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.

The Year of Moral Loss

 

By David K. Shipler             

              The deep paradox in the Arab-Israeli conflict is the immorality of each side’s moral certitude. Each is convinced of its righteousness.

But the high ground of righteousness has been completely flattened in the last year, beginning with the intimate atrocities of October 7 by the Palestinian movement Hamas, then with the remotely inflicted atrocities by Israel. The only shred of morality left is whatever attaches to victimhood.

              Not that wars are moral enterprises. Not that this conflict has ever been ethical or conducted within Queensberry rules. Since modern Israel’s founding in 1948, the struggle has been nasty, grinding, and brutalizing. Still, it respected certain boundaries. Forty years ago, the Palestinians had not yet adopted suicide bombers as a standard weapon against Israeli civilians, nor had they sexually assaulted and tormented young Israeli women. Israel had not sent tanks and fighter jets against Palestinian residents of Gaza and the West Bank, nor had Jewish settlers so systematically driven Palestinians from their West Bank villages. And non-Arab actors such as Iran had not directly attacked Israel.

              But now, as Tom Friedman has said, so many red lines have been crossed that “you kind of get used to it. And at the end of the day, there are no more red lines. And when that happens, watch out.”

              Both Israeli and Palestinian societies are diverse and fluid. Neither is monolithic; both contain moderate citizens embracing coexistence. Yet the most radical and hateful among them have been propelled into power by decades of strife. Palestinian leaders see all Israelis, including children, as potential soldiers. Israeli leaders in the current government—the most extreme in Israel’s history—conflate all Palestinians in Gaza with Hamas, one reason that Israel is willing to bomb whole buildings and kill many civilians to get one commander. On both sides, those at the top seem to have no moral brakes.

              Their military tactics have been devastating to non-combatants. Abhorrent methods of warfare have been normalized: sadistic killings and hostage-taking, food deprivation and massive bombings, indiscriminate rocketing, assassinations, exploding pagers designed to murder and maim even while innocent bystanders suffer. Hamas has embedded its fighters among civilians in their homes and schools and hospitals, using innocents as human shields. Undeterred, the Israelis have fought through those so-called shields, mostly with air strikes and artillery, killing and wounding tens of thousands, impeding food supplies, and shattering medical facilities.

Israel vs. Hamas: "Whose Side Are You On?"

 

By David K. Shipler 

                On Monday, October 9, two days after the assault by Hamas on innocent civilians in Israel, Kalpana Shipler was asked by a fellow student at her public high school in Washington, D.C., “Whose side are you on?” That was the question being tossed around by multiple teenagers to one another as Israel began bombing Gaza in retaliation. And that seems to be the question dividing college campuses and mobilizing protests, corrupting the capacity to analyze complexity. If you are forced to pick sides, you miss the tangles of guilt that have bound Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs for decades.

                Kalpana didn’t fall into the trap, I am proud to say as her grandfather. She was wise enough at age 15 to resist an instant answer, to know that she didn’t know, a rare skill in today’s America. She deferred to the cause of learning.

                Luckily, young people coming of age are not yet jaded. Shocked by the scenes of devastation and starvation in Gaza, students have acted on a purity of outrage, pushing the envelope of accepted rhetoric and calling to account their own country, Israel’s major supporter.

Yet the impulse to pick a side, as if war were a football game, has an unhealthy feature. It concentrates the blame, villainizing one adversary and idealizing the other. The dichotomy was prevalent among some activists who justifiably protested the U.S. war in Vietnam and decried our ally’s (South Vietnam’s) assaults on human rights, while regarding North Vietnam and the Vietcong as the only authentic patriots, skipping over the North’s tighter dictatorship and the VC’s brutality.

                A similar intellectual and moral flaw runs through the current protests over the Gaza war, in which Israel is supposedly “a monopoly of violence,” in the words of a Cornell professor. Palestinians through Hamas, which strives to replace the Jewish state with an Islamic state, are portrayed as exercising their anti-colonialist rights to liberty. Sometimes—only sometimes—vilification of the Jewish state has crossed into vilification of Jews, raising the stench of antisemitism in the “pro-Palestinian” encampments. They might be called “antiwar” encampments if they actually opposed war, if they protested not only against the atrocities Israel has committed in an effort to stamp out Hamas—the vast bombing, the barriers to food and medical care—but also against the intimate atrocities by Hamas—the rapes, torture, mutilation, and kidnappings—which unleashed this fighting.

