Though Israel garnered widespread sympathy after Hamas’ October 7 attacks, which included atrocities denounced by United Nations experts as crimes against humanity and war crimes, it has also drawn widespread criticism for its own mass slaughter as well as likely war crimes and crimes against humanity during its military campaign in Gaza, now over four months long. Officials, experts, and observers around the world have time and again emphasized the disproportionate and indiscriminate nature of Israeli violence.

While Hamas and other armed groups murdered unarmed civilians, including about three dozen children, and burned innocent humans to death, according to accounts by survivors, Israel cuts off water and electricity to civilians; purposefully limits humanitarian aid to a trickle; brings about massive destruction including of hospitals, schools, and mosques under the justification of “military necessity”; bombs civilian “power targets” that wipe out entire extended families; kills children en masse; forcibly displaces Palestinians; and even kills three Israeli hostages. International criticism of the Israeli operation “Swords of Iron” has increased as a result, reaching a provisional crescendo with South Africa’s charge at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that Israel is committing genocide of the Palestinian people.

The events of October 7 and beyond raise a major ethical question: by what standard is the violence that Hamas uses against Israel different from the violence that the Israeli state uses against Hamas? Three standards that can be applied to this question will be proposed and examined, namely legal, political, and operational. The legal standard assesses the legality with which different belligerents—a state versus an armed resistance group—can use violence under international humanitarian law in a context of enduring occupation. The political standard compares the objectives of violence deployed, in particular their degree of ideological extremism. The operational standard examines the (in)discriminate and/or (dis)proportionate nature of violence as actually applied, using international humanitarian law as a reference. Analyzing Israeli state and Hamas violence against these standards can help find more realistic ways out of the vicious spiral of repression that occupation has become, and to establish security for both Israelis and Palestinians.

A number of Western countries have long considered the violence of the Israeli state toward Hamas as morally superior to the violence of Hamas toward the Israeli state because they view the group as a violent extremist outfit. If Israeli state violence is akin to Hamas’ violence, however, the moral high ground habitually conferred upon the Israeli state is not justified. Moreover, Hamas has been regularly sanctioned for its indiscriminate use of violence. Yet, if the Israeli state deploys violence in a similar manner, it ought to be sanctioned as well. Hamas has also been excluded from several efforts to negotiate peace because of the extremist objectives of its violence. Yet, if the Israeli state were found to be just as extremist, both actors would need to be either included or excluded in future efforts, the latter rendering peace talks impossible. As peacemaking requires at least the imagined (im)moral equivalence of the parties, clarifying such issues matters to the success of future efforts.

First, Forget About Terrorism

Gauging the use of violence by Hamas and the Israeli state against these three standards—legal, political and operational—requires a preliminary step of putting to rest a term that is (too) often used to frame such violence: “terrorism”. Many commentators and politicians have used terms like “terror group” or “terrorist organization” as the determining descriptor of Hamas as a whole. However, the notion of terrorism is not analytically useful because it raises major moral, ideological, and philosophical disputes as to when and who can legitimately use violence. The UN Security Council condemned criminal acts purporting to provoke a “state of terror” in its resolution 1566 of 2004, but otherwise such debate remains unresolved. Hamas does not actually feature on the list of groups that the UN Security Council has designated as “terrorist organizations”, while agreement in the UN General Assembly has been even more elusive. Additionally, in international law, acts of terrorism do not exist as a separate category of major misdeeds. In brief, “terrorism” does not provide a useful strategic frame to compare the use of violence since the term is unclear, disputed, and often biased.

The evolution and nature of Hamas illustrate the difficulties of applying the nomenclature of terrorism. Hamas is a political party, a social movement, an armed resistance group, and until recently a governing entity. It has participated in politics, governed, and provided social welfare. It has also coerced and harnessed the population of Gaza to serve its ends, and committed violence against Israeli combatants as well as non-combatant civilians, often indiscriminately.

By labeling Hamas as a “terrorist group”, the Israeli state strips out such nuance. In doing so, it seeks to delegitimize the organization and to legitimize its own counter-methods. For example, it has used the label “terrorist group” to argue there is no Palestinian “partner for peace”, to discourage the international community from engaging with Hamas, and to wage several campaigns against the group during which it has regularly violated the laws of war. By imprinting the “terrorism” label on the group, the Israeli state also conveniently ignores several peace overtures by Hamas, its own role in the suppression of the electoral victory of Hamas in 2006, and prime-minister Netanyahu’s support for the group’s rule over Gaza until October 7 as part of a strategy to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.

The birth of many modern states went hand-in-hand with the use of extreme violence, which some of the fighting parties labeled as terrorism. Israel was no different. Consider the Zionist paramilitary Irgun blowing up the King David hotel in Jerusalem in 1946, the Lehi and Irgun groups committing the Deir Yassin massacre in 1948, or the Haganah forcibly displacing Palestinians. In their own eyes, they were fighting for independence. But to the British and Palestinians they were terrorists. In these situations, authorities often respond with indiscriminate violence that will likely be reciprocated in kind. Both French actions and the counteractions of Algerian insurgents during the French-Algerian war of 1954-1962 offer a case in point. The brutality of Hamas’ violence at close quarters and the careless application of industrial-scale firepower by the Israeli state fit squarely into such historical dynamics of violence between resistance and occupation.

A Legal Standard: Occupation, Resistance, and Self-Defense

Once the initial shock of October 7 started to wear off and Israel’s military campaign in Gaza took shape, the world recalled that Hamas’ violence was at least in part the result of fifty-seven years of Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories, sixteen years of blockade of Gaza—including several years featuring an Israeli near-starvation policy—and, paradoxically, substantial Israeli support for Hamas. Some analysts have traced Israel’s policies of occupation and blockade back to a deep-rooted need for security given the bitter experience of the Holocaust, and longstanding practices of antisemitism—especially in Europe. Other analysts consider Israel as the quintessential twenty-first century colonial state whose prosperity is based on land theft and structural settler violence.

Historically, it was the Israeli state that occupied the Sinai, Golan, Gaza, West Bank and East Jerusalem after the six-day war of 1967. Although legal in itself, occupation does not amount to annexation under international law and is supposed to be a temporary situation that awaits withdrawal of the occupying forces. For example, Israeli forces withdrew from the Sinai once a peace treaty with Egypt had been concluded in 1979. Israeli forces did not withdraw from the other territories. The international community never accepted Israel’s right to the territories it conquered in 1967 and has instead called time and again for Israeli withdrawal. Meanwhile, important aspects of Israel’s occupation have been declared illegal, including Israeli settlements (under the Fourth Geneva convention) and its partition barrier (by the ICJ). In addition, the ICJ took up a case that seeks to establish the (il)legality of Israel’s occupation as a whole in 2022, not to mention the recent proceedings instituted by South Africa under the Genocide Convention.

It is important to note that from a legal point of view, Israel’s occupation of Gaza is widely considered as continuing despite its 2005 withdrawal. This is due to Israel’s total control over sea, land, and air access points to Gaza; the strip’s telecommunications, electricity, and water supply; and Israel’s ability to intervene militarily at will. Even though the issue is complex, the right of inhabitants of occupied territories to resist occupation is recognized in United Nations resolution 3070 (1973), the Fourth Geneva Convention, and in existing interpretations of the use of force during occupation—just as the occupier is duty-bound under the Geneva conventions to maintain law and order in occupied territories. Both resistance and the maintenance of law and order (including counterinsurgency) must, however, at a minimum respect the confines of international humanitarian law.

Two insights follow from this short analysis. First, Israeli state and Hamas violence represent a dialectic of counterinsurgency and resistance that results from a situation of occupation. In the abstract, there does not appear to be a legal difference between the violence that they use, except with regards to those elements of occupation that have already been ruled as illegal. This may change further if a future ICJ advisory opinion assesses the entire Israeli occupation as illegal. Second, Israel does not have an obvious legal right to defend itself as stipulated in Article 51 of the UN Charter because Gaza is a territory already occupied by the same Israeli state.

A Political Standard: Pursuing Extremist Objectives with Violence

Unless it is criminal in nature, organized violence typically serves a political purpose. To compare and contrast the violence deployed by Hamas and the Israeli state, one must therefore understand the political intention of both parties. As occupation has deepened polarization and radicalization among occupier and occupied alike, a useful frame to assess the political use of violence is that of extremism.

Extremism refers to “the belief that an in-group’s success or survival can never be separated from the need for hostile action against an out-group.” Are such beliefs indeed present among Hamas and the Israeli state, and do they drive their respective use of violence?

Throughout its history, Hamas has consistently framed itself as a resistance movement. But as object of its resistance, it has alternated between the Israeli state as a whole and Israeli occupation. Defining the Israeli state as a whole as object of its resistance and calling for jihad to eradicate it as a political entity makes Hamas an extremist group according to the definition above. The 1988 founding charter of Hamas  put the organization firmly in the extremist camp. From this perspective, its later adoption of the slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” has been read by many as calling for genocide. In such a context, October 7 can be viewed as a preliminary move towards its intended destruction of the Israeli state and its people. The fact that Hamas does not have the capabilities of realizing such an aim today makes no difference. A dirty bomb might be obtained in the future and this threat would become real.

However, defining Israeli occupation as object of its resistance makes Hamas an armed movement that seeks to undo a specific injustice rather than eliminating an entire entity and its people. As noted above, parts of Israel’s occupation are illegal under international law, including its settlement program, separation wall, and frequent destruction of Palestinian property without adequate military necessity. Paradoxically, the international community and Hamas have—despite international sanctions against the latter—the same formal objective in this case: ending occupation, albeit through different means.

The 2017 revision of Hamas’ charter shifted the emphasis of the movement’s objective to resisting occupation. It clarified that Hamas fights the Zionist project and not Jews. Moreover, it considered a Palestinian state within the pre-1967 boundaries to be “a formula of national consensus”, even though the document also contained more hostile language towards Israel. As such, the revision can be seen as opening the door for political negotiations between the group on one hand and Egypt—which was antagonistic toward Hamas as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood—Israel, and the international community on the other. If this was indeed the intention, Hamas did not find any takers. Through this lens, October 7 looks like an act of resistance that was brutal toward its Israeli targets and cynical toward the civilian population of Gaza, but not as a preliminary move to destroy the Israeli state and its people.

To summarize, Hamas uses violence in pursuit of extremist political objectives, its 2017 charter revision notwithstanding. After all, this revision left ambiguity as to whether the object of the movement’s violent resistance remained the Israeli state and its people, or had shifted to Israel’s occupation. Hamas could have dispelled such doubt by explicitly recognizing the pre-1967 borders of Israel without caveats since this neither requires giving up resistance nor a surrender of arms. This would not be a potential concession harming the movement’s position during future negotiations, but instead frame itself as a resistance organization rather than an extremist one and thereby increase its legitimacy on the international stage.

Shifting the analysis to the question whether Israeli state violence pursues extremist political objectives, its statebuilding record indicates an early and clear intention to get rid of as many Palestinians as possible between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, Gaza included. This was even codified in places such as Ben-Gurion’s memorandum “Outlines of Zionist policy” (1941), the original charter of the Likud party (1977), the Absentee Property Law (1958), but also in the coalition agreement of the current Israeli government (2022) and recent statements by leading Israeli politicians. Moreover, there is the 2018 nation-state law to consider, which clarifies that the Israeli state exists for its Jewish citizens and is meant to be Jewish-dominated.

Violent actions initiated or sponsored by Israeli state to get rid of as many Palestinians as possible further incriminate it. These range from attacks on the civilian Arab quarters of Jaffa, Haifa, and other major cities in 1948; massacres like Deir Yassin and operation Cast Thy Bread in the same year; the settlement project since the early 1980s; as well as the regime of separation, control, dispossession, and degradation that has been imposed on Palestinians in all the occupied territories since 1967—not to mention using humanitarian aid as a weapon of war after October 7; or the recent conference on the resettlement of Gaza and the “voluntary” displacement of its inhabitants.

Up until the early 1980s some of Israel’s extremist objectives of annexation and displacement might be understood as a byproduct of war, or even as necessary to ensure the security of the Israeli state and its people. But this argument runs into trouble after the mid-1980s when PLO cross-border incursions largely ceased, as the organization was forced to relocate from Lebanon to Tunisia in 1982 due to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The last Israeli-Arab war took place in 1973. Except for the short interlude of the Oslo Accords from around 1993 up until 2000, the Israeli state deployed structural violence from at least the mid-1980s until today to maintain its occupation and encourage Palestinian departure without facing an existential threat.

It is clear that Israeli state violence pursues extremist political objectives with its systematic annexation of the Occupied Territories, which is executed by structural forms of violence and aims to forcibly displace parts of the Territories’ Palestinian population. Israel could have recognized the state of Palestine with East Jerusalem as its capital long ago, and invited the United Nations to help negotiate a formula for undoing occupation that learns from the Oslo Accords and creates mutually acceptable security arrangements. Instead, it pursued realization of extremist objectives that are in line with revisionist Zionist ideology.

An Operational Standard: Hamas and Israel at the Sharp Edge

At the operational level where violence actually occurs, one must consider the extent to which Hamas and Israeli state violence engage in “(in)discriminate (non-distinct) and (dis)proportionate attacks on non-combatant civilians” to understand its nature, since these are key operational criteria provided by international humanitarian law to constrain and enable violence.

The Hamas attack of October 7 targeted a number of Israeli military posts as well as kibbutzim close by the Gazan border and rapidly expanded to include additional civilian targets when Israeli resistance proved to be minimal. Operating on foot, by motorcycle. and by car, Hamas militants killed about 373 Israeli security personnel and about 766 civilians, according to the Israeli government (not accounting for friendly fire casualties). Where the group had time, it engaged in deliberate acts of murder, humiliation, and abuse of the civilians of several kibbutzim before its militants were killed themselves, but not before carrying off around 240 hostages to Gaza. It is clear that the group’s treatment of Israeli non-combatant civilians violated international humanitarian law as it was indiscriminate. The same applies to Hamas’ targeting of Israeli residential areas and civilian facilities around Gaza by rocket before October 7. In short, Hamas’ violence makes little to no distinction between Israeli combatants and non-combatants. Its methods at close quarters are crude and brutal.

Israeli bombardments of the Gaza strip—most recently in 2009, 2014, 2022 and 2023, as well as its violent suppression of the 2018/2019 Gaza border protests—feature a mix of relatively cautious targeting of Hamas militants and much more indiscriminate aerial attacks. While there is dispute about the extent of deliberate Israeli bombing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza during previous campaigns, past levels of destruction and numbers of dead Palestinians suggest carelessness at the very minimum. However, the purposeful targeting of civilians became crystal clear during the current offensive. It has been augmented by the deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure, such as mosques and schools, even after the fighting. Such tactics are grounded in Israel’s Dahiya doctrine, which stipulates large-scale civilian destruction as a way to break an opponent’s will to fight.

This is the result of a change in Israel’s objective from suppressing Hamas (before October 7) to eliminating the group (after October 7), including its perceived support base. In Gaza’s densely populated environment, in which militant and civilian infrastructure is interwoven, the Israeli state must target civilians and civilian structures to realize its objective. It does so through the brutal application of industrial-scale firepower and with disregard for the fact that the Israeli state itself is responsible for the making of Gaza’s environment through displacement, occupation and blockade. The sheer scale of destruction and death by the thousand, many of which children, indicate that Israeli forces have stopped caring to differentiate between Hamas fighters and infrastructure on the one hand and their civilian counterparts on the other. This likely amounts to war crimes and some IDF soldiers have already incriminated themselves online in the  expectation of enjoying full impunity for their deeds.

Implications for Peace

The preceding analysis allows for at least two conclusions. To begin with, the violence deployed by Hamas and the Israeli state respectively is not fundamentally different if reviewed against a legal, political, and operational standard. In terms of legality, Hamas may resist occupation, just as Israel may maintain order and engage in counterinsurgency operations in the territories it occupies—both within the confines of international humanitarian law. In political terms, both entities deploy violence in pursuit of extremist goals. In the case of Hamas it is somewhat ambiguous how extremist its goals really are, whereas in the case of Israel it is clearer of late. Operationally, both entities use violence in an indiscriminate and disproportionate manner with the key difference that Israel does so on a far larger scale than Hamas. More precisely, between 2008 and mid-2023, Israel killed at a ratio of 21:1 (present casualty numbers of both sides suggest this ratio may rise).

These insights have important ramifications for peacemaking efforts. The first is that the international community has tilted the odds against peace by sanctioning Hamas but not the Israeli state, even though their use of violence is comparable in key regards. Even though the Israeli state is far more powerful and commits far higher rates of violence, it is Hamas that faces greater international opprobrium. The international community further diminishes the prospects for peace by excluding Hamas from peace negotiations even when the Israeli state is not. This situation is reminiscent of the PLO before the Oslo agreements. Israel could not bring itself to negotiate with the group until it did. Countries like Turkey and Qatar could sponsor Hamas during peace negotiations and vouch for its actions after the present Israeli military campaign, on the understanding that excluding the movement from peacemaking efforts will likely cause them to fail. If October 7 is invoked to object to such a course of action, recall that Yitzak Shamir was in charge of an armed resistance group, Lehi, when it committed the Deir Yassin massacre, slaughtering between 115 and 250 Palestinian civilians. He went on to become prime minister of Israel.

I owe a debt of thanks to Jalel Harchaoui, Nancy Ezzeddine, Ko Colijn, Peter Haasbroek and Omar Hossam Auf for their review of this essay. The content is naturally my own responsibility.

The world is watching Israel’s indiscriminate bombardment of Gaza and the mass killing of civilians. While the International Court of Justice debates the allegations of genocide, it is incumbent upon all of us to reflect on the impact of this war on the wider region, especially as we contemplate the images of Gaza in ruin, and the devastating photographs of maimed children; in light of these images, what are the prospects for peace between Arabs and Israelis? The ramifications of this war are bound to be far reaching for great powers’ interests in the region, especially those of the United States, Russia, and China. Whether these powers expand or shrink their presence in the Middle East, and the implications of these changes for regional stability, is a question of great importance today.

A proper point of departure, if peace and regional stability is our goal, is to start with this premise: Hamas did not create the Palestinian-Israeli conflict but is a product of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. If we realize this simple fact, we begin to have a more nuanced understanding of current events in their broader historical context. To start with October 7, 2023 is to place Hamas and its actions in an ahistorical vacuum and thus obscure its implications for peace and regional stability.

I will frame my argument into three images: what the war means for the Arab world, the potential for radicalization, and finally the involvement of great powers in the Middle East. For the Arabs, as for the Israelis, the region post-October 7 is vastly different from the region it was before.

Regarding the first image, there is a clear difference in the way that the Arabs and Israel view October 7. While each party emphasizes only one side, the Hamas attack on Israel had two scenarios. In the first, Hamas managed to evade Israeli intelligence and missile defense systems to destroy communication command centers and capture Israeli soldiers as hostages. In the second, Hamas attacked Israeli civilians in the settlements and took civilian hostages. 

The Israelis highlight the second scenario to make the case that Hamas is a terror organization that targets civilians, while emphasizing Israel’s victimhood. The Arab image, on the other hand and as depicted by the first scenario, highlights the military defeat of Israel at the hands of a non-state actor with few resources.

The image of the Israeli Army as an invincible force was shown to be a myth on October 7. Hamas’ attack, as well as its endurance for more than three months, undermined the mythology of the Israeli intelligence services and their technological wizardry. In reality, Israeli intelligence failed to predict or prevent the attack. It has also failed to locate hostages in Gaza, let alone free them.

The demystification of Israeli power has wider implications, particularly for small states in the region. Many of the Gulf States have opted to normalize relations with Israel in the last few years in return for its protection from potential enemies like Iran. These recent failures of Israeli security indicate that this trade-off may not be lucrative. 

The war in Gaza has exposed Israel’s inability to deter Iran, both in the failures of its intelligence gathering and its military operations. Israel’s capacity is limited, it attacks Iranian-backed militias either in Syria or Lebanon or engages through small espionage operations with very little strategic value. These attacks have not prevented Iranian-backed militias from launching attacks on Israel’s northern border. October 7 has led to a reassessment of whether Israel’s military is as effective of a deterrent as it claims. 

In terms of deterring Iran from going nuclear, Israel has proven incapable of achieving this goal either, as Iran became a nuclear threshold state in 2023. If Iran were to develop a nuclear weapon, Israel would be hard-pressed to maintain its military engagements on three fronts: Gaza, its borders, and Iran itself.

As Arab states watch Israel’s failure to predict attacks or protect against them, they may begin to have second thoughts about their investments in Israeli security. One can argue that the disproportionate display of firepower over Gaza is only an attempt to repair the badly damaged image of the Israeli army as an effective regional deterrent.

Furthermore, Israel’s insistence on releasing the hostages by force is yet another attempt to repair the image of its intelligence services. After three months, the Israelis have failed on both fronts—there is no victory in sight and no hostages were released outside of negotiations. Thus, Israel is still a damaged regional power. This is problematic, not only for the neighboring Arab states who began normalization to have access to this power, but also for Western countries who have promoted Israel as a regional balancer and security asset.

Arab media outlets and audiences suspect that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyhu is aiming to pull the United States into a wider regional war as a cover for his failure in Gaza. If this strategy succeeds and the United States is dragged into a confrontation with Iran, the risk for neighboring Arab states will be high, especially for those that have already normalized with Israel.

The Gulf States, given their geographic proximity to Iran, could find themselves as the tip of the spear of a U.S-Israeli assault on Iran. In preparation for this scenario, countries like the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain have emphasized that their normalization processes with Israel are primarily economic and diplomatic, rather than military alliances. Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, has pumped the brakes on the normalization process and has told the United States that there will be no peace process with Israel until the recognition of an independent Palestinian state. This requirement was absent before October 7, indicating that the crisis in Gaza is hampering normalization processes across the region. 

The intelligence failure and lack of army readiness were not Israel’s only vulnerabilities. Cracks were already beginning to show in Israel’s dysfunctional society during the judicial reform protests of 2023. Netanyhu’s ploy to weaken the Israeli Supreme Court prompted many Israelis to take to the streets in protest, especially in light of the corruption allegations he faces. The composition of Netanyhu’s government has shifted to the extreme right, highlighting significant divisions along ideological and ethnic lines. These deepening fissures, and the weakness they reveal, has emboldened Hamas and other regional players to act. 

These fissures bring forth the second image: the potential for radicalization. From a Palestinian perspective, Hamas’ attacks made the Palestinian cause the most important foreign policy agenda item worldwide. In the meantime, the mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza by Israeli dumb bombs is creating more radicals in the region than it is taking out. Violence begetting radicalization should not be a surprise; most Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters today lost their parents and families during the 2014 war on Gaza—a conflict which created an army of orphans who lost their families to Israeli airstrikes. 

This radicalization is not limited to Gaza or Palestine in general, it spans the entire Arab and Muslim world. Extremism on one side breeds extremism on the other, as witnessed during the Sunni revival and radicalism of the 1980s, which grew as a response to the 1979 Shia revolution in Iran. Current Israeli extremism will produce a mirror image in the Arab and Muslim worlds to the extent that it might radicalize both the Sunnis and the Shiites, simultaneously. 

This has implications for the United States and for the region alike. Many consider America to be complicit in this war, especially through damaging statements such as those made by President Biden and the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken. Biden declared his support for Zionism while Blinken declared his Jewishness in an attempt to show solidarity with Israel.

These statements translate well amongst Israelis and much of the Jewish population in the United States. However, they translate very badly in the Muslim and Arab world and represent the conflation of the United States and Israel. As a result, the fury over Israel’s mass killings in Gaza is being translated into hating America and Americans. The United States might need another twenty years to recover from this.

Saudi Arabia has also been caught in the crossfire. Many analysts in the Western world have focused on how the Hamas attacks torpedoed the Saudi-Israeli negotiations over normalization. However, what is most important today is how Israeli violence in Gaza, and the radical response it has generated, will undermine Saudi’s reform project.

For the last seven years, Saudi Arabia has held Islamist currents at bay, but the recent violence may revive radical voices that had, until recently, been dormant. The appeal of this resistance discourse is gaining more ground and the lines between moderates and radicals are blurring in Arabic social media today. It seems the Islamists are back and nothing can stop them.

As regional radicalization begins to grow, the image for great powers’ interests in the Middle East also becomes more complex. For the United States, the war in Gaza and the engagement of U.S. battleships in the Red Sea and Yemen distracts from the greater strategic issue: the competition for global primacy with Russia and China.

This overstretching from Ukraine to Gaza to the Red Sea, all while thinking about the Indo-Pacific and potential war with China, is likely to make the United States lose focus; it cannot fight on three fronts at the same time. The implication of this loss of focus for regional and global strategy is certainly alarming for all concerned. With no clear international leader in the region, Arab countries will hedge their bets amongst the United States, China, and even Russia, indicated by Putin’s recent visit to the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia in December 2023. 

With regional conflict looming, rising risk of radicalization, fluctuating political alignments, and a deep uncertainty about what the future holds, the effects of Gaza must not be underestimated. The status of the Middle East today can be reflected in the words of the Irish poet William Butler Yeats: “Things (are falling) apart; the center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world; the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned; the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

As the war on Gaza rages on, people fear that “never again” is being challenged once more—after one failure too many was followed by another, and one lesson that came at far too high a cost nonetheless came every time. Those concerned with Palestinian rights recalled with trepidation the genocides of the 20th century, including but not limited to the Herero and Nama genocide, the Holocaust, Bosnia, and Rwanda.

