Current Affairs

The 7th October 2022, will be remembered in Israel for the absolute barbarity of a Hamas attack on the defenceless, women and children. It will also be remembered for the consequences of the attack and the bombardment of Gaza, where 5,000 have been killed and body parts strewn in rubble with the remnants of those killed – lined up in white body bags waiting for identification.

After the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, Gaza was controlled by Egypt, which neglected the territory. Post 1967 war, Gaza along with the West Bank, came under direct military control of Israel, but after the 1993 Oslo Accords, the Palestinian Authority controlled the strip until it fell into the hands of the militant Islamist movement Hamas, which in 2006 legitimized its control by winning an election taking legislative control of Gaza. For the past 16 years Gaza has been under siege, it has had barriers erected and is ostensibly controlled by Israel and Egypt who control the borders. What comes in or goes out has been determined by the big powers and the suffocating siege has left the majority living under the poverty line.

Israel’s hold on the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip has been ruthless in its inception, the suffocating land, air and sea blockade has seen 53% of the population living below the poverty line. The severe repercussions of the blockade has led to a severe degradation of the environment with water being polluted and a serious lack of drinkable water, which has resulted in waterborne diseases. A United Nations report warned that by 2020, Gaza could become uninhabitable due to the ongoing economic blockade and the long-term confrontation with Israel, which has left Gaza’s infrastructure close to collapse.

Until the 7th October attack, it had been part of Netanyahu’s policy to support Hamas’ continued control of Gaza. This was a cynical ploy by Netanyahu’s government to deepen the political divisions between the Palestinian Legislator and the Hamas legislator in Gaza. And in weakening the link between the two territories, Netanyahu hoped to weaken the Palestinians in the West Bank. Netanyahu stated this publicly in a Likud meeting in 2019, “anyone who want to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas.”

As for the West Bank, settlers are terrorising Palestinians, their land has been developed without consent by an Israeli authority who have received a nod and a wink from the Americans. The geriatric institution that is the Palestinian Authority seems unwilling or incapable of political argument that can challenge the settler movement and land confiscation, and the Israeli authority seems to encourage more and more land confiscation for development to house more settlers. Settler violence has often been encouraged openly by the members of Netanyahu’s cabinet and the extremist Israeli coalition government last year made it a “top priority to expand settlements ﾓin all parts of the land of Israel, including Judea and Samaria.”

This year, Israeli soldiers and settlers killed 250 Palestinians, including 47 children in the West Bank. The quickening pace of settlement building has been offset by deadly attacks against Palestinian villages, which has been surreptitiously backed by the Israeli military and Israeli cabinet, There has been calls for the transference of Palestinians to Jordan and ethnically cleansing the West Bank of Palestinians who have lived there for centuries.

The reaction of the Arab states has been negligible, they have been busy welcoming Israel into the Gulf under the Abraham Accord, and buying Israeli tech and spyware to keep an eye on what their citizens are doing. Israel has been busy doing deals with the Gulf and though Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have argued that those living in the West Bank have been subjected to a system that is structurally apartheid, business has continued to boom for the Israelis. The pressure placed on Saudi Arabia by American diplomats to sign a peace treaty with Israel, may have been the final argument for Hamas to carry out its bloody invasion of Israeli territory.

Israel will be searching for answers, the head of the military command in the Gaza area has already put their hand up, as has military intelligence and Shin Bet who were meant to keep a close eye on the Gazans, but it is the political fall out that has already begun to take its toll. Eighty one percent of Israelis think that the Netanyahu government was to blame for the murderous rampage. Palestinians too will be questioning their own politicians. Since the war began a further ninety one Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank, and the Palestinians will be wondering why Hamas did what it did, knowing full well the repercussions and the war has given Israel’s right wing government the moral high ground

It is Biden’s natural compunction to support Israel, but the bloody raid by Hamas has enabled Netanyahu to be more extreme than ever against the Palestinians. Last week Biden spoke as if there had not been a historical argument and that the war started in the West Bank and Gaza on the 7th October. It was as though the US did not have a toe hold in the conflict that has affected the Palestinians and Israelis since the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. The only cautionary warning Biden gave was that in the aftermath of 9/11, America became involved in two long protracted wars.

What happens next will be horrible, especially if the Israelis invade Gaza, but the consequences politically if the Israelis get this wrong will prove disastrous for Netanyahu. The absolutes determined by this one sided war challenges how the world will react to the loss of more lives. The Israeli politicians are already trying to bolster their propaganda machine with images of the dead who were raped, mutilated and cold bloodedly murdered in the Kibbutzim, fields and towns of southern Israel. But the images coming from Gaza are just as horrific, especially the body bags of children who have been killed in the bombing. The continued violence in the West Bank has also been subjected to media scrutiny in the West Bank and been magnified by all the news organisation looking for stories. Both conflicts will challenge how Israel is seen in the future and whether it acts with more dignity than Hamas did in the killing fields of southern Israel.