Israel & Palestine

As we all now know, the usual tensions in Israel have exploded with a surprise attack on Southern Israel by air and land. It has been one year since the infamous October 7th attacks on Israel by Hamas. Hamas militants flew using powered gliders into Israel from Gaza, while others moved by light trucks by land. Israel was caught entirely by surprise and this resulted in 200 hostages and about the same amount of deaths, including an attack at a music festival where young people were shot in cold blood. Israel’s Iron Dome defense was overwhelmed by the number of rockets being shot out of Gaza and into Israel in a stunning defeat of a system thought to be nearly impenetrable. 14 Americans are being held hostage along with other Israelis.

In response, President Biden addressed the nation on 10 October 2023 and announced that the Gerald R. Ford Super-carrier (America’s newest carrier and the first of her class) into the area. She was already in the region, and she is currently making the best time to Israel. Shipments of arms from the US are already arriving to replenish Israel’s Iron Dome Defense system. In the intervening months, a new floating supply dock has been added to the mission to provide aid, and Israel has cornered Hamas and most of the Palestinian population in Rafah, the last bastion in Gaza. The war has expanded, two carriers are in the region, and now there are attacks against Iran due to Iran supporting attacks via Hezbollah on Israel. The war has stretched into nearly a year. But how did this all start, and why did Hamas choose to attack now?

Hamas and the Palestinian Authority

Hamas is one of the most effective terrorist organizations in the world. Their origins extend to the first intifada (call by clerics for an uprising) in 1987, and they have been connected to the global (and very dangerous) Muslim Brotherhood that has connections throughout the region. Next to Al-Qaeda and Hezbollah, they have used violence, intimidation, and hostage-taking as part of their program for decades. They have been responsible for thousands of Jewish deaths through various terrorist campaigns.

Under the Bush administration, the US encouraged free and fair elections in Gaza and the West Bank as part of their program to spread democracy in the Middle East. The Palestinians elected Hamas to government and for the past 15 years, they have enjoyed both the power of violence and nominal political power within Palestinian-held areas of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, as well as a smattering of refugee camps. Since that time, Hamas has had more power than the Palestinian Authority, who had ruled the Palestinians areas of Israel in the 1990s. The sad part is that the Palestinian Authority still exists, but it has almost no temporal power in Palestinian areas.

Some people will point out that Hamas enjoys incredible popularity among the Palestinian people, but the reality is that like many dissident movements, they provide valuable services and control important public sector services like health and education. Unfortunately, this also means that they control much of the international resources that are poured into Gaza and the West Bank.

The Palestinian Question

Unfortunately, due to the arrival of Jewish people from Europe throughout the early 20th century and the collapse of Ottoman Empire and the subsequent division of its territories between Britain and France, what to do with the Palestinians in Palestine has been a problem. The British government had declared an intention to create a Jewish state in the Balfour declaration in 1917 in the darkest days of World War I. This was the result of nearly 10 years of lobbying by the Zionist Organization led by Theodore Herzl. The First Zionist Congress met in 1897 with an aim of how to create a homeland for Jews. By the end of the War, the Ottoman Empire had collapsed. It was time for the British to come good with their promise on official government policy.

1920 began with the British Mandate system. Between the allies and other powers (like Turkey) they had carved up the Ottoman Empire into sections for themselves, with France taking on what is now Lebanon and Syria and Britain taking Israel. The European powers would spend much of the rest of the interwar period carving up the Middle East and creating new countries out of whole cloth with a complete disregard for ethnic and religious boundaries as well the nomadic nature of some tribes desert tribes like the Bedouin and the Druze.

The remainder of the Mandate system would see massive immigration to the British Mandate of Palestine by Jews from around the world. Russian Jews had been arriving as early as 1905 to escape pogroms in Czarist Russia. As the Nazi’s took power in Germany, more Jews escaped to the Mandate. In numerous instances, boats would simply crash into the beaches, and people would jump off them and start a new life in the Mandate. Tent cities sprung up in Jerusalem. Money from Jewish people in America was raised to help these refugees.

The “Palestinian Question” was a hot geopolitical topic in the 1930s. Jerusalem had been a multi-ethnic and religious melting pot under the Ottomans, and the British didn’t do anything to stop but the influx of Jews meant that the Palestinian population who had been living in the region since at least the end of the Crusades (in some form or another) was being outnumbered by their new neighbors. New cities like Haifa popped up. Many Palestinian landowners sold land to the newcomers, and these areas frequently became popular, modern, and western with modern conveniences.

In 1946, as Israeli militia groups were attacking British soldiers while being responsible for the takeover of the territory for the handover, the creation of the state of Israel seemed to solve the “Jewish Question” once and for all. In the aftermath of the horrors of the Holocaust in Germany, Jews fled Europe for Israel, the United States, and even Australia, but Israel was a popular destination because it was close by; many had family there, and Jewish people had become the majority. Although still ruled by Britain, it was a safe option for those seeking to start a new life in the ashes of the War.

