Bibi, if you kill every last Hamas member, Israel still wouldn't be safe

Let's get right to it; Peter Beinart's brilliant-as-usual analysis of why Netanyahu's (unrealistic) goal of wiping all of Hamas from Palestine would still leave Israel in danger — even greater danger. It's longer than some readers might like, but it's essential reading and I've condensed its essence with no little ferocity. To read it all, go here.   

The harsh reality is that for many of the most powerful people inside the American Jewish community [to which Beinart belongs] and for many in American politics as well, there is only one metric that matters. And that metric is the safety of Israeli Jews. Essentially, any number of Palestinian deaths are acceptable if it produces an increased safety for Israeli Jews.... And the argument that I want to make is that this war will make Israel less safe—not more safe but less safe. [For the sake of argument] I want to start with a massive concession. I want to imagine that Israel in this war can destroy Hamas. 

I suggest that you will have an extremely difficult time finding a single reputable Palestinian commentator who says that destroying Hamas, if that were even possible, would make Israel safer. Now, why is that? Because Palestinians recognize that Palestinians do not resist Israel because of Hamas. They began resisting Israel long before Hamas was even created. Palestinians resist Israel because Palestinians are not free.... Most of the people in Gaza are from the families of refugees. Most of them were expelled from Israel during Israel’s war of independence. Many can actually see the lands from which their families were expelled or fled in fear.... 25 years before Hamas was created in the late 1980s—this is the early 1950s—Israel was going in militarily to Gaza because Gaza represented a threat to Israel. And the fundamental threat it represented was all of these refugees who wanted to return.

If you look at the armed resistance in the 1970s by Palestinians—including terrible acts of violence against Israeli civilians, the Munich Olympics attack, the Ma’alot massacre on children in 1974, the airline hijackings—none of them were done by Hamas because Hamas didn’t exist. None of them were even done by Islamists. They were largely done by leftist and nationalist Palestinian factions.... The reason for the resistance didn’t have to do with the particular ideology or name of the Palestinian resistance organizations. It was because Palestinians had been dispossessed and were fighting against their dispossession.

You destroy Hamas. And what then? We know that Hamas recruits from the families of people that Israel has killed. So, some future Palestinian group—give it whatever name you want, think about whatever ideological predisposition it might have—it will almost certainly do the same thing. And think about how many potential recruits there are now. Not only do you have a population of people who are of refugees, who have been seeking to return to their homes since 1948, who have been repeatedly traumatized by Israeli attacks over the years, but now you have a population, 90% of whose homes have been destroyed. Every single person in Gaza will have family or close friends who have been killed in this war.... Think about the desire for revenge that will produce among Palestinians.

A wasted opportunity.

If Palestinians could be convinced that giving up armed resistance, indeed, working with Israel to prevent armed resistance, could bring them closer to freedom, maybe not for refugee return, but for their own state, self-determination, human rights, the right to govern their own lives. If Palestinians believe that, perhaps even given this horror, you might be able to imagine that Palestinians would say, you know what, armed resistance is not the way to go.

But here’s the problem: we’ve run this experiment. In the West Bank, Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority have been doing exactly that. They’ve been cooperating with Israel, collaborating with Israel to prevent armed resistance from the West Bank for almost 20 years. And you know what? They’ve been pretty darn successful at it. And what have Palestinians seen that they have gotten out of that cooperation, that collaboration? More and more settlement growth that’s forced them into smaller and smaller little kind of ghettos in the West Bank, little cantons with Israel controlling all the territory in between, and more and more settler violence. You’d be very hard pressed to find any Palestinian who believes that strategy would work.

Especially given what the Israeli government is now saying about what they want to do after this war. They’re not saying that if Palestinians did absolutely everything right, they might move towards statehood. In fact, Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel, for more than 15 years now, have had a government that is explicitly opposed to Palestinian statehood. And now, the Israeli government is saying it wants to actually create a buffer zone that makes the Gaza Strip smaller, that crowds people in Gaza into smaller and smaller territories, probably an even harsher blockade that will make any prospect of genuine reconstruction out of this absolute catastrophe impossible.

You want to know what frightens me? And I’m speaking here to those people who only care about Israeli Jewish lives. You know what frightens me more than Hamas? As someone who cares passionately about Israeli Jewish life, Hamas certainly frightens me. What frightens me more is what comes after Hamas, given the unimaginable violence and destruction that Israel has now committed in Gaza.

Israeli governments have successively and repeatedly opted for fruitless war rather than dispelling the fundamental cause of violence by agreeing to Palestinian statehood.

In 1982 Israel invaded Lebanon to rid it of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The PLO survived, and worse, the invasion laid the ground for the coming of Hezbollah. In 2006 Israel again invaded Lebanon, this time to rid it of — you guessed it — Hezbollah, which is now stronger than ever.

Since 2008 Israel has waged three wars against Hamas in Gaza. The cumulative failure of those wars was hideously demonstrated by Hamas' 7 October attack. 

Israel keeps fighting for peace, which is like screwing for virginity. And if it keeps it up, it's going to permanently screw itself out of anything even close to stable security.

Comments

[GWN]

Without the Palestinians, the Israeli Right would hardly exist. So don't look for any policy that defuses the problems with Palestinians. The hardliners on both sides depend on their counterparts to justify their own survival.

[Anne J]

This piece made me think of all those little Palestinian children who will eventually survive this assault by Israel. After seeing their friends and families massacred, will this radicalized them when they grow up? Is this what Israel wants? To keep killing Palestinians so that it will create more terrorist groups so that they will always have an excuse to kill more Palestinians? To create more terrorists by constantly terrorizing people?

[GWN]

I fear the short answer to your question, Anne, is yes. The hardliners on both sides do not want a two state solution; indeed, they hardly want a one state solution unless it involves an ethnically cleansed version. A two state solution would depend on the large numbers of people in the center and center-left on both sides, but they would have to overcome their respective right wings. And these are not just ethnically and politically motivated. They are also religiously motivated. This conflict has been going on in one form or another since the story of Jacob and Esau was written to justify the hatred between Arabs and Jews.