It was astonishing to see 33 Harvard student organizations sign onto a statement issued by the Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee immediately after October 7 holding “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” Seriously? “Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum,” the statement declared. “The apartheid regime is the only one to blame. Israeli violence has structured every aspect of Palestinians existence for 75 years. . . Palestinians have been forced to live in a sate of death, both slow and sudden.”

                 So spoke some of the purportedly smartest people of the next generation. One can imagine them delighting in their incisive brilliance as they looked past the Hamas violence into its roots. Fine. There is never a vacuum. There are causes of every effect. However, to turn back only one page in a long history of mutual victimization demonstrates a laziness of mind or, perhaps, a mind indoctrinated.

If you are pro-Israel, do you leave out the thuggish gangs of Jewish settlers terrorizing and assaulting West Bank Palestinians? If you are pro-Palestinian, do you omit Israel’s military withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, the Palestinian self-government under Hamas arming itself and rocketing Israel? If you are pro-Israel, do you leave out the stifling border controls that suffocated Gaza’s development and fostered poverty? If you root only for the Palestinians, do you ignore the Hamas suicide bombers sent against Jews two decades ago to torpedo the growing Israeli acceptance of Palestinian statehood?

In your journey back in time, do you stop before Arab armies attacked the fledgling Jewish state? Do you stop before the Israelis’ expulsion of Arabs from their home villages before and during Israel’s 1948 war of independence? Do you stop before the earlier Arab assaults on religious Jewish communities in the Holy Land or, on the other side, the Jewish assaults on Arab civilians there? Do you stop before the Holocaust? Before the pogroms of Europe, which so traumatized the Jewish people that its reverberations still ring today?

If you are looking for the original sin in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, keep going, and going, and going until you come to realize that both sides are victims. This is not moral equivalence. This is suffering that is particular to each people, not to be measured or weighed, but—if you want to campaign against war—to be acknowledged. As an Israeli said to me long ago, putting two victims together is like mixing fire and kerosene.

Victimhood confers an illusion of moral immunity. “The sense of victimhood is functional for a nation that is involved in an ongoing bloody conflict,” wrote the Israeli thinkers Daniel Bar-Tal and Elkiva Eldar in the newspaper Haaretz. “It shapes the perception of the threatening situation against the cruel enemy and provides moral justification for harming it unrestrainedly and without mercy. Victimhood distinguishes between us and the Palestinians and provides a sense of moral superiority and permission to dehumanize them. . . . Victimhood severs the society from a sense of guilt and leaves room only for feelings of anger and revenge.”

The same might be said of the Palestinian side.

So, how does complexity figure into the student-led protests? It doesn’t. Demonstrations don’t do nuance. They are meant to be categorical and dogmatic. They are not dispassionate classroom exercises in the ambiguities and contradictions of history, politics, and warfare. They are meant to galvanize, excite, force change, and call on the clarity of conscience. They don’t even have to be practical, as in thinking that university divestments from companies doing business in Israel, one of their demands, will tip Israel’s policies. What could tip Israel’s policies, imposing a modicum of restraint, are the Biden Administration’s recent delay in certain weapons shipments, steps that might have been propelled partly by those students on the quads and greens.

The campus protests have amplified the growing American disaffection with Israel’s unvarnished brutality against Palestinians in Gaza, Israeli excuses and rationalizations notwithstanding. Yes, Hamas uses civilians as shields and shelters fighters in networks of tunnels, some under hospitals. Does that justify attacking the civilian shields and devastating hospitals? Yes, Hamas smuggles weaponry into Gaza. Does that justify restricting trucks of food and medical supplies destined for children, women, the elderly? The “pro-Palestinian” protesters would presumably say no. “Antiwar” protesters would presumably hold both sides in contempt.

