“When Israel attacked our people in the West Bank, we could not remain silent. We had to show we’re one people and one nation and must protect our people,” a Hamas official was quoted by Amira Hass in Haaretz, on July 12.
The statement gives an accurate summary of the succession of events that led to the Israeli war on Gaza starting six days later. The fact is that Israel’s so-called Operation Protective Edge is an attempt to distract from a greater fight that is finally uniting Palestinians throughout the Occupied Territories and in Israel, even though it is targeting Gaza and inflicting hundreds of deaths and injuries. (Israel said yesterday that it accepts Egypt’s proposal for a ceasefire.)
Palestinian National Authority (PNA) President Mahmoud Abbas, who is nearly 80 years old, seems oblivious. He is repeating old mantras, discounting Gaza’s resistance and, for some strange reason, is still holding his hand out to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, somehow expecting the latter to deliver peace.
“What are you trying to achieve by sending rockets?” Abbas asked Hamas on Palestine TV. “We prefer to fight with wisdom and politics,” he muttered as his words grew unintelligible.
A couple of days later, several Palestinians were killed when Israeli warplanes bombed a care home for disabled Palestinians in Gaza. The death toll by that day, July 12, rose sharply, climbing to over 150 since the bombing campaign started. (It reached at least 192 yesterday). Gazans fought back with ferocity. Their rockets reached Tel Aviv, but inflicted little or no damage, and no casualties.
Abbas’s words, targeting Palestinian resistance, seemed consistent with Israel’s own propaganda by threatening Gaza with more death and destruction. Netanyahu spoke of the “difficult” and “complex” fight that lies ahead, which would include yet “additional phases.”
But somehow Gaza survived, with its mutilated bodies, destroyed neighbourhoods and all.
Abbas — who must be fully aware that neither Netanyahu nor any character of his mostly right-wing and ultra nationalist cabinet has the slightest inclination for peace — somehow persists with his view. Not only did he fail to provide even moral guidance to Palestinians, he insists on raising a white flag in a battle in which he is not a party.
But this war is not about Hamas alone, or even Gaza, but something far more dangerous and worrisome to both Abbas and Netanyahu.
Harsh truths forgotten
When the bodies of three Israeli colonists were found on June 30 near Hebron in the southern West Bank, Israel went into a state of mourning and a wave of sympathy flowed in from around the world. The three had disappeared 18 days earlier in circumstances that remain unclear.
The entire episode, particularly after its grim ending, seemed to traumatise Israelis into ignoring harsh truths about the colonists and the militarisation of their society. But before the discovery of the bodies, the real face of Netanyahu’s notoriously right-wing government was well-known. Few held Illusions about how “peaceful” an occupation could be if run by figures such as Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, Economy Minister Naftali Bennett, and Deputy Defence Minister Danny Danon.
As mobs of Israeli Jews went out on an ethnic lynching spree in Israel, occupied Jerusalem and the West Bank that some likened to a ‘pogrom’, occupation soldiers conducted a massive arrest campaign of hundreds of Palestinians, mostly Hamas members and supporters.
Hamas said it had no role in the death of the colonists, and this appears plausible since it rarely hesitates to take credit for something carried out by its military wing. Israeli military strategists were well aware of that.
This war on Hamas, however, has little to do with the killed colonists, and everything to do with the political circumstances that preceded their disappearance.
On May 15, two Palestinian youths, Nadim Siam Abu Nuwara, 17, and Mohammad Mahmoud Odeh Salameh, 16, were killed by Israeli soldiers while taking part in a protest commemorating the anniversary of the Nakba, or ‘Great Catastrophe’. Video footage shows that Nadim was innocently standing with a group of friends before collapsing as he was hit by an Israeli army bullet.
In some way, the deaths of these Palestinian youths were a distraction from the political disunity that has afflicted Palestinian leadership and society for years. Their deaths were a reminder that Palestine, as an idea and a collective plight and struggle, goes beyond the confines of politics or even ideology.
Regional calculations
Their deaths reminded us that there is much more to Palestine than the whims of the aging PNA ‘President’ and his Ramallah-based henchmen, or even Hamas’ regional calculations following the rise and fall of the ‘Arab Spring.’
The Israeli reaction to the colonists’ deaths has been different. After the discovery of the bodies, fellow colonists and right-wing Israelis began exacting revenge on Palestinian communities. The mob was united by the slogan “death to the Arabs,” reviving a long-disused notion of a single Palestinian identity that precedes the emergence of Fatah and Hamas.
Perhaps paradoxically, the grief and anger provoked by the death of Mohammad Abu Khudair, 17, who was burnt alive by Israeli colonists as part of this lashing out, has furthered this reawakening of a long-fragmented Palestinian national identity.
This identity, which had suffered due to Israeli walls, military tactics and the Palestinians’ own disunity, has been glued back together in a process that resembles the events that preceded the first and second uprisings of 1987 and 2000 respectively.
However, unlike in the previous Intifadas, the hurdles towards a unified voice this time seem insurmountable. Abbas is a weak leader who has done so much to meet Israel’s security expectations and so very little to defend the rights of his people. He is a relic from a bygone era who merely exists because he is the best option Israel and the US have at the moment.
While Abbas was surviving in a state of political irrelevance, Hamas launched a fierce resistance campaign in Gaza. It united various resistance groups, including those affiliated with Abbas’ own party, Fatah, and began responding with a barrage of rockets into Tel Aviv, Haifa, occupied Jerusalem and elsewhere. Although few Israelis were hurt, at the time of writing this article, hundreds of Palestinians had been killed and wounded. Hamas’ show of prowess further alienated Abbas, now increasingly seen, along with his PNA, as ‘collaborators’ with Israel.
Netanyahu, on the other hand, has his own worries that are also shared by Abbas: a Palestinian uprising.
Fearing an intifada would unite Palestinians, threaten the PNA, and slow down the construction of illegal colonies, Netanyahu’s war on Gaza means to distract from the slowly building collective sentiment among Palestinians throughout Palestine, and among Palestinians in 1948 areas.
The targeting of Hamas is an Israeli attempt at challenging the emerging new narrative that is no longer about Gaza and its siege anymore, but rather the entirety of Palestine and its collectives regardless of which side of the Israeli “separation wall” they live on.
A true Palestinian unity culminating in a massive popular Intifada is the kind of war Netanyahu cannot possibly win.
