In his recent WSJ op-ed, Israel’s increasingly unpopular Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu writes: “Hamas must be destroyed, Gaza must be demilitarised, and Palestinian society must be deradicalised. These are the three prerequisites for peace between Israel and its Palestinian neighbours in Gaza.”
It is important to unpack some of the points in Netanyahu’s op-ed, starting with the very use of the term “peace.”
A desire for peace is normally difficult to fault. Everyone wants peace. But the question here is peace at what cost, on whose terms and to what end?
Netanyahu answers that query by saying “peace” requires “establishing a temporary security zone on the perimeter of Gaza and an inspection mechanism on the border between Gaza and Egypt that meets Israel’s security needs and prevents smuggling of weapons into the territory.” (italics added)
In other words, this peace has nothing to do with a sovereign Palestinian state. It is not about Palestinian rights and freedoms or their security. It is not about an end to their daily humiliations at the checkpoints that dot the Occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. It is not about settler violence, the demolition of Palestinian houses and orchards or raids on their villages. It is all about Israel’s security.
Further, Israel’s security must be ensured by breaking the Palestinian will to fight. Palestinians can either accept Israeli apartheid regime or leave. There is no third choice. Israel has the right to self-defence, we are told. But as Dr. Gabor Mate, a Canadian physician (himself a Jew) asked, “Self-defence against whom?”
Netanyahu does not say this clearly because he thinks he can fool all the people all the time. But Joe Biden, as well as the leaders of the UK, France, Germany and many others, know this. They are complicit in the atrocities committed by the Israeli apartheid regime. As Peter Beinart wrote in an article for Jewish Currents, “When it came to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, [Michael] Oren [Israeli ambassador to the US] notes in his memoir, Biden sometimes employed an uncomfortable analogy: ‘Never crucify yourself on a small cross.’ The message: The Palestinians aren’t pliable or important enough to be worth the trouble, given the political cost domestically.”
Asking for the erasure of Gaza is no longer an aberration. It is the norm in Israel.
Such is the measure of Netanyahu’s brazenness that in his WSJ op-ed he writes: “In destroying Hamas, Israel will continue to act in full compliance with international law.” (italics added). This is a lie. Other than the utterly delusional or the callously partisan, no scholar considers Israel’s bombing of Gaza to be compliant with international law.
Netanyahu is on record as likening his war against Hamas as the war against Nazism. Israel’s ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotovely, has compared and justified Israel’s campaign with the devastating Allied bombing of Dresden. And while Hotovely is a ultra-rightwing Likudnik, the list of Israeli former and current officials, politicians and diplomats calling for the total destruction of Gaza is long. Asking for the erasure of Gaza is no longer an aberration. It is the norm in Israel.
Netanyahu blames Hamas for endangering civilian lives. “Hamas places its terrorist infrastructure inside and underneath homes, hospitals, mosques, schools and other civilian sites, deliberately putting the Palestinian population at risk.” Therefore, as he tells us, “Unjustly blaming Israel for these casualties will only encourage Hamas.”
Either Netanyahu is conducting the war in compliance with international law or he is ending up killing thousands for which he wants the readers to blame Hamas. The irony of these two irreconcilable positions should of course be lost on the reader, or so Netanyahu hopes.
For good measure, he also says that “The expectation that the Palestinian Authority will demilitarise Gaza is a pipe dream.” As he puts it, “It [PA] currently funds and glorifies terrorism in Judea and Samaria and educates Palestinian children to seek the destruction of Israel.” I italicise Judea and Samaria because this is not just a reference to the ancient Kingdoms of Judah and Samaria but a deliberate avoidance of the modern-day reality: Netanyahu is talking about the Occupied West Bank, excluding East Jerusalem.
Hamas cannot be destroyed because Hamas is not just a physical entity; it is an idea — the idea that embodies Palestinian sovereignty and fighting spirit.
Netanyahu goes on to tell the reader that the Palestinian Authority “has shown neither the capability nor the will to demilitarise Gaza,” while deceitfully hiding the fact that the PA cannot even protect the hapless Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank against regular raids by the Israeli police and military forces from Hebron in the south to Jenin in the north.
So, yes, the PA cannot control Gaza; but neither can the Israeli Defence Forces. That’s where Netanyahu’s calculations go amiss. Hamas cannot be destroyed because Hamas is not just a physical entity; it is an idea — the idea that embodies Palestinian sovereignty and fighting spirit.
And this is where his idea of deradicalisation fails: “Schools must teach children to cherish life rather than death, and imams must cease to preach for the murder of Jews. Palestinian civil society needs to be transformed so that its people support fighting terrorism rather than funding it.” But children will begin to cherish life when they don’t end up dying because of Israeli bombs; when they don’t lose their parents; when their flesh is not burnt to the bones with phosphorous bombs. None of that makes Netanyahu’s list.
Palestinian children will also cherish life when they don’t have to go through the Erez Crossing, at the mercy of Israeli army and police. When they can travel freely to wherever they want to go. When they decide what comes into Gaza and what leaves Gaza. When they can see the sky and cherish its blueness; bathe in the Mediterranean knowing they are free, make music to lift their souls. When young Palestinian poets like Refaat Alareer do not have to write “If I must die, let it be a tale’ or Mahmoud Darwish didn’t have to write about “a prison cell with a cold window.”
Palestinian children will begin to cherish life when Israeli law doesn’t criminalise 12-year-olds or kill 8-year-olds with impunity. Essentially, be able to live a dignified life.
So, here are the actual three prerequisites for peace.
The utopia of Eretz Yisrael must be destroyed, the Israeli mindset must be demilitarised, and Israeli society must be deradicalised.
Eretz Yisrael lies at the heart of Israel’s settler-colonialism and apartheid. Even Yitzhak Rabin told Knesset barely a month before his assassination that “We would like this [Palestinian Authority] to be an entity which is less than a state and which will independently run the lives of the Palestinians under its authority.”
Ultra-orthodoxy and Religious Zionism has created an exclusionary mindset that lives in Biblical times and wants to recreate Eretz Yisrael in today’s world. The illegal settlers, sponsored by the state and protected by the IDF, are the vanguard of this radicalisation.
That must change.
Israel is a security state. It either walls in or walls out the Palestinians. It maintains checkpoints in the territories it occupies. It raids Palestinian refugee camps and homes at will, arrests and kills men, women and children. It has different roads for Jews and for Palestinian Arabs as well as different-coloured license plates for their vehicles. It controls Palestinians’ water and destroys their livelihoods at will.
That must change.
And yes, Israeli society must be deradicalised. Ultra-orthodoxy and Religious Zionism have created an exclusionary mindset that lives in Biblical times and wants to recreate Eretz Yisrael in today’s world. The illegal settlers, sponsored by the state and protected by the IDF, are the vanguard of this radicalisation.
Schools must teach children to value all lives, and rabbis must cease to preach for the extermination or exile of Palestinians. Israeli civil society needs to be transformed so that its people support peace through a two-state solution rather than enacting an apartheid regime in the name of security.