Editor’s Note
Dear Readers,
Thank you for continuing to read and support The Fieldston Political Journal!
As a publication dedicated to discourse around often contentious topics, we present a variety of issues, from cultural angst to existential threats, that compel our attention. Each subject is a flashpoint. We feel a further obligation to include articles discussing recent events in the Middle East. We understand discussion of these issues may be hard for some, so we tried to approach these articles with added sensitivity. We’ve asked two writers to be very brave; to be ambassadors to dialogue and bridge building. In order to maintain a diversity of articles, we have created a special feature within this edition: Two articles, each discussing the Conflict with alternative perspectives, will face each other on the page. Despite their analytical sweep, these articles represent the perspective of merely two students on the Israel-Palestinian Conflict. We recognize that there is a wide array of opinions held about this nuanced conflict and we hope that these articles are just the beginning of a greater conversation in the Fieldston community. Everyone at FPJ stands behind the intellectual forays made by the authors in an expository form.
For this edition, we are allowing readers to send letters to us that respond to an article/s in this edition. We hope you will take advantage of this opportunity to create respectful dialogue surrounding important political issues. If there is a letter that we particularly like, we may publish it in the next edition of the FPJ (with the author’s permission). You can email these letters to 24twsullivan@ecfs.org and 24tswaxman@ecfs.org.
It should be noted that this article and Tom Kirkpatrick’s article titled “A (real) Peace After October 7th” are presented side-by-side in our printed edition, and the two articles are intended to supplement each other. We encourage readers to explore both authors’ views on the issue.
Sincerely,
Theo Sullivan and Talia Waxman
An Attempt at Understanding The Israel-Hamas Conflict
Hamas’s invasion of Israel on October 7th of last year was the result of years of meticulous planning. It took Israel’s storied intelligence establishment by surprise and resulted in the deadliest day for Israeli civilians. (Reports were circulating about a year ago but not all intelligence reports are acted upon.) Not only were over 1400 Israeli Jews, Israeli Arabs, Bedouins, and foreign Thai workers killed, women were gang-raped, babies were beheaded, and nearly 240 hostages were taken back to Gaza. The barbaric form of attack was a wake-up call to Israel and its political leadership’s assumption, under Benjamin Netanyahu, that Hamas could somehow be tamed by the flow of hundreds of millions of dollars of aid into Gaza. Sadly this was a mistaken assumption.
To put the Hamas invasion in its context, the number of deaths on October 7th, as a proportion of Israel’s population, is equivalent to around 40,000 Americans on 9/11. Unlike the case of 9/11, when Al Qaeda was 3,000 miles from the United States, the Hamas terror organization sits less than a mile across Israel’s border. In the case of the United States, the response against Al-Qaeda was swift, as President Bush quickly dispatched military units to take out Al-Qaeda and its sponsor the Taliban, also making it clear that their supporters would also be considered enemies of the United States. Israel, also a democracy, has an overriding obligation to protect its citizens. Although people residing in the United States often view Israel as a country with one of the strongest militaries in the world and therefore does not need to take such great lengths to defend itself, its very existence is precarious. Israel is a tiny country that is vastly outnumbered by the Arab countries surrounding it. Many of these countries are now backing Hamas most notably Qatar and Iran which is supporting Islamic Jihad and Lebanon’s Hezbollah.
It is important to note that the evidence of sexual violence against Israeli men and women is overwhelming in terms of eyewitness and victim accounts, videos showing the violence, and forensic evidence. Yet it took almost two months for the UN to even acknowledge the sexual violence against Jewish men and women, leading some to question whether there is a bias against the testimony of Jewish victims. Even now, after the New York Times published a detailed article documenting the horrific nature of the sexual assault, people continue to deny that Israelis were actually victims.
Before going into detail about the current status of the war, it is worthwhile to set the context of the long-standing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In many ways, the roots of the conflict lie in the clashing beliefs of two sets of people. For Jews, who were conquered and then ejected from the land of Palestine by the Romans under Emperor Titus and Vespasian (commemorated in the Arch of Titus that still stands in Rome today) in the second century AD, there has always been a connection with the land of Israel. We would now classify this as a form of ethnic cleansing before the term was invented. Even though some Jews were exiled under the Roman Emperors, Jews have maintained a constant presence in Palestine for the past four thousand years. Almost six hundred of those years were under the rule of the Islamic Ottoman Empire, which collapsed in 1918, at the end of the First World War. The period that marks a “return” for Jews takes place between the 1880s and 1918 under Ottoman governance. Those who call Jews “colonialists,” would do well to note the difference in this respect between Jews in Israel and say the British who came to the United States, with absolutely no connection with the land, and then proceeded to destroy the birthright of Native Americans. The desire to return to Israel after the Roman exile is in fact written into the Jewish Daily Prayer book.
