David Lawrence-Young – Israel Scene May 2021 from Jerusalem
To paraphrase George Orwell, in 1941 he wrote: (1941): As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.*
Well, this isn’t exactly true, but while I am writing this, uncivilized Hamas terrorists are shooting literally hundreds of rockets into Israel. They are hoping that they will land in towns and settlements in order to cause mass destruction and major panic. So far they haven’t really succeeded although a number of rockets have landed in Ashkelon and Ashdod (near Gaza) and a few south of Tel-Aviv. Hopefully they won’t try to attack Jerusalem as their rockets aren’t too accurate and conventional wisdom says that they don’t want to hit their own holy Moslem sites here.
Now I will try and tell you how I understand this depressingly recurring situation happened and my own view of it all.
In 1967 in the Six-Day War, Israel captured the Gaza Strip, the area west of Jerusalem that was then called Transjordan, as well as the Golan Heights (a strategic strip of Syrian land which was used to threaten the north of Israel) and the Egyptian Sinai Desert.
Since then we have returned the Sinai Desert to Egypt but have kept the rest. This means that we are “sitting on/occupying” several chunks of territory, the most populated of which are the Gaza Strip (pop. two million) and the West Bank (pop. three million plus). We now have a ‘cold’ peace with our former enemies, Egypt and Jordan and a warmer and more positive peace with our newest Arab allies: Dubai, Bahrain and Morocco, none of the last three are our neighbors.
Personally, I would love to return the West Bank to Jordan (who doesn’t want it with its millions of anti-Jordanian Palestinians) and the Gaza Strip to Egypt (who kept the Gazans/Palestinians there until 1967 as 2nd class non-citizens and who don’t want them back either today.) I say this not because I love the Palestinians or because I’m a soft wooly-headed lefty, but out of nationalistic ‘selfishness.’ I believe in the Two-State solution, i.e. that they have their land and we have ours and we get rid of this headache and both sides can get on with the job of living peaceful constructive lives. I believe in this solution because my sense of history tells me that we cannot sit on/ occupy/ rule the Palestinians forever. It must come to an end somehow. In addition this whole occupation is costing us a fortune in money, effort and lives – both military and civilian. Even if we don’t love each other (as with Egypt and Jordan) it would be great to have at the minimum, a ‘cold peace’ with an independent Palestinian state.
However there is a major obstacle to this. There are now about 400,000 Israeli settlers living on the West Bank who have an enormous amount of right-wing political clout. I cannot see any Israeli government giving them up, even with these settlements moving into specially defended Israeli blocs on the West Bank. Bibi Netanyahu is pragmatically right wing and is being pushed all the time by the more extreme right wing politicians and settlers who make sure that he has a political majority. Bibi, despite his allegedly tough words, doesn’t dare to oppose these extreme right-wingers. This means that these West Bank settlers are given vast and disproportionate amounts of government funding for infrastructure, water, roads etc.
Personally, on my travels, I do my best to bypass these areas as they are always potentially dangerous with Palestinians throwing rocks or shooting bullets at passing cars. These poor people are being egged on by their leaders, e.g. Abu Mazan et al whose aim is to keep the pot boiling. By doing so, they hope that their poor countrymen will forget about the corruption and terrible services that their leaders are (or not) providing. It is easier to blame the imperialist Israelis than to improve their own standard of living.
In addition to all this, the Arabs on the West Bank have not had free elections for the past 15 years as Abu Mazan, the head of the Fatah party, finds any excuse not to have them. His latest excuse for cancelling the latest elections which were to have been held very recently is that the wicked Israelis would not let the Arabs in Jerusalem take part. He is scared that Hamas, the large and major opposition party, the party that runs Gaza, will take over.
Therefore, both Hamas and Fatah who hate each other, maybe even more than hating us, try and show who is more patriotically pro-Palestine by attacking us. This latest and present round is definitely a by-product of this internecine fighting.
In addition to this chaos, the Iranian supported Hamas have been firing rockets indiscriminately into Israeli towns and settlements and burning fields in the south for the past twenty years. These hostile actions are more of a nuisance value since fortunately they have killed very few civilians and are just carried out to keep up the present level of tension and allow the Hamas leaders to say to their people, “Aren’t we good? See how we’re attacking the wicked Zionists.” In the meanwhile, these same leaders are spending all their money and donations from abroad on building tunnels and an underground city to escape from the horrible Israelis who they know will attack them every few years in order to buy a few years of peace and quiet. As a result of the lack of civilian investment, the average Gazan is really poor and suffers from a high rate of unemployment, about fifty percent. Furthermore, the average Gazan has to put up with an inferior education system, insufficient medical and social services and an utterly inadequate local infrastructure. (I have seen this at first hand when I was there in the army.)
The situation now in May 2021 is that after the Hamas sent literally hundreds of rockets into Israel this past week, (to show how strong they are viz-a-viz Fatah) we decided to fight fire with fire. Now that we have seriously hurt their infrastructure, Hamas want to surrender before the rest of it gets blown up so they can prepare for another round of fighting.
Of course the only solution to all of the above is a political one. However, I cannot see any right-wing Israeli government giving up most of the West Bank, and until the population of Gaza gets rid of Hamas and realizes that fighting us every few years is a losing game, this terrible ongoing situation is not going to change.
From past experience, I assume that sometime in the next few days the fighting will come to an end. It will probably take the form of an internationally and/or USA imposed cease-fire. Unfortunately it will not be a peace treaty. They, Hamas, will claim victory in that they rocketed Israeli towns etc. with their big new rockets (paid for at the expense of their hospitals & schools) while we will claim victory that we have thoroughly smashed their military infrastructure and killed many of their leaders.
Unfortunately (and this is where the world will accuse us of being thoughtlessly cruel) we will have killed a number of Gazan civilians as well since the Hamas like to hide their rocket launchers in blocks of flats and other civilian buildings. This means that when we bomb them, even though we warn them in advance, many poor Gazans are forced to pay the ultimate price.
However, despite the horrible scenes of mass destruction now being broadcast all over the world, we must make sure that this time, unlike in the past, Hamas realizes that with these the attacks, they are wasting their time and that this game is simply not worth playing.
The only ray of light here is that the Hizbollah, the Iranian-backed Lebanese version of Hamas, has decided not to support Hamas. They (at the moment) understand from the damage they suffered in 2006 when they attacked northern Israel, the price was much too heavy. Let us hope that this time the Hamas will come to realize the same.
STOP PRESS: During the writing of the above, I learned that Ismail Haniyeh, the #1 leader of Hamas, is hiding out in Qatar, one thousand miles away from Gaza. So much for a devoted leader standing with his people.
*Essay: England, Your England (1941)
- Lawrence-Young is a retired English and history teacher and lecturer who came to live in Israel in 1968. He has written 25 historical and crime novels and lives in Jerusalem. He is married and has two children and three grandchildren. Served as a sergeant in armored infantry in the IDF
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