By James M Dorsey 

 

HUMAN beings’ most destructive instincts – survival, anger, fear, despair, and vengeance –dictate Israeli and Palestinian war strategy and policy in the wake of Hamas’ October 7 brutal attack on Israel. The dominance of emotions produces an environment in which one atrocity justifies another and reinforces Israeli and Palestinian demonization of the other. It also highlights both sides disregard for the lives of the other. “Humanity is on holiday. Empathy, the ability to understand other people’s loss and suffering, has become a rare and prized commodity. International law has been missing in action. Yet… international leadership represents perhaps the most shocking absence,” said Chris Doyle, director of the London-based Council for Arab-British Understanding. Hamas demonstrated with its wanton slaughter of Israelis that it views all Israelis, including innocent women and children, as legitimate targets. Hamas officials deny the killings. The closest they come to an admission is their labelling of Israeli settlers as soldiers, implicitly blurring the distinction between Israelis living within Israel’s pre-1967 borders and armed settlers on the West Bank, who increasingly attack Palestinians in a months-long cycle of West Bank violence, endorsed by members of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s cabinet. Many of the Hamas killings during its October 7 attack occurred in towns and villages along the Israeli border with Gaza often described as settlements, muddling the difference between urban areas in Israel and settlements on the West Bank. Refusing to answer questions about Hamas’ targeting of civilians, a spokesman for the group, Osama Hamdan, when asked whether residents of settlements were legitimate targets, insisted that “according to international law, the settlers are not civilians.” Israelis stagger at Hamas comparisons, claiming the moral high ground.

 

Yet, Israeli President Issac Herzog, reconfirming the fact that Israelis and Palestinians are in many ways mirror images of one another, declared as Israel’s military starved Gaza of food, fuel, water, and medicine and bombed Gaza back to the Stone Age: “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible. It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true. They could have risen up. They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’état.” A just released poll of Gazan public opinion by the pro-Israel Washington Institute of Near East Policy suggests otherwise. Conducted in July prior to this week’s unprecedented violence, 65 per cent of those polled believed “a large military conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza” was likely this year despite a ceasefire that ended the 2021 Gaza war. The emotions dominating Israeli and Palestinian warfare conjure up Israeli and Palestinians’ association of the violence with historic catastrophes that shape who they are. For Israelis, Hamas’ random, indiscriminate killing of innocent civilians is a modern-day repetition of the Holocaust, even if most Israelis were born after World War II. Hamas’ definition of Israeli civilians as legitimate targets in deeds, if not in words, reinforces Israeli perceptions. For Palestinians, particularly with Israel ordering Gazans to move from north to south, the Israeli attack raises the spectre of a third displacement following the 1948 and 1967 expulsions and fleeing of Palestinians as Israel conquered their lands. Israelis have done little to assuage Palestinian fears of a third round of expulsions and forced fleeing. “There is a way to receive them all (Gazans) on the other side for temporary time on Sinai… Egypt will have to play ball because human life is at stake,” said Danny Ayalon, a former Israeli deputy Foreign Minister and advisor to Netanyahu. Amidst violence that has spun out of control with both sides violating international law, the international community is missing in action. To be fair, few countries have any leverage to help put an end to the violence.

 

While the United States is the only country that could pressure Israel to halt its indiscriminate bombing of Gaza, it would need to work with the few states – Qatar, Turkey, and Egypt –that have any influence on Hamas to persuade the group to release the more than 100 Israeli and foreign, mostly civilian, hostages kidnapped during its attack. Even if Ayalon’s view does not reflect the Israeli Government’s intentions, history shows that steps like wholesale forced relocation of populations take on a life of their own. No matter what the case may be, the damage has been done. Hamas may have returned the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the top of the international community’s agenda at unconscionable human expense. But, at the bottom line, it has made a solution to the conflict even more remote whether with two states, an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel, or one state in which Israelis and Palestinians have equal rights. (IPA/By arrangement with the Arabian Post)