…As Jewish Israelis bury
their dead and recite psalms for their captured, few want to hear at this
moment that millions of Palestinians lack basic human rights. Neither do many
Jews abroad. I understand; this attack has awakened the deepest traumas of our
badly scarred people. But the truth remains: The denial of Palestinian freedom
sits at the heart of this conflict, which began long before Hamas’s creation in
the late 1980s.
Most of Gaza’s residents aren’t from Gaza. They’re the descendants of
refugees who were expelled, or fled in fear, during Israel’s
war of independence in 1948. They live in what Human Rights Watch has called an
“open-air prison,” penned in by an Israeli state that — with help from Egypt —
rations everything that goes in and out, from tomatoes to
the travel documents
children need to get lifesaving medical care.
From this overcrowded cage, which the United Nations in 2017 declared “unlivable”
for many residents in part because it lacks electricity and clean water, many
Palestinians in Gaza can see the land that their parents and grandparents
called home, though most may never set foot in it.
Palestinians in the West Bank are only
slightly better off. For more than half a century, they have lived without due
process, free movement, citizenship or the ability to vote for the government
that controls their lives. Defenseless against an Israeli government that includes
ministers openly
committed to ethnic cleansing, many are being driven from their homes in what Palestinians compare to
the mass expulsions of 1948.
Americans and Israeli Jews have the luxury of
ignoring these harsh realities. Palestinians do not. Indeed, the commander of
Hamas’s military wing cited attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank in
justifying its barbarism last weekend.
Just as Black South Africans resisted apartheid, Palestinians resist a system
that has earned the same designation from the world’s leading human rights organizations and Israel’s own.
After last weekend, some critics may claim Palestinians are
incapable of resisting in ethical ways. But that’s not true. In 1936, during
the British mandate, Palestinians began what some consider the longest
anticolonial general strike in history. In 1976, on what became known as Land
Day, thousands of Palestinian citizens demonstrated against the Israeli
government’s seizure of Palestinian property in Israel’s north.
The first intifada against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank
and the Gaza Strip, which lasted from roughly 1987 to 1993, consisted primarily of
nonviolent boycotts of Israeli goods and a refusal to pay Israeli taxes. While
some Palestinians threw stones and Molotov cocktails, armed attacks were rare,
even in the face of an Israeli crackdown that took more than 1,000 Palestinian lives. In
2005, 173 Palestinian civil society organizations asked “people
of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement
divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa
in the apartheid era.”
But in the United States, Palestinians received little credit
for trying to follow Black South Africans’ largely nonviolent path. Instead,
the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement’s call for full equality,
including the right of Palestinian refugees to return home, was widely deemed
antisemitic because it conflicts with the idea of a state that favors Jews.
It is true that these nonviolent efforts sit uncomfortably
alongside an ugly history of civilian massacres: the murder of 67 Jews in
Hebron in 1929 by local Palestinians after Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand
mufti of Jerusalem, claimed Jews were about to seize Al Aqsa Mosque; the
airplane hijackings of the late 1960s and 1970s carried out primarily by the
leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Yasir Arafat’s
nationalist Fatah faction; the 1972 assassination of Israeli athletes in Munich
carried out by the Palestinian organization Black September; and the suicide
bombings of the 1990s and 2000s conducted by Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad
and Fatah’s Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, whose victims included a friend of mine in
rabbinical school who I dreamed might one day officiate my wedding.
And yet it is essential to remember that some Palestinians
courageously condemned this inhuman violence. In 1979, Edward Said, the famed
literary critic, declared himself “horrified
at the hijacking of planes, the suicidal missions, the assassinations, the
bombing of schools and hotels.” Rashid Khalidi, a Palestinian American
historian, called the suicide bombings of the second
intifada “a war crime.” After Hamas’s attack last weekend, a member of the
Israeli parliament, Ayman Odeh, among the most prominent leaders of Israel’s
Palestinian citizens, declared, “It is
absolutely forbidden to accept any attacks on the innocent.”
Tragically, this vision of ethical resistance is being
repudiated by some pro-Palestinian activists in the United States. In a statement
last week, National Students for Justice in Palestine, which is affiliated with
more than 250 Palestinian solidarity groups in North America, called Hamas’s
attack “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance” that proves that “total
return and liberation to Palestine is near” and added, “from Rhodesia to South
Africa to Algeria, no settler colony can hold out forever.” One of its posters
featured a paraglider that some Hamas fighters used to enter Israel.
