Israel, Palestine at a crossroads

THE Gaza war has entered its second week, with Hamas’ terror attack drawing a fierce retaliatory response from Israel. The death toll is rising with each passing hour, leaving a trail of bloodshed. The ground situation is highly kinetic, and there is a possibility that the violence will escalate.

Hamas does not represent the broader voice of Palestine, and numerous liberal voices have expressed their disapproval of the group’s terror tactics.

Since the onset of the war, over 1,300 Israelis have lost their lives. Meanwhile, Israeli airstrikes on Gaza have resulted in the death of more than 2,300 Palestinians so far.

A million Palestinians have been forced to flee to safety. Egypt is reported to have taken ‘unprecedented measures’ to prevent its borders with Gaza from being breached by refugees and cautioned that Israel’s potential ground invasion of the territory will be a ‘grave mistake’.

While the stated Israeli objective is to eliminate Hamas, the terrorist group responsible for the attack being described as Israel’s 9/11 (a comparison with the terror attacks against the US on September 11, 2001), the collateral damage to the civilian population in Palestine will be immense.

This violation of international law and normative humanitarian tenets is not new, and the targeting of innocent civilians has a diabolical past since the advent of airpower in the early 20th century.

The long-festering Palestine issue has a complex and tangled history, but it is now accepted that over the past 75 years, Israel has, through its military power and forceful occupation of land by settlers, transformed Palestine into the world’s largest and most oppressive open-air prison. Around two million Palestinians live in ghettos that are densely populated and their daily lives are continuously monitored by a harsh surveillance system.

While Palestine, with Yasser Arafat as its distinctive voice, was a major issue for the Arab/Muslim world during the Cold War decades, the support the Palestinian cause received has progressively waned. The US ambivalence regarding statehood for Palestine and Israeli intransigence has resulted in an impasse, and in the light of more recent regional geopolitical developments, it appeared that an equitable resolution of the Palestine issue had gone off the global radar — until October 7.

Nonetheless, the dastardly terror attack by Hamas targeting Israeli civilians and foreign tourists, while bringing attention to the Palestine issue in a chilling manner, has also dealt a severe blow to the cause of statehood.

Hamas, with its anti-Jewish zealotry, does not represent the broader voice of Palestine, and numerous liberal voices have expressed their disapproval of the group’s terror tactics, although without much success.

However, the reprehensible acts of terror by Hamas and other groups cannot justify the numerous instances of Israeli mass killings and the prolonged suffering of Palestinians, including their expulsion from their homeland, over the past 75 years.

Two aspects of the ongoing violence warrant consideration as this conflict continues to intensify. Firstly, the scale of the surprise factor that seems to have completely stunned Israel and its much-vaunted surveillance grid and military infrastructure during the initial hours of the Hamas attack. Was it merely a case of total systemic collapse and institutional ineptitude? Or, as some Israeli military veterans seem to suggest, though it may sound heretical, was it caused by corruption, including clandestine collusion with the enemy? These are early weeks and only a more detailed investigation into the failures that led to the October 7 attack will provide answers to the many questions that are being raised both within Israel and beyond. The fake news and disinformation campaigns only add to the opaque murkiness.

The second aspect relates to a structural determinant — the causal factors that have led to this cycle of violence. Israel, like Pakistan, is an ab initio nation-state, which means that there was no such entity prior to 1948. Religion was the determining factor of the nascent nation, with a narrative of persecution symbolised by Hitler’s genocidal policies laying the foundation for legitimising the relentless occupation of Palestinian territory and the expulsion of its non-Jewish population. Academics have described such a pursuit as pseudo-nationalism, which consists of those movements that build on identity politics and confer high priority on members of a particular religious community as preferred citizens. This has also been referred to as religious nationalism, communal nationalism and, by some scholars, as fascist communalism.

In this formulation, the Jewish state can take recourse to any action to safeguard what it perceives as its interests, even at the expense of denying Palestinians their homeland, historical rights and human dignity.

Pitted against this religious nationalism is the ugly face of religious exceptionalism, as manifested by Hamas (and other Islamist terror groups), wherein death to the Jews is presented as an immutable tenet that is theologically ordained. Clearly, this template is highly deplorable and should be rejected, and, if necessary, groups that espouse such an ideology should be neutralised by force when warranted. The October 7 attack would qualify as one such exigency — but at what cost to innocent Palestinians?

In this bleak scenario, where both Hamas and Israel are locked in a ‘heads you win, tails I lose’ cul-de-sac, the chimera of ensuring ‘security’ at the cost of mortgaging ‘peace’ is striking. Israel, till recently, was the exemplar of a state that prioritised military security at any cost. However, in the process, it has not been at peace with itself or its colonised, non-Jewish Palestinian inhabitants.

Whether Israel will invest in security or peace after this current cycle of bloodshed is uncertain. For now, it is seeking retribution. But as the US experience in its global war against terror after 9/11 has demonstrated, ruthless vengeance cannot be a substitute for a pragmatic and ethical long-term policy — one that foregrounds human security and dignity of all inhabitants of a tortured region that is venerated as their holy land by the Semitic faiths.