12/21/23
12/21/2023If you are a Palestinian in Gaza, what are your options?
If you lived in north Gaza, you no longer do. You had to leave your home and most of your belongings, take your family and whatever you could carry, and head to south Gaza. Because if you stayed home, you were in grave danger from Israeli bombings and invading troops.
If you live in south Gaza, you are also in danger, because once the Israel Defense Forces destroyed most of north Gaza and worked their way through that area, they started in on south Gaza. Next, South Gazans, and those from the north who made it to the southern part of the enclave, have been told to move to a small area in southwest Gaza.
Food, water, medical supplies, shelter, toilets—-everything is in short supply. Some trucks carrying some of these supplies have been allowed through entry points from Egypt, but they are delivering only a fraction of what Gaza had been receiving before Israel retaliated for the Hamas attack that killed more than 1,000 Israelis near the Gaza border on October 7.
Civil order is beginning to break down across Gaza, as residents grow desperate for food and water for their families.
Fear is universal, and with good reason. The constant bombing and shelling, and gunfire from the invading Israel Defense Forces, have killed nearly 20,000 residents of Gaza, at least half of them women and children. Some of the dead are members of Hamas; most of them are civilians. The death count represents about 1 of every 100 residents of Gaza, and the bodies continue to pile up.
(One percent of the American population would tally about 3.3 million people.)
Most Palestinians live in Gaza, the West Bank (the area between Israel and the Jordan River), and East Jerusalem. These residents are stateless: they are not citizens of any country.
When the United Nations in 1948 delineated the borders of the new state of Israel out of the former Palestine mandate (in existence since the end of World War One), the remainder of the mandate was to become the state of Palestine. Jerusalem was to have had special multistate status.
That didn’t happen, and it hasn’t happened in the 75 years since then. First the United States, then other nations, then some Arab countries, and finally the Palestinian Authority—-all recognized the existence of the state of Israel, or at least granted the Jewish state the right to exist.
But a Palestinian state has yet to come into official existence. Israel keeps a tight rein on the Palestinian regions. And part of that control includes the construction of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, despite worldwide opposition to that activity.
Most of the world has called for a two-state solution to the bitter dispute. But the current Netanyahu government in Israel, which includes some strong right-wingers, adamantly refuses to consider that option.
Netanyahu doesn’t want to have to contend with an unfriendly self-governing Palestine as a neighbor, and neither do many of his constituents. In addition, some conservative Israelis want to see their nation expand to include the Old Testament borders—in other words, to officially annex the West Bank, Gaza, all of Jerusalem, and eventually even Syria and Lebanon if possible.
The fate of Palestinians under that scenario is uncertain at best. Israelis outnumber Palestinians almost two to one: roughly nine million to five million. But two million residents of Israel are Arabic; that drops the Jewish population of Israel to seven million.
If Israel absorbed the Palestinian population of five million, then the numbers of Jews and Arabs in the enlarged state of Israel would be about equal. If all residents of the enlarged state were granted equal citizenship, Israel would have extreme difficulty retaining its status as a Jewish state.
This kind of cogitating is sometimes labeled antisemitic. It’s not. Israel has a basic right to protect itself from its enemies, like Hamas, who would like to destroy both it and its Jewish residents. Going after Hamas fighters on their home territory in Gaza is both rational and necessary if further depredations against Jews in Israel, including brutal kidnappings and murders, are to be prevented.
But most of the world has increasing difficulty understanding the destruction of Gaza’s entire infrastructure, deprivation of Gazans’ basic life necessities, and killing tens of thousands of noncombatants with ongoing bombing and shelling. Nearly 85 percent of Gaza’s people have been displaced, some of them several times.
Israel owes the United States, its major supporter and military supplier, an explanation of its plans for Gaza once the destruction stops. Will Israel undertake the reconstruction of the enclave’s residential and commercial infrastructure, or will Israel even allow other nations to help out? Is Israel hoping, or expecting, that Arab nations will absorb most of Gaza’s residents into their own populations? How are the residents of Gaza supposed to live?
The Netanyahu government says rooting out Hamas in Gaza will take several months. It’s hard to imagine what condition Gaza Palestinians will be in if the destruction continues that long.
Collective punishment—-punishment or sanction imposed on a group for a crime committed by one or more of its members—-is a violation of international humanitarian law. And rarely is it successful.
There’s a story about a U.S. military invasion of a Vietnamese village, where fields, animals, and homes were destroyed. The commander of the military unit asked his Vietnamese aide how successful the aide thought the attack was as a wartime tactic. The aide responded, “I think you create more Viet Cong today.”
Israel claims that Hamas, by using civilians as human shields, is the enemy of the people of Gaza. There’s logic in that statement. But the 1.8 million Gazans uprooted by Israel’s
onslaught, and those bereft of relatives killed in the bombing, may have a different idea of the enemy, and Hamas may have found a new supply of converts.
What would you do if you lived in Gaza? ♦