            In true antiwar demonstrations, the symbols, the pieces of colored cloth woven into specific patterns, might be carried together. In true antiwar protests, wartime grief would be common ground. The Palestinian and Israeli flags might be intertwined, perhaps even tangled. Some demonstrators might want to burn them, as some Vietnam era antiwar protesters burned the American flag. But then, some leaders of the that antiwar movement thought it would be a more poignant symbol to wash the flag. What if both Israeli and Palestinian flags were washed in the middle of a college green?

The War of Atrocities

 

By David K. Shipler 

            In a grisly coincidence, the UN within 24 hours has documented two outrages of the Israel-Gaza war that will permanently scar the lives of those who survive: Sexual crimes by Hamas, which probably continue against young Israeli women who are still hostages. And severe malnutrition among tens of thousands of Palestinian children, some at critical stages of brain development.

A team headed by the UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict confirmed most earlier reports of sexual assaults by Hamas fighters who invaded Israel from Gaza on October 7. But in addition, the UN task force found “clear and convincing information that sexual violence, including rape, sexualized torture, cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment occurred against some women and children during their time in captivity and has reasonable grounds to believe that this violence may be ongoing.” The team did not say, but everyone knows, that the deep trauma suffered by such victims is likely to be ongoing as well, perhaps lifelong.

In what might aptly be called divine injustice, the hostages taken October 7, and evidently still being held, include seven young female soldiers from the Nahal Oz military base, an intelligence hub. Women agents there had picked up strong indicators of the coming Hamas attack and repeatedly urged their male superior officers—in vain—to take preventive action.

Whether the hostages are the same women who sounded the alarm is not publicly known, but they are from the same unit. That they should suffer such intimate brutality because they or their colleagues were ignored ought to haunt the incompetent government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and its somnolent security apparatus. Furthermore, Israeli officials have reportedly worried that Hamas would rather kill the women than release them to tell the world of their torment.

At the same time, the UN’s World Health Organization has warned that famine is “almost inevitable,” and reported this week that 10 children in northern Gaza had died of starvation. Israel’s retaliatory strategy of cutting off Gaza’s two million Palestinians from most supplies of food, water, electricity, and medical care has taken a severe toll on health, even as sporadic, inadequate aid shipments and air drops have been permitted. Eventually, famine and disease are expected to cause at least as many casualties as the 30,000 deaths Hamas has reported from Israeli bombing and ground fighting.

Here, too, the unseen impacts are inevitable. Just as post-traumatic stress disorder is a lasting condition for survivors of sexual torture, the cognitive damage to children suffering malnutrition is likely to be lifelong. (Why this is not a routine part of the mainstream media’s war reporting is surprising: Neuroscientists have researched it extensively.)

At critical periods of brain development—especially in last two trimesters of pregnancy and the first two to three years of life—the inadequacy of certain nutrients can inhibit the creation of neurons and synapses, of myelin sheaths and the neurological connections that are essential to reasoning, learning, memory, and behavior in adulthood.

For at least half a century, scientists have been documenting how the developing brain suffers from insufficient iron, iodine, folate, zinc, calcium, magnesium, selenium, and various vitamins, all found in balanced diets of fresh fruits and vegetables, meat, fish, eggs, and dairy products. The finding is made in study after study, including the succinct warning in the Journal of Developmental & Behavioral Pediatrics that, after age two, “the effects of malnutrition on stunting may be irreversible, and some of the functional deficits may become permanent.”

Longitudinal studies have shown the lifelong effects. Seventy-seven infants in Barbados, for example, hospitalized with protein deficiency, then received nutritious food between the ages of one and twelve. Nevertheless, in their thirties, they had compromised “verbal fluency, working memory, processing speed, and visuospatial integration” compared to a healthy group from the same classrooms.

Iron deficiency during pregnancy can cause serious damage to the fetus, even if the child gets adequate iron later. Without enough meat, poultry, fish, spinach, or beans, the mother and child can suffer from anemia, which decreases the formation of the myelin sheath, whose fatty matter insulates nerve cells and helps accelerate nerve conduction. Insufficient iron affects the metabolism in the hippocampus, critical for memory, and can lead to low birth rate, which is associated with cerebral palsy and other neurological problems.

