Gazan pupils didn’t attend school for the whole of last year. Had such a gap year occurred in peaceful circumstances, I would have envied them.
I grew up in a refugee camp in the south of Lebanon in the early 1970s. I hated school, but I was also terrified of Israeli air bombardments, which occurred frequently. I, and others of my generation, developed a habit of standing still, listening silently, trying to detect the faintest sound in the sky of approaching Israeli aircraft so we could immediately rush down to our underground shelters. These sounds—of planes, and the explosions that followed them—left a lasting effect on my hearing. Fifty years on, while I have managed to forget my bitter resentment of going to school as a child, I still jump if I hear a loud and unanticipated sound, such as fireworks.
Gaza’s pupils have suffered infinitely more than what my generation went through in the refugee camps of Lebanon. The heavy and continuous bombardment, the unprecedented number of casualties, mass destruction of homes, schools, hospitals, mosques, churches and whole streets of government and commercial buildings, frequent forced evacuations, living in tents with hardly enough food, no clean water and nowhere to wash. All of their senses, not only their sense of hearing, are being adjusted accordingly.
Gaza’s pupils have suffered infinitely more than my generation
Those lucky enough to survive will probably be informed by what they have heard and seen and smelt and tasted and touched in this year of horror. No matter how they grow up, whether they remain in Gaza or move away, and whatever their political convictions, a mere passing sound resembling what they heard under bombardment will conjure up painful memories of the daily fear of death and humiliation. Many of them will no doubt reach the same conclusion that many of my generation reached: that peace is the only way out of this conflict. Yet such commendable deduction will always rest on the darkest of realisations: that when Israel conducted its genocidal war, neighbouring Arab countries and the rest of the world did nothing to save them.
While writing this piece, I remember an Israeli friend telling me once that many Israelis felt as if Palestinians were more interested in destroying the Jewish state than in establishing one of their own. Such a feeling seems credible. Alongside the armed political groups who have categorically opposed the very idea of making peace with Israel, swearing to destroy the peace process by any possible means, the general attitude of Palestinians towards peace has been ambivalent. For example, despite the evident shortcomings of the Oslo accords—the economic agreements that followed the 1993 peace deal—Palestinians have gained much from them. But even those who benefitted don’t defend Oslo’s positive achievements.
And those who have come to accept that peace negotiations and agreements are the only way out of the dauntingly long Palestine-Israel conflict are incentivised more by practical gain than true commitment to peace. On 7th October, prior to knowing the real extent of Hamas’s actions in southern Israel, I heard of no Palestinians who unequivocally condemned Hamas for launching a violent attack on civilians. Not even those who for years had strongly criticised Hamas’s oppressive rule, as wary as they might have been of the disastrous consequences, seemed eager to question what Hamas had done. It was as if the savagery was the fulfilment of Palestinians’ deep desire to see Israel duly punished.
“Do you condemn Hamas?” This was the question western media addressed to Palestinians and pro-Palestinians at the beginning of every interview that followed 7th October. It was rarely answered without objection to its deliberate failure to acknowledge the political context in which 7th October had taken place. What most interviewees failed, in their turn, to acknowledge was that Hamas had broken the rules of engagement, pushing the conflict to an extreme from which it would be impossible to reach any kind of agreement.
Had I been asked the question, I would have answered: “I’ve condemned Hamas since the day Hamas came into existence!” Unlike some on the western left, I have never entertained any illusions about Hamas. I never thought of the group as a national Palestinian liberation movement that aims to establish a sovereign independent state. Hamas not only refused to join the Palestine Liberation Organisation, it tried to replace it. The aim of Hamas’s fanciful political project is to revive the Islamic Caliphate that collapsed with the defeat of Ottoman rule after the First World War.
I also abhorred Hamas’s repeated attempts to destroy the peace process with violence, especially its campaign of suicide bombing in the immediate years following the signing of Oslo. I have even written that it was the duty of the Palestinian Authority (PA) to disarm Hamas and other similarly dangerous organisations. Since Hamas’s military takeover of Gaza in 2007, I saw every attack by Hamas against Israel as an act of provocation, giving the Israeli government a pretext to exercise its habitual policy of collective punishment against the people of Gaza.
Yet when I first heard the news about Hamas’s attack, my initial reaction was one of approval, in the sense that I hoped it would end Benjamin Netanyahu’s political career. Nobody has done more damage to the possibility of achieving peace than Netanyahu, from his incitement of Israeli anti-peace protesters against former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin—ultimately leading to his assassination in 1995, many claim—to his replacement of the peace process with “conflict management”, thus strengthening Hamas in Gaza while weakening the PA in Ramallah. Indeed, his project of seeking peace with Arab countries who have never been hostile to Israel, while disregarding peace agreements with Palestinians, has made a mockery of the whole idea of peace in the Middle East.
As soon as the extent of the atrocity committed by Hamas became clear, however, I realised that not even the end of Netanyahu was enough of a reward for such a high price; we had entered a darker tunnel than the one we had long languished in. Soon the criterion of either/or, either pro-Palestinian or pro-Israeli, was stiflingly imposed on any public debate; the conjunction “but” was strongly unwelcome. Yet to discuss the politics of Palestine and Israel, even in the most direct and decisive statements, without the use of “but” is to obscure half of the full story. You cannot simply condemn Hamas’s action without making any reference to 57 years of Israeli military occupation in Gaza. Nor can the acknowledgement of the suffering of Gazans permit us to ignore that what Hamas did on 7th October included numerous war crimes.
