Hamas Quiz

CAN YOU PASS THE HAMAS QUIZ?
By Jeffrey Rudolph (June 2010; last update October 2023)

Mainstream media distortion of Hamas is endemic in the United States and Canada. Even in my local newspaper, the Montreal Gazette, one searches in vain for meaningful coverage of human rights reports or the opinions of past Shin Bet directors. Instead, there is persistent mention of Barak’s (mythical) “Generous Offer” and ahistorical reporting on Hamas rockets.

While it’s important to acknowledge that Palestinians also bear some responsibility for their difficult circumstances, it is crucial to keep three fundamental truths in mind to avoid confusion between the victims and the perpetrators:

1. Israel is illegally occupying Palestinian territory.
2. Occupied people have the legal right to resist occupation.
3. Israel, which is in violation of Security Council and General Assembly resolutions dealing with unlawful territorial change and the violation of human rights, and has failed to implement the 2004 advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice, escapes the imposition of sanctions and enjoys significant economic, military and diplomatic support from powerful states.
   

The following quiz is designed to provide essential context pertaining to the inadequate coverage of Hamas by the mainstream media.

THE HAMAS QUIZ

1. Has Hamas ever deliberately attacked an American target?

-No. According to Kenneth Pollack, former CIA analyst, Middle East expert and former National Security Council staffer, “[H]amas…[has] never deliberately attacked American targets. The PLO did…” Pollack adds that in recent times Palestinian militant groups have all concentrated on Israel and one another and not the US “despite the tremendous levels of anti-Americanism in the region, the popularity that al-Qa’ida has garnered for its attacks on the United States, and the lopsided pro-Israel policies of [American] administration[s].”
   “Consequently, it is difficult to suggest that Palestinian terrorist groups are a direct threat to the United States….[T]hey do not constitute the same kind of threat to American interests as al-Qa’ida and therefore do not merit the same response.” An objective observer is left to conclude that it is Hamas’s independence from the US orbit of control, coupled with the power of the Israel lobby, that engenders relentless US rebukes. (Kenneth M. Pollack, A Path Out of the Desert: A Grand Strategy for America in the Middle East, Random House, New York: 2008, 170.)

-It is wrong to equate Hamas with al-Qaeda or ISIS. “[Hamas] is not fighting for a world-wide Caliphate. It is a Palestinian party, totally devoted to the Palestinian cause [that also funds hospitals, schools, orphanages and soup kitchens]….It did not impose religious law (the ‘sharia’) on the population.” Furthermore “there are churches in Gaza [which] Christians attend…freely, [and] there is a seat in the Gazan legislature reserved for a Christian – that’s night and day from the way ISIS treats Christians…”
http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1407502014/
http://972mag.com/no-hamas-isnt-isis-isis-isnt-hamas/95957/
   By participating in elections, “Hamas has offered evidence that it is willing to function in a modern state and a democratic system. It has called for coalition governments inclusive of leftist and secular parties. Its government as well as its parliamentary list included women and its first government included Muslim and Christian ministers….[Its] position towards the Shiites is similar to that towards Christians….[H]amas refuses to denounce Shiites as apostates, and has interacted with them politically. When the relationship with Iran became strained during the Syrian crisis, the disagreement was political rather than doctrinal.”
http://www.juancole.com/2016/03/no-mr-netanyahu-hamas-is-not-isil.html

-“Hamas does not run a democratic regime and they crush opposition. There are hundreds of political prisoners in Hamas prisons….[However,] Hamas is not just a terrorist organization and Palestinians in Gaza are not terrorists because the Hamas regime governs them.” And in March 2018, after an overwhelmingly peaceful demonstration along the border with Israel, Gazans “are being told that even non-violent protest is not acceptable. What does anyone expect them to do — simply surrender their dreams of freedom and independence and lie down before their masters?” (Gershon Baskin, Facebook post, 31 March 2018)
   “United Nations investigators said on [28 Feb. 2019] that Israeli security forces may have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in killing 189 Palestinians and wounding more than 6,100 at weekly protests in Gaza [during 2018]. The independent panel said it had confidential information about those it believes to be responsible for the killings, including snipers and commanders. ‘The Israeli security forces killed and maimed Palestinian demonstrators who did not pose an imminent threat of death or serious injury to others when they were shot, nor were they directly participating in hostilities,’ it said in its report.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/israel-security-forces-should-face-justice-gaza-killings-u-n-n977526)
   “[While there may never be an ICC case], you — the snipers who sat on the border of the Gaza ghetto week after week, protected from head to toe, sniping [at] unarmed protesters — didn’t you know you were committing a crime? You, who…held between yourselves a…sick competition [to see] who [could take out] the most knees — didn’t you know that you [were] committing a crime?…You who whipped journalists, disabled people, children, medical staff members — didn’t you know…? The 234 dead and more than 33 thousand injured in the return marches yielded 17 military investigations and only one indictment. Considering the fact that the army itself sent you there to commit these crimes, it’s not especially surprising that it’s not investigating you for it. But you knew….Because if you shot…defenseless people like this without realizing that what you [were] doing [was] a crime, then [it’s unlikely] there’s a way back.” (Orly Noy, Facebook post, 5 Feb. 2021))

-Hamas does “have a military wing [the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades] engaged in armed resistance against the State of Israel, a state that has been ethnically cleansing Palestinians from their indigenous lands…” (4 Aug. 2014)
https://truthout.org/articles/israel-uses-palestinians-as-human-shields-but-us-lawmakers-condemn-hamas/
   It’s very unlikely “that Hamas’s strategy of armed resistance can achieve substantive results. However legally and morally defensible, firing bottle rockets at one of the world’s most formidable military powers will not bring it to its knees. It merely provides Israel with a convenient alibi when it periodically decides–in pursuit of objectives wholly divorced from these rockets–to annihilate Gaza.” The best strategy may well be mass nonviolent resistance by Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. (Norman G. Finkelstein, Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom, University of California Press, Oakland: 2018, 363. Hereinafter, “Finkelstein 2018.”)

-“Human Rights Watch on [23 October 2018] accused both the Palestinian Authority and Hamas of routinely engaging in ‘systematic’ unwarranted arrests and torture of critics, suspected dissidents and political opponents, and of developing ‘parallel police states’ in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, respectively.”
   “Saying the systematic use of torture could amount to a crime against humanity under the United Nations’ Convention against Torture, HRW called on the United States, the European Union and other international powers to halt all aid to the Palestinian agencies responsible for persecution and abuse — including the PA Preventative Security Forces, General Intelligence Services and Joint Security Committee, and the Hamas-run Internal Security — ‘until the authorities curb those practices and hold those responsible for abuse accountable.’” (23 Oct. 2018)
https://www.timesofisrael.com/report-details-torture-by-pa-and-hamas-in-their-parallel-police-states/

-It should be obvious that simply killing “terrorists” in, say, Gaza without changing the conditions that produced them is ineffective since new “terrorists” will simply arise. For example, “Israel has assassinated dozens of Arab political and military leaders….What have the results been? Overall – nothing positive. Israel killed Hezbollah leader Abbas al-Moussawi, and got the vastly more intelligent Hassan Nasrallah instead. They killed Hamas founder Sheik Ahmad Yassin, and he was replaced by abler men. [In November 2012 they killed Hamas military leader Ja’abari whose] successor may be less or more able. It will make no great difference.”
http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1353080494/
   A characteristic feature of interventions, such as the US’s global drone assassination campaign, is the belief that an “insurgency will be overcome by eliminating its leaders. But when such an effort succeeds, the reviled leader is regularly replaced by someone younger, more determined, more brutal, and more effective. [William Polk’s study of insurgencies, Violent Politics,] gives many examples. Military historian Andrew Cockburn has reviewed American campaigns to kill drug and then terror ‘kingpins’ over a long period in his important study Kill Chain and found the same results.” (10 May 2016)
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176138/tomgram%3A_noam_chomsky,_what_principles_rule_the_world/

2. True or False: Israel has supported Hamas.

-True. “For well over two decades after the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, Israel…[supported] the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoot Hamas in Gaza as a counterweight to the nationalist Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). This reached the point where the Israeli military occupation encouraged Brotherhood thugs to intimidate PLO supporters.” (Divide and rule has long been an effective method of colonial domination.) (Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood, Beacon Press, Boston: 2007, xxviii-xxix.)
   According to Anthony Cordesman, respected Middle East analyst for the Center for Strategic Studies, Israel “aided Hamas directly—the Israelis wanted to use it as a counterbalance to the PLO.” (Needless to say, once Hamas published its 1988 charter calling for active resistance to Israel, its relationship with the Jewish state changed dramatically.)
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2002/06/08/1320881.php
   “The brotherhood’s leadership pragmatically enjoyed this tacit arrangement with Israel and viewed it as a means of expanding its reach and confronting what it disapprovingly viewed as the secular influence of nationalist factions. Such competition between the Islamists and nationalists led to bloody and acrimonious exchanges, often in full sight of Israel’s occupying forces, which deliberately failed to end these confrontations and continued to enable the brotherhood’s growth.” (Tareq Baconi, Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance, Stanford University Press, California: 2018, 17. Hereinafter, “Baconi 2018.”)

-“Hamas’ origins were distinctly non-violent. Its parent organization, al-Mujamma al-Islamiyya, was founded in 1973 by [Sheikh Ahmed Ismail Hassan] Yassin as an Islamic charity linked to the Palestinian branch of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. The group had long adopted an apolitical stance, and even after the 1967 Six-Day War, when Israel annexed and occupied the Palestinian territories, or the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the Brotherhood categorically refused to participate in the armed struggle against Israel. Accordingly, al-Mujamma focused on providing social, religious, and educational services and welfare to Palestinians in Gaza. This stance was at odds with other secular Palestinian groups at the time, which were actively engaged in violent resistance against Israel’s occupation at home or terrorist attacks abroad, such as the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre. In contrast, al-Mujamma’s pacifist outlook led to Israel recognizing it as a charity in 1979, allowing it to operate freely and financing and supporting its development of a network of Islamist social institutions throughout Gaza.”
https://www.juancole.com/2023/11/hidden-history-hamas.html

-The following is a quote from Netanyahu addressing a Knesset committee in 2019: “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas. This is part of our strategy.”
   “Everyone involved in Israeli-Palestinian matters understood that successive Likud governments built up Hamas because they believed that Hamas would never accept Israel and hence Israel could avoid a peace deal that would lead to it exchanging land for peace. Shamir, Netanyahu and Sharon hated Arafat and Abbas and the PLO because they understood that Arafat and his people were desperate for a deal and that was the last thing Likud ever wanted.”
   “[A]mid [efforts] to impair Abbas, Hamas was [thus] upgraded from a mere terror group to an organization with which Israel held indirect negotiations via Egypt, and one that was allowed to receive infusions of cash from abroad. Hamas was also included in discussions about increasing the number of work permits Israel granted to Gazan laborers, which kept money flowing into Gaza…Since Netanyahu returned to power in January 2023, the number of work permits has soared to nearly 20,000. Additionally, since 2014, Netanyahu-led governments have practically turned a blind eye to the incendiary balloons and rocket fire from Gaza. Meanwhile, Israel has allowed suitcases holding millions in Qatari cash to enter Gaza through its crossings since 2018, in order to maintain its fragile ceasefire with Hamas…”
   “Bolstered by this policy, Hamas grew stronger and stronger until [7 Oct. 2023], Israel’s…bloodiest day in its history — when terrorists crossed the border, slaughtered [at least 1400] Israelis and kidnapped [200 persons] under the cover of thousands of rockets fired at towns throughout the country’s south and center….One thing is clear: The concept of indirectly strengthening Hamas — while tolerating sporadic attacks and minor military operations every few years — went up in smoke [on 7 Oct.]”
https://mjx847.substack.com/p/netanyahu-built-up-hamas
   “Over the years, from time to time, various figures on both sides of the political spectrum repeatedly pointed to the axis of cooperation between Netanyahu and Hamas. On the one hand, for example, Yuval Diskin, head of the Shin Bet security service from 2005 to 2011, told Yedioth Ahronoth in January 2013, ‘If we look at it over the years, one of the main people contributing to Hamas’s strengthening has been Bibi Netanyahu, since his first term as prime minister.’ In August 2019, former prime minister Ehud Barak told Army Radio that people who believed that Netanyahu had no strategy were mistaken. ‘His strategy is to keep Hamas alive and kicking…even at the price of abandoning the citizens [of the south]…in order to weaken the PA in Ramallah.’”
   “It would be a mistake to assume that Netanyahu thought about the well-being of the poor and oppressed Gazans – who are also victims of Hamas – when allowing the transfer of funds (some of which…didn’t go to building infrastructure but rather military armament). His goal was to hurt Abbas and prevent division of the Land of Israel into two states. It’s important to remember that without those funds from Qatar (and Iran), Hamas would not have had the money to maintain its reign of terror, and its regime would have been dependent on restraint. In practice, the injection of cash (as opposed to bank deposits, which are far more accountable) from Qatar, a practice that Netanyahu supported and approved, has served to strengthen the military arm of Hamas since 2012. Thus, Netanyahu indirectly funded Hamas after Abbas decided to stop providing it with funds that he knew would end up being used for terrorism against him, his policies and his people. It’s important not to ignore that Hamas used this money to buy the means through which Israelis have been murdered for years.” (21 Oct. 2023)
https://mjx847.substack.com/p/so-who-was-really-responsible
  (Three weeks before the 7 October 2023 attack, “Netanyahu sent the chief of Mossad to Qatar to personally appeal to the hesitant Qataris to keep funding the terrorists. This [was] after Israel had Hamas’s detailed plans for the [attack] in hand.”) (7 Apr. 2024)
https://mjx847.substack.com/p/israel-told-qatar-to-keep-paying

-“[I]t’s common to associate Hamas’s militancy with its Islamist ideology. The implication is that if only Islamists were eliminated from the Palestinian political scene, Palestinian politics would grow more moderate and quiescent. But Israeli leaders didn’t always see it that way. Just as US officials once saw Islamists like the Afghan Mujahedeen as less threatening than communists backed by the USSR, Israeli officials once saw Hamas as more pliable than Arafat’s more secular Fatah. [F]ormer [New York] Times’ Jerusalem correspondent David K. Shipler noted that in 1981, Israel’s military governor of Gaza told him that…‘he was giving money to the Muslim Brotherhood, the precursor of Hamas, on the instruction of the Israeli authorities. The funding was intended to tilt power away from both Communist and Palestinian nationalist movements in Gaza, which Israel considered more threatening than the fundamentalists.’ [Wrongly,] many Jewish leaders…thought Islamists were inherently more accommodating toward Israel. Today, they wrongly think Islamists are inherently more hardline toward Israel. In reality, political parties, secular or religious, respond to political incentives.”
   “Among Arab Israeli politicians, Mansour Abbas, an Islamist, has proved more open to joining a coalition with Netanyahu [in 2021] than his leftist and nationalist rivals. Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood for decades denounced that country’s government for its peace deal with Israel. But when a Muslim Brotherhood leader, Mohammed Morsi, became Egypt’s president in 2012, he maintained diplomatic ties to Israel even during the war that Israel fought in Gaza later that year. Why? Because political movements evolve in response to circumstances. In 1988, Hamas published a despicable and blatantly anti-Semitic Charter that cited the Protocols of the Elders of the Zion. In 2017, it published a new Charter that claimed ‘its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion…Hamas rejects the persecution of any human being or the undermining of his or her rights on nationalist, religious or sectarian grounds.’ Asking which one represents Hamas’s ‘real’ views misses the point. Like other movements, Hamas evolves in response to events.”
   “It’s not Hamas’s Islamism that keeps it from recognizing Israel. It’s simply good politics. In the eyes of most Palestinians, Fatah’s strategy of recognizing Israel has failed. It has led not to Palestinian statehood but to deepened occupation. That creates a market for a more hardline alternative. Eliminate Islamism from Palestinian politics and some leftist or nationalist faction would fill that same hardline niche and become America’s new bogeyman. Nor would eliminating Hamas eliminate Palestinian violence. After all, Palestinian leftist and nationalist groups fought Israel violently for decades before Hamas was born. And during the second intifada, it wasn’t only Hamas that launched violent attacks. Fatah’s militia, the Tanzim, carried out attacks too.”
   “Fundamentally, Israel doesn’t have a Hamas problem. It has a Palestinian problem. It dominates and brutalizes another people. Until that domination and brutalization ends, every cease-fire will be merely an interval until the next war, regardless of which parties lead the Palestinian struggle.” (20 May 2021)
https://peterbeinart.substack.com/p/if-israel-eliminated-hamas-nothing

-“The eruption of the First Intifada in 1987 refocused [world] attention on Palestine. The local branch of the Muslim Brotherhood abandoned its quietest posture and formed [a new Islamic Resistance Movement called] Hamas [– the Arabic acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya (Islamic Resistance movement), also meaning “zeal”]. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin deported 415 Hamas leaders bound and blindfolded into Lebanon in 1992, but the transfer only served to ‘transform us from a besieged parochial movement into an international one, and gave us a gateway to the world,’ recalls Imad al-Falouji, at the time a Hamas leader…Through Hezbollah, Hamas established diplomatic, financial, and military ties with Iranian and Syrian advisors, and created a military apparatus, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassem Brigades. In April 1993, Hamas conducted Sunni Islam’s first suicide bombing at Mehola, in the occupied Jordan Valley. Applying techniques acquired from Hezbollah, it embraced Hezbollah’s veneration of suffering and martyrdom, overcoming a religious ban on suicide.” (Hamas’s language was religious and intolerant; for example, it called Jews monkeys and pigs.) (Nicolas Pelham, Holy Lands: Reviving Pluralism in the Middle East, Columbia Global Reports, New York: 2016, 80-1. Hereinafter, “Pelham 2016.”)

-Essentially, during the “1970s and 1980s, Israeli leaders…viewed Palestinian Islamists as more moderate than the Fatah-dominated PLO, and therefore allowed them greater freedom to organize. [In fact,] in 1988 — a year after Hamas’s creation — one of the party’s cofounders, Mahmoud Zahar, met with Israel’s then Foreign Affairs Minister Shimon Peres ‘to propose a tacit recognition of Israel in exchange for its withdrawal from the territories occupied in 1967.’ But when the PLO publicly recognized Israel in 1988 and reaffirmed that recognition at the start of the Oslo Peace Process in 1993, Hamas’s rejectionism became impossible for Israel to ignore. Hamas denounced the PLO for recognizing Israel. And during the Oslo Process and the Second Intifada that followed, Hamas launched numerous terrorist attacks. It’s not surprising, therefore, that Israel did not welcome a Hamas-led government [in 2006].” (Legislative elections were held in the Palestinian territories in January 2006 in order to elect the second Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), the legislature of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA). Presidential elections for the Palestinian Authority had been held in January 2005 following the death of Yasser Arafat; these were won by Mahmoud Abbas with 62 percent of the vote.)
   However, in its 2006 election manifesto, “Hamas made no reference to Israel’s destruction. It spoke instead about ‘the establishment of an independent state whose capital is Jerusalem.'” “[H]amas didn’t run on a platform of sharia law and Qassam rockets. Rebranding itself as the Party of Change and Reform, the terrorist group promised to sweep away years of Fatah nepotism, kleptocracy, and slime. When the results came in, Hamas, a charity with an underground terrorist network, crushed mighty Fatah, an organization hitherto synonymous with the Palestinian struggle for independence….[Israel’s] military overreach strengthened a movement that fed on hopelessness and feelings of victimhood.”
  In January 2006, Hamas won an absolute majority in the all-Palestine election, in both Gaza and the West Bank, and proceeded to form a government. After this surprise victory, Hamas leaders did not offer to recognize Israel. But top Hamas official Mahmoud Zahar did declare that, “in return for ‘our independent state on the area occupied [in] 1967,’ Hamas would support a ‘long-term truce’…” (Hence, it’s important to highlight that in 2006 Israel rejected Hamas’s public offer of a truce.)
   Also “after its election victory, Hamas proposed a unity government with Fatah ‘for the purpose of ending the occupation and settlements and achieving a complete withdrawal from the lands occupied in 1967, including Jerusalem, so that the region enjoys calm and stability during this phase.’ Israel could have embraced this.”
   “Instead, the United States and Israel demanded that Hamas formally foreswear violence, embrace two states and accept past peace agreements — a standard that Netanyahu’s own government does not meet. [In other words, Israel wasn’t compelled to renounce violence, or to recognize the Palestinian right to statehood along the 1967 border, or to abide by past agreements.] Hamas, which spent the Oslo years calling the PLO dupes for recognizing Israel without getting a Palestinian state in return, refused. So Washington and Jerusalem pressured Abbas to reject a national unity government and govern without a democratically elected parliament.”
   Then, in 2007, after frustrating the creation of the Palestinian unity government, the US and Israel, in a failed effort to destroy Hamas, “backed an armed force under Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, touching off a bloody civil war in Gaza and leaving Hamas stronger than ever.” When the plot failed, Israel, with the support of the US and Egypt, “imposed a blockade designed not only to prevent Hamas from importing weapons, but to punish Gazans for electing it.” The result was devastation for Gaza’s economy. For example, by “2008, 90 percent of Gaza’s industrial companies had closed.”
   (“Even though President Bush had been talking about democracy in the Middle East for years, he threw his support behind Olmert and his decision to boycott and arrest the democratically elected Hamas leaders in the hope of keeping Abu Mazen [Mahmoud Abbas] in power. [Such] machinations only strengthened Hamas, which now branded itself as a national party acting on behalf of the Palestinian people, against Israel and a Palestinian government cooperating with the occupier.”)
https://forward.com/opinion/399738/american-jews-have-abandoned-gaza-and-the-truth/  (26 Apr. 2018)
(Ami Ayalon, Friendly Fire: How Israel Became Its Own Worst Enemy and the Hope for Its Future, Steerforth Press, New Hampshire: 2020, 231, 232. Hereinafter, “Ayalon 2020.”)
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/04/gaza200804
(Peter Beinart, The Crisis of Zionism, Times Books, New York: 2012, 76. Hereinafter, “Beinart 2012.”)
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3537078,00.html (28 April 2008)

-“In February 2007, on the brink of [their] civil war, Fatah and Hamas leaders traveled to Mecca, where they agreed to form a national unity government, a deal the United States opposed because it preferred that Fatah continue to isolate Hamas.” (Accordingly, with “Saudi help, the rival Palestinian factions managed to reconcile their differences. On 8 February 2007, Fatah and Hamas signed an agreement in Mecca to stop the clashes between their forces in Gaza and to form a government of national unity. They agreed to a system of power-sharing, with independents taking the key posts of foreign affairs, finance and the interior. And they declared their readiness to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with Israel.”)
   “Fayyad became finance minister in the new government, despite, he said, American pressure not to join. The Peruvian diplomat Alvaro de Soto, who had been the UN envoy to the Quartet, wrote in a confidential ‘End of Mission Report’ that the violence between Hamas and Fatah could have been avoided had the United States not strongly opposed Palestinian reconciliation. ‘The US,’ he wrote, ‘clearly pushed for a confrontation between Fatah and Hamas.’”
(Nathan Thrall, The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine, Metropolitan Books, New York: 2017, 117. Hereinafter, “Thrall 2017.”)
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/world/israel/64132/all-that-remains

-“Since the inception of its occupation in 1967, Israel had regulated passage of goods and persons along Gaza’s land and coastal borders. After Hamas consolidated its control of Gaza in 2007, Israel imposed a yet more stringent blockade on it. The motive behind the blockade was twofold: a security objective of preventing weapons from reaching Gaza; and a political objective of bringing Gaza’s economy to the ‘brink of collapse’ (as Israeli officials repeatedly put it in private [as disclosed by Wikileaks]), in order to punish Gazans for electing Hamas and to turn them against it. The list of items Israel barred from entering Gaza–such as chocolate, chips, and chicks–pointed up the irreducibly political aspect of the blockade.” However, it needs to be noted, the blockade hasn’t prevented missiles from being fired at Israel or caused a popular uprising against Hamas. (“Israel told US officials in 2008 it would keep Gaza’s economy ‘on the brink of collapse’ while avoiding a humanitarian crisis, according to US diplomatic cables [leaked to WikiLeaks and] published by a Norwegian daily…”)
(Finkelstein 2018, 182, 361)
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-palestinians-israel-wikileaks-idUSTRE7041GH20110105/
  “The boycott applied not only to imports but, perversely, also to some exports from Gaza. Why prevent the export of agricultural products, fish and other non-lethal goods? It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the hidden motive was to cripple Gaza’s economy and to inflict poverty, misery, and unemployment on its inhabitants.”
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/world/israel/64132/all-that-remains
   “Once Hamas had taken control of Gaza in July 2007, [the blockade left Hamas isolated and destitute]. In this atmosphere, the levels of religiosity and piety inside Gaza increased to the point where Hamas found itself rivaling even more religious groups than itself, namely Salafi, al-Qaeda-oriented Islamists which call for the establishment of an Islamic state with strict and literal application of Sharia rule. Hamas launched massive attacks against them and their followers to the point of almost total obliteration. To justify its position, Hamas used its old standing foster-mother, the Muslim Brotherhood’s view, that it is moderate in its application of Islam and that those Salafi and al-Qaeda groups have deviated from the message of moderation which stands at the heart of Islam, quoting the Qur’anic verse, ‘And so we made you a moderate nation…’…From such an incident, [observers should] notice the potency of [the French thinker Michel] Foucault’s analysis regarding power and the intrinsic imperatives which it sets in motion, as it becomes an end in itself alongside it being a means to perfect the hegemonic status quo and sustain its grip on power, a practice of domination which Hamas and Fatah follow unabatedly.” (Atef Alshaer, Islam In The Narrative Of Fatah and Hamas; Published in: Narrating Conflict In The Middle East: Discourse, Image And Communications Practices In Lebanon And Palestine, Edited by Dina Matar and Zahera Harb, I.B. Tauris, New York: 2013, 120-1.)
   In 2019, Suheib Yousef, son of Hamas co-founder (Sheikh Hassan Yousef) and brother of ‘Green Prince’ (Mosab Yousef) who secretly worked for Shin Bet to thwart terror attacks during the Second Intifada, fled his political/intelligence gathering post in Turkey due to Hamas’s self-serving use of power and extensive corruption. (4 July 2019)
https://www.timesofisrael.com/second-son-of-hamas-leaves-terror-group-exposing-corruption-turkish-spy-ring/

-“Hamas’s [September 2017] offer to submit to a long-delayed reconciliation process with its Fatah rivals signals that the balance of regional forces may be tipping in its favour…Hopes are that a reconciliation will end a decade of bitter feuding between Hamas and Fatah — and a parallel entrenchment of territorial divisions between Gaza and the occupied West Bank.”
   “Most analysts expect the reconciliation process to fail, as previous attempts have. The biggest stumbling block is likely to be over long-promised elections. Polls suggest that Hamas would win in both Gaza and the West Bank.”
   Egypt supports the talks to “forestall another war” between Israel and Gaza. Egypt fears that such a war could lead to Gazans “storming the Rafah crossing into Egypt” and to greater extremism in the Sinai. (“[H]amas’s revised charter, published in May [2017], had opened the door to further cooperation with Cairo by effectively renouncing the group’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.”)
   “[H]amas [wants] to extend its rule from Gaza to the West Bank. ‘Then it can negotiate a long-term [truce] with Israel…based on the 1967 borders. It needs Egypt’s help [to accomplish this].’ [As well,] no serious pressure can be exerted on Israel for talks unless Hamas and Fatah reconcile….[However, to solidify its hold on the West Bank, Israel’s] priority [has been] to foil reconciliation and maintain the territorial split between Gaza and the occupied West Bank.”
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/09/hamas-fatah-rapprochement-win-win-deal-170930101113068.html
  “Erez Tadmor, one of the founders of the far-right Im Tirzu movement and who headed Likud’s information campaign in the [2019] elections,” frankly explained why it is beneficial for Israel to not degrade Hamas to the extent it can’t rule Gaza. “[O]n Twitter [he wrote,] ‘The split between Abbas’ Judea and Samaria and Hamas’s Gaza is optimal for Israel … When necessary, we can strike Hamas in Gaza and not be forced to withdraw to the Auschwitz borders in Judea and Samaria’ …” (12 May 2019)
https://972mag.com/israeli-right-hamas-gaza-palestinians/141386/
   “[W]hy does Israeli security require banning businesses in Gaza from exporting processed foods like cookies and potato chips to Israel and the West Bank? Why does it threaten Israeli security to allow people in Gaza to visit the West Bank to attend a grandparent’s funeral? Why does Israel bar students in Gaza from studying at West Bank universities? … It is understandable that Israel inspects containers entering and exiting Gaza [and] conducts background checks to ensure that the people entering Israel or the West Bank have no ties to terrorism. But blanket prohibitions on the movement of everything from college students to potato chips don’t bolster Israeli security. To the contrary, they weaken it by fostering Palestinian hatred and despair, and denying people in Gaza exposure to more open, liberal societies. Which is why current and former Israeli security officials have repeatedly warned that Palestinian hopelessness creates the conditions for violence, and criticized the blockade. These blanket prohibitions on the movement of goods and people aren’t designed to reduce terrorism. They’re designed, as Netanyahu and other Israeli officials have acknowledged, to keep Gaza and the West Bank separate so Palestinians cannot achieve their own state.” (20 May 2019)
https://forward.com/opinion/424591/its-time-to-end-americas-blank-check-military-aid-to-israel/

-Hamas maintains varying degrees of popularity primarily due to Israel. Israel’s actions largely explain the failure of the PLO to achieve freedom and statehood, and this mainly explains Hamas’s influence. Israel’s actions have shown “Palestinians that nonviolence and mutual recognition are futile….[H]amas’s greatest asset…is not rockets and tunnels. Hamas’s greatest asset is the Palestinian belief that Israel only understands the language of force….The people of Gaza [won some] relief [after the 2014 war] not because Salam Fayyad painstakingly built up Palestinian institutions, not because Mahmoud Abbas repeatedly recognized Israel’s right to exist and not because Bassem Tamimi protested nonviolently in partnership with Israelis. Tragically, under this Israeli government, those efforts have brought Palestinians virtually no concessions at all. The people of Gaza [won] some relief from the blockade – as they did when the last Gaza war [in 2012] ended – because Hamas launched rockets designed to kill.”
http://www.haaretz.com/mobile/.premium-1.609257?v=F2E00FCD55B7B0599D387420A637B393
   “In May 2016, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz obtained a leaked copy of a state comptroller’s report on the 2014 war. According to Haaretz’s summary, the audit stated ‘that the Israeli leadership didn’t seriously consider easing the economic restrictions on Gaza, which might have delayed the eruption of the 50-day war in the summer of 2014.’ Yet well before the appearance of the leaked draft, the government appeared to have understood some of its past mistakes: it reversed its refusal to recognize the Palestinian consensus government; retracted its veto over the payment of salaries to Gaza government employees hired by Hamas; permitted limited exports to the West Bank; expanded the quantity and variety of imports to Gaza; and increased the number of Gaza patients and traders allowed to exit the territory.” Accordingly, “the lesson of the 2014 conflict [for Gazans] was…: although a devastating war had brought only limited and meager relaxations of the closure, the benefits of cooperating—indeed, of continuing to provide Israel with the sort of security that its top generals openly praised—were more meager still.” (Thrall 2017, 176-7)
   “After the brutal years of the second intifada, in which Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups repeatedly targeted Israeli civilians, President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority and Salam Fayyad, his prime minister from 2007 to 2013, worked to restore security cooperation and prevent anti-Israeli violence once again. Yet again, the strategy failed. The same Israeli leaders who applauded Mr. Fayyad undermined him in back rooms by funding the settlement growth that convinced Palestinians that security cooperation was bringing them only deepening occupation. Mr. Fayyad, in an interview with The Times’s Roger Cohen before he left office in 2013, admitted that because the ‘occupation regime is more entrenched,’ Palestinians ‘question whether the P.A. can deliver. Meanwhile, Hamas gains recognition and is strengthened.’” (14 Oct. 2023)
https://mjx847.substack.com/p/peter-beinart-on-palestine

3. Which groups committed the following terrorist acts in Palestine, to further nationalist goals, during the British Mandate period?
3.1 July 22, 1946: Terrorists blew up a wing of Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, headquarters of the British civil and military administration, killing 91 people (nearly a third of them Jews).
3.2 December 19, 1947: Terrorists attacked a village near Safad, blowing up two houses, in the ruins of which were found the bodies of 10 persons, including 5 children.
3.3 December 30/31, 1947: Terrorists  attacked the village of Balad al Sheikh, killing more than 13 persons.
3.4 March 3, 1948: Terrorists drove an army truck up to a building in Haifa and escaped before the detonation of 400 pounds of explosives that killed 14 persons and injured 23.