Studies following children who were anemic as infants found that years later, in school, they scored lower in math, written expression, motor functioning, spatial memory, and selective recall.

Then, too, hunger—or even the fear of hunger—creates an additional layer of anxiety on top of the terrors of war. Learning disabilities and mental health problems result. “Learning is a discretionary activity, after you’re well-fed, warm, secure,” said Dr. Deborah A. Frank, who founded a malnutrition clinic at the Boston Medical Center.

Persistent, elevated stress hormones have an impact on the size and architecture of the developing brain, a group of scientists reported in 2016, “specifically the amygdala, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex.” Mental health implications abound: people experiencing food insecurity alone, even without warfare, display depression, PTSD, hopelessness, and suicidality.

All this is happening to innocent Palestinian children in Gaza as a result of Israel’s draconian strategy. And that, in turn, is the result of Hamas’s sadistic attacks on innocent Israelis, which struck the country with a novel, pervasive fear of insecurity. And that, in turn is the result of . . . You can spin back through the weary history of that tortured land and try to find the original sin that caused it all. Or you can understand that every effect there has a cause and no untanglement of cause and effect is feasible.

Then, having been foiled by history, you can look to the future and understand that what lies ahead, damaged by the present, will effectively continue the war’s harm for a generation or more—even if a total cease fire were declared today.

Religious Absolutism: Isaac and Ishmael

 

By David K. Shipler 

Also published by Moment Magazine  

If you list the elements of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, you'll see that while most are subject to compromise, one is virtually non-negotiable: religion at its most dogmatic. It has grown more prominent over the decades as devout militants have gained power among both Israeli Jews and Palestinian Muslims.

Measuring its ultimate influence is difficult, for the dispute is largely secular, and is seen that way by most Israelis and Palestinians, polls show. In theory, the two sides’ overlapping territorial claims, driven by the clash of two nationalisms, could be resolved by drawing reasonable borders between Israel and a Palestinian state. West Bank Jewish settlements could be dismantled and consolidated. Security concerns could be addressed by humane, mutual protections. Jerusalem could be shared. Palestinians could bargain away their “right of return” to former villages inside Israel. The dueling historical narratives of grievance, so central to the conflict’s psychology, might gradually fade as uneasy neighbors learn to coexist. 

                That is all eventually possible, but less likely when each of the issues is salted with the absolutism of divine mission, as certain Israeli and Palestinian leaders are doing. They merge the sacred and the temporal, combine faith with tribal identity, and infuse piety into their peoples’ past grievances and present longings.

 The current example is the war in Gaza. At dawn on October 7, a voice on the Hamas military frequency announced to the fighters: “Rocket barrages are being fired right now at the occupied cities! May God empower and grace the holy warriors!” The man spoke in a pitch of ecstasy, echoed by another’s exultant answer through the static: “The resistance is now inside the occupied territories!”

“Allahu Akbar!” (God is most great!) the young Palestinians shouted as they streamed from Gaza through breaches blown in Israel’s border fence, their body cameras recording their fervent chants as they whooped in celebration over Israeli corpses. Each terrorist who died for his faith would earn the honor of being called shaheed (martyr).

Thus began the worst day for Israel in its 75-year existence, inflamed by religious slogans and symbols. Hamas wants to replace the Jewish state with an Islamic state. It named its sadistic attack “Al-Aqsa Flood,” after the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, the third holiest site in Islam, now in Israel’s capital.

In turn, after the Hamas slaughters that day, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu embraced a biblical analogy by likening the Palestinians to Amalek, the ancient nomads whose complete extermination was ordered by God. This seemed to consider the massive assaults on Gaza that followed as divinely blessed. Other religious terms were tossed around. Israeli officials named the artificial intelligence that picked its targets in Gaza “the Gospel.” Netanyahu reportedly proposed naming this “the Genesis War.”

