The Gaza War's Impact
By Richard C. Gross
“Power is not given, it is taken.”
--Augustus Caesar, reigned as first Roman emperor, 31 B.C.-14 A.D.
Israel’s long ghastly war against Hamas terrorists not only has torn apart Gaza but has opened the door to repeated harsh Jewish settler treatment of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank that smacks of ethnic cleansing and divides liberal American Jews because of the enormous civilian casualties, cracking their onetime unified support of the Jewish state.
The Gazan Health Ministry says 33,000 Palestinians have been killed, mostly women and children, since Israel struck back at Hamas for the horrific shock attack that killed 1,200 Israelis in their homes and at a festival in southern Israel Oct. 7. Hamas runs the ministry, so beware of inaccurate casualty figures. Independent verification of the toll was impossible.
It’s little wonder, then, that President Joe Biden wants a rapid end to the indiscriminate killing of innocents in Gaza, home to 2.2 million squeezed into an area the size of Las Vegas, pop. 656,274 as of 2022. Yet he just sent off another 1,800 2,000-pound bombs, known to cause mass destruction and heavy casualties, and 25 F-35A fighters, America’s newest stealth jets worth $2.5 billion. Both had been approved years ago.
Was that right, considering Washington repeatedly has been warning Israel to limit its devastation to avoid more civilian deaths and injuries?
Israel largely has ignored Biden. But some Democrats want to withhold weapons deliveries to enforce the president’s pleas, curtailing his largess to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Biden has Jews in his family: his wife, Jill, has daughters who both married Jews.
Could that have anything to do with his reluctance to force Israel to comply with his wishes?
Israel wants to finish the war, to be done with Hamas, where reportedly four brigades of its fighters are holed up in tunnels in the southern Rafah salient.
“The Biden administration needs to use their leverage effectively and, in my view, they should receive these basic commitments [to prevent major casualties] before greenlighting more bombs for Gaza,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., told The Washington Post. “We need to back up what we say with what we do.”
Shouldn’t we?
The shipment comes as Biden and some of his fellow Democrats have been upset about Israel’s seemingly merciless conduct of the war in trying to eliminate Hamas, an estimated 13,000 of its terrorists killed at a horrendous cost of innocent lives. Israel bombed incessantly to destroy hundreds of miles of tunnels beneath hospitals and other buildings. Using bombs instead of commandos to go after the terrorists underground saves Israeli lives.
Thousands of Israelis, ignoring the awkwardness of staging protests in wartime, demonstrated in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem Saturday and Sunday nights, respectively, calling for Netanyahu’s resignation because of his conduct of the war and a cease-fire to free the remaining 100 or so hostages held by Hamas. The protests were to continue for four days.
“I believe Israel is facing one of the most difficult moments in its history,” Moshe Radman, a protest organizer, told The New York Times Sunday. “We need a government that will act for the betterment of the nation, not in the interest of political and personal considerations of a prime minister.” Netanyahu is Israel’s longest-reigning prime minister, serving 17 years.
The impact on others of Israel’s aggressive offensive in Gaza is far different from any of its wars, the longest on its territory since it’s 1948-49 War of Independence when five Arab states attacked it just for existing. This one is not about the survival of the Jewish state; it’s about eradication of a dangerous enemy and the survival of noncitizen Palestinians, 3 million of whom live among the Jews in the West Bank.
Another 2.1 Palestinian are “Arab citizens of Israel” who live in Israel proper, mostly in the central and northern areas of Nazareth, home of Jesus, and Haifa.
Netanyahu’s far-right nationalist government has made no secret of favoring Palestinians packing up and leaving for gentler climes, both from what remains of Gaza and to get away from settler violence in the West Bank, home to about 700,000 Jews, East Jerusalem included. Many are Orthodox, or Haredim in Hebrew.
The rightist Haredim are threatening the government coalition because the Supreme Court has ruled that it’s time for their young people to join the military. The court agreed with a plea by Netanyahu to defer the ruling for a month.
