Time Is Running Out For Peace
The last 24 hours have contained numerous warning signs that Israel is going to ignore the world and turn the Gaza Strip into a parking lot, igniting full-scale Mideast war
The secretary-general of the United Nations, António Guterres, said yesterday, “It is important to also recognise the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. But the grievances of the Palestinian people cannot justify the appalling attacks by Hamas. And those appalling attacks cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.” Israel responded by refusing to allow entry to the UN’s undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs, and their ambassador to the UN said, “Due to his remarks, we will refuse to issue visas to UN representatives. We have already refused a visa for the undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs, Martin Griffiths. The time has come to teach them a lesson.”
Israel has long accused the United Nations of being anti-Israel because it has repeatedly called for a right to return for Palestinians forced from their homes during the 1948 war, and because it has passed resolutions condemning Israeli military activities (some of which were quite justified). The idea of “teaching the UN a lesson,” though, is deeply troubling. The UN is not an armed organization. It is the only group on the planet that, despite its flaws, can conduct many humanitarian operations that save the lives of millions of people. It is a body for diplomacy. What exactly does teaching them a lesson entail? More attacks on its staff in Gaza and the West Bank? If you look at the photos at the top of this post, those are from within the last 24 hours, in the southern part of the Gaza Strip, the place Israel told over a million Palestinians in and around Gaza City that they needed to evacuate to so they could be safe.
I hesitate to say this, but it is very difficult to look at the aerial photos of Gaza and not see the jarring resemblance of the Warsaw Ghetto, where 300,000 Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis after rising up against them in 1943. They had been herded into a walled-off part of Warsaw, and subsisted on meager rations while packed into rooms. The echoes of that are heard in Gaza today. They are also walled off, with meager rations trickling in since October 7th. The Israeli bombings have created far too similar a resemblance, and the effects on the public are decidedly negative.
The world has long rejected collective punishment, between the Nuremberg Trials and the Fourth Geneva Convention. Israel cannot claim with a straight face that it is not doing such a thing. Israel told a million Palestinian people to leave Gaza City and Beit Hanoun and move south to Rafah and Khan Yunis for their safety. Israel has repeatedly launched attacks against both cities. Israel, and now the US State Department, are claiming that Hamas is preventing foreign nationals from leaving through the Rafah crossing, but have provided zero evidence of that fact. It appears that their claim is meant to be supporting evidence for bombing the border crossing, but if you herd people into a space that is half the size of the existing space, and then you repeatedly drop bombs and launch missiles into that space, it stops looking like legitimate war to anyone with a conscience.
Past genocidal activities committed against Jews cannot be justification for Jews in Israel to commit genocide on the residents of the Gaza Strip. Israel built the wall to lock them in. Israel put naval ships outside their waters to keep them from leaving. Israel has full control over fuel, water, food, and electricity entering. No matter how much they want to justify it, no matter what reasons they give, it is undeniably a ghetto resembling Warsaw. The fact that more Israelis and members of the Jewish diaspora around the world are not horrified by that speaks volumes to the warping effects of trauma on the collective psyche of the descendants of the Holocaust’s millions of victims. The continued act of doing so is jeopardizing support and safety in Israel.
Jordan, which has had peaceful relations with Israel for almost thirty years, is sounding the alarm about the effect of Israel’s carpet bombing in Gaza. Egypt’s foreign minister said, “It is shameful that some continue to justify what is happening, citing the right to self-defence and resisting terrorism.” Qatar’s prime minister also condemned Israel’s “collective punishment” reprisals. These are the nations that have made peace with Israel! If that’s what they’re saying, it is likely far worse in the places that are not partners in peace. Which brings me to this.
President Erdogan of Turkey is an authoritarian thug, NATO member or not, and his statements that Hamas is a liberation organization and not a terrorist group is enraging. Hamas has taken advantage of the anger that Israeli policies have instilled in Palestinians as a recruiting tool, but this isn’t a liberation fight. A liberation fight would’ve been targeted at the IDF only and wouldn’t involve hostage taking. A liberation fight wouldn’t have slaughtered people at a music festival and grandparents. I have been a strong supporter of peaceful efforts by Palestinians, including BDS and the weekly marches they engaged in by the border wall. I would completely understand targeted assaults against the IDF as a just fight for freedom in light of Israel’s increasingly brutal apartheid policies of the past two decades. Indiscriminate murder is just murder, no matter who does it, which is why I’ve also been such a loud critic of Israel’s response to Hamas in the past three weeks.
The world has become so accustomed to this ideology of “with us or against us” that George W. Bush declared after the 9/11 attacks on America that it has found itself trapped, unwilling to do the hard work necessary to intervene between two groups of people locked in a cycle of death. The cynical mix of American evangelical support and geopolitical benefit have kept the main Western powers from cutting off the flood of military weaponry for Israel. The bad taste left in the mouths of the UN after their overly restrictive and failed peacekeeping in the Balkans thirty years ago means that peacekeeping military forces have not been placed in between Israel and the Palestinians, despite the success of past missions keeping Israel and Egypt apart before their peace treaty. As a result, nations declare unconditional support for Israel or solidarity with any Palestinian group willing to inflict violence upon an alliance considered to be colonial oppressors.
Time is running desperately short. 600 Americans continue to remain trapped in Gaza, along with an untold number of British subjects. Our governments remain utterly unwilling to gain their release, through force or otherwise, for fear of upsetting Israel. The likelihood that they will all die grows greater each day, as the perimeter for civilians shrinks and Israel’s march towards full invasion counts down. We still retain an option, collectively, for imposing the will of the free world upon this bitterest of conflicts, separating them and requiring they negotiate a final peace. Whether we have the courage to do so, or stand back and watch as an ethnic cleansing is carried out in real time on social media and television, remains unknown.