Israeli officials are facing backlash after years of Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu quietly allowing Hamas to remain in power.
But reporting in the New York Times has revealed that Netanyahu’s government was more hands-on about helping Hamas: they helped a Qatari diplomat bring suitcases of cash into Gaza, indirectly boosting the militant organization, according to the report.
The calculus — the Times reported on Sunday, citing Israeli officials, Netanyahu’s critics, and the man’s own reported statements — was to keep Hamas strong enough to counteract the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, allowing Netanyahu to avoid a two-state peace solution and keep both sides weak.
Israeli security officials got it wrong; they didn’t think Hamas was capable, or even interested, in launching a large attack against the Jewish state.
I am reading a book on the last hundred or so years of Zionism. It is really depressing, it is basically a product of European imperialism and racism. Europe was happy to fund Israel so they could do something with the Jews…
The nascent Israeli’s also kicked Palestinians off of their land and murdered them with paramilitary groups and then had Europe retroactively say it was ok because it was the Jewish homeland. Not to say the Palestinians didn’t as well, but I can’t say I blame them, they were getting invaded and killed and had their land taken.
At this point the only “moral” path forward in my mind is a secular single state managing the region. That is never going to happen until the United States stops seeing Israel as the useful idiot projecting Western power into the region.
In a theoretical situation, I’d completely agree.
But at this point, realistically, the situation is so fraught that I don’t think there’s a single authority anywhere on the planet capable of forming, administering, or managing that theoretical state.
You certainly couldn’t have Israelis or Palestinians running it, and every other solution would, by default, mean it would be a region ruled by a government not of or by the people…which would make it exceptionally difficult to convince those people that it was, in fact, for the people.
Basically, any individual or small coalition of nations trying to effect this solution would be, in essence, colonialism/hegemony, since as much as the Israelis and Palestinians don’t want each other running things, one thing they’d likely agree on is that neither of them want a foreign power running things. (Perhaps they might be okay with it, depending on which foreign power, but then we’re back to the issue that no one power would be agreeable to both parties.)
While it’s still nigh-impossible, really the only possible way this could happen would be a sort of UN peacekeeping administration, but that would likely be a huge negative impact on the Israeli side, so they wouldn’t be likely to go for this anyway. Even if you do let these people have some sort of democratically representative seat at the table, it’s either population based, favoring Israel, or it’s not, and it’s just a same-number deal, favoring Palestine. Or they’re non-voting members of that leadership group, which neither side would stand for, effectively giving up sovereignty.
There might be room for some sort of UN government in which there were two chambers like the US legislature, one scaled for population, the other not, but with a certain amount of seats…and explicit veto powers… residing with a UN contingent…but again, this is a theoretical solution that Israel is not ever going to stand for.
The only thing I could see bringing them to the table would be if all their Western allies made all aid contingent upon their cooperation. But that’ll never happen because of the value of the Western ally state in the Mideast, no matter how troublesome they may be.
So ultimately, we’re left with a situation where innocent lives are so comparatively unimportant to the governments who could do anything about it, versus the value of their alliances, that the incentive to stop the bloodshed isn’t as great as the incentive to keep it going…and that calculus is not likely to significantly change in the near future.
It’s definitely possible. South Africa managed it. All the black people didn’t kill all the white as soon as they got democracy, and in fact, white people kept a lot of the power, land, and money after lol. You just require a strong Constitution, international support and diplomats at the table, and a peace and reconciliation commission to push peace and moving forward over revenge. Create strong protections in the Constitution and some UN oversight for a bit and you should be fine. Have the new government, now a coalition of the former Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority government, work together with the international community to remove Hamas. Have all that international aid build up the run-down Palestinian parts of the country, like in Gaza, so they stop having power problems, have drinkable water,and not bombed buildings. (The PA fought a civil war against Hamas before, and Hamas has less than majority support in Gaza, so plenty of Palestinians would fight them to keep peace if the quality of life without their interference was better.)
The only problem that I agree with is that Israel wouldn’t accept it. It would need to be a secular government, accepting of Jews, Muslims, and Christians. But the whole idea of their state is based on Jewish power and being in that place specifically for religious reasons. Sharing power and land with the people who originally lived there basically goes against the idea of its founding. You’d need a US that’s focused on peace in the region over power projection and who knows if that will ever happen. We’d need someone like Bernie to get elected, and a Congress with the balls to threaten to withold aid to them.