond his support for Hamas. As Aaron Maté pointed out, in 2002 the Arab League offered Israel full normalisation in return for Israel’s withdrawal from the Occupied Territories; the creation of a Palestinian state; and “just resolution” to the refugee issue. Iran endorsed it; and even Hamas tacitly accepted it by accepting a Palestinian state within the pre-1967 borders. Israel, with US backing, rejected it.

We then perhaps shouldn’t be surprised that a Haaretz editorial published the day following Hamas’ attack claimed that “Netanyahu bears responsibility for this Israel-Gaza war”:

The disaster that befell Israel is the clear responsibility of one person: Benjamin Netanyahu. The prime minister... completely failed to identify the dangers he was consciously leading Israel into when establishing a government of annexation and dispossession, while embracing a foreign policy that openly ignored the existence and rights of Palestinians.

It’s rather astonishing that the longest-running, most respected Israeli newspaper had a less jingoistic approach than most Western media outlets. The following day the same newspaper carried an even more striking article by Gideon Levy, one of Israel’s best-known journalists and authors, titled “Israel can’t imprison 2 million Gazans without paying a cruel price”. Here’s an excerpt from the article:

Behind all this lies Israeli arrogance; the idea that we can do whatever we like, that we’ll never pay the price and be punished for it. We’ll carry on undisturbed. We’ll arrest, kill, harass, dispossess and protect the settlers busy with their pogroms.

We'll visit Joseph’s Tomb, Othniel’s Tomb and Joshua’s Altar in the Palestinian territories, and of course the Temple Mount — over 5,000 Jews on Sukkot alone.

We’ll fire at innocent people, take out people’s eyes and smash their faces, expel, confiscate, rob, grab people from their beds, carry out ethnic cleansing and of course continue with the unbelievable siege of the Gaza Strip, and everything will be all right.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu bears very great responsibility for what happened, and he must pay the price, but it didn’t start with him and it won’t end after he goes. We now have to cry bitterly for the Israeli victims, but we should also cry for Gaza. Gaza, most of whose residents are refugees created by Israel. Gaza, which has never known a single day of freedom.

Amidst the savagery and barbarity on both sides, seeing that there are still voices of truth in Israel offers a small glimmer of hope that maybe not all humanity is lost. Indeed, Levy wasn’t the only one to take this brave stance. Ofer Cassif, a member of the Knesset and leftist Hadash coalition, said in a statement that he had warned the situation would “erupt” if Netanyahu’s government did not change its policies towards Palestinians:

We condemn and oppose any assault on innocent civilians. But in contrast to the Israeli government that means that we oppose any assault on Palestinian civilians as well. We must analyse those terrible incidents [the attacks] in the right context — and that is the ongoing occupation.

We have been warning time and time again… everything is going to erupt and everybody is going to pay a price — mainly innocent civilians on both sides. And unfortunately, that is exactly what happened.

The Israeli government, which is a fascist government, supports, encourages, and leads pogroms against the Palestinians. There is an ethnic cleansing going on. It was obvious the writing was on the wall, written in the blood of the Palestinians — and unfortunately now Israelis as well.

It’s astonishing that one has to say this, but pointing out Israel’s responsibilities in creating the conditions that led to Hamas’ attack is not the same thing as justifying Hamas. As Caitlin Johnstone has pointed out, practically all Western pundits and politicians used the word “unprovoked” in denouncing the attacks on Israel by Hamas — exactly the same narrative used in the context of Russia’s invasion, which was anything but unprovoked. As she wrote:

It’s clear by now that whenever you see the word “unprovoked” being forcefully repeated in a uniform way across the entire political/media class, whatever they’re talking about was definitely massively provoked. We saw this exact same thing when Russia invaded Ukraine; from the very beginning Western politics and media were saturated with the word “unprovoked”, bashing the Western public in the face with that message over and over and over again despite the obvious and undeniable fact that the war in Ukraine was most definitely provoked.

As Noam Chomsky quipped last year, ‘Of course, it was provoked. Otherwise, they wouldn’t refer to it all the time as an unprovoked invasion’. And the same is of course true of the latest Hamas offensive. There are all kinds of arguments you could legitimately make about it, but one argument you definitely cannot defend is that it was unprovoked.

As the South China Morning Post columnist Alex Lo commented:

It must be pointed out that what Hamas has done is terrorism pure and simple, and that it is an atrocity to commit violence against civilians, taking them hostage, desecrating the bodies of victims and even cheering and celebrating the act. But such horrors and atrocities are not being committed by Palestinian militants without a background and a context.

They did not come out of nowhere as unadulterated and uncaused evil. To claim that the latest terror attacks were “unprovoked” is to whitewash the background and context that constitute the very history of this unending conflict in Palestine. It’s morally reprehensible propaganda of the worst kind that the mainstream Anglo-American media culture has been guilty of for decades.

It’s hard to even know where to begin to describe the horrors that people in Gaza — and the Occupied Territories more in general — have been subjected to on a daily basis for decades. A good starting point, which I mentioned in the last post, would be the book by the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories, a harrowing description of life in the world’s largest “open prison”. Here’s an excerpt:

The conventional Israeli policy of ethnic cleansing employed successfully in 1948 against half of Palestine’s population, and against hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank in 1967, was of no use [in Gaza]. You could slowly transfer Palestinians out of the West Bank, and in particular out of the Greater Jerusalem area, but you could not do it in the Gaza Strip — once you had sealed it as a maximum security prison camp. The result was the onset of a policy of incremental genocide by Israel against the Gaza Strip. ... The militarization of the Israeli policy towards the Gaza strip began in 2005.

