Witness

What is not especially visible on Israeli television is the unrelenting horror of Palestinian suffering in Gaza, where more than twenty-three thousand people have been killed in three months, and an estimated 1.9 million have been displaced. Only rarely do Israelis see what the rest of the world sees: the corpses of Palestinian children wrapped in sheets by a mass grave; widespread hunger and disease; schools and houses, apartment blocks and mosques, reduced to rubble...Gaza is a presence on Israeli television mainly through the dispatches of reporters embedded with the I.D.F. And they tend to emphasize the experience of Israeli soldiers—their missions, their clashes with Hamas fighters, the search for hostages, the crisp pronouncements of generals and officials helicoptering in from Jerusalem.

A disregard for the suffering in Gaza is hardly limited to reactionary ministers or far-right commentators. Ben Caspit, the author of a biography critical of Netanyahu, recently posted that he felt no compunction about concentrating on the home front. “Why should we turn our attention [to Gaza]?” he wrote. “They’ve earned that hell fairly, and I don’t have a milligram of empathy...We were forced into this situation. We did not initiate it. On the contrary, we initiated peace.” His is a common sentiment among Israelis.

“You do see Gaza on TV, but not enough,” Ilana Dayan, the longtime host of “Uvda” (“Fact”), a kind of Israeli “60 Minutes.” Dayan, who has aired countless reports critical of the Israeli government and military, allowed that a patriotic tone has overtaken much of what appears on the air. “And when I come home and I say, ‘We have to know more,’ it’s hard for them to care. We know our audiences are impatient with any kind of deviation from the mainstream. We interview people about October 7th - we are stuck on October 7th - and, after those atrocities, we too often, understandably, lack the empathy to see what is happening on the other side of the border. As an Israeli, I felt so, too. As a reporter, I feel that we have to tell Israelis about the price being paid in Gaza.”

When Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up twenty per cent of the population, voice their political sentiments on social media, the result can be harassment, doxing, or even a visit from the authorities. Many are repulsed by what they are seeing on Israeli television, in the light of what has appeared on media outlets based in the Arab world. “I can’t stomach it,” Diana Buttu, a human-rights lawyer who was once a negotiator for the Palestine Liberation Organization, told me. She lives in Haifa, a mixed city on the northern coast. “Palestinians are so dehumanized. They are not people. There is no sense of what it means that twenty thousand are dead, half of them kids. It’s only ‘We have to get Hamas.’ My neighbors in Haifa don’t see or comprehend what is being done in their name.”
 
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Palestinian citizens of Israel are required to negotiate an enormously complicated identity. They are physicians, nurses, teachers, and workers who speak Hebrew as well as Arabic and are integrated into Israeli life, and yet they also live among ghosts, villages and towns that were once Palestinian and are now Israeli. In times of crisis, Jewish Israelis often regard them with suspicion. Who are they first? Loyal Israeli citizens or Palestinian nationalists? Hassan Jabareen, the founder and director of Adalah, a human-rights organization that takes up legal cases in defense of Palestinian Israelis, also lives in Haifa, and he told me this was the first time that the Israeli police have barred antiwar demonstrations since the Oslo Accords. His community “doesn’t feel now that they have second-class citizenship,” he said. “No, now it is almost like occupation within Israel. We are treated as enemies.”

One statistic that disturbs many Jewish Israelis appeared in a recent survey conducted by Khalil Shikaki, the head of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research. His poll found that seventy-two per cent of respondents in the West Bank and Gaza believe that Hamas was “correct” to launch its terror attack. Just ten per cent said that Hamas had committed war crimes. The majority said they had not seen videos of Hamas fighters on their rampage - the very sort of evidence of shooting, looting, and butchery ubiquitous in the Israeli media and in social-media feeds.

Among Palestinians, particularly in the West Bank and Gaza, there is a distinct reluctance to talk about, much less condemn, the massacre of October 7th. Because so many of them have come to disbelieve anything Israeli officials say, there is a reflex to discount reports of atrocities or hostage testimonies. As always in this century-long conflict, multiple truths - the Hamas massacre and the Israeli bombardment; the instances of horrific rape by Hamas combatants in southern Israel and the killing of thousands of children in Gaza; Hamas’s eliminationist ideology and Israel’s irreconcilable condition of being both an occupier and a democratic state - cannot be taken in all at once. To deal with every historical episode and contradiction, every cruelty, would be to complicate one’s loyalties to the breaking point.

Mustafa Barghouti, an independent politician in the West Bank, told me he feels “sad for every person killed, Israeli or Palestinian,” but insisted that the Western world was “talking only about Israelis,” and rarely Palestinians. “Hamas is the result of the occupation. They say Israel has a right to defend itself. Don’t Palestinians have the right to defend themselves?”
Buttu, who said she was “shocked” by the brutality of the Hamas massacre, explains that she is offended when Jewish Israelis ask her about October 7th... It’s O.K. for them to question your moral fibre, whereas I have never done that to an Israeli.”
 