-3.1 The Irgun Zvai Leumi: This Zionist paramilitary group, tied to the Revisionist movement, “was founded in 1931 by Haganah commanders who broke away from the Yishuv’s main security organization in protest over its official policy of ‘restraint’ in the face of Arab attacks.” From 1943 to 1948, it was led by future prime minister Menachem Begin.
   The bombing of the King David Hotel “was a horrific attack but Begin viewed it as being part of a simple equation — the British had to withdraw from Palestine for Israel to be established. This meant that even devastating attacks…were legitimate.” “At the time, [the King David bombing] was the most lethal terror attack in history…” (The Irgun was classified as a terrorist organization by Israel itself when it became a state in 1948.)
  “In June 1938 the Irgun…planted a bomb at [Haifa’s] central Arab fruit market, killing eighteen people….Over the next seven months another 120 Arabs — and some Jews — were killed in Irgun attacks on public markets in Haifa.”
   Until his death in 1940, Ze’ev (Vladimir) “Jabotinsky was officially the Irgun’s supreme commander, appointing its military commanders in Palestine from afar, but he often failed to impose his will. He opposed the Irgun’s decision to carry out reprisals against Arab civilians and was skeptical about its ties with Poland’s ultranationalist and anti-Semitic government. In the late 1930s, the Poles secretly agreed to train and equip Irgun fighters as part of their ambition to encourage the emigration of Poland’s large Jewish community.” (“When World War II broke out, [the Irgun] accepted Ben-Gurion’s [approach], and suspended, for the most part, terror against the British.”)
(Anshel Pfeffer, Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu, Signal, Canada: 2018, 25. Hereinafter, “Pfeffer 2018.”)
(Yaakov Katz, Shadow Strike: Inside Israel’s Secret Mission to Eliminate Syrian Nuclear Power, St. Martin’s Press, New York: 2019, 84.)
(Tom Segev, A State at Any Cost: The Life of David Ben-Gurion, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York: 2019, 381. Hereinafter, “Segev 2019.”)
(Michael Vatikiotis, Lives Between the Lines: A Journey in Search of the Lost Levant, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London: 2021, 166.)
http://www.cjpme.org/fs_023
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irgun#cite_note-SshmidtFCPRIOT-3

-3.2 The Haganah: Jewish paramilitary organization which became the core of the Israel Defense Forces. Members of the Haganah included future prime ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Ariel Sharon.

-3.3 The Palmach: Elite fighting force of the Haganah. The Palmach’s last operation as an independent unit was against the Irgun. (Perhaps right-wing Jews should not be so smug when they hear of fighting between Fatah and Hamas.) (Segev 2019, 411)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balad_al-Sheikh

-3.4 The Stern Gang (LHY or Lehi): This radical Zionist paramilitary group split from the Irgun in 1940 “rather than give up fighting the British during WWII.” Future Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir was among its leaders. “As Lehi military chief, [Shamir] commanded operations that even many Jews considered acts of terror.”
   “[Lehi] specialized in bank robberies and assassinations of British officials.” In November 1944, Lehi operatives “assassinated Lord Moyne, then the most senior British official in the Middle East.” “In September 1948 [Shamir] ordered the assassination of a Swedish count, Folke Bernadotte, a UN mediator…” Shamir “later joined Mossad, where he founded the intelligence agency’s special operations unit.”
   (Count Bernadotte, who had saved hundreds of Jews from Theresienstadt during the Holocaust, “had put together a new peace plan that required Israel to agree to the return of the Arab refugees.” (“People forced out of their homes, Arabs and Jews, would be given the option of returning to their towns and villages or receiving compensation.”) “The plan also proposed a new set of boundaries–the Negev would go to the Arabs [Jordan and Egypt] and the [entire] Galilee to the Jews; Jerusalem would become an international city.” “Both sides rejected his plan, and four members of Lehi…murdered Bernadotte in an ambush.”) (Pfeffer 2018, 152) (Segev 2019, 382, 441) (Ayalon 2020, 18)
   The “prestate Zionist underground organizations Irgun and [Stern] executed many suspected Jewish collaborators. They also deliberately bombed crowds of civilians, hid behind their own civilian population, and had maximalist territorial goals. The Irgun and [Stern], the progenitors of Likud, practiced what could be called ‘Judeofascism,’ and, minus the religious fundamentalism, could be compared to Hamas.” (The Irgun car bombing at the Damascus Gate in December 1947 that killed 20 was just one of many incidents that targeted civilians.)
http://972mag.com/no-hamas-isnt-isis-isis-isnt-hamas/95957/

-“[British Mandate] promises, as approved by the League of Nations in 1922, were to recognize ‘the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine,’ and assist them in ‘reconstituting their national home in that country.’ To this end, the British were to promote the establishment of Jewish self-government in the country and facilitate Jewish immigration. But such aspirations fell victim to a pattern in which waves of Jewish refugees were met by Arab rebellions that threatened Britain’s Middle East empire at a time of mounting international tensions. And each uprising was followed by an investigative commission and a white paper recommending cutbacks in Jewish immigration and land purchases. Mandatory officials grew vocal in their opposition to Zionism, with some of them becoming openly antisemitic. Finally, in 1939, Britain issued a white paper that essentially closed Palestine’s doors to European Jews, dooming them to the death camps. No wonder Labor Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion vowed ‘to fight the White Paper as if there were no war and to fight the war as if there were no White Paper.’ Both the mainstream Haganah (Defense) and the Revisionist Irgun (the National Military Organization) volunteered to serve in the British Army. Only one faction—Lehi (Fighters for the Freedom of the Land of Israel)—broke away from the Irgun in 1940 and focused on fighting the British. By 1945, after the war’s end, all three Zionist militias joined in an effort to drive the British from Palestine. It was one of the first successful postwar struggles against colonialism, inspiring similar insurrections in Africa, India, and the Far East.”
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/the-beauty-queen-jerusalem

-“Terrorism has always and everywhere been a tactic to reach a goal, not a goal in itself. [The goal may be worthy or unworthy.] Mandela was jailed as a terrorist because he was caught red-handed planning a terrorist attack – as a tactic in the long struggle for democracy. Yitzhak Shamir took pride to the end of his life in having led a ‘terrorist’ organization, the Stern Group. In fact he told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee in 1990…that it was time to stop basing anti-PLO arguments on its use of terrorism, because ‘after all, we were terrorists.’ The real objection to the PLO, he said, was that they want our land and it’s ours.” (J. J. Goldberg, Facebook post, 29 Sept. 2019)
   “Lehi and Irgun militants enthusiastically embraced the label terrorist, and they used it to describe themselves to differentiate themselves from the Haganah. Indeed, literature that glorifies them — Koestler’s Thieves in the Night and Wiesel’s Dawn — likewise describes them as terrorists.” (Matthew Friedman, Facebook comments on Jeff Weintraub’s post, 31 May 2022)
  “[Israel has] the Olei Hagardom memorial to Lehi and Irgun terrorists arrested and executed by the British. [These terrorists] include Shlomo Ben-Yosef, who attacked a bus full of civilians in 1938, Eliyahu Hakim, who assassinated Lord Moyne in 1945, and Meir Feinstein, who bombed a train station. Every oppressed community produces its terrorists, whether they are the IRA, the Sons of Liberty, Louis Riel, Nelson Mandela, Hamas, or the Irgun. They all kill civilians, and they are all celebrated for it by their communities.” (Matthew Friedman, Facebook comments on Jeff Weintraub’s post, 31 May 2022)

-It is not disputed that Hamas has engaged in terrorism — some of it with the clear intention of frustrating peace efforts by other Arab actors. (For example, soon after the 1993 Oslo Agreement signing, Hamas “issued a statement calling the Oslo deal a disgrace and a sellout and urging Palestinians to oppose it. The group, which rejected any compromise with Israel, would devote itself in the coming years to scuttling the reconciliation.”) However, the relevant point is that now Hamas should be accepted as an important and legitimate Palestinian party. (Dan Ephron, Killing A King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel, W. W. Norton, New York: 2015, 20.)
   In December 2014, a “European Union court…removed the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas from its terrorist list… Hamas appealed a 2001 decision by the EU to place it on the list which followed similar actions by the US and Israel. The EU’s General Court found the decision was ‘based not on acts examined and confirmed in decisions of competent authorities but on factual imputations derived from the press and the internet.’…[According to] Hamas’s lawyer…‘Every decision since 2001 imposing restrictive measures, including on the armed wing, have been annulled….[T]his judgement shows the whole world that [Hamas] exists and is legal.’” Nevertheless, the EU is keeping Hamas on the list until an appeal process is complete.
http://time.com/3637355/european-union-hamas-terrorist-list/
   The inclusion of Hamas as a whole, or in some cases just its military wing, on terrorism lists in the US, EU, and UK “is clearly politically motivated: Unlike Daesh, Hamas has neither targeted nor called for targeting any entity other than the Israeli occupation. Hamas was added to the list of terrorist organizations following the events of Sept. 11, 2001, even though it had nothing to do with this terrorist attack.”
http://www.juancole.com/2016/03/no-mr-netanyahu-hamas-is-not-isil.html
   It is worth remembering that soon after its 2006 election victory Hamas publicly “offered a truce in Gaza but Israel rejected the [ceasefire] offer.” (28 April 2008)
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3537078,00.html

-During the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict, Netanyahu, “in a national broadcast, stated that the sole purpose of Hamas’s tunnels was ‘to annihilate our civilians and to kill our children’. However, Israel had already seen six instances in which Hamas was able to use the tunnels against Israel. Once when Gilad Shalit was captured [in 2006], and the rest during the [2014 conflict]. In all instances, Hamas’s target were [Israeli] soldiers, not [Israeli] communities.”
http://972mag.com/were-gaza-tunnels-built-to-harm-israeli-civilians/95279/
   “[A] UN Human Rights Council report pointed out that, although Hamas militants did cross into Israel via the tunnels, they never once targeted Israeli civilians, only IDF combatants. In fact, Israelis themselves have conceded this.” (The UN report acknowledged that the targeted IDF positions were “‘in Israel in the vicinity of the Green Line [i.e., the 1949 Armistice line], which are legitimate military targets.’…[As] Israel has deprived the people of Gaza of their right to self-determination via an externally imposed occupation[,] Hamas has the right to target via tunnels Israeli combatants enforcing this occupation from without, however much anxiety these tunnel attacks might induce among the civilian population.”)
http://mondoweiss.net/2016/04/norman-finkelstein-on-sanders-the-first-intifada-bds-and-ten-years-of-unemployment/
(Finkelstein 2018, 314-5)
   Hamas is not a meaningful threat to Israel. While Hamas can be a brutal organization, “so were any number of national liberation movements – that didn’t make the foreign occupation of their countries and the wars fought to maintain those occupations any more just.”
http://972mag.com/no-hamas-isnt-isis-isis-isnt-hamas/95957/
-Tunnel Economy: Gaza’s tunnel networks have “several purposes: defensive, offensive – and economic.” Regarding the latter, the combination of the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict and Egypt’s closure of the tunnels around the same time (as Egypt violently turned against the Muslim Brotherhood) “tipped Gaza into recession, and although the subsequent aid-financed rebuilding briefly generated some economic growth, it proved unsustainable. Gaza has never recovered from the destruction of its tunnel economy.”
   Some commentators imply “that the entire tunnel network was built by Hamas solely for military purposes, and diverted resources that could have been used to develop Gaza’s economy. But this isn’t true. Most of the tunnels were built by private sector operators for economic purposes, and although Hamas’s tax revenues from tunnel traffic were no doubt partly used to pay for weapons and military infrastructure, the smuggling itself caused Gaza’s economy to boom and enabled the rebuilding of its shattered physical infrastructure. Indeed, so successful was the tunnel economy that for a while it looked as if Gaza could even end its dependence on Israel and international aid — a commitment Hamas had made in its election campaign of 2006.”
   “In fact the tunnel economy always contained within itself the seeds of its own destruction. It was great for imports, but not so much for exports. Egypt wouldn’t officially allow exports to circulate in its economy, and exports to other places were rendered impossible by Israel’s continuing blockade. An economy that can import but can’t export is unsustainable. Gaza’s tunnel economy generated a lovely construction boom and import-led consumption boom, but as Greece could tell you, this is ultimately unsustainable. Gaza needed the export blockade to be lifted. It still has not been. That, fundamentally, is why it couldn’t recover from the 2014 recession — and couldn’t rebuild its tunnels.” (6 Feb. 2024)
https://coppolacomment.substack.com/p/tunnel-economy

-There are many groups more extreme than Hamas that have operated in Gaza. In fact, Hamas has acted against several of such groups when they interfere with Hamas’s objectives. In 2011, for example, Hamas arrested a jihadist “after he had issued a self-styled ‘fatwa’ justifying the murder of Christian civilians. The jihadists were believed to have been responsible for a series of attacks on the Christian community in Gaza, which had been reduced to 3000 people…This contrasted with the attitude of Hamas, which had included in its electoral list for Gaza a Greek Orthodox Christian, Hussam Tawil.”
   These more extreme groups are thought to have also been “responsible for numerous attacks on internet cafes and family celebrations, all deemed impious by the Salafists.”
   Violence between Hamas and such jihadist groups is the result of “irreconcilable differences…[Hamas] has always been identified with a Palestinian territory that needs to be liberated….The jihadist philosophy, however, was totally untrammelled by territorial restrictions, with global ambitions that transcended frontiers. Hamas claimed to represent the only legitimate Palestinian Authority: Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaida on the other hand accused it for this very reason of neglecting its religious duty and of allowing itself to be bound by international treaties. These charges were explicitly made by Bin Laden in December 2007 and were constantly reiterated in the accusations made against Hamas by al-Qaida and associated groups. While Hamas’s ambition was to consolidate its power in the only part of Palestine that was under exclusively Palestinian control, the ambition of the jihadists was to subvert this very control in order to precipitate a more apocalyptic conflict. Hamas is characterised in jihadist millenarian rhetoric as the principal enemy, and even as ‘Shi’ite’, and is destined to be brought low by the establishment in Gaza of a ‘Caliphate’ in anticipation of the universal victory of Islam.”
   However, in competition with more extremist groups in Gaza, Hamas has supported a greater “adherence to Islamic norms…[For example, after the 2008 ‘Cast Lead’ confrontation with Israel,] “Boys were banned from mixing with girls, the smoking of shisha pipes was forbidden and public dancing was outlawed….In a region so badly overstretched by constant conflict and crippling blockade, this was experienced as an additional and unwelcome burden.” (J.P. Filiu, Gaza: A History, Oxford University Press, 2014, 334-7. Hereinafter, “Filiu 2014.”)

-In 2009, Hamas appointed a commission “to investigate the roots of the Salafi jihadist phenomenon in Gaza and determine how it could be dealt with more successfully.” The resulting approach “resembled measures for dealing with violent radicalization that had previously been adopted in other Muslim-majority entities, notably the Gulf states, Saudi Arabia, and Indonesia….Through innovative means such as monitoring, respectful treatment, dialogue, and religious debate, the Hamas government opted for containment of the Salafi jihadist problem and possibly even the rehabilitation of the individuals involved. The commission’s report concluded that the local Gaza presence of Salafi jihadists was not primarily due to radicalization among the existing Salafi community. Rather, the problem lay within the political factions themselves. The majority of Salafi jihadists were found to be young and current (or former) members of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Fatah seeking alternative ways of channeling their despair and lack of hope in the future.” (April 2017)
http://www.inss.org.il/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/SA20.1_Brenner.pdf

-When former head of the Shin Bet Ami Ayalon began his tenure in 1996, it was clear to him “that Israel could not defeat terror without understanding the psychology and culture of the terrorists — what produces and fuels hatred and violence?” He came to understand “‘That Palestinians wanted peace with us, if we’d only lift our boots from [their] necks.’” In 1993 there was a viable political process that people trusted. But in 2019, as people behave according to what they expect, most Palestinians no longer support a two-state solution; they want a single state. (Ayalon 2020, 97)
   According to the Palestinian pollster Dr. Khalil Shikaki, most Palestinians see their leaders as collaborators with the Israeli occupation; they are disgusted with the blatant corruption of government insiders. Palestinians may thus prefer to have a single state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River because at least for its citizens, Israel has the rule of law. Essentially, to regain some confidence, Palestinian leaders need to stand up to Israeli settlers, blockade settlements, and non-violently resist Israeli colonization. (Ayalon 2020, 98-9) 

-In April 2020, “Hamas security forces in the Gaza Strip…arrested local peace campaigners for treason after they held a Zoom virtual conference with Israeli activists. [A] spokesperson from the Hamas-run interior ministry said the prominent Palestinian figure Rami Aman and others had been detained on charges of ‘establishing normalisation activities with the Israeli occupation via the internet’. … Aman, the main organiser, opened the talk by saying he led a group of around 150 Palestinians who were struggling for societal change.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/09/hamas-arrests-gaza-peace-activists-for-zoom-chat-with-israelis

-“Were Palestinians not so dehumanized in public discourse, it would be obvious that they, too, prefer not to kill or be killed when they can achieve their rights in more peaceful ways. Just compare Palestinians who enjoy Israeli citizenship to those who don’t. Israel’s Palestinian citizens, who live in much closer proximity to Israeli Jews than Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, could, if they wished, terrorize Israeli Jews far more effectively. Yet terrorism by Palestinian citizens of Israel is extremely rare. The best explanation is the one offered by political science research. When Palestinians in Gaza want to protest Israeli policies, they have few options other than to cheer Hamas rocket fire or march toward the fence that encloses them, and risk being shot. By contrast, when Palestinian citizens want to protest Israeli policies—including the policies that discriminate against them—they can vote for the Joint List.”
   “This dehumanization of Palestinians also underlies the widespread Jewish assumption that an equal Israel-Palestine could not be a functioning democracy. Hawkish Jewish commentators often claim (incorrectly) that the Arab world contains no democracies—the implication being that there is something inherent in Arabness that makes democracy impossible. A similar argument was once made about Africans.”
https://jewishcurrents.org/yavne-a-jewish-case-for-equality-in-israel-palestine/

4. Who said the following in 1998? “If I were a young Palestinian, it is possible I would join a terrorist organization.”

-Ehud Barak: Prime Minister of Israel from 1999 to 2001 and former Minister of Defense. This was Barak’s response to Gideon Levy, a columnist for Ha’aretz, when Barak was asked what he would have done if he had been born a Palestinian. http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/yossi-sarid-if-you-or-i-were-palestinian-1.267316 http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0306/25/se.13.html

   Perhaps Barak, like former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges, witnessed the following: “I [Hedges] saw small boys baited and killed by Israeli soldiers in the Gaza refugee camp of Khan Younis. The soldiers swore at the boys in Arabic over the loudspeakers of their armored jeep. The boys, about 10 years old, then threw stones at an Israeli vehicle and the soldiers opened fire, killing some, wounding others. I was present more than once as Israeli troops drew out and shot Palestinian children in this way. Such incidents, in the Israeli lexicon, become children caught in crossfire.”
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/why_israel_lies_20140803

   Why do some people find it hard to believe that Israeli missile strikes have intentionally targeted children? “It’s not as if the IDF had never before targeted Palestinian children or, for that matter, tortured them and used them as human shields; or that Israeli settlers, many of whom at some point pass through the IDF, hadn’t committed the most heinous atrocities against Palestinian children, such as burning them to death.” (Finkelstein 2018, 352)

-In 2017, it’s highly likely that if Barak were a Gazan youth he would join a militant group. In her visit to Gaza in 2017, “two things struck [Sara Roy, a senior research scholar at Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies,] particularly: the now devastating impact of Gaza’s decade-long isolation from the rest of the world, and the sense that an increasing number of people are reaching the limit of what they can endure. [Essentially,] Gaza is in a state of humanitarian shock, due primarily to Israel’s blockade, supported by the US, the EU and Egypt and now entering its 11th year. Historically a place of trade and commerce, Gaza has relatively little production left, and the economy is now largely dependent on consumption.” (Compounding the suffering is that Gazans, in early 2018, have about 3 hours a day of electricity — which means they often lack water. Gaza also suffers from a shortage of fresh water, and this translates into a very high rate of kidney disease and other ailments.)

   “Gaza’s debility, carefully planned and successfully executed, has left almost half the labour force without any means to earn a living. Unemployment – especially youth unemployment – is the defining feature of life. It now hovers around 42 per cent (it has been higher), but for young people (between the ages of 15 and 29) it stands at 60 per cent. Everyone is consumed by the need to find a job or some way of earning money.” (“[Yet] Gaza has a talented, tech-savvy population; if ever there were peace, an American investor said, ‘Gaza’s internet sector would become another India.’ [A] small number are already subcontracting for companies in India, Bangladesh and Israel.”)

   “At least 1.3 million out of 1.9 million people, or 70 per cent of the population (other estimates are higher), receive international humanitarian assistance, the bulk of which is food (sugar, rice, oil, milk), without which the majority could not meet their basic needs.…[S]uicide [and drug-use and prostitution] rates [are rising]…Gaza’s divorce rate, once just 2 per cent, now approaches 40 per cent…”

   “It’s important to remember that nearly three-quarters of Gaza’s inhabitants are under thirty and remain confined to Gaza, prohibited from leaving the territory; most never have. Amid such disempowerment, young people have increasingly turned to militancy as a livelihood, joining various militant or extremist organisations simply to secure a paying job.…It seems that unemployed young men in Gaza increasingly face two options: join a military faction or give up.”

   “There isn’t much more Hamas can do to strengthen its control over Gaza:…its control is already total.…[I]ts military wing appears to be an increasing presence in political decision-making and governance – a change that was made clear with the election [in 2017] of Yahya Sinwar [known as a founding member of Hamas’s military wing] to head Hamas’s political wing in Gaza.…But Hamas has its critics, particularly among the young [who critique] its use of religion as a coercive tool…”

   “Israel has exhausted all the ways it has of putting pressure on Gaza.…[A]ll that remains is menace – a policy towards Gaza that emerges not from any sense or logic but from what Ehud Barak once called ‘inertia’.” https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n12/sara-roy/if-israel-were-smart (15 June 2017)

   Despite drastic hardships, Gazans display an impressive degree of social solidarity. For example, in early 2018, “hundreds of shopkeepers erased millions of shekels in debts of their neighbors. Kids go to schools…Mosques are open with social services being provided — free clinics, nursery schools, social clubs…There is a full range of internet service available all over Gaza and two cell phone companies are working and everyone is online and connected. There is a system of law and order with civilian and even traffic police and courts that are working as well. Six universities are working in Gaza with thousands of [male and female] students…On the streets of Gaza people have a sense of security — except when Israel attacks.” (Gershon Baskin, Facebook post, 31 March 2018)

5. True or False: The Palestinian school curriculum incites hatred and anti-Semitism.

-False. “A landmark [US] State Department-funded study has cleared the Palestinians of demonizing Jews in school textbooks but contends that both Israeli and Palestinian teachers use classroom materials that distort the history of the Middle East conflict.”
http://forward.com/news/israel/170451/palestinian-textbooks-dont-vilify-jews-new-study-r/ (4 Feb. 2013)
   However, in September 2018, a “European Parliament committee voted to freeze more than $17 million in aid to the Palestinian Authority over incitement against Israel in its [recently revised] textbooks….The Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education, or IMPACT-se, said in a new report that its analysis of the new Palestinian textbooks for grades 1-12 aimed to encourage Palestinian children ‘to sacrifice their lives in the name of religion’ and glorified martyrdom and violent resistance.”
https://www.timesofisrael.com/eu-committee-votes-to-freeze-17m-in-palestinian-aid-over-school-book-incitement/  (28 Sept. 2018)
   Given the reality of life for Gazans, it’s not surprising that anger and extremism is manifested in Palestinian school textbooks. In fact, such textbooks should only need to focus on the bare facts of the Israel-Palestine conflict, as these are more than sufficient for any rational student to easily appreciate the gross injustices that Palestinians continue to suffer.

