At a time when peace seems further away than ever, the largely symbolic announcement by Spain, Norway and Ireland to recognize the Palestinian state constitutes a desperate call to revive the moribund two-state solution.
According to the criteria of
Unfortunately, the Gaza war has not only deepened the gulf of fear and mistrust between Israelis and Palestinians, it has also made a two-state solution more unlikely. The sins of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands have rightly been the subject of international opprobrium. However, the friends of Palestine have failed their cause by failing to censure the self-destructive pattern of behavior of the Palestinian national movement and its utter lack of capacity for self-criticism, without which national emancipation will remain elusive.
The billions of dollars that Qatar and many other Hamas enablers have poured into Gaza could have turned the strip into a Palestinian Singapore capable of dismantling any Israeli opposition to the existence of a Palestinian state.
Instead, Hamas built with those funds a monstrous military machine and an entire city of tunnels twice the size of the London Underground. The moderate Palestinians of the West Bank, for their part, do not have a better record of turning historical conjunctures into strategic occasions.
With these funds, Hamas built a monstrous military machine and an entire city of tunnels twice the size of the London Underground.
Five historical crossroads exemplify this self-destructive pattern of Palestinian behavior: the beginning of the war against the United Nations partition plan of 1947; the rejection in 1967 of Security Council Resolution 242 that later became the basis of all peace efforts; the drift towards the Al Aqsa intifada while rejecting Bill Clinton’s parameters, the most sensible peace plan ever presented by an American president; President Mahmoud Abbas’s frivolous rejection of Ehud Olmert’s 2008 peace plan, based on the full restitution of Palestinian lands; and, finally, the Hamas massacre of October 7, 2023.
There are five catastrophes, all marked by Palestinian euphoria at the beginning and denial at the end, that have shaped the Palestinian drama. All five times, the wars were preceded by grandiose Palestinian pronouncements and popular enthusiasm, as well as broad international support. And all five times, as soon as tragedy struck, the euphoria and enthusiasm were eliminated from the collective Palestinian memory, so that the event came to be remembered simply as a case of pure Israeli cruelty.
Wolfgang Schivelbusch (The Culture of Defeat. On National Trauma, Mourning and Recovery) has written about how defeated sides and countries (the South in the American Civil War, France in 1870, the German Wilhelmine Empire in 1918, and the case of Russia after the defeat of the Soviet Union in the Cold War) are capable of reconceptualizing military defeats as moral victories and reshaping their stories to transmute failure into cosmic injustice with the corresponding fantasies of revenge that this entails.
Euphoria and tragedy
The unbridled enthusiasm that followed the October 7 massacre of Israeli civilians was a moment of such euphoria that it was destined to lead to tragedy.
The unbridled enthusiasm that followed the October 7 massacre of Israeli civilians was a moment of such euphoria that it was destined to lead to tragedy. The fact is that every war Israel has fought with the Palestinians since 1948 has resulted in automatic accusations of genocide.
An Israeli psychoanalyst once noted with bitter irony that the West will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz. However, a Palestinian town of just over a million inhabitants in 1948 now has almost seven million in Palestine and more than 13 million worldwide, nine times more than in 1948; and Palestinian-Israelis, who in 1948 were 11% of the country’s population, are today 21%. That, as far as genocide is concerned.
Genocide is a horrific crime, and the promise of “never again” that followed the Holocaust of European Jews during World War II has been repeatedly broken. Bosnia, Darfur and Rwanda are infamous examples. Unfortunately, the claim that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza cheapens the term and only serves to obscure the more genuine concern about the possibility that Israel is breaking the laws of war; It is a possibility that has not been addressed, much less investigated, in cases such as the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or the war in Yemen with its hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths.
Gaza is a battlefield that no modern army has ever faced. US General David Petraeus acknowledged that Gaza is a scenario “much more complex than Fallujah, Ramadi, Baquba and Mosul combined.” This explains why 25% of Israeli casualties (including three hostages fleeing captivity) have been due to friendly fire. He also explains much of the involuntary deaths of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. When wanted terrorists hide in a tent camp intended for evacuees, as recently happened in Rafah, they do not have immunity under Article 28 of the Geneva Convention on the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War. war.
Any comparison with other conflicts since the beginning of this millennium reveals that Israel is the country that harms the least innocent people, both in relative and absolute terms.
Nothing can hide the unforgivable number of civilian victims and the Carthaginian devastation of Gaza’s material infrastructure. However, any comparison with other conflicts since the beginning of this millennium reveals that Israel is the country that harms the least innocent people, both in relative and absolute terms.
US forces spent nine months rampaging through Mosul to defeat the Islamic State, turning the city into a cemetery for at least 11,000 civilians. In Afghanistan, the mistaken attack on hundreds of civilians at weddings became such a common occurrence that Americans even gave it a nickname, wedding and boom.
According to a study by Brown University, between 280,771 and 315,190 civilians died in the Iraq War from aerial bombardments, shells, gunfire, and fires caused by bombing from the beginning of the invasion until March 2003. 70% of those who died in the “war on terror” starting in 2001 were innocent civilians and, according to Iraq Body Count, Americans killed at least three times as many civilians in Iraq as soldiers, and not “only” one and a half times, as is the case with Israel. in Gaza.
The laws of war
Under the laws of war, the proportionality of an attack is measured by the relationship between the expected security benefit and the expected harm to enemy civilians. The expected benefit of the Israel Defense Forces is to prevent the enemy from carrying out his stated intention: the destruction of Israel. Since Iran, Hezbollah, the Houthis and the West Bank Arabs have already joined Hamas, there is a possibility that this objective will be achieved, so it must be thwarted.
If the Palestinians want to snatch a victory from the jaws of the current tragedy, it would be desirable for them to accommodate their dreams to a reality that has changed considerably since their Pavlovian rejection of multiple peace offers.
Nabil Amr, a minister under Arafat, lamented the Palestinians’ self-destructive behavior in an open letter to his boss: “How many times have we been asked to do something we could have done and we have done nothing? Later, when the solution was already unattainable, we began to travel the world in the hope of achieving what had already been offered to us and we had rejected. And then we discovered that, in the time between our rejection and our subsequent acceptance, the world had changed…
If the Palestinians want to snatch a victory from the jaws of the current tragedy, it would be desirable for them to accommodate their dreams to a reality that has changed considerably since their Pavlovian rejection of multiple peace offers.
After his rejection of Bill Clinton’s peace offer, I put the same thing to Arafat in the following terms: “This leads us to a catastrophe. Next time, the West Bank will fill even more with settlements, you will forge an alliance with Hamas, and you will put us in the face of horror.
The bruised and reduced Israeli peace camp will never recover from this defeat. “You have opened the doors for the rise of Israeli hawks.” The truth is that hawks nourish each other.
Hamas is today the most popular force in Palestine, and that is leading nowhere. Stopping the war, as everyone but Netanyahu wants, is the formula for Hamas’ survival.
State building has never been the main motive of Palestinian nationalism, which now remains divided between pan-Islamists who dream of an Arab nation without borders and secular nationalists who have never been able to settle for Israel’s best peace offers.
AUTHOR: SHLOMO BEN AMI
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#suffering #Palestine #illusion #States