Steadily growing in the public discourse as Israel’s assault on Gaza continues despite international calls for a ceasefire is the notion raised by independent United Nations experts as early as October 19 that Israel may commit genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza.

By November, Israel’s assault had been described as a “genocide in the making”.

This view was not limited to the political sphere; on December 29, 2023, South Africa instituted proceedings against Israel at the International Court of Justice, claiming violations of the the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the Genocide Convention). It argued that Israel was acting with genocidal intent based on actions, omissions, and public statements by the government and government officials. South Africa said that it had—as a party to the Convention—an obligation to prevent genocide, and asked the International Court of Justice to order legally binding provisional measures for Israel to stop its assault and cease potentially genocidal acts.

The Court held public hearings on January 11 and 12, 2024, in which both sides made their case. Israel vehemently denied these accusations and argued that it had a right to defend itself, referring to Hamas’ attack over three months prior. The Court then issued provisional measures on January 26, ordering Israel to do everything in its power to prevent genocidal acts, make sure evidence is not destroyed, ensure humanitarian aid gets into Gaza, and report back on its efforts on these fronts in one month’s time.

To understand the nature of the ICJ’s order, its significance within the war on Gaza, the intricacies of international law relating to the case, and this field of knowledge more broadly, the Cairo Review of Global Affairs invited American University in Cairo associate professor of law and chair of the law department, Thomas Skouteris, to a Q&A. He is one of the founding members and the first secretary-general of the European Society of International Law and of the Foundation for New Research in International Law.

These questions were answered on January 26, the day of the announcement of provisional measures. Today, Israel will report to the Court its efforts to implement them.

Cairo Review: What do you think are the merits and weak points of the South African and Israeli arguments at the International Court of Justice? How valid is the argument for genocidal intent, and the counter-argument of acting in self-defense?

Thomas Skouteris:  Our conversation today could not be more timely. While our focus should rightly be on the intricacies of today’s ruling, it’s crucial to note that judicial processes represent only one facet of the broader workings of institutions of international governance. The implications of today’s decision are yet to be fully discerned. It is imperative to temper expectations regarding the transformative power of judicial proceedings. Often, international law is perceived as the deus ex machina that will save the day; however, it is often part of the problem.

With regard to the Court’s order: The arguments by both parties in this case were highly predictable, both in content and delivery, underscoring the theatrical, or even performative, nature of legal proceedings. Yet, this predictability doesn’t necessarily detract from their substance.

South Africa’s presentation was measured. It deliberately steered clear of sensationalism, perhaps to preclude any potential criticism from Israel. The approach was poised yet assertive, couched in legal doctrine, and reminiscent of British barrister-style rhetoric. It is no accident that the case was led by John Dugard, perhaps the most respected of South African international lawyers, and renown globally for his commitment to fighting human rights abuses for over sixty years. South Africa’s argument focused on fact with minimal drama, occasionally referencing the conflict’s history for added emphasis. The tone frequently shifted toward addressing the Court directly, seemingly to remind it of its duty to rise to the occasion. The argument was pressed against the backdrop of the Gambia v. Myanmar case, where provisional measures were granted under the same Genocide Convention. South Africa argued for the gravity of the Gaza situation, emphasizing the dire need for provisional measures to halt ongoing atrocities. South Africa’s referenced statements by Israeli top officials, such as the President of Israel and the Defense Minister, which were made in “dehumanizing language”. It also referenced UN-reported facts. The Court’s order, as it turns out, accepted the salience of the argument.

Israel’s approach was more dramatic, marked by defiance and an attempt to reverse the narrative. It portrayed Israel as the victim of genocide by Hamas. Israel’s strategy aimed to delegitimize South Africa’s position by highlighting alleged ties with Hamas. Professor Malcolm Shaw, representing Israel, accused South Africa of factual distortion and defended the Israel Defense Forces as the “world’s most moral army”. Israel contended that South Africa’s use of “genocide” trivialized the concept of genocide, thus undermining the purpose of the Genocide Convention.

Israel argued the situation was in reality an armed conflict in self-defense against a terrorist organization. It contended that the provisional measures sought would unfairly restrict its ability to defend itself. Additionally, Israel challenged the procedural basis of South Africa’s claim, arguing for its dismissal from the Court’s docket due to the absence of a “dispute” under the Genocide Convention. Israel emphasized its commitment to addressing any  breaches of humanitarian law by its forces through its domestic justice system.

The Court earlier today did not entertain the self-defense argument and did not seem to endorse much of Israel’s position, at least not for the purposes of the provisional measures stage of the case.

Yet the Court fell short of ordering a ceasefire.

TS: Indeed. The Court wanted to carefully address the request for provisional measures while trying not to limit the (inherent, under international law) right of a state to defend itself and, thus, not taking a position that would prejudice its finding on the merits of the case. As the Court frequently does, it went only as far as it needed to in order to justify its Order.

[At this stage, the ICJ is not looking into the merits of the case itself or even if it has jurisdiction to rule on it, but only on whether it has prima facie jurisdiction, jurisdiction upon first impression, to order provisional measures to prevent irreparable damage until closer examination is conducted by the ICJ.]

How enforceable is an ICJ order for provisional measures? 

TS: These orders are legally binding, as established by the ICJ’s statute and jurisprudence, notably in the LaGrand case (Germany v. United States, 2001).

[In the LaGrand case, the Court determined that its orders for provisional measures were, in fact, legally binding.]

However, their enforcement largely depends on state cooperation, reflecting the principle of sovereign equality in international law, due to the lack of a supranational enforcement mechanism, save for cases where a competent international organization or an organ of such an organization, such as the UN Security Council, takes binding measures necessary for the enforcement. This, however, is difficult to imagine.

Politically, these orders are also significant. They signal international acknowledgment of potential legal violations, exerting diplomatic and moral pressure on states for compliance. Public and media attention often intensifies this pressure. Compliance indicates a state’s adherence to international law, while non-compliance can harm its reputation and, in legal terms, undermine its case during the merits, as it will add another major point of legal scrutiny. In the instant case, the request by the Court for Israel to submit a report detailing measures taken in compliance with the order is likely to keep the matter high on the diplomatic agenda and proliferate the instances where the binding effect of the order might bear upon international negotiations. It is also likely to embolden out-of-court rhetoric that utilizes international law in the public domain to shame Israel and create pressure.

What are the precedents outside of the ICJ in terms of proving genocidal intent and prosecuting genocide? And how have similar cases in the ICJ developed the law in this regard?

TS: The prosecution and proof of genocidal intent has been largely undertaken by international criminal tribunals such as the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), and the International Criminal Court (ICC). These tribunals have played a critical role in shaping the legal understanding of genocide, particularly in terms of establishing genocidal intent.

In contrast, the International Court of Justice focuses more on state responsibility rather than individual criminal liability in genocide cases. It examines if states have breached their duties under the Genocide Convention, including the obligation to prevent and punish genocide. Key cases, such as Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro, and Croatia v. Serbia, have been instrumental in developing the legal understanding of a state’s responsibility in the context of genocide. This is why the Court’s Order indicating provisional measures focused largely on the obligations of the state of Israel to prevent and punish.

[There was no precedent for state responsibility in genocide before Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro, in which the Court in 1993 affirmed the Serbian state’s responsibility for the Srebrenica Massacre, which was determined as a genocide. Before that, genocide was seen only through the lens of individual criminal liability.]

Are there extralegal considerations that the ICJ may feel pressured to contend with throughout the case? 

TS: The interpretation of the law is invariably a political process, albeit one that is governed by legal methodology and binding rules of interpretation. Sometimes it’s termed as an “art” rather than a “science” to betray the impressionistic character of interpretation, but I also find this distinction problematic for other reasons. The bottom line is: espite efforts to shield its internal rationality from external influences, the law, for good or for bad, tends to fall short. Therefore, “extralegal” considerations are inherently part of the legal process.

Addressing, however, your question in the context of traditional realpolitik, which I believe was its intended meaning, it’s evident that such considerations always influence judicial proceedings. The International Court of Justice (ICJ), with judges from diverse geopolitical backgrounds, cannot be completely detached from the prevailing international political climate, the legacy of the Court, or the individual and collective interests and ideologies of its judges. The complexity of cases the Court handles, involving issues of sovereignty, war, and atrocities, places it under significant political pressures by definition. Consequently, the ICJ’s function as an arbiter of international law transcends mere legal adjudication.

To better understand your last comment: is there a theoretical or practical differentiation between political acts and interpretation of the law? Or is the application of the legal dimension solely a function of the political insofar as it has to abide by a legal process?

TS: There are lots of differences, for example in terms of the authority, legitimacy, enforcement, review, checks-and-balances, and the like. My earlier remarks weren’t intended to imply that judicial actions are synonymous with personal opinion. While the term “political”’ is somewhat useful, it lacks analytical purchase in this context.

In my view, and I acknowledge that some colleagues might disagree, the act of legal interpretation is not only technical. It must of course follow binding rules, professional practices, it is subject to review, it has legal effects and consequences, it may be reviewed and appealed, it may be deemed “correct” or “incorrect”—all the above comprises the legal trade—but it is never objective in the sense of revealing the “true content” of the legal norm, because there is no such thing. My point is that multiple legal interpretations can be equally defensible from a legal standpoint, yet they might vary in terms of broader acceptance.

How do the recent developments in international law affect its future and its relationship with the international community? 

TS: The last two decades have not been marked by a decrease in the frequency or severity of violations of jus cogens norms (the highest and most inviolable norms of international law) or international crimes, let alone of pain and suffering. The discourse has paradoxically broadened the scope for “lawfare”, the use of legal systems and principles to achieve military or political objectives. This expanded legal vocabulary is increasingly employed not only to uphold international law but also to advance broader political and strategic interests, sometimes under the guise of legal compliance. This adds complexity to international relations, as legal arguments are used to justify, contest, or negotiate global political and strategic actions. This had always been the case but now the production of a plausible legal pretext is  part of a state’s preparation for armed conflict. .

Furthermore, the proliferation of international criminal tribunals since the 1990s, including the establishment of the ICC, has not met the expectations. The optimism of the 1990s has transformed into a sense of disillusionment, raising questions about the next intellectual project that will drive internationalism. The evolution of international law, while creating avenues for accountability and justice, always introduces new opportunities for oppression and the perpetuation of relationships of domination with new means.

In 2024, the prevailing sentiment, at least this is how I experience it, is not one of progress and forward momentum. Instead, there’s a palpable sense of fin de siècle—a feeling akin to the end of an era. This mood reflects a complex mix of disillusionment, exhaustion, and perhaps a critical reassessment of the aspirations and achievements of the past decades, especially in the context of international justice and human rights. The initial optimism that marked the post-Cold War era, with its significant developments in international law and the establishment of institutions like the International Criminal Court, has given way to a more sobering recognition of the limitations and challenges inherent in these global endeavors.

International law continues to serve as a tool of oppression and domination, as well as a tool of emancipation and empowerment. This is why I invite everyone to engage with international law actively and responsibly, despite its evident limitations, as a process and as a language that may still be leveraged effectively.

On October 7, Hamas shocked Israel and the world by penetrating a multi-billion-dollar defensive shield, which included electronic surveillance, automated gun towers, a sea blockade and underground barrier, erected over years. It attacked and occupied Israeli military bases, towns, and a kibbutz for days. Analysts say it was the worst military and intelligence failure since the 1973 October War. Four-hundred-and-fifty Israeli Defense Force (IDF) soldiers, police, and Shin Bet agents were killed. A total of 1,200 Israelis died, and 240 hostages were spirited back to Gaza and hidden within its miles of tunnels.

Initially, the IDF refused to release casualty figures. Only after Haaretz made the refusal public in early December did it relent. The numbers the army did release then—1,600 wounded since the ground invasion began on October 23—were vastly undercounted. The health ministry, using actual hospital records, said that over 10,000 soldiers and civilians were wounded between October 7 and today.  Even excluding civilian casualties, there is a wide discrepancy between the two casualty counts.

The chair of an Israeli support group for wounded soldiers said that between 10,000 and 15,000 had been wounded since October 7, many of these suffered permanent disabilities: PTSD, amputees, paraplegics, blinded, and so on. The article includes interviews with Israeli mental health advocates who warn the level of trauma they have seen and expect to see in the coming year dwarfs anything they had ever experienced before.

In recent weeks, Israeli soldiers have spoken up about the lost opportunities to detect and prevent the attack. An officer with t Unit 8200, Israel’s signal intelligence unit (SIGINT), obtained a copy of the Hamas training document it called “Jericho Wall” (as in the Biblical story of the toppling of the city’s walls). It outlined precisely the attack that Hamas did indeed mount a year later. Upon obtaining the document, an Israeli officer warned her commanders in the field that Jericho Wall was not just a theoretical plan, but one that Hamas intended to implement as it had conducted a training exercise that seemed to mimic the one outlined in the document.

Separately, another IDF surveillance scout detected the Hamas exercises being played out in front of her eyes. She too alerted her commanders, six months before October 7, that these were not typical military training exercises, but rather intended for a real and impending attack on Israel.

Both their warnings were dismissed and the result was the tragedy that ensued.

After the October 7 attack, the entire country reeled from the disaster. Interviews with survivors and loved ones of the hostages flooded the airwaves. It shook the nation to the core. It took more than a week for the military to draw up its plans and prepare for war. The entire active-duty military and reservist force of 360,000 troops were mobilized for the counteroffensive.

Wars Based on Rage and Vengeance Fail
The goals and spirit of the counterattack on Gaza were clear: vengeance. The Israeli defense minister infamously said: “we are fighting human animals”. The president of Tel Aviv University called for the extermination of Gazans, invoking the Biblical command to eradicate the entire tribe of Amalek: men, women, children, and livestock. Members of the Knesset called for dropping nuclear weapons on Gaza and the intelligence ministry offered a plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza and expel its residents to tent cities in the Sinai.

While all wars are motivated by emotions like pride, anger, and nationalist fervor, most have political objectives as well—they are primarily intended to secure national interests. Israel’s war on Gaza had no such political component. It was fueled almost entirely by revenge. A war based purely on emotion, retaliation and fury is almost certainly doomed to failure.

Because Israel’s objectives are based on such irrational impulses, its objectives are divorced from reality and virtually unobtainable. Though Israel may want to exterminate Gaza or rid itself of all its residents, its Arab neighbors have rejected the latter plan. And the rest of the world will not permit the former to happen.

One of the IDF’s repeatedly stated objectives is to destroy Hamas. Yet after four months of combat, U.S. officials told the Wall Street Journal at the end of January, that it has eliminated only 20-30 percent of its fighters. Sources estimate it has between 30-40,000 overall.

Israeli officials have floated proposals for an indefinite military occupation after hostilities end. But they have been rejected by Hamas and the Biden administration.

However, wars are only winnable when their objectives are rational and realizable.  This conflict is neither, which is why Israel is losing this war. In fact, it will lose this war regardless of what military objective or ultimate outcome is achieved. It will not realize its declared objective: to obliterate Hamas and expel all Gaza’s residents. Even if, for argument’s sake, it achieved these goals, Palestinian resistance will exist wherever there are Palestinians—whether in Sinai, Beirut, Ankara, Tehran or Amman. Hamas is not just an armed militia; it is an idea. It represents Palestinian nationalism and is a powerful force of resistance to Israeli occupation, dispossession, and genocide. If there was no Hamas, the Palestinian people would create one.

Therefore, the idea that Israel will solve all its problems by eliminating Palestinian resistance is a chimera. It also poisons Israeli discourse.  There is no longer any constituency for peaceful compromise or a two-state solution. Israelis have eaten the fruit of the forbidden tree of security, and in refusing to believe in a political solution, they have embraced a garrison state model—at perpetual war with its neighbors near and far including Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, Iran, and the Houthis, as a few examples.

Israel’s Military Directives
As it wages an unwinnable war, Israel has resorted to military policies which have caused collateral damage on both sides.

The Hannibal Directive

When the IDF began mounting a counterattack on October 7, among the first to join the fight were helicopter pilots. As they went into the air, they found it difficult—if not impossible—to identify clear enemy targets. They became aware that Hamas fighters had taken Israeli hostages as they fled in vehicles back toward Gaza.

They either made individual decisions, or in some cases asked permission from superior officers to follow the Hannibal Directive, an order to kill IDF soldiers if they are captured in combat. The goal is to eliminate hostages and the need to negotiate with Hamas for the exchange of Palestinian prisoners.

Until now, the Directive has only applied to soldiers. There are credible claims, for example, that two soldiers killed during the 2014 Operation Protective Edge were killed by IDF fire, after they were captured by Hamas fighters and as they were dragged into a tunnel.

Until now, Hannibal has never applied to civilians.  But a number of Israeli civilians were killed by the helicopter pilots. An IDF officer interviewed by Israeli TV said that he’d viewed the carnage near the border fence after the battle was over, and there were clearly Israeli civilians who died from Israeli fire along with their Hamas captors.

There is also eyewitness testimony from Israelis who survived the Palestinian assault in a Kibbutz Be’eri. The fighters broke into their home and held them hostage.  An Israeli tank fired into the home, knowing there were civilians inside and a child was killed in this attack.

The Amalek Directive

An Israeli security source told the Cairo Review that the security cabinet issued a directive to the Shin Bet and IDF to assassinate the top six leaders of Hamas and their families, the Hamas fighters who participated in the October 7 attack and their families, journalists and their families. The order’s name refers to the Biblical Amalekites—sworn enemies of the Israelites—all of whom were murdered by King Saul upon divine command. I’ve named the cabinet document the Amalek Directive.

Both a grandson and grand-daughter of Ismail Haniyeh, head of Hamas’ political bureau, died during separate IDF attacks.  Fourteen other members of his family were killed in a separate attack. The entire family of Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau chief, Wael Dahdouh, died in a similar attack. Not only is the killing of journalists a war crime, the murder of their entire families, simply due to a relationship to him, is as well.

In other words, Israel no longer makes distinctions between Hamas and civilians. It considers all Gazans Hamas. Every resident has become a legitimate target. This explains why the vast majority of the Palestinians killed are civilians. Contrary to what Israel and the Biden administration are claiming about minimizing civilian casualties, the reality is that every living thing is a target.

Those who are not killed but instead captured by Israel undergo dehumanizing treatment. For example, we can see their treatment in videos and images aired on Israeli TV of scores of handcuffed, blindfolded, half-naked men kneeling on the ground. Though the IDF claims they are Hamas fighters, Haaretz reports that only 10 percent are. The only reasons to engage in such a sadistic exhibition is to satisfy the rage of the Israeli public, degrade the dignity of these men, and pour salt on the wounds of Gazans.

Genocide
Another critical element of Israeli war strategy is the destruction of virtually all of Gaza from people to infrastructure, to homes, to businesses, to schools. Many scholarly experts have agreed that this is genocide.

South African filed a complaint charging Israel with crimes of genocide before the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Last month, it ruled that there was sufficient evidence to support the charges. It ordered Israel to cease such military operations. Instead, it has escalated them.

During a visit by Blinken, Netanyahu announced that that he ordered the IDF to invade Rafah, where 1.5-million refugees have taken shelter.  He said they would be “evacuated.” But the army did not evacuate northern Gaza during its first military operation. An Israeli security source told the Cairo Review it will follow the same procedures in Rafah.  he IDF will make no effort to evacuate—unless it considers civilians fleeing for their lives an “evacuation.” Following warnings from the Biden administration, the prime minister has promised “safe passage” to civilians. But they despite promises and devising “safe zones” free from attack, thousands of Gazans were killed as they fled the north.

The International Criminal Court has not taken any action regarding an investigation of Israeli crimes begun after the 2014 Operation Protective Edge invasion of Gaza. Chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, visited the Egyptian Rafah border crossing, but was barred entry by the Israeli military. He did meet with Israeli October 7 survivors.

Though he said the investigation was “a priority”, he offered no explicit commitment or date when it would offer findings. His visit and statement were political, but not substantive.

The United National Security Council is stymied by a U.S. veto. A recent attempt to pass a resolution calling for a humanitarian ceasefire was rejected. Thirteen states voted in favor while the United States cast the only NO vote, and it was defeated.

Despite the ICJ’s ruling preventing Israel from proceeding with acts of genocide, the genocide continues unabated. Nearly 27,000 Gazans have been killed, 75 percent of whom are civilians. Of the overall total, 70 percent are women and children. Nearly ninety journalists have been killed, many of them specifically targeted in a IDF war on the media. For context, only sixty journalists were killed globally in all of 2022. The IDF wants no live coverage of its war, so it kills the messenger.

As has become typical with media coverage of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, the media has consistently reflected the Israeli narrative. Lurid video accounts of the rape of Israeli women by Palestinians during the October 7 attack circulated by Israel were amplified by the global media. Israel also offered screenings to members of Congress, world leaders, and even celebrities seeking to score points in the propaganda war.

Meanwhile, there has been substantially less coverage of the deaths of Palestinian women and children. The reason for the paucity of media reporting is that Israel has prohibited foreign journalists access to Gaza unless they are embedded with IDF units. Outlets like the BBC and NBC have availed themselves of this access, and this has ensured favorable coverage for Israel. On the other hand, the Gazans providing reports are mainly stringers and freelancers whose reporting receives less prominence than the regular bylined reporters.

A CNN reporter defied the media ban and was the first such foreigner to enter Gaza. She was able to do so because she entered with a Qatari relief convoy. Her first report was a harrowing account offered by the aunt of an 18-month-old orphan who will eventually learn that both his parents and all his siblings died in an Israeli strike. This is precisely the reason Israel banned such coverage. If the media documented the slaughter for an international audience, the outrage would be magnified a hundred-fold.

And while these atrocities take place, Gazans are being displaced on a daily basis. Eighty percent of Gazans have already become refugees, their homes destroyed or they have been expelled from them by IDF orders. Though Israel claims it has identified “safe areas,” they constitute a checkerboard of 600 micro-zones which few residents can identify, even if they could physically reach them.

Furthermore, Israel has laid siege to Gaza, refusing to permit any humanitarian aid to enter the enclave (aside from a weeklong ceasefire, when it permitted half the normal aid to bring in food and fuel). Meanwhile, residents seek shelter in the rubble or in homes which could be destroyed by IAF missiles at any time. The mental impact of stress, anxiety, and sheer terror Palestinian victims in Gaza are enduring is enormous, and will accompany everyone for the rest of their lives and for generations to come.

The Backlash in America
Powerful images from Gaza of a moonscape of demolished buildings, refugees carrying the elderly on carts, children clamoring for UN handouts with empty pots, the mass graves for those killed, and babies dying in incubators have motivated a powerful media counterattack by Israel and its defenders.

One strategy has been to appropriate pro-Palestinian slogans. Congressional Representative Elise Stefanik, in a House hearing excoriating U.S. university presidents for their laxness in punishing pro-Palestine students, declared that the word “intifada” meant calling for a “Jewish genocide”.  The former means “shaking off”—as in shaking off Israeli occupation in this context—and has a spiritual, and sometimes physical meaning. But it has absolutely nothing to do with Jews.

It is useful propaganda tool to appropriate “genocide” against Palestinians and turn it into a genocide against Jews, thus making it a taboo for pro-Palestine activists. Those who use it are labeled as anti-Semites and their views are discredited.

Another means of smearing the Palestinian cause has been to transform “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” from an aspiration for Palestinian national rights into an allegedly anti-Semitic slogan.

The accusation that “from the river” slogan is anti-Semitic is steeped in hypocrisy. In fact, the father of Zionist Revisionism (the precursor to the Likud Party and other right-wing movements), Zeev Jabotinsky, declared in a poem he wrote: “there are two banks of the Jordan, both are ours.” In his maximalist vision, Israeli territory stretches from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River. This is no more than a Zionist claim of territorial sovereignty over the Greater Land of Israel. Unlike the Palestinians, who haven’t yet achieved any of their political or national aspirations, Israel now exerts actual sovereignty over territory to its north, east, and south in Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon.

The misuse of the slogan has played out horribly on college campuses: any student or group on any campus which features it at a rally, is being accused of engaging in hate speech. Three universities, Columbia, Brandeis, Rutgers, and Georgetown, have banned Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), for engaging in protests. Their “offense”? They endangered Jewish students and public safety. The truth is quite different. The only violence at these rallies across the United States has been from pro-Israel forces seeking to disrupt or assault anti-war activists.

Student leaders of Palestine solidarity groups have been harassed and doxed by pro-Israel groups like Canary Mission and Israel on Campus Coalition. These groups allegedly pay students to spy on pro-Palestinian individuals and groups. The information is passed along to the main offices in Washington D.C. and from there relayed to Israeli intelligence. The pro-Israel groups managed to impact the careers of three such pro-Palestinian students who had been accepted as associates at major law firms only to have their offers rescinded. Billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman threatened to stop making millions of dollars in gifts to Harvard University and demanded to be brought the names of the students who circulated and signed an anti-war statement in the Harvard Crimson. He declared he would never hire anyone who supported an anti-war letter signed by thirty-five student groups. He also led a successful campaign to fire University President Claudine Gay, whom he disparaged as a “diversity hire” (she is African-American);  and for her refusal to stop pro-Palestine voices on campus. Ackman and his fellow billionaires are playing the role of Joe McCarthy in this morality play and are restoring a dreaded weapon of his era: the blacklist . In the 1950s, teachers, actors, directors, government officials were accused of Communist links. Congressional hearings hounded them and even forced them to expose colleagues as “Reds.”  Victims lost jobs and careers were ruined; some like Paul Robeson, Berthold Brecht, and Charlie Chaplain went into European exile.

