2023-11-27 02:22:40
The death toll in the Gaza war exceeded 13,300. Here a Palestinian and an Israeli soldier collide.
Photo: AP – Nasser Ishtayeh
Eight years following the founding of the State of Israel, Moshe Dayan, the chief of staff of the Israeli army, stood near the Gaza border to deliver a eulogy for a 21-year-old security officer killed by Egyptian and Palestinian attackers.
“Now let us not blame their murderers,” he noted in 1956. “What can we say regarding their tremendous hatred of us? They have been in the Gaza refugee camps for eight years now and they have seen how, before their very eyes, we have turned their territory and the villages where they and their ancestors used to live into our home.”
His brief speech, slightly longer than Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and a powerful reference for Israelis, is perhaps remembered less for this perspective on Palestinian hatred than for Dayan’s decisive conclusion.
“Without the steel hull and the muzzle of the cannon we will not be able to plant a tree or build a house,” he said.
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Now, 67 years later, at a time when Jewish lives have been lost once more at the hands of Palestinian attackers in the same kibbutz, Nahal Oz, that Roi Rotberg guarded, Dayán’s explicit evocation of the origins of “hatred and desires for revenge” of the Palestinians remains exceptional in Israel. Many Israelis have preferred to look away from the rage right next to them.
In the same way, the perspective that Palestinians have of the pressing ghosts of anti-Semitic persecution that were awakened in Jews due to the attack by Hamas terrorists on October 7 seems negligible. It is very difficult to find mutual empathy.
“Both sides ask to be considered the main victims,” said Mohammad Darawshe, director of strategy at the Givat Haviva Center for a Shared Society in Jerusalem, which promotes Arab-Jewish dialogue. “If we get caught up in victimhood, we see everyone else victimizing and dehumanizing.”
The consequence is a psychological chasm so deep that Palestinians are invisible as individuals to the Jews of Israel and vice versa. There are, of course, exceptions: some Israelis and Palestinians have dedicated themselves to overcoming that divide. But overall, the two sides’ narratives differ, burying any idea of shared humanity.
The Arab-Israeli war of 1948, known to Israelis as the War of Independence, is the Nakba, or catastrophe, for the Palestinians. The Nakba competes with the Holocaust as each side alleges “genocide.”
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The relentless militarization of history dates back to Bible times and the divergent fates of Abraham’s two feuding sons: Isaac, the patriarch of the Israelites, and Ishmael, a prophet of Islam.
“On October 7, Hamas trampled every nerve fiber in the Israeli psyche,” said Itamar Rabinovich, former Israeli ambassador to the United States. “Now, hate, fear and anguish are at their most extreme. But in the end there are two peoples who aspire to have the same territory and two sides of history that we must try to see.”
Demonization knows no borders. Since the Hamas attack last month, Yoav Galant, Israel’s defense minister, has spoken of fighting “human animals.” Ismail Haniya, head of Hamas’s political bureau, has described Israel as “neo-Nazis backed by colonialist forces.” In turn, Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, has described Hamas as “the new Nazis.”
An Israeli lawmaker, Ofer Cassif, has alluded to “pogroms” once morest Palestinians to describe the ruthless Israeli bombing of Gaza, a word whose specific historical meaning is the killing of Jews and a word that many Israelis have used to describe murder. regarding 1,200 people by Hamas last month, according to Israeli authorities.
Of course, war propaganda that describes enemies as monstrous is not limited to the Middle East. The United States described the Japanese as subhuman during World War II and the Japanese portrayed the Americans as deformed beasts. In order to justify mass murder, the Nazis called the Jews a plague.
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But there is something regarding the Palestinian-Israeli confrontation – two peoples located at the meeting point of places sacred to Judaism, Islam and Christianity – that imbues the conflict with a peculiarly ferocious charge, resistant to any attempt to control its potency.
“After 76 years, Israelis and Palestinians have only one thing in common: the feeling that they live alongside people who want to kill them,” said Rula Daoud, a Palestinian-Israeli who works to promote peace as director of a organization called Standing Together.
Overall, the decades that have passed since the Oslo Accords failed in 1993 have accentuated the psychological chasm. Everyday interaction between Israelis and Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank has been significantly reduced by walls and fences that attempt to create physical separation.
The Palestine Liberation Organization’s 1993 recognition of Israel’s right to exist in peace has been almost forgotten, as has then-Prime Minister Isaac Rabin’s determination to achieve that peace, a decision that cost him his life in 1995 at the hands of Israel. of a far-right Israeli assassin who said he was acting “on God’s command.”
These were the fleeting glimpses of a shared humanity that soon dissipated.
In the decades since, Hamas and the Israeli ultranationalist religious right have expanded their influence. Now, the conflict involves fundamentalist religious ideologies, different in essential aspects, but equally convinced that all the territory between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River was assigned to them by God.
Blood flows from the lack of recognition, dialogue and understanding. Rabinovich, the former Israeli ambassador, said he had seen a video of a Hamas gunman who participated in the Oct. 7 massacre. This man calls his father in Gaza and tells her, “I’m on the other side killing Jews. They cannot live happily when we live the way we live.”
The Palestinian hatred that Moshe Dayan perceived and vowed to oppose by being “prepared and armed, strong and determined” continues to grow fueled by Israeli oppression, fences and control, as well as the chronic misrule of Palestine. Palestinians in Gaza, whose deaths number more than 12,000, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health, are fearful of annihilation.
These fears are met with the “never once more” of a Jewish people who know, through the Holocaust, what genocide means and who sought, by founding their own State, to put an end to a millennia-old persecution.
The defeat of October 7 was a devastating blow to this ambition. This war in Gaza, triggered by the ruthless application of Hamas’s statute, is existential in that sense for an Israel that suddenly feels smaller and more vulnerable.
“If we cannot go beyond the walls, share this territory and come to value life above death, we are all doomed,” Daoud asserted. “About every three years we will be sending 18 and 19 year olds to their deaths.”
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