Israel is in real danger for three reasons
Parents Circle and Israel’s War on the Gaza Border: What Happens When Israel and Palestine Collapse in a Dialogue of Israel?
Aramin is outraged at what he sees as Israel’s quotidian mistreatment of West Bank Palestinians, including women, at checkpoints, but he sees the humanity in the soldiers there.
He said a process of mutual dehumanization has led each side to see the other as morally inferior. He noted that Israelis think that Palestinians don’t love their children and want to sacrifice them to fight the war, while Palestinians think the same about Israelis.
I noted to Aramin that these organizations promoting mutual understanding mostly date from the Oslo peace process, when two states were expected to emerge side by side. Now that process is in hibernation, if not dead. It is great that Parents Circle gives children from both Israel and Palestine the chance to get to know one another, but how about saving lives on the Gaza border?
He was asked if the story of history is long. Germany once tried to wipe out Jews and now exchanges ambassadors with Israel. Some day Israel and Palestine will coexist as states, he said, and the question is simply how many corpses will pile up before that happens.
He said that the land should be shared between one state or two states. We’ll get the same piece of land as the graveyards of our children if that doesn’t happen.
The Israelis are Helping Israel to End the Hezbollah-Israel War and to Help Israel Become a Global Player in the Middle East
The euphoric rampage of Oct 7 that killed some 1,400 soldiers and civilians has made Israeli hearts more sympathetic to the plight of Gaza civilians. It has also inflicted a deep sense of humiliation and guilt on the Israeli Army and defense establishment, for having failed in their most basic mission of protecting the country’s borders.
As Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, told reporters on Wednesday: “Israel cannot accept such an active threat on its borders. The whole idea of people living side by side in the Middle East was jeopardized by Hamas.”
In the course of Israel’s war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, thousands of innocent people are killed, many of them women and children, as Hamas forces it to kill them in order to rid it of its leadership.
If Netanyahu’s message to the world is “help us defeat Hamas in Gaza”, then Biden cannot help Israel build a coalition of the U.S., Europe and moderate Arab partners to defeat Hamas.
One of the most important Israeli towns on the border with Lebanon is Kiryat Shmona. That father said his family had fled the northern fence line with thousands of other Israeli families after the pro-Iranian Hezbollah militia and Palestinian militias in southern Lebanon began lobbing rockets and artillery and making incursions in solidarity with Hamas.
When might they come back? They had no idea. They have taken refuge in hotels and with friends across the small country of nine million people. And it has only taken a few weeks for Israelis to begin driving up real estate prices in seemingly safer central Israeli towns. Hezbollah was able to accomplish mission accomplished, without even entering like Hamas. Along with Hamas they are alsoshrinking Israel.
I asked Liat Admati, 35, a survivor of the Hamas attack who ran a clinic for facial cosmetics for 11 years in Be’eri, what would make it possible for her go back to her Gaza border home, where she was raised.
“The main thing for me to go back is to feel safe,” she said. I felt I had trust in the army before this happened. Now I feel the trust is broken. I don’t want to think we are covering ourselves in all of the time, while behind this fence there are people who might be able to do it again. I don’t know what the solution is.
She said that before Hamas came over and burned parents and children in her safe rooms, she and her neighbors built them to protect them from rockets. “The safe room was designed to keep you safe from rockets — not from another human who would come and kill you for who you are,” she said. She stated that it seems that Gazans who worked on the kibbutz gave Hamas maps of the layout.
There are lots of Israelis who heard the recording of a Hamas terrorist calling his parents and saying he had just killed a woman.
How many did I kill with my own hands? Your son killed Jews,” he says, according to an English translation. “Mom, your son is a hero,” he later adds. His parents can be heard making noise.
This kind of chilling exuberance — Israel was built so that such a thing could never happen — explains the homemade sign I saw on a sidewalk while driving through the French Hill Jewish neighborhood of Jerusalem the other day: “It’s either us or them.’’
This conflict is going back to its roots after being in the past. This seems to be a time of eyes for eyes and teeth for teeth. The policy thinking will have to wait after the mourning.
Really? According to the Times of Israel, at the end of 2021, 9.448 million people live in Israel, with Israelis in the West Bank settlements. The majority of those are Jewish, with 21 percent being Arabs and 50 percent being neither. According to the Palestinian Bureau of Statistics, the West Bank has a population of over three million and the Gaza has over two million.
So, Netanyahu is saying that seven million Jews are going to indefinitely control the lives of five million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza — while offering them no political horizon, nothing, by way of statehood one day on any demilitarized conditions.
Netanyahu came under fire for digitally wounding his army and intelligence chiefs in the middle of a war. I apologized for the things I said after the press conference, and the things I said after the press conference should not have been said. I fully support the heads of [Israel’s] security services.”
The damage was done. How much do you think military leaders would trust what Netanyahu said if the Gaza campaign came to an end? What real leader would behave that way at the start of a war of survival?
The society is better than its leader. It is not good that it took a war to get that home. The founder of Brothers in Arms is a retired member of Israel’s most elite special forces unit. The Brothers in Arms were ready to organize volunteers and aid workers for a long time before this incompetent government did.
It’s a remarkable story of grass-roots mobilization that showed how much solidarity is still buried in this place and could be unlocked by a different prime minister, one who was a uniter, not a divider. Or as Scherf put it to me: “When you go to the front, you are overwhelmed by the power of what we lost.”
