Gaza: Facts on the Ground

 

By David K. Shipler 

            In the late 1970s, Israel’s former general Ariel Sharon used to call Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories “facts on the ground.” As agriculture minister then, he provided the roads, wells, and power lines that made settlements possible. They would anchor the Israeli presence, he argued, making it hard to dislodge.

            He was accurate as far as the West Bank was concerned. Those settlements, proliferating over the decades, have balkanized the land that would be the heart of any Palestinian state.

But he himself dislodged the Israeli presence from the Gaza Strip. He still had a general’s mindset as he later became defense minister and then prime minister, and by 2005 had come to see the densely-populated territory as more liability than asset. His most notable and controversial act as prime minister was to end the occupation by withdrawing the army and sending Israeli soldiers to forcibly evict Israeli Jews from Gaza settlements.

The resentment and backlash by Israel’s religious right, combined with the area’s rapid takeover by Hamas militants, demonstrated the limitations of pure military calculations, which rarely consider politics, emotions, or the human quest for dignity. Israelis’ willingness to consider a Palestinian state was virtually obliterated by Hamas rockets.

Sharon was known for brutal retaliation, so if he were still alive and in power, he would surely be decimating Gaza as thoroughly as Israel has done since the intimate atrocities by Hamas fighters during their invasion of Oct 7, 2023. The resulting “facts on the ground”—some 80 percent of Gaza’s buildings destroyed or damaged, the bones of tens of thousands in the earth, a health care system and infrastructure in ruins, systematic sexual violence, over 2 million traumatized Palestinians struggling to survive—define a new reality not easily dislodged.

Most Palestinian Arabs in Gaza are powerless. They have never governed themselves in an open democracy. Their leaders have been ineffectual or violent, compensating for helplessness by militarizing their territory into a hotbed of terrorism against Israeli civilians. Israel has mostly walled them off, and fellow Arabs in nearby countries have wanted only the rhetoric of their cause, not the people themselves.

Compounding their misfortune, Gaza families are now at the mercy of the two worst governments imaginable, in the United States and Israel. Both are run by extreme anti-Arab radicals who care nothing for those caught in that miserable reality. President Trump, indulging his impulsive and mercenary fantasies, urges ethnic cleansing—voluntarily, he says—under the euphemism of luxury real estate development along Gaza’s Mediterranean beaches. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, amplifying his cabinet’s most excessive hatreds, smiles appreciatively at Trump’s dream of being rid of all those Palestinian Arabs.

It might be logical to assume, as Trump does, that many Gazans would rather be somewhere else instead of camping in the rubble. Departures through Egypt have been popular among young Palestinians, and even over the years before the current war, significant minorities of 26 to 48 percent told pollsters that they considered emigrating, according to the respected Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research. Turkey was the most favored destination, followed by Germany, Canada, the United States, and Qatar. And that was before October 7. Presumably, the numbers have risen since.

But here’s where facts on the ground get in the way. First, leaving is seen as a statement of retreat or betrayal—betrayal of the Palestinians’ aspirations for self-determination. Second, Hamas, which seeks the Jewish state’s destruction, has been diminished by Israel’s onslaught but not eliminated. We’ve seen the videos of masked, armed fighters surrounding Israeli hostages being released.

Third, while the vast majority of Gaza residents are descendants of refugees from inside what is now Israel, uprooted during Israel’s 1948 war of independence, a good number have told reporters of their attachment to their towns and neighborhoods of Gaza. Uprooting themselves again would feel like a repeated exile.

Fourth, nobody will take huge numbers of Palestinians—not Egypt, not Jordan, not Saudi Arabia, and certainly not Trump’s United States. At least half of Jordan’s population has Palestinian heritage, and as Jordan’s King Abdullah surely made plain to Trump during a White House visit, his pro-American monarchy would be destabilized by a huge influx of Palestinians from Gaza. The same for Egypt, whose alignment with Washington would be jeopardized.

Palestinians have not been integrated into any Arab countries except Jordan, where most Palestinian have citizenship. They remain stateless in Lebanon and Syria, for example, where they are largely confined to longstanding slums that still bear the label “refugee camps.”

