Israel’s biggest challenge is how to cope with ghost people. The Palestinians, the Palestinian question have been removed since several years from Israel’s political agenda and from the majority of its citizens’ collective soul. Palestinians are simply ghost people. I saw it with my eyes. There are highways connecting Israeli cities with Israeli settlements located in the occupied West Bank which are fenced along their sides by concrete noise barriers, which green hills and idyllic landscapes are drawn on. Behind those barriers, however, there aren’t green hills, but Palestinian villages, hidden from Israeli car drivers’ sight. I never forgot that image, which bounced around in my mind after last Saturday’s drammatic attack against Israeli lands, the « Al-Aqsa Deluge ».
Ghost people, yes. I would not otherwise explain to myself how a rave party can take place less than 5km away from the Gaza strip’s borders, whose inhabitants live in a state of semi-detention, under strict border closure, since many years. Away from the eyes, away from the heart.
A massacre is a massacre, and what happened last Saturday at that rave music festival near Kibbutz Reim, where more than two-hundred and fifty people were shot dead by the Palestinian militants, cannot be defined other than a war crime. But it is an absurd crime, not less absurd than the Palestinians’ fate. Imagine those young armed militants landing on Israeli ground with rudimentary motorised paragliders ; it was an unexpected, impossible dream by itself the fact they could cross the most patrolled borders on earth in such a rocambulist way, and see what was beyond them, after years of siege and isolation. And what do they see ? People dancing. My best friend in Gaza explained to me : «Most of those Hamas soldiers are young and oppressed, and they never dealt with Israelis before ; they’ve just been under blockade, siege and repression for ages ; in their mind, they consider settlers as criminals, as soldiers ; this is the image they have of settlers surrounding Gaza ». So, they saw settlers celebrating. And my best friend in Tel Aviv comments by adding: « I understand the context, but that doesn’t free any human being from the responsibility of humanity. Fighting is one thing, executing a mother with babies is another thing ». These statements I have received on my phone in the past few hours are both weighted and frank assessments, and they give a material image of what is happening on the ground and in people’s mind, when the absurd becomes reality.
Because when you ignore a whole nation pretending to keep them in isolated Indian reserves, and cancel their memories through systematic colonisation and eradication of their national history, you create the next disaster. You feed hate, you feed fanaticism and violence as the ultimate form of resistance. A desperate and criminal form of resistance.
Since the Oslo accords, colonisation of Palestinian lands never stopped, even the UN Security Council has recently come to the powerless standpoint of recognising that things only became worst and worst[1]. And colonisation, in the last months, even reached the core of Palestinian identity : the holy Al-Aqsa Mosque, which has been seeing many raids by hardliners, settlers and Knesset members, even under Israeli police protection. Impunity has ruled affairs in the Middle east, and the removal of the Palestinian nation and culture is now perceived as an achievable target.
Hamas has committed war crimes, they will pay for it, but it is very difficult in this seventy five years old story, if you are honest, to point the finger at a crime maker as if he were the only one. My best friend in Tel Aviv says : « Sixteen years of siege on Gaza is a crime. I don’t rationalize or justify it in any way ».
And what do we receive instead ? A one-way narrative : smash Hamas. And then, what ? The international community already did it in 2006, when they delegitimised the victory of Hamas at the Palestinian legislative elections (I was an international electoral observer, at that time). Today’s Hamas is also the son of those political moves[2].
You can only make peace with your enemies, not with your comrades. Very few people seem understanding it. War crimes on the one side, war crimes on the other side, no solution to the Palestinian catastrophe. This will make Israel weaker, divided and unstable. This will bring suffering among Israeli and Palestinian families for more decades.
It seems that fanaticism and blindness is the new ruling order on both sides, and the world follows, ignoring that they are part of the problem. Today’s statement of the Israeli minister of Defence : « I ordered a complete siege on Gaza. We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly »[3]. No water, no food, no fuel, no light (by the way, already in the past sixteen years, there were no more than 6-8 hours of light per day). Animals ? Do you mean 2,3 million people, sorry, animals (this is Gaza strip’s population)? Sodoma’s god of vengeance is coming back to restore its kingdom ?
At least, spare us the image of those paragliders bringing death on a trance party taking place nearby a large open-air prison. It is so scary, because it fully embodies the madness governing over there’s affairs.
October 9, 2023
[1] See the resolutions of last September 27 Security Council’s meeting : « Settlement Expansion in Occupied Palestinian Territory Violates International Law, Must Cease, Many Delegates Tell Security Council ».
[2] See Tariq Dana, « The EU and its paradoxes: enforcing stability not promoting democracy », International Politics, 60, Springer, April 2023.
[3] Source : Haaretz.
Gianluca Solera 