The death toll is mounting again in the Gaza Strip, with Israelis and Palestinians lobbing bombs and accusations following the demise of a six-month truce.
An Israeli military offensive that began Saturday already has taken the lives of more than 350 Palestinians, about 60 of them civilians, according to U.N. numbers reported by The New York Times. “Four Israelis — three civilians and a soldier — have died,” the paper also reports.
The two sides are laying blame for the latest hostilities on each other — Isrealis blaming Hamas rocket attacks, while Hamas blames Israeli aggression. It is a chicken-and-egg type argument that ignores the weight of a murky history of aggression on both sides.
A New York Times news analysis earlier this month — a day before the truce was to officially expire — sums up the truce’s failures and predicted the carnage that was to follow:
Israel and Hamas accuse each other of bad faith and of violations of the Egyptian-mediated accord, and each side has a point. Rockets from Gaza never stopped entirely during the truce, and Israel never allowed a major renewed flow of goods into Gaza, crippling its economy. This is at least partly because the agreement had no mutually agreed text or enforcement mechanism; neither side wanted to grant the legitimacy to the other that such a document would imply.
“I think it is going to get a lot worse before it gets better,” remarked Robert A. Pastor, who has been traveling in the region with former President Jimmy
Carter, meeting with Hamas and other officials. “It did lead to a significant reduction in the number of rockets fired at Israel until November, but the truce had less impact on the goods going in. One hopes both sides learn lessons and agree on a text and publicize it.”
That is yet to be seen. One thing is clear, however, and that there is plenty of blame to go around. The harsh occupation imposed by the Israelis in Gaza and its willingness to use its massive military force at the slightest provocation creates a desperation among Palestinians that now finds voice among Hamas militants. And Hamas uses what power it has — everything from rocks to mortars — to fight back.
A strange dynamic has developed in which both sides take go on the offensive and claim to be playing defense, upping the ante and intensifying the conflict. Only one side is accused of terrorism, however, a failure of language that fans the flames of populist resentment against the West and many of the western-aligned governments of the Middle East.
Nir Rosen, in The Guardian (UK), describes the dynamic this way:
Terrorism is a normative term and not a descriptive concept. An empty word that means everything and nothing, it is used to describe what the Other does, not what we do. The powerful – whether Israel, America, Russia or China – will always describe their victims’ struggle as terrorism, but the destruction of Chechnya, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the slow slaughter of the remaining Palestinians, the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan – with the tens of thousands of civilians it has killed … these will never earn the title of terrorism, though civilians were the target and terrorising them was the purpose.
Counterinsurgency, now popular again among in the Pentagon, is another way of saying the suppression of national liberation struggles. Terror and intimidation are as essential to it as is winning hearts and minds.
Normative rules are determined by power relations. Those with power determine what is legal and illegal. They besiege the weak in legal prohibitions to prevent the weak from resisting. For the weak to resist is illegal by definition. Concepts like terrorism are invented and used normatively as if a neutral court had produced them, instead of the oppressors. The danger in this excessive use of legality actually undermines legality, diminishing the credibility of international institutions such as the United Nations. It becomes apparent that the powerful, those who make the rules, insist on legality merely to preserve the power relations that serve them or to maintain their occupation and colonialism.
Attacking civilians is the last, most desperate and basic method of resistance when confronting overwhelming odds and imminent eradication. The Palestinians do not attack Israeli civilians with the expectation that they will destroy Israel. The land of Palestine is being stolen day after day; the Palestinian people is being eradicated day after day. As a result, they respond in whatever way they can to apply pressure on Israel. Colonial powers use civilians strategically, settling them to claim land and dispossess the native population, be they Indians in North America or Palestinians in what is now Israel and the Occupied Territories. When the native population sees that there is an irreversible dynamic that is taking away their land and identity with the support of an overwhelming power, then they are forced to resort to whatever methods of resistance they can.
The power imbalance contributes to the conflict, as does the ingrained — and earned — sense of victimhood among Israelis. There was a time when Israel was under siege in the region, targeted by the major Arab governments for extinction. That is no longer the case, though the mindset remains and is now focused on the relatively powerless Palestinian organizations Hamas and Fatah (primarily on Hamas).
Nothing will change in the Middle East until this circle of victimhood can be broken.
Hank Kalet 