Muslim-Americans have also become victims of anti-Palestinian terror attacks. A six-year-old Palestinian-American boy was stabbed to death by his landlord.  In Vermont, three Palestinian students wearing keffiyehs were shot by a white supremacist. One of them is permanently paralyzed.

While Ackman tends to support Democrats, GOP billionaires have joined the movement in defense of Israel. Almost a score of them have withheld or threatened to withhold hundreds of millions in donations to their alma maters until they punish pro-Palestine students. They have in turn enlisted Republicans and Democrats allied with AIPAC to hold a House of Representatives hearing in which the female presidents of three Ivy League schools were dressed down. Those who attempted to uphold their campuses as places in which a diversity of thought was permitted on these issues were denounced.

Afterward, wealthy donors and members of the Boards of Trustees, and even one governor, pressured the three women to resign. The University of Pennsylvania president, Liz Magill, did so under fierce pressure. Initially Harvard’s Board of Overseers support President Gay in the face of a fierce effort to unseat her. But pressure gradually mounted and she resigned. She issued a statement which pointed to the misogyny and racism of her opponents and deplored their tactics.

It is no accident that pro-Israel forces chose universities with female and/or Black leaders to target. Israel’s supporters not only have the pro-Palestine movement in their sights but are also going after the programs of Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI). These are programs designed to enhance ethnic diversity on campus, and to ensure all ethnicities, and all those with disabilities, are included in all facets of university life. Ackman and his fellow privileged white billionaires detest this concept, which embraces values of social justice and equity. They also detest campus activism (unless it is conservative). In fact, his tweet demanding Gay’s resignation included an attack on DEI. It claimed that Gay was a “diversity hire”. He made the even more ludicrous statement that promoting such “unqualified” candidates does them a disservice.

There is a mass hysteria in America as politicians, human rights, and Palestine solidarity activists, faculty, presidents, students, and professionals are made to fear for their careers if they post social media content supporting Palestine. Students have lost jobs at law firms; professors have been disciplined or fired; and university presidents were forced to resign, and more.

The most apt historical parallel is the Red Scare, in which the progressive targets in government, academia, and Hollywood were forced to testify, and implicate themselves or others as traitors to America and as supporters of Communism. This led to loyalty oaths and the Hollywood Blacklist. Some victims, Charlie Chaplain among them, were forced to emigrate to more friendly countries to escape victimization, social ostracism and lost careers. The doxing and sabotage of the careers of pro-Palestine individuals today is a throwback to that infamous era.

Failure of U.S. Policy
The Biden administration’s policy during the war has proven disastrous. The president, who has been an ardent Zionist for decades, has endorsed Israel’s attacks and sent billions in weapons to replenish the Israeli weapons arsenal; U.S. munitions are killing thousands of Gazans. Meanwhile, the U.S. Iron Dome is protecting Israelis from Palestinian rockets, thus allowing Israel to pursue the war with virtually no civilian casualties or popular dissent.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken even approached Jordan and Egypt with an Israeli plan to ethnically cleanse all of Gaza and dump the refugees in the Sinai. It called for both countries to accept the majority of Gaza’s 2.5-million inhabitants, and to sweeten the pot, Netanyahu suggested that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) forgive a “large part” of Egypt’s $22-billion debt to the IMF.  Yet, the Israeli prime minister never offered a penny from his own country.

U.S. support for ethnic cleansing is evident in the 106-billion-dollar supplemental aid package intended to replenish Ukrainian and Israeli war stocks. Tucked into the bill is a 17-billion-dollar request for weapons and humanitarian aid to Israel. After considerable wrangling, the House of Representatives failed to pass the bill.

The funding proposal also includes 1 billion dollars in aid to Gazans who may “voluntarily” leave the enclave (a portion will offer aid to Ukraine as well). The idea that any Gazan would leave Gaza independent of forced expulsion is absurd.

After the Arab countries rejected the proposal out of hand, the administration changed course and declared it opposed an Israeli attempt to expand its buffer zone by appropriating territory of northern Gaza; opposed any “forced relocation” of Gazans; and requested that Israel permit humanitarian aid to Gaza. Netanyahu has rejected each of these requests and pursued policies that directly contradicted them.

Blinken argued that Israel is taking every precaution to protect civilians in its attacks;  that the United States emphasized this consideration in discussion with Israel; and that any loss of Palestinian life is “regrettable”.

Israel also promised it would not harm civilians during its latest invasion of Rafah.  These, of course, are hollow statements designed to insulate the Biden administration from criticism. They fail to do so. Much of the world understands that these are lies.

Until recently, leaders in Europe and the U.S. Congress have been snowed by Israeli hasbara, not to mention cowed by fears of being labeled as anti-Semitic. The winds of change have now shifted, however; prime ministers of New Zealand, Australia, and Canada, who are among the United States’s closest allies, issued a joint statement calling for a Gaza ceasefire. The UN General Assembly (UNGA) voted 153-9 in favor of a similar resolution. Egypt and Mauritania also invoked UNGA Resolution 377, which allows the General Assembly to circumvent the Security Council when a veto has impeded its ability to address issues that threaten peace and security. If the UNGA does act, then the Council (and the United States) will face enormous pressure to pass a ceasefire resolution.

U.S. Elections in the Balance
Biden has the lowest approval rating at this point in his presidency of any modern president running for a second term. In part, due to opposition to his stance on Gaza. In the battleground state of Michigan, critical for any Democrat presidential candidate, an October poll showed support among Arab–Americans plummeted from 49 to 17 percent.  His opponents in this community have organized to deny him their votes.

Polls show that a majority of Americans not only do not support Biden’s approach, they disagree with Israel’s attacks against Gaza. In Congress, those calling for an immediate ceasefire rose from an initial thirteen House members to forty. Now, three senators have joined them. White House and State Department staffers have filed similar statements.

Biden is running behind Trump in most national polls. Any major factor that decreases the motivation of traditional Democratic voters could torpedo his election prospects. He is banking on the American public forgetting this debacle by November. But the longer the war lasts, the closer the election becomes and the more likely the average voter will remember.

AIPAC and the poisoning of U.S. electoral process

AIPAC, whose campaign donations amply fund the war chests of scores of senators and House members, demands fealty to Israeli legislative interests in return. It has now expanded its sights. Not satisfied with maintaining the loyalty of elected members of Congress, it seeks to control which candidates win primaries. This excludes undesirable ones from reaching a general election, and guarantees its chosen candidates will be elected.

Billionaire GOP donors have contributed tens of millions to AIPAC-related PACs (political action committees that use donations to fund election campaigns), which are spent attacking Democratic primary candidates. Those without millions at their disposal cannot withstand the incessant attack ads run on TV, radio, and social media. Any candidate willing to criticize Israel is a target. They include Muslim–Americans, women of color, LGBTQ individuals, and even Jews. Anyone who, if elected, would join or be sympathetic to such progressive Democratic politicians, known collectively as the Squad, became vulnerable.

AIPAC has its own PAC plus two others loosely affiliated with it. In 2022, they spent a combined 60-million dollars in primaries. They didn’t even have to participate in the general election, since a primary victory guaranteed their pro-Israel Democrat a House seat. The pro-Israel PACs will likely spend 100-million dollars in the 2024 primary cycle.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, among the most well-known members of the Squad, denounced AIPAC as “racist and bigoted.” She said the Lobby’s intervention degrades and subverts the electoral system and American democracy.

Against Israeli lobbying and electoral activism, there are few progressive PACs which push back. J Street, a liberal Zionist DC lobbying group raised nearly 6-million-dollars in 2022, 12 percent of what the pro-Israel PACs raised. Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), an anti-Zionist movement, has a PAC with an even smaller campaign war chest.

The Israeli lobby, meanwhile, continues to aim to police Israel-related discourse in government, the media, arts, culture, entertainment, and universities. Social media has also become a critical space in which this battle is waged. Israel monitors and arrests Palestinians for “anti-Israel” posts. It has threatened to monitor and punish platforms which incite anti-Israel sentiment. It monitors social media intensively and responds to what it perceives as hostile content. Sometimes it does so by directly lobbying corporate CEOs. It also files complaints with platforms which lead to suspensions or deletions of pro-Palestine accounts. It boasts publicly that up to 80 percent of its complaints are successful.

The Need, and Danger, of Speaking Up
In December, Israel assassinated Palestinian poet Refaat Al-Areer, along with many members of his family. Al-Areer was renowned not only in Gaza, but throughout the world. The New York Times published a 2021 profile that focused on his college classroom discussions of Hebrew and Palestinian literature. He also published an op-ed in the Times, about his daughter’s fears of an Israeli attack on their home.

An Israeli security source told Cairo Review that the Israeli security cabinet approved Al-Areer’s murder, designating him as “Amalek,” an eternal enemy of the Jewish people. According to Euro Med Monitor, he received repeated death threats, likely from Israeli intelligence. They told him that IDF troops were coming to get him. Because of this, he moved from an UNWRA school where he was sheltering, to his sister’s home. That is where a precisely targeted Israeli missile smashed into their apartment, without damaging the rest of the building.

The source told the Cairo Review that one of the major reasons he was on the Amalek hit list was a tweet he published last October, in which he responded to an Israeli hoax claiming that babies had been discovered baked in an oven. Al-Areer tweeted, mockingly: “with baking powder or without?” This may be one of the few instances during the entire Israeli–Palestinian conflict when someone was murdered for mockery.

A notorious right-wing journalist, Bari Weiss, highlighted the tweet, bringing it to the attention of her one million followers.  The same day, the Daily Mail published an article about the tweet, calling it a “sick joke.”

While NGOs like Palestine Legal and the Center for Constitutional Rights defend the victims of the Israeli Lobby’s ire in the legal arena, there are few groups who do so in the political arena.  There are Muslim and Arab–American groups, like the Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and Council for Islamic Relations, which protect the interests of these communities. But there is no group defending solidarity activists or launching counterattacks when AIPAC or the Anti-Defamation League declare JVP or SJP, “hate groups.” There is, essentially, no counter-hasbara initiative—nothing like the alphabet soup of pro-Israel groups (AIPAC, ADL, AJC, CAMERA, etc.). The Palestinian solidarity movement needs to respond robustly to the threats, doxing, smears, and attack ads. When university presidents are attacked or when House committees launch inquisitions, such an organization needs to push back, and present a counter-narrative that affirms the dignity and humanity of Palestine and the Palestinian people.

As the magnitude of the Hamas attacks of October 7 became clear, Israeli officials were quick to put out and endlessly repeat a phrase, particularly to global audiences: “Hamas is ISIL”. They would go on to explain that Hamas, like ISIL, has proven beyond any doubt that it is an evil terror organization, sowing and feeding off hatred among the civilian population, and intent on killing civilians in the name of Islam.

Drawing from that, they conclude that Hamas is not an Israeli problem alone, but one for the whole world, on behalf of which Israel is fighting. The only one way to deal with Hamas, the Israelis said, was to crush it completely using maximum force, allowing no room for compromise, denying those who undertook those attacks any semblance of success, and thus decisively discouraging any attempt to repeat them.

Standing next to U.S Secretary of State Anthony Blinken in a joint press conference during his visit to Israel on October 12, 2023, only five days after the attacks, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said: “Hamas is ISIS, and just as ISIS was crushed, so too will Hamas be crushed. And Hamas should be treated exactly the way ISIS was treated. They should be spit out from the community of nations. No leader should meet them. No country should harbor them. And those that do should be sanctioned.”

In a later news conference with visiting Romanian Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu on October 17, 2023, he elaborated further: “We are not fighting just our war, we’re fighting the war of all civilized countries and all civilized peoples. And just as the civilized world united in fighting the Nazis, united in fighting Daesh, ISIS, then the civilized world should unite behind Israel in fighting and eradicating Hamas.”

This idea tries to create a perfect congruence with the war launched by the United States and the coalition powers against ISIL in 2014–2017, and especially the battles of Raqqa (Syria) and Mosul (Iraq), the main centers of the “Caliphate”.

The “Hamas is ISIL” idea was quickly picked up as an established fact by many in the West who support Israel’s hard line, as well as many well-meaning analysts and observers. Most importantly, though, is its adoption as the official position by major Western governments, including the United States, immediately backing it up with strong diplomatic, military, and moral support for Israel. This was done under the justification that Israel has the right, and indeed the duty, to defend itself in this particularly extreme method, as the only means to protect itself from the repetition of such attacks.

Accepting the “Hamas is ISIL” proposition by Western governments was crucial in providing Israel with the cover and means it needed to impose its suffocating hermetic siege of the Strip that cut the supply of food, water, electricity and fuel, and to pursue its relentless bombing campaign, and the subsequent ground offensive, allowing only a trickle of humanitarian aid—so tiny that it meets a small fraction of the needs of the 2.3 million Palestinian inhabitants of the Strip.

The subsequent operation by one of the world’s strongest and most sophisticated militaries against a scantily manned and armed enemy and 2.3 million helpless civilians was not just massive, but also paid no attention to civilian casualties and the destruction it continues to inflict on this destitute region.

Nor did it care for international law and international humanitarian law. The result of Israel’s military campaign is, at the time of writing, close to 28,000 deaths, a third of which are children, and many more injuries; the destruction of more than half of Gaza’s residential and services buildings; the displacement of 1.8 million civilians; and a humanitarian catastrophe on a massive scale.

All this carnage was predicated on and justified by the “Hamas is ISIL” proposition. No other rationalization would have justified inflicting such a calamity on a civilian population under occupation by the occupying power, with total support from Western capitals.

This war had to be explained by something far bigger than a terrorist attack: the need to uproot an enemy of this uniquely dangerous and irrational type, as an existential and global threat, in order to gain enough international legitimacy and support. Therefore, an examination of this comparison between Hamas and ISIL as terrorist organizations—and its implications—is in order.

Context Matters
First, it might be appropriate to recall how terrorism is defined, to draw a line separating it from other related activities, such as political pressure, acts of war, or regular violent crime. In fact, there is no single clear-cut universally accepted definition of terrorism, and the United Nations has failed to reach such a definition despite repeated attempts.

However, there were several instances where the UN or one of its organs managed to develop language that provides something close to a definition to serve a specific purpose or be used in a specific context. For example, Article 2.1.b of The International Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism, signed on 9 December 1999, includes the following text describing terrorism in this context as being an act “intended to cause death or serious bodily injury to a civilian, or to any other person not taking an active part in the hostilities in a situation of armed conflict, when the purpose of such act, by its nature or context, is to intimidate a population, or to compel a government or an international organization to do or to abstain from doing any act”.

Similarly, the United Nations Security Council, in its October 2004 Resolution 1566—which dealt with international cooperation against terrorism without specifically attempting to define it—included wording describing what would be considered terrorist acts as:

“criminal acts, including against civilians, committed with intent to cause death or serious bodily injury, or taking of hostages, with the purpose to provoke a state of terror in the general public or in a group of persons or particular persons, intimidate a population or compel a government or an international organization to do or to abstain from doing any act.”

On the other hand, on a non-political level, the Oxford Dictionary provided its own definition of terrorism as being “the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims”, while the Encyclopedia Britannica defined it as “the calculated use of violence to create a general climate of fear in a population and thereby to bring about a particular political objective”.

Based on those definitions, the comparison between Hamas and ISIL might seem to have some merit. Both share fundamentalist religious ideology. Both draw on the frustrations of their relevant constituencies, particularly the youth, and their willingness to sacrifice their miserable lives for what each considers a “just and noble” cause and, in the process, gain eternal peace and happiness.

But most relevant to our topic is that both of them resort to violence to achieve their political goals by means that seem to fit the different definitions of terrorism, particularly in terms of the effects of violence on civilians. However, the leap from this to considering them “terrorist organizations” of the same fabric and nature is where problems arise.

In fact, there are no similarly clear definitions of what a terrorist organization is. Is it any organization that practices terrorism, no matter how integral it is to its overall mission and activities, and regardless of the context within which it commits its terrorist acts? Or can organizations that commit terrorist acts as defined earlier be divided into terrorist organizations, and organizations that have significantly broader and legitimate missions and therefore merit less incriminating treatment as organizations, without legitimizing their terrorist acts?

These questions have no legal answer in international law, but history shows a clear inclination to make these distinctions and treat the two groups differently.

In practice, designating terrorist organizations is a political decision, made mainly unilaterally by states, and only in rare cases collectively by international and regional organizations. In this context is the notable designation of Al-Qaeda and ISIL as terrorist organizations by the United Nations.

This absence of a broadly accepted definition, and the variance of designating organizations as terrorist among states, stems from the different answers to the questions mentioned above. Namely, these are how to handle the difference between organizations that commit terrorism in their pursuit of objectives or causes that enjoy little or no legitimacy, and organizations that represent legitimate causes, and have a much wider range of activities, but also commit acts of terror as they pursue those causes.

Resisting Occupation
Suffice it to say that countries of the Global South—most of which had a history of resisting occupation themselves, in large part through organizations which were described as terrorist at the time—are more inclined to make this distinction, and bestow significant legitimacy on national liberation movements. Western countries, on the other hand, tend to be more skeptical and less tolerant of the use of force in resisting occupation, having been on the receiving end of similar movements in the past.

However, there is wide agreement that the first type include organizations like Baader-Meinhof of Germany, the Red Brigades of Italy, the Red Army of Japan, and the pan-Islamic Al-Qaeda and ISIL. Such organizations live on and off terrorism, which is their core activity and main content, while their ideological or political cause is just a shell that, to them, justifies their struggle, but is simply not shared outside the organization at any significant level.

Examples of the latter include organizations such as the National Liberation Front (FLN) of Algeria, the African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), and the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Such organizations, besides resisting oppression/occupation, engage in significant social, political, and economic activities, making them the embodiment of a whole people or a nation, or a major part thereof. The instances where they use force, including what would be defined as terrorism, are aimed almost exclusively at the oppressive or occupying power.

All such organizations were described as terrorist organizations, particularly by their oppressors. It is one way the oppressor/occupier tries to level the moral playing field with the people they oppress/occupy, and a means to justify the use of severe and unjust force against them.

It is also true that virtually all liberation movements in history resorted, at one point or the other, to some kind of terrorist activity as a means to redress the massive power imbalance with the occupier/oppressor and to prevent their oppressor/occupier from becoming too comfortable in the status quo, thereby forcing it to change its policy and become more willing to loosen its oppressive grip.

This is where the slogan “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” comes from: the oppressors/occupiers and their allies would invariably call those who resist “terrorists”, while those who recognize the legitimacy of their cause call them “freedom fighters”, without necessarily condoning some of their tactics. Indeed, many authoritarian regimes find the terrorism label a convenient way to unjustly defame their democratic opposition.

Applying those points to the Hamas–ISIL comparison shows major differences in character and activities that completely rebut the notion that Hamas is similar to ISIL and should therefore receive the ISIL treatment.

The fundamental and original difference that distinguishes between the two organizations is the cause to which each is dedicated. ISIL’s cause, for which it uses violence, is to establish an Islamic Caliphate, apply its own version of Sharia, or Islamic jurisprudence, and engage the world of unbelievers, including those with different interpretations of Islam, in a religious war with the objective of conquest. It is this objective of sole domination that leads it to eternal war and renders any political engagement with it pointless.

Hamas, on the other hand, is essentially a national liberation movement, albeit with an Islamist character, as demonstrated by its full name, the “Islamic Resistance Movement”. It emerged from within Palestinian society in the late 1980s with the specific goal of resisting the Israeli occupation. It also believes in armed struggle for Palestinian liberation, which is legitimate as a matter of principle in international law. It aspires to “liberate” all of Palestine, although it later declared its willingness to accept an independent state in the territories occupied in 1967, with Jerusalem as its capital, which corresponds to the international consensus and the requirements of UN Security Council resolutions.

Its objective and its enemy are both limited and clearly defined by the occupation, and its area of action is confined to the territory of Historic Palestine, all of which is now under Israeli control. Hamas never declared war on any other opponent but Israel, and never intentionally acted violently against citizens of other countries. Those characteristics are very similar to most other national liberation organizations the world has known, many of which end up being glorified as freedom fighters, particularly after they succeed in obtaining freedom.

But Hamas has also been playing a major political, economic, and social role in Palestinian society under occupation—running schools, universities, hospitals, and social support networks, and taking charge of governance in the Gaza Strip for the past seventeen years. The fact that Hamas is dedicated to a national liberation cause shows how different a type of organization it is compared to ISIL and other terrorist organizations, notwithstanding any terrorist activities it might have committed.

It also shows how similar Hamas is to the long list of national liberation movements that were called terrorist organizations before they ultimately helped their people win their freedom and lose their radical edge along the way. The objective of such organizations—that is more specific and legitimate compared to the former type of organizations—can render itself to political engagement, where a political settlement allowing self-determination is a feasible means of ending the violence.

Accordingly, it might be more appropriate to consider Palestinian armed resistance movements such as Hamas, like other similar movements, combatants as defined in international law, and thus bound by its limitations no less than any country engaging in warfare, but also not more.

Israel’s Asymmetric Occupation and Acts of Violence
This brings up another equally important comparison, which is the one between Palestinian resistance movements—including Hamas—that are accused of committing terrorism, and Israel with its practices against Palestinians. The question here is whether any side stands on a higher moral ground, or enjoys more legitimacy than the other in their decades-long confrontation. This comparison is made by many supporters of the Palestinian cause, who point to a long list of potentially illegitimate or illegal actions by Israel—over and above the original sin of occupation—which they believe eclipse those of Hamas and the other Palestinian resistance movements.

Israeli actions are continuous and not confined to flare-ups of violence. They include building settlements in the territories that are internationally recognized as being occupied, extrajudicial killings and administrative detentions of Palestinians, illegal expropriation of property and water resources, arming illegal settlers and allowing them to terrorize the local population of the occupied territories, the siege of civilian populations and cutting the flow of food, water, and fuel. Most egregious of all is the use of indiscriminate and massive military force and collective punishment against civilians and civilian targets under Israeli occupation, including the illegal use of weapons and ammunition, and temporary and permanent forcible displacement.

Israel claims that civilian casualties are collateral damage to its pursuit of self-defense, a right that international law does not, in fact, extend to occupying powers vis-a-vis the occupied. Otherwise, they have little else by way of legitimate justification for the other allegations. Even the collateral damage claim is undermined by countless incidents which are backed by public statements from senior Israeli political and military leaders. These statements indicate the deliberate use of indiscriminate force to inflict maximum pain on the civilian population as reprisal or punishment for their presumed support of Hamas—or even to forcibly displace them out of the Gaza Strip altogether, going as far as showing intentions to annex the territory and populate it with Israelis.

In fact, Israeli officials have been warning the Lebanese militant organization, Hezbollah, to refrain from attacking Israel, and threatening—not to attack its bases or destroy its infrastructure—but to turn Lebanon’s capital city, Beirut, into Khan Younis, a Palestinian city Israel almost completely destroyed in the current war. This is retribution and blackmail, not self-defense, not unlike what is taking place in Gaza. Even if the state of Lebanon itself engages Israel in war, Israel is bound by international law not to attack civilians or civilian targets.

Here, too, we are confronted with allegations of war crimes that deserve to be independently investigated, as much as the allegations leveled at Hamas deserve to be independently investigated. Until this happens, we have to be cautious in accepting the allegations made by either party, particularly those presented without verifiable evidence or independent confirmation. But it has to be clear that we cannot legitimately hold Palestinian resistance accountable for its actions unless Israel, too, is held accountable for its actions.

But even as we compare the actions and infractions of both sides, we also have to remember that Hamas and Israel—as parties in this conflict—are not on equal footing. Among the many differences that are relevant to this matter, three critical ones stand out.

First, as alluded to earlier, as long as the Palestinian people are resisting occupation, while Israel is fighting to maintain it, there can be no equivalence in legitimacy or morality between the two sides. There is no way to equate infractions committed to resist oppression with those committed to maintain it.

Second, national liberation movements resort to tactics with questionable legitimacy not out of preference, but because they lack military capabilities that match their occupier. Had those movements possessed tanks and fighter aircraft, and high precision and potent missiles and artillery, reconnaissance equipment, and the space to organize a proper military to stand up to the occupying military, there is little doubt this would have been their preferred choice.

This is not only because it is more honorable, but also because it would be far more effective in inflicting pain and loss on the occupier, and—more crucially—in weakening the tool with which it maintains the occupation, which is its military.

Third, there is uniformly a huge discrepancy in strength and destructive power between the Israeli occupier and resistance movements like Hamas. While the occupier denies the occupied their right to exist in freedom, and can subject the population to massive hardship—as the war in Gaza spectacularly demonstrates—terrorist acts can never constitute an existential threat to the occupier, no matter how big and shocking they are. They serve as one of a very few options available to exact a price on the occupier for its occupation, without which there will remain no incentive for it to grant the rights of the occupied.

Why It Matters
The arguments made above hinge, to a large extent, on recalling that the Palestinian cause is a national liberation struggle, similar to the ones that defined the middle of the twentieth century. The entire discussion would have been less controversial had it occurred in the two decades that followed the Second World War, when the tide of national liberation was engulfing the Global South, and the world had a completely different understanding of armed resistance to colonialism.

But all this changed with the tapering off of colonialism, and more importantly after the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the emergence of ISIL, which made the “Global War on Terror” a defining factor in international relations. Israel is trying to connect Hamas to the Islamist terrorist organization ISIL, to shift focus away from the Palestinian cause of liberation and self-determination, and to garner as much international sympathy and support, especially in the West, as possible for this war condition.

