Let’s be clear: Hamas is a terrorist organization less committed to improving the lives of Palestinians than they are to killing Jews. It really is that simple. The same might be said of their sister in terror, Hezbollah, and their predecessor, the PLO. This has been the case since the war that immediately followed Israel’s declaration of statehood in 1948. The Palestinians, along with all of the Arab countries bordering Israel, vowed to push the Jewish inhabitants “into the sea.” Muslim Palestinians living side-by-side with Jewish settlers as co-inhabitants of what was then British-controlled Palestine fled the new nation of Israel and took up arms against them.
To be sure, the Palestinian people have struggled to establish their own state for generations. Prior to 1948, during the British and French colonial periods preceding the establishment of a Jewish homeland, plans were made to create two separate states in the area now designated as Israel. To the best of my understanding, the Palestinians rejected the proposals put forth as more favorable to Israel than to them.
Following Israel’s War of Independence, the Israeli government refused to allow the Palestinians, who had fought beside their Arab neighbors, back into the country. The Palestinians became displaced persons, neither welcomed by the Arab nations they fought beside, nor welcomed back to the place they had abandoned. They were now permanently displaced persons. They crowded into Gaza and the West Bank, areas still controlled by Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon.
Subsequently, the Six Day War launched against Israel by their Arab neighbors resulted in more territory being gained by Israel, and Israel refused to cede it back. They viewed the occupied territories as strategic to their national defense and a hedge against future aggression by hostile neighbors.
Since that time, and over the course of several generations, life for Palestinians has become progressively worse. In fenced-off Gaza, with a 70 percent unemployment rate, grinding poverty has become the norm. More than 2 million men, women, and children inhabit an area roughly the size of Las Vegas, Nev.
Attacks launched by Hamas on neighboring Israeli border towns have happened with some regularity, although such attacks were quickly quelled. Israel compounded the problem by continuing to build Israeli settlements close to both the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank and instituted increasingly harsh measures to ensure that Palestinian-inhabited territories were kept under tight control.
After taking office 16 years ago, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu instituted a blockade of Gaza in response to the long-standing Intifada declared by Palestinian extremists. Israel subsequently ended its military occupation of Gaza and built a border fence to tightly control movement in and out of the Gaza Strip. Gaza is now essentially a large cage containing two million human beings, the majority just trying to make ends meet and survive under very difficult conditions. Continued terrorist attacks by Hamas on Israel have served to escalate tensions and exacerbate the plight of the residents of Gaza.
All efforts to bring about a two-state solution have been routinely stymied by hard-liners within the Israeli government and within successive Palestinian regimes (the PLO, Hamas, and Hezbollah). The recognized government of the Palestinians (the Palestinian Authority) wields far less power than the terror groups who control the communities in which they live.
It is possible to recognize two opposing truths: Israel has a right to exist, and displaced Palestinians should have the right to live in their own sovereign nation. It seems to me that the Israelis and the Palestinians are the modern-day Hatfields and McCoy’s: No one examines or cares about how the feud began, or what made it worse, but everyone wants revenge for the most recent affront.
My heart goes out to all the people of Israel, who should be able to live in prosperity and peace. My heart goes out to Palestinians, who should also be able to live in prosperity and peace. But the individuals and groups who control the politics in that region have poisoned the well, and innocent people are the victims.
Not every Muslim is a terrorist. I continue to believe that most Palestinians want peace and freedom, not ongoing bloody conflict. But authoritarians and terrorists exist in every country and within every ethnicity, creating fear and mistrust. And they don’t just save their terror for their perceived enemies: They inflict it on their own people as a means of control. The Palestinian people are as much the victims of Hamas as are the Israelis, and the Israelis are just as much victims of Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government as are the Palestinians.
At present, however, there is no moral equivalency: Hamas, aided and abetted by Iran, Russia, and other state sponsors of terror, launched and continues to pursue a horrific and unjustified attack on Israel, and Israel, as a sovereign nation, must respond.
Eventually, the current fighting will stop. This horrifying and tragic episode will end, at least temporarily, until, through continued lack of reasonable compromise, it will happen again. The table is perpetually reset—not with plates and silverware, but with rhetoric, and inaction, and resentment and violence. The seeds of future conflict will be sewn in the tragic human toll of this war. When civilians, women, children, and the elderly are the targets, regardless of their ethnic or national identity, nobody wins.
Peace comes only when two sides leave their grievances and accusations at the door and approach each other with an overriding desire for reasonable and equitable outcomes. The time for a two-state solution is long overdue. It is possible that every Hamas terrorist responsible for this human catastrophe will have to perish in order for something good, and stable, and just, to emerge from the ashes. And maybe, just maybe, the citizens of Israel will decide to rid themselves of the autocrat Netanyahu, along with his authoritarian coalition, in order to make it so.