But what Netanyahu must explain now is why neither he nor his upper echelon of security leaders heeded warnings from intelligence officers and military analysts that Hamas was preparing the operation that they named Al-Aqsa Flood. (The Prime Minister’s office denies that Netanyahu received any early intelligence about a Hamas attack.) Among liberal, secular Israelis, Netanyahu has always been an object of scorn on a range of social and political issues, but now, across the ideological landscape, he stands accused of failing utterly on his promise of vigilance and security.
“There was an absence of the state!” Dayan said. “We have never experienced this. Being an Israeli means that the sense of the state is internalized in you. It’s part of who you are. And all of a sudden, where is the state?”

In his memoir, Netanyahu describes Israel’s periodic clashes with Hamas, which took power in Gaza not long after the Israelis uprooted their settlements there, in 2005. Every couple of years or so, in his narrative, Hamas would fire rockets at Israeli cities and towns and Netanyahu would order far deadlier bombing raids. And then, following protests and pressure from foreign states, there would be negotiations and, eventually, a kind of peace. This pattern of prolonged periods of calm interspersed with military action came to be known as “mowing the lawn.” Netanyahu resisted calls to go further:

What Netanyahu scarcely acknowledges in his memoir is the security policy in which Israel allowed Qatar to bankroll Hamas, figuring that it would forgo the ecstasies of armed resistance and embrace the burdens of governance. In the meantime, Netanyahu could concentrate on subduing the restive West Bank and on weakening the Palestinian Authority, which struggled to administer it. This dual-track policy was also intended to muzzle any coherent demands for negotiations.

In the years to come, it became clear that Netanyahu’s grand strategy was to complete the conversion of Israel’s old Labor Zionist socialist economy to a wealthy free-market Startup Nation economy and to implement a new security paradigm, in which Israel formed political, military, and economic ties with Gulf Arab states to oppose the Tehran-led “axis of resistance.” In that plan, the Palestinians were hardly a priority. They could be easily contained, even ignored. “The road to a broader Middle East peace between Israel and the Arab world did not go through the Palestinian seat of government in Ramallah,” he wrote. “It went around it.” There was now no real need to annex the West Bank and its half million settlers. The settlers had annexed the State of Israel.
 
It wasn’t just the Tel Aviv left that had come to view Netanyahu as a threat to the state. Even old allies on the right could no longer ignore the spectacle of his narcissism and self-dealing. Michael Oren, a former member of the Knesset and Ambassador to the U.S. under Netanyahu, was one of many who trotted out the apocryphal remark of Louis XIV, “L’état, c’est moi”—the state is me—to characterize the Prime Minister’s attitude. Netanyahu, Oren told me, “seems unable to distinguish between personal and political interests.” Ami Ayalon, the former head of Shin Bet, the country’s internal security service, described Netanyahu to me as “a person who will sell out everyone and everything in order to stay in power.” Moshe Ya’alon, the defense minister from 2013 to 2016, told me that Netanyahu’s ideology is now “personal political survival,” adding that his coalition partners “don’t represent the vast majority of the Israeli people” and are “so messianic that they believe in Jewish supremacy—‘Mein Kampf’ in the opposite direction. They’ve taken Netanyahu hostage.”

In both March and July of 2023, Brigadier General Amit Saar, the head of the research division at military intelligence, wrote to the Prime Minister warning that Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran recognized that Israel was “in a blistering, unprecedented crisis threatening its cohesion” and saw an opportunity “to create the perfect storm.” According to Haaretz, Saar concluded that the enemy saw Israel’s chaos and vulnerability as “the practical fulfillment of their basic world view—Israel is a foreign implant, a weak, divided society that will ultimately disappear.”

“We will come to you, God willing, in a roaring flood. We will come to you with endless rockets, we will come to you in a limitless flood of soldiers, we will come to you with millions of our people, like the repeating tide.”
Yahya Sinwar (December, 2022).
 
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The denunciations from Palestinian leaders [are] constant, and none more eloquent than a Christmas sermon delivered by the theologian Munther Isaac, in the West Bank city of Bethlehem. Isaac excoriated foreign governments for being “complicit” in the ongoing war. Christ was “under the rubble,” he said. “How is the killing of nine thousand children self-defense?” Hassan Jabareen, the Palestinian Israeli human-rights lawyer, compared the Israeli assault on Gaza to guerrilla wars and military follies of the past—to Afghanistan, Iraq, and particularly Vietnam, where the guerrilla forces lost battle after battle by conventional markers but went on waging a war of attrition and, finally, outlasted their enemies. “Can we really imagine that Hamas will raise a white flag?” Jabareen said.

