Gaza military attack is going nowhere useful; it’s an international tragedy 

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I don’t typically believe that there are political or social situations that are simply beyond solution. Depressingly, the Middle East might be one. 

And the complexity of the situation has communities across the world, including the progressive community in Santa Cruz, far more divided than we would want to be.

Nobody can tell me that if Israel had been a model good neighbor to Palestine over the past 75 years since its founding as a nation it would now be welcomed and better integrated into the region – or even accepted and better tolerated by its neighbors.

Israel has been marked by warfare with its neighbors since its founding as a nation, foisted on the region by a declining British Empire starting in 1917 with the Balfour Declaration’s announced support for establishing a “national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.” This was underlined by the United Nations’ 1949 recognition of Israel as a sovereign nation. 

All of this was uniformly opposed by the Arab League.

Israel’s creation forced the displacement of the Palestine people – with Egypt, Jordan and other Arab countries supporting the exit of Palestinians, while not allowing them to integrate into their societies. 

Israel did not move in the direction favored by most of its Zionist founders in Europe of becoming a truly secular and inclusive democratic state, with equal access to economic, cultural and social resources to all of its citizens, irrespective of their religion or ancestry.

Instead, Israel created a social-service safety net based in non-governmental, private, religious institutions. It never gave Arab languages equal recognition in schools and public life. Most recently, it has had its politics hijacked by fanatical nationalist religious parties, stolen land from Palestinians to create Jewish settlements in the West Bank and protected them with military road infrastructure and constant military incursions into what the U.N. defined as Palestinian territories (the West Bank and Gaza) in 1967’s U.N. Resolution 242.

In a highly provocative action, Israel has moved to limit access to Muslims to what is considered a sacred location by both Muslims and Jews, all the while developing new Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Perhaps more than anything else, the replacement of Palestinian homes with Israeli settlements on land clearly identified by the United Nations as Palestinian territory stands as an absolute impediment to any possible lasting peace agreement in the region. And the necessity of Israeli road infrastructure and constant military incursions to protect the settlements underscores that on a regular and frequent basis. 

Neither Israel, any of its Arab neighbors nor the U.S. and Western nations ever put the amount of economic resources into Palestine that would have been necessary to establish a sustainable, sovereign state on Israel’s borders. Meanwhile, billions of dollars of economic and military aid flowed to Israel every year. From the very foundation of Israel as a nation, it forced Palestinians who crossed into Israel from the West Bank and Gaza for daily work to undergo a humiliating and Kafkaesque experience that makes confronting the Transportation Security Administration at U.S. airports look like an amusement park ride.

But even if, counter to the actual history of Israel and the region, Israel had done everything within its power to create a self-sustaining, sovereign nation of Palestine – a two-state solution – nobody can persuade me that it would have been a successful strategy for peace in the region.

It’s not clear that they would have found a Palestinian partner to make such a strategy successful. The recent and short-lived exchange of hostages for prisoners, which does suggest at least some indirect communication is possible between Israel and Hamas, does not inspire confidence that an actual peace agreement could ever be achieved between the parties.

On the other hand, it is an understatement and it doesn’t take a genius to understand that the actual history of what Israel has done hoping to protect itself militarily and meet the outrageous demands of its right-wing religious minority has not endeared itself with either the Palestinians or Israel’s neighbors or other countries in the region – to say nothing of students on American college campuses, including UC Santa Cruz. It is not difficult to understand why students, especially at a progressive campus like UCSC, might feel deep sympathy for the oppressed Palestinian people. 

It doesn’t take a deep understanding of the history of the region to simply want to express outrage about the current loss of life and uprooting of millions of people, who appear to have no safe options, whatever their politics. There is no way in the long run that Israel can benefit from its war against the people of Gaza.

Statements from Hamas indicate that its Oct. 7 attack on Israel was intended to stimulate an unending war with Israel as a means of reviving the Palestinian cause, which it has.

