On historical metaphors of yesteryear - Hussein Agha and Robert Malley in The New Yorker:
‘The war that has engulfed Israel, the Gaza Strip, and well beyond since October 7, 2023, has confronted the world with much on which it had never set eyes before. In scope and brutality, Hamas’s assault on Israelis exceeded any prior Palestinian act. Israel’s military attacks and forced starvation in Gaza are an onslaught governed by unusual rules, in which the death of Palestinian fighters seems like collateral damage, while the widespread, indiscriminate slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians, many of them women and children, appears the main event. Killing is the purpose. Death is everywhere, its victims uncertain when or where it will strike next. Horror also has come at the hands of the West’s collusion and Arab governments’ indifference, which is no different from complicity.’
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‘If Palestinian attacks against Israelis never before reached the recent toll, it has not been for lack of trying but for lack of success. If Israeli military operations against Palestinians have fallen short of this ferocity, it has not been for lack of desire so much as for lack of opportunity.’
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‘But the forcible dispossession and displacement of Palestinians, the deprivation of their basic rights, has been a hallmark of the Zionist movement and of Israeli governments. There were differences among them, some of which mattered deeply to Israelis. None fundamentally affected the condition of being Palestinian. Many outsiders openly dream of an Israeli government without Netanyahu and his partners, one led by those they hope would replace them. That dream was not of an imaginary future; it had often been yesterday’s reality. It did not bring Palestinians any closer to fulfilling their aspirations, nor did it truly soften the blows they endured. It is convenient to personalize this affair, to turn it into the story of a single individual and his loathsome associates.’
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‘There is convenience, too, in conscious efforts to single out Hamas. October 7th was neither uniquely Hamas nor distinctively Islamist. It was Palestinian through and through, so much so that even Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President, so critical of violence, so convinced of its futility, took a long time before he could bring himself to utter a single negative word about it, and then primarily for other political motives. Hamas’s religious doctrine, not its resort to violence, is what sets it apart from Fatah, its chief rival for leadership of the Palestinian national movement. From the start, Fatah’s defining trait was armed struggle, often with scant heed to whether its victims were civilian or military. Both Fatah and Hamas are sprouts of the Muslim Brotherhood, a transnational organization dedicated to the Islamization of Arab societies. But whereas Fatah’s founders broke ranks with the Brotherhood in the nineteen-fifties when they decided to engage in guerrilla warfare, Hamas’s future leaders at first concentrated on domestic matters, prioritizing the religious transformation of Palestinian society over an armed confrontation with Israel. Of the two, paradoxically, Fatah has the more militaristic pedigree, and Hamas was the latecomer to violent struggle. Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader who designed the October 7th operations, in this sense bore more in common with the Fatah of old than with the Muslim Brotherhood of today.’
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‘It is no surprise that they both so freely bandied about historical metaphors of yesteryear: a reprise of the 1948 Nakba for Palestinians; another Holocaust for Israelis.’
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‘History does not move forward. It slips sideways. And, in the darkest of ways, repeats itself.’
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‘“To kill someone and walk in his funeral” is an old Arabic saying that says it all: America delivers weapons that kill women, children, and the elderly, that destroy homes, schools, and hospitals; it provides meagre humanitarian aid to sustain Palestinians who survived the latest U.S.-enabled attack only to await the next one. It happens when America assumes the maddening pose of moral conscience of the world and helpless bystander to its horrors. The air of anger, grief, and mourning that accompanied every American pronouncement on Gaza’s fate fooled nobody. Actions matter, not words that, in their perversity, made matters worse. Palestinians compared this to the old Mafia tradition of caring for those you are about to liquidate and to Rome’s gladiators saluting Caesar before proceeding to be slaughtered. Avē Imperātor, moritūrī tē salūtant.’
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‘When, under Barack Obama’s Administration—which included officials more understanding of the Palestinian cause than ever before—the effort sputtered and stalled, President Abbas seemed to lose faith. In a caustic remark to one of us, he suggested that even were America’s team to one day become staunchly pro-Palestinian and the Israeli government to be led by Meretz, the country’s most left-wing Zionist party, still, there would be no Palestinian state.’
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‘The world has tolerated it so far, rationalizing its forbearance by describing a fifty-year-old reality as temporary and a two-state solution as inevitable; it is hard to imagine why this attitude would change and why the passage of time, far from hardening opposition, would not take the edge off it instead. Palestinians may rise up, but Israel has experience dealing with the threat of Palestinian violence; its vast military preponderance and memories of the aftermath of both the second intifada and October 7th may not prevent deadly acts of violence, but they may well discourage any serious, large-scale Palestinian revolt. The status quo will work for those who can subdue or kill those for whom it does not work.’
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‘Ethics pose no obstacle to creative vocabulary.’
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‘Or to the U.K. Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, who, by threatening to recognize Palestine should Israel fail to change course, did not bother to conceal that he cynically deemed it a mere bargaining chip. It is all so unserious.’
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‘The Oslo peace process is dead. The two-state solution, dead. Participants in those efforts, discredited. The United States, exhausted. Israelis and Palestinians are left without a script or compass other than relics of earlier days. They settle in for the long haul, reverting to more familiar, established ways. What they lived through in recent decades was a detour that brought them back to where they began.
The future will be one of surprises. Israelis perhaps will awaken to the emptiness and absurdity of their military victories. Palestinians might find unity and a new politics, willing to fit Israeli Jews in their vision. Israelis and Palestinians might uncover novel ways to talk, and imagine new modes of living together. Arab states may use the prospect of normalization to achieve reconciliation with Israel and succor for Palestinians. The United States might start to see itself as others do—self-righteous, hypocritical, futile—tire of its own platitudes and lies, and consider a change. A new generation of American leadership could face its own moral reckoning.
The realization may dawn that this conflict is not essentially about territory. It is not about roads and dunes and hills. It is about people, their lives, emotions, anger, grief, attachments, and history.’
Read the article here.
It’s not about territory, it’s about people, who would be as all people extremely divided without a common enemy on the outside.
Two people, as many other people, caught up in historical metaphors of yesteryear.
The underlying question is: is the nation state, this slightly romantic vehicle from the 19th century, still the answer to the needs and dreams of people?
We know that a minority who is willing to use violence as a means to and end or as an end to an end can sabotage much more than just a thing called peace process.