Israel's Mission Impossible

 

By David K. Shipler 

                In October 1953, two days after infiltrators from Jordan threw a grenade into an Israeli home and killed a mother and her two small children, Israeli Unit 101, led by Col. Ariel Sharon, took revenge in a deliberately disproportionate manner.

Crossing into Jordan, the Israeli commandos destroyed some 50 houses and killed 69 civilians in Qibya, a town 5 kilometers south of where the infiltrators’ tracks had led. Sharon claimed that he didn’t know any people were in the houses he blew up, but property damage was hardly the point. “The orders were utterly clear,” Sharon wrote in his autobiography. “Qibya was to be an example for everyone.”

                That was, and remains, Israel’s basic strategy of deterrence: hold the neighbors responsible for the misuse of their territory by hitting back exponentially.  

                The practice has worked, to an extent, as long as the neighbor has been in control. Jordan eventually patrolled its side of the border closely, and the frontier was fairly quiet for decades before the two countries signed a peace treaty in 1994. The same with Egypt for several years before its formal peace with Israel in 1979. And even without a treaty, Syria has kept its heavily fortified border mostly closed to attacks on Israelis until exchanges of fire recently, during the Gaza war.

                But where the state has been weak or virtually non-existent, as in southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, only powerless civilians have a stake in preserving calm or stability. Non-state forces have prevailed—first the Palestine Liberation Organization, then Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza—and Israel’s strategy of fierce retaliation has little effect except to radicalize residents and fuel extremism.

                So it is in Gaza today. Israel’s military withdrawal in 2005 opened a vacuum for Hamas to govern, but its armed passion to obliterate the Jewish state provoked a partial Israeli and Egyptian blockade, deepening poverty and leaving the territory well short of autonomous statehood. Hamas used outside aid to construct tunnels and build an arsenal of weaponry, not to foster prosperous independence that it would want to preserve.

The Arsenal of Memory

 

By David K. Shipler 

First published by Moment Magazine 

                No fabrication or suppression of history is needed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Truths are enough to arm both sides. We are now witnessing additions to the stockpile of weapons in an arsenal of memory that never gets depleted.

                Victims do not forget. Nor do their descendants. When the Palestinian movement Hamas invaded Israel from Gaza to execute its monstrously planned slaughters and kidnappings, the date, October 7, was marked indelibly. Going forward, probably for generations, it will remind Israeli Jews of the grievance and rage that scar their long road. And for Palestinian Arabs, Israel’s coming onslaught on Gaza will reload the batteries of hatred--and what they call “resistance.”

                The two peoples are imprisoned by history. When they argue for themselves and against the other, the past looms. The pogroms in eastern Europe. The Holocaust. The scattered violence by local Arabs against Jews who fled to Palestine. The Arab states’ rejection of a Jewish state, and the 1948 war that Jews had to fight to secure Israel’s existence. The Arab-led wars that followed. The Palestinian terrorist attacks and suicide bombings into the heart of daily life.

Predicting the Mideast: Prophets and Fools

 

By David K. Shipler 

                The most obvious prediction this week, after Hamas fighters rolled easily from Gaza into the stunned villages and kibbutzim of Israel, would be this: The sputtering hope for a Palestinian state has been finally extinguished.

Having seen their children, women, and elderly bathed in blood and taken to Gaza as hostages, Israelis will never countenance Palestinian statehood anywhere nearby, not in Gaza and least of all on the West Bank, which is even closer to the heart of the country--literally just down the street from the capital, Jerusalem, and many other towns.

                 Since Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from its military occupation of Gaza in 2005, and the subsequent election of Hamas to rule the densely populated territory, the sporadic rockets and infiltrations have undermined Israel’s peace movement’s central concept. That’s been “land for peace,” a belief that once Palestinians had their own territory, they would accept Israel as a neighbor. Well, Gaza residents got their land, but Israel got no peace. That’s been the simplistic equation.

                Of course it can be argued—and usually is, on the political left around the world—that Palestinians didn’t really possess their land, that they were suffocated and radicalized by Israel’s imposition of tight border controls that restricted imports and hemmed people into what some call an open-air prison. Wages are low in Gaza, and better-paying jobs in Israel are inaccessible without a permit to cross the border. Even after Israel increased the number of permits in recent years, the Gaza unemployment rate stood at nearly 50 percent: a prescription for smoldering desperation and explosive fury.

