The War of the 1967 Gaza War: The Palestinians, the Israelis, and the Israeli Government: The Challenge of a Left-Right Symmetric Movement
The lack of detailed plans for postwar Gaza is evidence of some kind of problem with Israeli thinking. The oft-stated Israeli leadership commitment to destroying Hamas ignores the reality of what that movement is. Hamas is a terrorist organization and has been in power in the Gaza Strip for more than 15 years. There is an idea that resistance is part of the struggle for Palestinian liberation. Hamas is not a foreign organization but part of the fabric of Palestinian society. Its popularity is higher because other avenues to achieve liberation are closed to Palestinians.
First, Israel is facing threats from a set of enemies who combine medieval theocratic worldviews with 21st century weaponry — and are no longer organized as small bands of militiamen, but as modern armies with brigades, battalions, cyber capabilities, long-range rockets, drones and technical support. I am speaking about Iranian-backed Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic militias in Iraq and the Houthis in Yemen — and now even the openly Hamas-embracing Vladimir Putin. The enemies that have been there were all threatening Israel at the same time, and they looked like dragons.
The leaders of all the Arab nations have requested an immediate cease-fire, as well as the UN agencies, in order to recognize the danger of a metastasizing crisis. The nations opposing a cease-fire — Israel, the United States, some European countries and a few others — might acknowledge the perils looming. But they insist that after Oct. 7, Israel must be allowed to militarily eliminate Hamas and should be supported in that quest, despite the unconscionable and growing cost in civilian life.
$30 million per month in aid was granted by Israel to the Gaza Strip and the number of permit for Gazans to work in Israel was increased.
There has been a significant increase in illegal Israeli settlers in the West Bank since the beginning of the negotiation process, as well as the abandonment of the Palestinian Authority’s alternative offered via security cooperation with Israel.
That may sound like a dream. How can Israel be expected to engage, even indirectly, with a political body in which Hamas is represented? This is exactly what coming to terms with conflict looks like. There is a path to Israeli security, and it entails security and rights for Palestinians. Previous Israeli governments eventually talked to the once-banned P.L.O. Any future government that is serious about a way forward will have to engage with a reformed P.L.O. in which Hamas is represented.
A process of mutual dehumanization has led each side, he said, to regard the other as morally inferior. He noted that Palestinians traffic in a similar stereotype of Israelis, and thatIsraelis often suggest that Palestinians don’t love their children and are ready to sacrifice them for the struggle.
Some groups signed agreements with Israel to pave the way for a two-state solution. The Palestinian Authority, envisioned as a Palestinian government in waiting, had limited authority over parts of the West Bank and remained officially committed to negotiating an end to the conflict.
In 1948, when Israel was established, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were kicked out of their homes, in what would become the start of a military conflict that would eventually lead to its creation.
That was a turning point, Osama Hamdan, a Hamas leader based in Beirut, Lebanon, told The Times. Hamas was not fighting over issues in Gaza, but issues that affect all Palestinians, including those outside the enclave. The events also convinced many in Hamas that Israel sought to push the conflict past a point of no return that would ensure the impossibility of Palestinian statehood.
Mr. Sinwar became the armed wing’s representative to Hamas political leadership, connecting him more closely to the leaders of the military wing, including Mr. Deif. The two men were key architects of the Oct. 7 attack, according to Arab and Israeli officials.
Hamdan and Sinwar: Two-State Solution to the Syria-Israel War and the Future of Inter-Israeli Relations in the Middle East
“I am not saying I won’t fight anymore,” he said. I don’t want war anymore. I want the siege to end. You walk to the beach at sunset and you see all these teenagers on the shore chatting and wondering what the world looks like across the sea. What life looks like,” he added. “I want them free.”
While Hamas did not recognize Israel’s right to exist, it did issue a political program in which they allowed for the possibility of a two-state solution.
