Behind the bloodshed

On October 6, the Palestinian armed group Hamas launched “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood” against Israel in a most serious escalation since their 11-day war in 2021. Hamas said it had fired 5,000 rockets, while Israel confirmed that the group’s fighters had entered its territory. Within the first two days of war, the Israeli death toll due to Hamas attacks rose to at least 700 people who included many civilians and children. In retaliation, the Israeli army also launched “Operation Iron Swords” against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, ordered a “complete siege” of the Gaza Strip. “There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel – everything is closed,” he said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said his Security Cabinet has declared the country at war following the attack. The Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said he was “deeply shocked by the news of terrorist attacks in Israel” and that India stands “in solidarity with Israel at this difficult hour”.

The Palestinian enclave of Gaza has been under an air, land and sea blockade since 2007, when Hamas came to power. Since then, Israel has turned Gaza into an ‘open-air prison’. The tiny Gaza strip (150 square miles), one of the most densely populated areas of the world, has a population of 2.2 million. It is reported that Israeli strikes have demolished the entire Gaza neighbourhood. On October 16, an Israeli strike killed more than 500 Palestinians at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City. Till this Tuesday more than 2,800 Palestinians have been killed.

UN data on Palestine-Israel conflict shows, between 2008 and August 31, 2023, Israel had made four major assaults on Gaza: (i) 23-day assault during 2008-09; (ii) 8-day assault in 2012; (iii) 50-day assault, 2014 and (iv) 11-day assault in 2021. These assaults resulted in 6,407 deaths to Palestinians and 308 Israeli deaths. 1,52,560 Palestinians and 6,307 Israelis were also injured.

Hamas spokesperson has told Al Jazeera that the group’s military operation was in response to all the atrocities the Palestinians have faced over the decades. “We want the international community to stop atrocities in Gaza, against Palestinian people, our holy sites like Al-Aqsa. All these things are the reason behind starting this battle,” he said. Meanwhile an Israeli lawmaker, Ofer Cassif, a member of the Knesset and leftist Hadash coalition, said he warned the situation would “erupt” if the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not change its policies towards Palestinians.

International reaction

The international reaction to this conflict is divided. While most of the Western countries have condemned Hamas and expressed their solidarity with Israel, Russian President Vladimir Putin said the conflict showed the “failure” of Washington’s Middle East policy and called the creation of “an independent sovereign Palestinian state” a “necessity”. And China has “condemned” the acts that harm civilians, and called for an immediate ceasefire. Analysts believe that the Israel-Hamas conflict may morally boost Russia in war against Ukraine.

A statement after an extraordinary Arab League meeting on the Israel-Hamas war in Cairo on Wednesday (October 11) said: “We affirm on the importance of resuming the peace process and starting serious negotiations between Palestine Liberation Organisation and Israel.”

In another significant development, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman received a call on Wednesday from the Iranian leader, Ebrahim Raisi, during which they discussed “the current military situation in Gaza and its environs”. Iranian state news agency IRNA reported, saying the two men discussed the “need to end war crimes against Palestine.”

Birth of Israel

It is believed that the ancestors of the Jews — the first wandering Hebrew tribes — fled Mesopotamia and arrived to the hills of Judea to found their first sovereign state. Living at the crossroads of the caravan routes of Europe, Asia and Africa, the Hebrews endured a millennium of continuous assaults. In 586 BC and in AD 70, their conquerors inflicted upon them the supreme ordeal of exile and destroyed the temple they had built in Jerusalem’s Mount Moriah. From those dispersions and the suffering accompanying them, born their persistent attachment to their ancient land. The roots of Jews suffering grew out of the rise of Christianity. The early fathers of the Christian Church attempted to emphasize the differences between their religion and its theological predecessor by forcing upon the Jews a kind of spiritual apartheid. With the crusade, spiritual apartheid became systematic slaughter. The crusaders fell on every hapless Jews community on their route to Jerusalem.

During those dark centuries, the only example of normal Jews existence in the West was in Spain of the Caliphate, where under Arab rule, the Jews people flourished. But the ‘Christian Reconquista’ ended that. In 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella expelled the Jews from Spain. In 1880, after the assassination of Alexander II, the mobs, aided by Czar’s soldiers, burned and butchered one Jews community after another, leaving a new term in their stir: ‘pogrom.’

In 1895, a Viennese new paper by a man named Theodor Herzl created a vision for the Jews — it was Zionism. He produced its blueprint, a one hundred page pamphlet titled ‘Der Judenstaat-The Jews State’. Two years later, Herzl formally launched his movement with the First World Zionist Congress in Switzerland. The Congress elected an international Jews executive to guide the movement, created a Jews National Fund and a Land Bank to begin buying land in Palestine where he hoped to create his Jews state. They also decided on their national flag and the national anthem.