Those who accept Israel’s logic, whether or not they are aware of its fallaciousness, are not just committing a grave error of judgment that costs more innocent lives and makes it harder to resolve this conflict, but are also complicating the efforts to combat terrorism. Terrorist organizations would want nothing more than confirming their identification with Palestinian national liberation movements, which will be a boon to their recruitment and fundraising efforts, and their drive to gain legitimacy and build public support. In reality, defeating such organizations with public support requires distinguishing them from movements that have legitimate causes and public sympathy; otherwise, the efforts to combat terrorism will lose a lot of credibility.

Nothing in the above discussion is intended to minimize the gravity of targeting innocent civilians. Nor is it aimed at trivializing the dangers of terrorism or the use of force to achieve political objectives. What it basically attempts is to engage and analyze the comparison Israel made between Hamas and ISIL, and the opposite comparison made between actions by Israel and Hamas, and to reach more sensible conclusions that can better put an end to the dangerous cycle of violence that ultimately spares no one.

In 2002, during their annual summit in Beirut, the twenty-two members of the Arab League proposed the Arab Peace Initiative (API), which called for normalizing relations with Israel on the condition of the establishment of a viable Palestinian state.

The API was initially meant to be a framework to peacefully end the decades-old conflict. While that framework still remains intact today, the API has played a different function since the Arab Spring jolted the region into an intense zero-sum game between Saudi Arabia and Iran. From then on, Saudi official discourse treated the API as a focal point in the Kingdom’s pragmatic policy toward Israel. It gained a simultaneous function that allowed the Saudis to express their willingness for cooperation, yet still distance themselves from such willingness by emphasizing the centrality of Palestinian rights.

 In the years since the 2002 summit, the API would not only become the last vestige of the land-for-peace formula as a solution to Israel’s occupation of Palestine, but also came to be seen by its progenitor, Saudi Arabia, as the most enduring basis for a lasting peace in the Middle East.

With successive peace efforts failing and falling to the wayside, the API was eventually overshadowed when several Middle East states signed normalization agreements with Israel in 2020 and 2021 within the framework of the Abraham Accords—without guarantees for Palestinian rights. Nevertheless, in the past year, and prior to the current Israeli war on Gaza, Saudi Arabia was considered by both Tel Aviv and Washington to be the biggest regional player expected to normalize relations with Israel.

For this reason, the Kingdom’s pragmatic policy toward Israel is often misunderstood by a wide range of regional and global observers and actors, to the detriment of the API. Therefore, it is important to properly frame Saudi engagement with Israel within Saudi Arabia’s history of strategic balancing, and to focus on recontextualizing the API in the post-October 7 world rather than looking to the Abraham Accords as a pathway to peace.

History of Strategic Balancing: “Not Too Close But Not Too Far”
The Saudi position toward Israel can generally be depicted as operating in a constant state of balance; the Saudi ruling elite have historically had to weigh normative Arab and Islamic obligations that are crucial to their image and legitimacy on one hand, with a great deal of diplomatic and security interests with their traditional Western partners on the other.

This weighted approach by the Saudi monarchy to Israel is all the more complex when one considers that it is based on a trilateral relationship with the United States, perhaps the Kingdom’s most influential strategic partner.

This balancing act requires delicate strategic measurement and a discursive process that may lead analysts and policymakers worldwide to adopt false working assumptions that the Saudis will largely abandon Palestinian rights in any future peace process. Therefore, it would be fruitful to provide a historical perspective of how far back Saudi pragmatism toward Israel stretches to get a clearer idea of its future.

One of the enduring misconceptions on this topic is the idea that Saudi willingness to normalize ties with Israel is something new when it actually dates back to the late 1960s. When an American consular delegation met King Faisal in Dharan in 1969, American officials were surprised by the tone of the late king regarding Israel. The King even then was already blessing negotiations with Israel, but not direct Saudi–Israeli talks. This attitude was mainly due to the prevalent opinion among most Arab leaders after the 1967 Arab defeat that Israel was a de facto reality on the ground, and therefore there would be no recourse but to engage and pursue a settlement with it.

Even in the years after the 1973 Arab–Israeli War, Saudi officials were still not opposed to negotiations with Israel. In fact, their intention to lead the oil embargo was a means to apply pressure on the Richard Nixon administration to start a negotiated process to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Even when Egyptian President Anwar Sadat surprised the Arab World with his trip to Jerusalem, the Saudi ruling elite, notwithstanding their bitterness for not being informed beforehand, were supportive of negotiations with Israel. Of course, these instances were discussed quietly and discreetly, and such a position could not have been made public at the time due to popular sentiment. However, this illustrates that the balancing and measured position of Saudi Arabia toward negotiations with Israel is something that has been present for decades and ought not be considered new.

It was not until 1981 with Saudi Crown Prince Fahd Abdul Aziz’s peace plan, which materialized into the Fez plan of 1982, that the position of Saudi pragmatism toward Israel became more public. The Fez Plan called for an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital and for the “dismantling of the settlements established by Israel in the Arab territories since 1967”. The response of then-Prince Abdullah, when asked whether or not the Fez plan offered recognition of Israel, was to the effect of “how could it not”. This demonstrates that even public Saudi pragmatism and willingness to recognize Israel is really nothing new. On the other hand, the eruption of the Iran–Iraq War (1980-1988) and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait (1990) forced Saudi Arabia to focus on its imminent security issues rather than on peace in Palestine and Israel.

Operation Desert Shield/Storm during the 1991 liberation of Kuwait was a milestone in Saudi–Israeli relations. It essentially forced both states to be at the receiving end of Iraqi missiles amid Saddam Hussein’s miscalculated madness. Israel’s passivity in the war and its lack of complication of the Arab coalition amassing on Saudi territory to dislodge Iraq from Kuwait helped thaw the negative perception that the Saudi ruling elite had of Israel. However, they were still reluctant to imply any sort of tacit recognition of Israel—something they wanted to avoid—through their attendance of the 1991 Madrid Peace Conference. The Saudi ruling elite were already wary of public sentiment and society’s response to the large American presence on Saudi soil—they had to be careful.

Notwithstanding, the ruling elite did what they do best and balanced their position during the Madrid conference, attending the proceedings but only as the representative of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), and not the Kingdom on its own. This balancing process demonstrated the lead-from-the-back style of leadership the Saudi ruling elite tend to prefer.

In a discussion with U.S. diplomat Dennis Ross, the Saudi ambassador to the United States said that by representing the GCC, it would look as if Saudi Arabia itself is there due its dominant role in the Council. This strategic balancing exemplifies the policy of “not too close but not too far”. Saudi officials communicated their tacit willingness to be present, but also provided themselves deniability of their role in direct negotiations.

The 1990s illustrated the ebb and flow of Saudi policy toward Israel. After the Oslo Accords and the Jordanian–Israeli peace treaty the year after, Saudi policy thawed even further. In 1994, the ruling elite agreed to remove secondary and tertiary measures on the economic boycott of Israel, allowing interaction with companies that do business with Israel. In addition, against the backdrop of efforts toward an American brokered Syrian-Israeli peace, the Saudi ruling elite were willing to normalize relations with Israel as an incentive. However, the breaking down of the Syrian-Israeli peace track and the ushering in of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was not favorable to the Palestinian–Israeli peace process, made the Saudis distance themselves even further.

What contributed to this distance was the eruption of the Second Intifada. After some hope of peace in the Camp David summit in 2000, relations took a turn for the worse. In fact, it was one of the lowest points in Saudi–U.S. relations as then-crown Prince Abdullah sent a measured, yet firm message to the newly sworn in U.S. President George Bush Jr. that Saudi Arabia will have to take its business elsewhere, in light of the president’s overt support of Israeli actions during the Intifada. This public spat between the traditional partners and willingness to strategically shift away from the United States by then-crown prince Abdullah is yet another reminder of the trilateral dynamic of Saudi–Israeli relations. The September 11, 2001 terrorist attack only compounded tensions further. With all the turbulence ensuing from the Intifada, and against the backdrop of the early days of the War on Terror, the crown prince put forth the Saudi peace plan in February 2002. This, in turn, was adopted (with amendments) as the Arab Peace Initiative in March 2002.

After the Arab Spring, the API gained a new function of being a Saudi mechanism to harmonize relations with Israel in the context of the turbulent post-Arab Spring Saudi-Iranian regional rivalry. It performed this function by allowing the Saudis to express their willingness to move closer to Israel and in opposition to Iran, yet maintain a publicly acceptable distance by conditioning peace upon the creation of a viable Palestinian state.

The overture is akin to extending their hand yet pulling themselves back, so as to keep the gesture of normalization there, while deliberately being elusive. The API has therefore been caught in this overarching process of Saudi balancing. Accordingly, it may now require re-articulation in order to become the framework of peace it was supposed to be and evolve beyond merely serving as a focal point of Saudi pragmatism.

How to Revitalize the API
In legal literature, the term living constitution is used to explain how the nature and spirit of laws are relevant for the time in which they are introduced; peace initiatives may be considered in the same manner.

The API, viewed as a living peace initiative, allows itself to absorb the political and geopolitical changes that have dominated the Middle Eastern landscape. What makes the API the go-to framework for peace in 2024 is that it has been imbued and designed broadly and with flexible language that was seen to help negotiations address the core issue: the Palestinian-Israeli conflict—a key component missing in the Abraham Accords. However, the inherent strength of flexibility that facilitates negotiations with Israel is also a soft underbelly, as detractors will use this flexibility to discredit the essence of the API.

Therefore, if the API is to be readopted in the new era, the flexibility within it needs to be used to bring it back into the mainstream through shifting to more explicit language and increasing economic and non-economic incentives for peace. For example, a new API could define the framework of negotiations more explicitly and highlight specific projects that could be collaborated on once progress in talks is made. Moreover, it could highlight a roadmap to peace that clearly indicates milestones and a timetable within this process. Most rulers in the Middle East seem to be entrenched in their seats for the foreseeable future, so they could use time to their advantage  rather than operate according to the political calendar of the United States.

Given the growing Saudi ability to position itself in the ever-evolving multipolar world, this is its opportunity to help induce new language. This will entrench the API further into a peace process, and will allow negotiations within the framework of a Palestinian state rather than as a bilateral normalization agreement.

Moreover, the mechanisms of explications should not be confined to governments or official discourse in the region—Middle Eastern civil society, academics, and think tanks can play a more explicit role in this, too. While one is not oblivious to the fact that the regional environment may curtail a certain freedom of expression, the intellectual community in the region needs to play a more public role that can explicate the API.

For example, the intellectual community of regional analysts and academics could elevate the API by conceptualizing notions of sovereignty, security, and peace in a way that complements the spirit of the API and adheres to its paradigm. It may work toward a different understanding of sovereignty that is befitting to the complex situation the Palestinian-Israeli dynamic faces. It could, for example, reimagine and work toward a sovereignty that enables an inclusivity over exclusivity—a sovereignty that is about being broad rather than about being insular. Regarding security, the intellectual community could broaden its conceptual horizon and build a more intertwined, overlapped, and regionalized understanding of security. In a nutshell, what is missing is an intellectual effort that would have political impact and would push the API forward.

Rather than having a purely out-in approach where regional normalization ensues, and then the Palestinian issue gets addressed, the new and improved API could be used as a simultaneous process fusing the Palestinian-Israeli peace with regional reconciliation. In order to bridge the gap between Palestinian-Israeli peace with regional normalization, Saudi Arabia ought to be at the negotiating table to reduce the asymmetry between the Palestinians and Israelis.

Given the evolution of the API and conception of the Abraham Accords, with the latter receiving significant attention, one may question whether it is more prudent to expand upon the more recent initiative given that it is just over three years old. This is a fair question, but the Abraham Accords is beleaguered by a number of conceptual shortcomings which are resolved in the API, making the older paradigm the one worth embracing and expanding.

Look to the API, Not the Abraham Accords, for Regional Peace
One of the aspects that Israel’s War on Gaza has shown is that the region is not ready for more normalization. Instead, there is, more than ever, a dire need for a comprehensive peace in the region.

Leading up to the October 7 war, a great deal of the focus in the halls of the U.S. government was on Saudi-Israeli normalization. The danger of this sensationalist rhetoric of region-wide normalization and abandoning of a Palestinian state is overlooking the simmering and explosive issues on the Palestinian-Israeli front. Focusing on expanding the API, rather than the Abraham Accords, helps recalibrate the bearings toward a sustainable peace, as it is imperative not to conflate nor misunderstand the two different paradigms of peaceful conflict resolution.

Nevertheless, it is difficult to argue that the Abraham Accords have not brought economic benefit to the signatories involved. Economic relations have increased, but this is no surprise, as the economies of the GCC and Israel are complementary due to their tech-based markets. So, in that regard and from a purely bilateral economic perspective, the Abraham Accords are successful—notwithstanding polling suggesting they are unpopular. It is no doubt a milestone in Arab-Israeli relations fashioned in the likes of Jordanian-Israeli and Egyptian-Israeli peace deals.

However, the very DNA of the Abraham Accords is extraordinary, as it is a new paradigm in Arab-Israeli relations. While the API is based on a land-for-peace formula, which means Israel will return occupied Arab land in return for diplomatic recognition, the Abraham Accords is what would be described as a peace-for-peace paradigm: Israel would gain diplomatic recognition from the Arab signatories without any concessions to the Palestinians.

For Israel, as Netanyahu said: the “Abraham Accords enabled us to get out of the equation of land for peace to peace for peace, and we did not give up a span.” This was a strategic gain for Israel not just for more access to the signatories’ markets, but it created an inevitable interaction with Saudi Arabia by flying Israeli commercial airliners over its airspace to the United Arab Emirates, for example. As a result, the Abraham Accords gave confidence to Israeli leaders that they can achieve normalization of ties with the Kingdom without any concessions and without taking Palestinians rights to sovereignty and self-determination seriously.

That is precisely why the API, not the Abraham Accords, needs to be expanded upon and adapted to the new geopolitical context of the post-October 7 Middle East—it simultaneously influences the expectations of a peace process and a peace treaty with Israel so that it has, at its heart, a Palestinian component. The emphasis on the Palestinian cause is exactly what is needed at this juncture, and what the Abraham Accords lack.

At their very foundation, the Abraham Accords are fundamentally not about a Palestinian state, but a circumnavigation of it.

More specifically, the framework of the Accords are dual-layered. The first is an overarching layer of an American foundation that offers the principles of the Abraham Accords—a text that revolves around regional prosperity and ushering in a new era. While that does sound noble, it does not make any reference to a Palestinian state.

The second layer is made of the respective bilateral agreements between Israel, and the signatories of the UAE, the Kingdom of Bahrain, the Kingdom of Morocco, and the Republic of Sudan.

Though the first layer and the overall spirit of the Abraham Accords is not about addressing the Palestinian-Israeli impasse, it still does allude to the conflict in the bilateral texts. Starting from the UAE-Israeli bilateral text, Palestinian rights are mentioned, but only in passing. Moreover, where it was mentioned in the text is even more revealing. Palestinian rights were only mentioned in the preface to the agreement, in a historical context and not part of the clauses that both the UAE and Israel agree on. What the UAE-Israeli document outlines and upholds is a broad scope of bilateral relations.

Furthermore, there is one element of the Accords which is noteworthy for its design to insulate the UAE-Israel agreement to entrench this relationship and shield it from any regional tremors that may affect the relationship—namely turbulence on the Palestinian-Israeli front through the boycott of support of any Palestinian cause that may threaten the Abraham Accords. Said differently, if any problem occurs, the UAE is committed to maintaining its relationship with Israel. This can be seen in clause 9 as it says: the “Parties undertake not to enter into any obligation in conflict with this Treaty […] in the event of a conflict between the obligations of the Parties under the present Treaty and any of their other obligations, the obligations under this Treaty shall be binding and implemented.”

When it comes to the bilateral agreement between Bahrain and Israel, it does mention that it is striving toward solving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The entire text was a mere description of meetings between the respective representatives. So, one can say it was more of a declaration of principles rather than a clear-cut transactional process. In the entire text, Palestine was mentioned only once.

The Moroccan-Israeli text mentioned the Palestinian issue, but also in passing. It recalled a conversation between “Mohammed VI and His Excellency Donald Trump, on the current situation in the Middle East region, in which His Majesty the King reiterated the coherent, constant and unchanged position of the Kingdom of Morocco on the Palestinian question”. What makes the Morocco-Israel agreement stand out is that it was more clearly a trilateral agreement, where the United States was the one who offered the incentive of recognizing Moroccan sovereignty over the Western Sahara, as a substitute for any Israeli concessions to the Palestinians. In addition, like the UAE-Israeli agreement, it was mentioned in the preface.

The entire texts of the Abraham Accords, be it the American declaration of principles or the respective bilateral agreements, mention Palestine or the Palestinians only four times. Moreover, where Palestine was referred to in these respective texts within the broad framework of the Abraham Accords suggests it was used as an attempt to legitimize the normalization of relations—trying to make the Abraham Accords somewhat palatable to their respective citizens.

In contrast, the Saudi-based API has the Palestinian cause at its heart. While the entirety of documents pertaining to the Abraham Accords explicitly mention the Palestinian issue four times, the short API document mentions it once in the preface, but three times in the texts to be agreed upon. In addition, what the API mentions that the Abraham Accords do not are United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194 and United Nations Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338. As a result, the API, while not perfect because it does not propose an explicit negotiation framework with time-sensitive milestones toward a resolution, still does have the ingredients for solving the core issue of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, which the Abraham Accords lack. Only the API has the legal ingredients and building blocks to sustainably address the core issue.

Misunderstanding Leads to Division
Saudi pragmatism toward Israel has often been conflated with a disvalue of Palestinian rights—this is certainly a misreading. As we navigate through the aftermath of the October 7 war, and the aftermath of the catastrophe that is still unfolding in Gaza, understanding the very nature of Saudi pragmatism toward Israel is crucial for having accurate working assumptions in a future peace process.

Such a misunderstanding is used by political elites in Israel to isolate the Palestinians further from regional normalization. Just before the eruption of the war, the Israeli prime minister tried to push the narrative that Saudis no longer care about the Palestinians, and that negotiations should negate any regard for Palestinian rights.

The October 7 war is yet another tragic illustration of the results of a faulty policy of “kicking the can down the road”, which is not only a failure, but a strategic mistake with consequences for regional security. That is precisely why the API must be re-articulated with more explicit language, in a more clearly defined peace process, with a more involved Saudi role on the negotiating table, as it, unlike the Abraham Accords, has the necessary building blocks and references for reaching a Palestinian-Israeli settlement.

CNN’s Ben Wedeman looked exhausted as he fielded questions from an anchor in the United States in late November 2023. He had just reported on the deaths of two Palestinian boys in the West Bank, one of whom, a fourteen-year old, reportedly bled to death because Israeli troops refused to allow a Palestinian ambulance to reach him.

The anchor naïvely asked whether this reflected an increase in violence in the area. You could almost see Wedeman grit his teeth as he brusquely responded: No, this was not unusual; more than 250 Palestinians had been killed in the West Bank since October 7 in escalating attacks by Israeli settlers and the military, and thousands more had been killed or injured over the past decade. The veteran correspondent restrained himself from adding, “You’d know that if you had been paying attention”, but the expression on his face telegraphed the message loud and clear.

That exchange epitomized the sense of exasperation bordering on hopelessness felt by many of us who have reported on the region’s seemingly endless conflicts.

Forty years ago, I stood in front of the mound of rubble that minutes before had been the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut. The four-story building had been leveled by a suicide truck bomber. As our cameras rolled on October 23, 1983, shocked and wounded survivors scrambled to dig out their comrades. In all, 241 American servicemen died that day.

Back home, Americans watching our coverage asked, “Why?” The answer lay in the fatal collision of the same actors in the drama now playing out in Gaza: Israel, the Palestinians, Iran, and a U.S. administration that sees the Middle East only through a black-and-white lens.

Compassion Fatigue: A World Rarely Seen
I arrived in Beirut as a journalist in 1980. I’ve produced countless television and newspaper stories and have written six books on the region. Some days, I think I would have been better off specializing in Renaissance literature for all the impact it’s had.

Of course, that is nothing compared to how Palestinians are feeling.

Every few years, when things in the region get so bad that it briefly captures the attention of the American public, we “experts” wake up to the same questions: “Have the Arabs and Israelis always been fighting?” “Who was there first?” “Is Gaza the same as the West Bank?” “Wasn’t there a peace deal a while ago?” “Why aren’t the Palestinians ever satisfied?” “What’s wrong with these people?”

Some of the answers can be found in the largely untold story of what happens on the ground when the world is not looking. One grim example: Even before the current crisis, 2023 was the deadliest year on record for Palestinian children, who were being killed at a rate of more than one a week, according to Save the Children. In total, at least 188 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank in 2023 before the current crisis, the most in at least fifteen years, according to the UN, while six Israeli children and twenty-four adult Israelis across the country also lost their lives in that period.

How many Americans were aware of that? And how many news organizations reported on the deaths? When stories did appear, you had to work to find them. Case in point: A February 2023 Israeli military operation in Nablus described as “the deadliest such raid in years” that left eleven Palestinians dead and more than a hundred wounded, which  The New York Times buried that on page nine.

Americans are largely oblivious to the monthly body count among Palestinians in part because the killings receive so little coverage in the media. It’s all just too unpleasant and confusing to think about.

And then, there is the systemic bias that sits not with correspondents in the field, but with editors back home. One study of fifty years of American newspaper reporting about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict found that headlines focusing on Israel were four times more common than those mentioning Palestinians, and words such as “terror” appeared three times more often than “occupation”. In recent years, “references to Palestinians’ experiences of being ‘refugees’ or living under ‘occupation’ steadily declined” as the media—and the American public—got bored or other stories beckoned. Compassion fatigue, and all that.

As a result, when they looked at the news on October 7, countless Americans were asking “Why?” and media organizations scrambled to produce basic explainers to make up for years of journalistic neglect.

Hatred produces hatred. Generations’ worth. That is one constant of the Palestine/Israel story. Ironically, one of the most vivid portrayals of that tragic reality can be found in the Netflix series Fauda, produced in Israel. The star and writer are both former members of an undercover Israeli unit that operated in Gaza and the West Bank. They provide a raw and gripping portrait of the spiral of violence that traps and radicalizes both sides. It is a world where there is no black and white, only shades of gray—a world rarely seen on American TV news.

When I was recently interviewed on an Arab TV channel, the host thundered at me: “Americans love Israel and hate Arabs, don’t you agree?” I respectfully disagreed. Yes, I told him, the bonds between the United States and Israel are close. But I pointed to the rallies across the United States demanding a ceasefire and rising criticism of Israeli policies among many American Jews. He scoffed. For him, and millions of Arabs and Muslims, there is no nuance. From their perspective, Palestinians are dying in horrifying numbers and America is supplying the weapons.

Most Americans still don’t get that.

America’s Responsibility
In 1982, as he watched videotaped scenes of dead Palestinians in Beirut’s Sabra and Shatila refugee camp, murdered by Lebanese Christian militiamen under the watchful eye of Israeli troops who had invaded and occupied Beirut, PLO leader Yasser Arafat turned to me and whispered, “This shameful crime of genocide is an international responsibility, and first it is an American responsibility”.

A few years later, Iran’s ambassador in Damascus, Ali Akhbar Mohtashami, who pulled the strings on a wave of suicide bombings and kidnappings targeting Americans in the 1980s, told me: “We think that as long as America as a superpower looks to Israel in a special way and prefers it to all other countries, there will be difficulties.”

And here we are once more, with a White House that has pledged unwavering support to an Israeli prime minister who has framed the Gaza war as “a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness”.

“I say frankly to the American statesmen who are now managing the genocide in Palestine,” Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian told the UN General Assembly in October, “if the genocide in Gaza continues, they will not be spared from this fire”.

Time to Pay Attention
None of this, of course, is meant to condone the brutal slaughter of Israeli men, women, and children by Hamas on October 7, or argue the United States should abandon Israel.

It is meant to emphasize that if Americans—or their favorite media outlets—weren’t paying attention to the rising anger before, it is time for them to start. Itis time for the American public to recognize that the rest of the world views U.S. policy through a very different prism than most U.S. citizens.

As I wrote in my 2006 book, Reflections in a Bloodshot Lens:

The essence of this worldview disconnect was encapsulated in the question that rose like a collective moan from the U.S. body politic after 9/11. “Why do they hate us?” and was mirrored by an equally bewildered, “Why can’t they see?”

One of the great tragedies of the post-September 11era was that this disconnect meant that the United States squandered a huge groundswell of empathy among the world’s Muslims. There were several reasons: a failure to differentiate between the subset of extremists who celebrated the attacks and the majority of the world’s Muslims; the scale of America’s military response; a tone-deaf communications strategy, epitomized by George Bush’s reference to a “Crusade” against terrorism; and the American media’s one-dimensional and “patriotic” approach to coverage of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

“In the past, when the Marines were in Beirut, we screamed, ‘Death to America!’” Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement declared on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. “Today, when the region is being filled by hundreds of thousands of American soldiers, ‘Death to America!’ was, is, and will stay our slogan.”

From the perspective of most Arabs and many others around the world, the pattern set by the Bush administration after 9/11 is being repeated in the Biden administration’s “ironclad” support for an Israeli government that has proclaimed it is at war with “human animals” and that “the entire nation” of Palestinians “is responsible”—an ironic choice of words, given that Israeli governments have historically refused to recognize a Palestinian “nation”.

In outlining the Biden Doctrine for the Middle East back in February 2023, White House Coordinator Brett McGurk, a practitioner of the Bush “bomb ‘em and let Allah sort it out” approach to the Middle East, stated that U.S. policy “will always promote human rights and the values enshrined in the UN Charter”. He emphasized, “they’re not slogans”.