The one silver lining to Trump’s fantasies of relocation is its provocation: Arab countries have been provoked to counter with a five-year, $53.2 billion reconstruction plan for Gaza. But the proposal has two conditions that Israel rejects: the right to a Palestinian state, and “the full return” to Gaza of the Palestinian Authority (PA), which has weak oversight in parts of the West Bank. The PA, created by the 1993 Oslo accords, could be the embryo of statehood, so Netanyahu has spent years undermining its viability, partly by permitting millions in funds from Qatar to flow to the PA’s chief rival: Hamas. Yes, you read that right.

Trump is a new fact on the ground. His influence so far is contradictory. On the one hand, he is so eager to chalk up a victory by extending the Israeli-Hamas ceasefire and winning the release of remaining Israeli hostages that he broke with precedent and sent an aide to negotiate directly with Hamas. Netanyahu’s government was infuriated. But it can count its blessings on the other hand, since Trump is unleashing Israel to be as harsh as it wants against Palestinians. Whatever mild restraints the US placed on the Israelis—and they weren’t many—seem to have vanished.

Trump’s new ambassador in Jerusalem, Mike Huckabee, is a right-wing Christian who favors Israeli annexation of the West Bank, which Israeli settlers call by its biblical names Judaea and Samaria, connoting ancient Jewish title to the lands. Expect the State Department to adopt those terms. Annexation of Jewish settlements there was proposed in the first Trump administration.

If Israel’s radical government moves to take the entire territory, Trump probably won’t object—unless he wants credit for another victory. That would be the establishment of Saudi-Israeli relations, similar to his first administration’s Abraham Accords, which won Israel ties with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco. The Saudis, anxious to counter Iran and eager for US security guarantees, were on the brink of following suit with Israel when Hamas attacked. The Israeli atrocities in response hardened the Saudi demand for eventual Palestinian statehood, which West Bank annexation would block.  

Beneath those obvious impediments to both Trump’s grandiose scheme and the prospect for a near-term peaceful resolution of the conflict lie the facts of trauma and grief and humiliation visited upon both Israelis and Palestinians. These are active wounds as obstinate as any settlement of concrete and mortar.

 Israeli women and men taken hostage into Gaza were sexually abused and assaulted, as reported by a doctor who treated them after their release. During the October 7 attack, gruesome gang rapes and murders of Israeli women fueled a fire of revenge that burned through Gaza when Israel retaliated.

Sexual violence and humiliation have been the “intentional policy” of Israeli authorities, according to a report published last week by a United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry for the Human Rights Council. Multiple interviews and videos were cited to document alarming findings:

Israel troops forced men to strip in front of their families—to make sure they weren’t hiding weapons, Israelis authorities explained. They forced religious women to remove their veils and even undress to their underwear in the company of male soldiers and other men. Sexual assault of female prisoners “included kicking the women’s genitals, touching their breasts, attempting to kiss them, and threats of rape.” Male prisoners were also raped, the commission said.

 A November 2023 attack on a center for survivors of violence against women “appeared to have a clear gendered dimension,” judging by the soldiers’ graffiti in Hebrew: “We came here to fuck you, you and your mothers, you bitches,” accordng to the report, and, “The dirty pussies of your prostitutes, you ugly Arab you ugly, you sons of bitches, we will burn you alive you dogs.”

The commission does not entertain the possibility that the individual incidents are ad hoc aberrations typical in every war. Instead, it projects them onto a big screen of nefarious policy. “Sexual and gender-based violence is increasingly used as a method of war by Israel to destabilize, dominate, oppress and destroy the Palestinian people,” it concludes.

For example, in recounting the shelling of the Al-Basma IVF Centre in December 2023, the report says that about 4,000 embryos and 1,000 sperm samples were destroyed. The center carrried out 70 to 100 in vitro fertilization procedures monthly. “Satellite imagery indicates that the area around the clinic was extensively damaged due to the hostilities,” the commission notes. It presents no evidence that the center was intentionally targeted instead of being part of widespread collateral damage.

Yet that attack becomes ground for the report’s most damning conclusion: “The Commission finds that the Israeli authorities have destroyed in part the reproductive capacity of the Palestinians in Gaza as a group, including by imposing measures intended to prevent births, one of the categories of genocidal acts in the Rome Statute and the Genocide Convention.”

“Genocidal acts.” Were they? Whatever narrative each side constructs about this war, beliefs are also facts on the ground, not easily overcome.