Not only is the Jewish desire for a homeland in Israel rooted in Jewish religious beliefs, but it is also a necessity. By 1946, the Nazis had murdered six million Jews, and the Jewish population in Europe was decimated. Survivors of the Nazi killing machine had nowhere to go. Literally. American immigration policies placed quotas on the number of immigrants allowed in from each country. For example, in 1939 while Jews from Germany, Poland, and other countries in Europe were being taken from their homes and sent to death camps, over 300,000 Germans applied for visas to the US. Most of those applicants were Jews desperate for safety from Hitler’s death squads and only 20,000 visas were granted. A majority of the 280,000 Jews whose visas were denied were murdered by the Nazis. In addition, in 1939, the US Congress rejected a bill to give safe-haven to 20,000 Jewish children most of whom were killed in the Nazi concentration camps. The United States also denied visas to immigrants who are “likely to become a public charge.” This law applied to Jewish refugees fleeing from Nazi persecution with absolutely nothing to their name because the Nazis had stolen everything that belonged to them. The United States also turned down boats, such as the St. Louis, which contained Jewish refugees who had qualified for US visas. In 1942, FDR refused to change immigration laws to allow more refugees into the country. So where did this leave European Jews?
Since the establishment of the state of Israel, Jews living in Arab countries in the Middle East and North Africa for over 2,000 years were expelled. Before expulsion, these Jews were subject to discrimination and were not considered equal to their Muslim counterparts. Although almost a million Jews once lived in Arab nations before 1948, only 3,000 Jews now live in the Arab world with 2,000 of the 3,000 being Jews from Morocco, a country that recognizes the State of Israel.
For Palestinians, the belief in the desire for a state is equally strong. Palestinians too have lived in the land that is now Israel for thousands of years under Roman, Ottoman, and British occupation. Today, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are living outside of their native land in various other Arab states, such as Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. Many of them still live in refugee camps without citizenship often as one of the most oppressed people in their respective countries. They want to return to their ancestral homeland, but they have no sovereign state of their own. Therein lies the tragedy. Two people and one land. What should be done?
The United Nations called for the Partition of Palestine, after the departure of the British, in 1947, that would result in the creation of two states: a Jewish state of Israel, and a Palestinian state of Palestine. This partition plan was accepted by many Jewish leaders at the time, who declared their statehood. This partition plan was not accepted, however, by the surrounding Arab nations, (at the time that would have been Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon, all newly emerged as nations after WWII) who were opposed to the presence of a Jewish state, alongside a Palestinian state. Consequently, the Arab governments and their armies made the decision to invade Palestine, and the Jews prevailed in the ensuing conflict in 1948, and the modern state of Israel was born. For Palestinians who had fled or were displaced by the war, the experience was called the “Nakba,” or, “disaster.”
Israel was a country that, at that time, did not include Jerusalem or the West Bank, which then were part of Transjordan. Israel was formed as the only democracy in the Middle East, with the vote given to everyone within its border, including Arabs, Druze, Bedouins, etc. Racially, the country is very diverse with only 30% of the population being of European descent. As Rabbi Sacks, the former Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom puts it: “Jewish communities under threat have been rescued, including those like the Jews of Ethiopia who had little contact with other Jews for centuries. Jews have come to Israel from over a hundred countries, representing the entire lexicon of cultural diversity. A desolate landscape has bloomed again…Economically, politically, socially, and culturally, Israel’s achievements are unmatched by any country of its age and size.” Israel, once a desolate desert, is now a country responsible for some of the greatest technological inventions, from the USB flash drive to FaceID.
Early on, the importance of a strong military capability was impressed upon Israelis by the constant attacks on Israel from across its many borders.