Mustafa Barghouti, the independent politician in the West Bank, told me the war being waged now was a “genocide.” Jabareen used the same word, as do so many Palestinians, and I asked him to define what he meant. “Genocide is when you destroy the infrastructure and the culture and the bodies of people,” he said. “In Gaza, they are destroying complete cities, mosques and universities, schools and courts and hospitals. One per cent of the citizens of Gaza have been killed. Most are civilians. You are killing them and divorcing them from where they live. You have a memory of time and place, and now the place is not there.”

These considerations hold little sway with the Israel leadership, which has dismissed the genocide charges that South Africa has brought against it in The Hague as a “blood libel.” Israel might ratchet down the bombing, pull back some troops, and move into a more targeted phase of the attempt to defeat Hamas as a military force, but officials say that they will not relent in their hunt for the Hamas leaders, particularly Yahya Sinwar. In the popular Israeli discourse, Sinwar is Osama bin Laden, the embodiment of the enemy. Netanyahu appealed to Hamas directly: “I say to the terrorists of Hamas: It’s over. Don’t die for Sinwar. Surrender now.”
 
“There is a popular notion that he is somehow a crazy guy who has lost contact with reality,” Michael Milshtein, the former head of Palestinian intelligence for the I.D.F., told me. “Those terms reflect our lack of understanding. He is a very radical ideological leader, but you need to get into this logic. It’s a logic with a different kind of values and we need to understand that.” He went on, “Hamas promotes a dramatic, historic jihad against Israel, and maybe it won’t be a total defeat of Israel, but it’s an important way station on the way to defeat the Zionist entity and to control the al-Aqsa Mosque, in Jerusalem. This is the atmosphere he lives in. October 7th was the mission of his life. It’s not a tactical or strategic move. He wants to be remembered in the history books as the new Saladin, the one who cost Israel a historic defeat. Maybe he will be killed. It doesn’t matter.” Koubi, Sinwar’s interrogator, agreed. “Right now, Sinwar is deep underground, but I can’t imagine him surrendering. He wants to be a shahid, a martyr, a historical hero.” According to reports in the Israeli media, the I.D.F. believes that he is hiding in tunnels in the Khan Younis area and has surrounded himself with Israeli hostages as protection. (The I.D.F. declined to comment on this matter.)

Ami Ayalon, the former head of Shin Bet, told me that on October 7th Sinwar chose a “Samson option.” The plan was “diabolical,” Ayalon said, “but he brought the house down.” A conventional military defeat will not be important to Sinwar. “He will be rooted in the hearts of the Palestinians. And the only way for him to be defeated is to present a better idea, meaning a political horizon for two states. Sheikh Yassin once expressed that his biggest fear was that the Palestinians would come to believe that the Israelis will give them a state. Which, of course, Yassin saw as a betrayal of greater Palestine.”

Today, the prospect of two states for two people has never seemed more necessary or more distant. Fury and trauma dominate. The absolutists reign. Hussein Agha, a Lebanese academic who has worked as a negotiator for the Palestinians since before the Oslo Accords, told me that the experience of watching October 7th and its aftermath has been “a dagger in my heart. It reminds me that I am a loser. For fifty-five years, I’ve been trying to do something and now it culminates in an act of brutality - acts of brutality on both sides. It’s all meaningless. It didn’t amount to a hill of beans.”

He went on, “The Palestinians have been on the receiving end of brutality for a hundred years, and now was their chance to show they could do this. And it’s important to note that almost no Palestinians stood against it, except some N.G.O.s, which get Western money. Even Abu Mazen” (Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the Palestinian Authority) “cannot come out clearly against it. This runs deep inside the Palestinian psyche, this very act. It borders on the Biblical. It has nothing to do with politics or the interaction of the two peoples. It’s revenge. It comes out of a feud festering over decades, even centuries.” And even in the ruins of Gaza - amid all the suffering, death, destruction, and dislocation - many will revere Yahya Sinwar as an icon of armed resistance in the Palestinian national cause. “His picture from now on will be next to Arafat’s everywhere,” Agha told me. “His picture will be in the pocket of every Palestinian teen-ager. Even if the Israelis kill him, he is a hero. The important result of this war was over the night of October 7th. The rest is revenge. The I.D.F. cannot kill Hamas. It’s everywhere.”

The price of Netanyahu's ambition@the New Yorker.com
 
Odds said:
Today, the prospect of two states for two people has never seemed more necessary or more distant. Fury and trauma dominate.
The rest is revenge. The I.D.F. cannot kill Hamas. It’s everywhere.”

The price of Netanyahu's ambition@the New Yorker.com
Click to expand...

