At the start of Israel’s war on Gaza, when the intensive bombing of civilians began, the thought in my mind was: how will we Palestinians live with the Israelis after this? Twelve months later, with no relenting in the killings and the destruction of Gaza, with Israel spreading the conflict to the West Bank, where more than 700 Palestinians have been killed, and its escalatory attacks in Lebanon and Iran, the question has only become more pertinent.
In the course of these past 12 months many atrocities have been committed, starting with the killing by Palestinians of 1,200 Israeli soldiers and civilians, followed by the Israeli army killing more than 41,000 Palestinians, including more than 17,000 women and children, 287 aid workers and 138 journalists and media workers. This does not include those unaccounted for who remain under the rubble of the two-thirds of Gaza’s buildings that have been damaged or destroyed. Here is just one detail from this 12-month war: On 25 September, Israel returned a truck containing 88 bodies with no identifying details to Gaza.
Israel has been under the misguided belief that it could hide these atrocities from the world by limiting access to journalists. It has not allowed outsiders to do independent reporting in Gaza, which has made it easier to dispute Palestinian versions of events and the figures of those killed, and the extent of the damage caused. To shed further doubt, the tremendous number of lives lost is usually accompanied by the caveat “claims the Hamas-run health ministry”.
All of this made the Israeli army callous, and it has killed large numbers of Palestinians in single airstrikes. Benjamin Netanyahu made the killing or capture of Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader, a prime objective of the war for which no price was deemed excessive. Rather than use precision bombs when there was intelligence on Sinwar’s whereabouts, the Israeli military used 2,000lb (900kg) bombs, killing and injuring hundreds of innocent Palestinians. This has been repeated many times over this past year and has continued even after the US stopped supplying Israel with this type of bomb because of its use in civilian areas.
Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the majority of whom are refugees from towns and villages in what became Israel in 1948, have been forced to relocate multiple times; Israel has treated the population as dispensable chattels that it can move around at will. In the months since Hamas’s 7 October attack, almost all of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million have been displaced from their homes.
At the beginning of the war, I confess that I did not take seriously the initial pronouncements of Israel’s hawkish leaders, such as their promise to turn Gaza into an uninhabitable desert and descriptions of Palestinians in subhuman terms. I couldn’t believe that the Israelis had relegated the Palestinians to such an inferior state that they were capable of conducting this policy without a reaction from within and outside Israel. As events showed, they meant these words, and they have now left the Gaza Strip effectively uninhabitable. The dire warnings have materialised.
What I also failed to realise was that once they were able to get away with such atrocities in Gaza, the rightwing leaders would seize their chance to follow them with similar crimes in the West Bank and now in Lebanon. And so they began destroying the infrastructure of camps and towns in the West Bank, and used drones to kill Palestinians from the air just as they are doing in Gaza.
One development that I had high hopes for was theend of Israeli impunity with the South African case against Israel at The Hague. I took much cheer from the B’Tselem press release on 20 May, which stated that the “era of impunity for Israel decision-makers is over”. This proved to be false optimism. So far, Israeli leaders have not been deterred. I should have known better after my disappointments following decades of waging futile human rights battles against Israeli violations in the West Bank regarding the building of illegal settlements.
For Israelis, the events of 7 October last year have become akin to what the Turkish-Cypriot psychiatrist Vamik Volkan has called a “chosen trauma”, which he described as an event that binds a community’s sense of itself together even as it can close off the possibility of healing and making peace.
Yet the events of 7 October are not the only “chosen trauma” in Israel’s chequered past. Israel often narrates relations between Israelis and Palestinians as replete with traumas that are never forgotten and are used “to legitimate the killing of Palestinians as an effective tool to preserve a secure Jewish state and prepare Israeli youth to be good soldiers and to carry on the practices of occupation”, as Israeli professor Nurit Peled-Elhanan argued in her 2010 study Legitimation of massacres in Israeli school history books.
There is scant possibility that the Israeli population will eventually wake up and recognise the harm it has done to Palestinians past and present. In May, a Pew Research Center survey found that 39% of Israelis said Israel’s military response against Hamas in Gaza had been about right, while 34% said it had not gone far enough and only 19% thought it had gone too far. The prospect of this public coming to its senses seems remote.
Nor is there hope that the tide of unquestioned support for Israel by the US will be receding any time soon. Or that the US government will begin to see that unconditional support for Israel is self-defeating and injurious for Israel as well as too costly
Yet despite all the above, the poignant fact remains that the Palestinians are the crux of the matter. After its military success in 1967, the Israeli defence minister Moshe Dayan declared: “We are now an empire.” Fifty-seven years later, Israel remains unable to achieve peace because it has repeatedly refused to recognise Palestinian self-determination. Israel’s perceived success at clipping the wings of Hezbollah has already made it euphoric, confirming its belief that it can proceed with destroying the Palestinians in Gaza and will have a free hand in taking over the whole of Palestine to establish Greater Israel.
Yet after fighting on several fronts its economy is suffering and its dependence on support from the US, which it has repeatedly humiliated, remains undiminished. Soon it will become clear that Israel will have to keep on fighting one war after another and will remain a nation forever under siege if it continues on this path. Only when Israel realises that the cost of destroying the Palestinians is too high will the two nations find a way to live together in peace in our shared homeland.
Raja Shehadeh is a Palestinian lawyer and writer, and founder of the human rights organisation Al-Haq. His latest book is What Does Israel Fear From Palestine?
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