                But the partial blockade was itself a reaction--supported by Egypt along its border with Gaza—aimed at impeding Hamas from building an arsenal whose disastrous scope was displayed to Israel this week. In turn, that militarization of Gaza was a reaction to Israel’s “colonial” oppression, as many Palestinians see it. And Israel’s tough posture was itself a reaction to radical Palestinians’ ideology of obliteration, which dreams of a final end to the Jewish state.

                And so on, one reaction to another to another ad infinitum. Untangling the causal relationship depends on how far back in history you’re willing to go before stopping and deciding that you have found the original sin.

                It’s not so hard to look backward. It’s harder to look forward. In that part of the world, only prophets and fools are inclined to use the future tense. Prophets have been scarce for quite a while. Fools have been in plentiful supply.

                Unexpected consequences seem to be the rule. Israel’s lightning victory in the six-day war of 1967, celebrated tearfully by Jews able at last to pray at Jerusalem’s Western Wall, saddled the country with the unending dangers of containing hostile Palestinian populations in the captured West Bank and Gaza. Israel’s near defeat in the 1973 Yom Kippur war gave President Anwar Sadat of Egypt the stature, he thought, to make peace with Israel. Some have speculated that Hamas’s monstrous assault will give Palestinians the swagger to make eventual compromises. I wouldn’t put money on it, but you never know.

You never know, that should be the motto. And you need to be careful what you wish for. In 1981, it came to my attention that the Israeli government, confident in its ability to manipulate Arab politics, was funneling money to the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza, a precursor of today’s Hamas. That startling miscalculation was confirmed by Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, Israel’s military governor of Gaza, who explained that he was under instructions from the authorities to build up the Brotherhood as a counterpoint to the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Communists, whose goal of Palestinian statehood was seen as more threatening than Muslim fundamentalism.

                The Brotherhood was doctrinaire religiously but also deep into social welfare services for the impoverished Gaza population. I suppose the movement seemed benign to Israeli officials whose hubris led them to think they understood the Byzantium of Gaza’s politics. A year later, Israelis made the same mistake in Lebanon, where they went to war to succeed in expelling the PLO but fail dramatically at realigning Lebanese politics in a pro-Israel direction.

                Significantly, an architect of both the Gaza and Lebanon schemes was former general Ariel Sharon, then defense minister. Later, as prime minister, he ordered the army’s unconditional withdrawal from Gaza, with no agreement or international structure to keep some modicum of peace. Hamas rockets followed.

Palestinians have a rich history of miscalculation as well, and this Hamas attack seems destined to mark history with an indelible turning point. Israelis, it has been said, became complacent in their material comforts and relative security in recent years. True, masses took to the streets against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to emasculate the judiciary, but Jewish-Arab violence precipitated by Palestinians and vigilante Jewish settlers, was mostly confined to the West Bank, with little terrorism inside Israel proper. The “situation,” in the anodyne euphemism, did not occupy everyday worries.

In Gaza, Hamas lobbed occasional rockets, which were mostly intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile system. As radical as the group’s objectives were—Israel’s annihilation—it seemed contained, the two sides standing off in a hostile equilibrium. The Arabs’ conventional order of battle had been practically dismantled by peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, internal disarray in Syria, and the aftermath of the US war in Iraq.

The remaining threats came from non-state actors—Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza—but they seemed manageable. Then came the latest day of infamy.

What shift will this bring? “Hamas was once a tolerable threat,” wrote Haviv Rettig Gur in the Times of Israel. “It just made itself an intolerable one, all while convincing Israelis they are too vulnerable and weak to respond with the old restraint. . . . These heirs of a collective memory forged in the fires of the 20th century cannot handle the experience of defenselessness Hamas has imposed on them. Hamas seemed to do everything possible to shift Israeli psychology from a comfortable faith in their own strength to a sense of dire vulnerability.

