Two alternate realities
Via What a Maroon, Moumen Al-Natour writes in the Washington Post of the two Gazas:
Trump’s ceasefire has split Gaza into two alternate realities on either side of the “yellow line” behind which the Israel Defense Forces have withdrawn under Phase 1 of the ceasefire deal. On one side is a Gaza that is desperate for Trump’s plan to succeed; on the other is a Gaza that is being pulled back into the abyss once again. It is impossible for these two Gazas to exist simultaneously for more than a moment in time, and soon enough one will consume the other. Fighting over the weekend underscores just how precarious the balance remains.
My Gaza, where I wish to live, exists between Israel and the yellow line. There, the war is over and change buzzes in the air. People have access to food, medicine and electricity. And other signs of normality are beginning to return, such as some children going back to school. This is the Gaza that is waiting with anticipation to work with a new civil administration and an international protection force that will keep the peace as Israel withdraws. Few there speak of Hamas with any warmth or positivity. For once they no longer have to.
…
I have been deeply involved in Gaza’s underground civil society movement for many years, much of which was spent preparing for an unknown moment where we would have a chance to be free of Hamas’s cruel domination and break the cycle of war with Israel. That moment is now here, and I am certain that this is the chance for which I spent my life protesting, organizing and suffering. It was worth the scars and the terror to see that there can be a different future here.
But on the other side of the yellow line exists another Gaza that will do anything to prevent this from happening. Over there the war continues, albeit not between Israel and Hamas but between Hamas and Gaza itself. In the nearly two weeks that have passed since Trump’s deal was signed, and in the absence of IDF soldiers, Hamas has emerged from its tunnel network and is reasserting control in the most violent manner possible, its reemergence accompanied by a terrifying bloodletting that targets any form of internal dissent, both real and imagined, past and present.
With no Israelis in their scopes, no more hostages to torment and no more leaders capable of giving them a new identity, Hamas is taking its humiliation and rage out on the Palestinians who happened to be on the wrong side of the yellow line when the war ended. Whether the militants are executing a line of shackled men on the street or engaging in firefights around hospitals, Hamas’s violence against Palestinians has now become so intense and so visceral that you would think that their true enemy was Palestinians, not Israelis.
I suspect that violence is one of those drugs that you have to take in ever-larger doses to get the same high. Hamas’s doses are stratospheric.
I have lost many friends to Hamas’s barbarity and have come close to losing my own life on more than one occasion. And if we refuse to stand up to Hamas when it kills Palestinians and blatantly breaches the terms of the peace agreement today, then we are showing Hamas that the world will stand by as it reclaims the rest of Gaza, extinguishing my hopes and dreams once and for all.
Such an outcome would be a tragedy not only for Palestinians but for the rest of the world as well. If Hamas retains a foothold in Gaza, it will quickly undermine and disrupt the progress we are now trying to achieve. The only solution is to force Hamas to abide by the terms of the deal, by handing over its weapons and leaving the future of Gaza to people who have been denied a voice for a generation, rather than leaving a vacuum for it to exploit. The creation and implementation of a new civil administration and international stabilization force as outlined in the plan cannot come soon enough.
Here’s hoping.
If Hamas did not exist, the Israeli hard-line Right would have to invent it; or so it seems to me. The Palestinians have had to endure their country being taken over by the Ottoman Turks, who went on to form part of the losing side in WW1. In Germany, that defeat produced in turn the Nazi Party and WW2. In Palestine it produced the setting-up of Israel. and in due course, Hamas, arguably the Palestinian equivalent of the German Nazis.
As the former US Secretary of State Dean Rusk once remarked about Israel, “it’s a bit of a stretch to argue that the Books of Moses constitute some sort of land title.” Or something along those lines.
Palestine is the site of a major clash of civilisations (h/t Samuel P. Huntington, https://www.beyondintractability.org/bksum/huntington-clash .) It will all probably still be going on in 1,000 years’ time; maybe by then on a Trumpian Riviera.
Thank you, What a Maroon, for providing this.
That’s poorly expressed, Omar. No Palestinians had to endure their country being taken over by Ottoman Turks, because such a country never existed. The Ottoman Turks took the area sometimes called Palestine from the Mamluk Sultanate in 1516. The Mamluk Sultanate had taken the area from the Ayyubid dynasty in 1260, the Ayyubids took it from the Crusaders in 1187, the Crusaders took it from the Seljuk Turks (Antioch) and the Fatimids (Jerusalem) in 1097-1099, etc. etc.