During World War I (1914-18), Great Britain offered the Zionists the first concrete opportunity to realise their dream. In a 117-word note to Lord Walter Rothschild, head of the British Branch of the Jewish banking family, Arthur Balfore, Lord George’s Foreign Secretary, promised the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jews family where Jews constituted less than 10 per cent of the population at the time. (Collins and Lapierre, O Jerusalem, 1978)

The Balfour Declaration, which resulted in a significant upheaval in the lives of Palestinians, was issued on November 2, 1917. The pledge is generally viewed as one of the main catalysts of the Nakba – the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 – and the conflict that ensued with the Zionist state of Israel. After WW 1, the British began to facilitate the immigration of European Jews to Palestine. Between 1922 and 1935, the Jewish population rose from nine per cent to nearly 27 per cent of the total population, reports Al Jazeera.

The Palestinian Arabs, with the support of other Arab peoples, were determined to guard and hold their country, and to prevent it from being dominated further by continued Jewish immigration. The Zionist Organisation, encouraged by new large-scale immigration, legal and illegal, well equipped forces, with the Jewish Brigade providing the nucleus, and powerful foreign support, was unprepared to compromise on its long-standing objective towards which it had advanced so close – a Jewish State in Palestine. Faced with this situation, Great Britain decided in February 1947, to relinquish its mandatory role and to hand over the Palestine problem, created over three decades by the Balfour Declaration and the Palestine Mandate, to the United Nations.

On November 29, 1947, the United Nations adopted Resolution 181 (also known as the Partition Resolution) that would divide Great Britain’s former Palestinian mandate into Jewish and Arab states in May 1948 when the British mandate was scheduled to end. Under the resolution, the area of religious significance surrounding Jerusalem would remain a corpus separate under international control administered by the United Nations. The Christian Zionists who tendered their support for the creation of an independent Israel did not want to keep Jerusalem – a holy land totally under the control of Jews!

Despite growing conflict between Palestinian Arabs and Palestinian Jews, US president Truman, on the advice of the Pentagon, decided to recognise the state of Israel. Thus the USA got a trusted ally in Israel in the middle of the oil-rich Arab land.

In 1947, India voted against the partition of Palestine at the United Nations General Assembly. India was the first Non‐Arab State to recognise Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) as the sole and legitimate representative of the Palestinian people in 1974. India was also one of the first countries to recognise the State of Palestine in 1988.

Israel turns Palestine into its colony

By the end of the 1948 war – called the War of Independence by Israel and the Naqba (“Disaster”) by the Palestinians – Israel controlled 78 per cent of the country, including half the territory that had been allocated by the UN to the Palestinians. (Refer to Table 1). Some 750,000 Palestinians living in what became Israel were made refugees or “internally displaced” people; only 1,00,000 remained in their homes. More than 418 villages, two-thirds of the villages of Palestine, were systematically destroyed by Israel after their residents had left or been driven out.

Palestinian territory – encompassing the Gaza Strip and West Bank, including East Jerusalem – has been illegally occupied by Israel since 1967. Since then, the Israeli government has established a two-tiered legal and political system that provides comprehensive rights for Jewish Israeli settlers while imposing military rule and control on Palestinians without any basic protection or rights under international law. The Israeli government has also engaged in a regular practice of inhumane acts, as well as extrajudicial killings, torture, denial of fundamental human rights, arbitrary detention and collective punishment.

Palestine Liberation Organisation & Hamas

The PLO was created in 1964 with the goal to liberate Palestine, and today acts as the representative of the Palestinian people at the United Nations. PLO is a platform of numerous Palestinian political parties. Fatah, a secular

movement, was founded in Kuwait in the late 1950s by Palestinians diaspora after the 1948 Nakba – the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by the Zionist movement.

Fatah was founded by several people, most notably the late president of the Palestinian Authority – Yasser Arafat. Under Yasser Arafat, and after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, Fatah became the dominant party in the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO)

In the 1990s, the Fatah-led PLO officially renounced armed resistance and backed United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, which calls for building a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders (West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza), alongside an Israeli state. The PLO then signed the Oslo Accords, which led to the creation of the Palestinian National Authority, or Palestinian Authority, an interim self-governing body meant to lead to an independent Palestinian State.

The Hamas movement was founded in Gaza in 1987 after the start of the first Intifada, or Palestinian uprising against Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories. Hamas defines itself as a “Palestinian Islamic national liberation and resistance movement”, using Islam as its frame of reference. The movement believes that the “establishment of ‘Israel’ is entirely illegal”. This sets it apart from the PLO, of which it is not a member.

