Devastating Attack, Day Ten

The narrative shifts, hostages, Gaza as a shining city and UNRWA

That was the weekend. And it was as tense as all the seven days that came before it, maybe even more so as the scale of the horror became known and the counterattacks got underway. The stories of murder and kidnap kept coming, the list of casualties on both sides kept rising and the battle plans were getting some structure and direction. After a weekend of heavy fighting in Gaza and as of this writing it appeared the real battle is on hold as behind the scenes discussions with the involvement of Egypt and the US are ongoing. Focus is to release citizens through Egypt’s border crossings with Gaza, but details remain unclear. It is also evident that the US is now putting real pressure on Israel to minimize civilian casualties.

As it was weekend, the protests pro and against Israel gained traction across most large cities in the world and they reflected a worrying pattern. The press does not always help here. So, let’s start there.

The Positioning

No sooner did it become clear that Israel was getting ready for launching its ground attack, did the global outcry gain traction. As did the endless misinformation which we should always call out, and listen to this celebrity to get a reminder of that. Without going into detail, let me try and summarize how Israel’s response can in no way be equated to the way Hamas initiated hostilities. Consider this:

Israel was attacked on October 7, 2023 and innocent men, women, children and babies were deliberately targeted. They were murdered, tortured, burned alive, raped and taken hostage. There were no warnings given, on the contrary, and the levels of cruelty of this attack defy any description. In response Israel attacks Hamas and has given a warning to all Gaza citizens to evacuate to the southern part of the Gaza strip. Clear and early notice. In response Hamas has blocked its citizens from leaving making them hostages held captive by their own leaders for political purposes. This on top of the 160 or so Israelis and foreigners (among whom are children and babies) that Hamas is holding.

To see posts over the weekend accusing Israel of ‘genocide’ and ‘targeting Palestinians for ethnic cleansing’ are beyond the pale. They appear now regularly on my Facebook pages, posted by ‘friends’. Look, I can buy any argument and debate it, but if you cannot see the fundamental difference between the Hamas attack and the Israeli response, there’s something missing, the thing we call a moral compass. If we give in to these voices of moral equivalence and accuse Israel of that of which it is a victim, we play directly into the hands of Hamas. If the horrors inflicted on Jews - and not just in Israel as we are learning - fit into the narrative of ‘social justice’, ‘feminism’ and ‘resistance’ we have so lost the plot. If these ideas spread and become mainstream we will be entering the twilight and witness the steady demise of free and liberal societies.

Sure, the casualties in Gaza will pile up and carnage is unavoidable. As one commentator put it over the weekend, would we rather have Churchill measure his response to Hitler? To respond proportionally to the invasion of Europe, Russia, to Auschwitz? The issue is we are not used to and accepting of the real cost of war. We go to war memorials and remembrance day ceremonies and recite the ‘never again’ mantra. But we are unwilling to see what war actually means and what is required to maintain freedom and protect the innocent. The end of World War II saw mass killings (the allied carpet bombing of Dresden comes to mind) and mass expulsions (Germans and Poles being moved from their homelands into new areas). It was horrific sure, but the world accepted it as the fix to live in peace and moved on. Peace has a price and does not come cheaply when dealing with tyrants. That’s where we are at this moment.

Some of the children held captive in Gaza as of today. Heartbreaking is an understatement.

Gaza, the Pearl of the Mediterranean

See it could all have been so different. Going back to the 1990s I recall getting an invite for a project finance conference in 1995 where Yasser Arafat spoke. While I did not attend, it was an important marker of the times. The peace deals triggered massive western investment and government support and in 1998 it helped - among many other projects - fund Gaza’s international airport which was named after Arafat. The Clintons attended the opening and had the Palestinian Authority (the PA) grabbed the opportunity and the blank chequebook handed to them, you would now be flying from London Gatwick or Charles de Gaulle into Gaza City and enjoy the warm breeze, the good food while helping a shining city resplendent in wealth. A sort of Dubai or Singapore. But none of that happened. The PA doubled down on conflict and war and by 2001 the Israelis had bombed Yasser Arafat International Airport into oblivion.
Look, it was not for a lack of trying or for a lack of money and effort. The world had a plan to find the best possible way out of the war and that was through economic opportunity. Palestinians do not want to blow themselves up: they want a normal life, a job and a better future. And young Palestinians want to build innovative tech companies, like the Israelis do.

That route however did not align with the ‘from the river to the sea’ mantra which seeks the destruction of the State of Israel. By 2005 Israel handed full authority back to the enclave and after that the place spiralled into an impoverished piece of land, run by Hamas terrorists who actually managed to have very wealthy lives there (check out Imshin on '‘X’ who has documented this phenomenon over the years).

UNRWA
So it was the world that kept investing in peace and a lasting settlement. But the key agency hired to do most of the work dealing with displaced Palestinians, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), failed to bring the same reality to the people it was hired to take care off. The agency has throughout the years informed Palestinians that they were ‘refugees’ and that one day they could quite possibly return to the lands that were now formally recognized as Israeli territory. This is one of the gravest misreadings of the state of affairs and has helped the notion that one day the entire territory that is now Israel would be free of Jews, ‘from the river to sea’. That slogan is a horrendous one as it gives effect to what we saw happening on October 7 in Southern Israel: the mass slaughter of Jews to clear the land. And it worked: 100,000 Israelis have now been displaced from their homes.

Next

Israel does not seek to take over or cleanse Gaza. It is obliterating Hamas, much like the US did with al-Qaeda and ISIS. You have to remove the cancerous growth before the patient can be cured. And some in Israel (think Bibi) and the international community have looked away for far too long and even facilitated Hamas’s emergence as a major force. An era of new Palestinian (and indeed Israeli) leadership could emerge, but it will take a long time and the ‘two-state’ solution is now further away than ever. The world however owes it to all the victims to do a much better job this time. Before financing a peace arrangement let’s make sure it is a real one.