I am struggling to make sense of the recent events in Israel and Gaza. The barbarism and atrocities committed by Hamas on innocent Israeli citizens clenches my heart with an overwhelming sense of sorrow for the victims and their families. As one friend wrote to my wife, her family and friends in Israel are moving from bomb shelter to funeral. Families and communities have been shattered, and the horror of the massacre will surely impose a grief that will never leave the hearts of those left mourning.
This never should have happened. Israel, with all its state-of-the-art surveillance technology, should have seen Hamas preparing for these attacks in plain sight. A few years ago, I was standing next to an armoured UN vehicle on the Gaza side of Erez crossing, waiting to get my passport so I could travel the long, open corridor into Israel, and as I looked up in the sky, there was a surveillance balloon, which could most likely figure out my eye colour. Israel failed its citizens. Its initial reaction to the violence on its territory is unsurprising, given its past responses: unabated, incessant pounding of targets across Gaza. In a place as small as Gaza, civilian casualties are a tragic certainty, no matter how precise the strikes. The further escalation of Israel’s retaliation, from apparently using white phosphorus weapons, to cutting food, water and electricity, and now the absurd demand for one million Gazans to flee south is justifiably raising concern among the UN, aid agencies, nations around the world, and many of us seeing the suffering unfold through the news and social media.
Gaza and Israel have been through countless conflicts, with civilians paying the price on both sides, and however bad things seem now, I fear they will only get worse in the short term. Hamas, and Hezbollah in Lebanon, are backed by states and actors that seek to destabilize the region; it’s not hard to see how an escalating conflict in the region can descend into a devastating humanitarian crisis for millions of people.
I’ve been reluctant to speak about the conflict to many people in part because I am deeply troubled by what I’ve seen, and I know that a meaningful answer to “So, what do you think about what’s happening there?” is hardly achievable within the confines of any conversation. I’m also wary of people’s positions on Israel and Palestinians, which can be quite rigid, to the point where the conflict is reduced to a duality comprising of one side that is victimized and the other that is demonized. When someone is firmly on one side, even a tremendous effort to convince them that the other side is worth seeing through a lens that isn’t formed by bias is a daunting, if not impossible task. In case you think I’m favouring one “side” over the other, I’m not: I’ve talked about my work with Palestinian teachers on human rights to Jewish friends and acquaintances who cut me short and walked away from me, unwilling to hear what I had to say. I’ve worked in Gaza several times over the years, and there were Palestinians I met who still, incredulously, denied the Holocaust. Encouragingly – if it is even possible to see anything positive from this experience – I think the positioning of taking “one side” or another has been suffused by an enormity of grief experienced by all. There’s a greater empathy towards the plights of both Israelis and Palestinians, so many of whom continue to suffer, whether through loss of loved ones, displacement in a bombed-out hellscape, or living in anguish wondering about the fate of loved ones who remain hostages.
I’ve been to Gaza at least six times from 2011 until 2017, working as a consultant for UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. I helped create an agency-wide policy on human rights in schools, and worked on a couple of toolkits for teachers on how to integrate human rights values such as inclusion, equality, respect, and diversity into classroom activities. I provided training for hundreds of teachers and education specialists, who then went to on train thousands of other teachers in Gaza, but also other areas where Palestinian refugees live, including the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. Of all the places I’ve been to, Gaza was the most hopeless. Buildings are either rundown, abandoned, bombed, or unfinished because construction materials are unavailable. With unemployment at 45% and over 80% of the population living in poverty, there’s hardly a reason to dream of a more prosperous future. Many children have suffered through more than one war in their short lifetimes – this latest one likely being the harshest.
The call by Israel to evacuate over a million people, as well as cut off water, food and electricity is, as many have put it, nothing short of a violation of international humanitarian law. That’s of little consequence to Israel, which has violated international humanitarian law in the past. What makes it especially egregious is the scale of the displacement, and the impending catastrophic impact it could have on Gaza’s population. To cite but one statistic, fifty thousand women are currently pregnant in Gaza, with five thousand of them expecting to deliver their babies within one month. In unsanitary conditions, without access to proper medical care, many of those infants may die. Hamas needs to be weeded out and eliminated – but a strategy that puts civilians at risk on such a large scale appears more vengeful than tactical. There has already been a tremendous amount of suffering; asking a beaten and broken population to cram into one of the most densely populated spaces on the planet is inhumane. Asking them to move along streets that are bombed out is outright impossible.
The scope of the unfolding tragedy is so fierce, deadly and volatile that there needs to be a path towards safety for all Palestinians, displaced or living in their homes, in whatever state these homes are left in. This means establishing a humanitarian corridor to channel food and water; it means the reestablishment of electricity, to power at a minimum hospitals and other centres where displaced people are taking refuge, like UN schools. If the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) can eliminate Hamas in the north of Gaza, that’s an obvious and welcome objective; destroying the tunnels will be a positive step towards that. But Hamas have embedded themselves in the population, and even if the IDF successfully eliminates a significant number of Hamas militants, it would be foolish to think that post-war Gaza (well, post-this-current-war Gaza) will be free of Hamas; if anything, a conflict of this scale could incite some Palestinians to see no recourse other than violence as a means to end the occupation.
There must come a point when the cycle of violence ends, and a semblance of stability lays the foundation for peace. That begins to happen when people are no longer oppressed by terrorists – and to that point, I hope Hamas has sealed its fate by committing its latest and most heinous atrocities. That of course is insufficient in this complex and protracted conflict. A recognition of the inherent human rights and dignity of all persons needs to be a bedrock for peace. As the Dalaï Lama put it: “I accept everyone as a friend. In truth, we already know one another, profoundly, as human beings who share the same basic goals: We all seek happiness and do not want suffering.” I wish more people took that to heart.
paul mcadams - a change is coming 