The Israelis only wanted to find a way to get rid of the Palestinian cause. Mr. Hamdan said. They were heading towards that direction without even thinking about the Palestinians. And if the Palestinians did not resist, all of that could have taken place.”
Still, in 2021, Israeli military intelligence and the National Security Council thought that Hamas wanted to avoid another war, according to people familiar with the assessments.
Israel’s security establishment believed that its extensive border defense made it possible to keep Hamas out of Gaza.
American and other Western analysts estimated that Hamas had between 20,000 to 40,000 fighters with about 15,000 rockets, which were likely smuggled in through Egypt. The group had mortars, anti-tank missiles and portable air-defense systems as well, they said.
Mr. Sinwar had also restored the group’s ties to its longtime backer, Iran, which had frayed in 2012, when Hamas shuttered its office in Syria, a close Iranian ally, amid Syria’s civil war.
There was no turning to bombs and instead, he turned to reconciliation. He studied the Holocaust in a master’s program, learned excellent Hebrew and tried to see the humanity in Israeli soldiers at West Bank checkpoints.
“We don’t see each other as human beings,” he said, and he told me of the Palestinian mother of a teenage boy killed by Israeli soldiers who reluctantly came to a Parents Circle meeting, still fuming at Jews.
I told Aramin that the majority of the organizations promoting mutual understanding were from the peace process. Now that process is in hibernation, if not dead. The Parents Circle holds camps for Israeli and Palestinian kids to befriend each other, but how do they save lives on either side of the border?
The arc of history is long, he replied. Germany once tried to wipe out Jews and now exchanges ambassadors with Israel. Some day Israel and Palestine will coexist as states, he said, and the question is simply how many corpses will pile up before that happens.
“We must share this land as one state or two states or five states,” he said. “Otherwise, we will share this same piece of land as the graveyards of our kids.”
“These must include the Palestinian people’s voices and aspirations at the center of post-crisis governance in Gaza,” he said. Gaza should be unified with the West Bank under the Palestinian Authority.
The presidents of the United States and Israel are willing to be critical of each other in public in order to make up for the discontent they had over Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, according to veteran diplomats.
The remarks by Mr. Blinken on Wednesday reflect a deep anxiety on the part of Mr. Biden and his aides inside the White House as the conflict enters its second month. The president’s challenge has become more complicated in the days after October 7th, when he rushed to the defense of an ally.
According to John F. Kirby, a spokesman for the National Security Council, they don’t have it all figured out. I am not sure if it would be reasonable for us to believe we can at this point in the conflict. But we know that it has to be something different than what it was under Hamas.”
After Hamas killed more than 1400 people in Israel, White House officials said that Mr. Biden was fully behind Israel and its right to respond.
The presence of Israeli forces in Gaza, where 2 million Palestinians are found, was not made clear in his comments on Wednesday.
Which is why I’m worried about the leadership today. I was in the West Bank on Tuesday, when I heard that Netanyahu told ABC News that Israel would retain overall security responsibility in Gaza.
I was astonished by the number of Israelis who feel this threat personally regardless of where they live, starting with a woman in Jerusalem who told me that she and her husband had just obtained gun licenses. No one is going to take their children into a tunnel. Hamas, alas, has tunneled fear into many, many Israeli heads far from the Gaza border.
If Netanyahu’s message to the world remains: “help us defeat Hamas in Gaza,” Biden cannot help Israel build a coalition of U.S., European and moderate Arab partners to defeat Hamas.
Kiryat Shmona cried out for Israel: “You can’t leave Israel without destroying,” a grieving Israeli survivor told the Times of Israel
The town of Kiryat Shmona is located on the border with Lebanon. That father said his family had fled the northern fence line with thousands of other Israeli families after the pro-Iranian Hezbollah militia and Palestinian militias in southern Lebanon began lobbing rockets and artillery and making incursions in solidarity with Hamas.