Clearly, the Palestinian people and Hamas have a long list of justifiable grievances against Israel, and on an emotional level they might wish all Israeli Jews gone. But, a political organization like Hamas has an obligation to take actions that make strategic sense – especially if they know their actions are leading to huge sacrifices for those they represent. One cannot imagine Hamas did not understand that its invasion of Israel would lead to exactly the punishing disaster the Palestinian people are now experiencing.

Could Hamas leaders have possibly believed that this was a first (or early) blow that would drive a militarily superior country that has nuclear weapons like Israel out of existence?  Unlikely. 

And despite Hamas’ specific motivation for the attack, I can’t avoid condemning Hamas for that attack, no matter what indignities and serious oppression they have experienced under Israeli policy and action over the years.

I also have to challenge the now-common narrative in some Western media that Israel is going to somehow be able to root Hamas out of Palestinian society with military force. 

While I don’t believe that Israel is deliberately targeting civilian populations in its attack on Gaza, the ways in which Hamas is interwoven into the entire cloth of Gazan society means that any attack on Hamas hits not just their militants, but everyone in Gaza.

Contrary to what one might believe after reading Western accounts of the Middle East, Hamas is not some group of outside agitators or a small terrorist group that somehow just uses the civilian population of Gaza as a human shield for its attacks on Israel. Hamas did not come to govern Gaza through some kind of a military coup or terrorization of the population.

In the 1920s, impressed by the success of the Young Men’s Christian Association, or YMCA, Hamas formed a similar Muslim association. By the standards of contemporary Islamic movements, it is less ideologically extreme. It believes in government by a complex mix of Shariah and modernist, secular laws. 

The organization is deeply embedded in the social fabric and cultural life of Palestine (and influential in several other countries around the region). Hamas was fairly elected to lead the government of Gaza and the West Bank. Its victory in the West Bank was undone by the United States in a classic case of election denial as we have done all over the planet since World War II. Although there has not been a free election in Gaza since 2007, it is pretty clear that if a free election were held today, Hamas would be the victor.

They are not just outsiders hiding in tunnels under hospitals and homes in Palestine, but virtually indistinguishable from the civilian population.

So when Israeli warplanes and soldiers go after Hamas, they will find it virtually impossible to avoid something that looks a lot more like indiscriminate or even genocidal attacks on civilian populations than the separation and rooting out of a terrorist organization.

It is a fantasy that Israel can succeed at wiping out Hamas without inflicting mass casualties on non-combatant civilian Palestinians and bringing the condemnation of people around the world upon themselves for what appear to be war crimes against humanity.

That does not mean that I have a better plan for how Israel should defend itself or that I don’t condemn the Hamas invasion of Israel no matter how grievous the provocations of Israeli policy have been. 

I do condemn the Hamas invasion of Israel and what it has unleashed. But I doubt that the current Israeli attack on Palestine will be successful in achieving eventual stabilization or peace in the region and if it does succeed at that goal, it will come at a terrible cost in death and human suffering.

In the end, I can’t support demonstrations where the slogan “Palestine from the River [Jordan] to the Sea [Mediterranean]” is the chant because it implies the genocide of the Israeli people, which is both wrong and unlikely to ever happen, since Israel has the most powerful military in the region, strong support from Western powers, and nuclear weapons. While that slogan has been heard at UCSC student demonstrations in recent months, more typically, the chants have been about ending the occupation of Palestine by Israel and ending U.S. support for Israel’s attack on Gaza – in short, an appeal to humanitarian values without any real strategic goal. 

It is not alarmist to say that the current conflict might result in not just a wider war, but in a worldwide nuclear conflagration.  

Nor can I be persuaded that Israeli military attacks on Gaza and Palestine are going to resolve anything, let alone lead to a path to a peaceful future for all who live in the region. As is said about the biblical injunction “an eye for an eye,” in the end, we all end up blind.