Posted on 10/19/2023 1:57:20 PM PDT by Ultra Sonic 007
The events of recent days are unprecedented. The last time units of Jewish and Palestinian fighters — military or paramilitary — went to battle on such a broad front in Israel-Palestine was in 1948. There have, of course, been various battles over the years in Gaza as well as West Bank cities like Jenin, and Israeli and Palestinian units fought one another in Lebanon in 1982. But there is no parallel to the scope of what has taken place here since Saturday morning, and not since 1948 have Palestinian fighters occupied Jewish communities on this scale.
This fact is not just a historical anecdote; it has a direct political meaning. This murderous and inhumane attack by Hamas arrived just as it seemed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was about to complete his masterpiece: peace with the Arab world while completely ignoring the Palestinians. This attack has reminded Israelis and the world, for better or for worse, that the Palestinians are still here, and that the century-old conflict here involves them, not the Emiratis or the Saudis.
In his speech at the UN General Assembly two weeks ago, Netanyahu presented a map of “The New Middle East,” depicting the State of Israel stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea and building a “corridor of peace and prosperity” with its neighbors across the region, including Saudi Arabia. A Palestinian state, or even the collection of shrunken enclaves that the Palestinian Authority ostensibly controls, does not appear on the map.
Since he was first elected prime minister in 1996, Netanyahu has tried to avoid any negotiations with the Palestinian leadership, instead choosing to bypass it and push it aside. Israel does not need peace with the Palestinians to prosper, Netanyahu repeatedly claimed; its military, economic, and political strength is sufficient without it. The fact that during the years of his rule, especially between 2009 and 2019, Israel experienced economic prosperity and its international status improved, was, in his eyes, proof that he is following the right path.
The Abraham Accords signed with Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, and later also Sudan and Morocco, reinforced this belief conclusively. “For the past 25 years, we have been told repeatedly that peace with other Arab countries will only come after we resolve the conflict with the Palestinians,” Netanyahu wrote in an article in Haaretz before the last election. “Contrary to the prevailing position,” he continued, “I believe that the road to peace does not go through Ramallah, but bypasses it: instead of the Palestinian tail wagging the Arab world, I argued that peace should begin with Arab countries, which would isolate Palestinian obstinacy.” A peace agreement with Saudi Arabia was supposed to be the icing on the “peace for peace” cake that Netanyahu has spent years preparing.
Netanyahu did not invent the policy of separation between Gaza and the West Bank, nor the use of Hamas as a tool to weaken the Palestine Liberation Organization and its national ambitions to establish a Palestinian state. Then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s 2005 “disengagement” plan from Gaza was built on this logic. “This whole package called the Palestinian state has fallen off the agenda for an indefinite period of time,” said Dov Weissglas, Sharon’s advisor, explaining the political goal of disengagement at the time. “The plan provides the amount of formaldehyde required so that there will be no political process with the Palestinians.”
Netanyahu not only adopted this way of thinking, he also added to it the preservation of Hamas rule in Gaza as a tool for strengthening the separation between the strip and the West Bank. In 2018, for example, he agreed that Qatar would transfer millions of dollars a year to finance the Hamas government in Gaza, embodying the comments made in 2015 by Bezalel Smotrich (then a marginal Knesset member, and today the finance minister and de facto West Bank overlord) that “the Palestinian Authority is a burden and Hamas is an asset.”
“Netanyahu wants Hamas on its feet and is ready to pay an almost unimaginable price for it: half the country paralyzed, children and parents traumatized, houses bombed, people killed,” Israel’s current information minister, Galit Distel Atbaryan, wrote in May 2019, when she was yet to enter politics but was known as a prominent Netanyahu supporter. “And Netanyahu, in a kind of outrageous, almost unimaginable restraint, does not do the easiest thing: getting the IDF to overthrow the organization.
“The question is, why?” Distel Atbaryan continued, before explaining: “If Hamas collapses, Abu Mazen [Mahmoud Abbas] may control the strip. If he controls it, there will be voices from the left that will encourage negotiations and a political solution and a Palestinian state, also in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] … This is the real reason why Netanyahu does not eliminate the Hamas leader, everything else is bullshit.”
Indeed, Netanyahu himself had effectively admitted as much a couple of months before Distel Atbaryan made her comments, when he declared in a Likud meeting that “anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state needs to support strengthening Hamas. This is part of our strategy, to isolate Palestinians in Gaza from Palestinians in Judea and Samaria.”
Strengthening the Gaza fence became another aspect of Netanyahu’s strategy. “The barrier will prevent terrorists from infiltrating our territory,” Netanyahu explained when he announced the start of work in 2019 to add an underground barrier that would end up costing more than NIS 3 billion. Two years later, Israeli journalist Ron Ben-Yishai wrote in Ynet that the ultimate goal of the fence, which was considered to be an impenetrable barrier for terrorists, is to “prevent a connection between Hamas in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority in Judea and Samaria.”
