Back when I was a young editor in the early 1970s for the legendary radio newsman Paul Harvey, he wrote a commentary about Israel. I don’t remember his exact words but I remember his message: he pleaded with President Richard Nixon to give a section of Arizona desert to the Jews. Why, he asked, should they have to live surrounded by enemies? Put aside how Arizonans might have taken to the idea, his point was that a diaspora that had suffered the Holocaust should be able to live in peace.
But they couldn’t. Their homeland became a sovereign nation in 1948 and already they’d had to defend themselves across all their borders in two wars where their very existence was as stake.
Although they didn’t know it, a third one, launched by Arab enemies on Yom Kippur, was not far off.
Yesterday, a reader of this column wrote in the comments section along the very same lines: “Shame on those who created Israel in the midst of their blood enemies,” he lamented, “and expect anything less than endless war.”
But that’s what they got: endless war. Not just the three wars with Arab enemies, but an almost endless continuum of hostilities— from kids throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers to militants firing rockets at Israeli villages to suicide bombers blowing up innocent citizens having coffee or waiting for a bus.
Although it is simplistic to say it this way, that is why Israel has never has felt safe with Palestinians next door. Israelis have never been able to relax.
Neither have Palestinians. They have lived with a neighbor that, justifiably or not, built walls to hem them in, put restrictions on their ability to freely move in and out of their territory, and erected settlements on lands that Jews considered their biblical birthright but Palestinians felt were theirs before they lost them as the spoils of war. They have lived with leaders on their own side so corrupt with foreign aid money that I sometimes saw as many pricey German cars in the parking lots of PLO headquarters in Ramallah as I ever saw in a single parking lot in Germany, all at the expense of a needy population for whom the money was intended. They have had leaders who, even when they had a chance to make peace and create an independent Palestinian state, “never missed an opportunity,” as the late foreign minister Abba Eban once put it, “to miss an opportunity.”
Both sides are trapped. It may seem more obvious when we talk about the Palestinians, who are fenced into their two territories, Gaza and the West Bank.
At best it can take hours to pass through a checkpoint and cross a border— it has for me as a journalist and I’m not Palestinian— and in the case of Gaza, they can be forever stuck without access to the outside world. They have never developed significant industries— in the years I went in and out of the West Bank, olives and olive oil were their most profitable export. They are trapped by their own poverty.
But Israelis are trapped too. Look at a map.
To the north they face Lebanon, whose government is not hostile but with which no peace has ever been established. The southern part of the country, where it meets Israel, is under the control of Hezbollah, supported by Iran and confrontational with the Jewish state. This week Hezbollah lobbed missiles at nearby Israeli towns, and Israel responded by deploying tens of thousands of troops to that northern border. Next to Lebanon is Syria which, according to the Israeli Defense Forces, also launched missiles yesterday into Israel. To the southwest of course they have the Gaza Strip, ruled by an organization that has vowed to push Jews into the sea. Its militants have brought grief to southern Israel for decades.
And to the east, there’s the West Bank (so named because it is the west bank of the biblically revered River Jordan). Once, the West Bank’s Palestinians were the comparative moderates. Now, after years of inertia and the death of the peace process, many are radicalized. Clashes between Palestinians and Israeli soldiers have broken out there. The Palestinian Ministry of Health says the death toll so far is 21.
That is not to say that every Palestinian is a terrorist. They’re not. A friend of mine emailed yesterday with two questions: “Is the whole population of Palestine made up of violent rebels out to kill all who do not support Palestine? Are there regular people like us, trying to go about their daily lives peacefully and do not want conflict?” My answer was yes, that from my experience in the region there are regular people like us, but today they have little say in their fate. A woman I know in Israel wrote about losses close to her this week— the son of a friend critically wounded, a colleague’s close friend who lost her husband— and said, “It just feels bottomless.”
It has to feel that way on both sides. Some observers blame Israel for treating Palestinians as second class citizens, inspiring Hamas, as journalist Mort Rosenblum put it, to “blast past any human norm.” I blame Hamas. No question, Israel’s air strikes against Gaza have been brutal— they’ve hit schools and hospitals and mosques, they’ve killed hundreds of innocent bystanders. Israeli intelligence justifies it by saying that these are the kinds of places where Hamas’s operational commanders hide themselves, using civilians in otherwise inviolable landmarks as human shields.
But as brutal as Israel’s attacks have been, they are a response to the Hamas attacks. It’s Hamas that started it, it’s Hamas that sent out the terrorists. I don’t use that word to parrot what Israel calls them—or the United States or the UK or Germany or France or others. I use it to define them. An Israeli general took command at a kibbutz just across some fields from Gaza, where scores, maybe more than a hundred Jews were killed. He looked around and said, “It’s not a war or a battlefield; it’s a massacre, something more like a pogram from our grandparents’ time.” Reports say babies were even beheaded.
There is no empirical way to designate an act of terrorism, but you know it when you see it.
Israel’s defense minister, who on Monday announced the siege of Gaza with the words “no electricity, no food, no fuel,” said last night that he has “released all restraints.” He pledged, “Gaza will never return to what it was.”
In a different way, neither will Israel.
Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
Thanks, Greg, for your thoughtful and incisive commentary. I wonder if an explication of the European allies' WWI era double-dealing (e.g., Sykes-Picot, Balfour) wouldn't help our understanding, also? Responsibility/blame lies not just with Israelis, Palestinians, certain Arab neighbors, and non-state actors. Britain, especially, should also be held to account for the duplicity of 100+ years ago that gave rise to all this in the first place. The roots of what has become an intractable problem and ongoing human tragedy run straight through Europe.
The respective Gods on both sides must be asleep at the wheel to allow this terror. Christopher Hitchens was right to say "religion poisons everything."