-Nathan Brown, Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University, after a detailed study on The Palestinian Curriculum, writes: “[T]he Palestinian curriculum is not a war curriculum; while highly nationalistic, it does not incite hatred, violence, and anti-Semitism.”
   Right-wing supporters of Israel, seeking reasons why Palestinians harbor resentment against Israel and Jews, often point to Palestinian textbooks that purportedly instill such hatred. Prof. Brown demonstrates that a better explanation is to be found in the harsh occupation administered by Israel. As Prof. Brown writes in his conclusion: “With the effects of conflict felt on a daily basis, what textbooks and teachers say is probably irrelevant in any case.”
http://home.gwu.edu/~nbrown/Adam_Institute_Palestinian_textbooks.htm  (2001)

The Education of a Secular Israeli Jew
-“In school Israeli Jews are taught to identify with the prophets and warriors of the Bible as well as with the military heroes, guerrilla fighters, and revolutionaries of antiquity. With ancient history anchored in [their] minds, [Israeli Jews] almost never talked about Jewish life in the Diaspora.” (Ayalon 2020, 1)
   For example, former Shin Bet head Ami Ayalon “was raised believing that European Jews emerged from exile to reclaim [their] ancient identities, which had been frozen in time…[As a result, he and his peers saw themselves] as Hebrews, not Jews; [they] spoke Hebrew, not Yiddish. Arabs who had once lived on [their] land were ignored, and [Israel’s] bulldozers made sure there wasn’t much to see.” (Ayalon 2020, 1-2)
   Israeli Jews were taught that the Arabs attacked Jews in the 1948 war, and Jews conquered Arab “territories fair and square…The millions of [Jews] murdered in the Holocaust, and the bitterness of the battles in the Jordan Valley, left no room to regret what [was done] during the war or to think about the fate of Arab refugees who now lived in squalid camps across the Jordanian border. Besides, the Land of Israel was [the Jewish people’s] birthright. Everyone knew the villainous Romans drove [them] out and, after two thousand years, [they] at long last returned determined never to leave again.” In fact, many secular Israelis “hated the 1948 cease-fire lines because [the lines] cut [them] off from [their] biblical roots in Judea and Samaria. (Ayalon 2020, 4, 19)
-“While [Ayalon’s] teachers taught…only ancient history — Joshua, the Maccabees, and other Hebrew heroes — [Palestinian] children across the border studied a recent event: the Nakba, the Catastrophe, the story of their own exile.” (Ayalon 2020, 10)
  “The Nakba has become the seminal event shaping Palestinian identity and collective memory. The enduring image of the Nakba remains one of the long caravans of bedraggled refugees carrying their meager possessions and, crucially, the keys to their properties, desperately fleeing to safety in neighboring states, enduring constant harrying by Zionist militias along the way. Even to this day, almost every Palestinian family jealously guards a key to their historic home in Palestine, a precious family heirloom passed from generation to generation in the absurd hope that they might return one day to open the door of a house in a village that no longer exists.”
   “The memory of the Nakba continues to be invoked [for instance] in the [2023] hostilities. Israel’s mass displacement of Gazans towards the Egyptian border in the south, ahead of its aerial bombardment campaign, has been labeled a ‘second Nakba’ by Palestinians.”
https://www.juancole.com/2023/11/hidden-history-hamas.html
-“Despite the fact that Arabs in Israel seek equality within the state of Israel and have proven their loyalty in their nonviolent struggle for equal rights as citizens, [Israeli Jews] believe that given the chance [such Arabs would] drive [them] into the sea. The fact [Israel has] the fifth strongest military force on earth, vastly beyond anything [their] Arab enemies had at their disposal, does nothing to dull [the] insecurity [of Israeli Jews] whose source might be a history of deportations, pogroms, and the Holocaust but is whipped up by populist politicians to get elected.” (The education of  Israeli Jews contributes to their paranoia.) (Ayalon 2020, 245-6)

Change The Narrative
-“[People’s] perception of the past is a blend of facts and fables [they] tell [them]selves — [they] selectively assemble facts to reinforce the past as [they]’ve chosen to understand it. [For example, socialist Zionists who came to Israel in the prestate period] constructed a narrative about [their] returning to land that had been stolen from [them]…In this rendering they erased two thousand years of Jewish history in the diaspora and returned to the heroic age of the Israelite kingdoms and to [its] wars against the Greeks and Romans….Then, as now, the fight was about liberating what was exclusively [theirs].” (Ayalon 2020, 256)
   “[This] historical construct turned Palestinians into ‘plunderers’ or ‘holders of stolen property.’ This ideology justified the War of Independence and all the acts committed during the war. Once [Israel] ‘liberated’ Judea and Samaria in 1967, [Jews] rushed out of [their] kibbutzim to build new settlements….[I]f the occupied territories are [their] property, then all of [their] actions — the settlements [they] build on ruins of towns [they] destroyed in the war, the exploitation of resources, the walls and system of control — are justified.” (Ayalon 2020, 257)
   “[When] you are trapped inside a narrative, everything you come upon tends to reinforce it. Each act of terror reinforces the belief that Palestinians are interlopers, free-loading squatters on land that rightfully belongs to us [Jews].” (Ayalon 2020, 258)
   An ethical and productive narrative for Jews would begin by recognizing that since the early 1900s, “the international community has recognized a people’s right to self-determination within a nation-state in which they can live in accordance with their culture, language, calendar, and leaders. To define themselves as they please. [In the case of the Jewish people, for example, the] UN Partition Plan of 1947 provided a legal foundation for this natural right: Jews, the world agreed, especially after the Holocaust, had the right to build [their] nation-state and exercise [their] self-determination in the Land of Israel because [that was where their] sense of nationhood, historical memory, and culture were rooted…” Accordingly, the 1947 Partition Plan and the Jewish people’s “historical connections to the Land of Israel [are] the two foundations upon which the State of Israel was founded.” (Ayalon 2020, 259)
   “Making self-determination and not an ancient land deed the cornerstone of [the Jewish people’s] claims made so much sense to [former Shin Bet head Ami Ayalon] because it explained what [he’d] been doing most of [his] life. [He] fought, killed, and buried friends because in 1948 the Arabs rejected [the Jewish people’s] right to self-determination in the Land of Israel….Until 1967 the wars [Israel] fought and the actions [it] took were justified because [it was] defending a right endorsed by most of the world.” (Ayalon 2020, 259)
   Israeli Jews suffer “national pessimism” as they “believe the Land of Israel is all [theirs], and since most of [them] also believe the other side feels the same way about historic Palestine, they conclude that to make any territorial compromises is to be a sucker. Settlers brandishing a divine property deed are reinforced with the conviction that no matter what [Israel does], the Palestinians will continue to attack…[B]ullets are the only language Arabs understand.” (Ayalon 2020, 259-60)
   As a result, Israel has “created an apartheid situation in Judea and Samaria where [Israelis] control Palestinians by force, denying them self-determination. Eventually [Palestinians] will give up on the dream of a state, and they and most of the world will demand a single state where Jews will lose [their] majority…” Jews will then either lose their self-determination in a democratic state or Israel will become an undemocratic, Jim Crow state. (In other words, Israel can have any two of the following three elements, but not all three: a democracy, a Jewish state, the West Bank.) (Ayalon 2020, 260)
-“For years, left-wing and right-wing [Israeli] governments alike built settlements in Judea and Samaria, despite a Palestinian willingness to accept Israel in a two-state [agreement] and despite a clear statement from most members of the security community that continuing the occupation would increase terror. [T]he impetus for [this] expansion is coming from the majority of Israelis.” (Ayalon 2020, 267)
   While some Jewish Israelis condone any behavior to expand settlements, the beliefs of most Jews are the product of the dominant historical narrative. This narrative of unrelenting hatred, threat and vulnerability acts as a barrier to “‘a real compromise because it controls our actions and fears, and therefore our future.’” (Ayalon 2020, 267)
   “The same Israeli education system that brought the Maccabees back to life taught Moroccan Jews, whose roots go back twenty-five hundred years in the Atlas Mountains [–a mountain range in the Maghreb that stretches through Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia–] to feel as victimized by the Inquisition or the Holocaust as the…Ashkenazim. Even a fleet of high-tech submarines can’t cure [the] ingrained fear that disaster lurks around the corner. [As a result, Ayalon argues, Israel will] ‘never make peace…until [Israeli Jews] change the narrative about the past and admit…that the Palestinians have a right to their own country alongside Israel, and on land [Jews] claim as [theirs].’” (Ayalon 2020, 267-8)

-Lachrymose Narrative: “The trauma of antisemitism lies at the heart of the master narrative of universal Jewish victimisation. This is Jewish history as a never-ending litany of harassment, discrimination, oppression and persecution, culminating in the Holocaust. American-Jewish historian Salo Baron disparagingly termed it ‘the lachrymose conception of Jewish history.’ The true history of Jews in Europe, he argued, amounted to more than tragic suffering. But even if one concedes, for argument’s sake, that the lachrymose conception describes European Jewish history, it does not do justice to the history of the Jews in the Near East. Recalling the era of cosmopolitanism and coexistence that some Jews…enjoyed in Arab countries before 1948 offers a glimmer of hope.” (Avi Shlaim, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew, Oneworld, London: 2023, 17-18. Hereinafter, “Shlaim 2023.”)

-Resistance Education: “In post-[WWII] Israel, survivors of the Holocaust were harshly and unfairly criticized for not resisting…Jewish nationalism reacted against this passivity and glorified armed resistance….Jewish history, as it was taught in…school, lavished praise on individuals who resisted foreign oppressors and fought for Jewish independence. One of them was Simon Bar Kokhba, who led a revolt of the province of Judea against the Roman Empire in the second century CE. Bar Kokhba was held out as a national hero although the revolt he led was crushed, Judea was devastated and its population was killed, exiled or sold into slavery. The lesson we were expected to draw from the history of this revolt was that it is more honorable to go down fighting than not to fight at all.” (Apparently, an unknown number of  Palestinians and supporters of Hezbollah would agree.) (Shlaim 2023, 226)

-Inferior Education: “The minister of education from the mid-1950s was Zalman Aran, a prominent member of the ruling Labour Party, or Mapai as it was called in those days. Aran saw himself as the son of a superior Ashkenazi elite and looked down on Asian and North African Jews as an inherently inferior race. He believed that their poor performance at school reflected low native intelligence rather than external socio-economic factors. His aim was not to close the educational gap but to direct as many Mizrahim as possible towards vocational schools and the labour market; he wanted a large proletariat to support the country’s industrial and agricultural development….The effect of his policy was to hold back the Mizrahim by restricting their access to higher education and to the ‘white collar’ and well paid occupations that went with it.” (Shlaim 2023, 213-4)
   “In 1959-60, Mizrahi children constituted 50 percent of their age group in the country at large, but only 18.8 percent of their cohort in academic secondary schools….The limited measure of reverse discrimination [that was instituted] was not Aran’s idea and, in any case, it did not make much difference. The great majority of Mizrahim still failed the [key national exam].” (Shlaim 2023, 214)

6. Identify the Middle East entities responsible for the following promulgations:
6.1 “Armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine. This is the overall strategy, not merely a tactical phase.” “[We aim] at the elimination of Zionism in Palestine.” “The…establishment of the state of Israel [is]…entirely illegal, regardless of the passage of time…”
6.2 “The [entity]…flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan River.”
6.3 “Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel.”
6.4 “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.” “[We strive] to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine, for under the wing of Islam followers of all religions can coexist in security…”

-6.1 These are portions from the 1968 Palestine National Charter of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Peace/PLO_Covenant.html

   Israel negotiated peace accords with the PLO despite the fact that the 1968 Palestinian National Charter was in force at the time of the relevant negotiations. Clauses from the Charter were rendered void only after the 1993 Oslo Declaration of Principles was signed. (In fact, “prior to the Oslo agreement, the PLO itself was officially described by Israel and the US as a terrorist organization.”)

   “At the time of the [1993] signing on the White House lawn, the PLO charter was still in force. It called for the destruction of the illegal State of Israel and the return of practically all its citizens to their countries of origin….Only after the Oslo agreement came into force did the PLO National Council abolish these clauses of their charter in a festive ceremony, attended by President Bill Clinton.” http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1399048629/ 

   Before the early 1990s, the PLO Charter was regularly denounced by Israelis as an insurmountable obstacle to peace and “paraded around endlessly in Israeli propaganda.”
http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1407502014/

-6.2 This explicit rejection of a Palestinian state was part of Likud’s platform at the time of the 2009 Israeli elections; the elections led to a Likud-led government. http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2009/02/09/f-rfa-armstrong.html

   Despite this clause of the Likud platform, which contravenes international law, Hamas has indicated a willingness to support talks with Israel.

   At least Likud has been consistent: “In a speech to Likud’s central committee a few months after taking office [as prime minister in 1996], Netanyahu flatly declared, ‘There will never be a Palestinian state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan.’ To make good on that pledge, Netanyahu created a government dominated by parties hostile to the peace process, and repeatedly used their hostility as an excuse for avoiding the steps that Oslo required.” While Netanyahu endorsed a Palestinian state in 2009, the conditions he attached made the endorsement meaningless. (Beinart 2012, 118, 133)

   While the “Likud Constitution of May 2014…contains commitments to the strengthening of Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria, it does not explicitly rule out the establishment of a Palestinian state.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Likud

-6.3 This is a clause of one of Israel’s Basic Laws. http://www.knesset.gov.il/laws/special/eng/basic10_eng.htm

   Despite this official law of Israel, which contravenes international law, Hamas has shown a willingness to support talks with Israel. (Until the Trump administration, even the US did not recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.)

   Martin Indyk, former US ambassador to Israel, argues that “It was not reasonable to expect that Arafat, or any Arab leader…, would agree to an end-of-conflict agreement that left sovereignty over the Haram-al-Sharif [Temple Mount] in Israeli hands forever.” (Beinart 2012, 72)

-6.4 The portions are from the 1988 Hamas Charter. “[T]he charter shed light on Hamas’s understanding of Israel, Judaism, and Zionism at the time it was released. The text was replete with anti-Semitic references that built on age-old stereotypes about the Jewish people, including their alleged accumulation of immense wealth, their treacherous and devious nature, and their ability to influence global media. Hamas attributed Zionism’s success in creating Israel to Jewish manipulation of global affairs, including the two world wars and the establishment of the UN. The movement drew its insight about Zionism from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-Semitic text that fabricated a myth about a Jewish plot to dominate the world. Throughout the charter, Hamas used references to Jews and Zionists interchangeably…The charter also described Israeli policies toward Palestinians as the ‘Nazism of the Jews.’ It cited the collective punishment and frequent killing of innocents…as the manifestation of Nazi policies in Palestine.” In sum, the 1988 Hamas Charter is antisemitic, denies Israel’s right to exist, and calls for a unitary Muslim state in the whole of historic Palestine. (Baconi 2018, 22)

   In 2017, Hamas issued a new charter which, inter alia, (i) accepts a transitional Palestinian state in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza (and therefore, indirectly, “accepts that there will be another state entity outside these borders, even if it does not mention Israel”); and, (ii) states that Zionism, not the Jewish people, is the enemy to be defeated, as it is responsible for the “occupation of Palestine”. The new charter, which does not explicitly supplant the previous charter, “was announced by the [then] head of the movement’s political bureau, Khaled Meshal… ‘Hamas advocates the liberation of all of Palestine but is ready to support the state on 1967 borders without recognising Israel or ceding any rights,’ he said.”
https://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AZbAXItgbF6XZGo2enJrcV8xMTZjZ2pnMjZnYw&hl=en
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/01/hamas-new-charter-palestine-israel-1967-borders

   While the Charter is one tool used by Israel to largely refuse to deal with Hamas, similarly odious clauses—provided above—did not prevent Israel from negotiating with the PLO. In any event, would it make a difference to Israeli leaders if a Hamas leader made more conciliating statements? See question 7.

7. Who made the following statements in 2007? “[T]here will remain a state called Israel—this is a matter of fact.…The problem is not that there is an entity called Israel. The problem is that the Palestinian state is non-existent.” “As a Palestinian…I speak…for a state on 1967 borders. It is true that in reality there will be an entity or state called Israel on the rest of Palestinian land.”

-Khaled Meshal: Former Chairman of the Hamas Political Bureau. Meshal made similar statements in 2014, as well. (In May 2017, Ismail Haniyeh replaced Meshal as Chairman.)
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/jan/11/israel
http://www.thirteen.org/programs/charlie-rose-the-week/charlie-rose-interviews-khaled-meshaal/
   The crucial question is not whether Hamas formally endorses “the two-state solution. (After all, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party had never endorsed the two-state solution.)” The crucial point is that Hamas has pledged to support the Palestinian people if they formally endorse a two-state deal. (26 Apr. 2018)
https://forward.com/opinion/399738/american-jews-have-abandoned-gaza-and-the-truth/

-“[M]eshal told former US president Jimmy Carter in 2006 that ‘Hamas agreed to accept any peace agreement negotiated between the leaders of the PLO and Israel, provided it is subsequently approved by Palestinians in a referendum or by a democratically elected government.’” (Finkelstein 2018, 31-2)

-In April 2008, Khaled Mashaal, the exiled leader of Hamas “offered Israel a 10-year truce…if it withdraws from lands it seized in the 1967 Mideast war as proof of recognition of a Palestinian state on those lands. Mashaal said Hamas will accept the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, a departure from the group’s customary claim to all of Israel, Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank for Palestinians. Mashaal’s comments appear to be the group’s strongest indication of potential acceptance of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and came hours after former US president Jimmy Carter said the group is prepared to accept the right of Israel to ‘live as a neighbor next door in peace.’” (21 Apr. 2008)
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/hamas-leader-offers-israel-10-year-truce-1.732948

-“It’s easy to proclaim abstract-moral solutions when you lack the obligations of power, but each time a Palestinian leadership has reached a position of official responsibility (first the PLO in 1974 when Arafat spoke at the UN, then Hamas in 2006, when it won the parliamentary elections), it had to revise its political program from a ‘one-state’ to a ‘two-state’ settlement, because otherwise it could not function on the international stage. Many self-described radicals have called this ‘selling-out,’ [Others] call it accommodating intractable…political exigencies.”
https://mondoweiss.net/2012/06/a-debate-about-the-two-state-solution-with-norman-finkelstein/

-According to Islam, once an area has become part of the Islamic world, it is considered Muslim and should always remain part of the Ummah (community). Due to this religious restriction, “Hamas itself cannot sign a peace agreement [with Israel]. But, like religious people everywhere (especially Jews and Christians), it has found ways around God’s commandments. The founder of Hamas, the paralyzed Sheik Ahmad Yassin (who wrote the [first Hamas] Charter and was assassinated by Israel [in March 2004]) proposed a 30-year hudna. A hudna is a truce sanctified by Allah, which can be renewed until the Last Judgment.”
http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1407502014/

-The first hudna Hamas offered Israel “was conveyed in 1997 by then King Hussein of Jordan, but Israel [under Netanyahu as prime minister] did not respond. Former Mossad agency chief Efraim Halevy found out about it (ex post facto) when he went to Jordan that year to handle the fallout from Israel’s attempted assassination of Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal. … In 2005, a European intermediary conveyed another hudna proposal via then Shin Bet head Yuval Diskin. The document was headlined, ‘Offer of a reconciliation agreement between Hamas and Israel’ and was addressed to [then-prime minister] Ehud Olmert… Israel did not respond to this deal… Hamas made an additional attempt…after Operation Protective Edge [in 2014], but an Israeli defense official told Al-Monitor…that Israel did not respond either ‘because there was no reason to conduct a dialogue with a bruised and beaten movement.’ Israel would rather maintain its position of deterrence, threatening Hamas with a harsh response should it fire missiles at Israeli targets. Israel regards the Hamas fear of an additional round of violence as a guarantee of the cease-fire deal reached in Cairo in 2014, to which Hamas has studiously adhered…”
   “Hamas offers truce deals whenever it runs into serious trouble. In 1997, the movement felt isolated after being left out of the Palestinian institution-building that appeared a preparation for the establishment of a Palestinian state under the terms of the Oslo peace agreements with Israel. In 2005, the hudna suggestion was born of the fear that Israel would continue its policy of taking out the Hamas leadership after it assassinated Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and his successor, Abdel Aziz Rantisi.”
   “The Hamas political leadership has been aware for a while that absent a significant easing of the siege, the organization will no longer be able to run the Strip since the popular protests by desperate residents would not only be directed at Israel but would also turn against Hamas.”
   “One of the main hudna advocates pushing for understandings with Israel is Hamas leader in Gaza Yahya Sinwar, but he too is only suggesting a cease-fire and is unwilling to entertain the idea of disarming Hamas and demilitarizing Gaza. In fact, despite the cease-fire agreed upon after the 2014 Gaza war, Hamas continued to enlarge its army and is trying to rebuild the attack tunnel project. For Hamas, the cease-fire actually means that it is careful not to fire rockets at Israel so that it does not retaliate.”
   “Hamas will quickly discover that the obstacles that eventually derailed reconciliation with Abbas are also those that will prevent any understandings with Israel. Abbas demanded that Hamas give up its weapons as a condition for any deal, and Israel has posed similar conditions in return for a significant easing of its siege.”
   “Hamas post-2014 is a weak, rundown organization, and the hudna it is now offering [in 2018] has already been in force for nearly four years. The only question is how long the Protective Edge deterrence and the siege of the Gaza Strip can last.”
https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2018/05/israel-egypt-gaza-palestine-hamas-long-term-truce-hudna.html

-A 2009 study by an official US government agency concluded that “Although peaceful coexistence between Israel and Hamas is clearly not possible under the formulations that comprise Hamas’s 1988 charter, Hamas has, in practice, moved well beyond its charter. Indeed, Hamas has been carefully and consciously adjusting its political program for years and has sent repeated signals that it may be ready to begin a process of coexisting with Israel. [And,] As evidenced by numerous statements, Hamas is not hostile to Jews because of religion. Rather, Hamas’s view toward Israel is based on a fundamental belief that Israel has occupied land that is inherently Palestinian and Islamic.”
http://www.usip.org/sites/default/files/resources/Special%20Report%20224_Hamas.pdf
   The respectable economic and political performance of Turkey under the Justice and Development Party — Turkey is the fifteenth-largest economy in the world — demonstrates that Islam can coexist with a sound economy and a (seriously flawed) democracy. However, it should be noted that Turkey’s constitution has compelled Islamist parties “to de-Islamize their entire political platforms. The constitution [is] rather explicit about secularism. The preamble states that ‘there shall be no interference whatsoever by sacred feelings in state affairs and politics,’ while Article 2 enshrines the secular order ‘based on the fundamental tenets set forth in the preamble.’”
http://www.canadaexportcentre.com/index.php/press-release-mena-region-turkey
(Shadi Hamid, Temptations Of Power: Islamists and Illiberal Democracy in a New Middle East, Oxford University Press, New York: 2014, 186.)
   Malaysia is another Muslim-majority country which has demonstrated “that Islam [is] not incompatible with economic dynamism and social energy.” In fact, “Malaysia is the most affluent large state in Southeast Asia, according to the United Nations Human Development Index (2011).” Mahathir bin Mohamad, Malaysia’s prime minister from 1981-2003, used Islam’s “strict ethical standards to root out cronyism and corruption. By his ability to combine religiosity and devoutness with science and technology, Mahathir made Malaysia…central to the values debate in the Middle East.” (Robert D. Kaplan, Asia’s Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific, Random House, New York: 2014, 75, 83.)

-Ethan Bronner, the then Jerusalem bureau chief for the New York Times, had this to say concerning Gaza under Hamas in early 2009: “Honestly, the idea that this is some totalitarian spot where you can’t write honestly is not true. … Hamas is not al-Qaeda. … I can’t tell you whether they are going to accept Israel. What they basically say…is if we can go back to the ’67 borders and we can deal with the question of a right of return and all Palestinians agree…we won’t stand in the way. … [A]s a broad observation, it seems almost impossible to imagine that there could be a Palestinian state that doesn’t include Hamas as part of a political structure. And if that’s true, then Israel will not have the security of being a Jewish democratic state, not an occupier, without some relationship with the Hamas movement.”
http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=99901768

-According to an October 2012 New York Times article, “Hamas…is working to suppress the more radical Islamic militant groups that have emerged [in Gaza]. The jihadist extremists, known as Salafists and inspired by the ideology of Al Qaeda, are challenging Hamas’s informal and fragile cease-fire with Israel.” After the 2006 elections, “militant jihadists began attacks against Israel and also against Internet cafes, restaurants and women’s hair salons in Gaza, places they saw as being at odds with their deeply conservative interpretation of Islam.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/20/world/middleeast/hamas-works-to-suppress-militant-groups-in-gaza.html?_r=1&src=rechp&pagewanted=print
   In March 2014, Hamas militiamen continue to “find and stop renegade militants inside Gaza from firing rockets into southern Israel in violation of the ceasefire declared after the end in November 2012 of Operation Pillar of Defense, in which about 150 Palestinians and six Israelis were killed….Israeli officials share the assessment that Hamas is working actively to contain militants from firing into their country. ‘Today we can describe Hamas as a much more…responsible organisation than it used to be a decade or two decades ago — this all in light of their statehood experience,’ says a senior Israel Defence Forces officer…” (Financial Times, 5 March 2014, World News, 4)
   “Like so many former liberation organizations around the world, including Begin’s Likud, [Hamas] is transforming itself from a terrorist organization into a political party.”
http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1399048629/

-In an important 2012 book by Shlomi Eldar, Getting to Know Hamas, high-level officials in Hamas, such as its then political chief Khaled Meshal, are shown to be strategic and pragmatic, not fanatical ideologues as commonly portrayed by Israeli leaders. For example, after “Shalit was seized by Palestinian militants in a 2006 cross-border raid” a detailed document was “sent by messenger to then Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.” The document included the following: “Hamas offers two alternatives: 1. A separate track, dealing only with the release of Gilad Shalit in return for 1,000 Palestinian political prisoners. 2. A release of prisoners will take place in the broader context of a strategic approach ‏(as follows‏), and the number of prisoners released will not be in the hundreds.” (Note: Questions 17. and 18. provide information on the outcome.)
   The detailed document, “whose existence and transmission to the prime minister were denied completely by Olmert’s office at the time, constituted an offer by Hamas to conduct a multilevel dialogue with Israel, beginning with discussion about a cease-fire and the building of long-term trust, and ending with a coexistence agreement to last 25 years, and the establishment of a Palestinian state within 1967 borders.”
   The book explains that the “Shalit kidnapping was a premeditated action carried out by the Hamas military wing, led by Ahmed Jabari; the Popular Resistance Committee, headed by the Abu Samhadana family; and the Army of Islam, led by the Dormush family. Eldar describes it as an independent operation carried out despite the Hamas political leadership’s opposition. This and other…examples [in the book] offer proof that the organization is rife with divisions.”
   Israel’s lack of understanding of Hamas, according to Eldar, “may be rooted in Israel’s acceptance of Hamas activities before the First Intifada broke out in 1987, when Israel believed that it was worthwhile to let a religious and social movement compete with Fatah, as a way of neutralizing the influence of then Fatah leader Yasser Arafat in the occupied territories. The First Intifada, and even more so the second one, [wrongly] made clear to Israel that the double front it had hoped to create between Hamas and Fatah and between Israel and Fatah was to all intents and purposes a single and more violent front…”
http://www.haaretz.com/culture/books/giving-israel-a-new-look-at-hamas.premium-1.465584

-In April 2020, Hamas continues to pursue “a prisoner exchange with Israel. The organization has been sending out its senior members, from its leader in Gaza Yahya Sinwar downwards, to ensure that Israel understands its willingness to be flexible.”
   In June 2019 Hamas “dispatched its military spokesman to declare in a dramatic speech that during the May 2019 escalation between Hamas and the IDF, Israeli bombs had harmed some of its own people held captive in Gaza….[H]amas issued this statement in the hope that it would spark discourse in Israel about the need to release prisoners and find missing persons — yet that hope was shattered.”
   “The reasons for this are varied. Hamas has in its possession the bodies of two IDF soldiers, Hadar Goldin and Oron Shaul, and two civilians, Abra Mengistu and Hisham al-Syed. The Israeli public is less emotionally connected to the captive civilians. Their families are not running an effective and aggressive campaign for their release…” (Mengistu is a Jewish Israeli citizen of Ethiopian descent. Al-Sayed is a Palestinian Israeli citizen of Bedouin descent. Both suffer from poor mental health.)
   “The main reason, though, is that the Israeli public is still scarred by the consequences of the release of captive IDF soldier Gilad Shalit in 2011, which resulted in the release of a large number of terrorists, whose activities are still being felt to this day. But this time the tables are turned. Israel, despite its desire to see the captives brought home, is less inclined to negotiate for these reasons. Hamas also knows it does not have an ace up its sleeve in the form of a living soldier and has suddenly become impatient, trying as hard as it can to make a move.”
   “For a long time, [Hamas] has had one condition in negotiations for a prisoner exchange — the release of several dozen Palestinians released in the Shalit deal and over the years rearrested by Israel. The Defense Ministry vehemently refused this condition, and there were no real efforts to to end this impasse.”
https://www.ynetnews.com/article/HJdB11qg008  (12 April 2020)