The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), in its early days, was committed to the destruction of Israel and sponsored terrorist attacks, like that at the Munich Olympics in 1972, which resulted in multiple civilian deaths. Successive wars were also launched by Israel’s neighbors, each one won ultimately by Israel. As a result of these military victories, the borders of Israel were extended to include the Sinai Desert, Gaza, Jerusalem, and the West Bank of the Jordan River. The occupation of the West Bank after the ‘67 war is often seen as the flashpoint for the agonies of Modern Israel. Some Palestinians reject the mere existence of Israel, but for others the Six-Day War is the point where the UN guidelines and map got side-stepped, paving the way for violence and mistreatment of Palestinians in the West Bank.
Israel, despite extending its borders, sought on multiple occasions to return the lands it had occupied. Prime Minister Begin and Egypt’s President Sadat at Camp David signed the first such agreement between Israel and an Arab nation when Israel gave back the Sinai Desert that it had won during the 1967 war. The cold peace agreement with Egypt has been held ever since. Eventually, PLO Chairman Arafat and Prime Minister Rabin also came to the negotiating table and signed the Oslo Accords. In signing these accords, Arafat and the PLO came to accept and recognize, for the first time, the legitimacy of the State of Israel. The Palestinian Authority was born as the intended precursor to a Palestinian state.
Unfortunately, the path to peace was paved with difficulty. On Israel’s side, Rabin was assassinated at a peace rally by an Israeli religious zealot and far-right nationalist, Yigal Amir. On the Palestinian side, the Second Intifada, in the early 2000s, which included the suicide bombings of multiple buses in Jerusalem and the deaths of over a thousand Israeli soldiers and civilians, and thousands of Palestinian militants and civilians, was launched after a firm offer for a Palestinian state that incorporated parts of Jerusalem. However, it did not include the right of return of millions of Palestinians, which was subject to further negotiations, so it was rejected by Arafat. Ultimately, Israel retreated both from Gaza and the West Bank, without a firm peace agreement.
It was at this time, in the early 2000s, that peace activists on both Israelis’ and Palestinians’ sides started to lose credibility, and more hawkish views came to the forefront. The once-strong Israeli Left, characterized by politicians like Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak, who preached peace and the two-state solution, has lost ground to increasingly right-wing politicians and parties, who favored more and more settlements that were a fusion of extreme religious and nationalistic beliefs in the West Bank. The once-governing Labour Party of Rabin and Peres was reduced to 4 seats in the election of 2022 a historical low point. Benjamin Netanyahu, the current Israeli Prime Minister, is one of these right-wing extremists, who has served a total of sixteen years. He has publicly stated that he is “open” to negotiations about a two-state solution as long as the Palestinian state has no military or security power. Essentially, he is not willing to negotiate for a Palestinian state with Palestinian sovereignty. Netanyahu has also legalized dozens of illegally built outputs and occupied territory in the West Bank. It is important to note that a majority of Israelis disagree with Netanyahu’s policies, although he does have a significant number of supporters.
On the Palestinian side, Hamas displaced the PLO in Gaza, by winning both elections in 2006 with a majority of votes (44%) and following that, a brutal civil war in Gaza. Hamas did not win a majority of votes in any district in Gaza and has not held an election since the one in 2007. Children make up about half of Gaza’s population so only a small fraction of Gaza’s population actually voted for Hamas.
So what is Hamas?
While the PLO was originally a Marxist, left-wing secular resistance movement. Hamas, originally the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, is a completely different political animal. It was founded in 1987 by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, a Palestinian Muslim cleric committed to Islamic Resistance. Hamas published its covenant in 1988. Article 3 of the 1988 Covenant states that “the basic structure of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) consists of Muslims who have given their allegiance to Allah whom they truly worship”. Article 6 states that, “it strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine,” Article 13 goes on to reject the very idea of negotiated peace, “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors.” Article 31 states, “it is the duty of the followers of other religions to stop disputing the sovereignty of Islam in this region.” Article 32, states, that, “The Zionist plan is limitless. After Palestine, the Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates. When they have digested the region they overtook, they will aspire to further expansion, and so on. Their plan is embodied in the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” This document was a fabrication by anti-semitic Czarists in the early 1900s that created the idea of a Zionist conspiracy to rule the modern world.
It is clear then, that Hamas is not looking for peaceful co-existence with other religions within Palestine. And its use of the long-debunked anti-semitic lies in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is proof if further proof were needed that Hamas has a bedrock opposition to the Jewish religion and a complete misunderstanding of Jewish ethics and intentions in the region. Far from seeking to expand its borders, per the claim of the Covenant, as we discussed, Israel has made concerted efforts to trade land for peace.