Just months later, the United States is actively providing the weapons that are laying waste to Gaza. Meanwhile, the image of an American president, who is a self-declared Zionist, physically embracing Benjamin Netanyahu will be emblazoned on posters at “death to America” rallies for years to come.

Of Consequences and Outcomes
Forget about what all this means to the United States—let’s talk about what it means to human beings. How many decades of slaughter does it take for policymakers to realize killing innocent people has consequences and that the outcomes rarely mirror the confident predictions voiced in those rosy policy planning sessions or prematurely celebratory news conferences?

Humankind may be “doomed to repeat history,” but it is particularly tragic when those events are part of modern history, which we have lived through and watched play out in our newspapers and TV screens. We should at least be able to learn from what happened in our own lifetimes.

Lebanon

In June 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon and laid siege to Beirut. At least 19,000 Lebanese and Palestinian civilians were killed. Israel’s goals and the outcomes: 1) Crush the PLO—its fighters were forced into exile; 2) Drive the Syrians out of Lebanon—they stayed until 2005; and 3) Install a strong, pro-Israeli central Lebanese government that would sign a peace treaty with Israel—the Lebanese government collapsed less than a year after signing the deal, which was scrapped.

As Israeli warplanes were bombing Beirut, former Prime Minister Menachim Begin predicted the fighting “will soon be finished” and the war would usher in forty years of peace. In 2000, after Israeli public opinion turned against the interminable death toll that had claimed more than 1,200 Israeli service members, then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak declared “this 18-year tragedy is over” and withdrew from south Lebanon. The pretense of Israel’s myth of invincibility had been punctured.

The implications were not lost on the Israelis themselves. “A few hundred Hezbollah combatants have defeated the big and strong Israeli army,” Israel’s Yediot Ahranot newspaper wrote in an editorial. Haaretz columnist Doron Rosenblum asked, “What did we gain from all those wasted years, from all the needless bloodshed?”

The answer was tragically simple: a new, more powerful enemy. While the PLO’s fighters might have been dispersed to the far reaches of the Arab World, in their place rose the Iranian-backed movement Hezbollah, which today effectively controls the government of Lebanon and is one of the world’s most heavily armed non-state actors.

Israel would fight a major war against Hezbollah in 2006—that killed or injured more than a thousand Israeli troops, claimed the lives of at least forty-four Israeli civilians, and wounded more than a thousand more—and remain permanently locked in an ongoing low-level border conflict that would claim scores more lives. At the same time, some 1,500 Israelis would die in attacks by Palestinians inside Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, prior to October 7.

So much for forty years of peace.

Afghanistan

The goal of Israel’s war in Gaza is the elimination of Hamas. The Bush administration said much the same of the Taliban in mounting its 2001 invasion of Afghanistan.

“Our military went to Afghanistan, destroyed the training camps of Al-Qaeda, and put the Taliban out of business forever,” President George W. Bush boasted in 2003.

It’s not like history wasn’t littered with signs of what was coming. Afghanistan is famously known as “the graveyard of empires”. American policymakers didn’t need to go as far back as 330 B.C. and Alexander the Great. Some of them were involved in the proxy war that drove the Russians out of Afghanistan—a war mounted by some of the same militants who became the Taliban.

But America, of course, was different. “The history of military conflict in Afghanistan [has] been one of initial success, followed by long years of floundering and ultimate failure. We’re not going to repeat that mistake,” Bush promised a year after the invasion. At about the same time, then-White House national security adviser Condoleezza Rice announced that the Taliban had been “eliminated”. Nineteen years later, with a death toll that included some 70,000 Afghan civilians, 79,000 allied Afghan and Pakistani government troops, and more than 6,000 U.S. service members and American military contractors, at a cost of 2.3 trillion dollars, the United States ceded Afghanistan back to the Taliban in a chaotic withdrawal that will be a permanent stain on the Biden administration’s record.

Iraq

From the earliest days of his presidency, the team around George W. Bush pursued an agenda to invade Iraq and plant the seeds of a “New Middle East”.

“President Bush has insisted that the Iraq conflict is part of the war on terrorism,” I wrote as U.S. forces unleashed their “shock and awe” assault on Iraq. “Yet far from coherently demonstrating that the invasion will reduce the threat, there are numerous signs it will further inflame Muslim rage, radicalize the moderates, and unite voices at both ends of the Islamic political spectrum.”

Mine was just one of countless voices in media and policy circles predicting Iraq would be a repeat of Lebanon on steroids. “The idea of a quick and easy democratic transformation is a fantasy,” the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace warned. But for the Bush administration—like the Reagan White House in Lebanon—it was all cut and dried.

“Major combat operations in Iraq have ended,” Bush proudly proclaimed six weeks after the invasion began, standing beneath the now-infamous “Mission Accomplished” banner on the deck of the USS Abraham. “We have fought for the cause of liberty and for the peace of the world.”

If that display of American exceptionalism was not enough, the newly appointed U.S. administrator in Baghdad, Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, exulted to reporters: “We ought to be beating our chests every day. We ought to look in a mirror and get proud and stick out our chests and suck in our bellies and say, ‘Damn, we’re Americans.’”

The overt goal of the invasion was the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and neutralization of his supposed “weapons of mass destruction,” but the broader agenda was to rewrite the political map of the Middle East.

“Iraqi democracy will succeed—and that success will send forth the news, from Damascus to Tehran—that freedom can be the future of every nation,” Bush confidently declared. “The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution.”

Instead, as Algerian researcher Abdelkrim Dekhakhena put it in a study for the Social Science Research Council, “Chaos and destruction became the ‘manifest destiny’ of these peoples and democracy became a dangerous fantasy”.

The overthrow of Saddam Hussein resulted in a bloody scramble for power among manifold ethnic groups, a dramatic increase in Iranian influence in Baghdad, and a brutal insurgency that claimed the lives of thousands of U.S. soldiers. And the 2011 withdrawal of most of the 170,000 U.S. forces opened the way for the rise of the Islamic State, which seized one-third of Iraq and Syria and forced the Obama administration to send troops back not only to Iraq but Syria as well, where they remain to this day. Cost in human lives: about 300,000 dead in Iraq alone, with more than one million internally displaced, 4.1 million in need of humanitarian assistance, and a reconstruction bill estimated at more than 88 billion dollars.

Rather than a stable democracy that is an inspiration for the region, Iraq today is an unstable and violent morass of ethnic and religious groups where American troops continue to be targets. As the Council on Foreign Relations warned in October: “There remains a larger concern that the aftermath of the conflict and challenges of reconstruction and reintegration will lead to the breakup of Iraq and that sectarian tension will plague the region for years to come.”

Gaza

So when Israeli government spokesman Eylon Levy confidently tells reporters that as the government discusses “day after” contingencies for Gaza, the “common denominator” is that the Strip will be “demilitarized” and will “never again” become a “terror nest,” students of modern Middle East history—and those of us who have covered it—take that with a very large heaping of Dead Sea salt.

Death and Destruction Through the Lens
The quantum difference between Gaza and the post 9/11 wars is in the coverage. The American and Arab media provided their audiences with two completely different views of the Iraq and Afghan wars. The epitome of the disconnect was the U.S. siege of Fallujah, where American networks were embedded with the Marines and Arab cameras were at the receiving end of the U.S. assault. Americans saw stalwart troops defending freedom; Arabs saw dead babies.

Now, while the narrative may be different, the whole world is seeing the death and destruction in Gaza through the lens of the same cameras, wielded by Palestinian journalists, more than seventy-five of whom have been killed reporting on the conflict. Even U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III has warned that although Israel may prevail on the Gaza battlefield, it faces “strategic defeat” in the court of global public opinion, with huge implications for the future, even as America’s own standing among its allies erodes.

Emblematic of the shifting narrative: Social media lit up when CNN anchor and former Israel lobbyist Wolf Blitzer confronted an IDF spokesman over an Israeli airstrike in early November that killed fifty civilians and injured 150 others.

“You knew there were civilians there. You knew there were refugees. But you decided to still drop a bomb on that refugee camp attempting to kill that Hamas commander?” Blitzer pressed, his voice incredulous.

To some, it carried a hint of Walter Cronkite’s famous broadcast declaring America’s war in Vietnam was doomed. President Lyndon Johnson is said to have declared, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America”.

“You know Israel has lost the public relations front when Wolf Blitzer, former AIPAC spokesperson, is questioning the IDF on its cruel and unusual collective punishment of the Palestinian people,” said one in a long string of such comments on X, formerly Twitter.

In this age of fragmented media, Blitzer’s influence is nothing like that of Cronkite, but his—at least momentary—transition from flag-waving supporter of all things Israel to critic of its tactics in the face of the carnage unfolding on the world’s television screens is emblematic of the degree to which, as a result of this conflict, the American media has—for the moment—shifted from largely ignoring the Palestinians to focusing on the same carnage the rest of the world is witnessing, hour after hour, day after day, week after week, even as the Biden administration ramps up billions of dollars in more military aid to Israel.

So perhaps, when the inevitable terrorist retribution comes in the years ahead, Americans will know why “they” hate “us.”

Horror has been unleashed on Gaza and its people for over four months now. The imprisoned inhabitants of the narrow strip are cruelly the targets of the heaviest and most lethal bombs and missiles from land, air, and sea. By the end of January 2024, some 26,000 Palestinians had been killed and close to 60,000 maimed and wounded, the vast majority children, women, and non-combatant men. The International Court of Justice has issued multiple provisional measures against Israel regarding the prevention of genocidal activities in response to accusations by South Africa. Israeli strategy is based on an impossible premise: ensure peace through obtaining absolute security. In reality, peace is unattainable when Israeli security is being pursued through the brutal destruction of civilian lives and infrastructure.

The Palestinians have clamored for an immediate ceasefire. Their pleas are echoed by protesters demonstrating in support of the embattled Palestinians all over the globe. The vast majority of the United Nations member states have also called for immediate ceasefire, be it only for humanitarian purposes, as evidenced by the vote on the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) Resolution adopted on December 12, 2023. The UNGA resolutions, being mere recommendations, were ignored by Israel. The United Nations Security Council (UNSC), the only organ with the authority to order and enforce its resolutions, could not adopt a ceasefire resolution. The United States vetoed several draft resolutions submitted to the UNSC calling for the ceasefire.

An immediate ceasefire was the prominent bone of contention, but it did not keep both its proponents and opponents from thinking in the longer term. Whether in relation to the ceasefire or not, two competing concepts for long-term prospects for security and peace in the Middle East have emerged. The first concept was proposed by Israel. The second, with considerable variations, was espoused by the other parties directly or indirectly concerned with the Palestinian–Israeli conflict, and therefore can be considered an international concept.

Israel’s Concept for Realizing Security and Peace in the Middle East
Israel’s concept, as articulated by Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu and far right members of his government, identifies security as their utmost, if not exclusive, concern. Two parts constitute this concept: First, Israel alone will guarantee Gaza’s security; it cannot trust any other organization with it. Israel will take control of security in Gaza and its forces will enter the Strip any time it wishes in the future. Hamas’ leaders will be killed and the movement will be completely destroyed. The Palestinian Authority, headquartered in Ramallah, will not return to Gaza or participate in running it.

This first part of Israel’s concept of security is not surprising. Israel has put it into practice during its five wars in Gaza (2006, 2008, 2012, 2014, 2023-24) since it withdrew forces from the Strip in 2005. The only difference lies in the exceptional violence used to enforce security and the huge number of victims it produced in the current war. The violence deployed in the war in Gaza and the disdain of international humanitarian law reveal that Israel is not only after Hamas’ leaders or the movement as an organization, but is intent on systematically stifling any Palestinian drive to resist or to even question its actions.

It is the second part of Israel’s concept that is novel, or rather, revitalized, after several decades of relative inaction. Shifting its bombardments between different regions of Gaza, the pursued result was to push the inhabitants toward Gaza’s borders with Egypt. The Israeli prime minister declared that he wanted Israel to be in full control of the two sides, Palestinian and Egyptian, of the Philadelphia corridor running along the border between Gaza and Egypt.

At the same time, statements from former Israeli officials were made that Egypt should receive the Palestinian inhabitants of Gaza in the Sinai Peninsula. A concept paper with this plan, produced by the Israeli Intelligence Ministry, was revealed at the end of October. Another concept document went to the extent of identifying uninhabited housing projects in Egypt where the Palestinians could be relocated. A major Israeli politician boldly considered that crossing the border to Egypt would be an act of voluntary migration by the Palestinians that his country should facilitate, rather than a migration forced by the 65,000 tons of explosives dropped on Gaza by Israel.

The plan to forcibly transfer Palestinians out of what remains of Historic Palestine is now underway. The plan does not stop at pushing the Palestinians toward Egypt, however; Israeli voices have called on European countries to accept the resettlement of Gaza Palestinians in their territories.

In the first days of 2024, the Israeli press announced that the Israeli government had held talks with a number of countries and that specifically the Republic of the Congo had agreed to take in thousands of Palestinian migrants from Gaza. In the same week, Netanyahu told a faction of his Likud party that he was working on facilitating the voluntary migration of Gazans to other countries. Other voices, such as those of the National Security Minister and the Finance Minister, have called for the return of Israeli settlers who had evacuated Gaza in 2005. These comments, while condemned by the U.S. government, have gone without reprimand from the prime minister. Israel’s first concept, the pursuit of security, was thus an opportunity to resuscitate the old Zionist ambition of colonizing the entirety of Palestine. In case the incessant bombing failed to quell their determination, Gaza would be emptied of its Palestinian inhabitants. This would ensure Israel’s security and further the realization of Zionism’s designs.

The most recent Israeli plan for the governance of Gaza after the war, outlined by the Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant, corroborates Israel’s concept of security and peace in the region. It slightly differs with the second part of the concept, as it discards any idea of Jewish resettlement in Gaza. However, while it stops short of referring to the forced displacement of the Gazan people, the plan does not deny the possibility of this option. The plan confirms that the Palestinian Authority will not return to Gaza, and that the governance of Gaza will rather be entrusted to Palestinian committees, the members of which must be approved by Israel. An international force composed of moderate Arab countries, the United States, and Europe will assume responsibility for the reconstruction and economic rehabilitation of the territory. However, Israel will be free to operate militarily in the Gaza strip.

In Israel’s concept, peace is absent. The word was not uttered by any of its leaders since the Gaza war erupted. However, its security, as it defines and ensures it, is the peace that Israel pursues. In this peace, there is no place for a Palestinian state.

The International Concept for Security and Peace in the Middle East
The many variants of the international concept for security and peace are united by the prospect of the so-called two-state solution. According to this concept, an internationally recognized Palestinian state should be established. It would recognize Israel’s right to exist and live in peace alongside it.

In one variant, chiefly expressed by the United States and supported by the United Kingdom and a small number of European states, this prospect can only be realized after Hamas has been wiped out. By exercising its veto right in the UNSC, the United States allows Israel the time it needs to eradicate Hamas and to impose its vision of security on the Palestinian people and the entire region. But, as President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken articulated, this variant also critically departs from Israel’s vision for Gaza.

In an op-ed in the Washington Post on November 18, Biden outlined that Israel should not occupy Gaza again; the inhabitants of Gaza will not be forcibly displaced; Gaza’s surface area will not be diminished; there will be no delinking between the West Bank and Gaza; the responsibility for Gaza would be taken up by a reinvigorated Palestinian Authority; and, finally, a Palestinian state would be established. Biden had already expressed “our view” of “a two-state solution” in a joint press conference with Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in the White House on October 25. Commenting on the situation in Gaza, he stressed that “there’s no going back to the status quo as it stood on October 6”. This is a stark, if unadmitted, recognition that the aim of Israel’s post-October 7 mission is rooted in occupation and in the denial of the right of the Palestinian people to govern themselves in an independent state of their own. It is a clear departure from Israel’s perspective.

A European variant of the concept, slightly different from the American approach, does not accept the unbounded violence Israel metes out to Gaza, even if it still wants Hamas eradicated. In a statement issued after their meeting in Brussels on October 27, European Union leaders said that they were “ready to contribute to reviving a political process on the basis of the two-state solution”. They added that the EU “welcomes diplomatic peace and security initiatives and supports the holding of an international peace conference soon”.

The third variant is that of the vast majority of the United Nations member states. By 153 votes in favor, 10 against, and 23 abstentions, the 10th emergency special session of the UN General Assembly adopted the December 12 resolution calling for a humanitarian ceasefire without condemning Hamas or making any specific reference to it. This was an overwhelmingly Global South vote. Interestingly, except for seven, all the EU member states voted for the resolution. The UNGA resolution did not include any reference to a two-state or any other long-term solution.      However, this resolution has to be read in conjunction with the one previously adopted by the emergency special session on October 27. That resolution, adopted by fewer but still overwhelmingly with 121 votes for, 14 against, and 44 abstentions, reaffirmed in its paragraph 13 that “a just and lasting solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict can only be achieved by peaceful means, based on the relevant United Nations resolutions and in accordance with international law, and on the basis of the two-state solution”. This resolution did not make any mention of Hamas either.

The fourth variant, expectedly the most aligned in letter with Palestinian interests, was expressed by the joint summit of the League of Arab States (LAS) and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) held on November 11. The summit’s resolution, recalling the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative (API), reiterated that the conditions for peace and establishing normal relations with Israel are predicated on the end of its occupation of all Palestinian and Arab territories, the independence of a fully sovereign Palestinian state within the demarcation lines of June 4, 1967—with its capital in East Jerusalem—and the recognition of the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people. It also included at its core the right of Palestinian self-determination, and the right of return (or to reparations) for the Palestinian refugees in accordance with UNGA resolution no. 194 of 1948.

The joint summit resolution called on the international community to immediately launch a serious peace process meant to enable the two-state solution that would result in the establishment of the above Palestinian state that would exist in security and peace alongside Israel. The resolution also stressed that the absence of a solution to the Palestinian question was the root cause for the deterioration of security and stability in the region. Significantly, the resolution stressed that the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. It did not mention Hamas. This may be considered a reflection of the mutual hostility between some Arab states and the Islamist movement.

The Palestinian Authority espouses the variant adopted by the Arab-Islamic summit, the essence of which is the two-state solution. This is the variant consistent with and derived from the Oslo Accords, signed in Washington D.C. in 1993 by the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, chairman of the PLO and first president of the Palestinian Authority. It also stems from a November 1988 proclamation made by the Palestinian National Council—then based in Algiers— of an independent Palestinian state. Arafat reiterated this proclamation at a UNGA meeting in Geneva in December 1988, coupling it with the acceptance by the PLO of all relevant UN resolutions, explicitly mentioning UNSC Resolution 242. This later resolution recognized the rights of all states of the region, including Israel, to sovereignty. Moreover, the Arab-Islamic variant is based on the 2002 API in whose adoption the PLO was a party.

The real fifth variant is that of Hamas. The main way it differs from the Arab-Islamic variant, shared by the Palestinian Authority, is that it does not explicitly recognize Israel’s right to exist. However, Hamas’ 2017 charter accepts the establishment of an independent Palestinian state on the territories behind the demarcation lines of June 4, 1967, with East Jerusalem as its capital. This acceptance is an implicit recognition of the Israeli state on the territories on the other side of these lines, which is one-half of the prerequisite for a two-state solution

The (Im)possible Realization of the Two-State Solution `
The above analysis shows that Israel is alone in not recognizing its occupation of the Palestinian territories as the cause of the October 7 operation that breached its security and resulted in the death of its people. The continued expansion of the settlements in the West Bank and the settlers’ and Israeli army’s lethal aggressiveness toward the Palestinians are condemned by the international community, but Israel does not see these violations of international law as the reasons for the Palestinian anger that finally resulted in the October 7 Hamas attack. In the meantime, Israel continues to promote the forced migration of Palestinians from Gaza—a policy denounced by all parties, including its protector, the United States.

The Israeli approach to these three issues will be discussed before turning to the two-state solution—considered by all concerned parties the appropriate avenue to ensure security for all peoples and states in the Middle East, realize peace, and ensure stability in the region—which Israel rejects.

Israel’s refusal to recognize that the breach of its security emanated from its effective occupation of Gaza can only mean that it does not want to put an end to this occupation. For Israel, occupation and security are not mutually exclusive. Israel has used extreme violence to prove the continued validity of this proposition. The collapse of this proposition is tantamount to changing the entire mindset on which it was built.

Israel wants to ensure its security on its own terms. Without saying it outright, for Israel, the condition for peace in the Middle East is its own absolute security, immune from any possible threat. Apart from the fact that nothing is absolute in human endeavors, the ironic result is that, for Israel, occupation and peace, like occupation and security, are also not mutually exclusive. The desire for absolute security is at the center of this fallacious reasoning. One party ensuring its absolute security alone will necessarily encroach on the security of others, without ever truly guaranteeing its own. Thus, Israel’s concept is fundamentally a denial of any foundation for a possible peace.

The international community has condemned the colonization and the aggression of settlers against the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. Yet, Israel continues expanding the settlements and does not restrain the settlers, but rather abets their violence with its army’s support. This is another indication of Israel’s pursuit of security while maintaining and deepening occupation.       

The proposition of settling Israelis in Gaza and the forced displacement of the Palestinians from the Strip, which Israel calls “voluntary migration”, are denounced by the international community. These ideas are a flagrant violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the protection of civilians in times of war. Article 49 of the convention unequivocally states that “the Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies”. It also prohibits the “individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory”. Since the 1950s, the Palestinians have refused to leave their land.

Now, assuming that the devastating Israeli destruction since October 2023 has changed their minds, the Palestinians would not qualify for refugee status. The 1951 convention on the Status of Refugees excludes the Palestinian refugees from its scope. Article 1D of the convention says that it does not apply to persons receiving protection or assistance from a UN organ other than the United Nations Commission for Refugees (UNHCR). In 1951, UNRWA provided assistance and the now-disappeared United Nations Conciliation Commission furnished protection to the Palestinian refugees.

It is inconceivable that Israel would now accede to encompassing the Palestinian refugees by the 1951 convention so as to facilitate their resettlement. Along with resettlement, the 1951 convention envisages two other durable solutions for refugees: voluntary repatriation and local integration. The Gaza Palestinians would not ask for better than that, since 80 percent of them are refugees who were displaced in 1948. Israel would not voluntarily take this initiative, which is possibly the reason for the use of the concept of “voluntary migration”. Current times are marked by restricted voluntary migration and of hostility toward migrant flows. The migration of millions of Palestinians is just unimaginable. The idea of “voluntary migration” out of Gaza is disingenuous, outrageous, and illegal.

The plan outlined by Gallant, to establish an Israeli-controlled committee of Palestinians to govern Gaza, is far-fetched, to say the least. After the brutality it inflicted on the people of Gaza, Israeli approval of the committee’s membership will hinder its ability to run Gaza with any sense of legitimacy and therefore deprive it from effective functioning.

The idea of establishing such committees also runs counter to the U.S. proposal to return the reinvigorated Palestinian Authority to Gaza to administer its affairs. Additionally, Gallant’s plan to have international forces assume responsibility for the reconstruction and economic rehabilitation of Gaza is a strange proposition. Reconstruction and rehabilitation do not need forces. Armed forces have external security and, exceptionally, internal security functions. In fact, in this plan, Israel wishes to attract the United States and Arab and European countries to take up internal security responsibilities in Gaza at a time when the Israeli military may enter the Strip when it wishes. The United States and the Arab and European countries cannot agree to be Israel’s accomplices.

In the face of Israeli attempts to outmaneuver global consensus, the international community, except Israel, calls for the two-state solution. It may be recalled that one element of the rationale for this solution was to preserve Israel from the prospect of one state where the majority of the population would be Arab. The Arab and Islamic countries and the EU have called for an international conference to settle the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and to give effect to the two-state solution. A protracted approach, such as the failed peace processes of the last three decades, is obviously not an option. Thus, a draft resolution should be tabled at the UNSC to convene the conference.

The differences in the variants of the international concept of the two-state solution can be addressed at that point. The outcome of the conference should not be prejudged. However, some basic parameters should be written into the resolution, such as the indivisibility of the occupied Palestinian territories, the right to self-determination of the Palestinian people, and the guaranteed security of all states in the region.

The main problem would obviously be the question of Palestinian representation at the conference. The Israeli rejection of the Palestinian Authority’s participation cannot be sustained. While the need for the Palestinian Authority is advocated by the United States, the proponents of the two-state solution may find themselves divided over the participation of Hamas— whether within a delegation of a revitalized Palestinian Authority or separately. The outcome of the current war should condition Hamas’ participation. But clearly the effectiveness of any negotiated agreements depend on the participation of the significant parties to the conflict in their negotiations. Britain, it may be recalled, ended up negotiating with its bitter enemy, the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Distinguishing between the military and political wings of the IRA may be a useful lesson to keep in mind.

The United States cannot be in a position to veto a draft UNSC resolution calling for an international conference that is supported by the majority of the UN membership and which could result in operationalizing the two-state solution it calls for. The United States should only weigh on Israel to accept it. Rejecting the conference would put the United States and Israel at odds with the entire world. It would also leave Gaza, the Palestinian people, Israel, and the region in the same situation they were in on October 6 and before.

The failure of seeking to realize the two-state solution would give credit to the argument, held by a considerable number of observers, that the solution has long been dead.

“It would be good if Gaza would be swallowed up by the sea, but that’s impossible,” said the then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1992. In the fever of ongoing conflict, this quote is a reminder of the particular contempt that Israel’s political-military elite have long retained for the Gaza Strip and its people, a sentiment which has escaped closer scrutiny.

