semitism.net

I have not blogged in quite a while - I was working on migrating my site to a new server, and redesigning it. Hope you like the new look. I’ll do a post later outlining the features. Meanwhile, I’m catching up on the news. It doesn’t look good. I see that a suicide bomber just blew himself up outside the Hasharon mall in Netanya, wounding thirty. Islamic Jihad - one of the more violent factions in the territories - has claimed responsibility…

In February I was standing in Tulkarm, looking past a graveyard with decorated graves of “martyrs”, over the separation wall, at Netanya - and thinking of the horrific Passover bombing that took place there just a few years ago.

Our group was staying in an instutution operated by a local Islamic group. One floor serves as a travelers’ hostel, but it is mainly a home and school for orphans. Many of their parents are in that graveyard, buried as martyrs or (in most cases) as victims of Israeli incursions.

One nice kid named Ramiz from the orphanage wanted us to tell him all about American sports teams. I remember him shouting down to us from a fifth story window to ask, in broken English, if any of us were from Chicago.

We had dinner with Dr. Eyan, a local physician. He told us how his twins were terrified when Israeli tanks rolled down the streets after the Passover bombing, firing morters and destroying nearby apartments; how the whole family was kept standing at gunpoint in the rain, along with everyone else on the street, in the middle of the night; how he was detained and released; how his kids had nightmares for months afterward.

He said that experiences like this undermine parental authority. Scared kids become angry teenagers. They don’t trust the traditional structures or leadership to protect them. They are ripe prospects for militant groups looking to recruit. Dr. Eyan prays every night that his children, when they get older, will steer clear of these groups.

Today, I fear, it will be Israeli kids who are orphaned. And how will they grow up? How can Israelis trust the Palestinians’ intentions, their own future if Israel give up control of the territories?

The Hasharon incident, at a glance, looks like an effort by the militants to re-assert dominance. I assume this means people are losing faith in Abbas and in negotiation as a means of achieving peace. There has been a series of challenges to the PA’s ability to speak for Palestinians, to govern and maintain order.

Yesterday Palestinian gunmen assaulted the PA security chief. Attacks on settlements in the West Bank and Gaza have increased.

YNet reports that Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahar told Italian paper Corriere Della Sera:

Hamas would “definitely not” be prepared for coexistence with Israel should the IDF retreat to its 1967 borders.

“It can be a temporary solution, for a maximum of 5 to 10 years. But in the end Palestine must return to become Muslim, and in the long term Israel will disappear from the face of the earth.”

It seems to me there is a fragile balance in Palestinian society between hope and despair, and thus between the politics of construction (working toward a peace that will bring independence, building a civil society) and the politics of destruction.

In the parenthesis above, I referred to a peace that will bring independence. That, of course, depends also on Israel - on its real intentions, and on the messages it sends. If there is no real hope of a viable, contiguous state for the Palestinians - or if the majority of Palestinians see no hope of this - the politics of violence will predominate.

For Israel, this poses a paradox and a challenge: to respond to violence with forebearance and not, as always before, with “overwhelming force”. Such force, in almost every case, harms the innocent among the Palestinian population and plays into the hands of the militants by displaying the Israelis as brutal oppressors.

Israel needs to act to strengthen the constructive, nationalistic forces in Palestinian society. Today’s bombing was as much a challenge to Abbas as to Israel, I am quite sure. He is not strong enough, militarily or politically, to crack down on groups like Islamic Jihad. The Palestinian people need hope. And they realize that Abbas cannot bring them statehood, or peace, without agreement from Israel. Which, they suspect, is lacking.

There is a logical alliance between advocates of a binational solution on both sides. But this alliance is rarely realized, at least in part because Israel’s leadership does not seem fully committed to binationalism, at least not in a form that is viable for the Palestinians.