If I were to say that I am looking at what has been happening from both sides, in the hope of introducing a balanced view, it would not be appreciated. Indeed, balance is precisely what has been so thoroughly rejected by pro-Palestinians and pro-Israelis; acknowledging it would mean treating both sides of the conflict as equals when in fact both reject the idea that they are equal. For pro-Palestinians, the sheer disparity between the number of victims on each side makes any assumption of equivalence scandalously unjust. For pro-Israelis, it is unacceptable to compare a democratic state like Israel with an organisation like Hamas. That’s why the present debate on Gaza doesn’t sound, at the best of times, much better than an exchange of accusations.
Since 7th October, I have felt that peace has moved further away than ever. There was not a glimmer of hope to be seen anywhere. Or perhaps there was!
With news of life-threatening shortages of food in the north of Gaza, I wrote a poem imagining myself as a child in a refugee camp who had barely survived death by bombardments only to find himself facing death by starvation:
Doors are open, the house and the mirror
I’m an orphan at home
And in the mirror
A ghost of dust, skinny, starving to death
No mother to feed me before going to school
No memories of bread either
Only flesh
As soon as I posted it on my Facebook wall, Ahmad, a Gazan friend who had evacuated his home and was then living in a tent, commented, without a hint of irony, that the very availability of food could be a source of grave concern. You had to eat very little, or even refrain from eating altogether, because there were no lavatories.
Ahmad was only echoing what other Gazan friends with whom I have kept in touch throughout the war have been describing. These are the dire conditions of their survival: that you mustn’t eat because there is no place to defecate. The idea that a person has to evacuate their home but is unable to empty their bowels clarified for me why my friends talk of despair as often as they talk of death. Many told me they would rather die than suffer the daily humiliation of trying to survive.
One friend said that the whole idea of living in Gaza, even after reaching a permanent ceasefire, had become unthinkable; no one would ever waste the slightest opportunity to leave. I explained that to be accepted as a refugee anywhere in the world today has become extremely difficult, humiliating even. His shocking reply was that perhaps the best solution for people like him would be if Israel used its nuclear weapon, as one Israeli cabinet minister has actually suggested.
Those very friends belong to a larger group of Gazans who have been my best source of knowledge about what is happening there. They were also, ironically perhaps, the only hope I could find of introducing a balanced view that would overcome the either/or criterion. They are the ignored voices of dissent in the heart of Gaza itself.
Contrary to much reporting, not everybody in Gaza supports Hamas. There has been conspicuous opposition to its rule from the moment Hamas militants seized power 17 years ago. True, the main opposition comes from those who are loyal to the president of the PA, Mahmoud Abbas, but there have always been independent Gazan voices. They belong to different generations and walks of life. They are writers, journalists, artists, teachers, university students, charity workers and civil society campaigners. Social media, especially Facebook, is their means of expressing daring views. They are the ones who couldn’t be blackmailed into silence because of Israeli repression. These Palestinians were born under Israeli military occupation; many grew up under Hamas’s intolerant rule. They know what none of us outside Gaza could claim to know.
Though their very existence, since 7th October, has been the target of an ugly war, though some have lost relatives and friends, their homes and livelihoods, though they have been reduced to living in tents and relying on humanitarian aid—when and if such aid is made available —to survive, they have been thoughtful, honest and brave enough to realise that it is not all Israel’s fault.
Over the past 17 years, such voices of dissent have grown larger in number and louder—especially with Hamas’s repeated military engagements. Its launching of rockets into Israel has only provided Netanyahu’s government with an excuse for retaliating with excessive force. Risking the consequences of Hamas’s intolerance of criticism, some Gazans have spoken out against the organisation’s corrupt leadership and the failure of its economic and social policies. Others have preferred to be cautious—not only out of fear of reprisals, but because both Hamas and Israel are to blame for their problems.
By managing the conflict instead of pursuing a “peace process”, the Netanyahu government has made it impossible for life in Gaza to get less insufferable. The long, suffocating Israeli siege and repeated military retaliation, targeting militants and civilians indiscriminately, were all in evidence for those who aimed to be accurate in assigning blame for the plight of Palestinians in the Strip.
However, since 7th October, even those cautious detractors have become outspoken critics of Hamas. With the unprecedented number of casualties—nearing 41,000 at the time of writing, according to Gaza’s health ministry—and the massive scale of destruction in such a short time, some dissidents in Gaza have argued that the only way out of this catastrophic situation is for Hamas’s militants to leave and for the PA to be put back in charge. Had such a suggestion been considered, thousands of Palestinian lives would have been spared, Israeli hostages would have all been released and Hamas would have no longer represented a security threat to Israeli citizens, or indeed to Palestinians.
True, neither Hamas’s leadership nor the Netanyahu government would have even contemplated accepting such a solution; it would have made it impossible for either to survive. But the point is that Palestinian dissidents were suggesting this precisely because of the Gazans who have been rational and brave enough to look, with brutal honesty, at the situation from all sides.
Remembering what my Israeli friend said, about Palestinians desiring an end of Israel more than their own state, I wonder now about trying to see from every perspective. Could this be a step towards liberating the future of Gazan children, who for so long had no schools to attend, from their traumatic past?
There is another benefit to the act of looking from all sides, not just your own. This looking can rehabilitate the senses. It could enable Palestinians, who have suffered such unthinkable violence, to use their senses as a way of acquiring new, and positive, knowledge, to overcome their memories of fear and shame, and consequently to subdue the deep desire for revenge that can grow in even the most gentle of souls. Instead, this looking can nurture a deep desire for peace. It is here, then, in among death and despair, that hope lies.
This essay is one of a pair about this year of darkness in the Middle East. It has been published alongside an essay by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, an Israeli clinical psychologist and novelist.