-“[In 2021], Hamas, which has ruled Gaza since 2007, fired thousands of rockets at Israel in an 11-day war, surprising Israeli defence officials with the scale and volume of its barrage. But [during the August 2022 conflict], it chose to sit on the sidelines, leaving the smaller, more radical group [Palestinian Islamic Jihad] to engage in a 56-hour conflict.” That decision “underscored the differing interests of the two militant groups, and cast a spotlight on Israel’s latest attempt to manage [the] conflict…”
   “Israel and Egypt have blockaded Gaza since Hamas took power, crippling the 365 sq km strip of land’s economy, and hemming in its population of 2.3 million. But since [the 2021] war, Israeli authorities have increasingly sought to give Hamas economic inducements in a bid to ensure stability, easing restrictions on some imports and issuing some 14,000 permits for Gazans to work in Israel in exchange for calm.”
   “As the dust settled on [the Aug. 2022] conflict, Israeli officials suggested this approach had played a part in Hamas’s decision to stay out of the fighting. They also raised the prospect of continuing the inducements.”
   “Analysts add that the latest tensions were triggered when Israel targeted Islamic Jihad leaders, not Hamas. [August 2022] clashes erupted after Israeli forces arrested a senior Islamic Jihad official in the occupied West Bank, and days later killed another commander in a Gaza air strike.”
   Analysts also say that Hamas’s decision reflects “the differences between its interests and those of Islamic Jihad. Both oppose Israel’s existence and share a similar Islamist ideology. But Islamic Jihad is more radical and has always rejected any involvement in Palestinian politics — unlike Hamas, which won 2006 elections in Gaza — or hint of compromise with Israel.”
   “[In July 2022], [PIJ’s] leader, Ziad al-Nakhalah, criticised Hamas’s acquiescence to the permits-for-peace trade-off as counterproductive….By contrast, Hamas, as the Gaza Strip’s ruler, has to calculate both the impact of repeated bouts of violence, and whether to try to rein in a fellow militant group operating under its watch.”
   “Gaza is still recovering from [the 2021] conflict, in which more than 250 Palestinians were killed and hundreds of homes and other buildings destroyed or damaged. In Israel, 13 people were killed. ‘Hamas knows that the public mood in Gaza vehemently opposes another war…[And Hamas is] not as ideological as Islamic Jihad…[Hamas] also knows that donors [such as Qatar and Egypt] are fatigued…’”
   “The morning after [the] ceasefire, Israel reopened access at crossings into Gaza for humanitarian deliveries, and it has since further eased restrictions.” Some argue that if Israel provided “broader concessions, such as allowing an industrial area in Gaza or expanding access to reconstruction materials, it could help shift the balance of power between Hamas hardliners and moderates.” However, others maintain that without a comprehensive peace deal, such economic inducements merely manage the situation between inevitable rounds of violence.
https://www.ft.com/content/5352ea24-5e26-45e5-a8bc-37e7a5316df6
(FT Weekend US edition, 13 Aug/14 Aug 2022, 2)

-Oct. 7, 2023 Hostages: “Hamas initially set strict terms for a hostage exchange: the release of all Palestinian prisoners, about 8,000 people, which…included 559 serving life sentences for killing Israelis. Israel has undertaken even more lopsided deals than that, as with the 2011 exchange of 1,027 Palestinian prisoners for…Gilad Shalit…”
   “I [Gershon Baskin] was one of Israel’s negotiators on that 2011 deal…” “From my communications with Hamas and with people in the Israeli war cabinet in the first days [following the 7 Oct. 2023 Hamas attack], I saw that a quick deal would have been possible to return the women, children, wounded, sick and elderly on terms that Israel could tolerate.”
   “Negotiations overseen by Qatar’s prime minister and the head of Egypt’s intelligence service [–as there is no direct contact between Israel and Hamas–] have  produced the release of 240 Palestinian prisoners and detainees…in exchange for 105 hostages and a seven-day cease-fire. It was a start. [B]ut instead of…finding [more] solutions, Netanyahu was anxious to resume fighting.”
   As of early April 2024, “Israel has destroyed the vast majority of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure. More than 30,000 Gazans have been killed and about two million are displaced with no homes to return to….Throughout all that, despite amassing enormous amounts of intelligence, the Israeli military has succeeded in rescuing just three hostages…According to official figures, 130…remain…”
   “In Cairo and in Doha…negotiations are ongoing….Hamas no longer demands an all-for-all hostage-for-prisoner swap. Its leaders now talk about ending the war, getting urgently needed humanitarian aid, enabling people to return to their homes or the places where their homes once were and getting Israel out of Gaza. Israel, not only traumatized but also humiliated by the Oct. 7 attack, insists it will stop at nothing to remove Hamas…”
   “I was told by three different Hamas leaders…that Hamas is prepared to open a direct back channel, which could…lead to more feasible solutions. I delivered that message to the Israeli team [that interacts with Egypt and Qatar] but did not receive a positive response. It is possible, of course, that such communications are underway in secret…” (The New York Times, What Netanyahu Must Do to Bring Home the Hostages, 7 April 2024)

-“It is because of the Holocaust lens that Jews who have spent decades developing relationships with Hamas leaders—like the late Menachem Froman, the former rabbi of the settlement of Tekoa, and Rabbi Michael Melchior, a former Israeli cabinet minister—are ridiculed or ignored when they suggest that these leaders are willing to live in peace. The Holocaust lens makes Jews who recognize Palestinian humanity appear naïve, if not traitorous, and makes Jews who view Palestinians as bloodthirsty appear realistic and tough-minded, even when—as is often the case—they have never cracked a book by a Palestinian author or eaten in a Palestinian home.”
   “This dehumanization masquerading as realism is a cancer. It not only turns Palestinians into Nazis, it turns anyone who takes up the Palestinian cause into a Nazi sympathizer, guilty of antisemitism until proven innocent. It leads the Israeli government and its diaspora Jewish allies to view activists who boycott Israel in the name of Palestinian equality as a greater threat to Jewish life than white supremacist politicians whose followers attack synagogues.”
   “For generations, Jews have seen a Jewish state as a tikkun, a repair, a way of overcoming the legacy of the Holocaust. But it hasn’t worked. To justify our oppression of Palestinians, Jewish statehood has required us to see them as Nazis. And, in that way, it has kept the Holocaust’s legacy alive. The real tikkun is equality, a Jewish home that is also a Palestinian home. Only by helping to free Palestinians—and in the process coming to see them as human beings, not the reincarnation of our tortured past—can we free ourselves from the Holocaust’s grip.”
https://jewishcurrents.org/yavne-a-jewish-case-for-equality-in-israel-palestine/

-Question 7 demonstrates that Hamas essentially accepts the existence of the state of Israel. Nevertheless, right-wing supporters of Israel argue that “words are cheap,” and Hamas doesn’t keep its word. However, see question 8.

8. Which party, Israel or Hamas, broke the six-month ceasefire that was agreed to in June 2008?

-In June 2008, “Egypt had ­brokered a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas…­[that] was a success: the average number of rockets fired monthly from Gaza dropped from 179 to three. Yet on 4 November Israel violated the ceasefire by launching a raid into Gaza, killing six Hamas fighters.” http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/feb/03/gaza-tony-blair-betrayal

   In a “document entitled ‘The Hamas terror war against Israel,’ The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs provides striking visual evidence of Hamas’s good faith during the lull. It reproduces two graphs drawn up by the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center at the Israel Intelligence Heritage & Commemoration Center: [Graphs provided] The graphs show that the total number of rocket and mortar attacks shrank from 245 in June to 26 total for July through October, a reduction of 97 percent [on a monthly basis].” http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10123.shtml

-“Hamas’s acceptance of the two-state settlement, on the one hand, and the cease-fire, on the other, put Israel on the diplomatic defensive. It could no longer justify shunning Hamas, and it was only a matter of time before Europeans renewed dialogue and relations with the Islamic movement. The prospects of an incoming US administration negotiating with Iran and Hamas, and inching closer to the international consensus for settling the Israel-Palestine conflict–which some centrist US policy makers [such as Richard Haass] now advocated–threatened to cast a yet more piercing light on Israeli intransigence….[Hence,] Israel needed to provoke Hamas into resuming its attacks. If Hamas rose to the bait and armed hostilities ensued, it would be disqualified as a legitimate negotiating partner, as intransigents got the upper hand in internal struggles, or it would be physically wiped out so as to make way for a settlement on Israel’s terms.” (Finkelstein 2018, 33-4)

   “If Hamas had not reacted after the 4 November killings, Israel would almost certainly have ratcheted up its provocations–just as it did in the lead-up to the 1982 Lebanon war–until restraint became politically untenable for Hamas. In any event, faced with the prospect of an asphyxiating Israeli blockade even if it ceased firing rockets, forced to choose between ‘starvation and fighting,’ Hamas opted for resistance, albeit largely symbolic. ‘You cannot just land blows, leave the Palestinians in Gaza in the economic distress they’re in, and expect that Hamas will just sit around and do nothing,’ the former Israeli commander in Gaza observed. ‘Our modest, home-made rockets, Hamas leader Khaled Meshal wrote in an open letter during the invasion, ‘are our cry of protest to the world.’” (Finkelstein 2018, 37)

   Israel faced a similar “peace” threat in the early 1980s and responded with its brutal attack on Lebanon to destroy the PLO. “The Israeli invasion ‘had been preceded by more than a year of effective cease-fire with the PLO.’ But after murderous Israeli provocations, the last of which left as many as 200 civilians dead (including 60 occupants of a Palestinian children’s hospital), the PLO finally retaliated, causing a single Israeli casualty.” (Finkelstein 2018, 34)
https://detailedpoliticalquizzes.wordpress.com/hezbollah-quiz/

-“Once the cease-fire ended, in the middle of December [2008], Hamas proposed to extend it for another six months, but only if Israel lifted the blockade around Gaza. [Shin Bet head Yuval Diskin] told the government that Hamas was ‘interested in continuing the truce, but wants to improve its terms…it wants us to lift the siege of Gaza, stop attacks, and extend the truce to include the West Bank.’ Olmert rejected the terms, so Hamas fired even more Qassams….Somehow Olmert…couldn’t see that fighting fire with fire only bolstered Hamas’s popularity in the Palestinian street.” (Ayalon 2020, 241)

   “From the opening salvo [on Dec. 27, 2008], [Israel’s] government articulated no strategic goal, held out no hopes for peace talks once the hostilities were over, offered nothing to the Gazan people, and strove neither for diplomatic success nor for reconquering the territory and ousting Hamas….[Israel’s] bombardments killed fourteen hundred Palestinians and turned world public opinion against [it]….[Hamas] took a pounding militarily but won on the Palestinian street because [it] refused to surrender and vowed to continue the fight. [Hamas] won because [it] understood the nature of modern warfare far better than [Israel] did.” (Ayalon 2020, 241-2)

   Since the mid-1970s, wars tend to be unending, “and are ‘fought amongst the people, not on the battlefield.’” “‘War no longer exists as battle in a field between men and machinery’ or ‘as a massive deciding event in a dispute in international affairs.’” Accordingly, that would be the reason Israel wins its battles while losing the wars. “Just wars involve the use of proportional force and discrimination between combatants and noncombatants, and should only be fought as a last resort.” Israel fails those tests. (Ayalon 2020, 238-9, 241-2)

-While Netanyahu constantly expresses his disgust and mistrust of Hamas, since he became prime minister in 2009 “he has negotiated with Hamas…with far more good will than with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. [N]etanyahu reached at least two written agreements with the Gaza terror group; one in the 2011 deal in return for the kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit, and the second confirming the cease-fire that ended Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012.  Netanyahu, who squeezed Abbas hard in exchange for freeing 80 pension-age prisoners who had been sitting in Israeli jails for more than 20 years and who broke up [US-led] negotiations [in April 2014] with the Palestinian Authority over the release of 14 Arab Israeli prisoners, was prepared to give Hamas 1,000 young and healthy terrorists, among them Arab Israelis. While Netanyahu refused to allow Abbas any sign of Palestinian sovereignty in the West Bank, he did not hesitate to recognize Hamas as sovereign in Gaza.”
http://normanfinkelstein.com/2014/excellent-commentary-on-hamas-pa-unity-deal/

   “People everywhere wonder why Netanyahu daily denounces Abbas as an ‘inciter’ and ‘sponsor of terror’, while not mentioning Hamas. To solve this mystery, one must understand that the Israeli Right does not fear war, but is afraid of international pressure – and therefore the ‘moderate’ Abbas is much more dangerous than the ‘terrorist’ Hamas.” http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/09/30/abu-mazens-balance-sheet/

-Hamas has demonstrated that it does in fact keep its word. Therefore, Israel knows how to prevent rocket and other attacks from Gaza: enter good faith talks with Hamas. However, it is precisely Hamas’s potential as a serious and independent negotiating partner that threatens Greater Israel. Israeli policymakers know that the result of proper negotiations will be the relinquishing of resources (primarily land and water) and the suffering of domestic turmoil. (As Prime Minister Rabin stated, “Peace has a cost.”) But, right-wing supporters of Israel argue: What about Barak’s Generous Offer? See question 9.

9. Who stated the following in 2006? “Camp David was not the missed opportunity for the Palestinians, and if I were a Palestinian I would have rejected Camp David, as well.”

-Shlomo Ben-Ami: Israel’s Minister of Public Security in 1999, Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2000-2001, and Israel’s top negotiator at Camp David and Taba negotiations. (What Ben-Ami recognized was that Israel in fact offered the Palestinians an unviable Middle East Bantustan — several blocks of West Bank land with huge Jewish settlements in between.)
http://www.democracynow.org/2006/2/14/fmr_israeli_foreign_minister_shlomo_ben

   Mainstream commentators continue to reproduce the baseless Israeli claim that former Prime Minister Ehud Barak was very generous in the offer he made to the Palestinians at Camp David in 2000. The quote by Ben-Ami should be sufficient to end this harmful myth.

-The conclusion of questions 6 to 9 is that Israel will not negotiate fairly unless forced by US pressure—for example, in March 1957 Israel was forced to withdraw from Gaza, following the Suez War, after US President Eisenhower applied heavy diplomatic pressure and threatened economic sanctions—or Arab strength—for example, Egypt’s effectiveness in the 1973 war led to Israel’s willingness to negotiate an agreement at Camp David in 1978 which led to a peace treaty in 1979. Without such pressure, Palestinians will continue to suffer from tactics such as the one presented in question 15.

   Besides Eisenhower in 1957, other US presidents have applied pressure on Israel when necessary. “After Israel attacked Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981, the Reagan administration had not only supported a UN resolution condemning Israel, it had delayed various arms sales. Between 1990 and 1992, George H. W. Bush’s administration had not only conditioned loan guarantees on a settlement freeze, it had backed six UN Security Council resolutions criticizing the policies of the Jewish state. [Bush’s tough stance contributed to Shamir’s dethroning as prime minister.] In 2004, after Israel repaired and upgraded an unmanned aerial vehicle it had sold to China, the Pentagon had demanded the resignation of the director general of the Israeli Defense Ministry.” (Beinart 2012, 136)

-Palestinians did try a largely non-violent resistance to Israel’s occupation during the First Intifada (1987-1993). And, in September 2000, Palestinians again launched a rebellion, the Second Intifada (2000-2006), which was overwhelmingly nonviolent at its inception. However, in both cases, Israel responded with disproportionate, lethal force.

-According to a leading American academic specialist on nonviolent resistance, commenting more than a year into the uprising, “The [First] Intifada has thus far been distinguished on the Palestinian side by predominantly nonviolent forms of struggle…Considering…the severity of Israeli repression in the form of beatings, shootings, killings, house demolitions, uprooting of trees, deportations, extended imprisonments and detentions without trial, and so on, the Palestinians…have shown impressive restraint.” (“Amnesty [International] reported that the number of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons during each of the first years of the [First] Intifada hovered around 25,000, of whom 4-5,000 were administrative detainees.”) (Norman G. Finkelstein, Knowing Too Much: Why the American Jewish Romance with Israel is Coming to an End, OR Books, New York: 2012, 103, 108-9. Hereinafter, “Finkelstein 2012.”)

   “Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s decision to give soldiers clubs and issue orders for them to ‘break hands and legs’ failed to quell the Intifada (Uprising) and [further tarnished Israel’s image].” (Pfeffer 2018, 164)

   It is telling that one of “Israel’s early acts of retaliation [during the First Intifada] was to deport the Palestinian-American pacifist Mubarak Awad of the Center for the Study of Nonviolence.” Awad “was credited with inspiring acts of non-violent resistance to the occupation.” “Tactics he had [long] championed in small classrooms and academic journals were…put into widespread use by a popular movement backed by major political parties: consumers boycotted Israeli goods and services, laborers in Israeli industries refused to work, shops closed down in unison, customers withdrew funds from Israeli banks, residents refused to pay taxes and most of the Palestinian tax collectors and police resigned. The Bank of Israel reported that the Palestinian boycott had cost Israel $650m ($1.4bn [in 2018 dollars]) during the first year of the uprising alone. [As a result,] Mubarak was charged with ‘fomenting a rebellion against the state’; like dozens of others, he was deported by Israel during the first year of the intifada.” (Likudniks often ask, “Where is the Palestinian Gandhi?” Now we know that if they find him they’ll deport or imprison him. Ironically, in 2019, Prof. Awad, an Adjunct Professor at American University in DC, was invited to teach a course at Haifa Technion.)
(Finkelstein 2012, 114) (Black 2017, 284)
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/aug/14/bds-boycott-divestment-sanctions-movement-transformed-israeli-palestinian-debate

  However, it is absolutely “true that these nonviolent efforts sit uncomfortably alongside an ugly history of civilian massacres: the murder of 67 Jews in Hebron in 1929 by local Palestinians after Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, claimed Jews were about to seize Al Aqsa Mosque; the airplane hijackings of the late 1960s and 1970s carried out primarily by the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Yasir Arafat’s nationalist Fatah faction; the 1972 assassination of Israeli athletes in Munich carried out by the Palestinian organization Black September; [t]he suicide bombings of the 1990s and 2000s conducted by Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Fatah’s Aqsa Martyrs Brigades[;] and the horrific terrorism of Hamas on 7 Oct. 2023.
https://mjx847.substack.com/p/peter-beinart-on-palestine

-In the 2000 rebellion, instigated by Israel’s growing occupation and Sharon’s “walk” to the ultrasensitive Temple Mount, “Palestinians began throwing stones… Israeli forces responded with rubber bullets, killing six. In the days that followed, the Palestinians escalated to Molotov cocktails and Israeli forces kept firing, discharging over a million bullets in the first three weeks of violence.” (The IDF “knew it could only take advantage of its technological superiority over the Palestinians if the [2000] uprising became an armed struggle…In order to achieve this desired transformation, the army massively overreacted to the riots.”) “It is now largely forgotten that the first Hamas suicide bombing of the second intifada did not occur until five months into Israel’s relentless bloodletting.” (Beinart 2012, 70) (Ahron Bregman, Cursed Victory: A History of Israel and the Occupied Territories, Allen Lane, London: 2014, 250.) (Finkelstein 2010, 20)

   “Ever the tactician, Arafat moved to harness the bubbling anger on the street. On October 8, [2000,] he chaired a meeting with PLO factions in Gaza to coordinate activities. In a rare show of unity, for the first time in its history Hamas was represented. Less than a week later, 350 prisoners, including many Hamas and Islamic Jihad members, were released from PA prisons… Israel interpreted this move as Arafat giving the green light for military operations to commence, an abdication of his responsibility to safeguard Israel’s security and a reversal of the PLO’s commitment to renounce terrorism. … Aside from Islamic Jihad, the other early instigator from the Palestinian side was Fatah Tanzim, a decentralized movement that had split from Fatah in the mid-1990s. Tanzim’s military wing, al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, was occasionally aided by operatives from Arafat’s presidential guard and the Palestinian security forces, exacerbating suspicions of Arafat’s involvement in the armed struggle. By November, Israel had initiated its use of extrajudicial targeted assassinations, carrying out twenty-five before the end of the year, killing ten Fatah and six Hamas members, as well as ten bystanders.” (Baconi 2018, 37-8)

   “With Sharon’s [February 2001] election, the intifada quickly transitioned into a war of attrition. On his first day in office, Sharon launched ‘Operation Bronze,’ promising to return security to Israel within one hundred days. Operation Bronze fortified the emergency measures that Barak had taken. The occupied territories were segmented into sixty-four distinct military units where the Israeli army was deployed, home demolitions and bulldozing of Palestinian land was expanded, and targeted assassinations increased. Sharon’s actions accelerated the militarization of Palestinian factions that was already underway. Less than a month after he entered office, Hamas carried out its first suicide operation since the beginning of the uprising. On March 4, 2001, a Hamas suicide bomber detonated his explosives in Netanya, Israel, resulting in three deaths and sixty-six injuries.” (Baconi 2018, 42)

   “Hamas rapidly became the central instigator of armed operations against Israel. [It adopted] a ‘Balance of Terror’ approach: in return for the brutal and indiscriminate killing of the elderly, women, and children, ‘now, the Zionists also suffer from being killed…’ Balancing terror was a tool for Hamas to deter Israeli attacks by forcing Israel to anticipate inevitable retaliation.” Nevertheless, “Israel maintained its focus on the PA rather than Hamas. In the spring of 2001, Sharon authorized the deployment of F-16s against the Palestinian security infrastructure throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the first use of such measures since 1967.” (Baconi 2018, 42)

-“The first uprising by the occupied Palestinians in 1987-93 ended with a political victory. Israel was forced to recognize the PLO, which no previous Israeli government had done. Which is why, when the Second Intifada started in late September 2000, the Israeli army unleashed means of repression out of any proportion with those used during the previous insurrection. In the very first days, a month before the first Palestinian bombing took place, an Israeli helicopter gunship fired missiles at a ‘terrorist target’ in Ramallah that turned out to be a Fatah youth center….During the First Intifada, no Israeli tanks entered a Palestinian city. This time around, tanks immediately poured in and shot up the cities. Nor did the end of the Second Intifada in 2005 bring an end to those aggressions.” Rather, Israel’s victory led it to avoid negotiations and to apply extensive, violent control. (Sylvain Cypel, The State of Israel vs. the Jews, Other Press, New York: 2021, 24-5. Hereinafter, “Cypel 2021.”)
   An example of its aggressive control: “Israel incarcerates an average of eight hundred to a thousand Palestinian minors…every year….They are jailed for an average of three and a half months….Some [of those minors] were told ‘If you don’t confess, we’ll take away your father’s permit to work in Israel….’ Whether the boys sign or not, they are hauled before a military court, where they are unfailingly convicted.” (“[97] percent of the children arrested are from villages near settlements, because the military assumes that it’s mainly minors throwing the stones.”) (Cypel 2021, 25-6)

-“Hamas’s opposition [to Oslo and relinquishing Palestinian territory seemed] vindicated in May 2000, when Ehud Barak unexpectedly decided to withdraw Israel’s occupying forces from south Lebanon after years of explosive confrontations with Hezbollah. The swiftness of Israel’s retreat in the absence of a peace agreement with Lebanon left the impression that it was pressured to let go of the territory because of Hezbollah’s armed struggle. Hamas hailed the success of the ‘Lebanese model’ as proof that resistance was the only way to liberate Palestine.” (Baconi 2018, 35)
   “Hamas’s statements indicated both that its military operations during the Second Intifada were limited to the goal of liberating the occupied territories, rather than to the destruction of Israel, and that the movement was ready to end violence in return for an end to the occupation. In this way, Hamas accepted the notion of a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders, much as the PLO had done before it, without conceding the goal of liberating historic Palestine by recognizing Israel. Hamas saw itself postponing the full liberation of Palestine to a future battle, the responsibility for which it placed with the wider Arab and Islamic worlds.” (Baconi 2018, 40)

-Intifadas: Effects on Right and Left: “In 1987, at the outset of the First Intifada, only 21 percent of Israelis favored the establishment of a Palestinian state. But by 2001, 57 percent of Israelis backed the idea. The popular Arab uprising had led most in Israeli society to conclude that Israel could no longer continue ruling over the Palestinians. But if the First Intifada injured the Israeli right, the Second Intifada almost completely destroyed the Israeli left. The Second Intifada exploded in September 2000; it involved less popular Arab participation, and it was much more violent than its predecessor. The rioters of the First Intifada were now joined by suicide bombers….The intifada targeted women and children in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem along with soldiers in the territories. This intifada pulverized the left, not simply because of the ferocity of its violence but mainly because…it came only two months after the Camp David Summit.” (Micah Goodman, Catch-67: The Left, The Right, and The Legacy of The Six-Day War, Yale University Press: 2018, 46-7.)

-“[In March 2017] B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, published a report [which] reveals that, from the start of the Second Intifada, in September 2000, to the end of February 2017, Israel killed 4,868 noncombatant Palestinian civilians, more than one-third of them (1,793) were children and adolescents below the age of 18. Thousands of others, who were also not involved in fighting, have been wounded and permanently incapacitated. Next to none have received their due: compensation from the state that caused their condition.” http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.783329 (April 2017)

-Iron Cage: Since the second intifada, Israel has significantly strengthened its occupation by using drones, facial recognition, intercepts, informers, and other security tools. Israel has divided the West Bank into segments to facilitate control. (The second intifada was characterized on the Palestinian side by numerous suicide bombers; there are none now. In fact, the West Bank has been used as a laboratory to test and improve technology which is exported to many, often repressive, regimes.)
   The 2023 Israeli government can exploit this IDF and Shin Bet control to crush Palestinian resistance and thus suffocate the outbreak of a third intifada. While Palestinians have used violence, it’s striking how few Israeli casualties there have been. And what Israeli civilian casualties there have been, only serve to increase polarization and justify greater Israeli force.

-Gandhi: “[I]t’s…not certain that Gandhi would have disapproved [of Hamas’s use of violence]. ‘Fight violence with nonviolence if you can,’ he exhorted, ‘and if you can’t do that, fight violence by any means, even if it means your utter extinction. But in no case should you leave your hearths and homes to be looted and burnt.’” (Finkelstein 2018, 76)
   Abraham Lincoln Agrees: “In reference to you, colored people, let me say God has made you free. Although you have been deprived of your God-given rights by your so-called ‘masters’, you are now as free as I am, and if those that claim to be your ‘superiors’ do not know that you are free, take the sword and bayonet and teach them that you are; for God created all men free, giving to each the same rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” (Speech delivered to freed slaves in Richmond, Virginia, Apr 4, 1865)
https://socialistworker.org/2015/11/02/our-liberation-is-bound-together
   “[Gandhi] categorized forceful resistance in the face of impossible odds—a woman fending off a rapist with slaps and scratches…or Polish armed self-defense to the Nazi aggression—as ‘almost nonviolence’ because it was in essence symbolic and acted more as a fillip to the spirit to overcome fear and allow for a dignified death; it registered ‘a refusal to bend before overwhelming might in the full knowledge that it means certain death.’”
   When Gandhi was asked, “What do you feel is the most acceptable solution to the Palestine problem?”, he responded, “The abandonment wholly by the Jews of terrorism and other forms of violence.”
https://www.dubaiforums.com/dubai-politics-talk/great-gandhi-quotes-t42251.html

-Nabi Saleh’s Resistance: As of 2018, Israel has effectively countered resistance in the West Bank. For example, resistance in the village of Nabi Saleh has dwindled over the years. “It’s amazing that [its resistance] lasted as long as it did…Four died in Nabi Saleh, hundreds were injured, and roughly a third of the village was detained or jailed. For a village of 500 people to put up that kind of resistance on its own for [years] is extraordinary. But, yes, eventually it dies down and dwindles. Oppression works. Terror works.” https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/aug/14/bds-boycott-divestment-sanctions-movement-transformed-israeli-palestinian-debate

-Issa Amro: In January 2021, “Palestinian peace activist Issa Amro was convicted by an Israeli military court…on charges relating to his nonviolent activism in the flashpoint city of Hebron…An Israeli judge at the Ofer military court — a court that boasts a 99 percent conviction rate against Palestinians — convicted Amro on three counts of protesting without a permit, two counts of ‘obstructing’ an Israeli soldier, and one count of assaulting an Israeli settler in Hebron. Amro, a co-founder of the Hebron-based Youth Against Settlements (YAS) group and internationally-recognized nonviolent activist, has been on trial since 2016, when Israeli prosecutors brought forward 18 charges against him relating to his activism.”
   “Amnesty International has described the case against Amro as ‘politically motivated’ and the charges against him as ‘baseless,’ expressing concerns that convicting Amro could pave the way for further suppression of Palestinian activists and human rights defenders.”
   “‘The military court is just an organ of occupation. The [indictment for nonviolent protest] is an example of how the courts are used in order to deter the important voices of human rights defenders,’ Lasky [Amro’s attorney] said.”
   “Amro’s group, YAS, organizes nonviolent activities, demonstrations, and protests in the Old City of Hebron, where a few hundred ultra-nationalist settlers and thousands of Israeli soldiers control every aspect of life in the city.”
   “‘If they had any real evidence against me, they wouldn’t have released me over and over again all these years. I would have been in prison a long time ago and never let out,’ Amro said….[He adds] that dozens of the witnesses who were called by the military prosecution during the trial to testify against him, had actually attacked, assaulted, and harassed him in the past.”
https://mondoweiss.net/2021/01/its-an-injustice-israeli-court-convicts-palestinian-peace-activist-issa-amro/

-Legal Right to Resistance: “[T]he United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) has explicitly affirmed the right of Palestinians to resist Israel’s military occupation, including through armed struggle. This right was affirmed in the context of the right to self-determination of all peoples under foreign and colonial rule.” There are several “relevant UN resolutions on this matter”. (August 2023)
https://www.cjpme.org/fs_236
   (The UNGA resolution 3070 of 1973, reaffirms the legitimacy of the peoples’ struggle for liberation from colonial and foreign domination and alien subjugation by all available means, including armed struggle. This recognition is also reflected in international conventions.)

