The Hopelessness in the Gaza-Israel Relationship

There is one great truth about the current attacks that should be remembered by everyone. The Hamas leadership had to know that the continued missile launches would inevitably lead to an attack by Israel. They had to know this. They knew there would be casualties like they are currently seeing. Yet they chose to go ahead and continue with the attacks on Israel. In other words, they provoked this on purpose along with all of the suffering it has brought. I don't know that what Israel is doing is wise or just but could any Israeli government survive if they did nothing? Why would we really expect them to?

If Hamas actually stopped all missile launches from Gaza, which they do have the muscle to accomplish and kept it that way for six months or so could Israel really resist the international pressure to treat the Palestinians in Gaza better? I think not. But Hamas is ideologically capable of doing something that rational and I base that statement on recent history.

I agree with prettymuch everything you wrote, Jim. I'd add that when I was in Israel this August, and we were scheduled to visit Sderot, our plans were changed at the last minute and instead, the person with whom we were to meet, a psychologist who works with the residents there, not for PTSD but to just live day to day, conveyed to us the sense of anger and frustration that the residents and others in that part of the S. Negev feel re: Israel not taking any military action. It's not that they don't understand that they live there and choose to, to the extent anyone chooses where they live. It's not that they didn't understand what the consequences of action would be. It is more the feeling that no one cared - not Hamas, not residents of Gaza (have we ever read that they have asked Hamas to stop launching rockets?) and, finally, not the government of Israel or Israelis living outside rocket range - with the possible exception of residents of Kiryat Shimona and that area in the north that's been victimized by Katushas.

The blockade is unacceptable to me, Jim. I will state that outright. There have got to be other ways that between the UN, the Arab League, Israel and its allies that those waters can be made safe and only what should get through gets through.

But what is totally lacking - from what I can see - is any reason to trust that Hamas has any good faith INTEREST in peace. I just don't think they do.

So then what? That's where I always end up.

Moshe Dayan:

We have no solution, you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave, and we will see where this process leads.

* Yossi Beilin, Mehiro shel Ihud (Revivim, 1985), 42 speaking of the Palestinians

As usual the innocents suffer the most when powers that run nations are inept and sociopathic. It will be interesting to see if Obama can introduce anything useful to this nightmarish cycle. And yes, why isn't the Arab League doing more? Seems like they would have a better chance than anyone else in pressuring Hamas to end the insane provoking.

JSpencer - this NPR piece from this morning featured Shibley Telhami talking about the Arab League nations' iffy relations with Hamas in part because several of the members of the Arab League are far more secular and interested in stable, economically viable nation-building rather than destruction. But - to be fair, they get that "luxury" because they are in their "own" lands - Egypt for example - that is a population that's never been displaced at any time in history. Palestinians, members of Hamas, cannot say that. Nor can Israelis - of any religion.

Here's the NPR piece - it's short and worth listening to:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?st...

thank you Jillzie for someone with a viewpoint for finally broaching/bearding the underlayment of these situations for TMV. Appreciate it. There is so so much to be said aloud about all these matters that many still say aloud only behind doors. A lot of people, including myself, feel unqualified to report on something we dont have enough facts/ historical perspective about yet other than huge amounts of rhetorical insistence from many quarters. That you have some eyewitness for impressions is useful also. There used to be a commenter at TMV whom I havent seen for a while. He so aptly described his own family in Israel and outside Israel, and how within a single family, there were many points of view, many stands and premises about these matters, many clearly adamant

dr.e

Well, you know how much I respect you dr. e, but I will say so again: your comment means a lot to me.

It's true - if I didn't still have the voice and words of the Israeli Arab mayor of West Bartaa in my head, telling us about how his son, who is in his early 20s and graduating from college - either Haifa or Tel Aviv, considers himself 100% Israeli but dedicated and determined to fight (rhetorically, legally, and not with violence) for equality with Jews, and telling us, himself, how the polls that say Israeli Arabs - the nearly 1.5 million of them - would prefer to live under the Israeli gov't than a Palestinian one, then maybe it would be even easier to feel the gutwrenching sickness at the images of devastation in Gaza.

But what do we demand of them - what do we demand of them to demand for themselves? Hamas was supposed to be a relatively decent caretaker in its early years but it's long ceased to have that as its focus, and from what I've read, that was never its long-term goal.

Isn't this problem somewhat similar to the Iraqis - not quite - not like Saddam, but still - this issue of who decides when a population chooses for itself? And yet, they did - they chose Hamas. Obviously not my first choice. :)

Someone asked me two days ago, what pressure could be brought on Israel to give up the blockade - but in answering that question, doesn't it continue to seem odd that the Arab League nations are, as they have been for decades, so mute on this? We do know how to explain it, but, I've written this before - if they won't deal with Hamas, why should Israel have to - especially if Israel and Hamas do not have any common interests? At least Israel and some of the Arab League countries have some common interests.

Sigh - I don't know what is going to happen. But I know that due to all the anger fomented all these years in the refugee camps, I'm quite terrified that much of the population in Gaza will support going for broke.

What, in turn, will that provoke in the Arab League nations??

I am not sure Jillzie, in part because I dont think I quite grasp all the underlying agendas by all sides. But, as a shrink with some knowing about human nature and the psychology of power vis a vis Rank, Freud et al, I think that we might learn most by looking at the silent ones, as you point out, rather than only the ones hurling weapons...for in the psychology of maintaining tight control on one's own power, one tries to get someone else to fight with one's enemy instead of fighting them oneself, thereby 'letting others fight one's battles for one,' while remaining innocent-looking, while not engaging in the highly unpopulat conscripting of young men and thereby upsetting one's own citizenry, and not having to pillage the king's coffers to supply a war that often has NO expiration date.

In that sense, it may mean 'the silent ones' are practicing an ancient craft: waiting for someone else to spend themselves silly in war, to lose all of a generation of their promising young men to either death or lifelong trauma, to let someone else bear the burden. And who would that burden-bearer be? Not the provacateur. Rather, the protectors of the provacateurs.


Re another good point you bring up about the camps, one wonders how/ what are the differences between the refugee camps there, compared to, for instance, how people lived after coming out of Treblinka, Dachau, Bergen Belsen; those who came out of the Russian slave labor camps (my father's relatives); those who were forced from Bataan; those who came out of the 'containment Japanese American camps' in the US; those who were dragged from their homes and farms after WWII all throughout eastern Europe and forced to 'displaced persons' camps and never again allowed to return to their ancestral homes; those who were forcibly interred in Rwanda, in South Africa.

There seem to be many choices about how to live once one comes out of squalor and injustice.

dr.e

The blockade is the main thing I had in mind when I referred to treating the Palestinians better, Jill.