Palestinians who live in Gaza live in some of the harshest and poorest conditions in the world. The city is basically an open-air prison, where 96% of the water is undrinkable, 49% of youth are unemployed, 56% live in poverty, and a blockade enforced by Israel and Egypt means that most Gazans cannot leave. The strip is controlled by Hamas, a terrorist organization that came to power in 2007 and since then has spent its time terrorizing Palestinians and launching attacks on Israeli civilians. Hamas cracks down on freedom of expression of Palestinians in the strip and subjects those who oppose them to torture and kidnapping. They store their weapons in schools and civilian centers, use humanitarian aid to buy weapons and continue funding their reign of terror.
When Palestinians are not being terrorized by Hamas, they are bombarded by Israeli missiles and rockets. Every few years, tensions flare up between Hamas and the IDF, and the civilians of Gaza are always caught in the middle. During the 11 days of fighting, Israeli airstrikes (and apparently some errant Hamas rockets) killed 243 Palestinians and wounded 1948, leaving at least 58,000 displaced and homeless. Of those killed, 66 were children, and 39 were women. In 2014 when the war between Israel and Hamas waged for 50 days, at least 1,462 Palestinian civilians were killed, including 495 children and 253 women. An unconditional ceasefire that allows Hamas to remain armed and does not do anything to prevent radicalization in the Gaza Strip spells out more clashes and destruction in the future.
MEANWHILE, THE window for change is closing, as extremism among Israeli and Palestinian youths continues to grow. According to a Pew Research poll in 2016, 43% of Israeli Jews think that peace is an impossibility, while 48% think that Arabs should be expelled. In the 2019 election, Israelis aged 18 to 24 preferred Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over his more liberal counterpart by 65% to 17%, while Israelis over 65 preferred Blue and White leader Benny Gantz over Netanyahu by 53% to 35%. The Kahanists, a group of violent extremists who believed in a theocratic Jewish state and were banned from Israeli politics due to their racism and extremism, were brought back into mainstream Israeli politics by Netanyahu to gain allies in the 2019 elections. In the most recent elections, they gained seats in Knesset. This includes people like MK Itamar Ben Gvir, who until recently had in his living room a portrait of Dr. Baruch Goldstein, a Rabbi Meir Kahane disciple who killed 29 Palestinians as they prayed in the West Bank.
As for Palestinians, Hamas is quickly gaining favor in places like east Jerusalem and the West Bank. Just last Friday, the mufti at al Aqsa, who is affiliated with the Palestinian Authority, was expelled from the mosque by Palestinians who support Hamas. Fighting then quickly broke out outside the mosque between PA and Hamas supporters. Meanwhile, in the West Bank, Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, canceled the long-overdue election likely in fear that he would get ousted from power or have to form a coalition with more radical groups with links to Hamas. The threat of having two Gazas surrounding Israel will do nothing but further escalate the situation and create a more vicious cycle of violence that would leave hundreds dead in the future.
HOWEVER, I rarely hear these points or this urgency from pro-Palestinian activists. Instead of bringing light to the radicalizing politics of occupation, activists seem to be more focused on getting caught up in theoretical wordplay over the “true” definition of Zionism. For many activists in the West, the problems they have with the State of Israel are not discriminatory policies but its very existence as a state. Many still seem to be laboring under the delusion that one day more than six million Jews, many of whom were born in the State of Israel, will pack up and leave. To put it clearly, the only way that Jews or Palestinians will leave the land is if they are ethnically cleansed and forcibly removed. The only option now is coexistence.
Any solution will be difficult to implement and will require great compromise. The wounds sustained over the course of 73 years will not heal overnight. The explosion of Arab-Jewish violence in towns like Haifa, Lod and Acre has revealed some of the tensions that have been building up in Israeli society and set back much of the effort to build coexistence and oust Netanyahu. However, the efforts by Jewish and Arab civilians to maintain the peace and call for a ceasefire have also revealed that peaceful coexistence already exists in Israel. It is clear that activists who want a two-state solution, or even a one-state solution, must act urgently and pragmatically to end the politics of radicalization and create more sustainable peace.
Otherwise, this ceasefire is a mere respite until the next clash between the IDF and Hamas.
The writer, an Egyptian student at the American University in Cairo (AUC), majoring in political science and communications, is passionate about Middle Eastern politics, history and culture.