Background: First Intifada (1987-1991)
-Overview: “Over the course of two decades, Israel had expropriated Arab land; expanded an illegal settlement enterprise that fragmented the Palestinian territories; and maintained a repressive military occupation that routinized human rights violations of Palestinians under its rule, including arrests, deportations, home demolitions, indefinite detentions, curfews, and killings. With the intifada, Palestinians rose to shake off the yoke of military rule. They boycotted Israeli goods and refused to comply with the administrative processes underwriting their oppression, including procedures such as the issuance of ID cards and tax collection by the Israeli authorities.” (Baconi 2018, 2)
    “The image of Palestinian youth hurtling stones at Israeli tanks came to denote the spirit of this period. Over the course of four years, the intifada resembled an anticolonial struggle….Throughout the territories, decentralized popular committees emerged to organize mass action.” The United National Leadership of the Uprising, a coalition of factions, with the stated political goal of establishing a Palestinian state, “was created early in the intifada to coordinate activities among the different towns and villages…” (Baconi 2018, 2)
   “Thousands of miles away,…Arafat watched the spreading protests from his exile in Tunis. Under his guidance, the [PLO], the official representative of the Palestinian people and effectively the government in exile, scrambled to assume a leadership role over this unexpected mass mobilization. Through its offices in Amman and Tunis, the PLO coordinated with local leaders inside the occupied territories to shape the intifada’s trajectory and ensure it remained nonviolent.” (“Having been ostracized by the US throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Arafat and the leaders of the PLO had begun clandestine efforts to pursue diplomatic channels with the Americans. The PLO’s inclusion in diplomacy was made contingent on its complete renunciation of terrorism and its recognition of Israel’s ‘right to exist.’ This condition meant conceding the goal of liberating the entirety of Palestine and focusing instead on the 22 percent [Israel] captured in 1967…Given the weight of making such a concession, the PLO’s process of recalibration unfolded over the course of several years, during which tensions between Israel and the Palestinians living under its occupation increased. Intermittent skirmishes proliferated throughout the 1980s and in 1987 bubbled over when the fateful car accident on December 8 sparked the intifada.”) (Baconi 2018, 2-3, 20)
   “Led by Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, Hamas’s cofounders viewed the intifada as an opportune time to leverage all the preparation that had been taking place clandestinely for years to create an organization dedicated to ‘rais[ing] the banner of God over every inch of Palestine.’” On December 9, 1987, “it was decided that the brotherhood would finally leverage all its preparatory work and spin off a small militarized offshoot that would join the likes of Islamic Jihad in armed confrontation against Israel. The Islamic Resistance Movement, HAMAS, was officially launched in January 1988. Although intended as an offshoot, Hamas rapidly subsumed the parent organization’s institutional infrastructure.” (Baconi 2018, 3, 20-1)
   “The PLO’s concessions were anathema for Hamas, whose charter proclaimed that ‘jihad for the liberation of Palestine is obligatory.’ No other path for liberation was viable. The movement dismissed diplomatic efforts as contrary to its ideology, primarily because they were premised on the condition of conceding parts of Palestine, but also because Hamas believed they were unlikely to serve Palestinian interests.” (“Jihad was not limited to armed struggle, although this did comprise a central element of Hamas’s misson.”) (Baconi 2018, 23, 24)
   “By the fourth year of the Palestinian intifada, in 1991, the uprising in the Palestinian territories had been considerably weakened and fatigue had seeped in. The economy faltered and the social fabric strained as Israel’s repressive military tactics divided the West Bank into small, easily manageable units and barred Palestinian workers from coming into Israel for their jobs. From its exile in Tunis, the PLO had worked closely with the local leadership to lead the uprising. Nonetheless, the power dynamic within the territories had shifted, as the PLO’s softening coincided with Hamas’s rising popularity. This change in fortune was accelerated in 1990 when Hamas made the decision to condemn Saddam Hussein, who was widely popular among Palestinians given his historic support of the Palestinian cause. Hamas’s position was unpopular locally but placed it in a positive light with the Gulf States, which promptly redirected their funds toward the nascent movement, effectively plunging the PLO into a financial crisis. Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait forced many of Hamas’s leaders who were based there, including Khaled Meshal, to relocate to Jordan, where they benefited from a more developed brotherhood infrastructure.” (Baconi 2018, 27)
   “Like the PLO before it, Hamas began its military operations by targeting Israeli army posts and settler communities as it detonated car bombs within the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Leaflets declared that Hamas was attempting to limit civilian casualties, focusing instead on combatants and settlers, whom they viewed as being legitimate targets. Hamas’s campaign prompted Yitzhak Rabin to arrest 413 members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad in December 1992 and deport them to an area called Marj al-Zuhur in south Lebanon. Inadvertently, the deportation placed Hamas in the international spotlight and allowed it to broadcast its message to the world. From their exile, Hamas’s internal leaders, typically isolated under occupation, met with their counterparts in the external leadership and initiated communication channels with other organizations, including Hezbollah and, indirectly, Iran. Domestically, exile elevated Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians as it demonstrated its leaders’ steadfastness in the face of Israeli repression.” (Baconi 2018, 28)
-Movement Before and After: Soon after the 1967 War, Palestinians could “move quite freely in the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, and pre-1967 Israel. Unless there was a general closure of the territories, a Palestinian could have breakfast in Ramallah, lunch in Jerusalem, and dinner in Haifa as long as he returned home by 1:00am. That changed during the intifada, with the emergence of an ever-more labyrinthine system of restrictions. Israel put up checkpoints within the occupied territories, along the pre-1967 lines, and between East Jerusalem and the West Bank. The ability to pass through them depended on the color of your ID, what part of the occupied territories you were born in, how old you were, your gender, and whether you had ever been detained or arrested.” (Nathan Thrall, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy, Metropolitan Books Henry Holt and Company, New York: 2023, 32-3. Hereinafter, “Thrall 2023.”)

10. Who wrote the following after serving six US secretaries of state on Arab-Israeli negotiations? “For far too long, many American officials involved in Arab-Israeli peacemaking, myself included, have acted as Israel’s attorney, catering and coordinating with the Israelis at the expense of successful peace negotiations. If the United States wants to be an honest and effective broker on the Arab-Israeli issue, then surely it can have only one client: the pursuit of a solution that meets the needs and requirements of both sides.”

-Aaron David Miller: Middle East negotiator and adviser on Arab-Israeli affairs at the US State Department for 25 years. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/22/AR2005052200883.html

-During the Clinton administration, Aaron David Miller “saw Bibi [Netanyahu] as a kind of speed bump that would have to be negotiated along the way until a new Israeli prime minister came along who was more serious about peace. In the words of Miller’s boss, Dennis Ross, ‘neither President Clinton nor Secretary Albright believed that Bibi had any real interest in pursuing peace.’ But every time the Clinton administration tried to drag Netanyahu in the direction of a viable Palestinian state, Netanyahu rallied American Jewish groups and conservative Republicans to his defense.” Netanyahu has remained consistent in his vision. “In 2005, he resigned as Sharon’s finance minister to protest Israel’s dismantling of settlements in Gaza.” (Beinart 2012, 122, 123)

   “[In August 2017], Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu…told an audience of Jewish settlers that he has no intention of dismantling Israeli settlements in the West Bank in exchange for peace with the Palestinians. ‘We are here to stay, forever,’ Netanyahu said…‘There will be no more uprooting of settlements in the land of Israel,’ he vowed….Netanyahu’s comments run counter to decades of stated US policy calling for some settlements to be evacuated as part of a peace deal with the Palestinians. Under previous US administrations, Netanyahu would have been rebuked.” (Netanyahu likewise stated in January 2014 that he had no intention of “‘evacuating any settlement or uprooting any Israeli.’”) https://www.vox.com/world/2017/8/29/16220132/netanyahu-settlements-we-will-stay-forever-west-bank

-“Where the issue of Palestine is concerned, American Middle East policy from Truman down to Obama has consistently hewn to…three patterns…: an almost total lack of pressure from the Arab Gulf monarchies [which rely on US protection, and are threatened by Palestinian democratic movements]; the impact of US domestic politics, driven by the Israel lobby; and an unconcern about Palestinian rights [due largely to the powerlessness of the Palestinians]. The preferred approach of US presidents has therefore generally involved deferring to Israel and its American supporters, and refusing to advocate forcefully for inalienable Palestinian national and political rights.” (Rashid Khalidi, Brokers Of Deceit: How the US Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East, Beacon Press, Boston: 2013, 1.)

11. Who said the following? “Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of US partnerships with governments and peoples [in the Middle East and surrounding regions].”

-General David Petraeus: US Army general, former Commander of the US Central Command, and former director of the CIA. http://www.haaretz.com/news/u-s-general-israel-palestinian-conflict-foments-anti-u-s-sentiment-1.264910

-One reason Arabs are angry is because of the deep psychological damage Israel has caused in Gaza. Consider the words of James S. Gordon, a psychiatrist: “I’ve worked for 20 years with psychological trauma – during and after the war in Kosovo, after the earthquake in Haiti, with US troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, and in Israeli towns like Sderot that have been continually shelled by Hamas for years…And since 2002, I’ve worked here, in long-beleaguered, isolated Gaza, leading workshops, training local clinicians and leaders and setting up a program of self-care and group support to deal with the population-wide psychological trauma. In those decades, I’ve never seen psychological devastation this intense.” http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/11/03/gaza-isnt-just-a-physical-wreck-the-psychological-damage-is-even-worse/

12. According to the United Nations 1947 Partition Resolution, was the Gaza Strip to be part of the Jewish State or the Arab State?

-Arab State. Arab rejection of the 1947 Partition Plan remains understandable as Jews made up 37 percent of the population of mandatory Palestine and owned 7 percent of the land, yet the Jewish State was allocated 55 percent of the land. (Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881 – 2001, Vintage, New York: 2001, 186. Hereinafter, “Morris 2001.”)

-After the 1948-9 War, Gaza came under Egypt’s administrative control. “The concentration of refugees and their proximity to their homes, now on the Israeli side of the armistice line, made the Gaza Strip an active spot for incursions into Israel by a range of insurgent movements as well as individuals and families seeking to return to their homes. Alongside social regeneration projects, the [Muslim] brotherhood…established military training camps to support armed missions aimed at the liberation and return of the Palestinian homeland.” (Baconi 2018, 11)

-“[E]gypt kept a tight rein on the activity of Fedayeen (Palestinian guerrillas) in Gaza. But in early 1955, Israeli leaders plotted to lure Egypt into war in order to topple President Gamal Abdel Nasser. They launched a bloody cross-border raid into Gaza killing 40 Egyptian soldiers. The Gaza raid proved a near-perfect provocation, as armed border clashes escalated. In October 1956, Israel (in collusion with Great Britain and France) invaded the Egyptian Sinai and occupied Gaza, which it had long coveted. … ‘The United Nations estimated that…Israeli troops killed between 447 and 550 Arab civilians in the first three weeks of the occupation of the Strip.’ In March 1957, Israel was forced to withdraw from Gaza after the US president Dwight Eisenhower exerted heavy diplomatic pressure and threatened economic sanctions.” (Finkelstein 2018, 4-5)

   “A UN peacekeeping force entered the region, and Israeli ships were assured passage through the Straits of Tiran (although not the Suez Canal). Nasser’s image in the Arab world as the man who had stood up to the former colonial powers, Britain and France, was enhanced. With Soviet support, Egypt swiftly reconstituted its army. The Fedayeen attacks ceased, and a fragile truce, valuable for Israel in terms of building up its economy and military, held for a decade.” (Pfeffer 2018, 59)

-“The persecution of Gazans took new forms when Israel conquered the Strip in 1967. From recent Israeli scholarship we learn that the goal of the [Israeli] government was to drive the [Palestinian] refugees [in Gaza due to the 1948 War] into the Sinai, and if feasible the rest of the population too. Expulsions from Gaza were carried out under the direct orders of General Yeshayahu Gavish…Expulsions from the West Bank were far more extreme, and Israel resorted to devious means to prevent the return of those expelled, in direct violation of Security Council orders. The reasons were made clear in internal discussion immediately after the war. Golda Meir, later Prime Minister, informed her Labor colleagues that Israel should keep the Gaza Strip while ‘getting rid of its Arabs.’ Defense Minister Dayan and others agreed. Prime Minister Eshkol explained that those expelled cannot be allowed to return because ‘We cannot increase the Arab population in Israel’ — referring to the newly occupied territories, already tacitly considered part of Israel. In accord with this conception, all of Israel’s maps were changed, expunging the Green Line (the internationally recognized borders [established by the 1949 Armistice line])…” http://chomsky.info/articles/20121201.htm

   According to minutes of meetings of the inner Israeli cabinet within six months of the end of the June 1967 War, Prime Minister Eshkol said, “‘We are interested in emptying out Gaza [of Arabs] first’…To which Labor Minister Yigal Allon suggested ‘thinning the Galilee of Arabs,’ while Religious Affairs Minister Zerah Warhaftig said, ‘We must increase [the number of] Jews and take all possible measures to reduce the number of Arabs.’” https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.823075

-According to Sara Roy, a Senior Research Scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University (and child of Holocaust survivors), Gaza under Israel’s occupation suffered “de-development” as “the native population [was deprived] of its most important economic resources—land, water and labor—as well as the internal capacity and potential for developing those resources.” According to Benny Morris, an Israeli historian, “Like all occupations, Israel’s was founded on brute force, repression and fear, collaboration and treachery, beatings and torture chambers, and daily intimidation, humiliation, and manipulation.”
(Finkelstein 2018, 16-17) (Morris 2001, 341)

Background: 1956 War
-“In September 1955, Egypt announced that it had signed an arms deal with Czechoslovakia, which would include a supply of tanks and MiG aircraft. The country had already ratcheted up its restrictions on shipping to Eilat and signed a defense pact with Syria. Like the supply of arms to Israel during the War of Independence, the deal required the Soviet Union’s sanction. The Russian penetration of the Middle East created a new and dangerous situation.” (Segev 2019, 560)

   “The growing friction on the Gaza Strip border [between Israel and Egypt] faced Ben-Gurion with two sets of heavy pressures. Dayan and several political leaders were demanding war against Egypt, as soon as possible. They based their position in part on the ‘Czech deal,’ which meant, so Dayan said, that Egypt was preparing to destroy Israel. Most members of the Cabinet…opposed war.” (Segev 2019, 561)

   (“What is certain is that the IDF’s top command advocated a larger Israel and sought to instill that view in the troops.” It’s also clear that Ben-Gurion “viewed the Green Line [i.e., the 1949 Armistice line] as a temporary border, which is indeed how it had been designated in the armistice agreements. From time to time he pondered ways of correcting it.” Furthermore, Ben-Gurion believed that Nasser sought military superiority so he could defeat Israel in a war. (Segev 2019, 564-5, 568))

   In early November 1955, “the IDF carried out an operation in the area of Nitzana, which was disputed between Israel and Egypt. Operation [Volcano] left some eighty Egyptians and six Israelis dead. A few days later, Dayan again proposed…that Israel bring about a ‘large-scale confrontation’ with Egypt…The goals of the war he was proposing had not changed–the conquest of the Gaza Strip and the Straits of Tiran….Every one of [the generals at a General Staff meeting] favored a preventative war.” (Segev 2019, 567)

   By March 1956, amidst ongoing, low-level fights, “Ben-Gurion had reached the conclusion that there was no way of preventing fedayun incursions from the Gaza Strip; the only way to stop them was to undermine Nasser’s regime.” (Around the same time, “the first six Mystere IVA fighter-bombers purchased from France arrived in Israel under a veil of the highest secrecy.” “France had lent aid to the Zionist struggle before the establishment of the state, and during the War of Independence as well.”) (Segev 2019, 571, 574)

   On July 26, 1956, “Nasser told an audience of three hundred thousand [in Alexandria] that he was nationalizing the Suez Canal. [I]srael, which up to that point had faced war with Egypt alone, suddenly found itself with two potential allies, Britain and France.” (While Britain was focused on the Canal, France wanted Israel to start a war with Egypt to “ensure that Egypt would not intervene in the Algerian revolution against French rule.”) “The [general war plan] was that Israel would attack Egypt and that Britain and France would demand that the two sides agree to a cease-fire. Israel would consent on condition that Egypt also agreed, but Egypt would reject the ultimatum, providing a pretext for the two powers to join the Israeli offensive.” (Segev 2019, 573, 574, 580)

   Israel only required four days “to capture the entire Sinai Peninsula and the islands of the Tiran Straits.” Very soon after the Sinai conquest, Russia “demanded the immediate withdrawal of IDF forces from Egyptian territory ‘before it is too late.’ President Eisenhower also demanded withdrawal.” (Segev 2019, 582)

  “It was President Dwight Eisenhower who finally brought the war to an end, without the nuclear rattling of the Soviets. He was incensed by what he saw as the treachery of his allies, who had kept him in the dark about their plot.” (Lawrence Wright, Thirteen Days in September: Carter, Begin, and Sadat at Camp David, Alfred A. Knopf, New York: 2014, 133. Hereinafter, “Wright 2014.”)

   Israel was slower than France and England to obey Washington’s withdrawal demand, as Ben-Gurion “declared to the Knesset, ‘Egypt has lost its sovereignty over Sinai, which has now become an integral part of Israel.’ Eisenhower had little support in Congress for his threat to impose sanctions and withhold aid if the Israelis did not withdraw unconditionally, so he took his argument to the American people. ‘If we agreed that armed attack can properly achieve the purposes of the assailant, then I fear we will have turned back the clock of international order,’ the president said in a nationally televised address. Ben-Gurion finally bowed to the pressure”, as the last Israeli soldier left Egypt in March 1957. (Wright 2014, 134)

   Eisenhower was the “last president who told Israel to either withdraw from territory or I’ll cut off all US funds to you (including tax-exempt funds from individuals)…But those were different times and Ike was, after all, the general who defeated the Nazis and liberated the camps. Incidentally, a week after voting against Israel’s incursion into Sinai at the United Nations, Eisenhower won reelection with the highest percentage of Jewish support any Republican received before or since.” (15 Dec. 2023)
https://mjx847.substack.com/p/bidens-hands-are-tied

-Primary Results of the 1956 War:
(i) Britain and France were exposed as minor powers. Within the “next two years Iraq, Libya, and Syria had joined Egypt as Soviet clients….However reluctantly, America had inherited the Middle East portfolio and now was the only real arbiter of peace…” Accordingly, Israel now understood “that it could not depend on European alliances. There were only two powers that mattered now, and since Egypt and several other Arab countries were in the Soviet orbit, that left only America to turn to.”
(ii) Despite losing the war, Nasser “emerged as an even more formidable figure…”
(iii) “In addition to demonstrating the IDF’s strength, the war guaranteed Israel free navigation of the Gulf of Eilat. The Sinai Peninsula became a demilitarized zone and a UN peacekeeping force was stationed in the Gaza Strip.” However, “[t]he attempt to get rid of Nasser, Israel’s principal goal in the war, was quickly revealed as…foolish…What remained was the question of how Ben-Gurion could have believed that two declining colonial empires could fashion a Middle East without Nasser, without Jordan, with a divided Syria and Lebanon, with a solution to the refugee problem, and with peace.”
(iv) “The Arab world was now confirmed in its suspicion that Israel had been created not as a homeland for persecuted Jews but as a base for Western imperialists to maintain their stranglehold on the Middle East.”
(v) As a “consolation prize for the fiasco, the French agreed to provide nuclear technology and resources to Israel. The remorseful prime minister Mollet confided to an aide, ‘I owe the bomb to them.’”
(Wright 2014, 134-5) (Segev 2019, 597-8) 

13. Whose account of the forced expulsion of Palestinians by Jewish fighters in 1948, on the orders of David Ben-Gurion, was censored from his memoirs?

-In July 1948, Ben Gurion gave orders “for the operations in Lydda and Ramleh: ‘Expel them!’ he told Yigal Allon and Yitzhak Rabin — a section censored out of Rabin’s memoirs, but published thirty years later in the New York Times.” (David Gardner, Last Chance: The Middle East in the Balance, I.B. Tauris, New York: 2009, 161-2.)
http://mondediplo.com/1997/12/palestine

   It was as a result of expulsions and fighting that “Approximately 250,000 Palestinians driven out of their homes during the 1948 war and its aftermath fled to Gaza and overwhelmed the indigenous population of some 80,000.” (Finkelstein 2010, 15)

   The 1967 war led to an estimated 40,000 to 50,000 Gazans fleeing, “perhaps because they feared a repeat of the massacres of November 1956. Most went to Jordan….For months [after the war’s end] there was a steady exodus, helped by Israel’s policy of providing free transport to the Jordan bridges.” (Black 2017, 190)

14. When Israel disengaged from the Gaza Strip in 2005, what percentage of the population of Gaza was Jewish settlers and what percentage of the land of Gaza was controlled by Israel and Jewish settlers?

-When Israel disengaged from Gaza in August 2005, Jews constituted 0.6 percent of the population — as 8,000 Jewish settlers and 1.5 million Palestinians lived in Gaza — and Israel and Jewish settlers controlled 25 percent of the territory, 40 percent of the arable land and a disproportionate share of the scarce water resources. (Avi Shlaim, Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations, Verso, London: 2009, 308.)
   “Despite fears of violent clashes between Israeli settlers and the Israeli security forces evicting them, disengagement from Gaza was over with few casualties in eight days…Most Israelis were relieved. For Likudniks, however, it was the deepest crisis in the history of the Revisionist movement. A Likud government had voluntarily, without international pressure and without receiving anything in return, relinquished part of the Land of Israel and uprooted Jewish communities….[As a result,] Likud was irrevocably split between Sharon’s supporters, who justified disengagement, and those determined to punish Sharon and ensure Likud never again repeated such a travesty. Netanyahu sought to lead the latter camp…” (Pfeffer 2018, 295)

-The 2005 withdrawal was generally seen as a victory for Hamas and a humiliation for the Israel Defense Forces. (Prime Minister Sharon refused to negotiate or even coordinate the withdrawal from Gaza and the orderly transference of governance to the Palestinian Authority.)
   Proof that the withdrawal elevated Hamas: “In 2006, Hamas won the Palestinian elections [as it was] seen as being responsible for getting rid of Israel. Negotiations didn’t get rid of Israel — Palestinian armed resistance worked. That is how the Palestinian public saw it. In addition, Hamas was seen as clean, not corrupt like the Arafat regime. Hamas didn’t run under the Hamas label — but under the name ‘Change and Reform’ and their platform talked about Change and Reform and not about throwing the Jews into the sea or destroying Israel.” (Gershon Baskin, Facebook post, 31 March 2018)

-As indicated in question 15, the withdrawal was not intended to enhance peace prospects. In fact, in the year after the withdrawal another 12,000 Israelis settled on the West Bank—hardly a sign of Israeli goodwill.
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/what-do-you-mean-when-you-say-no-1.233463

-Demographic Driver: In terms of land mass, “the Gaza Strip encompasses just under 1.5 percent of the total area of British Mandate-era Palestine, (or ‘Greater Israel’ as the settlers like to call it). However, that same tiny area is [in 2012] home to approximately 1.7 million Palestinians, or over a quarter of the total Palestinian population between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. So, in divesting itself of just 1.5 percent of the land, Israel significantly recalibrated the so-called ‘demographic equation’ (the ratio of Jews to Arabs in the area under its control). [This recalibration] paves the way to permanent Israeli control of 98.5 percent of the land. West Bank Palestinians can either join their left-behind-in-1948 confreres as second-class citizens in an enlarged Jewish state or continue their stateless existence in insecure and disconnected enclaves of limited autonomy, a kind of Bantustan status. Meanwhile the inhabitants of [Gaza] remain isolated in an area that a recent United Nations report concluded might not be ‘a liveable place’ by 2020.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/opinion/seven-lean-years-of-peacemaking.html?_r=1

-Unilateralism Leads to Problems: Likudniks argue that while Israel “left” Gaza in 2005 it got “Hamastan,” which has made “the lives of the nearby Israeli communities miserable.” However, according to Eran Etzion, former head of policy planning in the Foreign Ministry and former deputy head of the National Security Council, “that’s the difference between unilateral moves and agreements. I remember that when I was in the NSC during the period of the disengagement, Sharon called in [NSC head Maj. Gen.] Giora Eiland and said, ‘Listen, I’ve decided that I’m getting out, now tell me how.’ We carried out…a classic example of policy planning. We…constructed alternatives. In the end we recommended going for an agreement and under no circumstances to leave unilaterally. But Sharon didn’t want to listen. At the suggestion of his advisers, he acted contrary to the recommendation. He feared a precedent of admitting to a withdrawal to the 1967 lines and the implications of that for the West Bank. And for that we are paying a price to this day.” (9 July 2018)
https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-does-iran-really-want-to-nuke-israel-1.6244003  

-The Greenhouse Story: “[There is an] oft-repeated narrative about how Palestinians in Gaza supposedly tore apart the beautiful greenhouses left behind for them in an act of enraged mob violence against their former overlords. This story is told…to show that even when Israel is…generous with Palestinians, the Palestinians are so consumed with hatred that they spoil it. Therefore [people] should not think being…generous with [Palestinians] will help resolve the situation.”
   “Understanding that the Greenhouse Myth is not true is important both because it helps us to understand the contours of the conflict more accurately and because it will make us more skeptical of the way…false narratives are deployed for the purposes of propaganda. Those…who have…believed this story should…wonder what other falsehoods [they] have been told, and why.”
   First, it should be understood that the settlers themselves “demolished or rendered unusable their residences” and “as much as half of the [agricultural] greenhouses before handing their settlements over to Tsahal [the IDF].” (“According to the New York Times, two months prior to the withdrawal Israeli settlers demolished about half of the greenhouses, ‘creating significant doubts that the greenhouses could be handed over to the Palestinians as a living business.’”)
   Second, one person who knows the facts “is the prime mover behind the greenhouse deal, Australian-Jewish businessman James Wolfensohn, who served as the Quartet’s Special Envoy for Gaza Disengagement. In his memoir, Wolfensohn notes that ‘some damage was done to the greenhouses [as the result of post-disengagement looting] but they came through essentially intact’ and were subsequently guarded by Palestinian Authority police. What really doomed the greenhouse initiative, Wolfensohn argues, were Israeli restrictions on Gazan exports.”
   “In early December [2005], he writes, ‘the much-awaited first harvest of quality cash crops — strawberries, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, sweet peppers and flowers — began. These crops were intended for export via Israel for Europe. But their success relied upon the Karni crossing [between Gaza and Israel], which, beginning in mid-January 2006, was closed more than not. The Palestine Economic Development Corporation [PED], which was managing the greenhouses taken over from the settlers, said that it was experiencing losses in excess of $120,000 per day.’”
   So, the facts are clear. The Gates foundation and James Wolfensohn had bought the remaining greenhouses from the Israeli settlers on behalf of Gazans for $14 million. (Wolfensohn donated half a million of his own money.) The PED invested more than $20 million into the project. (The head of the PED “has said that as a result of the destruction by Israeli settlers and Palestinian looters the PED had to invest an additional $5 million into the greenhouse project to revive it.”)
   “In mid-December, the greenhouses made their first export of 8 tons of peppers.” However, “for the project to be successful, it would require moving at least 25 truckloads of produce a day through the Karni crossing….A crossing that was supposed to be open all the time according to an international agreement to which Israel was party, was instead only opened by Israel sporadically and unpredictably. Israel cited security concerns as the reason, though it should be noted that [many] experts have argued convincingly for years that the restrictions on Gaza are excessive…By February 2006, the BBC reported that because the farmers could not get their produce through the crossing, trucks were dumping perfect, ripe produce onto a wasteland to be eaten by goats.” (Filiu 2014, 285-6)
https://medium.com/@MatthewZGindin/greenhouses-in-gaza-what-happened-ba22b1ac9fdd

-2024 Postwar Resettlement Plan: “[There is a] burgeoning movement to rebuild Jewish settlements in Gaza and impose Israeli rule over the Strip once the war dust settles….Although they are not the Israeli mainstream and have been subject to much criticism, adherents of the lunatic plan cannot be dismissed as merely a fringe.”
   “A recent conference in Jerusalem brought together thousands of supporters of Gaza resettlement and was attended by about 40 percent of the Israeli Knesset’s governing coalition. Keynote speakers included Itamar Ben Gvir, Israel’s national security minister, and Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister. In total 11 cabinet ministers and 15 other MKs attended the event, participating in a frenzy of messianic zeal for Jewish supremacy and contempt for Palestinians.”
   “Though he has mildly distanced himself from the resettlement movement, Prime Minister Netanyahu has done nothing to rein in its support, even from among those who are members of his own party.” (CFPN Newsletter, 2 Feb. 2024)
https://www.peacenowcanada.org/news-releases/cfpn-denounces-extremist-plans-for-jewish-settlements-in-gaza/

15. Who made the the following 2004 statement indicating the primary motivation for Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from the Gaza Strip? “The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process…And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and permission. All with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of [the US] Congress.”