When might they go back? They had no idea. Like more than 200,000 other Israelis, they have taken refuge with friends or in hotels all across this small country of nine million people. Real estate prices in central Israeli towns have been rising for a few weeks. For Hezbollah, that alone is mission accomplished, without even invading like Hamas. Along with Hamas, they are managing to shrink Israel.
I asked Liat Admati, 35, a survivor of the Hamas attack who ran a clinic for facial cosmetics for 11 years in Be’eri, what would make it possible for her go back to her Gaza border home, where she was raised.
She said that she went back to feel safe. “Before this situation I felt I have trust in the army. I feel like the trust is broken. I don’t want to think that people are hiding from us all the time, but behind this fence there are people who can do it again. At this point in time, I don’t know what the solution is.
Before Oct. 7, she and her neighbors thought the threat was rockets, she said, so they built safe rooms — but now that Hamas gunmen came over and burned parents and kids in their safe rooms, who knows what is safe? She said that the safe room was designed to keep you safe from rockets and not from another human. She stated that the most depressing fact is that it appears that some Gazans who worked on the kibbutz gave Hamas maps of the layout.
The Times of Israel published an audio recording of the man who was killed in the October 7 assault on the army, and many Israelis listened to it.
“Look how many I killed with my own hands! According to an English translation, he said that his son murdered Jews. He says that your son is a hero. His parents can be heard seemingly rejoicing.
This kind of chilling exuberance — Israel was built so that such a thing could never happen — explains the homemade sign I saw on a sidewalk while driving through the French Hill Jewish neighborhood of Jerusalem the other day: “It’s either us or them.’’
This conflict is now back to its most biblical and primordial roots. This seems to be a time of eyes for eyes and teeth for teeth. The morning-after policy thinking will have to wait for the mourning after.
Really? According to a report from the Times of Israel, at the end of 2021, there are about 9.409 million people in Israel, which includes Israelis in West Bank settlements. “Of those, 6.982 million (74 percent) are Jewish, 1.99 million (21 percent) are Arab and 472,000 (5 percent) are neither. The West Bank has a population of 3 million and the Gaza has a population of 2 million.
Netanyahu is saying that seven million Jews will be in control of five million Palestinians in the West Bank, and they will not have a political horizon, or statehood one day.
After being slammed by the public for digitally stabbing his army and intelligence chiefs in the back in the middle of a war, Netanyahu published a new tweet. “I was wrong,” he wrote, adding that “the things I said following the press conference should not have been said, and I apologize for that. I support Israel’s security services.
The damage was done. How much do you suppose those military leaders trust what Netanyahu will say if the Gaza campaign stalls? What real leader would behave that way at the start of a war of survival?
It’s a remarkable story of grass-roots mobilization that showed how much solidarity is still buried in this place and could be unlocked by a different prime minister, one who was a uniter, not a divider. “When you get to the front, you are overwhelmed by the power of what we lost” – according to Scherf.
The U.S. and the Palestine Liberation Organization (P.L.O.) have no confidence in the status of post-Hamas Gaza
The Palestinian Authority has told the Biden administration that it is open to a governance role in post-Hamas Gaza if the United States commits to a full-fledged two-state solution to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, according to a top official of its parent, the Palestine Liberation Organization.
The official, Hussein al-Sheikh, the P.L.O.’s secretary general, said he had told Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken last week that the Palestinian Authority sought “a commitment from the U.S. administration, with a comprehensive political decision that would include the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.”
The White House has been trying to get out of the worst violence between Israel and Hamas in decades, and this message is a challenge to them. American officials say the Palestinian Authority must play a central role in Gaza after Israel completes its military mission to destroy Hamas, which the authorities say killed 1,400 civilians and soldiers in its Oct. 7 attacks.
Mr. al-Sheikh said the core issues that have stymied peacemakers for three decades have been Israel’s withdrawal from the West Bank and the political status of East Jerusalem.
Mr. al-Sheikh said he had no confidence that the current Israeli government, which has pushed to annex large parts of the West Bank, would agree to those terms. “Where is the partner on the Israeli side?” he asked.