Conflict theorists invariably portray parties as proverbial ‘scorpions in the bottle’ engaged in atavistic self-destruction. This theory was expounded in Northern Ireland by the late John Darby, where the 1998 Good Friday Agreement has (since) shown that antagonistic enemies can embrace peace. As someone who has often served in the Palestinian Authority and Gaza, I am aware of how difficult it is to reach consensus on controversial political events. Often the best thing you can achieve is listening to those controversial voices, and that’s what I’ve done for this article. I do this knowing that Gaza’s dark history is one that confuses the daily lives and troubled minds of Palestinians and Israelis alike.
During the 1948 war, large numbers of Palestinians fled to Gaza, which was then under the control of Egypt. During the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, Israel captured Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The first Palestinian intifada broke out in Gaza in December 1987, when Hamas was founded. The Oslo peace process gave the country limited autonomy in Gaza and parts of the occupied West Bank. Israel withdrew its troops and Jewish settlements from Gaza in 2005. Hamas has controlled Gaza since 2007, after winning a majority of seats in a Palestinian legislature.
My initial assessment was that the Hamas attacks really caught all parties by surprise. Within a few days, I had participated in one-on-one or group interviews by telephone with, among others, a contact in the Hamas press office, a prominent Israeli peace activist, a senior doctor, and an IDF staffer. My intention was to try to create a profile of personal experiences on the ground. I especially wanted to get some idea of Hamas thinking. I wanted to assess whether the Israeli peace movement could still be intact. Most of all, I wanted to hear a medical voice.
When I listened to a Hamas representative in late October 2023, his feedback was very reflective. The consensus was that the dark history that brought Israelis and Palestinians together in Gaza involved much more than just conflicting political or religious cultures:
This dark history is part of the psyche of the Palestinian people and I suppose we have to recognize that the opposite is true, that it is the worst nightmare of those on the Israeli side who can never sleep for fear of attack… right conflict, nor a fair conflict. It is we (Palestinians) who are oppressed. It is we (Palestinians) who have lost our land… We (Palestinians) are trapped in Gaza. We (who are banned from our land) are the worst treated refugee populations in the world. I am sure that the great Edward Siad, one of the most eloquent spokespeople for our plight, did not expect to die when the situation for ordinary Palestinians is much worse now than when he started writing. Intifada came twice… and it didn’t get any better. Our neighbor, that scorpion you’re talking about, built our land with fanatics who only wanted to destroy us… Then Israel started electing politicians who had more in common with the horrible people of their own dark history – from the Second World War… That dark history is repeating itself and those who were society’s biggest victims reveal themselves to be among the worst perpetrators… That’s why war comes back to haunt us…
Israelis and Palestinians are now facing the deadliest clashes in fifty (mostly) bloody years, with the number of deaths painfully increasing on both sides. The now near-all-out war between Israel and Hamas, the Gaza Strip’s preeminent militant group, is an ongoing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians that has destabilized economies and disrupted prospects for broader peace in the Middle East. These two peoples seem condemned to continued self-destruction after so many frustrated attempts at local truces and international peace-building. In addition to being the oldest refugee crisis in the world, more than three hundred thousand Gazans are homeless, according to UNRWA.
Hamas, the Palestinian militant group with overall power in the Gaza Strip, brutally attacked a pop concert, Israeli settlements and kibbutz on Gaza’s borders, causing Israel to declare war. Hamas showed no mercy for civilian targets and took more than two hundred Israeli hostages. Hamas militants justified their invasion as moral retaliation for the deteriorating conditions for Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. In previous negotiations with Qatar, Egypt and the UN, Hamas had pushed for significant Israeli concessions regarding the sixteen-year blockade of the Gaza Strip. These discussions got them nowhere and (perhaps) the surprise attacks could be interpreted as an outburst of anger, the result of some fifty-six years in prison in ‘the largest prison in the world’. Hamas officials referred to the location of Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque, which is sacred to both Muslims and Jews. Disputes over the site, known to Jews as the Temple Mount, have led to violence before – including the brutal ‘eleven-day’ war of 2021.
Israel then cut off food, water, electricity and other supplies to the Gaza Strip, in what would amount to an all-out siege of one of the most impoverished and densely populated areas in the world. Speaking about the conditions of anonymity with a prominent Israeli peace activist, one gets the sense that the message of peace has “gone hoarse” amid such atrocities:
We have stood for peace with the Palestinians for decades. When I say we don’t mean not to fight. I mean, we stand for mutual respect, for coexistence, yes even among most of us for some kind of two-state solution. We have faced every form of abuse, intimidation and even assassination attempts from the extremists in our own camps… Death threats, bullying of our own children, bombs, turds in the mail… I can’t begin to say what it fate belongs to an Israeli. peace activist….And you know what? Some of my peace friends say how little we have accomplished and how little we have left to convince us to continue. And yet some of us still protest and say that peace is right… But I can’t tell you that when we woke up to the latest macabre events and to the sight of the torture perpetuated by animals, people who pretend to represent the Palestinians. And as we see our Israeli brothers in Gaza being kidnapped and held to ransom and used as human shields, I cannot attempt to convince you that we as peace activists find it difficult to turn the other cheek to this monstrous atrocity ….So I will. can you honestly say that I now find it difficult to continue with this work….”
Dr. Hammam Alloh, a medical consultant in Gaza City, suggests that the Israeli blockade “always necessitated rationing of medicines, blood products, fresh water and energy, and this is merely an intensification.” In the same interview, his medical colleague asks some crucial questions about humanitarianism in war:
President Biden is begging for new humanitarian corridors. Does he think Israel is a humanitarian actor? Look, this isn’t the first time the roads to Gaza have been closed. This is a typical Israeli tactic. It is like the prison guard in this great prison that is the territory of Gaza, who denies the privileges to the convicts held captive in their own land by the Israeli security apparatus – the settlers – the occupiers – the enemy. It’s as if the prison guard says: shoot us and you won’t get any food. If you oppose us, you will not be granted convict privileges. Prisoner 100 – you are entering even worse detention than what you already have in Gaza prison. You will now also have to work hard to retrieve the bodies of loved ones you lost in the rubble of the buildings that Israel destroyed. Go dig your own graves in Gaza.
Israeli warplanes have bombed Gaza repeatedly since the Hamas operation, ahead of offensives to eradicate Hamas. According to the Israeli army, a ground invasion is already underway. Anonymously, a military officer agreed to say the following:
In my decades of service, I have never seen such determination among the Israeli people. In any other country, people often run for the hills when the mention of reservists is mentioned. From the moment of the attacks we had traffic jams. I mean, no one waited for the mobilization. We had so many reservists reporting that we could barely process them. I am a professional soldier. I’m not a man of emotion. I’m sorry to say it can never be the same again. For example, any moderate sentiment that we found among the young generation, children who had never seen Hamas violence up close, well, sometimes the young are among the most extreme. I feel the violence and desperation in their voices. This attack is a game changer. I don’t think we can ever look at Palestinians the same way again. I think it would take generations to forgive, and the children and grandchildren of those who witnessed and are now forensically confronting these latest massacres… Hamas is to blame… Well, forget any hope that they will pursue to a new Oslo- or something else, except maybe another wall or a better weapon to defend Israel with….
Unfortunately, the conflict now seems unresolvable. This latest return to the darkest episodes of a grim history is like that ghostly, flickering filmography of the 1947-1949 Palestine War, remade. Whether Israeli or Palestinian, the voices and the toll of losses have rarely seemed more stark.
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