-Dov Weisglass: Senior adviser to then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/top-pm-aide-gaza-plan-aims-to-freeze-the-peace-process-1.136686

-“[Ariel] Sharon and his top advisors said…that the Gaza evacuation was meant not to create a Palestinian state, but to forestall one. By 2004, the Second Intifada had fizzled, Arafat was dead, and America’s sequel to Oslo, the Road Map, was going nowhere. Into the breach came two initiatives. The first was the [2002] offer, drafted by Saudi Arabia and endorsed by the entire Arab League, to recognize Israel if it returned to the 1967 lines and negotiated a ‘just’ and ‘agreed upon’ solution for the Palestinian refugees. The second was the [2003] Geneva Accord, a model peace agreement signed by former Israeli and Palestinian negotiators that would have required Israel to dismantle major settlements like Ariel. These moves terrified Sharon, a lifelong opponent of a Palestinian state who feared international pressure to agree to the kind of deal that Clinton had proposed in December 2000.” (Thus the above Weisglass quote clearly reflected Sharon’s goal to exploit an Israeli unilateral withdrawal to prevent Israel from being dragged into initiatives like the Geneva Accord and the Arab League offer.)

-Divide-and-Rule: Despite the Gaza withdrawal, argued former Israeli foreign minister “Shlomo Ben-Ami in 2005, ‘Sharon’s hidden agenda, which he has been harbouring for years, remains unchanged[:] the confinement of a Palestinian homeland within scattered enclaves surrounded by Israeli settlements, strategic military areas and a network of bypass roads.’” (Beinart 2012, 72-3)
   Furthermore, in Gaza, “Sharon knew that Hamas was by far more powerful than the security forces of the Palestinian Authority, and poised to take over. [While his] main objective…was to rid Israel of the economic and security burdens that Gaza posed, [if the unilateral withdrawal] would divide the Palestinians, so much the better.” (4 Feb. 2016)
http://www.alonben-meir.com/article/the-truth-about-israels-national-security/
   “[A] separate Gaza Strip is an Israeli invention. In the Oslo agreement, Israel undertook to open four ‘safe passages’ between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Under the influence of the army, Rabin violated this obligation right from the beginning. As a result, the West Bank was [and continues to be] totally cut off from the Strip…”
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/09/30/abu-mazens-balance-sheet/

-Crush Hope and Empower Hamas: Sharon’s crass unilateral approach “ran a Sherman tank over secular, moderate Palestinians like Sari [Nusseibeh] and Mahmoud Abbas with whom [Israel] could reach a settlement and end the conflict once and for all. By crushing hope and elevating suspicion and fear into core strategic principles, Sharon tipped the balance of power toward Hamas in Gaza, thus fomenting the kind of chaos that could justify additional unilateral steps. Instead of a single Palestinian state alongside Israel, there would be at least two…Palestines filled to the brim with angry, despondent people.” (Ayalon 2020, 219)
   “Hamas had begun its campaign of slaughter in reaction to Oslo. Its murder of hundreds of Israelis had helped derail the peace process, and [Israel’s] government [rewarded] them by handing them Gaza, free of charge.” (Ayalon 2020, 221)

Gaza Remains Occupied
-“Tzipi Livni as Foreign Minister wanted to declare that the Israeli occupation over Gaza ended with the Israeli disengagement, but the legal adviser of the Israeli Foreign Minister told her that as long as Israel controlled the airspace — including the electro-magnetic sphere controlling communications, radio and television waves — the coastal waters and the external borders, Israel could not declare that the occupation was over.” (Gershon Baskin, Facebook post, 31 March 2018)
-“The Sharon government not only locked Gaza, it stopped transferring tax monies collected by Israel on behalf of the Palestinians as agreed to in the Paris protocol. This was not the first time that Israel did it, in contravention to a signed agreement and even against the opinion of the Israeli Attorney General.” (Gershon Baskin, Facebook post, 31 March 2018)
-“If you don’t think Israel controls the West Bank and Gaza ask yourself whether Palestinians can legally enter and exit those territories without Israel’s permission. With small exceptions, they cannot.” (7 Sept. 2022)
https://peterbeinart.substack.com/p/does-israel-have-a-right-to-exist-61a
-According to Human Rights Watch, “While Israel has since [its 2005 withdrawal] declared the Gaza Strip a ‘foreign territory’ and the crossings between Gaza and Israel ‘international borders,’ under international humanitarian law (IHL), Gaza remains occupied, and Israel retains its responsibilities for the welfare of Gaza residents.” In conjunction with Egypt, which controls the Rafah checkpoint in Gaza’s south, “Israel maintains effective control over Gaza by regulating movement in and out of the Strip [–including exports and imports–] as well as the airspace, sea space, public utilities and population registry.” (Inclusion in the Palestinian Population Registry enables a person to receive an identification card. This documentation, for example, enables passage through Israeli military checkpoints in the West Bank.) Israel also bars most Palestinians from roughly one-third of the arable land inside Gaza. “In addition, Israel declared the right to re-enter Gaza militarily at any time in its ‘Disengagement Plan.’ [In fact,] Since the withdrawal, Israel has carried out aerial bombardments…” (Norman G. Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History, UC Press, Berkeley: 2008, xvii.) (Beinart 2012, 77)
-“Israel constrains the lives of virtually every person in Gaza. As the indispensable Israeli human rights group Gisha has observed: ‘Gaza residents may not bring a crate of milk into the Gaza Strip without Israeli permission; A Gaza university cannot receive visits from a foreign lecturer unless Israel issues a visitor’s permit; A Gaza mother cannot register her child in the Palestinian population registry without Israeli approval; A Gaza fisherman cannot fish off the coast of Gaza without permission from Israel; A Gaza nonprofit organization cannot receive a tax-exempt donation of goods without Israeli approval; A Gaza teacher cannot receive her salary unless Israel agrees to transfer tax revenues to the Palestinian Ministry of Education; A Gaza farmer cannot get his carnations and cherry tomatoes to market unless Israel permits the goods to exit Gaza.’ Claiming that Israel divested itself of responsibility for Gaza when it ‘withdrew totally’ in 2005 may ease American Jewish consciences. But it’s a lie.” (26 Apr. 2018) https://forward.com/opinion/399738/american-jews-have-abandoned-gaza-and-the-truth/

-Self-Defense and Occupation: Since Israel occupies Gaza, it’s simpleminded “to analogize Hamas’s rockets — repugnant as they are — to Mexico or Canada attacking the United States. The United States is not occupying Mexico or Canada.”
   According even to the US State Department’s 2017 Country Report on Human Rights Practices, Israel has been occupying Gaza, the West Bank and the Golan Heights since 1967. However, under President Trump, the 2018 report “speaks of them as under Israeli ‘control.’”
http://duckofminerva.com/2014/07/thursday-linkage-the-future-of-israel-edition.html
https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/US-report-does-not-refer-to-Golan-West-Bank-Gaza-as-occupied-territories-583328
   “[I]srael is still the occupying power because after its withdrawal it continued to control access to Gaza by land, sea and air. Put simply, one does not have the right to self-defence against a territory that one occupies. [T]herefore, the self-defense clause, Article 51 of the UN Charter, has no relevance. It is the people under occupation who have under international law the right to resist, including the right to armed resistance. And the Palestinian people are in a unique position: they are the only people living under military occupation who are expected to ensure the security of their occupier [or suffer attack by the IDF].” (6 Dec. 2023)
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/world/israel/64132/all-that-remains
   It’s unacceptable to argue that “‘both sides are to blame.’ Israel is a free country that denies millions of Palestinians their freedom at gunpoint, and has done so since 1967. There is no moral equivalence between the two sides in this conflict.” Furthermore, saying “that Israel is a democracy within the Green Line, just not beyond it, is like saying a country that doesn’t let women vote is a democracy for men, just not for women.”
http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.702155  (8 Feb. 2016)
(Larry Derfner, Facebook post, 18 April 2019)

-Israel Unlike Egypt: While both Israel and Egypt legally block Gazans from entering their territory, airspace and waters, only Israel illegally prevents Gazans from doing all sorts of things concerning Gazan territory, airspace and waters, as the following examples demonstrate.
(i) “[I]srael declares parts of Gaza off-limits to the people who live there. Israel has established buffer zones — it calls them Access Restricted Areas — to keep Palestinians away from the fence that separates Gaza from Israel. According to the United Nations, this restricted area has ranged over the past decade from 100 to 500 meters, comprising as much as one-third of Gaza’s arable land. People who enter these zones can — and over the years have been — shot.”
(ii) Israel bars Palestinians “from much of Gaza’s water. In 1993, the Oslo Accords promised Gazan fisherman the right to fish 20 nautical miles off the coast. But since then, Israel has generally restricted fishing to between three and six nautical miles. (Occasionally, it has extended the boundary to nine nautical miles.) Since sardines, which the United Nations calls Gaza’s ‘most important catch,’ ‘flourish at the 6 NM boundary,’ these limitations have been disastrous for Gazan fisherman.” (Gazan fishermen have in fact been killed by Israel. As “Gaza’s smooth, flat coast offers no natural deep harbor and no protection from winds[,] fishermen often had to cast their nets far from shore to avoid the waves and currents.”)
(iii) “Israel controls the airspace above Gaza, and has not permitted the reopening of Gaza’s airport, which it bombed in 2001. Neither does it allow travel to and from Gaza by sea.”
(iv) “[I]srael controls Gaza’s population registry. When a child is born in Gaza, her parents register the birth, via the Palestinian Authority, with the Israeli military. If Israel doesn’t enter her in its computer system, Israel won’t recognize her Palestinian ID card. From Israel’s perspective, she will not legally exist. This control is not merely theoretical. If Israel doesn’t recognize your Palestinian ID card, it’s unlikely to allow you into, or out of, Gaza.” (Without the population registry’s unique ID number, an occupied Palestinian may not even be able to exit into Egypt.) “And because Israel sees Palestinians as a demographic threat, it uses this power to keep the population in Gaza — and especially the West Bank — as low as possible. Israel rarely adds adults to the Palestinian population registry. That means that if you’re, say, a Jordanian who marries someone from Gaza and wants to move there to live with her, you’re probably out of luck. Israel won’t let you in.”
-One Conclusion: “The dirty little secret of Israel’s blockade is that elements of it are motivated less by any convincing security rationale than by economic self-interest. In 2009, Haaretz exposed the way Israeli agricultural interests lobby to loosen restrictions on imports into Gaza when Israeli farmers want to sell surplus goods. In 2011, Israel found itself with a shortage of lulavs, the palm fronds that observant Jews shake on the holiday of Sukkot. So Israel lifted its ban on Gaza’s export of palm fronds. Had the security risk suddenly changed? Of course not. What had changed were the needs of Israeli consumers. [Israel’s behavior] isn’t surprising. The Israeli government is accountable to Israeli citizens. It’s not accountable to the people of Gaza, despite wielding enormous power over their lives. When governments wield unaccountable power, they become abusive and corrupt.”
(Forward, Opinion, 26 Apr. 2018)
https://forward.com/opinion/399738/american-jews-have-abandoned-gaza-and-the-truth/
(Ayalon 2020, 79)

-Fishing: Repairs, Dual-Use, Confiscations: “For Gaza’s fishermen, the blockade has ended the ability to buy motors, propellers, fibreglass and many other items needed to repair the boats and maintain a functioning fishing fleet. It has damaged a vital but shrinking part of the strip’s economy while crimping the supply of an important but increasingly out-of-reach part of the local diet.”
   “Repairs and maintenance that were once easy and affordable became too costly or scarce, causing some fishermen to just give up and dump their unsalvageable boats…”
   “Israel says the blockade and restrictions are for its security and intended to prevent Hamas, which controls Gaza, and other militant groups from using ‘dual use’ items — products that Israel says can be used for both civilian and military purposes. ‘Some items that serve the fishing industry are defined as dual-use materials,’ the Civil Administration, the Israeli authority that carries out civilian policy in occupied territories under the command of the military, said in a statement.”
   “Israel’s blockade has devastated Gaza’s economy, in which poverty is widespread and unemployment hovers around 50%. Palestinian officials and human rights groups have long maintained that the blockade amounts to collective punishment of Gaza’s 2 million residents…”
   “A UN-initiated program to allow maintenance and repair materials to be sent in was finally just put into place after months of negotiations…The agreement allows individual fishermen to request orders of dual-use materials needed to repair their boats. Each request must be approved by both the Palestinian and Israeli sides. Once it is approved, fishermen can place the order, and the importation and distribution of the materials will be overseen by the UN….On Nov. 13, [2022] the first batch of materials entered Gaza, the first since 2007, a shipment that included 500 pounds of fibreglass…”
   “In addition to the limits on goods coming in, the naval blockade restricts how far out into the Mediterranean Sea fishermen can go and thus how much and what types of fish they are able to catch. Fishermen are at risk of being shot at by the Israeli coast guard and being detained or having their boats confiscated by Israel if they get too close to the boundaries of the permitted fishing areas. There have been more than 300 shooting episodes this year…with 14 fishermen injured. At least 47 have been detained by Israel.” (New York Times International, 27 Nov. 2022, 8)
   As of Dec. 2020, the Israeli army continues to regularly detain and open “fire on unarmed Palestinian fishermen, shepherds, and farmers along the fence separating the besieged Gaza Strip from Israel, if they approach the unilaterally declared buffer zone. Israeli human rights group B’Tselem…concluded that Israel’s Gaza closure and ‘harassment of fishermen’ have been ‘destroying Gaza’s fishing sector,’ with 95% of fishermen living below the poverty line.”
https://www.palestinechronicle.com/israeli-army-gunfire-targets-gaza-fishermen-farmers/

-Restrictions Undermine West Bank Economy: “The settlers and their supporters were a major factor in thwarting the Palestinians’ aspirations for statehood, but those within Israel and elsewhere who had a financial stake in the occupation were at least as influential. Many products had to be imported through Israel, even water, all of which was taxed and permitted.” (Ethan Michaeli, Twelve Tribes: Promise and Peril in the New Israel, Custom House, New York: 2021, 325. Hereinafter, “Michaeli 2021.”)
   “Under the extensive rules of the occupation, the Israeli military restricted even consumer goods that were commonly used in businesses….The effect of these restrictions, when multiplied across the whole West Bank, was to hold back much of the Palestinian consumer economy. Citing research from the independent Palestine Investment Fund,…the cost of the occupation to the overall local economy was $16 billion annually.” For example, Palestinian telecommunications companies were blocked from profiting from the 5G cellular service network, necessary to handle the latest popular apps. The airwaves and land were thus occupied. (Michaeli 2021, 325-6)
   “Those who invested in a hotel [in the West Bank, for example,] learn that they weren’t allowed to import beds because of military rules that restricted the number of beds as a ‘security issue.'” Such restrictions lead to increased unemployment, poverty and violence. As a result, “the Palestinian economy remained dependent on funds from the UN and other international charities,” and was thus structurally unsound. (Michaeli 2021, 328)

-Open Gaza Can Benefit Israel: In a June 2021 talk, Shlomo Tzaban, “the manager of the Erez Crossing between Israel and Gaza,” argues that “[o]pening up Gaza ‘is clearly in Israel’s interest’ and that ‘Gaza has to be opened up immediately, without linkage to prisoners and missing persons and without linkage to Hamas…If we open [Gaza] today, there will be no suicide bombings and Hamas will be severely weakened.’”
   “Tzaban, who has been overseeing the civilian entry and exit point between Israel and Gaza since security at the crossing was privatized in 2006…contradicted the positions of many Israeli politicians regarding the Strip and debunked the security myths that are commonly used to justify the siege, which Israel has imposed since 2007. The southern Rafah Crossing that Gaza shares with Egypt is the only crossing not controlled by Israel.”
   “Tzaban insisted throughout his lecture that Gaza’s development and prosperity [are] a necessity — echoing the positions of many former Israeli military officials who have criticized the policy of maintaining the blockade. ‘If things are bad in Gaza, they will be bad in Israel,’ he said.”
   According to Gazans, “Egypt’s rule over the Strip from 1948 to 1967 [was] ‘as a Holocaust,’ whereas the years [of] Israel’s occupation of Gaza from 1967 until the beginning of the First Intifada in 1987 are considered a time of prosperity.” However, since 1987, Israel’s harsh restrictions and military actions have caused the situation in Gaza to deteriorate significantly.
   “Opening up Gaza…would be very beneficial to Israel. ‘It is in Israel’s interest that 200,000 Gazans enter [into Israel] today to build us homes and provide financial support to the 2.2 million Palestinians [living there] who have nothing to do with the conflict,’ he said.”
   “Tzaban was firm in his position on the lack of security threats involved in opening up Gaza: ‘Since 2006…, I’ve allowed 9 million Palestinians to enter from Gaza to Israel. There were zero casualties, and zero terrorists…If you open the crossings, there will not be a single suicide bombing.’”
   “The Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, ‘knows how to distinguish between those who are good and those who are bad,…and Israel has the most advanced technologies in the world’ to inspect those entering Israel. ‘We must let [Palestinians] taste what they’ve known between 1967 and 1987[:] the perks of…employment, livelihood, and…dignity,’ he added.”
   “Tzaban also expressed unwavering support for direct coordination with Hamas…. ‘Do you know that before 1987, Hamas’s leadership, [co-founder] Ahmad Yassin and others, would visit the Kirya freely?’ Tzaban remarked, referring to Israel’s military compound in Tel Aviv. ‘You must understand: agreements are made with enemies, there’s no need for deals with friends. I’m in favor of using mediators, but also of communicating directly [with Hamas], as we did [during] the Oslo Accords.’”
   “Regarding Hamas, Tzaban claimed on the one hand that ‘terror organizations must be destroyed, terrorist leaders must be wiped out.’ But in the same breath, he argued that opening the crossings between Israel and Gaza is a mutual interest. ‘Hamas will not prevent the residents of Gaza from entering Israel…In five years, there will be 3 million Palestinians in Gaza, living across [141 square miles]…Gaza is an Israeli problem, not a Palestinian one….If we don’t solve this…we will continue to run from incident to incident…[O]pen the gates of Gaza and within a decade there will no longer be a terror organization.’”
   Many experts on Gaza agree with Tzaban that the siege of Gaza isn’t sustainable. However, “an Israeli Defense Ministry spokesperson said that ‘Tzaban presented his personal opinions, which do not represent the Defense Ministry’s position.’” (21 June 2021)
https://www.972mag.com/gaza-siege-erez-crossing-manager/

-Vaccines and Occupation: “In acquiring vaccines…Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government left out the West Bank and Gaza (although Israel [eventually offered] coronavirus vaccines to Palestinian settlement workers and those with Israeli work permits). The government’s tacit position…is that the 1995 Oslo II Accord transferred all responsibility for fighting epidemics to the PA. [However,] Oslo II does not change Israel’s obligation as an occupying power to acquire vaccines. It only delegates the job of administering the vaccines to the PA. Even if one accepts the disputed position that Gaza is no longer occupied, Israel’s own Supreme Court has ruled that Israel must provide Gaza’s basic humanitarian needs, and vaccines are certainly such a need.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/03/09/israel-palestinians-vaccines-snl-michael-che-colonialism/

16. Who stated the following concerning Hamas’s victory in the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary elections? “The boycott of Hamas after winning a free and fair election in 2006, and subsequent punishment of the people of Gaza, have backfired and the group may be more popular than ever. Polls show that Palestinians voted for Hamas members because of frustration with corruption in the dominant party, Fatah, and because Hamas’s humanitarian efforts and good governance of municipalities had helped people educate and provide for their children amidst a crippling occupation. The same polls show that popular support for Hamas in 2006 was not based on support for the group’s religious or political ideologies. The international community and Israel should have seized on the opportunity to persuade more Palestinians to participate in the political process, which would have done more to undermine extremist ideologies than the current course.”

-Jimmy Carter: President of the United States, 1977-1981. The Carter Center, in partnership with the National Democratic Institute, sent an 85-member team to observe the election which was found to be peaceful, competitive, and genuinely democratic.
http://www.cartercenter.org/news/features/p/conflict_resolution/gaza_questions_042108.html

-A “report by the Congressional Research Service noted that the election ‘was widely considered to be free and fair.’” Nevertheless mainstream American Jewish groups “supported an Israeli blockade aimed at undoing that victory via economic pain.” (Beinart 2012, 50, 51)

-Gazans were “disgusted by years of official corruption and fruitless negotiations [so they] voted into office the Islamic movement Hamas…Privately, Senator Hillary Clinton rued that the US didn’t rig the outcome: ‘we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win.’” (Finkelstein 2018, 11)

-In fall 2012, Fatah did poorly in municipal elections across the West Bank. “The old Fatah leadership has already lost most of its moral prestige, having bet it on being able to deliver a state with American and European backing.” “Because of the rift between Fatah and Hamas, there were no elections in the Gaza Strip, and no official Hamas candidates competing in the West Bank.” http://bernardavishai.blogspot.ca/2012/11/what-does-israeli-right-really-want.html http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/21/world/middleeast/west-bank-elections-show-mixed-results-for-fatah.html?_r=0

17. What is the name of the Israeli soldier who was captured on 25 June 2006 by Palestinian fighters in a cross-border raid and was subsequently held as a prisoner in Gaza by Hamas?

-Gilad Shalit: He was probably the world’s best known captive. Shalit “was released on 18 October 2011, as part of a deal between Hamas and Israel under which over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners were to be freed.”
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/gilad_shalit/index.html

   Such a lopsided exchange was not unprecedented. In May 1985, Israel “agreed to exchange 1,150 mainly Palestinian prisoners for the release of three IDF soldiers who had been captured by the PFLP in Lebanon.” (Pfeffer 2018, 161)

-After the 2006 election victory by Hamas, the US and Israel “quickly moved from a crippling financial siege of the PA, with the aim of bringing down that government, to an escalation of Israeli assassinations of Palestinian militants, and to artillery and air attacks in Gaza that killed and wounded scores of civilians. Hamas had for 18 months observed a cease-fire in the face of these and earlier provocations (other factions were not so restrained, firing rockets into Israel). However, after a major spike in Palestinian civilian deaths and the particularly provocative Israeli assassination of militant leader Jamal Abu Samhadana, whom the PA government had just named to a security post, Hamas finally took the bait and responded with the capture of one Israeli soldier [Shalit] and the killing of others. The predictably ferocious Israeli response—even more killings of civilians, more assassinations, and ground incursions in Gaza…” (Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood, Beacon Press, Boston: 2007, xv-xvi.)

-“Ignoring immediate Hamas offers of a truce after the 2006 election, Israel launched attacks that killed 660 Palestinians in 2006, mostly civilians, one-third minors. The escalation of attacks in 2007 killed 816 Palestinians, 360 civilians and 152 minors. The UN reports that 2879 Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire from April 2006 through July 2012, along with several dozen Israelis killed by fire from Gaza.”
http://chomsky.info/articles/20121201.htm

18. What are the names of the two Palestinians that were kidnapped from Gaza by Israeli soldiers on 24 June 2006 (i.e., one day before the Shalit capture)?

-Osama Abu Muamar and Mustafa Abu Muamar: Probably among the world’s least known captives. (Israel claimed the brothers were planning attacks on Israel.)
http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/mpapps/pagetools/print/news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5112846.stm

-According to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, “At the end of December 2012, some 4,517 Palestinian security detainees and prisoners were held in Israeli prisons. A few dozen other Palestinians…are held in IDF facilities for short periods of time.”
http://www.btselem.org/statistics/detainees_and_prisoners

-In November 2009, according to Daoud Kuttab, a Palestinian journalist and former Ferris professor of journalism at Princeton University, Israel holds thousands of Palestinians, “some without charge or trial. Almost all of these prisoners are being held in contradiction to various international laws and treaties, particularly the Geneva Conventions, which regulate the actions of a prolonged occupying power.”
https://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/23/israels-gamble-in-a-prisoner-swap/

-In June 2018, “Ignoring the mild protestations of the French government, Israeli defense minister Avigdor Lieberman has extended the administrative detention of Palestinian-French human rights defender Salah Hamouri for an additional three months. Like the 430 other administrative detainees held by Israel, Hamouri has been imprisoned without charge or trial since he was seized by Israeli occupation forces from his home in occupied East Jerusalem last August. Hamouri works as a researcher with prisoners rights group Addameer.”
https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israel-extends-detention-french-human-rights-defender

19. Who made the following 2006 statement when referring to the purpose of economic pressure exerted on Gazans after the election victory of Hamas? “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”

-Dov Weisglass: Adviser to then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/apr/16/israel/print

-The forced diet (i.e., illegal collective punishment) is working as “data from UNRWA [indicate that] children’s inadequate nutrition is stunting their growth in Gaza. Israeli military do not allow vitamins and other essential nutrients into Gaza, so older persons and children, particularly, suffer from malnourishment.”
http://globalag.igc.org/armedconflict/unrwa_gaza.htm  (28 May 2009)

-In 2012 “An Israeli human rights organization, Gisha, sued in Israeli courts to force the release of a planning document for ‘putting the Palestinians on a diet’ without risking the bad press of mass starvation, and the courts concurred. The document, produced by the Israeli army, appears to be a calculation of how to make sure, despite the Israeli blockade, that Palestinians got an average of 2279 calories a day, the basic need. But by planning on limiting the calories in that way, the Israeli military was actually plotting to keep Palestinians in Gaza (half of them children) permanently on the brink of malnutrition, what health professionals call ‘food insecurity’.”
http://www.juancole.com/2012/10/creepy-israeli-planning-for-palestinian-food-insecurity-in-gaza-revealed.html

-“[I]f the intent of the Israeli siege [of Gaza] was to degrade Hamas’s military capacity, not to harm Gaza’s civilian population, surely it was cause for wonder why Israel severely restricted entry of goods ‘not considered essential for the basic subsistence of the population,’ and why it allowed passage of only a ‘humanitarian minimum’ of civilian goods. It was also cause for puzzlement why Israeli officials [according to Wikileaks] kept repeating privately that they intended ‘to keep the Gazan economy on the brink of collapse without quite pushing it over the edge.’” (Finkelstein 2018, 161)

20. Which US leader said the following on 25 January 2006, the day after Hamas won the Gaza elections? “So the Palestinians had an election yesterday, and the results of which remind me about the power of democracy….And there was a peaceful process as people went to the polls, and that’s positive.”

-George W. Bush: President of the United States, 2001-2009. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=65146

-Bush had a stake in the election as his Administration had demanded them. However, soon after making the statement, Bush supported sanctions against the Hamas government. Apparently, democracy is the right to elect someone the US approves of—Venezuela, Iran, and other countries have also learned this lesson.

   Thomas Carothers, who was “director of the Democracy and Rule of Law Project at the Carnegie Endowment”, published a book “reviewing the record of democracy promotion by the United States since the end of the Cold War. He finds ‘a strong line of continuity’ running through all administrations, including Bush II: democracy is promoted by the US government if and only if it conforms to strategic and economic interests.” (Noam Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects, Haymarket Books, Chicago: 2010, 45.)

21. Who was the head of the United Nations fact finding mission mandated to investigate the 2008-9 Gaza conflict?

-Richard Goldstone: Former judge of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, former Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and member of the Board of Governors of the Hebrew University. He is not only Jewish but is also a self-declared Zionist who firmly supports Israel as the state of the Jewish people. He identifies the Nazi holocaust as the inspiration for his pursuit of international and human rights law.

   The Goldstone Report found that Israel’s assault was based in a military doctrine that “views disproportionate destruction…as a legitimate means to achieve military and political goals,” and was “designed to have inevitable dire consequences for the non-combatants in Gaza.” Although Israel justified the attack as self-defense against Hamas rockets, the Report concluded that the attack was “a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability.”
(Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, 25 September 2009, paras. 63, 1213-14 and 1893.)

