Israel vs Palestine

Start with the basics

There are few conflicts out there that can draw out as much emotion as the one between Israel and Palestine. But as usual the narratives are often incommensurable and both sides try and accuse the other of what they themselves have done in the past.

A hostage situation?

Let’s start with a few basics about what occured on Saturday the 7th of October 2023 when members of Hamas broke out of the Gaza Wall and killed innocent Israelis at the Supernova Music Festival while also taking many civilians hostage. The most obvious point should be that killing innocent people is a crime and that taking hostages on top of that is also a crime. No crime in the name of “liberation” can be a defense in court.

But the second point equally obvious is that criminals should be punished for their crime, not those who did not commit the crime. Collective punishment is unacceptable in a civilised legal system. I am not allowed to flatten the house of the neighbour of a rapist and even less so kill his daughter. The rapist should go to jail.

This is where the “Pro Israel” crowd loses me entirely, because I see no justification for a military response to a hostage situation. It makes no sense. You cannot “defeat terrorism “ with a conventional army and unfortunately you have to strategically “negotiate with terrorists”, if you want to save human lives.

A hostage negotiator doesn’t ask for the entire country’s police force to charge in, he rather strategically negotiates with the hostage-takers so that the hostages are released one by one.

No, pointing this out doesn’t make you “pro Hamas”.

Israeli’s Response?

Thus far Israel has mobilised 360 000 reserves for an invasion of Gaza - an area more densely populated Tokyo and smaller than a suburb of Cape Town. As of today Israel has dropped more than 6000 bombs on Gaza. The number is more than the US dropped than during 1 month of the invasion of Iraq and so far not a single Israeli hostage has been saved.

The best literature on terrorism shows that terrorists are almost always motivated by the occupation of their homeland and that religion is not the root cause. This was the case with Al Queda and the Taliban and it is also the case with Hamas.

"Rather, what nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland. Religion is rarely the root cause, although it is often used as a tool by terrorist organizations in recruiting and in other efforts in service of the broader strategic objective.

In fact, most suicide bombers in the last century were secular. Hamas acts no different than the Irish Republican Army, the African National Congress, the Tamils and many Liberation Fronts did.

Throughout the Middle East, Israel is referred to as “Occupied Palestine” and there might be a hint in that term and why many Muslims have deep sympathy for the Palestinians. Hamas speaks to the occupation of their homeland, the lack of a viable palestinian state and the systematic dispossession since the 1947 Nakba when many Palestinians were kicked of their land. They use terrorism to advance their cause, because it’s the only way to compel Israel into a negotiation. But again, explaining how the phenomenon of terrorism works doesn’t justify the terrorism.

Furthermore Hamas’s appeal to the Palestinian Youth speaks to the conditions that they are living under and the way that they are being treated by Israel. The abuse ranges from the forced removal from the land, the Israeli fanatics launching pogroms against the worshipers at the Al Aqsa Mosque on regular occasions, and half of Gaza’s population being unemployed with almost nobody allowed to go in and out. Israel has since 2005 routinely rationed their their water, electricity and food. Before this conflict broke out up to 47 Palestinian children have already been killed in 2023, often by Israeli Snipers.

Given the list of abuses, it’s not difficult to see why there would be terrorism under such conditions.

Once again, pointing this out doesn’t “justify the attacks” or make you “pro Hamas”, it simply explains the root cause of the anger. Just look at a map of the situation to see what is really going on.

As long as Israel ignores the “two state solution” by not respecting the 1967 borders, it will continue to drift into a “one state reality”. As with the Apartheid government it will collapse, because of its own arrogance and stubborn attitude as it refuses “to negotiate with the terrorists” for a viable Palestinian State.

But here is another truth that goes unspoken in public? Why did Hamas become so popular?

As it turns out Hamas was identified by Mossad in the late 1970 as a means to undermine the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) that are the time consisted of marxists and atheists. One of the chief instigators of this policy was none other than the current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who even bragged about the tactic at the 2019 Lukkid Party Conference.

Effectively, Netanyahu’s entire worldview collapsed over the course of a single day. He was convinced that he could make deals with corrupt Arab tyrants while ignoring the cornerstone of the Arab-Jewish conflict, the Palestinians. His life’s work was to turn the ship of state from the course steered by his predecessors, from Yitzhak Rabin to Ehud Olmert, and make the two-state solution impossible. En route to this goal, he found a partner in Hamas.

“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” he told a meeting of his Likud party’s Knesset members in March 2019. “This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.”

Before we blame Iran’s involvement in the attacks again - of which Israel now admits there is no evidence. Let’s start with the guys that gave the lunatics the money to begin with. The right wing Israelis that went out of their way to obstruct the peace process and their enablers in the United States of America.

By supporting fundamentalist groups Israel thought it could “contain” Hamas and now it blew up in their faces.

See below how John Mearsheimer explains the situation.