Thinking about Gaza

I spent the past fortnight in Europe, though Israel and its war continued to sit heavily on my mind. At Gorizia, in northeastern Italy, at the four-day annual History Book Festival, there were two panels on Israel and Palestine (there were three hundred(!) panels altogether). The first passed without incident. The second, ostensibly on “Jerusalem,” zoomed in on the current conflict. As I began to speak, a half-dozen or so Muslims\pro-Hamas rowdies, to the right of the stage, stood up, unfurled large Palestinian flags, and shouted “Down with Zionism” and “Palestine from the river to the sea.” I was silenced by the continuous chanting. But after a few minutes, some members of the audience – it numbered 100-200, mostly Italians – stood up and shouted at the protestors to shut up and sit down. The bulk of the audience seemed to sympathize with the anti-rowdies. The rowdies were stunned but kept up their performance. A minute or two later, several policemen in civvies – perhaps energized by the audience’s reaction - approached and persuaded the rowdies to sit down and shut up. The flags disappeared and calm prevailed for the rest of the session. I assume the detectives had threatened them with arrest.

I thought the detectives should have acted more swiftly. But the audience’s reaction to the protestors took me by surprise. These past nineteen months TV screens in the US and Western Europe have been flooded with images of noisy anti-Israeli demonstrations. But here it appeared were Europeans hostile to or at least uneasy about the interrupters. No doubt, many were simply interested in hearing me out or adamant about allowing freedom of speech. But perhaps, too, there was here a measure of sympathy for the Jewish state assailed these past nineteen months by Islamist extremists, Hamas, Hizbullah, Houthis, Iraqi militiamen, Iran.

By chance, while in Gorizia I was reading Becoming Eichmann by British historian David Cesarani, a biography of the Nazi who in the 1940s orchestrated the transportation of the Jews to the death camps in Poland, a major executive in the massacre of Europe’s Jews. In 1961 he was apprehended in Argentina by Mossad agents, smuggled to Israel and tried and executed for his crimes. In this meticulous history, Cesarani traces the evolution of Nazi policy toward the Jews which evolved from a steady process of dehumanization to a (failed) effort to expel the Jews from Germany - and, eventually, from German-occupied territories - to the systematic mass extermination that began in summer 1941. I could not help thinking about the current war, in which Palestinian Arabs are gradually being dehumanized in Israeli hearts and minds and in which Netanyahu and President Trump have declared that “transferring” – expelling - the population out of the Gaza Strip is one of Israel’s ultimate war goals.

The dehumanization of the Palestinians in Israeli minds and hearts has been ongoing for decades and has intensified since the Hamas massacre of almost 1200 Israelis in the surprise invasion of southern Israel on 7 October 2023 (a process that has paralleled the dehumanization of the Jews in Palestinian Arab hearts and minds during the past century, more or less since the start of the Arab-Zionist conflict. Nowhere has this process of dehumanizing the Jew been more blatant than in the Hamas-run kindergartens and schools in the Gaza Strip during the past two decades).

Of course, Netanyahu and Trump have spoken of a “voluntary” transfer of the Gaza population. But the word “voluntary” is a cheat. The conditions in embattled Gaza are such – poverty, malnutrition, daily bombing and the threat of bombing, and hopelessness – that any normal person would wish to flee that territory “voluntarily.” Of course, the Hamas, guided by the doctrine of summud (steadfastness), opposes flight and will likely use lethal means to prevent Arab abandonment of Gaza. But the main obstacle to “transfer” is that no one wants to absorb hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, no Arab state, including most vociferously Egypt, which bounds the Gaza Strip, and no Western state, however loud their protestations of sympathy for the Strip’s desperate population.

The Arab experience in taking in Palestinian refugees, incidentally, has been poor-to-catastrophic. In 1970-1971, the Palestinian refugees from the Israeli-Arab wars of 1948 and 1967 tried to overthrow Jordan’s Hashemite government; and in 1975-1991 the Palestinian refugees and their descendants in Lebanon were instrumental in triggering and prolonging that country’s Muslim-Christian civil war that resulted in some half a million deaths. In Lebanon, the quarter-million-strong Palestinian population, mostly Muslim, remains a major political and social problem and in Jordan the Palestinians, some 60% of the country’s demography, is restless and, in various ways, subversive.

But getting away from the immediate future and taking an historical perspective, the underlying problem is that Netanyahu and Trump have a point. If, as is likely, the 2.3 million Gaza population remains in the Strip at the current war’s end, what future have they? And how will they affect future Israeli-Palestinian relations? Whatever the war’s outcome, in the coming years Gaza’s Arabs will continue to live – and suffer - amid the urban rubble and in the tent-cities that have sprung up on the fringes of the Strip’s devastated towns. It will take years to clear away the rubble and many more years to rebuild the territory’s infrastructure and properly house the now-tented millions.