   Therefore “the death and destruction Israel visited on Gaza’s civilian population were not ‘incidental’ or the result of a ‘failure to take all feasible precautions’ but, on the contrary, calculated and deliberate, ‘designed to punish…’” (Finkelstein 2018, 354)

   “The Goldstone Report found that Palestinian detainees rounded up during Cast Lead were ‘subjected…to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment…’…were ‘subjected to beatings and other physical abuse that amounts to torture,’ were ‘used as human shields,’…” (Finkelstein 2018, 44)

   “[The Goldstone Report] also ticked off a considerable list of war crimes committed by Israel, including ‘willful killing, torture or inhuman treatment,’…‘extensive destruction of property, not justified by military necessity…,’ and ‘use of human shields.’…The Report pinned primary culpability for these criminal offenses on Israel’s political and military elite…” (Finkelstein 2018, 89)

   “The Goldstone Report did not limit itself strictly to Cast Lead. It broadened out into a comprehensive, full-blown indictment of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians during the long years of occupation. The Report condemned Israel’s…restrictions on Palestinian freedom of movement; its ‘institutionalized discrimination’ against Palestinians both in the occupied Palestinian territories and in Israel;…its wholesale detention, torture and ill-treatment of Palestinians (including hundreds of children)…; its ‘silent transfer’ of Palestinians in East Jerusalem in order to ethnically cleanse it…” (Finkelstein 2018, 90-1)

-“In light of his Jewish/Zionist bona fides, Israel could not credibly play its usual cards–‘anti-Semite,’ ‘self-hating Jew,’ ‘Holocaust denier’–against Goldstone.” Nevertheless, “The Obama administration worked behind the scenes in concert with Israel to foreclose consideration of the Report in international forums, and privately gloated at the successes it had scored.” (Finkelstein 2018, 99, 105)

   “‘For the first time,’ the director of HRW’s Middle East division rued, ‘the Israeli government is taking an active role in the smearing of human rights groups.’ These groups and one of their benefactors (New Israel Fund) came under virulent attack in Israel for allegedly providing the data used by the Report to blacken Israel’s name. A Knesset subcommittee was established to ‘examine the sources of funding’ of Israel-based human rights groups, and a succession of Knesset bills proposed, respectively, to outlaw NGOs that provided legally incriminating information to foreign bodies, and to compel members of Israeli NGOs to declare their foreign funders at all public functions.” “The backpedaling by HRW was symptomatic of the fact that Israel’s coordinated and relentless attack on the Goldstone Report had taken its toll.” (Finkelstein 2018, 112, 115)

   “On 1 April 2011, Israel’s biggest headache went away. Dropping a bombshell on the op-ed page of the Washington Post, Richard Goldstone effectively disowned the devastating UN report of Israeli crimes carrying his name….There was much speculation on why Goldstone recanted….Did he finally succumb to the relentless hate campaign targeting him?…What can, however, be asserted with certainty is that his stated rationales cannot account for his decision to reverse himself. The gist of Goldstone’s recantation was that Israel did not commit war crimes during Cast Lead, and that it was fully capable on its own of investigating violations of international law that did occur.” However, “What [Goldstone] presented as new information consisted entirely of unverifiable assertions by parties with vested interests. The fact that he couldn’t cite any genuinely new evidence to justify his volte-face was the most telling proof that none existed.” (Finkelstein 2018, 117-8, 129)

   It’s telling that Goldstone recanted “without first notifying his three colleagues on the fact-finding mission or anyone at the United Nations. If Goldstone did not confide in them beforehand, wasn’t it because he couldn’t credibly defend, but didn’t want to be shaken from, his resolve to recant? If he was apprehensive that his colleagues wouldn’t back him, his intuition proved sound. Shortly after publication of his recantation, the three other members of the Goldstone mission–Christine Chinkin, Hina Jilani, and Desmond Travers–issued a joint statement unequivocally affirming the Report’s original findings: ‘We concur in our view that there is no justification for any demand or expectation for reconsideration of the report as nothing of substance has appeared that would in any way change the context, findings or conclusions of that report.’ … The eminent South African jurist John Dugard [likewise concluded that] ‘There are no new facts that exonerate Israel and that could possibly have led Goldstone to change his mind.’” (Finkelstein 2018, 130-2)

-“[Israel] killed as many as 300 Gazans in just four minutes on the first day of [the 2008] Cast Lead [conflict].” According to Amnesty International, “The majority of targets were located in ‘densely populated residential areas,’ while the bombardments began ‘at around 11:30 a.m.,…when the streets were full of civilians, including school children leaving classes at the end of the morning shift and those going to school for the second shift.’” (Finkelstein 2018, 23)

-“The death and destruction wreaked by Cast Lead clearly went beyond Israel’s declared mission of eliminating ‘terrorists’ and ‘terrorist infrastructure’ or even collective punishment of Palestinian civilians….[Cast Lead’s] purpose, according to [the influential conservative military analyst Anthony] Cordesman…was to ‘restore Israeli deterrence, and show the Hezbollah, Iran, and Syria that it was too dangerous to challenge Israel.’” (Finkelstein 2018, 65)

-In the years after Cast Lead, the 2008-9 Gaza conflict, Amnesty International and other human rights organizations have been far more tentative in criticizing Israel’s crimes. “[S]cores of human rights reports meticulously documented Israeli crimes during the [Cast Lead] assault, and it appeared as if, finally, Israel might be held legally accountable for its crimes. Confronted by this grave, palpable threat, Israel and its powerful international lobby set out to reverse the tide by combatting what was dubbed ‘lawfare’—that is, ‘isolating Israel through the language of human rights.’ A furious and ruthless campaign was mounted, replete with smears, slanders, and strong-arm tactics, targeting critics of Israel’s human rights record. The most notorious casualty of this juggernaut was Richard Goldstone: a Jewish-Zionist judge with impeccable professional credentials was forced to deliver a humiliating, highly public mea culpa that damaged his career and tarnished his reputation for life. Goldstone’s fate served as a cautionary tale for the human rights community; none of Israel’s critics was beyond reach, none was safe from retribution. In short order, respected jurists Christian Tomuschat and William Schabas were devoured by the Israeli maw….[T]he handwriting was now on the wall: if you (or someone close to you) had skeletons in the closet, the prudent move was not to go too hard on Israel…Undeniably, other factors came into play. The human rights reports on Cast Lead ultimately died a slow death in the UN bureaucracy as the US, Israel, and the Palestinian Authority colluded to kill them. It appeared pointless to churn out more human rights reports if they too would be consigned to oblivion, not least by the victims themselves—or at any rate by their official representatives. By the time Israel launched Protective Edge [in 2014], public opinion had also grown inured to Israel’s periodic massacres. Minutely documenting the carnage seemed less urgent, as fewer people any longer harbored doubt that Israel was capable of such brutality. In the meantime, as the Arab Spring metamorphosed into the Arab Winter, the ensuing regional upheaval and attendant human rights catastrophe dwarfed and marginalized the Palestine question. But the intimidation factor was almost certainly the overriding one in Amnesty’s volte-face. Indeed, Israel lobby groups, such as NGO Monitor, had openly set their crosshairs on Amnesty.” (Finkelstein 2018, 285-6)

   “Amnesty’s multiple reports on Protective Edge analyzed the assault at three discrete levels: individual incidents (e.g., a single home), major attacks (e.g., Rafah), and the operation as a whole. At each of these levels, Amnesty’s legal analysis reached a similar conclusion: Israel might have committed war crimes in the course of pursuing legitimate military objectives, but it almost never intentionally targeted civilians. For example, in Families under the Rubble, which analyzed Gazan homes targeted by Israel that resulted in large numbers of civilian deaths, Amnesty divined a possible military objective in each and every attack. … [However,] The evidentiary standard used by Amnesty in [a 2015 report on Yemen] was this: if a belligerent possesses weapons capable of ‘striking…chosen targets with a certain degree of accuracy’; and if civilian objects were ‘attacked repeatedly on separate occasions, at times of day when many civilians were present’; and if Amnesty ‘found no evidence indicating’ that the civilian objects ‘had been used for military purposes’; then it suggests that the civilian population was ‘in fact the intended target of the attack.’ But then didn’t Israel’s saturation bombing, precision-missile attacks, and intensive artillery shelling of Rafah’s densely populated civilian neighborhoods, stretching nonstop over a four-day period and in the near-total absence of a legitimate military target, suggest that the civilian population was ‘the intended target of the attack’?” (Finkelstein 2018, 297-9)

   “Once Israel successfully browbeat the international human rights community into submission, the only remaining chink in its armor was domestic human rights organizations. Of these, Breaking the Silence most aroused Israel’s wrath. The soldier eyewitness testimonies it had compiled after each of Israel’s massacres in Gaza were as unimpeachable as they were devastating. Israel consequently set out in a very public way to destroy Breaking the Silence. In the US, the slander campaign was spearheaded by…Dershowitz, who accused the group of ‘…not telling the truth.’” (Finkelstein 2018, 288)

   (In July 2018 a law passed by the Knesset “gave new authority to the minister of education to bar outside speakers from public schools. The purpose is to keep high schools from inviting speakers from Breaking the Silence, the veterans’ group that collects soldiers’ testimony on serving in the occupied territories. A last-minute amendment was aimed at barring other human rights groups.”
http://prospect.org/article/netanyahu-cements-his-place-illiberal-international  (19 July 2018))

   “[D]espite the pleas of Save the Children, War Child, and even UNICEF, as well as a dozen Palestinian human rights organizations and B’Tselem, Israel was crossed off a 2015 UN list of grave violators of children’s rights after top UN officials ‘buckled under political pressure’ from Israel.” (Finkelstein 2018, 289)

-In 2016, “B’Tselem issued a report…, The Occupation’s Fig Leaf: Israel’s military law enforcement system as a whitewash mechanism. It announced that henceforth it would cease cooperating with Israel’s military law enforcement system….The B’Tselem report concluded: ‘[T]he semblance of a functioning justice system allows Israeli officials to deny claims made both in Israel and abroad that Israel does not enforce the law on soldiers who harm Palestinians….These appearances also help grant legitimacy…to the continuation of the occupation….B’Tselem’s cooperation with the military investigation and enforcement system has not achieved justice, instead lending legitimacy to the occupation regime and aiding to whitewash it.’ The purpose of Israeli pseudo-investigations…, B’Tselem further observed in a complementary publication…, was ‘to prevent the International Criminal Court in The Hague from addressing the issue itself.’” (Finkelstein 2018, 350-1)

Background: Breaking the Silence (BtS)
-“Breaking the Silence members are Israeli military reservists whose goal is to expose the oppression of Palestinians through firsthand accounts of those who practiced it: the soldiers themselves. BtS was founded in 2003 by officers and noncoms who had served in the West Bank city of Hebron, the place where Israel’s control is the most cruel, and also the most unusual. Since 1997, six hundred extremist messianic settlers, protected by about a thousand soldiers, have terrorized tens of thousands of Palestinians living in what is called the H2, the ‘Jewish’ zone. That’s the location of the Old City and the Tomb of the Patriarchs, which is sacred to both Jews and Muslims. On some streets, those Palestinians who haven’t yet been driven out by the settlers’ constant harassment live like caged animals, behind fencing they have erected to protect themselves. Settlers in the buildings above them constantly dump their garbage down into Arab houses, terraces, and courtyards.” (Cypel 2021, 140)
   “In 2004, BtS organized its first exhibition of testimonies about the Arabs’ daily life in Hebron. The authorities took note of the organization’s initial publications about unpunished abuses committed by the occupying soldiers. Its leaders were invited to testify before the Knesset’s defense committee. At that point, BtS was presented as the ultimate proof that Israel was a model democracy. But when its 2005 report on Gaza became public, the authorities’ attitude changed. In the words of a number of elected officials, BtS became ‘an enemy of the State of Israel.’ In 2012 BtS published ‘Our Harsh Logic’, a book containing 145 soldiers’ accounts of what they saw and did in the Occupied Territories. All described how Palestinians were dehumanized, while young IDF soldiers were gradually groomed to accept their role in the repression.” (Cypel 2021, 140)
   “In an early attack on BtS, a law was passed forbidding the organization from speaking in Israeli schools….[In 2016] Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon called for an investigation of BtS, charging it with leaking classified documents. BtS responded by suing the government for libel. The attorney general’s investigation supported BtS’s claims of fabrication on every point…” Nevertheless, BtS remains under attack. (Cypel 2021, 141)
   “[Think tanks] and the Zionist Strategic Center have set up websites like NGO Monitor that are dedicated to undermining organizations…trying to protect Palestinian rights. ZSC is also behind the Im Tirtzu movement, which targets associations that oppose the occupation….The biggest success of those think tanks and associations…’is that the very word occupation has practically disappeared from Israeli political discourse. If you use it, you are immediately branded a leftist or a foreign agent…'” BtS even has difficulty renting spaces for public meetings. Tyranny seems to be coming to Israel in small steps. (Cypel 2021, 142)

Nuremberg’s Lessons
-Considering the lessons of the Kafr Qassem and Nuremberg trials, it is dispiriting that there are not numerous cases of Israeli soldiers refusing to carry out illegal orders. “On the eve of [the Suez war], on 29 October 1956, the Israeli authorities imposed a 5 p.m. curfew on villages near the border with Jordan. In Kafr Qassem border guards shot and killed forty-nine unarmed Arab citizens, including women and children, who were returning from their fields and had breached the curfew because they were unaware of when it came into effect. Eyewitnesses described police repeatedly firing rifles and machine-guns at villagers as they arrived back at the village on foot, on bicycles, by donkey or on trucks. The victims were buried that night in a mass grave. The aftermath saw the unit’s commander and seven other soldiers sentenced to prison terms of between eight and seventeen years [–however, they were all freed within three years, some even returned to IDF careers]; damages paid to the families of the dead and injured; and a new IDF rule obliging soldiers to refuse to carry out any order they deemed to be ‘manifestly illegal’.” (“[The judge] defined such an order graphically: ‘The hallmark of manifest illegality is that it must wave like a black flag over the given order, a warning that says: forbidden!’ It was also one of the principal messages that Israel was supposed to learn from the Holocaust.”) (Black 2017, 155) (Segev 2019, 596)
   According to Nuremberg Principle IV, “The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.” (In other words, it is not an acceptable legal defense to say: “I was just following orders.”)
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/applic/ihl/ihl.nsf/52d68d14de6160e0c12563da005fdb1b/3a0ef64882993569c125641e004ab014?OpenDocument
   “The Kafr Qassem massacre also had roots in the tenor of [Ben Gurion’s and other elites’] rhetoric” which branded Israeli Arabs “as a fifth column”. Furthermore, “some of the soldiers who took part in the…massacre were aware of a plan code-named Operation [Mole, which], in the case of war between Israel and Jordan, [called for] Arabs living in villages along the border…to be driven out of their homes.” (Segev 2019, 594, 595)
-In 2003, twenty-seven Israeli air force “pilots sent a letter to the commander of Israel’s air force refusing to carry out duties, which include track and kill operations, in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. One of the pilots told Israeli television that the letter said: ‘We, veteran pilots and active pilots alike…are opposed to carrying out illegal and immoral attacks, of the type carried out by Israel in the territories. We, who have been educated to love the state of Israel refuse to take part in air force attacks in civilian population centres. We refuse to continue harming innocent civilians.’” (Since 2001, “Israel’s ‘targeted assassinations’ have killed dozens of bystanders by using bombs weighing up to one ton in densely populated areas of the Gaza Strip.”)
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/sep/25/israel
-In 2023, amidst demonstrations involving hundreds of thousands protesting Netanyahu’s plans to increase control over the judiciary, “200 reserve pilots–a significant proportion of the IAF’s pilots, though not a majority–signed a letter on [March 24] saying that, in protest of the judicial proposal, they would not report for duty for the next two weeks.” A growing number of reservists from other branches of the IDF have also “threatened to withdraw from voluntary duty”.
   “For weeks, Prime Minister Netanyahu [had] defied critics of his plan to weaken Israel’s highest court”, but on March 27 he announced that he would delay his government’s plan. “Israel has faced growing dissent since January [2023], when Netanyahu’s government announced plans to increase government control over who can be a judge and reduce the judiciary’s ability to strike down laws passed by Parliament.” Critics feared that the plan would “remove one of the few remaining checks on government overreach and could pave the way to an authoritarian state.”
   “The plan to remake the courts — which would give Netanyahu’s government greater power to handpick judges, including those presiding over his corruption trial, in which he is charged in three cases and faces potential prison time — has pitted liberal and secular Jewish Israelis against more right-wing and religiously conservative factions, along a fault line long in emerging.” (The New York Times International, 25 March 2023, A11) https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/03/27/israel-judicial-reform-protests-live-updates/
   In July 2023, “At least 180 senior fighter pilots, elite commandos and cyber-intelligence specialists in the Israeli military reserve have informed their commanders that they will no longer report for volunteer duty if the government proceeds with a plan to limit judicial influence by the end of the month….Israeli fighter squadrons are strongly reliant on reserve pilots…Israel’s regular strikes in Gaza and Syria; patrol missions over Israel; and surveillance missions over Lebanon and the occupied West Bank are frequently led by reserve pilots and drone operators, who often have more experience than those in the full-time forces.” Opponents of the planned changes fear that the Supreme Court will be unable to remain one of the few checks to protect a pluralist society from the demands of settlers and religious Jews. “Many reservists are also concerned that the degrading of Israel’s judiciary might leave them more vulnerable to prosecution in the International Criminal Court…since it might strengthen an argument…that the Israeli judiciary is not independent enough to hold its army to account.” “Similar warnings and resignations in March [2023] played a decisive role in the government’s decision to suspend an earlier round of judicial changes.” (The New York Times International, 16 July 2023, 11)
-In a 2014 open letter, a group of 43 serving and former Unit 8200 reservists revealed that they would refuse to continue to serve for “what they said were coercive spying tactics being used on innocent Palestinians, including the collection of embarrassing sexual, financial or other information.” (Unit 8200 is the “Israeli military’s legendary high-tech spy agency, considered by intelligence analysts to be one of the most formidable of its kind in the world.”) “One of the whistle-blowers, in a statement released along with the letter, described his ‘moment of shock’ when watching The Lives of Others, the 2006 film about the Stasi’s pervasive spying in East Germany. … The [whistle-blowers] say they were asked to gather information not only on people suspected of plotting to harm Israel but on their family members, neighbours and others who might supply information about them.” Essentially, the gathered information–on medical conditions, financial problems, sexual orientation, etc.–enables Israel to coerce innocent Palestinians into collaborating with the illegal occupation.
https://www.ft.com/content/69f150da-25b8-11e5-bd83-71cb60e8f08c
(Financial Times: FT Magazine Israel, 10 July 2015)

22. True or False: Amnesty International reported the following concerning the 2008-9 Israel-Gaza conflict. “Contrary to repeated allegations by Israeli officials of the use of ‘human shields,’ Amnesty International found no evidence that Hamas or other Palestinian fighters directed the movement of civilians to shield military objectives from attacks. It found no evidence that Hamas or other armed groups forced residents to stay in or around buildings used by fighters, nor that fighters prevented residents from leaving buildings or areas which had been commandeered by militants. …  In the cases investigated by Amnesty International of civilians killed in Israeli attacks, the deaths could not be explained as resulting from the presence of fighters shielding among civilians, as the Israeli army generally contends. In all of the cases investigated by Amnesty International of families killed when their homes were bombed from the air by Israeli forces, for example, none of the houses struck was being used by armed groups for military activities. … [However, Amnesty International did find that Israeli soldiers] used civilians, including children, as ‘human shields’, endangering their lives by forcing them to remain in or near houses which they took over and used as military positions. Some were forced to carry out dangerous tasks such as inspecting properties or objects suspected of being booby-trapped. Soldiers also took position and launched attacks from and around inhabited houses, exposing local residents to the danger of attacks or of being caught in the crossfire.”

-True. Investigations by other human rights organizations, including Israeli ones, were likewise very critical of Israel’s—and to a much lesser extent Hamas’s—actions. (Finkelstein 2010, 84-5) https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/48000/mde150152009en.pdf

-It cannot be said that Israeli justice completely ignored war crimes resulting from the 2008-9 Gaza conflict. “[F]our Israelis were convicted of wrongdoing…The severest sentence meted out was seven and a half months, for the theft of a Gazan’s credit card. Two soldiers convicted of using a nine-year-old child as a human shield received three-month suspended sentences.” (Finkelstein 2018, 81-2)

   (In October 2019, “An Israeli soldier who shot and killed a plainly unarmed Palestinian boy [Othman Helles] during mass protests along the Gaza border fence [on 13 July 2018] has been sentenced to a month in military prison and demoted. … The [killing] was captured on video… The Israeli soldier, who was not identified, agreed…to a plea bargain in which he was convicted of ‘disobeying an order leading to a threat to life or health.’” (The New York Times International, 31 Oct. 2019, A8))

-The 2008-9 Gaza conflict “took thirteen Israeli and fourteen hundred Palestinian lives. Despite Israel’s genuine efforts to limit civilian damage, the war partially or completely destroyed 14 percent of Gaza’s buildings, including sixteen hospitals, thirty-eight health clinics, and 280 schools, some of which were in session when the bombs fell.” (Beinart 2012, 77)

-“Since the beginning of the occupation in 1967, Israeli security forces have repeatedly used Palestinians in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip as human shields, ordering them to perform military tasks that risked their lives. As part of this policy, soldiers have ordered Palestinian civilians to remove suspicious objects from roads, to tell people to come out of their homes so the military can arrest them, to stand in front of soldiers while the latter shoot from behind them, and more. The Palestinian civilians were chosen at random for these tasks, and could not refuse the demand placed on them by armed soldiers.” (“[T]he Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits an occupying military from using local residents for military actions.”) (11 Nov. 2017)
https://www.btselem.org/human_shields 

-During the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict, the US State Department and Israeli government have “repeatedly claimed that Hamas is using women and children as human shields to protect its weapons and rocket launchers, forcing Israel to massacre innocent Palestinians. [However,] The only evidence Israel has provided for this unsubstantiated accusation is cartoon sketches. [And] even The New York Times has conceded that ‘There is no evidence that Hamas and other militants force civilians to stay in areas that are under attack.’…Ironically, it is Israel that has a well-documented history of using Palestinian civilians, including children, as human shields. In what is referred to as ‘the neighbor procedure,’ Israeli soldiers force Palestinian civilians to approach armed suspects and homes potentially rigged with explosives to protect the lives of soldiers.” (4 Aug. 2014) https://truthout.org/articles/israel-uses-palestinians-as-human-shields-but-us-lawmakers-condemn-hamas/

   “In 2009, B’Tselem documented how Israeli soldiers used a 53-year-old Palestinian man as a human shield, forcing him to ‘enter five houses in the area and gather the occupants of each house in one room.’ Only after the man entered those other Palestinian homes did ‘the soldiers enter each house and search it,’ according to B’Tselem. After Israel’s 2014 assault on Gaza, B’Tselem again received testimony from Palestinians who said soldiers had used them as human shields. Similarly, in 2014, Defense for Children International–Palestine documented an incident in which Israeli soldiers forced a 16-year-old, at gunpoint, ‘to search for tunnels for five days, during which time he was interrogated, verbally and physically abused, and deprived of food and sleep.’” (13 May 2021)
https://jewishcurrents.org/a-guide-to-the-current-crisis-in-israel-palestine/

-“Gaza is one of the world’s most densely populated places. It would be impossible for armed fighters to find a place far away from civilian areas. ‘There is almost no way to fight from [Gaza] without exposing civilians to danger’… Hamas is Gaza’s governing body, and a part of the fabric of its civilian life. Gaza’s police officers and health ministry officials are all Hamas-affiliated. Hamas fighters do not sleep in army bases; they sleep in their homes. (It’s worth noting that Israel’s army headquarters is likewise located in a residential part of Tel Aviv, near a hospital and a museum.) It’s also true that, even if a greater separation between warfare and civilian life were possible, Hamas’s leadership might not view it as desirable. Hamas, which is at a severe military disadvantage when facing the weight of the Israeli army, uses guerilla tactics to compensate. Attempting to confine the fighting to areas apart from residential zones would thus undermine Hamas’s military operation. Hamas’s guerilla tactics have been condemned by the international community: In 2014, Hamas stored weapons inside schools run by UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees.” (13 May 2021)
https://jewishcurrents.org/a-guide-to-the-current-crisis-in-israel-palestine/

-“If you walk around Tel Aviv and Ramat Gan, you’ll see plaques commemorating where the Irgun, Lehi and Haganah kept ‘slicks’ of weapons hidden at schools, post offices, etc. before 1948. They weren’t the strong side, certainly not against the British, and they used human shields all over the place. Why? Because the alternative was to station their militias away from the population, in plain sight, [where they would’ve been] wiped out. The Zionists weren’t that dumb, and neither is Hamas.” (Larry Derfner, Facebook reply on his own post, 17 May 2021)

-“[I]n response to Israel’s assertions that Hamas situates its military centres in civilian areas, some have pointed out that the IDF’s headquarters, the Kiriya, is in central Tel Aviv, surrounded by a hospital, blocks of flats, shopping centres and offices.” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/24/gaza-hamas-fighters-military-bases-guerrilla-war-civilians-israel-idf

   “Sheba Medical Center outside Tel Aviv protects the Tel Hashomer military base. The navy base in Haifa hides in the shadow of the Rambam medical center….And Israel’s leaders? The prime minister hides behind the civilian residents of Jerusalem’s Talbieh neighborhood, and his designated successor does the same in Ra’anana. The defense minister hides in Rosh Ha’ayin, and the military chief on Moshav Adi. His deputy is surrounded by a wall in the form of the civilians of Hod Hasharon. And so on; they’re all sheltering behind civilians, as if they were Hamasniks.” (2 June 2021)
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-hamas-it-s-israel-s-leaders-who-are-hiding-behind-civilians-again-1.9869339

23. Which conflict was more devastating to Gazans, 2008-9 Cast Lead or 2014 Protective Edge?

-On 8 July 2014, Israel launched Operation Protective Edge which “was ‘the most devastating round of hostilities in Gaza since the beginning of the Israeli occupation in 1967.’ Operation Cast Lead lasted 22 days, whereas Protective Edge lasted fully 51 days…Some 350 children were killed and 6,000 homes destroyed during Cast Lead, whereas fully 550 children were killed and 18,000 homes destroyed during Protective Edge.” “‘In the 30 years that I have spent researching and writing about Gaza…,’ Sara Roy of Harvard University reflected after Protective Edge, ‘I can say without hesitation that I have never seen the kind of human, physical, and psychological destruction that I see there today.’” (Finkelstein 2018, 211, 216)

   Breaking the Silence, an Israeli nongovernmental organization comprising former Israeli soldiers, transcribed soldiers’ eyewitness descriptions of the conflict. Many of the accounts state “that the IDF’s modus operandi during the operation was shoot to kill anything that moves, often on explicit orders but also because it was ‘cool.’” (“None of the hundreds of testimonies collected by this organization…has ever been proven false, and all of them were approved for publication by the IDF censor.”) (Finkelstein 2018, 218)

   “The number of Palestinians…killed reached 2,100, half of them civilians. Tens of thousands of buildings in Gaza were destroyed, but Hamas received only empty promises for ending the blockade and rebuilding the Strip. On the Israeli side, 73 soldiers and civilians were killed. The IDF, with its overwhelming firepower, had significantly degraded Hamas’s arsenal [and tunnels], but rockets were still launched daily, throughout the operation, against Israel’s cities, including Tel Aviv and the vicinity of Ben Gurion Airport, leading to most foreign airlines suspending services to Israel for forty-eight hours.” (Pfeffer 2018, 350-1)

-“Protective Edge traced back to yet another…display of Hamas pragmatism. At the end of April 2014, the Islamic movement and its secular Palestinian rival Fatah formed a ‘consensus government.’ … Hamas did not object when Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, speaking on behalf of the new unity government, reiterated his support for the [US’s traditional] preconditions [for diplomatic engagement: recognition of Israel, renunciation of violence, and recognition of past agreements]….The prospect of ‘Palestinian unity’ was a ‘red line’ for Netanyahu (and Israeli leaders in general), so he reflexively sought to sabotage it. In the event that the Palestinian consensus held, he could no longer invoke standard Israeli alibis—Abbas represented only one Palestinian faction; Hamas was a terrorist organization bent on Israel’s destruction—to evade a settlement of the conflict.” (Finkelstein 2018, 212-3)

