Palestine Matters

One fine morning, several Hamas operatives based in Gaza barged into Israel through land, sea and air, killed hundreds of Israelis, abducted another few hundred, and went back singing. At least, this is what the Western media will have you believe. They will also hammer in the fact that, being a peace-loving democratic country, Israel has the right to defend itself.

There will be no mention of decades of violence perpetrated against more than 2 million people of Gaza, who are crammed into a tiny piece of land covering around 141 square miles. They will also overlook the dire situation of Palestinians in the West Bank, who are daily targets of settler violence with the blessings and encouragement of Israeli occupation forces.

Over the past few years, the condition for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank has continuously deteriorated. At the same time, the U.S. administration, European powers and even Muslim leaders have constantly tried to shove them under the carpet.

In this context, this writer regards Hamas’s October 07 attack as a statement: we are still here, and we matter!

Donald Trump tried to put a nail in Palestine’s coffin when he cut them out of the Abraham Accords. Joe Biden followed the same course, pushing for Arab-Israeli normalisation while avoiding Gaza and Palestinians. They were reduced to mere footnotes entitled to minuscule respites from their daily humiliations. The 2021 conflict between Israel and Hamas should have been an eye-opener for the Biden administration, allowing them to comprehend that Palestine is at the centre of this conflict and that any solution that failed to incorporate genuine Palestinian aspirations is doomed to fail.

And it did fail.

The attack on October 07 not only washed away the Abraham Accords but also catapulted Palestine back on centre stage.

The American reaction to the attack was predictable. After repeating the trademark ‘right-to-defend’ phrase, the U.S. president endorsed false claims that Hamas operatives had killed Israeli babies by beheading (in a humiliating move, the White House walked back on this statement later). Biden further claimed (again falsely) that Hamas was using 2 million people in Gaza as a human shield.

Israel was already seething with anger. A few hundred ill-equipped and marginally trained fighters had beaten them at their own game. The Middle East’s most powerful army and the world’s most efficient intelligence agencies were taken off guard as Hamas operatives broke out of their collective cage.

The gloves were off now. Israel clarified that it was not bound by any rules of war (as if it had always abided by every international law). In the next few days, Gaza was subjected to a campaign that saw an equivalent of one-fourth of a nuclear bomb being dropped on the tiny enclave crammed with civilians.

Israel’s onslaught on Gaza blew up the U.S. Middle East policy in the president’s face. Several prominent Arab leaders refused to meet Joe Biden during his hastily prepared Middle East trip when Israel bombed a hospital, resulting in hundreds of deaths.

When the bomb hit Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza, several Israeli ministers claimed responsibility for the attack gleefully. However, once the severity of the damage came to light and adverse world reactions began pouring in, Israel started accusing Palestinians. What the writer finds most disgusting is the haste with which a few Western news outlets began towing the Israeli line and asserted that the Al-Ahli Hospital carnage resulted from an Islamic Jihad misfire. If Palestinians had such powerful rockets capable of causing massive carnage, how come no such damage was seen in Israel, which received thousands of those rockets on October 07?

Sadly, once in Israel, the U.S. president echoed the same false Israeli view regarding the Al-Ahli bombing.

In more than one way, the U.S. is as much responsible for the brewing crisis in the region as Israel itself. Let us try to see things from this perspective. In the immediate aftermath of the October 07 attack, Israel cleverly developed a narrative that it was a watershed moment in its history and had a right to take Hamas head-on. The White House and several other Western nations echoed the same notion. Israel saw this as a one-time opportunity to change the facts on the ground in Gaza.

The U.S. allowed Israel to bomb northern parts of Gaza in the guise of hitting Hamas but with the fundamental objective of pushing hundreds of thousands of Gazans towards the Southern part of the enclave bordering Egypt. The idea was to drive half of Gaza’s 2 million people into Egypt, where they will again become refugees.

In the beginning, the plan seemed to work. Daily Israeli warnings to evacuate Northern Gaza started an exodus towards the South. Western public accepted the idea of Israel evacuating Northern Gaza and sending in ground forces to eradicate remnants of Hamas.

Jordan’s King Abdullah was the first Arab leader who realised the fundamental US-Israeli objective behind this plan. He stated in the strongest words that Arab countries will take united action against any attempts to displace Palestinians from Gaza. Soon, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt also joined in. The U.S. realised that the forced expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza would be unacceptable. However, it is now too late for them to stop Israeli bloodletting after giving an initial free hand.

What Israel experienced on October 7 – incursions, deaths and abductions - was only a sliver of what they have been doing to the Palestinians for decades. Rather than bombing Gaza and radicalising a new generation of Palestinian youth, it can now end the siege and allow Gaza to prosper. Otherwise, there will always be someone – if not Hamas – who will break the cage and spit in its face.