Trump, the financial wizard, may fantasize about turning Gaza into an Eastern Mediterranean “Riviera,” but the economic prospects for the Strip are dire. It has no industry or industrial expertise (except in rocket-making) and little agriculture, and its millions will continue to procreate excessively (3.38 births per woman in 2023) and will continue to live on international charity – as indeed, Gaza has done since 1949. And, after the war, Gaza’s population will remain void of hope, impoverished (international charity can go only so far), disgruntled and vengeful. Gaza’s Arabs, more than 80% descendants of refugees, have been vengeful vis-à-vis Israel since their displacement from what became Israel in the 1948 War; now, to be sure, having suffered 54,000 dead and more than three times that number wounded and maimed (most of the casualties, apparently, non-combatants) these past nineteen months, they will be geometrically more vengeful. What does that bode for future Israeli-Palestinian relations and the possibility of an eventual peace settlement?

Since the 1950s the Strip and its population have been a source of anti-Israel terrorism and violence. Likely they will continue to be so. And there will be resentment if not hostility toward the West. Many of the bombs and rockets that hit the Strip these past months were supplied by America, and Washington and most Western governments supported Israel’s counter-offensive against the Hamas. And the West’s financial largesse will not necessarily breed friendship. Rather the opposite – living on charity is emasculating and, long-term, a cause for resentment. Unlike the West, the Arab states, including the oil-rich Gulf states, were never generous toward the Palestinians. In the recent past, only Qatar has stood out in this respect – but its generosity toward Gaza has been generated by a shared Islamism, their largesse designed to aid Hamas terrorists and to promote anti-Western jihadism, as subtly or not so subtly purveyed by Al Jazira, the emirate’s bullhorn.

For much of the current war, Qatar, while supporting the Hamas financially and politically, has duplicitously served as a go-between in the Israeli-Hamas deals which led to the release of many of the Israeli hostages taken to the Strip on 7 October. What happened that day has left Israel traumatized to this day and in an acutely vengeful mood and I suspect that a day of reckoning – with Qatar – is not far distant. Once the hostage situation is cleared up, Israel will indulge in payback, killing the Hamas leaders hosted by Qatar in Doha’s seven-star hotels and perhaps punishing their hosts as well. Indeed, it is possible that Qatar’s strategy, all along, has been to leave enough Israeli hostages in Hamas hands to delay for as long as possible the day of Israeli payback. I have no doubt that in a final hostage deal Qatar will seek guarantees from Washington to assure its inviolability – and the inviolability of the Hamas leaders they host - to Israeli assault.

At Gorizia one of the Middle East panelists was Lorenzo Cremonesi, an old friend and veteran correspondent of Corriera della Sera, Italy’s leading daily. Cremonesi spent decades living in Israel and covering the Middle East, the Iraq and Afghan wars, and, more recently, the conflict in Ukraine. Once he was (briefly) held hostage by Palestinian gunmen - but he also goes out of his way to recall the kindness of poor Gazan Palestinians who hosted him when he was caught up in Gaza in an Israeli military curfew during the Second Intifada. In the current war, he was one of the few Western journalists who managed to get into the Strip (through Egypt). (Israel has (foolishly?) completely barred journalists, Israeli or foreign, from entering the Strip, which is why the war in that territory is almost completely reported by inevitably slanted Hamas-aligned Arab journalists, something TV viewers in the West seem unaware of.)

Cremonesi recalled that Amos Oz had once told him that Israel had been created so that Jews would not be slaughtered by their gentile neighbors. Of course, that is exactly what happened on October 7. He also told me that a retired Italian surgeon, whom he respects and who had spent months working in the Strip with medecins sans frontieres, remembered a specific period in a Gaza hospital treating children. Unusually, a cluster of some twenty children had arrived with a single bullet wound to the head or neck. She said she had never seen such a concentration of similar wounds in Afghanistan or Iraq. The implication was that an IDF sniper had deliberately targeted the children. (I lamely offered that this was not Israeli government policy.) But, if true, here was evidence of a war crime. Cremonesi now leans toward defining Israel’s campaign in Gaza as “genocide.” I don’t agree (there is no government policy of genocide, there is no governmental or national intent to “Kill the Palestinians,” which is what genocide means) – but undoubtedly Israeli troops have committed war crimes in Gaza – and in the West Bank – during the past nineteen months.

My brief sojourn in Europe in effect ended with the ride home from Ben-Gurion Airport - and my cab driver’s thoughts and recollections. He admitted that in the distant past, in the days of right-wing prime ministers Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon, he had voted Likud. Now he viewed the party and its leader Netanyahu with open disgust. He added that many of his fellow cab drivers, who had idolized Netanyahu, now felt the same way. They see him, he said, for what he is - a corrupt, venal and incompetent politician who has led Israel to disaster and international isolation. Most Israeli cab drivers are of oriental Jewish extraction, Sephardim, the Likud’s, and Bibi’s, traditional political base. My driver then segued to hearsay about Sarah Netanyahu, Bibi’s (unbalanced) wife. He said he had once driven a former classmate of hers and they had talked about her. His passenger had told him that the young Sarah – often regarded as Netanyahu’s grey eminence – had had a miserable childhood\youth, had been unpopular in school and had often shown up in tattered clothes. His passenger had recalled that she and her classmates had been shocked, years later, at a class reunion, when they learnt that Sarah was a flight attendant or “stewardess” in El Al Israel Airlines. Stewardesses at the time were chosen for good looks and were seen as glamorous. Indeed, Sarah and the twice-divorced Netanyahu had hooked up on board an El Al jetliner.