Hope is being extinguished in Gaza
Published by The i paper (8th April, 2024)
Six years ago, while on a reporting trip to Gaza, I met a 26-year-old man called Mohammed al-Taluli who had dared to challenge Hamas by organising protests with his friends against power cuts. He spoke freely about the failures of the terror group in running the blighted territory, with woeful public services and suppression of dissent. “We want democracy,” he said passionately, arguing that his people were fed up with their caged lives on a crammed sliver of coastal land and the dismal political leaders on all sides with vested interest in their continuing misery.
This was brave talk living under a group that routinely carried out suicide attacks and brutalised opponents even before the atrocities inflicted on Israel last October, which had led to seven recent spells behind bars. He offered a reminder that even under Hamas, there was some dissent and bubbling political undercurrents.
Sadly, we have seen too many people retreat into banalities or tribalism over the past six months. As the commentator Anshel Pfeffer wrote in Haaretz, many people reacted to the horrors of 7 October by digging in to “woefully inadequate and self-serving preconceptions” – whether it is one side seeing those awful events as proof that co-existence is impossible or the other claiming that mass murders and rape might be justified by the “context”.
When I asked Mohammed his views on Israel, his reply was again clear: “All of us want the right of return but we don’t want to remove the Israelis.” This stance was influenced by having had surgery in a Tel Aviv hospital; perhaps he was taken there by one of those volunteers from the progressive kibbutzes near Gaza who saw such initiatives as a path to peace, only to be slaughtered or taken hostage by Hamas. His response was far from unique, however, since I heard similar words even from families of people killed in the protests taking place by the border fence, which were exploited by Hamas and met with gunfire from Israeli forces.
How many Palestinians would say such things now after Israel’s onslaught on Gaza, which has killed more than 33,000 people, destroyed half the homes and left so many citizens at risk of starvation? One clue came from a recent opinion poll that indicates support for Hamas staying broadly consistent over these past six months in the enclave, with one-third of citizens supporting them – but tripling to similar levels on the West Bank, where there was minimal backing before the war. Support for Fatah – which runs the Palestinian Authority and is seen by many outsiders as the only viable alternative to Hamas – has fallen to just 17 per cent after all the deadly Israeli raids, mass arrests and intimidation by extremist settlers.
As Martin Luther King once said, instead of destroying or diminishing evil, violence sparks a “descending spiral” that multiplies it. After six months of a war launched to destroy Hamas and recover hostages, there are still 130 Israeli captives missing amid the carnage of Gaza – 34 of them believed dead – and much of the terrorist group’s leadership remains intact.
Meanwhile, that same poll showed 70 per cent of Palestinians are “satisfied” with Hamas in this hideous struggle. Other polls indicate even those who dislike the group are pleased that its barbarous actions pushed their cause firmly back up the global agenda, while despairing young Palestinians have abandoned the idea of a two-state solution.
This is all too predictable since ideology is not beaten by bombs and bullets. Even if Hamas is demolished, it is difficult to believe this razing of Gaza makes Israel more secure, especially when Benjamin Netanyahu – Israel’s longest-serving and worst prime minister – seems to have no long-term strategy beyond self-preservation.
When this war was launched, I wrote here that Israel should be wary of walking into the trap set by Hamas, and heed the lessons of the bungled response to 9/11. “How will unleashing fresh hell on an impoverished and repressed people help the cause of peace rather than fuel burning anger – let alone do anything to assist all those Palestinians desperate for a better future?” I asked.
Netanyahu is riding a wave of understandable anger and grief in Israel, a country I first visited in 1982 to work on a kibbutz by the Lebanese border. Tanks drove past in a disastrous operation launched after a terrorist attack in London that was supposed to take two days but lasted three long years. Now another Israeli prime minister appears to be failing in his mission to destroy the fanaticism threatening his nation, merely inflaming hatreds. And having corroded moral authority borne out of the most terrible agony, he is shredding global support to such an extent that even its closest allies threaten to turn away.
It is tragic – and so telling on the value placed on Palestinian lives – that it took the deaths of six Western aid workers to crystallise Western concern over this conflict. Yet, Alicia Kearns, Tory chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, was right to argue last week that the way Netanyahu is prosecuting Israel’s right to self-defence makes the world less safe – and to point out forcefully that support for an extremist Likud-led government is not the same thing as support for Israel.
Sir Winston Churchill warned that nations should “never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on that strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter”. Now there is alarm the risks of wider war in the Middle East are rising. Certainly it is hard to see a way out of this latest morass. The only clear thing is that peace – and the simple hopes of lives lived in freedom expressed to me six years ago in that conversation with Mohammed – look further away than ever.
Categorised in: home page, Israel, West Bank & Gaza, World