Hamas entered Palestinian politics as a political party in 2005 when it engaged in local elections, and won a landslide victory in parliamentary elections in 2006, beating Fatah. Since 2007, Israel has launched three wars against Hamas and the Strip. After Hamas won elections in that year, Israel also imposed an airtight blockade.

Hamas and Fatah are the two most dominant parties in the Palestinian political scene. Hamas has been the de facto ruler in the Gaza Strip since 2007, after defeating President Mahmoud Abbas’ long-dominant Fatah party in parliamentary elections. Hamas then pushed Fatah out of Gaza when the latter refused to recognise the result of the vote. Hamas and Fatah have ruled the occupied Palestinian territories of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank respectively ever since. However, it is alleged that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu allowed Hamas to grow while undermining the Abbas government in Palestine.

Conflict among the Jews

A major new survey (2016) by Pew Research Centre found deep divisions in Israeli society – not only between Israeli Jews and the country’s Arab minority, but also among the religious subgroups that make up Israeli Jewry. The religious composition of the population was as follows: (i) Non-Jews 19 per cent, (Muslims 14 per cent, Christians 2 per cent, Druze 2 per cent); and (ii) Jews 81 per cent. Among the Jews, there were: Hiloni (Secular 40 per cent), Masorti (Traditional 23 per cent), Dati (religious 10 per cent), Haredi (Ultra-orthodox 8 per cent).

Christian Zionists still play an important role in shaping Israel’s policy. Jamin Christopher Carlisle (2007) in his thesis, ‘A Dangerous Friendship: Jewish Fundamentalists and Christian Zionists in the Battle for Israel’, outlined three important findings: (i) the history of Jewish religious Zionists and the ways in which it attempts to influence the Israeli government. Special attention was paid to religious settlements founded in the West Bank as a tactic for expanding Israel’s borders; (ii) Christian Zionists’ use of biblical scripture to argue in favour of expanding Israel’s borders to reflect those described in the Hebrew Bible; and (iii) Christian Zionists’ rhetoric vilifying Arab Muslims in an attempt to heighten the pre-existing tension between Arab Muslims and Jewish fundamentalists.

The conflict between Christian Zionist and orthodox Jews has come out in the open. In January 2023, a pair of ultra-Orthodox Jewish lawmakers introduced a bill soliciting someone to convert their faith should be punishable by one year in prison and solicitation to convert a minor would be punishable with a two-year sentence. The proposal had raised an uproar with evangelical Christians — one of Israel’s strongest and most influential supporters in the United States. Then, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had to assure that he would prevent the passage of the proposal.

A controversial legal bill to reform Israel’s judiciary has plunged the country into chaos — airports were closed, thousands took to the streets and a minister was sacked, all in one day. The government has been pushing for changes that would limit the Supreme Court’s powers to rule against the legislature and the executive, while giving coalition lawmakers more power in appointing judges. Even Netanyahu’s own Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, came out against the legal change, calling on the government to halt legislation on changes to the judiciary.

Hamas probably wanted to take advantage of these visible contradictions among the Jews to wage a war against the occupier.

Observations

* A brief history of wandering Jews suggests that they had faced maximum persecution in the hands of Christians. Arabs were not hostile to them. Ironically, a strategic alliance between Christian and Jew Zionists has evicted their Arab hosts from ancestral land and turned them into helpless refugees.

* Hamas attack has provided the hardliner Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu an opportunity to fan ultranationalist fervour among the citizens, many of whom were on the street a week earlier, protesting against his tyrannical policies, particularly on judicial reforms

* The US-initiated Oslo agreements also have been flouted by Israel and the peace process that began in Oslo has been ignored. The neighbouring Arab states may play an important role in establishing a permanent solution through the formation of a Palestinian state.

* The Arab world, especially the people of Palestine, expect a balanced and compassionate approach from India towards their plight. India’s business stake is also very high in Israel. Recent investment of USD 1.2 billion in Haifa port by Adani group is a case in point. Indo –Israel annual trade now crossed over USD 11 billion.

* The political thesis, ‘The Clash of Civilisations’, as proposed by the American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington in 1992, contended that future wars would be fought not between countries, but between cultures. He argued that people’s cultural and religious identities would be the primary source of conflict in the post-Cold War world. Since then, this thesis has vastly influenced the US war strategists. A combined cultural identity of Christian and Jew Zionists has been created, maybe, to engineer ‘a clash of culture’ between Zionism and Islam. This possibility cannot be ruled out.

Views expressed are personal