Israel's occupation has been ongoing since either 1947 or 1967, depending on how you count. An indisputable fact is that Israel has kept Palestinians under martial law for the last 75 years and has steadily chipped away at land intended to be their national homeland.
Israel and the Western nations, however, have continuously thwarted Palestinian statehood and winked as endless incursions, assassinations, land theft, and marginalization have created a de facto Apartheid state. American politicians speak of a deep commitment to a "two state" solution knowing full-well that the land theft has progressed to the point that, without dismantling the illegal settlements, "two states" is nothing but a cynical, hollow slogan.
Much like the US creation of the Taliban, Israel's creation of Hamas (which was intended to neutralize the political power of Fatah and the PLO) has backfired spectacularly.
In 2005 Prime Minister Ariel Sharon made the decision to withdraw from Gaza. The Israeli military indeed withdrew, but more controversial and traumatic for Israelis was the decision to physically dismantle 21 illegal settlements. This was seen as a betrayal of Zionist ideals by Israel's far right, which still lists Sharon's "betrayal" in its long enumeration of grievances.
Israel's 2008 war on Gaza, known as "Operation Cast Lead," killed 3 Israeli civilians and left 10 IDF soldiers dead by "friendly" fire. It also left vast devastation in Gaza and killed between 759 and 926 Palestinian civilians. A prize-winning photo by AFP photographer Mohammed Abed shows Israeli phosphorus munitions (which melt human bodies) raining down over a ruined school in Gaza. This was a brutal, disproportionate use of Israel’s military, which drew widespread international condemnation — though very little from the United States.
Israel is now in the throes of a crisis of its one-sided democracy. Amid demonstrations that have exposed fault lines in Israeli society, the nation formed its 37th coalition government around Netanyahu's ultraconservative revisionist Zionist Likud party, Bezalel Smotrich's ultranationalist Religious Zionist party, and Itamar Ben Gvir's Neo-fascist Jewish Power party, which openly calls for expelling all Arabs from Israel and territory that Israel claims.
Ben Gvir’s political base is the old Kach party, which was banned for its advocacy of terrorism, and consists of extremists from the settler movement with links to Ygal Amir, who assassinated Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin in 1995, and Baruch Goldstein, who murdered 29 Palestinians at prayer and injured 125 in Hebron in 1994. to its shame, the Biden administration removed Kach from its list of terrorist organizations in 2022.
Last year Netanyahu and Ben Gvir agreed to legalize settlements frozen, not coincidentally, in 2005. The entire West Bank is to be Israel's Wild West. In a nation without a constitution, Israel's supreme court is the only obstacle to human rights abuses. And now this coalition wants to neuter the nation's court. Liberal Israelis fear the country is headed toward a future like Hungary’s.
Greater Palestinian suffering and the rise of an even more authoritarian Zionism with fewer restraints and greater territorial aspirations is the context to this weekend's invasion of Israel by an undisciplined group of Hamas fighters who carried out horrific murders, rapes, assaults and abductions of Israeli and international civilians in violation of international law.
But as an opinion piece by Sanjana Karanth reminds us, the Hamas attack may have been sadistic, indiscriminate and illegal. But to consider it totally "unprovoked" is to ignore 75 years of Israeli repression and Palestinian suffering.
As I watched videos of Hamas fighters moving systematically house-to-house in Sderot, it reminded me of the many videos I've seen of IDF troops moving house-to-house in Palestinian villages. The Hamas kidnappings were likely intended in some twisted way to parallel Israel's arrests, removal to Israeli soil, and indefinite imprisonment of Palestinians, arrested without warrant and imprisoned without court proceedings. Likewise, the savagery of the attacks were intended to remind Israelis that they can not expect to feel any more secure than Palestinians under constant occupation and bombardment.
In 2009 I visited Israel and Palestine. I saw one of Israel's physical Apartheid walls with my own eyes, visited the dehumanizing checkpoints, and I got a sense of the grim reality and deprivations for Palestinians. I visited a refugee center that generations of Palestinians have had to call home. I also visited an illegal settlement so large and so "American" that it was indistinguishable from an Orange County suburb with its ACE Hardware store and a community college. I visited Hebron and met an ultranationaist settler whose zealotry and violent fantasies alarmed me more than walking around Ramallah unchaperoned looking for a lunch spot.
In Sderot, which this weekend was ravaged by the Hamas invasion, I met with Mizrachi (Jews from Arab countries) peace activists who used to go into Gaza City to shop and who described the widespread PTSD of adults and children forced to hide in safe rooms. At the Zikim kibbutz, which was also breached by Hamas, I met with lefty Jews like me who sympathized with the plight of Palestinians despite being shelled. A huge concrete shield is built over the kibbutz's daycare center to protect it from ketusha rockets fired so frequently that a cheeky rockets-to-ploughshares menorah was constructed out of the spent cylinders.
Everyone I met on both sides of the Green Line were all dear people, all precious lives. For everyone, Israelis and Palestinians alike, I want what we should all have – peace, enough to eat, security, a future for children and grandchildren. But for both Palestinians and Jews there can be no peace so long as Israel and Western nations (themselves no strangers to colonialism) wink at Israel’s colonial oppression and refuse to recognize the explosive potential of an oppressed people rising up in frustration because no one will prevent their abuse.
Once again this week we saw that potential.
As Israel's "pro-democracy" movement suggests, Israelis themselves are beginning to understand that a state only for Jews with laws that privilege only Jews cannot ultimately even be a democracy for Jews.
Just as white Americans have started to acknowledge a similar truth and our own history of genocide, slavery, and Jim Crow, many Israelis have begun to grapple with the realization that Zionism is not so different from good old-fashioned American white supremacy. That nationalism is incompatible with democracy.
The long-awaited Third Intifada has finally broken out. The old slogan "no justice, no peace" seems particularly apt. Palestinian desperation and Israeli insecurity will be permanent features of Israel's Apartheid state until there is sufficient American and international pressure on Israel to abandon its vast illegal settlements to finally enable a Palestinian state to become a reality.
David: Thank you for employing your extraordinary intelligence and and courage for writing this piece. I agree with it totally. Comment on what's happening picks dates: mostly 1973 in the first reports because of the coincident element of surprise. Some have picked upon 1967. But, as your piece asserts, it really goes back all the way back to 1947-48, and earlier. The Israeli assaults on places like Deir Yassin and the genocidal evacuations of Lydda (now Lod) and Ramle come to mind. As you point out, Israel bears great responsibility for the existence of Hamas, thanks to its own enablement of Islamic radicals in Gaza to counteract the PLO, and the emergence of the radical Islamist Shi'ite Hezbollah as a consequence of Israel's invasion and prolonged occupation of Lebanon .
As a journalist and editor responsible for coverage of the Middle East for many years from 1973 to 2004 watching the coverage of the current conflict, I am reminded of the awfully striking differences that eternally exist between reporting on the experiences of families horribly impacted in the conflict.
I listen sympathetically to the descriptions of horror described by Israeli mothers and fathers describing the horrors inflicted on their loved ones by the Hamas assault.
But the contrast between them and the Arab mothers and fathers who have endured the same tragedies at the hands of the Israel's so-called "defense" force , are manifest.
To anyone reading this, I ask: When did you ever watch and or listen to voice of an Arab mother or father who had lost a spouse, a child or other family member in an Israeli raid anywhere in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Gaza or Lebanon?
Brilliant. Courageous. Honest. Thank you, Mr. Ehrens, for writing the truth.