Three months had passed since the start of its war on Gaza, more than 20,000 Palestinians had been killed and Israel had increasingly turned its attention to central and southern Gaza, here it has surrounded and targeted the city of Khan Younis in particular. But on January 16, Hamas launched 25 rockets from the northern Gaza strip at the southern Israeli city of Netivot. While no civilians were killed, the attack punched holes in the Israeli claim that it was on its way to destroying Hamas, even after more than 100 days of war.

At the time, many analysts warned that destroying the group was an unrealistic aim that would only compound the costs imposed on Gaza’s civilian population. Now, the fresh signs of Hamas regaining the ability to target Israel from northern Gaza further bolster those predictions.

“If you can still fire rockets and if you can still attack troops – in the north of all places where Israel has laid siege for 112 days – then [the war aim of destroying Hamas] is failing,”

Israel has vowed to destroy Hamas’s vast tunnel network under Gaza. But so far, Israel has failed to substantially impede the movement of Hamas fighters underground, according to Oren Ziv, an Israeli commentator and a journalist with +972 magazine, a publication based in Tel Aviv. “I would estimate that Israel doesn’t have the full picture of where the tunnels connect from and how. And the fact we still see attacks from northern Gaza means that the tunnel system is still operating,” Ziv told Al Jazeera.

Lovatt said he doubted the Israeli figure of 9,000 Hamas fighters killed so far. But “even if we take that number as accurate”, he said, that still leaves the vast majority of the armed group’s personnel alive and ready to fight. According to the CIA, Hamas has about 35,000 fighters in Gaza alone, Lovatt pointed out. “That shows there are still a lot of fighters in Gaza that will outlast Israel’s military operations.”

“Israel is capable of reducing Hamas’ military capacity, but its collective punishment on Gaza’s civilian population is feeding the generational drivers of resistance in every way possible,” Rahman, from the Middle East Council for Global Affairs, told Al Jazeera.

No Justice. No Peace@Al Jazeera
 
2018_3-6-Israeli-PM-Benjamin-Netanyahu-in-Washington20180306_2_29079236_31388148.jpg



“Those who make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities”,
Voltaire.
 
The suppression of pro-Palestinian voices is not fighting anti-Semitism because there is nothing anti-Semitic about opposing genocide.

On December 5, 2023, I joined fellow Jewish university students outside the United States Congress to protest against a resolution conflating criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. Our calls to reject the resolution were not heard. Two weeks earlier, a hearing was held where our concerns were yet again ignored; only pro-Israeli witnesses were called to testify. To us, progressive Jews, it appears elected officials who proudly stood by former President Donald Trump after he refused to condemn neo-Nazis and dined with anti-Semites value our voices only when they can tokenise a select few to fulfil their political goals.

Conflating anti-Semitism with criticism of a modern apartheid state is dangerous historical revisionism. It ignores the fact that since the conception of Zionism, there has always existed strong and diverse Jewish opposition to it. For decades, progressive Jewish movements have held Zionism to be a dangerous form of nationalism, with some Holocaust survivors openly denouncing Zionist policies.

Like countless other Jews, I was brought up to believe in extending solidarity, combating oppression and supremacy, and standing up for the sanctity of human life. The Torah states that all people are made B’tselem Elohim (in the image of God), making each life sacred. The Talmud teaches that saving a single life is to save the whole world, commanding Jews everywhere to fight against the loss of life anywhere. These teachings drive the love I have for my faith and culture … and the heartbreak I feel whenever I see the destruction Zionism has wrought.

The Israeli government claims it is fighting to destroy Hamas. Yet, Israeli authorities have long supported strengthening Hamas, facilitating payments to the group and dismissing intelligence reports on a planned attack on southern Israel. Israel has sought to obliterate every aspect of the Palestinian nation, including its knowledge and culture. More than 390 educational institutions have been destroyed in Gaza, along with every single university; thousands of students and teachers have been killed.

Just earlier this month, members of the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) groups were attacked with what is believed to be an Israeli-made chemical-based weapon while they were peacefully rallying for a ceasefire on campus at Columbia University. At least eight students have since been hospitalised. The university administration chose to blame the victims for what happened, saying their protest was “unsanctioned and violated university policies”. Columbia is one of the many universities fuelling the dangerous, ahistorical conflation of Judaism and Zionism, having banned its chapters of SJP and JVP. These smears and hypocrisy are nothing new. As a student in Washington, DC, I have watched political pundits slander pro-Palestine marches as “breeding grounds” for campus anti-Semitism while claiming the November 14 March for Israel was an event rejecting anti-Semitism.

In the face of unspeakable violence, Palestinians continue to show resilience and selflessness, and the world owes them solidarity. Proclaiming that the actions of the Israeli government do not represent us is not enough; the grief and rage we feel at the ongoing violence must motivate us to act.

Lela Tolajian@Al Jazeera
 
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