“I just wish they would disappear.” These are the words of a young Israeli friend, spoken well before the current war in and around Gaza. Hers is a popular sentiment among Israelis, all the more so today. This is a common outlook which sees Palestinians as the implacable obstacle to normal national and personal life.

For the last generation, Israelis and the international community at large have done much to assure themselves that the contest between the Arabs and Israel has been concluded in Israel’s favor. Israelis convinced themselves that the Oslo Process inaugurated by the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, however imperfect, enables them to live a normal life and enjoy the advantages of a stable, deluxe occupation.

What options indeed did Palestinians have to successfully contest Israel’s management of a system Israeli leaders themselves have defined as a system of apartheid? How could they carve an agreed upon homeland out of territories claimed and settled by Israel when for the last decade there has not been even the whisper of a diplomatic process aimed at realizing that objective?

The hapless Palestine Authority is failing in its primary responsibility: to protect its people against an Israeli campaign to forever undermine a sovereign Palestinian presence west of the Jordan River. And in Gaza, Palestinians were—to quote former Israeli chief of staff Raphael (Raful) Eitan—left to “scurry around like drunk cockroaches in a bottle”.

The political failure of Palestinian leadership of whatever stripe has proceeded in tandem with the disappearance of popular Israeli support for Palestinian independence and an end to occupation. In the Knesset today, the number of politicians promoting an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

Israel has tried mightily to live as though Palestinians have indeed disappeared. How else do you explain the thousands of young people attending the Supernova music festival on October 7, barely 5 kilometers from the prison that is Gaza?

It should come as no surprise that Palestinians, especially those in Gaza, find the system of occupation established to promote Israel’s legitimate yearning for a normal existence to be insufferable.

“Enough is enough,” replied the architect of Operation Al Aqsa Storm, Mohammed Deif, when asked for the rationale behind driving Hamas’ unprecedented attack.

Gaza in Israel’s Eyes
In his eulogy for a fallen comrade in a settlement near Gaza almost seventy years ago, then chief of staff Moshe Dayan, one of Israel’s most accomplished military commanders, speaks with heartfelt eloquence to us even today. Palestinians, Dayan declared, are not going away. They will not disappear. Nor can their hatred be assuaged. Israelis must be prepared to live by the sword, to forego a normal life, to be reconciled to the price to be paid to ensure Israel’s existence—to pay the price of well-founded Palestinian hatred and not be suckered by talk of peace.

“Yesterday with daybreak, Roi was murdered. The quiet of a spring morning blinded him, and he did not see the stalkers of his soul on the furrow,” Dayan said. “Let us not hurl blame at the murderers. Why should we complain of their hatred for us? Eight years have they sat in the refugee camps of Gaza, and seen, with their own eyes, how we have made a homeland of the soil and the villages where they and their forebears once dwelt.”

With a passion that resonates through the generations, Dayan issued a call to arms. Israel, he declared, was engaged in a brutal process of nation building, necessarily and justifiably undertaken at the expense of the Palestinians. Israelis, if they were to establish a state out of the ashes of the Holocaust, must be prepared to wage an unwavering, generational national conflict against Palestine.

“Not from the Arabs of Gaza must we demand the blood of Roi,” Dayan counseled, “but from ourselves. How our eyes are closed to the reality of our fate, unwilling to see the destiny of our generation in its full cruelty. Have we forgotten that this small band of youths, settled in Nahal Oz, carries on its shoulders the heavy gates of Gaza, beyond which hundreds of thousands of eyes and arms huddle together and pray for the onset of our weakness so that they may tear us to pieces—has this been forgotten? For we know that if the hope of our destruction is to perish, we must be, morning and evening, armed and ready.

“A generation of settlement are we, and without the steel helmet and the maw of the cannon we shall not plant a tree, nor build a house. Our children shall not have lives to live if we do not dig shelters; and without the barbed wire fence and the machine gun, we shall not pave a path nor drill for water. The millions of Jews, annihilated without a land, peer out at us from the ashes of Israeli history and command us to settle and rebuild a land for our people. But beyond the furrow that marks the border, lies a surging sea of hatred and vengeance, yearning for the day that the tranquility blunts our alertness.”

Dayan understood that the Palestinians’ justified, insatiable desire to make Israel and Israelis disappear could not be tempered by half measures that failed to respect the legitimacy of Palestinian rage at their personal and national predicament.

Nor must Israel “heed the ambassadors of conspiring hypocrisy, who call for us to lay down our arms,” he cautioned. Israel, Dayan counselled, had no choice but to build an iron wall that Palestinians would be unable to breach.

“It is to us that the blood of Roi calls from his shredded body. Although we have vowed a thousand vows that our blood will never again be shed in vain—yesterday we were once again seduced, brought to listen, to believe. Our reckoning with ourselves, we shall make today. We mustn’t flinch from the hatred that accompanies and fills the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs, who live around us and are waiting for the moment when their hands may claim our blood. We mustn’t avert our eyes, lest our hands be weakened. That is the decree of our generation. That is the choice of our lives—to be willing and armed, strong and unyielding, lest the sword be knocked from our fists, and our lives severed.”

“Roi Rotberg, the thin blond lad who left Tel Aviv in order to build his home alongside the gates of Gaza, to serve as our wall. Roi — the light in his heart blinded his eyes and he saw not the flash of the blade. The longing for peace deafened his ears and he heard not the sound of the coiled murderers. The gates of Gaza were too heavy for his shoulders, and they crushed him.”

Roi Rotberg in his time. The young people attending the Supernova music festival in our own.