Papito:
As far as I am aware, the ‘Palestine’ of the New Testament has been occupied continuously by people who in whatever language have called it their homeland. The Arabic word for it is “Felastin. Ring any bells?
It was ‘the land flowing with milk and honey’ revealed to Moses by God in the OT account, and promised by God to Moses on certain conditions, as summed up in the Ten Commandments. The original residents of Turkey may not have identified as Ottomans, who came later, but one helluva lot of them supported the Ottoman Empire in WW1. Farmers only become nomads when all other options are closed to them.
Ottoman schmottoman; toiks is toiks.
Omar, the Arabic word for the area would have little to do with the original inhabitants, because it was brought there by invaders from… Arabia. (Ring any bells?)
The name “Palestine” was given to the area by the Greeks, who recorded it as Παλαιστίνη in the 5th century BCE. That name was probably derived, ultimately, from the Hebrew פְלֶשֶׁת, or pelesheth (also Philistia). The Philistines it refers to arrived in the area around 1175 BC, during the late Bronze Age collapse, possibly from Greece. And, yes, the Jews were already there.
The Arabs and their language only invaded the area in the mid-7th century CE, during the Rashidun Caliphate; that’s like ten invasions further on. The Romans (Byzantines) they took it from called it Syria Palaestina, so the Arabic is just a transliteration of the Latin.
There are few places that have not been invaded multiple times by many different new comers. Whose ancestors were there first seems a very poor basis for who should live there now.
My impression is that currently one is much better off being a non-Jew in Israel than a non-Muslim in the nearby territories. That is why my sympathies are more with Israel than eg: Hamas.
Fascinating stuff. However, nothing in it disproves the rule that I maintain runs from the present right back down through human history to include as well the Animal and Plant Kingdoms, and all living things: If you can’t defend it, you don’t own it. There is no book up there in the sky into which God has written that the Tibetans own Tibet, the Italians own Italy, the present population of Greece owns Greece, and the cactus plant growing in my front yard owns the patch of dirt it presently occupies. Etc, etc……
And they all live and behave accordingly.
I am surprised to hear you suggest that the Palestinians don’t own the land they live on, but the Israelis do. I had interpreted your comments otherwise.
Sometimes I toy with an idea for a story about what would happen if everyone on Earth woke up one day having forgotten all of human history. People still have their skills, families, jobs, etc., but no one remembers what happened four thousand years ago, or yesterday. I’ve never gotten further than the basic premise, but I think in the hands of a talented story teller it could be interesting.
All of which is to say, sometimes the problem is not forgetting history, but remembering it.
Papito @ #8: I was referring to realities, not to preferemces. With 20/20 hindsight, I would say that the Jewish survivors of The Holocaust should have been given the beautiful German state (Bundesland) of Bavaria, with all the Jewish shrines (Wailing Wall, Temple Mount etc) in modern Israel jackhammered out of their present locations, shipped to Bavaria and set up there. A second Exodus if yoi like, and cheaper than the present reality, whose ultimate cost may be a nuclear exhange between Israel and Iran, escalating into WW3..
Bavaria is, after all, where Nazism got going in the 1920s: specifically at its rallies in the beer-halls of Munich, and in response to the Versailles Treaty of 1919. But by that time the Cold War was underway, and the US needed the support of the Germans in its stand-off with the then Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Versailles
#1 Omar
Would it surprise you to know Netanyahu admitted the Israeli government assisted Hamas by permitting its access to funding? The goal being to keep Palestinian leadership split between two factions with differing goals and methods, rather than a single unified leadership. Netanyahu even admitted this was useful to him as it meant he could avoid negotiations as there was no single body to represent the entire Palestinian population.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/world/middleeast/israel-qatar-money-prop-up-hamas.html
Others in Israel’s government have said similar, and may even have conspired to create it in the first place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_support_for_Hamas#Debates
@Holms, Netanyahu may have been up to all sorts of nefarious skulduggery, but the idea that Israel created Hamas in the first place is ahistorical tommyrot.
Hamas was founded in the 80s as the armed branch of the Gaza wing of the Muslim Brotherhood. They say they are a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood right in their own charter.
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/21st_century/hamas.asp
The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928. Modern Israel didn’t even exist then.
Firstly, I am not sure that ‘conspired to create’ necessarily means ‘sole creator’, but for clarity please accept a rewording to ‘conspired with others to create’. Secondly, there are plenty of sources at the second link. It is not something that has been established beyond doubt, but there is enough there – plus the penchant for nefarious skullduggery you note – to make it a genuine possibility.