The basics have not changed
It is hard to believe that Israel’s revenge war for the cross-border attack by Palestinians belonging to the Islamic Hamas movement has lasted a year. And there is no end in sight.
What happened on and after October 7, 2023 to civilians, whether Israelis or Palestinians or Lebanese, adds up to war crimes, regardless of the perpetrator or the victims or the background. At the same time, it is a mistake for anyone following the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to ignore or forget the context. By the time of the Hamas attack on Israel, seventy-five years had passed since Israel first refused to address the Palestinian refugee problem that it caused on the eve of the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. Nineteen years later Israel occupied Gaza and the West Bank—as well as the Syrian Golan Heights and the Egyptian Sinai—in an offensive war (contrary to Israeli claims). With the exception of the peace deal with Egypt, Israel has refused to end its military control over five million Palestinians for the past fifty-seven years. Finally, Gaza itself has suffered from a seventeen-year illegal land, air, and water siege since 2007.
In response to the brutal Hamas attack and the hostage-taking, Israel began a revenge war, killing, injuring, and decimating Palestinian civilians and their bakeries, schools, hospitals, mosques, churches. Children, women, and medical and humanitarian personnel who have been maimed or killed number in the tens of thousands. Nearly two million Palestinians have been displaced from their homes in fear for their lives, many only to be killed while sheltering in schools and other locations. Among those killed were twenty-one Palestinian Christians, most of whom died while sheltering in a housing complex next to the third oldest church in the world. Hundreds of Palestinians have been imprisoned and tortured, and thousands are being held without charge or trial. Documented reports have shown that they are badly treated—confined to reduced food and denied any contact with their families or lawyers.
A ceasefire and an exchange of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners seemed likely following a proposal by President Joe Biden. This proposal was later codified into an international law by the UN Security Council. Yet after initially agreeing to the plan along with the Islamic Hamas, Israel reneged and decided at the last moment to add new conditions, thus scuttling the deal.
Allies to the people of Gaza who tried to press Israel to agree to a deal were also brutally attacked, when Israel blew up booby-trapped pagers that had been sold to the Hezbollah movement in Lebanon. The pagers were part of a low-tech effort by the Lebanese movement to avoid detection, but Israel had booby-trapped the low-tech machines and then in September blew them up simultaneously, causing tens of deaths and hundreds of injuries, including children and hospital staff.
As a journalist, I have been angered by the Israeli decision to keep out all the international press while it has picked off over a hundred local Palestinian journalists. This was clearly done as part of a systematic effort to keep the truth of the Israelis’ actions unknown while they spin their own untruths.
The violence and counter-violence have not stopped and show no potential for stopping. President Biden seems unable to use the powers of the presidency to any effect. Some argue that Israel’s prime minister has been trying to stall with the hope that his favorite in the elections, Donald Trump, will win. Others say that Netanyahu, facing corruption charges, is refusing to end the war, acting on the assumption that he will eventually be victorious and thus see his other mistakes erased.
A sinister analysis is that Netanyahu’s ultimate goal is a war with Iran, one in which he is sure Washington would stand with Israel and thus somehow end the rule of Islamists in Iran. But the reality that most Israelis, including military analysts and knowledgeable retired generals, can clearly see is that Israel will not be able to annihilate an entire people or an entire movement. Militant Islamists who have a strong commitment to their faith and ideology are unlikely to surrender. Israel cannot win against the Palestinian Hamas, nor against the Lebanese Hezbollah, and certainly not against Iran.
The efforts of the U.S. to end the war will keep failing and Israel’s radical leadership will keep refusing to accept the advice of American and other Western allies—so long as weapons and ammunition flow from those countries who give lip service to the calls for ceasefire but fail to put any weight behind their calls.
For Palestinians and others in the Middle East, the potentially genocidal war on the peoples of the region has exposed the immorality of countries in the West. The very countries that have called on Russia for a ceasefire and an end to the occupation of Ukraine, and have used sanctions against Moscow, refuse to apply the same principles when it comes to their pampered Israeli ally.
Instead, leading evangelical leaders, who are called by Jesus to be peacemakers, have turned into warmongers justifying and encouraging Israel to continue. Former UN ambassador under Trump, Nikki Haley, signed Israeli bombs with the words “finish them.” Former Vice President Mike Pence similarly signed his name to bombs that have killed innocent children made in the image of God. This makes Palestinian Christians very angry.
Nevertheless, regardless of the killing and the carnage, the war crimes, and the violence against civilians on both sides, the important lessons of these wars have yet to be absorbed. What we know now is what we have known for decades. Neither Palestinians nor Israelis are going away. The only sensible solution to resolving the deep differences is either the sharing of power in a single bi-national country or the sharing of the land in what is commonly referred to as the two-state solution. The present status quo, however, has been documented by international human rights organizations as an apartheid situation in which Jews are supreme to Palestinians, who have no political rights and live under an unwanted foreign occupation.
The daily killings will not solve the conflict. We are no closer to peace now than we were on October 6, 2023. At least many more people around the world are aware of the Palestinian cause and have seen with their own eyes Israel’s inhuman brutality and the crime of starving an entire people as a strategy to force a surrender.
The prayer for a just peace must not stop. After directly and indirectly fostering the bloodshed that we now see, the international community must not lift its hands from this region. We are all in this boat, and we are all responsible for ensuring that it finds a safe place to land: a place where peace and justice will flow, heeding the call of the prophet Amos.
Daoud Kuttab, a graduate of Messiah College, is an award-winning Palestinian Christian journalist and former Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University. Follow him on X @DaoudKuttab and on Threads @daoud.kuttab
Image credit: People’s Health Dispatch in Gaza
Excellent piece. Thank you for contributing this to Current.