Stop the Gaza nightmare

Israel has turned Gaza into one of the worst places in the history of the world. For the sake of a just and peaceful future for Israel and Palestine, this pointless slaughter must stop now.

Jack Guez/AFP/Getty Images

As soon as I heard about Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, I was filled with sorrow, dread, anger and despair. Sorrow for the innocent Israelis killed and taken hostage. Dread for the far larger number of innocent Palestinians I knew were about to be killed. Anger that Israel and its patron, the United States, had ignored the tragic plight of the Palestinians as they have done for decades, thereby creating a ticking time bomb that would inevitably explode. And despair that this terrible situation, the way out of which has been known by all parties for decades, now appears more insoluble than ever.

Gaza is a horror unlike any of us who did not witness the worst atrocities of World War II have seen. More than 25,000 Gazans are dead. More than 10,000 of them are children: Gaza is the most dangerous place to be a child in the world. More than 62,000 people have been wounded. Israel claims that it has killed 9,000 Hamas fighters, but has produced no evidence to support that claim. Entire families have been wiped out. At least 37,000 buildings in Gaza have been damaged, and 10,000 completely flattened: the destruction is so vast that the tiny enclave no longer looks the same in satellite images. The survivors of Gaza’s population of 2.2 million, crammed into a 20-mile-by-7 mile area they cannot leave, are bombed wherever they go. Following Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s announcement that Israel was “imposing a complete siege on Gaza. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly,” Israel has weaponized water and food. One in four Gazans are starving: According to the World Health Organization, Gaza has the worst rate of food insecurity ever recorded. Even more catastrophic health consequences may result from Israel’s cutting off water to the Strip. Gazans have been forced to drink water from the sea contaminated with human waste; those in UN shelters have access to only one liter a day. (International standards recommend at least 15.) In Rafah, there is one toilet for every 486 people. Disease is approaching catastrophic levels. Hospitals are horror shows, where children have their limbs amputated without anesthetics and die of easily preventable infections because there is no medicine. At least 83 journalists have been killed in Gaza, more than the number killed in any one country in one year ever. Doctors, nurses, professors, poets, UN workers, nonprofit aid workers—all have been killed and continue to be killed by Israeli strikes.

Is this war genocidal, as South Africa has charged in a case it has brought against Israel at the International Court of Justice? In my view, it is not: If Israel wanted to completely wipe out the population of Gaza, it could do so. But Israel’s utter indifference to Palestinian civilian casualties brings its campaign close to that monstrous crime against humanity. And certainly, just as Hamas committed war crimes in its slaughter of 1,200 Israelis, most of them civilians, Israel is also committing war crimes in its slaughter of far greater numbers of civilians. Even President Biden acknowledged that Israel’s bombing is “indiscriminate.” Israel has routinely dropped 2,000-pound unguided (American-made) bombs on apartment buildings, killing scores of civilians. Even if such strikes were aimed at Hamas fighters (and Israel has not presented little evidence of that) such wanton disregard for civilian life is disproportionate on the face of it, a violation of the Geneva Convention. Since Vietnam, the United States has never used weapons that result in such massive overkill, with the exception of one 2,000 pound bomb it dropped on ISIS’s self-declared “capital” in Syria. Starvation and thirst cannot be used as military tactics. The entire war constitutes collective punishment, which is forbidden by international law. University of Chicago professor Robert Pape, an expert on international security, calls Israel’s Gaza war “one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history.”

And this unspeakable carnage is utterly pointless. Even if Israel achieved its avowed war goal,  killed every Hamas fighter and destroyed every tunnel under Gaza, which is probably impossible, the Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation would not end. The “iron wall” strategy of deterrence by inflicting massive casualties that Israel has pursued since its founding has never worked—not in the more than 13 times it has waged war on Gaza since 1948, one-sided conflicts that have featured Palestinian-to-Israeli casualty ratios as high as 140 to 1—and it will not work now.

The only lasting solution, as the entire world except Israel has recognized for more than 50 years, is the creation of a Palestinian state. Yet Israel has actively opposed that outcome for decades, keeping the Palestinians stateless and in misery—and, in Gaza, keeping them locked up in a giant open-air prison, an overheated boiler waiting to explode. Far-right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has spent his entire career working to prevent a Palestinian state. He has openly supported Hamas for years because doing so furthers that goal. His political vision for the day after hostilities end is to keep Palestinians living under apartheid forever. This outcome will inevitably lead to more violence. Considering all this, it’s impossible to regard this war as anything except a massive, self-defeating exercise in revenge.

The United States, as Israel’s indispensable patron and supporter, is the one country that has the power to influence its policies. Yet it is, as always, utterly unwilling to stand up to Israel. President Biden, who shamefully embraced Netanyahu and green-lighted Israel’s savage onslaught, has been reduced to pathetically begging him to consider maybe, someday, but only if he feels like it, allowing the Palestinians to have their own state. And when Netanyahu predictably spits in his face, as he has been doing since the Obama presidency, Biden grovels some more. As Khaled Elgindy, an analyst at the Middle East Institute, wrote, “Humiliating Biden has become a daily occurrence for Netanyahu.”