Many outside observers appear to have forgotten the political and social consequences of five successive wars on the Strip (in 2009, 2012, 2014, 2021, and 2022) that wiped out hundreds of families and, before those, a longstanding colonial tradition that fractured Palestinian society. The unfortunate consequence is that Gaza’s current ongoing tragedy is being portrayed in a historical vacuum.

Israel’s war on Gaza in the past two decades has been part of a wider political project—ongoing since the 1948 Nakba and before—that seeks to remove the Palestinian presence from Historical Palestine. It is essential to remember this project as Israel bombards defenceless civilians, religious sites, and healthcare and educational facilities, while creating the conditions for mass starvation and disease.

Ghassan Abu Sitta, a Palestinian surgeon who has been treating victims of the Israeli siege and bombing at the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in the Strip and who gave his testimony at the South Africa International Court of Justice hearing, did not stop at the observation that “[t]his is a war unlike any and its aim is to make Gaza uninhabitable”. Instead, he proceeded to state that what is happening now is a continuation of the Nakba.

The implications of this continued Nakba do not only apply to Gazans but also extend to West Bank Palestinians, including Jerusalemites, and even Palestinian citizens of Israel. One must not consider Israel’s current actions as a particularly egregious “excess” or an abrupt departure from established Zionist practice. Rather, it is essential to place these actions in the wider historical context and to see the current practices of population “transfer” and depopulation as being synonymous with pre-existing Zionist theory and state practice.

Gaza’s Depopulation: The Colonial Context
Fighting Hamas is only a pretext for Israel to destroy Gaza and displace its people. It is guided by Zionist policy that aims to eliminate Palestinians and replace them with settlers, and has been in the works for years, if not decades.

In providing immediate historical context, it is essential to remember that after Hamas seized control of the Strip in 2007, Israel informed U.S. officials that it sought to bring the Gazan economy to the “brink of collapse” by causing it to “function at the lowest level possible”. Buffer zones were constructed on agricultural land and the Strip’s access to the sea was limited. These and other challenges to basic human survival led the United Nations to predict that the Strip would soon be “unliveable”. During the ongoing war on Gaza, Israel continued this project by destroying nearly 70 percent of the Strip’s civilian facilities and infrastructure.

A leaked “concept paper” from the Israeli Intelligence Ministry on October 13 proposed that the 2.3 million Gazans should be transferred into Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula as a way of addressing humanitarian needs. The document suggested residents should live in tents before being permanently settled and prevented from returning to the Strip.

In an Al-Jazeera interview on October 13, Danny Ayalon, Israel’s former deputy foreign minister, responded to the collective punishment and indiscriminate bombardment of civilians in Gaza by observing:

We told the Gazan people to clear the area temporarily, so we can go and take Hamas out, and then, of course, they can come back… We don’t tell Gazans to go to the beaches or drown themselves … No, God forbid … Go to the Sinai Desert. There is a huge expanse, almost endless space in the Sinai Desert just on the other side of Gaza.

Israeli officials are no longer trying to conceal their intentions to remove the Palestinians. In 2021, the Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, responsible for administering the West Bank, said that the first prime minister of Israel, who instigated the 1948 Nakba, should have “finished the job” by removing all Israeli Arabs when the country was formed. In addition to expressing support for a shoot-to-kill policy, Smotrich has also denied the existence of a Palestinian culture, history, and even people. In speaking at a Paris conference, he stood behind a podium covered with a banner of the Israeli flag and a map of “Greater Israel” that included Jordan.

Similar statements have been made with regard to the West Bank. For example, on October 27, settlers in the West Bank distributed leaflets in Salfit City about a “major Nakba” that warned Palestinians: “By God, we will descend upon your heads with a great catastrophe soon. You have the last chance to escape to Jordan in an organized manner.”

Meanwhile, Ben Gvir, the Israeli National Security Minister, has called on Palestinians in the West Bank to emigrate, and his party “Jewish Power” continues to call for the “transfer of the enemy, an exchange of populations, and any other way that will help the enemy leave our country”.

The 2020 U.S–Israeli “Peace to Prosperity Plan”, which the Trump administration established and publicly announced without consulting Palestinians, shows how determined Israel is to complete its settler colonial project and to force the agreement on Palestinians, on the model of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ‘[w]hether [Palestinians] accept it or not, it’s going to happen’.

Under this plan, Israel was permitted to disregard all relevant UN resolutions, annex Area C (including settlements and the Jordan Valley), establish Jerusalem as its united capital, and make “peace” synonymous with its own security needs. However, it is insufficient on a number of key aspects: in fact, the plan is very much in the lineage of the “colonial” Oslo Accords, which enshrined Israeli security concerns as the basis of peace.

The Oslo Accords fragmented the land and led to political division, weakening Palestinian unity and encouraging Palestinians to leave their homes. The unilateral Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2007 perpetuated the division between Palestinians by isolating them into either Gaza or the West Bank, thus pushing them into different categories with different concerns and needs.

This is similar to the case of Jerusalem, which Israel isolated from other Palestinians. Jeruselamites, since 1967, are alien residents struggling to keep their homes in the face of discriminatory laws that aim to revoke their residency and expel them from the city and, in some cases, from the country, as in the case of Salah Hamouri.

The securitized, neo-liberal “peace” suggested in the “Peace to Prosperity” plan substantially predates the Trump administration and includes the 2007 donor reform agenda, under which the United States allocated more than 392 million dollars to the Palestinian Authority (almost one-third of whose entire budget is committed to the security forces) with the aim of enhancing its counter-terrorism capabilities. Focusing on security coordination deepened Palestinian division. The PA, reliant on international funding and functioning in this neoliberal context, was prevented from challenging the ongoing colonization project and from taking any action to hold Israel accountable.

Before this, members of Israel’s ultra-Orthodox and far right had openly stated their intention to construct further settlements to build “Greater Israel”. During former U.S. President Barack Obama’s visit to Israel in March 2013, municipal representatives within the occupied territories prepared a nine-step plan that laid out their vision for the colonization of the West Bank. Step five of the plan clearly states an intention to create a situation in which it “becomes clear to the international community that another state west of the Jordan River is not viable”.

Naftali Bennett, the then-Israeli education minister, tweeted that there is “no need for a third Palestinian state beyond Jordan and Gaza”. The colonial “divide-and-rule” tactic is an Israeli policy that is publicly admitted by officials. Smotrich stated in an interview in 2015 that the PA is “a burden” and Hamas is “an asset”.

As part of this divide-and-rule strategy, Israeli policy actors have come to realize the potential of Hamas as a means through which to divide the Palestinian national movement. In 2014, Netanyahu warned Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas that he must choose between peace with Israel or peace with Hamas; five years later, Netanyahu changed tracks and permitted Qatar to transfer money to Hamas with the deliberate aim of impeding the establishment of a Palestinian state.

The Historical Context
In a November 18 press conference, Netanyahu spelled out his intellectual and political debt to his late father, a distinguished historian, and to Ze’ev Jabotinsky, one of the most influential Zionist ideologues. Netanyahu explained: “From both of them I learned a fundamental principle of leading a military-diplomatic campaign. It is impossible to establish military victory without diplomatic backing, and it is impossible to establish diplomatic backing without turning both to leaders and to public opinion in their countries.”

This is ironic, given that Netanyahu rejects all diplomatic efforts and insists on total security control over the Occupied Territory while the war on Gaza and settler attacks on the West Bank Palestinians continue.

Jabotinsky, Netanyahu’s inspiration, became the leader of the right-wing part of the Zionist movement in 1904. Just over two decades later he established a new revisionist party and an associated youth movement (Betar), which sought to establish a Jewish state on both banks of the Jordan River. In 1937, Irgun, a Jewish underground organization founded in 1931, became Betar’s military wing and carried out terrorist attacks against British and Palestinian targets in the Mandate’s “late” period, including the bombing of Jerusalem’s King David Hotel on July 22, 1946 and the notorious Deir Yassin massacre on April 9, 1948.

These were not egregious excesses, but were very much consistent with Jabotinsky’s article “The Iron Wall”. In 1923, he wrote,

Every indigenous people will resist alien settlers as long as they see any hope of ridding themselves of the danger of foreign settlement…All this does not mean that any kind of agreement is impossible, only a voluntary agreement is impossible. As long as there is a spark of hope that they can get rid of us, they will not sell these hopes…Only when not a single breach is visible in the iron wall, only then do extreme groups lose their sway, and influence transfers to moderate groups. Only then would these moderate groups come to us with proposals for mutual concessions. And only then will moderates offer suggestions for compromise on practical questions like a guarantee against expulsion, or equality and national autonomy.

Other than his disregard for their advice on diplomacy, Netanyhu’s thinking is very much aligned with the founders of the Israeli state and the long-established Zionist project to empty the Palestinian territory of its population.

Perhaps the clearest and most far-reaching Palestinian account of transfer in Zionist thought was provided by Professor Nur Masalha’s seminal 1992 book, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948. Examining Israeli state archives, Masalha reveals how Zionists have been proposing the transfer and expulsion of Palestinians since the 1880s.

This project of depopulation continued beyond 1948. After the 1967 War, Israeli ministers discussed different potential locations for transfer, including the Sinai Desert and neighbouring Arab countries. General (and later, Prime Minister) Ariel Sharon, head of the IDF Southern Command after the 1967 War, sought to resolve the Strip’s refugee problem by reducing or removing the refugee camps.

Home demolitions were justified to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) under the pretexts of widening roads to enable better patrolling and improving water and electricity. Around 2,000 homes were demolished and 16,000 people displaced, including some to the Sinai Desert, in 1971. In the period from 2000-2004, the Israeli army demolished more than 2,500 homes in the south of the Strip (mostly in Rafah) to build a wall along the Egyptian border.

Recent declassified documents indicate that this goal of expulsion has remained present in Israeli policy and place Reuven Aloni, the deputy director-general of the Israel Lands Administration, on record as saying, in reference to Palestinian citizens in Israel: “A day will come, in another ten, fifteen, or twenty years…when the basic solution will be a matter of transferring the Arabs. I think that we should think about this as a final goal.”

Israel has cited different pretexts for this ongoing transfer and depopulation. For example, security and military pretences were used to justify Hebron’s Kiryat Arab settlement. In a July 1973 interview with Time, Moshe Dayan, the-then Defence Minister, remarked that this settlement meant “[t]here is no more Palestine. [It is] Finished”. Measures introduced after the Baruch Goldstein massacre in February 1994, including the division of the city into H1 and H2 areas, and the imposition of checkpoints, barriers, and closed military zones, have functioned as an outgrowth of Israel’s depopulation policies.

The Israeli army has also used temporary evacuation as a depopulation tactic, most notably in the West Bank and the Jordan Valley. The ultimate aim, which can be traced back to the 1967 Allon Plan, is to annex this part of the West Bank. A declassified document from Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon shows how the Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and U.S. president Ronald Reagan discussed the future status of Palestinian refugees. While Begin favoured transfer to Libya, Iraq, or Syria, Reagan preferred granting them Lebanese citizenship. The goal, always, was to expel.

Building an Alternative Future
Palestinians, in responding to Israel’s colonization activities and ongoing attacks, have not only led protests, but have also insisted on placing the events in the Gaza Strip within the wider historical context.

Palestinians have always sought to align with international anti-colonial movements and to work with solidarity groups across the world to assert Palestinian demands for freedom and justice. In doing so, Palestinians have taken a leadership role in networking, advocacy, and lobbying activities.

The B.D.S. (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement has emerged as an important part of this transnational struggle. The internet and social media have enabled Palestinians and solidarity groups to reach audiences across the world and undertake political advocacy while explaining the Palestinian narrative. Social media has also made it possible to provide “hands-on” guidelines for practical support and actions.

Israeli-Palestinian solidarity groups, however, have shrunk as Israeli public opinion has shifted farther right and non-recognition, including transfer, has become a standard part of Israel’s political discourse.

The few Israelis still involved in Palestinian solidarity activities are harassed and in some cases jailed, such as the history teacher Meir Baruchin, who was accused of treason, jailed for four days, and held in solitary confinement after criticizing the killing of Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip. Dissent, including calling for a ceasefire, is becoming increasingly criminalized.

As the notion of a two-state solution fades into the political background, Palestinians and some Israelis have begun to search for alternatives. The One Democratic State Campaign, which is a Palestinian-led initiative established in 2018 by Palestinian and Israeli-Jewish activists, intellectuals, and academics, envisions a single democratic state in Historical Palestine, the dismantling of the colonial Zionist apparatus, and the establishment of a political arrangement in which Palestinians and Israeli Jews are equal and enjoy an equal entitlement to cultural, economic, and social justice.

The campaign seeks to position itself within a wider global human liberation movement, including progressive forces in the Arab World. Ultimately, they and other activists have come to realize that the essential choice is between an apartheid state or a democratic alternative based on equal rights for all.

On October 14, 2023, in the early days of the War on Gaza, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof posed a question he had raised more than a dozen years earlier: why have the Palestinians not produced a Mahatma Gandhi? The same question was shortly later directed to Egyptian comedian Bassem Yousef by British TV presenter Piers Morgan on his program “Uncensored”.

This is a question that has been raised in different ways, even by those sympathetic with the Palestinian cause, and it is one that I myself have been asked on numerous occasions, with Nelson Mandela sometimes invoked instead of Gandhi. The Israelis, in contrast, are seldom queried about producing a leader—such as Charles de Gaulle, who was elected president of France during Algeria’s war of independence—who can recognize the futility of Israel’s settler-colonial mindset and sue for peace with the Palestinians.

Those who are pro-Palestine may believe that a leader on par with Gandhi or Mandela could force Israel to change its ways. For others, like Kristof and Morgan, the question means to blame Palestinians for their violent resistance—and what they see as Israel’s legitimate response to it—and, by implication, hold the Palestinians responsible for their state of perpetual colonization. The inquirers’ intentions aside, the question of why Palestinians have not yet produced a Palestinian Gandhi/Mandela is a pivotal one and should be unpacked because of what it obscures about Israeli violence: its forms, the context in which it is committed, and therefore who bears the responsibility for perpetrating it, and ultimately bring it to an end.

Three Nations Under the Same Colonial Power
Posed without referencing the historical context, the Gandhi/Mandela question does not consider when the violence started and who started it. The two Asian/African leaders, Gandhi and Mandela, appeared on the political stage because Britain had colonized India and European colonial settlers instituted South African apartheid, or color-based segregation. Both imposed their rule and farcical racial hierarchies through violence. Globally, colonialism in its various forms plagued four continents and was perpetrated by less than a dozen countries from Europe. Let’s not even mention the European genocides of the natives in the Americas and Australia, and the enslavement of black Africans in the United States and elsewhere. All subsequent violence and the historical and moral responsibility for it stems from that fateful moment of colonization.

The Indian struggle had commenced long before Gandhi, and it was not all nonviolent. Even during Gandhi’s time, violence was practiced by other factions. For instance, historian Peter Heehs writes that violent resistance was “preached and practiced throughout the independence movement and had a significant role on its course and outcome”. In South Africa, the African National Congress (ANC) engaged for many years in armed resistance against apartheid. Mandela himself had military training in Algeria during its war of independence from France, and he said bluntly to the judges during the 1964 Rivonia Trial that he engaged in planning “sabotage”, and was one of the founders of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the paramilitary wing of the ANC. He explained that they did it out of pragmatic considerations, for they “felt that without violence there would be no way open to the African people to succeed in their struggle against the principle of white supremacy.” Many other colonized countries, like Algeria, Kenya, Vietnam (twice), and Ireland, violently resisted imperialist powers. The intermittent resort to violence by Palestinians in their struggle for national self-determination, while largely peaceful, is thus of a piece with the practice of other colonized peoples.

The Palestinian experience with colonization has similarities with those of India and South Africa, although it does differ in other ways. In Palestine, as in India, the colonizing power was Britain; but, unlike in India, colonization was of the settler type. Great Britain was the sole colonial power in Palestine from 1917 to1947, with a mandate from the League of Nations, which was controlled by European states, to bear its “White Man’s Burden” and prepare the Palestinian population for self-rule. At the same time, it acted as the chief sponsor of the Zionist project of creating a Jewish state in the country, the idea of which was a response to the European disease of antisemitism, which had spread long before the Holocaust, and which the Palestinians had nothing to do with; to the contrary, they, too, were the object of European self-serving stereotyping.

The realization of the Zionist project was detrimental to the Palestinians, who suffered what has come to be known as the Nakba, or “the catastrophe” in which more than 700,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes in 1948. The long shadow of the Nakba makes Palestinians keenly apprehensive about a mass exodus today in Gaza. The country that used to be Palestine was overnight struck out from the map in 1948, as most of it was transformed into Israel. The new state demolished villages and blocked Palestinian refugees from returning. Thus, instead of gaining self-government per the British Mandate, the Palestinians became threatened with extinction as a nation.

At the same time, Israel defined itself as a Jewish state, an ethnocracy, which it codified seventy years later in 2018 in the Jewish Nation-State Basic Law, despite the fact that about 20 percent of its citizens are descendants of Palestinians who remained after 1948, mostly Muslims and Christians. One of the principal manifestations of Jewish supremacy is that the state grants any Jewish person anywhere in the world the right to make Aliyah (“ascend”) by becoming a citizen of Israel; meanwhile, refugees like myself, and their offspring, continue to be denied the universal human right to return to their homeland. Israel completed its control over the entire territory of Palestine when it seized the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the June 1967 war, once more causing the dispossession of about half a million people. From the outset, the Palestinians resisted British colonialism and Zionist settlers, and subsequently Israel, in myriad forms, as I had written in an earlier article,

…peacefully (overwhelmingly so), and violently; publicly and in disguise; spectacularly (like plane hijacking) and subtly; individually and collectively…. [in] courts, and prisons, and school and college campuses…at checkpoints and international ports….against land seizure and house demolition; against uprooting their orchards and trees; in funerals, memorials, and celebrations; in short and long mobilizations; discursively in books, newspapers, films, poetry, and fiction; in posters hung on the walls of their public buildings and in murals on the Segregation Wall; by participation and boycotts, especially the international Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (B.D.S.); in material space and cyberspace. They have learned from others and others were inspired by them; they won and lost; they have multiplied and survived as a people.

Having lived through and led the fight against colonialism, it should not be surprising that both Gandhi and Mandela strongly backed the Palestinians. Gandhi opposed the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine because, he said, the country belonged to the Arabs. And firm Indian support for Palestinian rights lasted until the election of Hindu nationalist, Narendra Modi, as prime minister.

Likewise, Mandela made many unequivocal statements in support of Palestinian rights and struggle, including, “[Yasser] Arafat is our brother in arms”, and he described Israel as a terrorist state. Perhaps because of this legacy, South Africa has stayed the course as a staunch supporter of Palestine and an outspoken critic of Israel. And in this last round of confrontation between the Palestinian resistance and the Israeli army, the South Africa’s parliament voted to suspend diplomatic ties with Israel. The government also recalled the country’s ambassador from Israel. And, most crucially, South Africa eventually charged Israel with perpetrating genocide in Gaza before the International Court of Justice in the Hague, a charge the Court found plausible and, although stopped short of ordering a ceasefire, it ruled in favor of provisional measures in South Africa’s genocide case against Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip.

And, yet, if we were to compare the histories of resistance of all three countries, we would notice how one is singled out over the others for delegitimization. Take, for example, the international B.D.S. campaign, a grassroots movement initiated internationally at the request of Palestinian civil society organizations, and which gained substantial support. B.D.S was modeled after similar campaigns in India and South Africa, which were instrumental in eventually leading to India’s independence and pushing White South Africa to dismantle the apartheid system and accept the principle of one person one vote. Instead of encouraging this form of peaceful resistance, which is supported by some leading Jewish activists and intellectuals, Israel’s lobbies and Western governments have tried to satanize and outlaw the movement by readily stamping it as antisemitic, speciously conflating B.D.S. with European antisemitism.

Pacifist Abbas and Israel’s Slow Violence
Palestine, after the death of Yasser Arafat and the ascendance of Mahmoud Abbas, fell short in leadership quality compared to both India and South Africa. Abbas has been the president of the Palestinian Authority (PA) for the last twenty years. The PA was created after the 1994 Oslo Accords, signed at the White House in the presence of former President Bill Clinton, between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Israel.

While Gandhi and Mandela were activists and visionaries, Abbas may be characterized as a rigid pacifist, wanting for charisma, vision, and political agility. His only method has been to appeal to a hard-of-hearing “international community” to help the Palestinians establish their own state on a limited territory in the West Bank and Gaza, with East Jerusalem as its capital city, or on about 22 percent of British-mandated Palestine. Although the PA provides internal security and municipal services for the population, it is seen today by many Palestinians as more of an Israeli rather than Palestinian asset, especially because of its security coordination with the occupying power, pacification of the Palestinian population, and inability to protect them from settler—not to speak of Israeli army—violence. And amid the death and devastation in Gaza, which has spread to the West Bank, Abbas has made lackluster appearances losing even more credibility. He is remembered only when there is a wave of violent resistance against the occupation, as evidenced by the stream of American and European emissaries meeting with him in Ramallah after the start of Israel’s current war on Gaza.

Israel continues to be the sovereign power in the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, where the Palestinians today number more than 7 million, surpassing the number of Jews. It has cut off the West Bank from Gaza, which has been governed by Hamas since 2007 after it was denied its election victory by the PA, Israel and the United States. The Strip has since been subjected to a tight blockade by Israel and periodic bombardment varying in scale, the most violent of which was carried out in 2014 when more than 2,200 Palestinians were killed and a large number of residential buildings leveled.

At the same time, the West Bank has been shredded into spatially and legally isolated cantons within what are elliptically-named by the Oslo Agreement as areas A, B, C. The last, comprising more than 60 percent of the West Bank, hermetically seals the other two areas and is entirely under Israeli jurisdiction. Only 40 percent of the West Bank, or about 8 percent of historic Palestine, is under limited control by the PA. In brief, the West Bank and Gaza have become a series of open prisons guarded by walls and fences, and checkpoints manned 24/7 by Israeli security forces. Israel controls the entrance and exit of Palestinians and their goods, not only into and out of the country, but also within. Even diplomatically, instead of isolating Israel, the PA has been left out in the cold, including by Arab states, like the United Arab Emirates and Morocco, which have recently normalized relations with Israel.

Ever since Israel occupied Gaza and the West Bank in 1967, the Palestinians have been living under conditions which writer Teju Cole—after his visit to Palestine—called “slow violence,” that

…is in fact extremely refined, and involves a dizzying assemblage of laws and bylaws, contracts, ancient documents, force, amendments, customs, religion, conventions and sudden irrational moves, all mixed together and imposed with the greatest care.

This slow violence has textured Palestinian everyday life, and put them, according to Cole, “into deep uncertainty about the fundamentals of life” for more than forty-five years of occupation. Palestinian daily existence is menaced by relentless land grabs to expand Jewish settlements in the West Bank, which now are inhabited by more than 700,000 settlers. Israel, according to the Israeli NGO B`tselem, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International, has established an apartheid regime, manifested in a deleterious system of spatial, legal, economic, and political segregation. But it is more than South Africa’s apartheid. In Palestine, there is also the ever-present Israeli threat of a forced mass exodus, as happened in 1948. And it is precisely such “radical contingency,” as the scholar May Jayyusi explained in the context of the second uprising (2000-2005), that pushes the Palestinians—not unlike the reasons Mandela said compelled the ANC to engage in sabotage—to occasionally resort to spectacular acts of counter-violence, like the recent raid by Hamas guerrillas in Israel on October 7.

Israel’s response has been an all-out war with unprecedented firepower and much wider goals, including genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians to other countries. This last objective had already become more palpable through the acts and statements of extreme-right, fundamentalist coalition cabinet members about inflicting another Nakba, arming settlers and other Israelis, and wrecking the village of Hawwara in the West Bank in ways reminiscent of anti-Jewish pogroms in Europe. It was, moreover, confirmed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in his address to the UN General Assembly last September, when he made it clear that he would pursue normalization of relations with Arab states without first forging peace with the Palestinians. Netanyahu underlined his intention by displaying a map of the Middle East in which Israel covers the entire area from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. And on more than one occasion during the assault on Gaza, he and other officials made threats to drive Gazans out, either to Egypt or elsewhere.

These goals have been concretized by turning Gaza into a killing field with indiscriminate destruction of residential buildings and public institutions, mutilation of the landscape, cutting off food and water, fuel and medicine, and allowing in meager quantities of international aid. Close to half of the population have ended up in a shrunken area near Rafah, in a terrible transit zone close to the Mediterranean and the Egyptian border. The specter of ethnic cleansing of the Strip today haunts tens of thousands of Gazan families. The much-cited Zionist epithet of Palestine as “a land without a people for a people without a land”—itself an extreme variation of the well-known British doctrine of terra-nullius (“empty-land,”) applied in Australia, the Americas, and parts of Africa by European settlers—is being pursued now through a colossal war.

All in all, it is not difficult to see how the intentionally genocidal war against Gaza is not a mere response to Hamas’s violent incursion on 7 October 2023, but a “part of a continuum,” characterized by an enduring occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, an apartheid system, land grabs, a sixteen-year blockade of Gaza, and threats of expulsion. It is the persistence of these violent practices that engender Palestinian counter-violence and for which Israel must in the first place be held both morally and politically accountable.

The United States: Guarantor of Israeli Violence
Israel could not have embarked on a massive military campaign against Gaza that by the day 112 had taken more than twenty-six thousand lives, apart from uncounted thousands of others under the rubble, without the active participation and encouragement of the United States. Washington saw Hamas’s incursion into the Naqab (Negev) region as an attempt to undermine its advancing diplomatic effort to forge a strong alliance with Saudi Arabia and normalize the kingdom’s relations with Israel. These aims were part of a larger plan to prevent the Arab Gulf states from developing closer relations with China, the incipient American arch enemy.