Hamas issued a 2017 Charter, that detailed its policies on a number of points, but the original Covenant was not repudiated and remains in effect, alongside the new Charter. In the new Charter, “Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea. However, without compromising its rejection of the Zionist entity and without relinquishing any Palestinian rights, Hamas considers the establishment of a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of the 4th of June 1967, with the return of the refugees and the displaced to their homes from which they were expelled, to be a formula of national consensus.” In other words, Hamas declares itself open to a state within the 1967 borders, but only as an interim step leading to the full liberation of Palestine.
When Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, it was not inevitable that an entity like Hamas would assume leadership in that territory, but Hamas’ rule has been a disaster for Palestinians in Gaza. Hamas has diverted millions of dollars of aid to the building of a war machine that could take on Israel. Hamas uses its funds to build tunnels which are almost half as long as the New York City Subway station. As of 2014, the cost of the tunnels was estimated to be 30 to 90 million dollars. Since there has been significant expansion since that time, it is likely that the resources expended are certainly much higher. Hamas does not provide its citizens with basic infrastructure such as wells and water treatment. As such, around 12% of children’s deaths in Gaza are due to contaminated water.
It was also surely not in Israel’s interests to build walls. Gaza lies next to the Mediterranean and has been going through a booming population growth. Israel would have much preferred to see the growth of a dynamic Palestinian economy on its borders. Instead, it has a neighbor led by an organization with a medieval ideology that sees no room for compromise or negotiation. Countless attacks have been launched against Israel, which has had to take measures to defend itself, and October 7th is only the latest, albeit deadliest, of such episodes. Israel’s defense machine, the Iron Dome, shuts down about 90% of rockets by Hamas. Unlike in other democracies where the enemy does not view civilians as legitimate targets (see, e.g., the various intifadas), Israel’s enemies do. Thus, the development of the Iron Dome which functions essentially to protect civilians was absolutely essential. And, of course, the Iron Dome does not protect against land attacks such as October 7. In addition, though the civilian death toll in Israel is far, far lower than in Gaza, Israeli forces do not hide among their own civilians. It serves Hamas’s political advantage for Palestinians to die so they do nothing to protect their civilians. In fact, they intentionally put civilians in harm’s way.
Hamas launched its invasion on October 7th, knowing that it would provoke a response from Israel. A deadly response, and one that would inevitably result in civilian casualties in Gaza. Why? Because countries have a duty to protect their citizens and because Hamas operatives place themselves in the midst of Palestinian civilians, whether in apartment blocks or below hospitals.
Now the question is how can Israel minimize civilian deaths in a situation where the enemy hides out among civilians. First, Israel has taken concrete steps to protect civilians from unnecessary deaths. It has tried to provide warnings and provide safe passage between different parts of Gaza, as well as evacuation zones. There is absolutely no intention on the part of Israel to attack civilians as an objective in itself in the way that Hamas did. Palestinian civilians are dying, very sadly, because Hamas uses them as human shields. According to the Health Ministry in Gaza which is run by Hamas (and not verified by an outside source), around 20,000 Palestinians have been killed. The IDF reported (also not verified) that for every two civilians killed, one Hamas terrorist is killed. If Hamas’s number is to be believed, that would indicate around 13,000 innocent Palestinian civilians have been killed.
Even one civilian death is far too many. Military experts are divided on the best approach to rooting out an enemy hiding among civilians. Of course, more has to be done to protect the innocent. The number of childhood deaths, the inconstancy and unpredictability of the war, the lack of shelter, and the scale of destruction in Gaza are frightening. Leaked audio of a meeting with the hostage’s family and Netanyahu reveals that even they believe that Israel’s bombardment of Gaza is too much. In addition, there were even some hostages killed by Israeli soldiers indicating that rules of engagement need to be clarified. Fortunately, Israel recently announced that it will be scaling down its attack on Gaza. They will move from large-scale ground and air attacks to a more targeted approach in which a smaller group of Israeli soldiers will “move in and out of population centers in the Gaza Strip to find and kill Hamas leaders, rescue hostages and destroy tunnels.” I can only hope that this method will lead to lower innocent civilian deaths whilst achieving Israeli war objectives.
