Peace in the Middle East seems more elusive than ever, with October 7 setting off a battle over not just land but the narrative itself.
A year has passed in Israel and the Gaza Strip like some nightmare from which there is no awakening. Hatred is the only winner. It towers over the corpse of a two-state Israeli-Palestinian peace and threatens to spread across the Middle East.
“Bring them home now” say ubiquitous posters in Israel, alluding to the roughly 100 hostages, many dead, still held by Hamas. Gaza lies in ruins as Israel exacts a terrible price in Palestinian life for the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack that killed more than 1200 Israelis, and summoned in Jews every devouring spectre of the Holocaust. War spreads to the Israeli-occupied West Bank, to Lebanon and to Iran, defying the futile peacemaking efforts of a rudderless world.
Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport stands almost empty, symbol of a lonelier Jewish state that is excoriated in many places amid calls to “globalise the intifada”. Protesters in New York chant “the state of Israel has to go”. Health authorities in Gaza announce that Israel has killed 41,788 Palestinians in the past year. Numbers tend to numb, but they promise another cycle of retribution in due course.
As after the September 11 attacks two decades ago, the world has changed, people have changed, language itself has changed, becoming more treacherous. The tribal has triumphed over reason in a sea of mutual incomprehension and recrimination. Once the David of Middle Eastern conflict, Israel is now the increasingly vilified Goliath, even as it sees itself in a struggle for survival that it did not initiate.
“We are a different society, a different country. Just look at the traumatised faces of people,” said Nirit Lavie Alon, an Israeli teacher at the Technion university in Haifa. “I gave up on peace, completely. Really, we are very desperate.”
Doaa Kaware, a housewife and mother of four in the Gaza city of Khan Younis, said: “This was a year that killed our hearts and souls before it destroyed the buildings, hospitals, schools and streets. In this war we feel someone pushed us down into a deep, dark and awful well.”
Israeli and Palestinian narratives have always seemed irreconcilable, but over the past year they have diverged with a new intensity. For Israel, the October 7 Hamas attack was its 9/11, with the enemy not across the world in Afghanistan but right next door. The country, shaken and disoriented by the catastrophe, shamed by its failure to foresee it, was near unanimous in the conviction that it must extirpate Hamas from Gaza, at any price.
Much of the world understood Israel’s reaction, at least for a moment. But quickly a Palestinian narrative of Israeli “genocide” in Gaza gained traction, backed by wholesale destruction and killing in the rubble of collapsed buildings. The catastrophe, then, was not Israel’s, but that of the Palestinian people, systematically oppressed, in this telling, by a ruthless Israel intent for decades on dispossessing them.
The issue, in a striking transference, was no longer October 7; it was the Israeli retaliation.
Now, with the widening of the war to Lebanon and even Iran, the catastrophe is broader and murkier, the narrative even more confused, as the suffering spreads. Iran and its Shiite proxy forces are no longer facing off with Israel; they are at war with it. Hamas is only part of the story now. But by no means does all of Lebanon or Iran want to die for the Palestinian cause.
Much has changed and much has not. The war, detonated a year ago by Hamas rockets in the dawn fired from Gaza, is new in its frenzied intensity, its yearlong duration and its expansion to include Iran directly, but not in its essential nature.
As the author IF Stone noted in 1967, just after the third Arab-Israeli war in 19 years and the Israeli conquest of the West Bank, the “struggle of two different peoples for the same strip of land” is marked by an “ethnocentric fury” to which “the Bible is still the best guide”.
Writing in The New York Review of Books, he noted that both sides believe that “only force can assure justice”. He continued: “If God as some now say is dead, He no doubt died of trying to find an equitable solution to the Arab-Jewish problem.”
Almost six decades have gone by since those words were written, not without glimpses of possible peace, to which the 1995 assassination by a nationalist Israeli zealot of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin sounded the death knell.
But the cycle of destruction has never been broken, and the conflict that erupted with the founding of the modern state of Israel in 1948 is now well on the way to becoming the Hundred Years’ War of our times. No other war has such power to lacerate nations, communities, families and even the conscience of a single individual.
Perhaps the “situation,” as it is sometimes wearily called, has never seemed so far from resolution.
Long dormant, the idea of a two-state peace resurfaced in Washington and other capitals in the wake of the Hamas attack, like some forgotten memento found in an attic trunk. It re-emerged just when it had become least conceivable. Peace demands trust; there is virtually none today between Israelis and Palestinians.
Returning to Israel a year on, I have the feeling of a country frozen. “There is not a single hour on TV when the Hamas massacre is not mentioned, with discussion from every angle and video clips of the horror,” said Alex Levac, a photographer. “Israel lives in the trauma of October 7.”
The current round of fighting has been different in some ways, and not only in its feverish register. It has demonstrated the limited reach of American diplomacy, once decisive but now ineffective and increasingly attacked for its ironclad military support of Israel, even as thousands of Palestinian children have been killed in Gaza.
The war has seen another significant shift: the broad embrace of the Palestinian cause as an extension of movements for racial and social justice in the United States. It has also been adopted by the Global Majority, sometimes known as the Global South, as an expression of the battle of Indigenous peoples – read Palestinians – against white colonial oppressors and interlopers.
This has changed the equation for Israel and for Jews who feel more vulnerable, more entrenched in their identity, and more confronted by antisemitism than at any time since World War II.