To preempt this threat, the United States rushed to provide Israel with an unprecedented stream of military assistance and to shield it diplomatically, demonstrating its support for the war with a prompt visit by President Joe Biden to boost the sunken morale of Israeli leaders. It is the U.S.-supplied weapons arsenal—like the advanced F-35 fighter jets, F-16 Apache helicopters, 2,000-lb bombs, smart and dumb (half of the airstrikes’ munition) bunker buster bombs, white phosphorous, and others—that have caused most of the killing, mutilation, and ruin in Gaza.

One of the explicit purposes of such combined aggression is “regime change,” a long-standing practice of American foreign interventions, expressed this time in the vow to dismantle Hamas. In addition to the direct military supplies to Israel, the United States dispatched an armada of naval vessels and two aircraft carriers to the Eastern Mediterranean, and re-enforced these with a nuclear submarine. Once it expanded the war by joining it, the United States has not ceased warning other parties, especially the Lebanese Hezbollah and the Houthis in Yemen, against expanding the fighting in support of the Palestinians. Isn’t this a classic case of gunboat diplomacy?

But as the ceaseless rallies across the globe in support of the Palestinians demonstrate, Israel and the United States have lost in the court of public opinion. With his zealous backing of Israel and his inherently racist rhetoric, parroting Israel’s fake news, such as that of Hamas beheading babies, while discrediting Palestinian statistics about the numbers of the dead, Biden is personally losing.

The world’s hegemonic power and the Middle East region’s strongest state could convince only ten other, primarily small states, to vote against the UN General Assembly resolution, passed by 153 votes on December 12, 2023, calling for an immediate ceasefire. Israel’s supporters were even fewer than in an earlier vote in October.

Likewise, the United States found itself alone when—piling on its previous vetoes to protect Israel from international sanctions—it repeated an earlier move and cast a veto against UN Security Council resolution on December 22, 2023 which had called for an “immediate humanitarian ceasefire”.

The resolution was presented after UN Secretary General António Gutteres triggered the seldom-invoked Article 99 of the UN Charter, expressing his alarm at the danger of “a collapse of the humanitarian system” in Gaza. The United States cast its veto against the endorsement of thirteen Council members and the abstention of Britain. What else could such isolation be called but the moral pit of a pariah state?

With the prospect of normalization with Saudi Arabia gaining momentum, Israel thought it had relegated the Palestinian Question to a case of economic betterment. When the fighters from Gaza broke through its high-tech barriers, effectively declaring that the political death of Palestine had been greatly exaggerated, Israel suffered a severe blow to its self-image and prestige—damaged further from the lives it lost and the large number of hostages captured. These losses pale now compared to the subsequent World War II-scale of death and destruction its army and American-supplied armaments visited on Gaza.

An Israeli de Gaulle?
Since its inception following the June 1967 war, the Palestinian National Movement has made historic peace offers, whether in the form of a single democratic secular state for all its citizens, confederation of two binational states, or two separate states. Israel has always and propagandistically dismissed these as mere means to its destruction, and clung to an ethnocentric, exclusivist vision of the land, as summed up in the Jewish Nation-State Basic Law, cited earlier. This nihilistic “either-us-or-them” binary mindset is what drives the state to wage the current scorched-earth military campaign in Gaza, that the Jewish-American journalist Masha Gessen likened to the Nazi liquidation of Jewish ghettos in Europe. She stressed that the comparison is necessary because we…have to constantly be asking ourselves, are we laying the foundations for the mass murder of millions of people? Are we employing or as part of the world employing the same kinds of tactics that were employed by the Nazis?

Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire, in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, wrote of this “duality” of the oppressed, “to be is to be like, and to be like is to be like the oppressor” (Emphasis in the original). The only way out of this tragic road to nowhere is for the Israeli Jews, who seem to be caught in the grip of a pathological bloodlust, to look at themselves in the mirror, and see what kind of people they have become after turning genocidal. This is evidenced by all the ruination, the forced displacement, and the “banality of evil” that is exhibited in Israeli soldiers’ and civilians’ posts on social media, not the least of which is the repeated “Abu Ghraibing” of the hundreds of abducted men. They must decide whether they want to be a copy of their racist, European exterminators. Countless Jews around the world have answered with a resounding no. But not the majority of Jews in Israel, who evince no signs of shifting their outlook any time in the meaningful future.

A less radical but perhaps not impossible turn is the emergence of a pragmatic leadership that understands that there is no way out of this conflict except by meeting the Palestinians half way. The relevant figure for such an Israeli leader, is not a Gandhi or a Mandela, but a Charles de Gaulle.

De Gaulle became President of France in 1958, four years after his country’s defeat in Vietnam and the start of the Algerian War of Independence in 1954. At first, de Gaulle promised Algerians better economic and educational opportunities (not unlike what the Israelis and Western backers have been dangling for the Palestinians). The confrontation quickly became quite bloody—a glimpse of which can be seen in the film “The Battle of Algiers”— eventually claiming hundreds of thousands of Algerian lives. And reminiscent of what Israel is doing today in Gaza and did with the Palestinian Bedouin in the Naqab after 1948, it involved forcing at gunpoint about 2.5 million Algerians out of their villages and hamlets and eventually concentrating them in “centers,” in an operation euphemistically called regroupment in French.

It took de Gaulle a year, and much domestic and international opposition to the conduct of the war, including from a United States that was on its way to becoming a “hegemon” in the post-WWII international order, to realize the impossibility of a military resolution for the conflict. And in 1959 he uttered the word, “self-determination” for Algerians, which produced a violent backlash among the French settlers, the pied-noir. Nonetheless, in 1962 and following three more years of fighting and negotiations, Algeria won its independence after 132 years of colonial rule, and most of the pied-noir exited to France and elsewhere.

Europe and the United States never produced the likes of the Indian and South African leaders, neither in their fight to keep their colonies or former colonies, nor in the wars amongst themselves. Some of their most celebrated Western political figures owed their prominence to their bellicosity, whether as soldiers or civilians. The list includes George Washington, at once a slave owner and army chief in the war of independence from Britain; Abraham Lincoln, the president during the Civil War that led to emancipation; and Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, and Dwight Eisenhower—the latter three being of WWII fame. Then President Harry Truman declared the end of that war not in a Gandhian or Mandelian humanist gesture, but with the apocalypse of two nuclear explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Martin Luther King, an exception, emerged from among the internally-colonized Blacks, and was inspired by Gandhi, not by a Euro-American precedent; the Black liberation movement as whole, before and after him, witnessed mass bursts of “disturbances” and “uprisings.”

Zionism and Israel have been on a winning streak for the last one hundred years against the Palestinians. The Palestinians have always ended up on the losing side, even if there were moments when it looked as if it could be otherwise. Throughout, the Israelis tried to sear into Palestinian consciousness that resistance was pointless; but, as Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish said, directing his words to the Israelis, “You are steadfast in your victory/ and I in my defeat”. Although the analogy may be imperfect, the enduring Israeli-Palestinian encounter of war-resistance could be brought to an end, through arrangements parallel to those of Algeria/ France, with West Bank settlers relocating to Israel. The first prerequisite is a new leadership in Israel that understands this and is capable of translating it into policy; the sooner the arms fall silent in Gaza, the better the chance of this happening.

For decades, to be Muslim and/or Arab in the United States meant quietly tolerating the Jewish–American narrative about the Middle East. This narrative was kept alive with the injection of millions of dollars of funding into the media, national elections, think tanks in Washington, D.C., and lobbying groups with access to the U.S. Congress. The Arab and Muslim response for the most part was a resigned silence, partially due to having a lack of money and connections to compete with the presiding narrative. Moreover, feelings of frustration and defeatism over the barrage of falsehoods that dominated American conventional wisdom abounded. There was also the particular fear that confronting Jewish–American groups could mean losing a job, or being the target of an internet campaign, or being accused of anti-Semitism—the single most effective political weapon against any criticism of Israel. As an Arab-American, I, too, have been a target of Jewish–American wrath at different points during my twenty-five-year career as an author and journalist.

Against this backdrop, it is not surprising that U.S. President Joe Biden felt no hesitation when, during the early days of Israel’s war against the Palestinians in Gaza, he gave Israel full endorsement to take unlimited military action in the Strip—and even provided the advanced weaponry needed to accomplish that mission. According to The Washington Post, Israel used 22,000 U.S.-provided bombs to pummel the Palestinians in Gaza in the first six weeks alone. During that same period, Washington also handed over 2,000-pound “bunker buster” munitions and more than 50,000 artillery shells, the newspaper said, citing intelligence reports given to Congress.

But what the Biden administration has learned since October 7 was surprising, not only to officials in the White House and State Department, but to ordinary Americans: Arabs and Muslims have suddenly found a powerful public voice, one that could cost them reelection in what promises to be a close race in 2024. A new poll conducted for the progressive think tank Data for Progress October 18–19 found that 66 percent of American voters “strongly agree” or “somewhat agree” with the following statement:  “The U.S. should call for a ceasefire and a de-escalation of violence in Gaza. The U.S. should leverage its close diplomatic relationship with Israel to prevent further violence and civilian deaths.”

Although Biden administration officials have been alarmed by the American electorate’s new support for the Palestinians in Gaza, much of the U.S. Congress has turned a blind eye to this profound shift in public opinion. Most continue to provide unconditional support for Israel and fail to even acknowledge the Palestinian plight. Nonetheless, there has been a public awakening, which is perhaps far more dangerous than the hatred and polarization former President (and possible 2024 Republican candidate) Donald Trump had created.

A New Broad-based Pro-Palestinian Coalition
Why has this dramatic shift in perception of Palestinians, and the Palestinian–Israeli conflict more broadly, happened, seemingly overnight? The main reason lies within the deep, overlapping connections among activists, particularly among the younger generation, who have tied opposition to Israel’s nearly hundred-year-old occupation of Palestine to the struggle for women’s rights, 2SLGBTQIA+ rights, Black Lives Matter, indigenous rights, and the rights of Latinos and all people of color in the United States. Even churches, including those led by black clergy, of many religious denominations are holding vigils for the Palestinians and demanding a cease-fire.

Arabs and Muslims, who remain a distinct minority in America, were suddenly able to mobilize hundreds of thousands of demonstrators on the streets of Washington and other major cities because they no longer stood alone. They were able to find solidarity with other special interest groups who have had a long history of applying political pressure, rather successfully, to achieve their goals. More broadly, public determination to save Palestine (or what is left of it) is part of a larger fight against the old colonialist order, to which the United States serves as a compelling poster child in the way it is backing Israel’s expansionism and settler-colonial project. Evidence of this broad coalition for Palestine can be seen in street protests since October 7. In November, for example, thousands of Americans, including African–Americans, Latinos, and other minorities, marched from Brooklyn to Manhattan to demand a ceasefire and justice for Palestinians. When interviewed, some of the demonstrators said the oppression Palestinians face is the “same” as that which Asian–Americans and African–Americans historically endure.

Further evidence of the newfound coalition for Palestinian rights can be found on some American radio stations, such as Pacifica Radio Network, a left-leaning broadcaster with a forty-year history of advocating for human rights. Each day, programs are aired by Arabs, Muslims, and others condemning Israel’s actions in Gaza and demanding a ceasefire. Broadcasters such as Pacifica stand in sharp contrast to the pro-Israel mainstream media, including CNN, MSNBC, and The New York Times—all of which behave as if the Palestinian side of the story does not exist, or is less important. The Israeli hostage crisis, for example, dominates their news agenda much more than the Palestinian hostage situation or the suffering of tens of thousands of Palestinians under occupation. Furthermore, Jewish and Israeli commentators are given free rein to tell their side of the conflict while Palestinian analysts rarely make appearances; if they do, they are bashed with the question: “Do you condemn Hamas?”

In addition, much of the reporting provided by broadcasters lacks crucial context and typically begins with the phrase “when the war started on October 7, after Hamas’s brutal attack on Israelis . . . .” This completely fails to provide any historical context, including the fact that Palestinians have lived under an illegal and inhumane occupation for more than five decades.

Another reason for Arab–American and Muslim empowerment is the emerging profile and demographic of the demonstrators on the streets. The young people criticizing Israel and challenging pro-Israeli Jewish–American groups were not even born at the time of September 11. Therefore, they have not been raised with the instilled fear pervasive in older Arabs and Muslims in American society at the time and for many years after 9/11. Rather, many are fully engaged in their universities, communities, and professional circles—they have healthy incomes, they know their legal rights as U.S. citizens, and they use the near-omnipresent power of social media to get their voices heard.

Furthermore, the younger generation of Arab and Muslim activists defy Americans’ perception of their experience in the United States. According to a March 2021 Pew Research Center survey asking Americans how much discrimination they think a number of religious groups faced in society, they were more likely to say that Muslims face “a lot” of discrimination compared to other religious groups included in the survey, including Jews and evangelical Christians. In some ways, the socio-political upheaval seen in the United States led by the younger Arab and Muslim generation bears resemblance to the Arab uprisings of a decade ago: a fearless young generation that is demanding change and challenging perceptions of their identity.

Nevertheless, a disconnect between American society supporting the Palestinians, and the Washington body politik’s almost-unanimous backing of Israel remains and is clear in recent polling. Another poll from Data for Progress said that 61 percent of likely U.S. voters support calls for a permanent ceasefire and a de-escalation of violence in the war. Citing the poll in a post on social media platform X, Democratic Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, who was censored by her colleagues in Congress for her criticism of Israel and demands for a ceasefire, questioned why so few members of the government were aligned with the public’s views. She noted that only 11 percent of members of Congress have called for a ceasefire. In December, Congress passed Republican-sponsored legislation condemning anti-Semitism, which many conflate with any criticism of Israel. The vote was 311 to 14.

Yet, despite the views in Congress, a recent Gallup poll also reflected the American public’s unease with U.S. official support for Israel in the war. A November 30 Gallup found that 45 percent of Americans disapproved of Israel’s military action in Gaza, while 50 percent approved. It found that 63 percent of Democrats, 64 percent of people of color, and 67 percent of young people aged 18–34 all opposed the war. Only 32 percent of Americans approved of Biden’s handling of the Israel–Hamas situation, Gallup said.

All of these new developments do not mean that Arabs and Muslims are safe from acts of violence, threats, and racial discrimination in the United States. According to data tracking by several Arab–American organizations, there has been a dramatic spike in hate crimes, exceeding those after 9/11. Perhaps the violence and threats against Muslims and Arabs are happening partially because of this broad support from American interest groups and the fact that the views of the former can no longer be marginalized as fringe opinions.

 The Pro-Israel Jewish–American Response
For the first time, the Jewish–American community in support of Israel has found itself among a diminishing pool of Americans who shared their views. In response to broad public support for Palestine, Jewish-American groups have unleashed millions of dollars to discredit their opponents. The Jewish–American campaign this time is far more aggressive than I have ever witnessed. For example, the American Israel Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a rightwing lobbying group, has vowed to spend 100 million dollars to defeat the candidates running for Congress who criticize Israel’s military action in Gaza.

Pro-Israel Jewish–American groups, which already have deep support within American media, are paying for ads in major newspapers. For example, The New York Times ran a full-page ad on December 3 titled “An Open Letter to Hamas Apologists”. The ad, sponsored by a group called Israel 365, stated: “Until now, cowards excused their hate by telling us that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism.…That gig is up.” The ad goes on to admonish Israel’s critics: “I accuse the world media, who could barely constrain their exuberance in publishing the blood libel of Israeli airstrikes killing 500+ civilians at the Gaza hospital only to be disproved by inconvenient facts, of malpractice of the highest order for their ‘facts’ on the Hamas Ministry of Health.”

In addition, the same groups are threatening to withdraw donations from universities that allow pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campuses; blacklists have been drafted with names of students who participate in the demonstrations, either to ensure they could no longer get jobs or that the jobs they had been offered are rescinded. Professors on campuses who dare to defend Palestinians or criticize Israel are called out and demands are made for their removal. Furthermore, all opponents are labeled anti-Semites, or worse, Nazis. In short, the weaponization of the Holocaust is in full operation.

Campus Free Speech Under Israeli Occupation?
University campuses have become the battleground for debating the Israeli–Palestinian conflict; for some students, it seems as though they are living in “Israeli-occupied universities”. College campuses are the focus of Jewish-American ire. Professors, especially those who teach courses on the Middle East, are practicing self-censorship, according to a poll conducted by University of Maryland professor Shibley Telhami.

Demands are being made for the dismissal of presidents of Ivy League schools who do not completely restrict speech on college campuses regarding criticism of Israel. During a hearing before the U.S. Congress in December, the presidents of MIT, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania refused to explicitly say that calling for the genocide of Jews would necessarily violate the universities’ codes of conduct. The three said it would depend upon the context in which the statement was made. The presidents were unable to assure critics that campus free speech rules do not allow for explicit calls for violence but do make room for political statements, no matter how disturbing they might be.

The pro-Israeli American–Jewish reaction was swift. The next day the CEOs of top corporations and politicians called for the university presidents’ dismissal from their universities. Pennsylvania’s Jewish governor Josh Shapiro called the University of Pennsylvania’s president’s remarks “shameful”.

A few days later, the president of the University of Pennsylvania and the chairman of the university’s board of trustees were forced to resign. Never mind that the Supreme Court has already ruled that such speech is protected unless there is a clear cause-and-effect relationship between hate speech and violence in a particular incident. In other words, saying aloud that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians or calling for genocide against Jews is protected unless a clear connection can be made between the speech and a violent act. It is unfortunate that the presidents did not make this point during their testimony before Congress. Harvard’s first female black president, Claudine Gay, survived an emergency meeting of the university’s governing board. After two days of intense deliberations in response to her testimony before Congress, the board said it supported her and remained confident in her abilities to lead Harvard. However, during the weeks that followed the board’s decision, powerful Jewish donors who fund Harvard continued their intense campaign against her. On January 2, she wrote that she could no longer stand the pressure—including criticism of her academic research and even threats to her life—and she resigned as Harvard president.

A columnist for the Guardian, Moustafa Bayoumi, eloquently noted that the presidents were victims of a trap. He wrote: “The American university is, by tradition and design, precisely where abhorrent ideas can be uttered. So if someone had called for the genocide of Jews, which they haven’t, that would be extremely disturbing but still protected speech.”

The more neutral argument made about what speech should be allowed on American college campuses focuses on the question of whether universities have become too politicized, leaving behind the traditional mission of education. For those who agree with that statement, political debates have no place on campuses. However, over the last half-century, student protests against the war in Vietnam, the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran—when Iranian students demonstrated against the clerical takeover of Iran—and the U.S. invasion of Iraq have turned campuses into fora of debate and protest. In more recent years, the politicization of campuses has accelerated, as groups such as the AIPAC have used their vast funds to influence political debates, which professors should be hired, and which curricula should be taught.

Responding to Jewish pressure, some campuses, including George Washington University in Washington D.C., have banned the group National Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a network that was founded in Berkeley, California with chapters across the United States. Free speech advocates, including the American Civil Liberties Union, argue the ban is an infringement on the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and lawsuits have been filed in response. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis accused SJP activists of being in league with Hamas, and a state official ordered the “deactivation” of chapters at two state schools.

Pro-Israeli American–Jewish groups have also condemned more liberal Jewish groups for supporting the Palestinians. A campaign was launched against Jewish Voice for Peace, a group that has joined forces with Arab and Muslim groups and claims 300,000 members. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a conservative and well-funded Jewish advocacy group, condemns the Jewish Voice for Peace as a “radical anti-Israel and anti-Zionist activist group that advocates for the boycott of Israel and eradication of Zionism”. ADL has pressured university administrators to ban its presence from university campuses and some have complied, prompting free speech legal experts to say the action is unconstitutional.

There is no middle ground when it comes to views about Israel’s war against the Palestinians. For those in the growing chorus of Americans pressing Biden to demand a ceasefire (even though he has little leverage over the Israeli government at this point), nothing short of ending the war will satisfy them. For many Jewish–Americans and their powerful allies in the Congress and the media, any mention of sympathy for the 30,000 Palestinians (at the time of this writing) who have been slaughtered is an act of betrayal against Israel.

Shifting Tides in U.S. Politics
The polarization of opinion that has developed among Americans over Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians is likely to have an effect for years to come. The pro-Palestinian coalition is likely to expand, particularly within a younger generation of Americans who are concerned about human rights around the world, and support for the traditional Jewish position is likely to continue shrinking. Jewish groups may soon discover that the millions of dollars they have used to manipulate American public opinion about the Israeli occupation only has an effect on Congress. As a result, they will find it more difficult to reconcile with how their taxpayer money is invested. Pro-Israeli American-Jewish activists admit as much, now that the tide is turning against them. Already, the hate crimes against Jews have increased 59 percent since last year, at least according to the conservative Jewish group, the Anti-Defamation League. Conflating what it is to be a Jew in America with unconditional support for Israel—long the objective of the pro-Israel lobby—is now having some serious ramifications.

Biden’s pro-Israel stance—the greatest from any U.S. president in recent history—could cost him his reelection in 2024, even though he is cynically relying on two assumptions: American voters will forget about the horror in Gaza by November; and those who do not, will decide Biden is still a better alternative to Trump. Not only will he likely lose states such as Michigan, which has large Arab and Muslim voters, but advocates of human rights in other swing states, such as Pennsylvania and Ohio, have vowed to actively work to defeat him by boycotting the election. In this way, the outrage over the Biden administration’s policies on Israel and the Palestinians is overshadowing fears over the prospect of a second Trump term in the White House. That says a lot about the shifts in public opinion. And it is not only Biden who is motivating human rights advocates to vote against him in 2024: Vice President Kamala Harris, whose roots in India have made her a symbol of ethnic diversity, is perceived as hypocritical. While she ran on a platform for the need for brown and black power and against white colonial rule, in office she has done little to advance these goals and has fallen far short of defending the lives of Palestinians, who presumably would be included in her campaign pledge to help minorities. Thus, she is of little use to those who were enthusiastic about her election as vice-president in 2020.

This scenario is indeed full of gloom. But the upside is that, perhaps for the first time, Arabs and Muslims in the United States have broad support within society and are viewed not as a problem but as champions for being on the right side of history. Unfortunately, this will not end the horrific tragedy now unfolding in Gaza or save the Palestinians there from more Israeli brutality.

 

 

Since the Hamas attacks on October 7 and the start of Israel’s retaliatory offensive in the Gaza Strip, European Union (EU) member states have broadly split into three camps. At one end are those who have professed to stand “on the side of Israel”, flying its flag on government buildings, backing its military campaign, and avoiding criticism even after the Israeli army flattened most of Gaza and killed thousands of Palestinian civilians. The Czech Republic, Austria, and Hungary stand out in this camp, followed by Germany. 

At the other end of the spectrum are governments that proclaim to stand “on the side of peace” and, while strongly condemning Hamas, have been calling for a ceasefire and openly criticizing Israel for violating international humanitarian law. Belgium, Spain, and Ireland are the most vocal members of this moderate camp, followed by France and several others. The third, middle camp, is made up of those who are somewhere in between the first two groups: siding with Israel but in less absolute terms than the first camp.

 It would be wrong to label the moderate camp as “pro-Palestinian”. The fact is that there is no pro-Palestinian camp at the level of EU governments: none of them has hoisted Palestinian flags or primarily condemned the Israeli occupation or its devastating Gaza offensive, as many countries in the so-called Global South have done. The only vocal exception may be Spain’s Deputy Prime Minister Yolanda Díaz of the leftwing Sumar party who has denounced “Israeli apartheid” and called for sanctions and an arms embargo against Israel. However, her statements do not represent the position of the government as a whole.

Encouraging Rather Than Restraining Israel
The EU’s overall position is the result of a power balance between the Israel-aligned, moderate, and in-between camps. In fact, the common EU statements agreed by the twenty-seven member states since October 7 are somewhat closer to the positions of the Israel-aligned camp. This is because of the latter’s greater blackmail potential: the hardliners are prepared to block the adoption of common positions altogether if they contain any direct criticism of the Israeli operation. A compromise formula affirming “Israel’s right to defend itself in line with international law” has been devised by diplomats drafting the joint statements to conceal the deep gulf that exists between those who believe Israel is committing war crimes and those who deem its conduct irreproachable.

But despite the EU’s efforts to project unity, votes on the UN General Assembly’s Gaza resolutions on October 27 and December 12 split the EU member state bloc back into three groups. By the second vote, much of the middle camp joined the moderates in supporting the UN resolution calling for a “humanitarian ceasefire”—but the Austrians and Czechs still voted against it. With the majority of EU states moving toward support for a ceasefire, but a hardline minority digging in its heels, the EU leaders’ summit in December failed to agree on any joint statement. And in mid-January, a deeply divided European Parliament passed a resolution calling for a ceasefire but conditioning it on “dismantling Hamas”—thus in effect legitimizing the continued Israeli offensive. By then the death toll in Gaza had surpassed 24,000, much of the enclave had been reduced to rubble, and 2 million people were displaced, facing starvation and disease. 

The European response hasn’t been confined to gestures and statements, but also action. Germany and the Netherlands—as well as the UK—have continued to supply weapons to Israel, despite their arms exports policies requiring to halt such transfers when there is a risk of contributing to violations of international humanitarian law. On balance, Europe has done more to encourage than to restrain Israel’s offensive, considered now one of the deadliest and most destructive bombing campaigns in modern history. In spite of that, it should be noted that political positions do not necessarily reflect public opinion. For example, according to an October opinion poll in the Netherlands, 55 percent of the public thought that the Dutch government, which is part of the EU’s middle camp, should be more critical of Israel, and only 6 percent said it should be more supportive of it. In a January poll, 61 percent of Germans said Israel’s military action in Gaza was not justified given the many civilian victims while 25 percent thought it was.

