Putting an End to the Slaughter
By Patrick N. Theros - November 3, 2023
Modern
wars kill civilians in numbers geometrically greater than deaths among
combatants. That grim fact is a product of the 20th century. It all has
to do with efficient modern weapons, true “force multipliers,” that
allow fewer troops to kill many more noncombatants. On October 7, Hamas
killed 1,400 Israelis, more than a thousand were civilians. Striking
back, Israel has, as of this writing, killed more than 9,000
Palestinians, again the overwhelming proportion being civilians; a
horribly large proportion are children.
The Israeli-Palestinian
War, I should remind readers, started before World War II, not on
October 7, 2023. October 7 is only another, albeit even ghastlier,
chapter ballooning the death tolls that, in turn, inspire more revenge
killings. The last ninety years have been one continuous series of
revenge killings, each justified as payback for the atrocities of six
major wars and countless smaller bloodbaths from the 1930’s to 2023. The
carnage has dehumanized each side's perception of the other. Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu calls for the Palestinians to be
treated like the “Amaleks” – an ancient Cannanite tribe exterminated by
King David (see the 1st book of Samuel), while his Defense Minister
describes Gazans as ‘animals’. An early Palestinian leader declared
“killing Jews is good in the eyes of God.” Common decency and lack of
space do not allow a detailed account of what each side has inflicted on
the other, nor will I entertain any arguments about which murder of
whose baby was worse. As one side slaughters the children of the other,
it is digging graves for its own children.
Netanyahu has laid out
his objectives for the war on Gaza; he will eradicate Hamas both
militarily and politically. He has cast the war in existential terms as a
fight for the “very survival of Israel” – rather than a battle against a
militant group holding a block of territory 141 square miles big,
surrounded and outgunned. For a few days, Netanyahu proposed expelling
two million Gazans to Egypt, ostensibly for their own protection while
the Israelis hunted down Hamas. For Palestinians and Egyptians,
Netanyahu’s call conjured up memories of the expulsion of more than a
million Palestinians in 1948.
Allowing the conflict to fester
since then has only driven more revenge-inspired bloodshed. As I have
written in this column earlier, this conflict did not originate with the
Palestinians or the Israelis. Europeans laid the groundwork for the
conflict in 1915, and European antisemitism, culminating in the
Holocaust, brought it to a head. Foreign powers, especially the US, have
perpetuated the conflict. The US jealously guards its monopoly over
negotiating any settlement of the conflict. We push “peace process”
negotiations but our track record of success is dismal. The record is
littered with failed strategies. Henry Kissinger first articulated the
theory that supplying unlimited military equipment to Israel sufficient
“to ensure its superiority to any combination of possible enemies” would
give the Israelis the confidence and sense of security needed to make
compromises for peace. Every successive American administration has
tried the same policy and they all have failed. We repeatedly dragged
the Palestinian Resistance Organization (PLO) to the negotiating table,
but we never seemed to understand that the Palestinians, much the weaker
party, lacked the strength to negotiate. In 1993, it appeared that we
might have had a breakthrough with the Oslo Accords that established a
Palestinian Authority (PA) and initiated the concept of the two state
solution. Tragically, an Israeli fanatic assassinated Yitzhak Rabin, the
Israeli leader who signed the Oslo Accords, and everything began to
slide downhill thereafter. Israel, in a misguided attempt at ‘divide and
conquer’ initially nurtured Hamas to undermine the PA which has lost
all credibility. Palestinians see it as an ossified and corrupt
collaborator with the Israeli occupation. In 2005, the US and Israel
insisted that Palestinians conduct elections over the objections of the
PA. Hamas won the vote by a big margin, but the US and Israel then
refused to accept the results; apparently on the theory that democratic
elections are only valid when our guy wins.
This bloody downward
spiral has led the protagonists into a situation where each side’s
minimum demands are unacceptable to the other. The nationalists on both
sides demand that their state exclusively occupy the land. The national
narrative of each side envisions a state only occupied by their own
ethnic group. The chant “From the River to the Sea” echoes in both
camps.
The time has truly come for the outside world to step in
forcefully and put an end to the conflict it started and helped
perpetuate. Pundits wring their hands and worry that Israel will never
dismantle settlements, for example, or that Palestinians will never
forfeit the refugee’s right of return. Why not? Some of us are old
enough to remember that in 1978, President Jimmy Carter took a famous
“walk in the woods” at Camp David with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem
Begin after the latter stated he would rather “give up his right arm' '
rather than withdraw from a single settlement from the Sinai. When the
two got back from the walk, Begin had agreed to the withdrawal of all
settlements from Sinai. Why not try it again?