A critical part of Hamas’s war effort is to enlist public opinion and when it publishes the daily list of dead Palestinian civilians to do so, there is no opportunity to check or verify the numbers released. In a famous case, at the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital, Hamas was so quick to tell people that Israel had just struck and killed hundreds of people in an attack on the hospital, that they didn’t bother to check that the deaths were the result of a misfired Islamic Jihad rocket. It was too late, however, because worldwide people were already rallying against the so-called Israeli action which turned out not to be Israeli action at all.
Of course, if Israel orders evacuations it is blamed for transferring population, and if it attacks Hamas without evacuations, it is condemned for killing civilians. Israel is damned either way. It is imperative to mention that Israel is not perfect, nor is any other nation. There is evidence of their use of US-supplied illegal white phosphorus for their attack against Lebanon. They have also provided Gazans with safe zones in the South, which they later bombed only because, according to Israeli intelligence, Hamas was firing rockets from these safe zones. In addition, some people may argue that Israel should have sent in targeted special force units rather than a larger ground force. While this would undoubtedly have led to greater risk for those Israeli soldiers, standard military strategy means that if and when you launch an attack using ground forces, whether in the time of Napoleon or the Gulf War, one needs to provide your troops with covering fire. Part of that cover is addressed by the use of bombs. It is hardly Israel’s fault that Hamas launched a brutal attack from a densely populated area. Israel’s ground operations took around three weeks to prepare. Israel had to react quickly to Hamas and therefore began their attack by dropping bombs. They did this for two reasons. One, to hit back from where Hamas was firing rockets at an alarming rate. Two to free up that area to invade during ground operations and move the population out.
I think we can all agree the loss of human life in Gaza is heartbreaking and the destruction of whole neighborhoods, including homes has caused a humanitarian disaster. Innocent children and women, who hold no responsibility for the actions taken by Hamas, are being killed. Ironically, the leaders of Hamas and the orchestrators of the October 7th attack are hiding out in Qatar. The top three Hamas leaders together are worth 11 billion dollars while their civilians are suffering in Gaza often with limited access to food, clean water, and proper medical care.
And things did not have to be this way. As a Middle East Expert and New York Times foreign correspondent, Tom Friedman argued: that after Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, the Palestinians could have followed the model in United Arab Emirates model, where an economically prosperous state was built, but instead the ruling party Hamas diverted economic aid to its war machine, and even worse, to its own corrupt officers: “Had Hamas embraced Oslo and chosen to build its own Dubai, not only would the world have lined up to aid and invest in it; it would have been the most powerful springboard conceivable for a Palestinian state in the West Bank, in the heart of the Palestinian ancestral homeland. Palestinians would have proved to themselves, to Israelis, and to the world what they could do when they had their own territory. But Hamas decided instead to make Gaza a springboard for destroying Israel.” Indeed, through its actions, Hamas has proven it is more concerned about destroying Israel than creating a safe and prosperous state for the people it purports to represent. Of course, the Israeli expansion of settlements in the West Bank is another major obstacle to peace and serves to further antagonize and suppress Palestinians living in the West Bank.
Since the war, support for Hamas has waned in Gaza but has increased from West Bank Palestinians. Khalil Shikaki, director of the think tank and a professor in Ramallah, said “Gaza, which usually gives Hamas greater support, is showing more criticism of Hamas than the West Bank. There is more questioning of the decision to go to war.” Gazans are beginning to blame Hamas for their harrowing condition. On October 7th, according to poll data by the AFP, “many Gazans were hostile to Hamas ahead of the group’s brutal Oct. 7 attack on Israel, with some describing its rule as a second occupation.” Alternatively, West Bank Palestinians, who have never actually experienced life under Hamas’s government support them.
Ultimately, I am optimistic that peace will eventually be made that will result in a democratic, Palestinian state sitting alongside a democratic Israel with both states providing rights to all religions and minorities within their respective borders. This can only be achieved once Israel and Palestinians have leaders who are truly committed to peace and respect the sovereignty of the other side. The invasion by Hamas, on October 7th, however, was not calculated to bring peace but to obstruct peace. One has to hope that the forces for peace on both sides can recover from this blow and make strides toward that solution in the long term. In the short term, one has to hope that Israel’s military operation can be concluded as rapidly as possible, with as few civilian deaths as possible, that the hostages can be returned safely, and that Israel can secure protection for its citizens from ongoing brutal attacks from an implacable enemy.