The reference to Algeria reveals the delusion
underlying this celebration of abduction and murder. After eight years of
hideous war, Algeria’s settlers returned to France. But there will be no
Algerian solution in Israel-Palestine. Israel is too militarily powerful to be
conquered. More fundamentally, Israeli Jews have no home country to which to
return. They are already home…
The failure of Hamas and its American defenders
to recognize that will make it much harder for Jews and Palestinians to resist
together in ethical ways. Before last Saturday, it was possible, with some
imagination, to envision a joint Palestinian-Jewish struggle for the mutual
liberation of both peoples. There were glimmers in the protest movement against
Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul, through which more and more Israeli
Jews grasped a connection between the denial of rights to Palestinians and the
assault on their own.
And there were signs in the United
States, where almost 40 percent of American Jews under the age of 40 told the Jewish
Electoral Institute in 2021 that they considered Israel an apartheid state.
More Jews in the United States, and even Israel, were beginning to see
Palestinian liberation as a form of Jewish liberation as well.
That potential alliance has now been
gravely damaged. There are many Jews willing to join Palestinians in a movement
to end apartheid, even if doing so alienates us from our communities, and in
some cases, our families. But we will not lock arms with people who cheer the
kidnapping or murder of a Jewish child.
The struggle to persuade Palestinian
activists to repudiate Hamas’s crimes, affirm a vision of mutual coexistence
and continue the spirit of Mr. Said and the A.N.C. will be waged inside the Palestinian
camp. The role of non-Palestinians is different: to help create the conditions
that allow ethical resistance to succeed…
Israel, with America’s help, has repeatedly undermined
Palestinians who sought to end Israel’s occupation through negotiations or
nonviolent pressure. As part of the 1993 Oslo Accords, the Palestine Liberation
Organization renounced violence and began working with Israel — albeit
imperfectly — to prevent attacks on Israelis, something that revolutionary
groups like the A.N.C. and the Irish Republican Army never did while their
people remained under oppression. At first, as Khalil Shikaki, a Palestinian
political scientist, has detailed, Palestinians
supported cooperation with Israel because they thought it would deliver them a
state. In early 1996, Palestinian support for the Oslo process reached 80
percent while support for violence against Israelis dropped to 20 percent…
As Palestinians lost faith that cooperation with Israel could
end the occupation, many appealed to the world to hold Israel accountable for
its violation of their rights. In response, both Democratic and Republican
presidents have worked diligently to ensure that these nonviolent efforts fail.
Since 1997, the United States has vetoed more than a
dozen United Nations Security Council resolutions criticizing Israel for its
actions in the West Bank and Gaza. This February, even as Israel’s far-right
government was beginning a huge settlement expansion, the
Biden administration reportedly wielded a veto threat to
drastically dilute a Security Council resolution that would have condemned
settlement growth.
Washington’s response to the International Criminal Court’s
efforts to investigate potential Israeli war crimes is equally hostile. Despite
lifting sanctions that the Trump administration
imposed on I.C.C. officials investigating the United States’s conduct in
Afghanistan, the Biden team remains adamantly opposed to
any I.C.C. investigation into Israel’s actions…
Hamas — and no one
else — bears the blame for its sadistic violence. But it can carry out such
violence more easily, and with less backlash from ordinary Palestinians,
because even many Palestinians who loathe the organization have lost hope that
moral strategies can succeed. By treating Israel radically differently from how
the United States treated South Africa in the 1980s, American politicians have
made it harder for Palestinians to follow the A.N.C.’s ethical path. The
Americans who claim to hate Hamas the most have empowered it again and again.
Israelis have just witnessed the greatest one-day loss of Jewish
life since the Holocaust. For Palestinians, especially in Gaza, where Israel
has now ordered more than one million people in the north to leave their homes,
the days to come are likely to bring dislocation and death on a scale that
should haunt the conscience of the world.
Never in my lifetime have the prospects for justice and peace
looked more remote. Yet the work of moral rebuilding must begin. In
Israel-Palestine and around the world, pockets of Palestinians and Jews, aided
by people of conscience of all backgrounds, must slowly construct networks of
trust based on the simple principle that the lives of both Palestinians and
Jews are precious and inextricably intertwined…
Like many others who care about the lives of both Palestinians
and Jews, I have felt in recent days the greatest despair I have ever known. On
Wednesday, a Palestinian friend sent me a note of consolation. She ended it
with the words “only together.” Maybe that can be our motto.
[Peter Beinart (@PeterBeinart)
is a professor of journalism and political science at the Newmark School
of Journalism at the City University of New York. He is also an
editor at large of Jewish Currents and writes The Beinart
Notebook, a weekly newsletter.]
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