The reignited cycle of violence in Palestine and Israel provides the Israeli government with exactly what it has been begging for months for, violence. However, for once, Israel may be facing a new fact of life—as the sole military power in the conflict, it has the full ability to start a widespread campaign of violence, but it may no longer be the party who single-handedly decides how it ends. This particular round of violence has the potential to surprisingly end with political progress towards peace.
If this new, heartbreaking round of violence is what finally brings an end to the 46 years of Israeli military occupation, then the 11 Israelis and Palestinians who so brutally lost their lives this past two weeks would not have died in vain.
I refer not of the usual violence that the world has become numb to, such as 46 years of military occupation of Palestinians and their lands, nor the cries of desperation from Gaza that are stupidly expressed by misguided militants launching unguided, homemade-like projectiles indiscriminately into Israeli cities, but rather an escalation in violence that allows Israel to open the only playbook it knows in managing the conflict, one based on more violence.
This sad round of yet more Palestinian-Israeli violence is creating a nightmare scenario for the Israeli government. The extremist parts of the Jewish Israeli community and Jewish diaspora, particularly American Jews, are being seen in the open and across social media venues calling for Israel to ‘Kill all the Arabs’ and ‘Bomb Gaza into a parking lot’. Worse yet, Jewish Israelis are suspected of perpetrating a horrendous hate crime in Jerusalem, the murder, mutilation, and burning of a 16 year old Palestinian Jerusalemite who was walking home from morning prayers. The world is getting a peek into the Israel that Palestinians have been complaining about forever.
Shockingly, to the west, some of the violent outbursts coming out of Israel are being made by senior Israeli officials, including current ministers. Assuming the situation on the ground settles down, the damage done to Israel’s manufactured image of being a society aligned with western values has already been permanently disfigured, even given that the majority of Israelis, like the majority of Palestinians, deplore all the recent senseless killings. The current moment is possibly creating an opening for political progress if the international community acts expeditiously.
Maybe for the first time since Jewish terrorists in 1946 planted explosives in the King David Hotel, killing 91 and wounding 46 persons, and a Jewish religious student in 1995 assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in a public square in Tel Aviv, extremist elements within the Jewish Israeli society are being seen in the light that the Palestinians have been pointing out for decades. These Israelis are not only threatening Palestinians, but are now a threat to Israel’s future, no less a threat than violent Palestinian voices are to Palestine being able to realize its freedom and independence.
As the US’s latest efforts, spearheaded by Secretary of State John Kerry, slammed into a cement wall (figuratively and literally), President Obama put the entire Palestinian-Israeli issue on ‘pause’ until a path forward could be charted out. At least this is what the public has been led to believe. Reality on the ground does not corroborate the words emanating from the White House any more than the justification Israel is touting regarding the wanton actions they are engaged in with their campaign of collectively punishing an entire society based on an unsubstantiated assumption that two individual Palestinians may have murdered three of their citizens.
Israeli violence in Palestine is the norm. This has been true for over six decades. Until the key international actor in this conflict, the US, upholds its obligations under international law, no one should expect anything but more blood and tears. The US is no longer believable when it pretends that it is shocked by the deteriorating events on the ground. You can’t support the acquisition of land by force, fund and arm a state’s military occupation, cover-up diplomatically and politically for the state for over six decades, ignore dozens of UN resolutions condemning the actions of that state, and then turn around and be surprised that events are spiralling out of control.
Israeli citizens, Jewish and otherwise, as well as Christian and Muslim Palestinians in Palestine deserve a better global governance leader.
Sam Bahour is a Palestinian-American business consultant in Ramallah, the West Bank, and blogs at epalestine.com.
Spot on. Israel is the proverbial albatross around our necks. Better to let them to their own devices and keep our foreign aid. Let Sheldon Adelson and the like fund this rouge state.
There is a generation gap amongst US Jews. The older generation brought up on the belief that Israel can do no wrong is dying out.
Looking back, the murder of Rabin ended the last chance for the two state solution. The country could have responded by dealing harshly with the settlers and pulling back. Instead they elected Sharon. And by the time Sharon realized that the settlements meant the end of the Jewish state it was too late.
The single fact that nobody in the US seems to want to accept is that there can only be peace if the people living in the area are prepared to live together peacefully. And that can’t happen when Israel enforces a whole raft of Jim Crow laws to preserve the ‘Jewish state’ as such.
Jewish settlements on Palestinian land get government approval while Palestinians are prohibited from building on land they own.
Eventually the US will lose patience and the money supply will be cut off. But it will take a dozen more years before it reaches that point. But when it is reached the transition will be very sudden.
As someone who was raised on both sides of that generation gap, I have to say that your assertion is not quite correct. My Grandmother was Sephardi, and an ardent Zionist. But she never believed for an instant that “Israel could do no wrong.”
She saw too many Nation-States go too wrong before 1948 to believe that, Including France and Germany.
The moment you assign “infallibility” to any Nation, no matter what the reasons or the sentiments, you consign that Nation to a degree of destruction, because no Modern State can maintain the cloak of jingoistic thinking in which it wraps itself, along with a flag.
I am a Jew. I consider myself an Israeli. But the moment anyone begins to push on me that Israel, or any other Nation is somehow beyond fault, I’ll make it my business to go out of my way to disprove this dangerous idea.
It’s dangerous because it backs Nations and peoples into a corner. One that they cannot grow out of. I’m sorry, but the only other way a Nation can truly grow and mature is to admit when it has been wrong. Strip this away, no matter your good intentions, and there is no growth as a Nation, or for its people.
As a matter of thinking, I know that Israel is never always right, and the other side of that coin is that the people who don’t like Israel are not always wrong.
As you can imagine, this make my life somewhat interesting at times. But my goal isn’t just the continued existence of Israel. My goal includes her growth and security. This means a maturation process, just as it does for the other Nations in the Middle East. The only way everyone is secure is if there is not only peace on paper, but peace between people. This means, as it meant in South Africa, a form of Truth and Reconciliation. That cannot come to be unless we are all honest enough to know and acknowledge that no one has a monopoly on being absolutely right all the time.
It needs to become widely known that the source of the majority of the violence in the occupied West Bank is perpetrated by American fundamentalist extremists, followers of the Jewish Nazi, Meir Kahane.
Fundamentalism is its own religion. Labeling it “christian,” “jewish” or “muslim” is just naming the particular sect. They all have more in common with each other than they do with the actual religions they claim to be “purifying.”
Israel prevented 60 previous kidnapping attempts of Israelis by Palestinians; they just didn’t prevent the latest one. They also know who the kidnappers are, and they are militant Palestinians.
The death of the Palestinian teen is still being investigated. I’ve read elsewhere that his family is already known to the police and that they earlier claimed that a car full of men tried to kidnap their younger son. The mother claimed it was a car full of Jews but the father claimed it was a car full of Arabs. And there were insinuations that the older son was killed for other reasons including that he might have been gay.
Whatever the investigation will conclude won’t matter because the Palestinians will always blame the Jews–sort of like the author of the article who only sees Israeli violence. By the way, one of those unguided homemade missiles hit a kindergarten.