However, with the resolution of the Jewish question, a new question arrived: the Palestinian question. What was to be done with the population of people (non-Jewish) who had already been living there? What would their place be in a Jewish state based on zionist principles?

The answer came immediately upon Israeli independence in 1947. 13 Arab nations declared war on Israel, and these militias who had been fighting the British were immediately called upon to defend the nascent Jewish state. The Palestinians, now a minority in land they had once lived in under the Ottomans, were caught in the crossfire. They rejected a two-state solution as proposed by the newly minted United Nations (with Jerusalem as an international city, controlled by neither). This proved to be a terrible miscalculation as Israel pushed back the countries attacking it, and it left the Arabic population in Israel, the people we now call Palestinians, in limbo.

One of the uncomfortable truths for the Palestinian people is that none of their Arab neighbors want them, leaving them with nearly nowhere to go. They are second-class citizens within Israeli society, and they have been subject to endless checkpoints and, in the case of people living in the West Bank, forcible evictions in favor of Jewish settlements. Gaza has been described as an open-air prison where Israel controls the water and power and can shut things off as needed. There is never an excuse for violent extremism like Hamas and Hezbollah, but these actions make recruitment far too easy for those violent organizations. It is an unpleasant truth on the ground.

Solving the Israel/Palestine problem has been something that has plagued every US president since at least Kennedy. The Palestinian Authority would have another chance at a two-state solution with Bill Clinton in 1998 and the leader of the time, Yasser Arafat rejected the US-brokered deal with Israel. Even though a few have had success with some peace deals like Jimmy Carter with the Camp David Accords which helped Israel reach peace with Egypt (a long-time rival) and the Abraham Accords which were signed between Saudi Arabia and Israel to normalize relations and brokered by the Trump administration.

That brings us to today and the nasty and protracted conflict that has divided public opinion on both sides of the Atlantic and has caused protests and even become an issue in the US presidential election. Where do we go from here?

Anti-Semitism and Genocide

Is Israel defending itself against a hateful terrorist organization, or is it committing genocide? These days that depends heavily on whom you ask. For many on the far left and readers of The Cameron Journal, the answer is clear: genocide. For others who are bigger supporters of Israel, they would say Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, and they are defending themselves against an organization that kills women and children and takes people hostage. The counter-argument is that Israel bombs schools and hospitals. The reality is that in this war, neither side is clean. Neither side is a righteous fighter. Both sides have blood on their hands, and for those who complain, I would say, “Welcome to geopolitics in the Middle East.”

However, there is a greater problem in this conflict. We may not be able to tease who is the rightful party between Israel and Hamas, but the rise of antisemitism around this topic has been particularly concerning. I will say right now that I think Israel has been running an apartheid regime and that criticizing the government of Israel, which happens to be led by Jews, is not antisemitism. But there are those who are certainly reviving some terrible ideas from the past.

A brief look around any X (formerly known as Twitter) thread, and you’ll find some rather nasty anti-semitism. There are elements of this impulse in both the left and right. Tablet magazine recently posted an article about how anti-racism can conflict with anti-semitism. I’m often surprised at some comments and pictures posted, especially given the shootings at synagogues in the past 10 years, it is concerns that it didn’t take much for anti-Jewish sentiment to explode online. In the protests on college campuses across the nation, anti-semitism from the Left is on display, as Jewish students have reported attacks and people blocking them. They are not instruments of the Israeli government, the only they share is an ethnicity and (possibly) a religion. It is always fair to criticize the government of Israel, but it is never a good thing to attack people for merely being Jewish. Anti-semitism is unacceptable in a civilized society. While I do not like the turns the conflict in Israel has taken, I think this rise of anti-semitism is far more concerning.

What Happens Now?

If there were easy solutions to the problem between Israel and Palestine, I would certainly pay a great deal of attention to myself with all the answers. But the reality is that there are no easy solutions to this conflict. It appears that Israel is going for broke and working to eliminate Hamas entirely. I don’t know how many Palestinian civilians are going to survive this war, and already entire families have been wiped out. The world is divided. I cannot tell anyone whom to support or what to think about the situation. In my view, this war will not be stopping anytime soon. If anything, with the attacks on Iran and in southern Lebanon by Israel, the war is beginning to expand into a regional conflict, which I have long feared would be the case.

I think this means that this war could extend for some years. How long the US will be willing to keep funding remains to be seen, and it will certainly be affected by whoever is elected president. If I were to give any piece of advice to Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, I would wrap things up quickly. Public opinion is fickle, and it could soon turn in such a way that regardless of who wins the US election, Israel may not be able to sustain the war as long as they might like to sustain it.