Divisions Among EU Leadership
In addition to divisions between and within member states, the crisis has also split the leadership of EU institutions. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, a German Christian Democrat, has personified the Israel-aligned approach: in the days after October 7, she projected the Israeli flag on the Commission’s headquarters (previously done only for Ukraine), stressed Israel’s “right to defend itself—today and in the days to come,” and visited Israel to convey the same unqualified support. At the time of her visit, nearly 2,000 Palestinians had been killed in Israel’s no-holds-barred bombing campaign in Gaza. Even the minutes of the Commission’s internal meetings led by Von der Leyen in October emphasize “the need for the EU’s full and unequivocal support for Israel”. Having established herself as the “face” of the EU, Von der Leyen’s approach has shaped the perception of the EU’s position around the world.

In contrast, European Council President Charles Michel, a Belgian liberal, and the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs, Josep Borrell, a Spanish socialist, have tried to steer the EU in a more moderate direction. Borrell, who has most embodied the moderate camp at the EU level, has often spoken more frankly about the realities of the conflict than other international leaders. Besides condemning Hamas, he has described the crisis as “the consequence of a thirty-year-long political and moral failure of the international community (…) to make the two-state solution a reality”. And while Von der Leyen, as the Gaza casualties soared, touted the EU’s humanitarian aid to show that it also cared for the Palestinians, Borrell made clear how such talking points come across: “It does not make any sense to give me a dinner tonight, if you are going to kill me tomorrow.”

Furthest on the opposite Israel-aligned end of the spectrum has been EU Commissioner Olivér Várhelyi, who oversees relations, including financial aid, with the EU’s neighbors. After the Hamas attack, the Hungarian commissioner unilaterally announced the suspension of all EU development aid to the Palestinians—a solo move reversed after pushback from Borrell and some member states. Subsequently, with Von der Leyen’s backing, Várhelyi pushed through the EU’s first-ever funding package for Israel and the Abraham Accords, the Arab–Israeli normalization agreements that bypass the Palestinians. Aware of its controversiality amid the carnage in Gaza, the Commission unusually refrained from announcing it publicly.

In supporting Israel, European leaders such as Von der Leyen have toed the Biden administration’s line rather than promote a more balanced and international law-based approach, traditionally associated with Europe. In fact, Biden has on occasion been more critical, for example when calling out Israel’s “indiscriminate bombing”. And while the Americans have coupled their “bear hug” of Israel with private pressure to at least reduce the apocalyptic impact of the war in Gaza, Europeans have nothing to show for their rhetorical support.

Moral and Strategic Failure
The impulse among a significant part of Europe’s political elite to align with Israel is driven by a sense of civilizational attachment and historical responsibility as well as  less openly pronounced resentments toward Arabs and Muslims. October 7 has supercharged these sentiments at the expense of concern for Palestinian lives, international norms, and even Europe’s material interest in regional stability. Identity politics has trumped both liberal, international law-respecting foreign policy and interest-based realpolitik.

The Israel-aligned crowd usually couches its support for the Gaza offensive in moral terms. But the justified moral indignation at Hamas brutality is accompanied by staggering moral complacency toward Palestinian suffering. Prior to the Hamas attacks, politicians in this camp never protested Israel’s decades-long occupation, systematic human rights violations or the sixteen-year blockade of the Strip. No wonder their current discourse sounds as if the conflict only began on October 7, ignoring the context they refused to address even before.

Once again, Von der Leyen is emblematic of this. As the European Commission president, she has repeatedly eulogized Israel, even under its most rightwing government, while remaining completely silent about the occupation, violations of international law, and oppression of the Palestinians. Not only at the level of rhetoric, but also on that of policy: in May 2020, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sought to formally annex the West Bank, Borrell tried to put together an “options paper” on measures the EU could take to deter such an Israeli move. Von der Leyen stalled the attempt, limiting the EU to its usual statements of concern.

The alignment with Israel is also justified, especially in Germany and to an extent in Europe as a whole, by the historical responsibility for the Holocaust. In itself, this invocation is more than appropriate: October 7 was the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, followed by a wave of antisemitic incidents in Europe and around the world. What is on display, however, is a stunning distortion of historical consciousness. When the memory of the Holocaust is used to downplay or justify mass killing and collective punishment of civilians in Gaza and to silence voices of protest, it is the ultimate betrayal of its historical lessons.

If Germany was serious about its history, it should be the first not only to condemn the Hamas atrocities but also to protest the Gaza hecatomb and warn against genocidal incitement by a range of Israeli politicians and public figures. Even if its only concern was the safety of Jews, Germany should be the first to caution that this war will not make Israel more secure but will lead to more bloodshed in the future—and that the only way to prevent a repeat of October 7 is through a political solution based on peace and equality with the Palestinians.

But selective moralism also leads to strategic blindness. It obscures the likely unattainability of the goal to eliminate Hamas, a movement deeply rooted in Palestinian society. Rather than restoring Israel’s deterrence, its offensive will almost certainly produce an even larger stream of Palestinians willing to take up arms against the occupier and avenge the dead, especially if all other routes for achieving Palestinian freedom remain closed.

Unconditional backing for Israel also contradicts Europe’s strategic interests. The greater the horror in Gaza—and the stronger Israel’s sense of international impunity—the higher the risk of a full-blown war with Hezbollah and of a wider regional conflict, which Europe is keen to avoid. The bloodbath inflicted on Gaza with perceived Western support is fueling extremism worldwide, creating security risks for Europe’s own societies. The EU’s apparent double standards are undermining its soft power, the main source of its influence in the world. And Western cover for Israel’s blatant violations of international humanitarian law discredits the global rules-based order, an underlying factor of European security. The statements of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz—who repeatedly claimed that Israel was acting by international law, while it was holding the entire Gaza population under siege and wiping out whole families and neighborhoods with airstrikes—are particularly damaging in this regard.

Ukraine versus Gaza
Western backing for the Gaza war has also canceled out months of diplomatic outreach to persuade countries in the Global South to align with the Western position on the war in Ukraine. Efforts to convince the world that European and American support for Ukraine against Russian aggression was based on universal principles of international law rather than the West’s geopolitical agenda were squandered when the West veered off those same principles in Gaza.

Europeans themselves are deeply divided over how to compare the two high-intensity wars raging in their neighborhood. Where the moderate camp highlights the need for coherence based on international law, the Israel-aligned camp draws a parallel between Israel and Ukraine as two Western democratic allies under attack. Once again, the contrasting positions of EU leaders illustrate the fundamental differences between the EU camps.

In an effort to steer the EU toward a more moderate position on Gaza, Charles Michel, the European Council president, has emphasized that the EU must be “a steadfast advocate for peace and respect for international law, as in the case of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine”. Borrell has warned that the EU faces criticism for “applying double standards regarding international law in Ukraine and in Gaza” and stressed that “we need to counter it by our words and deeds”. While underlining that the two conflicts are different, he pointed out that “depriving a human community under siege of a basic water supply is contrary to international law—in Ukraine and in Gaza. If we are unable to say so, for both places, we lack the moral authority necessary to make our voice heard”.

In contrast, Von der Leyen has equated Israel with Ukraine: “Vladimir Putin wants to wipe Ukraine from the map. Hamas, supported by Iran, wants to wipe Israel from the map. Shelter democracies we must,” she told the U.S. Hudson Institute in October. In this view, the identity of Israel as a Western, supposedly democratic, ally is put above international law. The Israeli occupation is once again erased from the picture. The reality, in which Israel is wiping Palestine from the map by de facto annexing the West Bank and now also by leveling Gaza to the ground, is turned on its head. And framing Israel as a democracy without qualification conceals its anti-democratic rule over millions of Palestinians deprived of basic rights. These distortions allow the likes of Von der Leyen to reconcile their opposition to the Russian occupier annexing Ukrainian territory with their support for the Israeli occupier annexing Palestinian territory.

Where EU moderates try to address the criticism of double standards, the Israel-aligned camp self-righteously doubles down on them. In doing so, it helps discredit the case for Ukraine in the non-Western world. As a side note, hypocrisy over Gaza is not an exclusive feature of the West. If the Arab regimes that had recently normalized relations with Israel (the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco) or pursued such normalization (Saudi Arabia) really cared about the thousands of children killed in Gaza, they would have threatened to freeze their ties with Israel unless it stops the onslaught and commits to the two-state solution. Instead, they have sent reassuring signals that normalization will continue once the war is over. Unlike Europe, these Arab governments combine pro-Palestinian identity politics at the level of rhetoric and Arab League resolutions with cold realpolitik in their actual conduct.

No Day After Plan
Despite European divisions over Israel’s military offensive and whether or not to call for a ceasefire, there is one important area where EU leaders have been relatively united: the “day after” in Gaza. People split by ideology can sometimes still agree on forward-looking solutions. A month into the war, Von der Leyen and Borrell articulated very similar principles for the future of Gaza: no Hamas control over Gaza, no Israeli reoccupation, no reduction of Gaza’s territory, no forced displacement of Palestinians from Gaza, and no sustained blockade of the enclave. Instead, the Palestinian Authority (PA) should govern Gaza and there should be a renewed effort to achieve the two-state solution. No EU member state has challenged the principles. United States Foreign Secretary Antony Blinken has formulated a similar set of guidelines.

However, there are two major problems here. 

First, the principles have not been translated into a diplomatic plan. If the goal is to bring Gaza under PA control, it requires a serious effort to identify what this would entail, engage all relevant actors, and flesh out a plan. This is one area where the EU, as the largest donor to the PA, could be a real player. Such a plan could offer a diplomatic path out of the crisis and help build conditions for a sustainable ceasefire. But more than three months into the war, the Europeans have not come up with anything concrete. In December, Borrell presented a non-public note to EU foreign ministers “on the stabilization and future of Gaza”. It offered no plan, just a menu of ideas—some useful, many vague—that do not offer a way out of the crisis and are wholly inadequate to the unfolding catastrophe. In mid-January, he presented ministers with another plan, for an international conference to try to restart a peace process toward the two-state solution. But skipping the immediate question of a political solution to the Gaza catastrophe risks making the plan uncredible and disconnected from the burning crisis on the ground.

The second problem is, in a way, the opposite of the first: the assumption that Hamas will be removed from Gaza and the PA in its current shape will take over. By excluding Hamas without having a diplomatic plan to bring back the PA, the Europeans are locking themselves into a scenario that may prove to be a fantasy. It also implicitly supports Israel’s maximalist war aims to eradicate the movement in Gaza. Instead, the EU should come to terms with the strong likelihood that Hamas will survive and that any governing authority in the Strip will require its consent. The militant movement will certainly remain part of the wider Palestinian political landscape, probably with significantly stronger popular support than before. Some accommodation with Hamas will be vital to prevent it from acting as a spoiler.

Some Palestinians are proposing to establish a government of technocrats that would rule both Gaza and the West Bank with the backing of all Palestinian factions, including Hamas, but without their direct participation. This would pave the way toward Palestinian political unity and elections. A broadly similar approach has been suggested by Egypt and Qatar as part of their plan for a ceasefire. However challenging such proposals are, they are more grounded in reality than the scenario of returning the current, unpopular PA into Gaza on the back of Israeli tanks and in total opposition to Hamas. Rather than trying to engineer Palestinian politics according to Israeli and Western preferences, the EU should be open to arrangements that have the widest support and legitimacy among Palestinians. This offers a better prospect to reunite Gaza and the West Bank under a single, broadly backed, and truly “revitalized” Palestinian Authority.

So far, the European response to the Gaza crisis has been a moral and strategic disaster. Going forward, the EU has a chance to partially redeem its record by contributing to a legitimate political solution for Gaza and by pushing for a serious peace effort. Even for its own sake, it should not fail again.

 

 

In times of conflict, language becomes another weapon used by the warring sides on the battlefield of public opinion. This has been painfully true of Israel’s War on Gaza: how to describe Hamas—a legitimate resistance movement against occupation, or a terrorist organization bent on Israel’s destruction; the onslaught on the Strip—a measure of Israel’s right to defend itself or a calculated military operation that is the centerpiece of a campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide.

Since October 7, 2023, these questions have been asked, hashed and rehashed, debated and debunked in newsrooms around the world. At the Cairo Review, we recognized these considerations as important to our coverage of the death and destructive power of Israel’s invasion of Gaza but acknowledged that the images of humanity under attack were undeniable snapshots of a civilian population brought to its knees in despair and suffering.

The images—and the stories they tell—truly answer the questions being contemplated by editorial teams around the world. That is why we chose our cover photo to be of Inas Abu Maamar, a thirty-six-year-old Palestinian woman embracing the body of her five-year-old niece Saly, who was killed in an Israeli strike, at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip on October 17, 2023. The photo, taken by Reuters photographer Mohammad Salem at the Nasser Hospital morgue, where residents were going to search for missing relatives, exemplifies the horrific nature of the Israeli military juggernaut in Gaza and the gravity of a collective decay of human moral sensibility.

Salem writes that he saw Inas squatting on the ground in the morgue, sobbing and tightly embracing Saly’s body. “I lost my conscience when I saw the girl, I took her in my arms,” Inas said. “The doctor asked me to let go… but I told them to leave her with me.”

The Health Ministry in Gaza says that at least 26,900 people have been killed since Israel launched its reprisal campaign against Hamas on October 7. More than 10,000 of those have been children. In recent days, Israeli intelligence has confirmed that the figures are accurate.

It is not surprising why Palestinians, and many in the region, believe that Hamas is a pretext for a long-existing campaign to ethnically cleanse and repopulate the Gaza Strip, writes Nadia Naser-Najjab, a Senior Lecturer in Palestine Studies at the European Centre for Palestine Studies, University of Exeter, UK. But can annexation of the Gaza Strip provide Israel with the peace and security it seeks? No, say many regional experts, who instead insist that the two-state solution remains the best hope for Middle East stability.

In the piece, Peace and Security After the War in Gaza, Director of the Center for Migration and Refugee Studies Ibrahim Awad says that in order to pursue a two-state solution, the international community must be able to conquer three main points of contention: Israeli occupation, the creation of a Palestinian state, and the role of Hamas.

Pursuing and reaching a two-state solution requires that the Palestinian–Israeli conflict be positioned within its historical context since even before 1948, and not be looked at in isolation from October 7, 2023 onwards.

That responsibility falls on the global media, who still have much to do in order to objectively and fairly cover the conflict.  In Covering the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: Between Exasperation and Empathy, Lawrence Pintak, the founding dean of The Edward R. Murrow College of Communication at Washington State University, and a former CBS News Middle East correspondent, uses his personal on-the-ground experience to reflect on how American media needs to do a better job covering Arab and Palestinian affairs.

But there is a glimmer of hope as the media begins to shift to more equitable reporting on the Gaza carnage. How American Public Opinion on Palestine Has Shifted, by Geneive Abdo, examines how overlapping connections among young activist groups have been key for a dramatic shift in how the Palestinian–Israeli conflict is being perceived in the United States. These and other essays reflect the diverse perspectives offered in this special issue of the Cairo Review titled “Gaza”, especially voices from the region that are marginalized in mainstream international coverage of the war.

Cairo Review Co-Managing Editors,

Karim Haggag

Firas Al-Atraqchi

Israel’s military campaign in Gaza has killed over 26,000 Palestinians and displaced over 1.9 million since October; those who have survived are at risk of starvation and rampant disease, according to the United Nations. This level of destruction has caused many to ask why international law has been unable to restrain Israel and protect the lives of the Palestinians. According to Beckett, associate professor of law at the American University in Cairo, this failure of international law is because the United Nations was built to enable Israel, not constrain it. 

“The formation of Israel was the last formal settler-colonial project in international law, thus, it enjoys protection from international law,” says Beckett.

He points to the preamble of the United Nations, which promises “to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small”. Yet, it was this same organization that facilitated the creation of the state of Israel, an explicitly colonial state that denied the equal rights of the native Palestinians.

 According to Beckett, this contradiction from the UN can be understood through the long and troubled history of its predecessors in international governance, beginning with the brutal European subjugation of the New World, through the failed League of Nations after World War I, and finally to the creation of the UN after World War II. 

The Spanish conquistadors, who came to the Americas in the late 15th century, wanted to enslave the indigenous population without the fear of eternal damnation. “International law was formed as a solution to that paradox: how do you do horrible things and still get into heaven?” says Beckett. “What the Spaniards decided, as the basis of our current international law, is that Native Americans were inferior to Europeans and could only overcome this deficiency through conversion.”

As time progressed, the motivations to rationalize the subjugation of native peoples became less religious and more political. Scholars of liberalism in the 17th century, like John Locke, suggested that native people were deficient because they did not take full advantage of their land. 

“Locke argued that God gave the earth to everyone but only those who work to improve the earth deserve ownership rights over the land,” explains Beckett. “If a people aren’t improving a land, then the land will be given to the more industrious.”

Founded in England, test-ran in Ireland, then exported to the Americas and India, this idea of ‘lazy natives’ was used across the globe to dispossess indigenous people of their legal right to their own land. Belgium used it during its brutal treatment of the Congo, as did the Netherlands in Indonesia, South Africa, and New Guinea. France resorted to it in Algeria, as did Germany in Rwanda, and so on. “Every major writer on international law from the time employed some version of this rhetoric,” Beckett says.

He tracks the story of colonialism through the 19th century as the Europeans began expansion into Africa, carrying with them the rhetoric of the White Man’s Burden—the belief that white men have a moral duty to civilize the world. This grand plan came to a grinding halt with the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, ushering in a very unusual moment for Europe’s legal history.

“The end of World War One was the first time that a war had been declared unlawful in European history,” explains Beckett. “Before that, states had the right to use force in their national interests as they wished. But this time, the losers were punished.”

To the Victors …

What does “punishment” look like? The German, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian empires were stripped of their territories and colonies, which were then turned into mandates to be divided between Britain and France.

Beckett explains that the mandates perpetuated this long-standing belief in the inherent deficiencies of natives, now sold and justified under the name “self-determination”. According to this framework, the natives were incapable of self-governance and needed to be tutored and controlled by Britain and France in order to attain self-determination. 

This is where Palestine enters the story, a former territory of the Ottoman Empire now being claimed by several international forces due to a convoluted British plot after World War One. In the midst of the war, the British produced three documents, each of which promised the land of Palestine to a different group. 

“The first was the exchange of letters called the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence, in which the British promised the Palestinians self-governance if they rebelled against the Ottomans during World War One,” explains Beckett. “At the same time, the British were devising the Sykes-Picot agreement, which would split the Ottoman Empire, including Palestine, between the British and French after the war. The third document was the Balfour Declaration, where the British government indicated its support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine.”

At the conclusion of the war in 1918, three empires had fallen and two—the French and the British—were now bulging with new territories. With such rapid expansion, how were they to fulfill (or rescind) the many promises they had made during the war? Enter the League of Nations, the now-defunct predecessor to the United Nations, which was responsible for the initial stages of Zionist expansion into Palestine.

“The League of Nations was an openly colonial project,” says Beckett. “During the 1920s and 30s, Britain heavily encouraged Zionist immigration to Palestine. The idea was simple: European Jews would establish a settler community in the name of civilization. This would give the British a reason to stay in Palestine, now as the protectors of the self-determination of the Jewish-European community.” 

The beginning of the Second World War would usher in a new era of international dynamics. “World War Two was a war between the British Empire and Germany, with the goal of preserving the British Empire while the United States and the U.S.S.R were beginning their own imperial projects,” Beckett states. 

The United Nations was formed out of the ashes of the failed League of Nations and the former’s self-contradictions are woven intricately into its foundation. Beckett points to the preamble of the UN Charter, which passionately defends the inherent dignity and equality of all men in the wake of two devastating world wars. It was written, in large part, by Jan Smuts, who is known for introducing apartheid into South African law during his tenure as prime minister, and for being a staunch supporter of establishing the State of Israel in the land of Palestine. Equality, it seems, was never truly in the cards for the colonized. 

“Speaking personally,” Beckett says, “ I believe that the creation of the State of Israel was a just compensation for what happened in the Holocaust. What I disagree with was how the compensation was paid. The Jewish people who were most affected were Europeans and mostly had no interest in leaving Europe. The state could have been made out of a significant portion of Germany.”

That idea was unthinkable at the time. There were seven potential locations put forward for the State of Israel and none of them were in Europe; every option was in a colonized territory. No matter where the State of Israel would go, it would follow the colonialist system, with the help of UN Charter Chapters 11 and 12, which explain how to legally run a colony, Beckett states. 

Chapter 11, which explains the legally-acceptable way to “assume the administration of territories whose peoples have not yet attained a full measure of self-government”, was drafted as a way to allow empires like France and Britain to maintain control over their colonies and mandates in a legal manner. Israel, founded from the territory of the Palestine Mandate, was the UN’s last formal colonial project.

Is it Illegal?

Given the West’s long history of legal oppression of the Third World, Beckett suggests that the legality of Israel’s current actions may not matter. “The Israeli occupation of Palestine is a product of international law, regulated and recognized by international law. Despite the occupation, international law allows Israel to be a full member of the UN, to engage in preferential trade agreements with the European Union, and receive military aid from the United States,” explains Beckett. “We can bleat about Israel being illegal, but at the end of the day, as long as foreign multinational corporations are allowed to invest heavily there, nothing will be done.”

That has not stopped the international community from attempting to use international governance to restrain Israel. In December 2023, South Africa accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide in December.

Is it fair to accuse Israel of genocide? Beckett believes, yes. He reads from the convention, “‘Killing members of the group’? Check. ‘ Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group’? Check. ‘Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part’? Check, check, Check.”

But will the court agree with him? While it is far too early to tell if the allegations can be proven, which may take years, the court in late January did agree to take on the case and issued several provisional measures against Israel. 

These measures include the requirement to prevent the commisison of any acts considered genocide, to prevent and punish the incitement of genocide, to take immediate measures to allow humanitarian assistance, to take immediate efforts to prevent the destruction of evidence, and to submit a compliance report regarding these measures within one month. Will these requirements have any real effect?

“The provisional measures will not have a direct impact on Israel’s engagement in Gaza, especially since they did not call for a ceasefire,” Beckett states. “You can’t say ‘increase the humanitarian aid’ without saying ‘stop the bombing’.”

The court’s provisional ruling, Beckett says, basically tells Israel to follow the rules of the Convention because Israel is a party to the Convention. Israel, however, argues that they have been following the rules the whole time. As a result, it is unlikely Israel will institute any changes to the strategy it has implemented since the beginning of its campaign. Since the provisional measures offer little solace to the Palestinians, is there any hope that Israel will be found guilty of genocide in the coming court procedures?

In a podcast with the The Cairo Review of Global Affairs, Beckett explains the problem is proving intent. “The tricky legal question is whether Israel intends to be genocidal,” he states. “Israel’s argument is that they have no intention of destroying the Palestinians or the Gazans, their only intention is to destroy Hamas.” 

Israel may have a hard time proving that argument, especially when government officials have made comments that seem to indicate a desire to remove the Palestinians entirely. For instance, Knesset member Amit Halevi stated that there should be two goals for Israel’s victory, to ensure “there is no more Muslim land in the land of Israel … [and] after we make it the land of Israel, Gaza should be left as a monument, like Sodom”, referencing the town of Sodom obliterated with sulfur and fire by God in the Old Testament.

“The problem is, Israel can claim that all these individuals were not speaking for the state,” Beckett explains. “Since the court ordered Israel to punish the incitement of genocide, at most, some of these people may be convicted symbolically. Beyond that, it is very difficult to prove that the government’s official policy was genocidal.”

Even if the ICJ did find Israel guilty of violating the convention, which Beckett believes is incredibly unlikely, it would be too late to help the Gazans suffering now. He explains that the only UN body capable of initiating economic sanctions against Israel immediately would be the Security Council. However, any decision made in the Security Council can be vetoed by the United States, which has offered perpetual immunity to Israel. 

Ineffective and Unenforceable 

Meanwhile, the UN Human Rights Council is equally ineffective. “Even if there were definitive proof of human rights violations committed by Israel, nothing decided in the UN Human Rights Council would be enforceable,” says Beckett. 

There is one slight beam of light in the darkness for the legal fight against Israel’s human rights violations, but it is barely flickering. The International Crime Court, which has been investigating the situation in Palestine and Gaza, could charge any Israeli individuals who had been proven to commit a violation and issue a warrant for their arrest.

“But who would arrest them?” asks Beckett. “In theory, any state that is party to the ICC has the obligation to arrest them if the individual lands on their territory, but Israel won’t arrest their own people and the United States isn’t party to the ICC, so these people could travel freely as long as they stay out of Europe.”

There is a slight chance, according to Beckett, that the ICC will investigate the crimes of apartheid and genocide, but it’s unlikely. “It’s always worth emphasizing that the ICC has never prosecuted anyone who was not a black man,” Beckett reminds. 

Palestinians Haven’t Died Out

In a world that wishes to shake off the last reminders of colonialism, why has Palestine remained such a sticking point? According to Beckett, it’s because the Palestinians are one of few native groups that have survived this long. 

“The United States doesn’t have to maintain control over the natives because there are practically none left, same with Canada, Australia, and New Zealand,” states Beckett. “The only real difference between Israel and the rest is that the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians hasn’t worked yet.”