"One day, when it's safe, when there's no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this."--Omar El Akkad, Award-winning novelist, author and journalist, three weeks after the attacks began against Gaza
In an upper level college course covering the period of European history that included the two World Wars, I chose the topic of the Holocaust for the required research paper. It was reading Herman Wouk's The Winds of War and War and Remembrance that prompted my interest. Though his works were fiction, they were based on research historical fact, and Wouk, who was himself Jewish, born to parents who Russian immigrants from Minsk, did a great job of digging out the historical facts that separate the Holocaust as a distinctively deliberate attack on the Jewish population of Europe, from the way that the Third Reich treated its other political enemies.
So I am having more than a little trouble trying to understand what is happening in Gaza. After an event that saw the establishment of six concentration camps built for no other purpose except that of executing people because of their ethnicity, and their religion, the long struggle that finally brought it to an end, the shock at the discovery of just how bad things were, including the displacement of millions from their homes, and a deliberate persecution that included cruel starvation, intentional murder of children, and the destruction of their humanity, the cry that emerged fromt the suffering was, "Never again!"
And yet the national government of the state founded largely by the survivors of the Holocaust is raining death and destruction down on the inhabitants of a neighboring province, creating a humanitarian crisis, and then, from what the media that is there is reporting, deliberately blocking the delivery of food and medical supplies, leading to widespread starvation of the inhabitants.
"Never again!" wasn't specific to just the victims of the Holocaust. It was a vision shared by most of the rest of the world in the wake of a war that was believed to be the one that would end all wars. So I'm having a real difficult time understanding what benefit the people of Israel are getting from their government's deliberate destruction of the Gaza Strip. And that includes a death toll getting close to 70,000 civilians, mostly women and children, from bombing.
Retaliation or Response to the October 7, 2023 Attack?
It's been almost two years since the brutal, and unconscionable attack on Israel was launched from across the border in the Gaza Strip. That is always a danger which Israel knows is present, due to the political unrest within the impoverished, largely refugee population of Gaza. Israel's right to exist as a nation was established by the British, , in the post-war period, primarily as a reaction to the horrors of the Holocaust, and as a response to the push by Jewish political groups, mainly the Zionists, through the United Nations, to open Palestine up to unrestricted Jewish immigration.
There was talk about creating a "two state solution" to make room for increased Jewish immigration and well as to provide for the Palestinian Arabs who already lived there in some kind of "peaceful" means. I'm not sure who was in charge of doing so, whether it was the United Nations, or the British, but it never materialized. The history is complicated. Israel established itself as an independent state in 1948, and the territory it claimed has been expanded as the result of multiple wars and skirmishes. The boundary line that created the West Bank was established by an armistice in 1949, while the boundary that created the Gaza Strip was part of the 1950 armistice.
Together, Gaza and the West Bank take up about 40% of the territory within the province under the British mandate that borders the Mediterranean on the west, the Jordan River on the East and the Egyptian border through the Sinai, to the Gulf of Aqaba. A lot of people think this is the "two state solution" that gets talked about from time to time, but it isn't. The West Bank is under Israeli occupation, and has been since the 1967 war. And no Palestinian governing authority has been recognized in Gaza, which effectively puts that small province also under Israeli control.
And so, the terrorist groups that have sprung up in response to the presence of the Israeli state, and as the result of the multiple wars that have been fought over control of the land, find it relatively easy to gather support from among the areas populated by displaced persons who have no recognized governing authority of their own, under indirect Israeli control. They really have no backing at all, as they face off against Israel, which is backed by the United States and most of the western democracies.
It's easy for a terrorist group like Hamas to embed themselves in a place like Gaza, and plan terrorist attacks against Israel, not with the idea that they will gain territory or win back the land that their previous generations owned and worked, but that they will inflict enough damage to change the status of their oppression.
No one is justifying the October 7th attacks, which targeted innocent civilians, women and children, leading to more than 1,000 causualties. Likewise, Israel's right to exist, and to defend itself, established by diplomatic recognition of the United Nations, and supported strongly by the United States and Great Britain, is also not under any question here. But there are some legitimate questions that require answers.
Two Legitimate Questions
Israeli security is among the best in the world. So one of the questions here is how is it that this group of Hamas terrorists made it across the tightly defended, heavily watched border between Gaza and Israel and managed to commit this inescusable, violent, deadly attack on Israel? We still do not have any explanation for how this happened, with the border security being at its current level.
Defense of the Gaza border region is essential to Israel's survival. We know that. But we also know that something went wrong here for which those in charge have still not been held accountable. Was the breakthrough allowed in order to provide a pretext for an all-out assault aimed at the complete destruction of Gaza? The Netanyahu government has taken a position that is favorable toward elimination of Gaza, even as it ignores UN resolutions and American opposition to building settlements on the West Bank, which it continues to do.
Such moves for Netanyahu would eliminate any possibility of a "two state solution" which is what the UN, and the United States, have pushed for as a means of resolving conflict and bringing peace. For if Israel's right to exist, and defend itself is recognized, then so must the rights of those Palestinian Arabs, most of whom are now the children of the first generation that lived with Israeli sovereignty, to exist, have a sovereign self-governed state, and defend themselves.
The other legitimate question which must be asked is how much is too much? What has happened to Gaza is much more than simple retaliation for the October 7th attack. This looks very much like a war of aggression, aimed at invasion and conquest, and an almost deliberate attempt to bring the "two state solution" talk to an end, since the independence of Gaza is critical to that means of achieving peace, if it can ever be achieved.
It would also not surprise me to learn that most Israelis are not in favor of what is happening. This is not what is expected from a people who endured the kind of persecution that occurred as a result of the Holocaust. The persecuted Jewish survivors of the Holocaust had more than just their own people in mind when they declared "Never again." This was the desire for the whole world.
It might still be possible to salvage some good will, and recover some image of peace from this, depending on how it is handled from here on out. That might result if there is an immediate cease fire, and more than just rudimentary reparations are part of the restoration and solution to the problem, along with genuine efforts to make peace work, not just the tit for tat series of wars that have characterized the middle east since before the second world war.
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