The situation has never been bleaker. But its very extremity may hold the seeds of hope. There is still a way forward, one that will allow Israelis and Palestinians to someday peacefully coexist in their respective countries. But it will require Israel to abandon not just the land it conquered and illegally occupied in the 1967 war, but its entire self-defeating security doctrine. And it will require the U.S. to end its “special relationship” of eternal vassalage to Israel, which has proved disastrous not just for the Palestinians, but for both Israel and the United States.

Hamas’s brutal attack on Oct. 7, with its sadistic, almost pornographic quality, rightfully drew the horror and condemnation of the world. By killing, kidnapping and raping civilians, Hamas committed grave war crimes, and those who planned the attack and those who carried it out should be held to account. Israel’s supporters point to Hamas’s atrocities and argue that it is simply acting in legitimate self-defense, as any country would.

Self-defense is indeed a legitimate motivation for war. But virtually every country that has ever gone to war claims it was acting in self-defense. And Israel’s self-defense argument falls apart when considering the context in which the attack took place--the context of Israel’s 56-year-old illegal occupation of the Palestinians, the context of the miserable imprisonment it has imposed on Gazans for 17 years and the slightly less miserable occupation it has imposed on the West Bank, the context of the countless Palestinian civilians it has killed and wounded with impunity, and the context of Netanyahu’s long, cynical support for Hamas. Above all, it ignores the fact that Israeli politicians have consistently rejected the one thing that would bring Israel lasting security: a Palestinian state.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the Oct. 7 attack “did not happen in a vacuum.” The Israeli ambassador to the U.N., predictably, professed outrage at Guterres’s statement and called for him to resign.  For the long-dominant right wing in Israel and its supporters in the United States, every attack on Israel always happens in a vacuum. Only one historical context matters: the Holocaust, and it is always happening, again and again and again. The Palestinians are just the latest avatars of Hitler, driven by blind hatred of Jews. And even if Israel’s defenders acknowledge that the Palestinians may have legitimate grievances, they insist that Israel offered them a state at Camp David, but that the Palestinians turned down Israel’s “generous offer” because they will never be satisfied with anything less than the eradication of Israel. Hamas’s singularly brutal attack has allowed Israel and its defenders to paint it, and by extension the entire Palestinian resistance, as no different from al-Qaida or ISIS—bigoted religious fanatics who can never be appeased. They’re evil, anti-Semitic terrorists. End of story. 

These nostrums allow many Americans, including many liberals, to comfortably push the Israeli-Palestinian conflict out of their minds. But none of them are true.

The concept of “terrorism” is the single biggest obstacle to thinking clearly about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yes, Palestinian resistance groups have periodically resorted to attacks on Israeli civilians, particularly during the Second Intifada that erupted in 2000 after Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon made a provocative visit to the Haram al-Sharif (the Temple Mount) in Jerusalem. As Palestinian-American Columbia professor Rashid Khalidi argues in “The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017,” this tactic has been disastrous for the Palestinians. “With horrifying scenes of recurrent suicide bombings transmitting globally (and with this coverage eclipsing that of the much greater violence perpetrated against the Palestinians), Israelis ceased to be seen as oppressors, reverting to the more familiar role of victims of irrational, fanatical tormentors,” Khalidi writes. The Palestinian use of such tactics has been both morally objectionable and pragmatically disastrous.

But Palestinian terrorism is a symptom. The Palestinians have been driven to engage in it because all other attempts to win their freedom, including diplomacy and non-violent civil disobedience, have proved futile. The underlying issue is Israel’s occupation and oppression of the Palestinians. That oppression has resulted in the deaths of far more Palestinian civilians than all the Israelis killed by terrorist attacks, yet it is the Palestinians who are condemned as evil terrorists and “human animals.”

Unfortunately, the Biden administration reacted to the Oct. 7 attacks the same way the Bush administration did to the 9/11 attacks, giving Israel full-throated support to engage in its own “War on Terror.” One would think that after George W. Bush’s original “War on Terror,” a strategic debacle that brought ISIS into existence, made Iraq even worse than it had been under Saddam Hussein, destabilized the Middle East, cost thousands of American lives and did not make the United States any safer, Americans would be wary of Manichaean, good-vs-evil moral judgments about “terrorism,” and the policies that flow from them. (As my former Salon colleague Suzy Hansen noted in an excellent piece in the New York Times, younger Americans grasp the failure of the “War on Terror” far more acutely than their elders, which helps to explain the generational difference in the response to the Israel-Gaza war.)

Yet today we’re right back in the post-9/11 universe, with its simplistic and ahistorical moral judgments about “terrorism.” The word “terrorism” is an all-powerful discourse-stopper, which has been employed by Israel for decades to avoid addressing Palestinian grievances. (This 1982 Doonesbury cartoon hilariously skewers this tactic, and points out the inconvenient truth that some Israeli leaders also engaged in acts of terrorism.) In the current climate, even to try to discuss Hamas objectively, to analyze it as a major player in the conflict that must be dealt with, is to invite charges of anti-Semitism, aiding terrorists, and wanton amorality. But unless we objectively assess what Hamas is, why it exists, what its goals are, and the choreographed pas de deux that Netanyahu has performed with it for years, we won’t understand how to end this terrible situation, and this cycle of violence will keep happening again.

This is the first of a 2-part article. The second part will appear on Jan. 24.