On Saturday morning, that fence was torn down, and with it the broader Netanyahu doctrine — adopted by the Americans and many Arab states — that it is possible to make peace in the Middle East without the Palestinians. As hundreds of militants crossed the border unhindered on their way to occupy army posts and infiltrate dozens of Israeli communities as far as 18 miles away, Hamas declared in the most clear, painful, and murderous way possible that the conflict that threatens Israelis’ lives is the conflict with the Palestinians, and the idea that they can be bypassed via Riyadh or Abu Dhabi, or that the 2 million Palestinians imprisoned in Gaza will disappear if Israel builds a sufficiently elaborate fence, is an illusion that is now being shattered at a terrible human cost.
This is not necessarily good news. It is impossible not to define the actions of Hamas as war crimes: the massacre of civilians, the murder of entire families in their homes, the kidnapping of civilians including the elderly and children into captivity in Gaza — all of these violate the laws of war, and if the International Criminal Court does exercise its jurisdiction over Israel-Palestine, then those responsible for these actions will have to be prosecuted. In other words, Hamas’ “declaration” that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict still exists came at the price of the blood of hundreds of innocent people.
It is also not necessarily good news because it seems that the conclusion Israel is currently drawing from the understanding that the conflict is here in Israel-Palestine, and not in Saudi Arabia, is to “overthrow Hamas” or “flatten Gaza.” Likud MK Ariel Kellner and right-wing journalist Yinon Magal likely represent a significant portion of the Israeli public — and certainly the government — when they call for the response to be another Nakba.
And yet, beyond the moral judgments, the attack by Hamas has brought all of us — especially the Israelis — back to reality, reminding us that the conflict began here, in 1948, and that no magic cure can make it disappear. And since Hamas, as strong and capable of surprises as it may be, cannot murder 7 million Jews, and since Israel — I believe — is not capable of carrying out another Nakba (or even recapturing Gaza), it is possible that from the trauma of the past few days will grow the idea that the conflict must be resolved on the basis of freedom, national and civic equality, and the end of the siege and the occupation.
After the trauma of the 1973 war, which many are comparing to what is happening today, it dawned on Israelis that peace could come at the expense of withdrawing from the Egyptian territory it had occupied. The same realization can happen after the trauma of 2023.
This article has been republished with permission from +972 Magazine. It originally appeared in Hebrew in Local Call.
Is Netanyahu being set up?
Same mistake every Israeli Governments makes. They get pressured by the West to make concessions to bring the terroirsts to the table.
The 2018 bit with Qatar financing Hamas would have been during Trump’s administration; I can’t see how Bibi would have been pressured to cater to Hamas then, at least by us.
What evidence is there that Netanyahu’s toleration of Hamas was forced upon him by the West, as compared to being an actual government policy aimed at keeping Gaza and the West Bank at political cross-purposes to weaken nationalist sentiments amongst the Palestinians as a whole?
It’s interesting, but may not be 100% on the mark. There is only token opposition to Israel’s War on Hamas by the wider Arab governments so far, and a lot of support from the West. One can read from this that they, too, see the likes of Hamas and Hezbullah as problems for regional prosperity. Even the Palestinian Authority would like to see Hamas neutralized. Netanyahu was partly correct, Israel has been able to normalize relations with a lot of the Arab world without going through the Palestinians. The Palestinian cause has grown tired and these other countries aren’t going to tie their futures to a people who cannot get their own act in order. They’ve had endless chances at responsible self-rule. And their failure is partly our (Western world, UN, and Arab alike) failure for just throwing money at them without accountability. We give them money, which is syphoned, funneled, stolen, misused and never put pressure on them to progress towards coexistence.
Bottom line, none of these countries want Al-Queda, ISIS and the like around. Hamas and Hezbullah are their ideological cousins. The Palestinians did not hold up their end of the Oslo deal and voted Hamas in in Gaza largely because they grew tired of the corruption and lack of progress under the Palestinian self-rule government.
What comes after, well, that’s difficult to predict. So the article is correct, Israel cannot and could not go on forever ignoring the Palestinians. Unfortunately, the Palestinian leadership in Gaza embarked on the most barbaric and heinous act in their attempt to get attention. So now, as they wanted, they’ve got Israel’s - and much of the world’s - attention. But not in a way that is productive for them, for now.
Presidents come and go. The bureaucrats running the US Goverment do not
https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4969105,00.html
Netanyahu says Trump issued no ‘blank check’ to Israel
Speaking during a Likud party meeting on Monday afternoon, the Israeli premier insists that while relations were warm between the US and Israel, Jerusalem did not have carte blanche to act in any way it pleased; acknowledges ‘great understanding’ of Israel’s position by the US, but urges Likud members act ‘diligently and responsibly.’
Indeed.
I hope that cooler heads are prevailing in Israeli’s government currently, because — at least publicly — neither Egypt nor Jordan nor Lebanon are willing to tolerate the displacement of more Palestinians from Gaza, not in light of everything else they’re dealing with currently.
