Gaza: Origin Stories

Years ago I laughed and cheered at a prophecy:  that Israel would one day control all of Palestine, from the river to the sea. I was not alone. Most Americans in the 1970s saw Israel simply as David to the Arabs’ Goliath.

Gradually my views changed. A friend told me that early Zionists had included terrorist groups. Once in graduate school I met international students, with their different perspectives on the situation. When the two-state solution was being touted, for instance, an Arab friend claimed that a map hung in an Israeli governmental office, showing a future Israel which included all of Palestine. I was startled; I had once cheered that idea, but no longer. In the 1980s Israel unsealed documents describing atrocities committed by early Zionists.

My view of Israel became conflicted, in much the same way as my view of my own country’s history. My view of the Arab world also evolved.

I continue to learn, recently about history. I’ve been struck by how the West, in its imperialism and its anti-semitism, unwittingly laid the ground for today’s horrors. Unwittingly, but not innocently.

The story begins

The story begins a century ago. Or 2000 years ago: As Europe became Christian, it became anti-Semitic. Jews learned to expect pervasive discrimination and episodic violence. Not so in the Muslim world, however. Arabs and Jews lived side by side for centuries, throughout the Middle East, including the region called Palestine. (It was never an independent country.) Generally the two groups lived in harmony. When Christians reconquered Spain (1492), for instance, Jewish residents were expelled along with Muslims. The Ottomans welcomed all of them, sending ships to the rescue.

A peace to end all peace

The First World War was called, optimistically, the war to end all wars. At its end, the victorious Allies assumed the right – as they thought, the responsibility -- to govern what the Ottomans had once controlled. Britain was given Palestine, and soon issued the Balfour Declaration: From this territory we will carve out a national home for the Jewish people. It promised half of Palestine to its tiny Jewish population (8 – 10% of the total). After Balfour, sporadic violence erupted, intensifying as Jews fleeing Nazism sought refuge in Palestine. (Where else would they go? European nations, the U.S., and Canada, refused to accept them.)

In November 1947 the fledging United Nations declared that Palestine would be divided into two states, one Jewish, one Arab.

The map created by the UN is astonishing. Hostilities between the two groups had been growing for 30 years. No one could imagine these borders were defensible, for either party. (Equally naive, the decree asserted that all inhabitants would retain equal social and political rights, whatever their race or religion.)  A historian of the period called his book A Peace to End All Peace.

Zionists welcomed the decree: For decades they had wanted a state where, finally, Jews could be safe. Arabs, still two thirds of the population and owning 90% of the land, rejected it.

Immediately, violence exploded, from both sides. Zionist forces were more powerful. They attacked Palestinian villages, razing more than 400, killing, sometimes raping, inhabitants. Until the 1980s, this violence was hidden from much of the Western world, including from Israeli schoolchildren and immigrants. (The resonance with America’s handling of our own history is striking.) Israel’s pre-eminent historian of the period calls the violence ethnic cleansing.

Israel declared its independence in May 1948. The day after, neighboring Arab countries declared war. When peace finally settled, 700,000 Arab Palestinians had been expelled or had fled in terror.

The Arab nations lost; Israel took possession of most of what the UN had intended for Palestinians. In cruel symmetry with what Jews in Europe faced a decade earlier, Arab nations refused to accept Palestinian refugees. Today Israel still controls the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, each filled with refugees and their descendants.  

The 75 years since have seen an unending cycle of violence. Both sides have committed war crimes. There is fierce disagreement on relative blame.

Gaza

In 2005 Israel withdrew its settlements and its military from Gaza, but retained (with Egypt) control over all land, air, and sea entrances. In 2007 Hamas, committed to the destruction of Israel, seized power. In response Israel tightened its control of borders. The blockade made it difficult, often impossible, for Gazans to leave: for jobs in Israel, for medical care, for professional conferences, for family emergencies. Its control of imports and exports – including water, gas, and electricity -- gave Israel a chokehold on the Gazan economy. Hamas, for its part, was both incompetent and corrupt, diverting resources meant for the people into its war machine.

Life within Gaza became desperate: Poverty, hunger, unemployment and confinement ruled the day. Israel believed its constraints were necessary for self-protection. Gazans found their economy in ruins and their lives harshly constrained.

Then came October 7, 2023.

Next: A justly waged war?