That year Gaza became an official military target from the Israeli point of view, as if it were a huge enemy base rather than a place of civilian habitation. Gaza is a city like any other in the world, and yet for the Israelis it became a dummy city for soldiers to experiment with the most recent and advanced weapons. ... [Practices included] the senseless demolition of houses, the spraying of civilians with phosphorus shells, the killing of innocent civilians by light weaponry, and obeying orders from their commanders generally to act with no moral compass. “You feel like an infantile child with a magnifying glass that torments ants, you burn them”, one soldier testified. In short, they practised the total destruction of the real city as they trained in the mock city.

For a shorter take, check out this article by the always-powerful Chris Hedges, “Palestinians Speak the Language of Violence Israel Taught Them”:

The indiscriminate shootings of Israelis by Hamas and other Palestinian resistance organizations, the kidnapping of civilians, the barrage of rockets into Israel, drone attacks on a variety of targets from tanks to automated machine gun nests, are the familiar language of the Israeli occupier.

Israel has spoken this blood-soaked language of violence to the Palestinians since Zionist militias seized more than 78 percent of historic Palestine, destroyed some 530 Palestinian villages and cities and killed about 15,000 Palestinians in more than 70 massacres. Some 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed between 1947 and 1949 to create the state of Israel in 1948.

This is not to defend the war crimes by either side. It is not to rejoice in the attacks. I have seen enough violence in the Israeli occupied territories, where I covered the conflict for seven years, to loathe violence. But this is the familiar denouement to all settler-colonial  projects. Regimes implanted and maintained by violence engender violence.

If you’re more into videos than text, check out this 10-minute video by the British-Iraqi hip-hop artist and political campaigner Lowkey, this incredible exchange between Fareed Zakaria and Palestinian activist and legislator Mustafa Barghouti — which somehow made it past the CNN filter — or this documentary by Abby Martin. While you’re at it, listen to this heartbreaking song by a 15-year-old rapper from Gaza, MC Abdul, which tells you more about life in the strip than a thousand articles. But perhaps not as much as the following image:

Ultimately, however, as Alex Lo points, the real problem with the “unprovoked attack” narrative is not only a moral one, but also and even more importantly — just as in the Russia-Ukraine conflict — a very practical one relating to the search for a viable peace settlement:

By legitimising violence from one side while delegitimising and demonising violence from the other — for whichever side you happen to support — it makes it impossible for an already intractable conflict to find a solution or a compromise. With their unconditional and uncritical support of Israel, the West and the United States in particular have essentially made such a peace impossible.

And now they are legitimising Israel’s brutal reprisal against Gaza. Israel’s collective punishment of the people of Gaza — “We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly,” Israel’s defence minister said, announcing a complete siege and total war on Gaza — has just begun, but the scope of the destruction already wrought by Israel’s bombing campaign is beyond shocking.

Here’s footage of Israeli jets flattening a high-rise residential building in central Gaza; of the aftermath of an Israeli strike on the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza; and of an entire neighbourhood turned to rubble. Over 700 people — including at least 91 children — have already been killed in the airstrikes.

The silence of Western countries over the indiscriminate bombing of civilians is unconscionable. As Andreas Krieg, a senior lecturer at the School of Security Studies at King’s College London, Royal College of Defence Studies and fellow at the Institute of Middle Eastern Studies, wrote on Twitter/X:

I can’t stop thinking about how different US, EU, UK reactions would be if these images were in #Ukraine. Palestinian civilians didn’t prompt, plan, finance, coordinate or support #Hamas atrocities. Our Western moral high ground will be measured against our silence over #Gaza.

Indeed, one can’t help but noting that that those who say — rightly — that nothing justifies Hamas’ barbarous acts of terrorism against Israeli civilians are the same ones justifying (often in the same sentence) Israel’s equally barbarous terrorist reprisal against the civilian population of Gaza.

The only words of sanity and restraint, as is often the case these days, are coming from non-Western countries. Here’s a thread covering the reactions of the Global South to the developments in Israel/Gaza. Here’s China’s statement:

The fundamental way out of the conflict lies in implementing the two-state solution and establishing an independent state of Palestine. The international community needs to act with greater urgency, step up input into the Palestine question, facilitate the early resumption of peace talks between Palestine and Israel, and find a way to bring about enduring peace.

Back in December, Xi Jinping had urged firmly to find a just settlement of Palestinian issue (only to be ignored by the Western media, of course):

The Palestinian issue bears on peace and stability in the Middle East. The historical injustices done to the Palestinian people should not be left unattended indefinitely. The legitimate rights and interests of a nation are not up for trade, and the demand to establish an independent state shall not be denied. The international community should stay firm in its commitment to the two-state solution and the principle of “land for peace”, make resolute efforts to promote peace talks, provide more humanitarian and development assistance to Palestine, and strive for a just settlement of the Palestinian issue at an early date. Recently, through the efforts of Arab states, important progress has been made in Intra-Palestinian reconciliation. China welcomes these developments. I would like to reiterate that China firmly supports the establishment of an independent state of Palestine that enjoys full sovereignty based on the 1967 border and with east Jerusalem as its capital. China supports Palestine in becoming a full member of the United Nations, and will continue to provide humanitarian assistance to Palestine, support livelihood projects in the country, and increase donations to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).

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Best regards,

Thomas Fazi

Website: thomasfazi.net

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