And I sincerely do not believe that Israel has to raze or bulldoze Gaza to the ground (as some have called for) to defeat Hamas.
Might want to look a little closer at your source
The historical reporting is at least by-and-large cited, and even the bits Rapoport didn’t (like the bit with Qatar financing Hamas in 2018) I was able to validate in less than thirty seconds of searching.
What part of the editorial that you disagree with, exactly? You can do that with immediately resorting to ad hominem.
Let try this another way
What is the solution here? You want to stand in judgement. How about instead tell us what you think Israel should be doing?
This specific phrase is as old as war. I have no idea if or to what extent Israel or the West or both were forcing the divisions. But, the fact is that the Palestinian political divisions exist, and that made them weaker and internationally less important politically. So it would probably be natural to just let the division exist. It is not, per se, Israel's problem that the Palestinians can't get their own house in order and why would Israel try - they tried and tried for over 30 years since Oslo. You could argue this war is a consequence of not trying, but really there is nothing Israel could do about people with the ideology of Hamas. What are you going to negotiate with a person who swears to kill you, the method of your death?
Of course, now, things have to change. And that means change in the future too. Ultimately though nobody can resolve the Palestinian problem but the Palestinians themselves. We, the west and Arab world and Israel can help but the status quo of just giving them cash without accountability has to end.
This article is nonsense.
I think we're just seeing him for who he is.
Advocating for every single Jew and Palestinian to convert to Christianity and kneel before the name of Jesus, because that's the only way peace will ever actually reign.
Wrong use of ad hominem.. Nice deflection attempt but it will not work
I told you to consider your source. Very 1st thing anyone should do is consider what point of view, what biases, what blind spots the source may have. What point of view are they approaching the issues from?
For example, if Hillary Clinton is writing about Donald Trump, she is going to have a much different view that if Steve Bannon is writing the article
In this case, you have someone decidedly to the left writing about someone decidedly to the Right poltically.
When you see that, or vice versa, you want to take anything they write with a very large grain of salt.
What he is telling you is his point of view, with the goal of doing political damage to the target. Did you look into the rest of the story or did you like what you heard and rush to post it?
True statement. But that will only be accomplished by God.
Yes they do. Invade Syria. Establish a buffer state for refugees from Gaza. Raze Gaza to the ground. Then transport refugees from Gaza to Syria. Jordan and Egypt will remain happy because they don't have to accept any refugees.
If there’s a God, it obviously doesn’t care about what happens on Earth.
There is no such thing, for the next 50 years, as a resolution on the basis of freedom or national and civic equality, because the Hamasniks are feral animals. No Omar Khayyam for them. Listen to what they seriously say to reporters. They're just empty-headed street punks now. Their culture has nothing left but bile and blood-worship.
Nothing will change until Hamas's institutions are destroyed, their leaders and their elites are dispersed or preferably dead, and someone else occupies Gaza.
It doesn't have to be Israel, or even Moslems. Just not jihad jockeys.
Until enough decades roll by.
The solution is to eliminate the capacity, and the will, to wage war of extermination against Israel. Then, find some way towards peaceful coexistence after the will to war is gone. The first part of that (eliminate the capacity to make war) is going on now.
What comes next is very much an open question. If Hamas is destroyed, the Palestinian Authority will be expected to step up but are they truly capable of maintaining order? They have been degraded, fat and lazy by their own corruption and frankly they are not quite one mind themselves. Israel essentially still has to keep the radicals in the West Bank in check even though the PA is supposed to do that under the Oslo deal. Hezbullah is now facing a potentially existential crisis and that makes them way more unpredictable and potentially irrational (suicidal). Lebanon should deal with them, but unlikely. It's entirely possible we will see some forms of reoccupation for a while - what shape and form that will take is unpredictable. I doubt Israel will want to occupy the Gaza population. They may keep a firmer grip on the West Bank. It has been floated in years past that Jordan should take administrative control over the West Bank, but that's also unlikely.
Jared Kushner tried to assemble, with a $50 billion opening offer, some sort of plan - I think part of his plan was to help alleviate Gaza crowding by 99 year lease a few hundred sq miles of the Sinai (which is about 23,000 sq miles in size) to develop an airport and seaport and homes and industry for Palestinians and Egyptians to benefit, with Jordanian investment included and involvement in the West Bank with an eye towards a final map of two states for Israel and Palestinians. It never went far, but got us the Abraham Accords. Before that, there were plans to connect Gaza to the West bank by carving a rail and road corridor (sunken, not elevated) but Ramallah didn't want that, Ramallah is afraid of Hamas. And... if it isn't complicated enough, there are what 1-2 million self-described Palestinians living in Lebanon expecting some place to go? Where? Not Gaza obviously too crowded already. And the people of the West Bank feel NIMBY about that idea too.
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