“And it will soon learn the scale of that miscalculation. A strong Israel may tolerate a belligerent Hamas on its border; a weaker one cannot. A safe Israel can spend much time and resources worrying about the humanitarian fallout from a Gaza ground war; a more vulnerable Israel cannot. A wounded, weakened Israel is a fiercer Israel.”

It seems a reasonable prediction. The page will be turned from heart-rending pictures of Israelis massacred and kidnapped to heart-rending pictures of Palestinians bombed and mangled in Gaza. Woe to the fools who see only one page.

Israel's Failed Strategies

 To watch the PBS documentary, Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land, click here: https://vimeo.com/550030784 Free of charge.

By David K. Shipler 

                For many decades, Israel has calculated that neighboring Arab counties would think twice before attacking, knowing that a punishing Israeli military reaction would follow. The practice has sometimes worked against nation states. But it has rarely been effective against the non-state actors arising as significant players in the Middle East—among them, as is now obvious, Hamas in Gaza.

                Israel persists nonetheless. “You can either conquer them,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told foreign ambassadors Wednesday, “and that’s always an open possibility, or you can deter them. We are engaged right now in forceful deterrence.”

An early demonstration of the strategy came in 1953 after a band of Arab terrorists stole into Israel from Jordan to attack Israelis. The retribution was conducted by a young Israeli colonel, Ariel Sharon, whose Unit 101, known for ruthlessness, crossed into Jordan and ravaged the border town of Qibya, blowing up 45 houses and killing 69 Arab villagers.

Later, during the War of Attrition in 1969, Israel responded massively to repeated Egyptian attacks on Israeli positions in Sinai by bombarding Egyptian villages along the Suez Canal. Some 55,000 homes were destroyed, 750,000 civilians were forced to flee, and numerous Egyptians were killed and wounded.

 Along certain frontiers, Israel’s strategy of defense by retaliation—even against civilians—brought peace without peace treaties. Decades before its 1994 treaty with Israel, Jordan worked hard to deny Palestinian terrorists the use of its territory. Jordanian troops patrolled their side of the border as assiduously as Israeli monitored its own.

Syria, despite its refusal to make a formal peace, has kept its border with Israel on the Golan Heights mostly quiet and has been slapped hard for infractions. Egypt’s frontier with the occupying Israeli military in Sinai calmed down in the years between the Yom Kippur War of 1973 and the two countries’ historic peace treaty in 1979.    

But failed states can’t be leveraged into compliance. Lebanon’s long civil war weakened the reach of the central government, opening a vacuum in its southern territory that was later filled by the Palestine Liberation Organization. The PLO, within artillery range of Israel, had no stake in Lebanon’s stability or security, so no threat of retaliation deterred occasional shelling and terrorist attacks on Israel’s north. The solution—the temporary solution—was an Israeli invasion in 1982, which expelled the PLO, only to see an equally hostile replacement eventually take its place: Iranian-backed Hezbollah, which recently fired several rockets into northern Israel. Israel responded with shelling.

If it seems that the kaleidoscope is just being given another shake, and then another, that’s a fair analysis. Take Gaza, that strip of arid land teeming with impoverished Palestinians. In 2005, after thirty-eight years of military occupation that began with Israel’s victory in the 1967 war, it was Sharon, ironically, who as prime minister decided to withdraw unilaterally with no formal agreement or international guarantees. Because Sharon thought like a soldier, not an ideologue, he assessed the Gaza occupation, in conventional military terms, as more of a burden than an asset. Furthermore, an associate of his once told me that Sharon had begun considering that his historic legacy should include some gesture of peace. History has not been kind to him, however, as it rarely is to anyone in that part of the world.

Under Sharon as Defense Minister, Israel itself contributed to the rise of Hamas. As I recalled in a recent letter to the editor of The New York Times, Israel’s military governor of Gaza, Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, told me in 1981 that he had been given a budget to help fund the Muslim Brotherhood, a precursor of Hamas, as a counterweight to Communist and Palestinian nationalist movements. Odds are that Hamas would have evolved without Israel’s financial contributions. But the funding was consistent with Israel’s strategic blunders in trying to manipulate internal Arab politics in Gaza, Lebanon, and the West Bank.