“We Jews are traumatised and, consciously or unconsciously, we think that if Israel is not a shelter, what becomes of us?” said Yedidia Levy-Zauberman, a French businessman.
Across the world, from the Americas to Africa, the quest to create a state of Palestine supplanting Israel has become the North Star of many young people. Israeli “colonialism” is increasingly shorthand for the Zionist project of establishing a homeland for the Jewish people after their millennial persecution, rather than for Israel’s post-1967 colonial settlement of the occupied West Bank.
Not all the protesters think this way, of course. They are appalled by Israel’s conduct of the war but do not dispute its right to exist. As with past protest movements against the Vietnam War or apartheid South Africa – but unlike the seemingly numbing wars in Syria or in Ukraine or in Sudan – this is now the passionate cause of a generation, the emblem of their idealism.
It focuses on the forced displacement of some 750,000 Palestinians at Israel’s birth and the high death toll in Gaza today. It tends not to acknowledge that Israel is a multiracial society born through UN Resolution 181 of 1947 and peopled not by colonial forces but by persecuted Holocaust survivors and other refugees, often from Arab states that evicted them, with no motherland to return to. As for the October 7 Hamas attack, it has generally been relegated to a subordinate clause.
“I’d been hearing warnings of antisemitism on the left, but the militancy of the antisemitism of student groups has been shocking,” said Ruth Franklin, an adjunct associate professor of writing at Columbia University and the author of the forthcoming The Many Lives of Anne Frank. “When you hear ‘Burn Tel Aviv to the ground,’ as I have with my own ears, the intent is pretty clear.”
For others, it is Israel’s intent that is clear. In a speech in Athens, Greece, last week, Omar van Reenen, the founder of Equal Namibia, an organisation that has led the struggle for LGBTQ rights in Namibia, declared that “our fight is intertwined with that of the Palestinian people” because their quest for self-determination echoes “our own histories of colonialism and struggle”.
Democracy is illusory, he said, when “genocide is being perpetrated by states that brandish themselves as democracies in the Middle East”.
So does a war over a small strip of land become global. Nakba vies with Holocaust. Everyone becomes a “Nazi”; demonisation knows no bounds. Each side invokes “genocide”. The psychological chasm is now so deep that, with some exceptions, it renders Palestinians invisible as individuals to Israeli Jews, and vice versa.
Earlier this year, as the National Holocaust Museum in the Netherlands opened almost 80 years after three-quarters of the Dutch Jewish population was killed in the Holocaust – the highest proportion in Western Europe – an angry crowd of pro-Palestinian demonstrators gathered outside. “There is a holocaust in Gaza,” they yelled.
As they did so, a 5-year-old Jewish girl named Sharai Penina Laibowitz, a great-granddaughter of one of the Jews shipped to Adolf Hitler’s death camps, walked past the protesters. In a photograph of the scene, a man thrusts toward her an image of a Palestinian father in Gaza cradling a dead baby.
In this conflict, there is no peace for the dead or the living. A little Dutch girl and a Palestinian baby are thrown together into a vortex that promises further bloodshed. The United States and the world seem powerless to stop it.
Today, Israel is poised to strike back against Iran in response to Iran’s firing of nearly 200 ballistic missiles at Israel last Tuesday, which in turn was a retaliation for Israel’s assassination in Lebanon of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, the potent army of Iran’s westward projection.
Certainly, there were other possible courses for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, including a ceasefire, a deal for the release of Israeli hostages in return for the release of Palestinian prisoners, and the possible breakthrough normalisation of Israel’s relations with Saudi Arabia that President Joe Biden pushed for many months.
But ultimately Netanyahu has felt free to ignore American pressure without cost or consequence. His need to satisfy his far-right partners in Government and his interest in prolonging the war to postpone a possible formal reprimand for the military and intelligence failures that allowed the October 7 attack will almost certainly complicate any diplomatic efforts.
Hamas, with the hostages as leverage and global support growing for Palestinians, has its own reasons to adopt a waiting game as the killing spreads.
“This time sadness is beyond bearing,” Kaware, the Palestinian housewife said. “Nothing will ease this pain that will last forever.”
As for Lavie Alon, the teacher, she struggles to survive. “We don’t have enough things to give us hope,” she said.
Her younger son, Chen, 22, told her last week he will be out of touch for a while as he is about to deploy with Israeli forces in Lebanon. Her older son, Noam, 25, has gone to Germany to avoid the pain of the October 7 anniversary.
Noam’s great love, Inbar Haiman, 27, lived her last moments of freedom at the Tribe of Nova music festival, where Hamas killed 364 people on October 7. A video captured her being dragged, bleeding from the face, into Gaza.
When there was a hostage release last November, Lavie Alon and her son hoped that Haiman would be among those freed. But a month later, on December 14, 2023, the Israeli army informed them that she was dead.
Haiman’s corpse is still in Gaza. “We are struggling to bring her back,” Lavie Alon said. “We don’t have a grave. We cannot start to rebuild.”
Nor can anyone in Gaza. The gyre inexorably turns.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Roger Cohen
Photographs by: Avishag Shaar-Yashuv, Sergey Ponomarev, Samar Abu Elouf, Diego Ibarra Sanchez, Yousef Masoud and Jonah Markowitz
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