They’ve been exempted since the first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, waived military service for 400 of them in 1948 so they could devote themselves to religious studies to reinvigorate sacred tradition that was nearly extinguished during the Holocaust.
What apparently was a small family of Haredim, including pre-teens wearing white shirts and black skullcaps, wielded long poles battering branches of an olive tree in the West Bank, according to a video I watched on the website of Yesh Din (There is Law). It’s a human rights nonprofit founded in 2005. It documents violations against Palestinians under occupation.
The video also showed two adult men, also in skullcaps and white shirts, carrying two huge white plastic bags filled to bursting, presumably with olives, to each of their small white cars parked nose down on a small hill. It didn’t identify the Palestinian owner, his village, the Jews’ settlement or when the incident or incidents occurred.
“The 2023 olive harvest in the West Bank was dramatically impacted by the war in Gaza,” Yesh Din said in a summary. “Settler violence against Palestinian harvesters was organized and severe, while soldiers helped the assailants instead of protecting the harvesters and prevented many Palestinians from harvesting.”
Yesh Din volunteers documented 93 incidents of settler violence during the harvest in October and November and 20 more with soldiers present, all during the Gaza War. To compare how the attacks have increased markedly, it said there were 38 incidents of settler violence in 2022, 42 in 2021 and 2020 and 28 in 2019.
It’s come to the point at which creating a Palestinian state alongside a Jewish one on densely populated land and expect peace will be a near-impossibility. Who will create this far-fetched dream of liberal folks like Americans who don’t live there and understand the hazards, the deep hatred on both sides. If it comes to pass, high walls will be required.
Could you live there?
Another dramatic result of the war and its deleterious impact on Palestinians generally is how it has divided the American Jewish community, especially on the left. This is serious stuff, not something to be dismissed as temporary. Israel, to which parents of means send their kids to be bar- and bat-mitzvot, may have lost its allure for liberal American Jews.
“The emerging rupture between American liberalism and American Zionism constitutes the greatest transformation in American Jewish politics in half a century,” wrote Peter Beinart, professor of journalism and political science at the City University of New York, in a lengthy recent opinion piece in The New York Times. “It will redefine American Jewish life for decades to come.”
It’s difficult for Jewish progressives, who believe strongly in social justice, a core value of Judaism, to support Zionism when paired with Israeli treatment of occupied Palestinians at a time, Beinart wrote, when Netanyahu for two decades “has lurched to the right, producing politicians so openly racist that their behavior cannot be defended in liberal terms.”
The phrase “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” “suggests a Palestine free of Jews,” he wrote. “It sounds expulsionist, if not genocidal. It’s an ironic charge, given that it is Israel that today controls the land between the river and the sea, whose leaders openly advocate the mass exodus of Palestinians and that the International Court of Justice says could plausibly be committing genocide in Gaza.”
The story of Israel, perhaps best portrayed by Otto Preminger’s 1960 movie “Exodus” starring Paul Newman, based on Leon Uris’ novel about the founding of the Jewish state, and the film’s accompanying song with the tear-stirring lyrics of “God gave this land to me,” no longer is relevant today. It’s long been over.
The state has been built, solidly. New York-like skyscrapers dot Tel Aviv’s skyline. Marinas with pleasure boats line the Mediterranean coast from where Jewish refugees from a broken World War II Europe secretly landed in Palestine, defying its British mandatory rulers. The League of Nations adopted the mandate in 1922.
Glowing tales of Jewish pioneers clearing away swamps and rocks and digging into the soil to make the desert bloom and singing songs about soldiers guarding collective farms and dancing horas around campfires are for Jewish kids at summer camps. Reality has changed, become even more challenging. As it has most everywhere.
Now may be time for another camp, back to the future: Camp David 1978.
Richard C. Gross, who covered war and peace in Israel and the American military at the Pentagon, was foreign editor of United Press International and the opinion page editor of The Baltimore Sun.