The list of self-inflicted wounds by both Israeli and Palestinian leaders runs too long for less than a book-length piece of writing. To summarize: Each side has radicalized the other. Each side has a marksman’s eye for striking the other’s nerves of fear and indignation. Each side has eroded its own middle ground of reasoned compromise. Each side has empowered the most extreme, violent elements of the other.

Palestinians, deprived of ethical, visionary leadership, have missed opportunities for peacemaking with Israel. They have protested with uprisings and terrorism rather than non-violent passive resistance, by which they probably could have impeded Jewish settlement construction in the West Bank in the 1970s and 80s, when Israel still nurtured moral objections to the occupation. They launch rockets from Gaza indiscriminately to feed the political fortunes of Hamas rulers. And Netanyahu replies with an onslaught to cling to his prime ministerial sanctuary as he is put on trial for corruption. A word more deadly than “cynical” is needed.

Aside from “forceful deterrence,” Israel’s other strategy has focused on converting areas from Arab to Jewish by settling Jews in place of Palestinians. It is happening in East Jerusalem, whose Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood was the point of friction that lit the latest conflagration. There, near the supposed tomb of Simon the Just, a Jewish priest in the Second Temple, right-wing Jews have for years been hectoring Palestinians to move out, sometimes combining intimidation with lucrative offers to buy their property. Israel’s Supreme Court is due to rule on a set of evictions based on a claim that Jews actually purchased the land in the nineteenth century.

But the symbolism is as potent as the law, and more compelling than actual census data. The Arab population of the Jerusalem District continues to rise--from 277,000 in 2008 to nearly 372,000 in 2019. Yet for Palestinians, the evictions resonate with the longstanding injuries of displacement—during Israel’s 1948 war of independence, during the 1967 war when Israel captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem from the attacking Jordanian army, and since then as Jewish communities have mushroomed among the Arab villages of the West Bank.

Sharon used to call those settlements “facts on the ground.” Much of that ground was seized without due process as Israel exploited the absence or vagueness of land titles from Ottoman times. Still, the modern use by Palestinians was clear enough: vineyards, olive groves, and villages’ common pastureland.

What Israel chooses not to notice is this: Every bulldozed grape vine and olive tree is added to the arsenal of memory. Every vigilante act by Jewish settlers against Palestinians is written on a kind of  cultural balance sheet for the sake of future retribution. That is Israel’s second strategic failure.

The third is based on the assumption over decades that Israel proper can be walled off from the surrounding indignities experienced by Arabs in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza. Yet while many Arab citizens of Israel—now 20 percent of the total population—yearn for belonging and participation in Israeli society, they are not fully embraced and are not insulated from grievance.

Israeli governments—especially Netanyahu’s—have increased aid to Arab villages. Economic conditions have improved, along with more access to higher education. Before the recent outbreak of warfare, an Arab party was poised to enter a coalition government for the first time. Yet also for the first time since the 1948 war, the country has been rocked by communal violence between Arabs and Jews, often thugs who project their violence onto a big screen of religious and historic righteousness.

The intoxication with righteousness drives the strategies, which continue to fail, again and again and again.

Also published by The Washington Monthly.

Should We Talk to Hamas?

By David K. Shipler

            It’s nice for Egypt’s new government, led by the Muslim Brotherhood, that the United States has handcuffed itself by refusing to deal directly with Hamas. And perhaps it’s just as well, since Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi has more influence with Hamas than Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would. Plus, he gets to play a pivotal role in the eternally exasperating Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Lucky him.

            But it’s not so great for American interests that the “terrorist” label, which the U.S. government has imposed on Hamas, carries such a broad set of taboos as to restrict Washington’s flexibility in a crisis.

Hamas employs terrorism, obviously—witness today’s bus bombing in Tel Aviv, the random rocketing of Israeli civilians—but it was also elected to govern Gaza, which Israel voluntarily left to the Palestinian residents in 2005. Denying Hamas the symbol of legitimacy it would gain through contact with American officials may be morally satisfying, but it has about as much impact on reality as the U.S. embargo of Cuba.