   “In June 2014, a gift dropped into Netanyahu’s lap. A rogue Hamas cell abducted and killed three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank. Netanyahu was aware early on that the teenagers had been killed (not captured for a future prisoner swap) and that Hamas’s leadership wasn’t responsible. [N]etanyahu parlayed this macabre ‘boon’ to break up the Palestinian unity government. Feigning a rescue mission, Israel launched Operation Brother’s Keeper in mid-June. At least five West Bank Palestinians were killed, homes were demolished and businesses ransacked, and seven hundred Palestinians, mostly Hamas members, were arrested, including many who had been released in a 2011 prisoner exchange [for Gilad Shalit]. The rampage was patently tailored to elicit a violent response from Hamas, so as to ‘prove’ it was a terrorist organization.” (Finkelstein 2018, 213)

   “Hamas at first resisted the Israeli provocations, although other Gaza factions did fire projectiles. But in the ensuing tit-for-tat, Hamas entered the fray and the violence spun out of control.” (Finkelstein 2018, 214)

   “As [Israeli] ground troops crossed into [Gaza], Israel let loose with abandon its explosive arsenal. Gaza’s civilian population and infrastructure—homes and businesses, schools and mosques, hospitals and ambulances, power stations and sewage plants…–came under relentless, indiscriminate, disproportionate, and deliberate attack.” (Finkelstein 2018, 215)

   An Amnesty International report on the 2014 war reveals “a pattern of attacks on civilian homes by Israeli forces which have shown a shocking disregard for the lives of Palestinian civilians, who were given no warning and had no chance to flee.”
http://amnesty.ca/news/news-releases/israeli-forces-displayed-%E2%80%98callous-indifference%E2%80%99-in-deadly-attacks-on-family-homes

   “For many years, Israel has used American weaponry in Gaza: Apache helicopters, F16s, bunker busting bombs. Amnesty International has questioned whether Israel’s use of such weapons violates the Arms Export Act of 1976, which requires that American-made weapons not be used for ‘violations of internationally recognized human rights.’”
https://forward.com/opinion/420590/why-does-congress-care-more-about-jewish-feelings-than-palestinian-rights/  (8 March 2019)

-“News bulletins on Channel 10, supposedly the most critical of Israel’s television networks, reported the [2014] terror campaign Gaza had waged against Israel with its rockets, which as on most days inflicted no casualty…There was no mention of the devastation in Gaza….Unable to rely on the media to broadcast the Palestinian death toll, an Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem, commissioned an advertisement. The broadcasting authority banned it. Unaware of the destruction Israel had inflicted, a survey reported that 45 percent of Israeli Jews felt Netanyahu had used too little firepower on Gaza; only 6 percent thought he had used too much.” (Pelham 2016, 73-4)

-Hamas’s missiles were ineffective during the 2014 conflict. “According to UN figures, Hamas fired 5000 missiles and 2000 mortar shells during Protective Edge. Israel’s official number is that Iron Dome deflected 740 of the Hamas missiles. That still leaves [over] 4200 missiles that weren’t disabled. But, according to Israeli reports, only one Israeli house was destroyed during Protective Edge. You can perhaps argue that so few Israeli civilians were killed because Israel has a sophisticated early warning/shelter system. But houses don’t take cover in shelters. How can it be that only one house was destroyed? Because they weren’t [effective] missiles… Hamas also perpetuates [the myth of its ‘missiles’ by saying that] armed resistance does work, look at how afraid they are of our missiles.” http://mondoweiss.net/2016/04/norman-finkelstein-on-sanders-the-first-intifada-bds-and-ten-years-of-unemployment/  (April 2016)

   In December 2019, the “Israeli military is considering cancelling rocket alert sirens”–leaving the civilian population to rely solely on the Iron Dome defense system–as “data revealed that a majority of those hurt during rocket fire from Gaza are injured as a result of hastily running to bomb shelters or suffer a mental trauma as a result of shock…For instance, during [November 2019’s] Operation Black Belt that began after Israel assassinated a top Islamic Jihad military commander in Gaza, Baha Abu al-Ata, not a single Israeli civilian had been injured directly as a result of the rocket fire… During the two days of cross-border fighting, over 450 rockets were fired by the militants into Israeli communities. The most serious injury suffered by an Israeli during the flare-up was a woman who had a heart attack in the central city of Bat Yam. The incident apparently occurred due to the woman’s severe reaction to hearing the rocket alert sirens…During the operation, 60 percent of the rockets – fired mostly by Islamic Jihad – landed in open areas. Out of the remaining 40 percent of the projectiles that had been heading for residential areas, 90 percent were intercepted by the Iron Dome.” https://www.ynetnews.com/article/BkSsXq8AB

-“[I]srael’s failure to carry out good-faith negotiations based on international law has delegitimized its occupation…Whereas it proclaims the right of self-defense against Hamas projectiles, Israel is in effect promulgating a right to use force to perpetuate the occupation. Were Israel to cease its violent repression, the occupation would end and, ideally, the projectile attacks would also stop as Palestinians went about the business of consolidating their own independent state. The right to self-defense could justly be invoked by Israel only if the attacks continued regardless.” (In other words, Israel “cannot pretend to a right of self-defense if the exercise of this right traces back to the wrong of an illegal occupation/denial of self-determination…The refrain that Israel has a right to defend itself is a red herring. The real question is, Does Israel have the right to use force to perpetuate an illegal occupation? The answer is no.”) (Finkelstein 2018, 234-5)

   Furthermore, when Israel commenced military operations in Gaza during Protective Edge in July 2014, “with the stated objective of stopping the rocket attacks by Hamas and destroying its capabilities to conduct operations against Israel[,]…Israel couldn’t [legally] resort to armed self-defense unless it had exhausted nonviolent options and, hence, was driven by ‘necessity’ to launch an attack. In the event, Israel did have at hand an effective nonviolent remedy. Even egregious Israeli propagandists acknowledged that Hamas’s objective from the inception of hostilities was to ‘reopen Gaza’s borders.’ The World Bank reported at the time that ‘access to Gaza remains highly controlled’…It follows that if the cessation of Hamas rocket attacks was Israel’s objective, then it only had to terminate its suffocating siege of Gaza…” (Finkelstein 2018, 308-9)

   “[S]ince 2005 Israel has maintained its occupation of Gaza largely by remote control. ‘Modern technology now permits effective control from outside the occupied territory…Before Israel’s physical withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, Palestinian acts of violent resistance were directed at Israeli forces within the territory. This was during the Second Intifada. Since then, Palestinian militants have been obliged to take their resistance to the occupation and the illegal siege of Gaza to Israel itself. The alternative is to do nothing, a course no occupied people in history has ever taken. It is unusual for an occupied people to take its resistance outside the occupied territory. But it is also unusual for an occupying power to maintain a brutal occupation from outside the territory.’” (Finkelstein 2018, 269)

-Can you spot the pattern? In early August 2018, Hamas fired rockets into Israel. “Did you know that Israel is retaliating heavily, mostly to placate its right-wing government? Did you know that Hamas was retaliating for Israel killing two of its soldiers during a training exercise? Did you know that Israel admitted that the shooting was a mistake, but instead of offering compensation to the families, warned Hamas against retaliating? (You see, Palestinians have no right to self-defense or to retaliate.) Will you read about this chain of events anywhere in Israel except Haaretz? Maybe… But for Israelis it only seems natural that we kill Hamas militants; why apologize for it, they are terrorists. We have the right to kill them. They have no right to kill us.” (Jerry Haber, Facebook post, 9 Aug. 2018)

-On 4 May 2019, “Palestinian militants launched about 150 rockets into southern Israel from Gaza [severely wounding one Israeli from shrapnel], and the Israeli military responded with airstrikes and tank fire against targets across the [Gaza Strip].” However, the 4 May rockets were preceded by the following chronology of events on 3 May: (i) the killing of two Palestinians by Israeli soldiers “during Friday’s weekly protest along the fence dividing [Gaza] from Israel…”, (ii) the wounding of two Israeli soldiers by a Gazan sniper, and (iii) the killing of two Hamas militants by an Israeli airstrike.

   Hamas and Islamic Jihad have “expressed frustration over what they consider the slow pace of Israeli concessions meant to ease an acute economic crisis in Gaza, part of an Egyptian-brokered understanding meant to stabilize the on-again-off-again cease-fire.” (The New York Times International, 5 May 2019, 8)

-What precipitated the 2012 Gaza Conflict? “On November 14, 2012, an Israeli drone flying over Gaza City fired a missile, killing Ahmed Jabari, the Hamas military chief who had held Gilad Shalit and forced Israel to release 1,027 prisoners in exchange for the soldier. It was the starting shot for Operation Pillar of Defense. Israel attacked hundreds of Hamas targets in Gaza, and Hamas fired rockets at Israeli cities. Eight days later, the Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt brokered a ceasefire. Six Israelis and 223 Gazans, three-quarters of them members of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, had been killed. Tens of thousands of ground troops were on stand-by, but Netanyahu opposed sending in ground troops.” (Pfeffer 2018, 341)

   “Obama supported Israel throughout, branding Hamas the aggressor for firing on civilian targets. Israeli casualties were low, though Hamas rockets reached as far as Tel Aviv. Nearly all the missiles threatening urban areas were intercepted by the Israeli-built Iron Dome system. The Obama administration had allocated Israel, in addition to the annual $3 billion in military assistance, hundreds of millions of dollars to build more Iron Dome interceptors.” (Pfeffer 2018, 341-2)

   “Some on the Israeli left accused Netanyahu of an ‘elections war.’ The operation was widely popular in Israel. The election on January 22, 2013, gave Netanyahu the easiest win he had ever experienced.” (Pfeffer 2018, 342)

2021 CONFLICT
Conflict Overview
-“The [2021] conflict grew out of threatened evictions of Palestinians from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in [East] Jerusalem and was magnified after provocative Jewish settler marches through Arab areas of the city, with some marchers chanting ‘death to Arabs.’ Violence spread to the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, one of the holiest sites in Islam, and an Israeli police raid on the venerated mosque — including the use of stun grenades on worshipers demonstrating there — set off more demonstrations. At the same time, Israeli officials tried to deescalate, postponing the evictions and rerouting a potentially provocative parade by religious Jewish nationalists.”

   “Things took a dramatic turn on [10 May], when Hamas and another Islamist group, Palestine Islamic Jihad, sent massive salvos of rockets into Israel, firing them toward Jerusalem, with claims of defending the holy mosque and Palestinians there against Israeli aggression — the first rocket attacks on Jerusalem since 2014. Israel then responded with airstrikes on Gaza… Hamas launched more rockets at Tel Aviv, as well as targets closer to Gaza, such as Ashkelon. Residents of cities targeted by the rockets are forced to hide in shelters… Arab citizens rioted in several Israeli cities and towns. In mixed Jewish-Arab cities, including Jaffa but especially Lod (Lydda) and Acre, communal violence not seen in decades included mobs attacking civilian homes, synagogues, and property, with vigilante violence and reprisals.” https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2021/05/12/hamas-tries-to-seize-the-day/

Timeline
-“An outbreak of violence in the ongoing Israeli–Palestinian conflict commenced on 10 May 2021, though disturbances took place earlier, and continued until a ceasefire came into effect on 21 May.” The following is a timeline of the conflict.

   “Palestinian protests began on 6 May in Sheikh Jarrah, but clashes soon spread to the al-Aqsa Mosque, Lod, other Arab localities in Israel, and the West Bank. Between 10 and 14 May Israeli security inflicted injuries on approximately 1,000 Palestinian protesters in East Jerusalem.”

   Sheikh Jarrah: “Palestinians and Israeli settlers first clashed on 6 May in Sheikh Jarrah, where Palestinian families are at risk of being evicted. Palestinian protesters had been holding nightly outdoor iftars. On 6 May, Israeli settlers and members of the far-right political party Otzma Yehudit set up a table across the street from Palestinians. Social media videos showed both sides hurling rocks and chairs at each other. Israeli police intervened and arrested at least 7 people. Israeli police subsequently engaged in extensive spraying of Sheikh Jarrah’s Palestinian homes, shops, restaurants, public spaces and cultural institutions with Skunk, a lasting stench used to contain protests.”

   Al-Aqsa Mosque: “On 7 May, large numbers of police were deployed on the Temple Mount as around 70,000 worshippers attended the final Friday prayers of Ramadan at al-Aqsa. After the evening prayers, some Palestinian worshippers began throwing previously stockpiled rocks and other objects at Israeli police officers. Police officers fired stun grenades into the mosque compound, and into a field clinic. A mosque spokesman stated the clashes broke out after Israeli police attempted to evacuate the compound, where many Palestinians sleep over in Ramadan, adding that the evacuation was intended to allow access to Israelis. More than 300 Palestinians were wounded as Israeli police stormed the mosque compound. Palestinians threw rocks, firecrackers, and heavy objects, while Israeli police fired stun grenades, tear gas, and rubber bullets at worshippers. The storming came ahead of a Jerusalem Day flag march by Jewish nationalists through the Old City. More than 600 Palestinians were injured, more than 400 of whom were hospitalised. Militants in Gaza fired rockets into Israel the following night.”

   “More clashes occurred on 8 May, the date of the Islamic holy night of Laylat al-Qadr. Palestinian crowds threw stones, lit fires, and chanted ‘Strike Tel Aviv’ and ‘In spirit and in blood, we will redeem al-Aqsa’, which The Times of Israel described as in support of Hamas. The Israel Police, wearing riot gear and some on horseback, used stun grenades and water cannons. At least 80 people were injured.”

   “On 10 May, Israeli police stormed al-Aqsa for the second time, injuring 300 Palestinians[;] 21 Israeli police [were also injured].”

   “After Friday prayers on 14 May, Palestinians protested in more than 200 locations in the West Bank. Protesters hurled stones and Israeli soldiers responded with live fire and tear gas. As a result, 11 Palestinians were killed in the clashes.” In subsequent clashes, several more Palestinians were killed by Israeli troops.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Israel%E2%80%93Palestine_crisis

-Gaza: “Hamas delivered an ultimatum to Israel to remove all its police and military personnel from both the Haram al Sharif mosque site and Sheikh Jarrah by 10 May 6 p.m. If it failed to do so, they announced that the combined militias of the Gaza Strip…would strike Israel. Minutes after the deadline passed, Hamas fired more than 150 rockets into Israel from Gaza. The IDF said that seven rockets were fired toward Jerusalem and Beit Shemesh and that one was intercepted. An anti-tank missile was also fired at an Israeli civilian vehicle, injuring the driver. Israel launched air strikes in the Gaza Strip on the same day.”

   “On 11 May, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad launched hundreds of rockets at Ashdod and Ashkelon, killing two people and wounding more than 90 others. A third Israeli woman from Rishon LeZion was also killed, while two more civilians from Dahmash were killed by a rocket attack.”

   “On 11 May, the 13-story residential Hanadi Tower in Gaza collapsed after being hit by an Israeli airstrike. The tower housed a mix of residential apartments and commercial offices. IDF said the building contained offices used by Hamas, and said it gave ‘advance warning to civilians in the building and provided sufficient time for them to evacuate the site’…[A]n Israeli state-owned oil pipeline was hit by a rocket…”

   “On 12 May, the Israeli Air Force destroyed dozens of police and security installations along the Gaza Strip…Over 850 rockets were launched from Gaza into Israel… Hamas also struck an Israeli military jeep near the Gaza border with an anti-tank missile. An Israeli soldier was killed and three others were wounded in the attack.”

   “On 13 May, Israeli forces and militant groups in Gaza continued to exchange artillery fire and airstrikes. Hamas attempted to deploy suicide drones against Israeli targets, with an Israeli F-16 engaging and shooting down one such drone. The Iron Dome intercepted many…rockets…A series of Israeli strikes targeted the headquarters of Hamas’s internal security forces, its central bank, and the home of a senior Hamas commander.”

   “On 14 May…the IAF launched a massive bombardment of Hamas’s extensive underground tunnel network…”

   “On 15 May the IDF destroyed the al-Jalaa Building in Gaza, which housed Al Jazeera and AP journalists, and a number of other offices and apartments. The building was hit by three missiles, approximately an hour after Israeli forces called the building’s owner, warning of the attack and advising all occupants to evacuate.” (“On 8 June, Israel stated that a Hamas electronic warfare unit developing a system to jam the Iron Dome was based in the building. AP demanded proof… Israel said that it did not suspect that AP personnel knew of Hamas’s use of the building, and offered to assist AP in rebuilding its offices and operations in Gaza. Israel stated that it provided the US government intelligence on the strike but would not make the information public. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken confirmed that Israel had sent the US information…”)

   On 16 May, the “deadliest incident of the campaign occurred…when Israeli warplanes fired 11 missiles along a 200-yard stretch of Wehda Street, in the upscale Rimal neighborhood. According to the IDF, a Hamas tunnel and underground command center were the targets of the attack which destroyed two residential buildings, killing 44 civilians….The IDF said that it had not expected the extent of the civilian casualties which occurred.” (“On 26 May, Yahya Sinwar, leader of the Hamas political wing in Gaza, denied that any of their tunnels were under civilian areas…On 5 June, Sinwar admitted that Hamas did embed military command centers in civilian locations.”)

   On 17 May, “The IAF carried out another large-scale series of raids against Hamas’s tunnel network…, bombing over 15 kilometers of underground passages, with 54 Israeli jets dropping 110 bombs. The homes of nine Hamas commanders…were also bombed.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Israel%E2%80%93Palestine_crisis

Conflict Statistics
-Casualties: “When the cease-fire was announced [on 21 May], 256 Palestinians had been killed, including 66 children and 40 women, while almost 2,000 were injured. More than 113,000 people were displaced during the height of the hostilities, as Gaza’s infrastructure was decimated.” http://arabcenterdc.org/policy_analyses/the-changing-nature-of-israel-hamas-warfare/

   Israel suffered 12 civilians and one IDF soldier killed, and 312 civilians and three soldiers wounded. https://jcpa.org/article/casualties-in-the-2021-gaza-war-how-many-and-who-were-they/

-Rocket Overview: “[I]sraelis were caught off guard by [Hamas’s] ability to hit deep inside Israeli cities, with not just Tel Aviv but Jerusalem within their reach. The group fired 4,360 rockets over a period of 11 days, four times more than it did in the 50-day war in 2014. For a brief period, the rockets overwhelmed Israel’s Iron dome missile-defense system. Moreover, despite a rigorous surveillance routine by Israel, Hamas has built a much more intricate maze of tunnels under the coastal enclave to hide its arsenal.” https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/06/15/israels-big-new-shift-in-hamas-policy/

   “4,360 rockets and mortar shells [were] fired at southern and central Israel, an average of 400 per day. About 3,400 successfully crossed the border while 680 fell in Gaza and 280 fell into the sea. The Iron Dome shot down 1,428 rockets detected as heading toward populated areas, an interception rate of 95 percent. Some 60–70 rockets hit populated areas after the Iron Dome failed to intercept them. The attacks killed 6 Israeli civilians…Three other Israeli civilians… died from injuries sustained after they fell while running to bomb shelters during attacks.” “The IDF estimated that it destroyed 850 rockets in strikes on the Gaza Strip and also severely degraded local rocket manufacturing capabilities in strikes on about three dozen rocket production centers.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Israel%E2%80%93Palestine_crisis

-Assassinations: Israel assassinated approximately 30 Hamas commanders and a few Islamic Jihad commanders with airstrikes. “Israel’s ability to locate senior commanders to such an extent indicated extensive Israeli intelligence penetration of Hamas’s ranks.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Israel%E2%80%93Palestine_crisis

-Anti-tank Missile Operators: “During the fighting, Hamas militants with anti-tank guided missiles repeatedly took positions in apartments and behind dunes. These teams were identified by IDF reconnaissance units and subsequently destroyed in pinpoint attacks.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Israel%E2%80%93Palestine_crisis

-Unmanned Subs: “[T]he IDF sank Hamas’s fleet of small unmanned submarines designed to explode under or near Israeli naval vessels or oil and gas drilling rigs. Hamas tried repeatedly to attack Israel’s Tamar gas field. At least two attempts to launch attacks with autonomous submarines were intercepted.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Israel%E2%80%93Palestine_crisis

-Cross-border Raids: “In three instances, Hamas attempted to launch cross-border raids into Israel to kill or kidnap soldiers and civilians, utilizing tunnels that approached but did not cross into Israeli territory…All of these attacks were foiled.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Israel%E2%80%93Palestine_crisis

-Internally Displaced: “Seventy-two thousand Palestinians were displaced in the recent round of violence as residential buildings collapsed and became rubble within seconds.” These displaced Palestinians sheltered “mostly at 48 UNRWA schools in Gaza. After the ceasefire, less than 1,000 displaced Palestinians were sheltering in UNRWA schools…”
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/06/15/israels-big-new-shift-in-hamas-policy/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Israel%E2%80%93Palestine_crisis

-Infrastructure: “Crucial infrastructure, including hospitals and clinics, the power grid, and the water desalination plants, all suffered damage. Unexploded ordnance is strewn all across [Gaza]…”

   “[N]o one is going to invest in major reconstruction that will be jeopardized the next time Hamas decides it has something to gain politically by launching rockets into Israel.” “[H]amas has been redirecting construction materials towards its own purposes at the cost of the donors and the people of Gaza. ‘The problem with not having control over the material that goes into Gaza, where it is stored, and then how it is delivered to construction sites, is that Hamas will divert materials for its purposes of rebuilding its underground tunnel network and rearming. Look at what it did after 2014…It increased its rocket-fire by tenfold from 2014 to 2021. It built an underground tunnel network—one so extensive that Israel destroyed 60 miles of it and that is only a fraction of what Hamas secretly constructed. They used enormous amounts of cement, steel, electrical wiring, and wood—all of which was desperately needed for above-ground construction in impoverished Gaza.’”

   “[I]t is impossible to prevent…reconstruction materials from getting into Hamas’s hands. ‘All the materials and financial aid goes to the families but at the end of the day some of those families are connected to Hamas…At least 30% of Gaza’s people are supporters of Hamas.’” https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/06/15/israels-big-new-shift-in-hamas-policy/

How The War May Change Warfare
-“The [2021] conflict between Israel and Hamas was…a brief and limited exchange falling far short of other wars. There was no ground offensive, no Israeli incursion into Gaza or Hamas ground attack into Israel, and no taking of prisoners. The conflict was limited to a series of rocket launches, artillery barrages, and air strikes.”

   “Nevertheless, this short conflict may prove to be an important step in the development of modern warfare. For decades, nations have been trying to perfect a technological mode of warfare in which military operations are carried out without risking soldiers’ lives. Speaking in purely military terms…this round represented a step toward refining that objective when both Hamas and Israel relied exclusively on indirect fire in the conflict.”

   “This was the first war in which one side (Hamas) sought—as its primary tactical goal—to overwhelm a modern ground-based air defense system. It was the first war in which the bulk of one side’s air defense system—Israel’s—was operated autonomously, that is, without human interface in identifying, selecting, and firing on targets. It was also among the first wars in which an adversary (Israel) sought to destroy or neutralize an extensive underground network of military facilities without having a presence on the ground.”

   “Israel’s defense capability was mostly effective not because of a radar or a missile, but rather because of the command-and-control algorithm that integrated the various components of the Iron Dome system without the need for human intervention. With rockets incoming at short range, there really is not enough time for a human to intervene, determine the nature and orientation of the threat, and then launch an interceptor missile if one is needed.” Remarkably, autonomous systems defended “an entire country. This expansion of autonomous missile systems into such a role is without precedent.” http://arabcenterdc.org/policy_analyses/the-changing-nature-of-israel-hamas-warfare/

Hamas’s War Goals
-“[A]t the strategic level, the conflict represented a refinement of the subordination of military aims to political goals. The Israeli strategic narrative of warfare has been one of invincibility, based on technological superiority and superior intelligence gathering. The Hamas strategic narrative of warfare has been one of unrelenting resistance, even in the face of an overwhelmingly superior force. The Hamas forces (and allied units) that launched the rocket barrages had no reasonable chance of achieving any plausible military goal. They could not and did not have any hope of striking a militarily significant target within Israel, or of causing Israel to cede any territory to them. Instead, they conducted an extensive campaign of military operations without hope of military success in order to achieve political goals…”

   “Hamas’s political and military aims in this campaign were…to show that it is committed to Jerusalem’s Arab and Muslim identity (thus increasing its clout in Palestinian affairs) and to overwhelm Israel’s vaunted Iron Dome rocket defense system, thereby puncturing Israel’s narrative of invincibility. As for the first aim, Hamas considers itself a victor. Amid celebrations in Gaza following the announcement of a cease-fire—after the world saw Israel get a bloody nose—the organization’s leaders declared that they forced their adversary to end its expulsions of Palestinians from Jerusalem.”

   “Hamas and affiliated units were able to achieve their second aim by building and firing an unexpectedly large number of rockets and missiles in coordinated salvos at Israel. This tactic took Israel’s defense forces by surprise, and in some instances overwhelmed the Iron Dome system.”

   Accordingly, “Hamas had two operational military objectives”: First, “to demonstrate that Hamas and its allied militias had managed to build and stockpile a large arsenal of rockets in spite of the continued blockade of Gaza since 2007….The first Hamas rocket, the Qassam, is still in use. Despite being relatively primitive and simple, it is nevertheless dangerous. Hamas has since added more than 10 different types of rockets to its arsenal, and it has shown the ability to produce these rockets in militarily significant numbers….The production of these rockets, and the diversity of the Hamas rocket arsenal, is in itself a military victory. It calls into question the entire Israeli strategy for dealing with Gaza and shifts its problem from the level of a military irritant to one of a serious challenge…” Second, Hamas’s “rocket barrage attempted to overwhelm the Israeli defenses by sheer numbers….Israel’s Iron Dome system…proved effective at countering the primitive ballistic missiles that Hamas fired.…[However,] Even with perfect tracking and optimal performance, the Iron Dome interceptors (as with the US Patriot system and the Russian S-400) still are limited in number. If there are 25 Iron Dome missile interceptors, then Hamas only has to fire 26 rockets (which cost a fraction of the Iron Dome missiles) to get one through. Indeed, it costs Israel just as much to intercept a primitive rocket as it does to intercept a state-of-the-art guided missile.”

   “Iran has clearly employed new procedures in the run-up to this conflict. Rather than attempt to smuggle in entire missiles (as Iran has done with long-range missiles in Yemen), it has instead opted to transfer manufacturing knowledge to build a self-sustaining rocket manufacturing capability that does not rely on the import of specialized parts. This approach minimized both risks and costs for Iran. The fruit of this approach is obvious: Hamas rocket makers are now able to produce solid-fueled rocket motors that are more stable, and they are also capable of being hidden in site for long periods of time with minimal maintenance.”
http://arabcenterdc.org/policy_analyses/the-changing-nature-of-israel-hamas-warfare/

-According to the former director of the Shin Bet security agency, Ami Ayalon, “Those of us in Israel’s massive and sophisticated security apparatus — the IDF, the Mossad, and the Shin Bet — thought we were always one step ahead of our Islamist enemies. [However,] Hamas terror masters didn’t expect to defeat us militarily. Through fear, they wanted us to overreach, to employ tanks and hundred-million-dollar fighter planes. They wanted to bankrupt our treasuries and our democratic ideals. Most of all, they wanted to show us that they would never surrender, and for us, in turn, to demonstrate to the Palestinian population, and to people around the world, that Israelis could never be their partners — and we’d fallen for it.”

   “The Islamists were winning because most Israelis were out for Palestinian blood. They were winning because each time a bereaved Palestinian mother wept on CNN she undermined what we needed most: confidence that we could win the war on terror without betraying our values. They were winning because everyone, from the prime minister down to the cabdriver…, repeated like a mantra, ‘No partner.’ This ideological us-versus-them approach…was the most lethal threat to Israeli security, and to our survival as a democratic Jewish state, because it left the Palestinians with nothing to lose.” (To win this war amongst the people, Israel’s “missiles do more harm than good because they wreak so much collateral damage that entire populations rush into the arms of our enemies. To kill terrorist leaders without addressing the despair of their supporters is a fool’s errand and produces more frustration, more despair, and more terrorism.”)

   “Our most pressing security question was, therefore,…how best to foster hope among Palestinians….Only when the Palestinians believe that the political process will lead to an end to the occupation and discrimination, and to the establishment of their own state alongside Israel, will they stop supporting terror.”

   “As individuals, we Israelis, citizens of the Start-Up Nation, are optimists with can-do attitudes. But our body politic — our voting habits, military tactics, and sense of our place in the world — are dominated by fear….The source of Israeli pessimism is not Palestinian hostility. It came from…the fatally flawed Zionist stories we tell ourselves about the past.” (Ayalon 2020, xxvi-xxvii, xxix) 

-Israel’s strategic goals have been clear for decades: treat Gaza and the West Bank as separate entities (despite their being part of Palestine); keep Palestinians divided; enable the Hamas government to barely function (by permitting funding of its institutions from Qatar and other entities); permit the PA to brutally police parts of the WB (thus preventing coordinated resistance); and integrate tightly those parts of the West Bank that are to remain Israel’s. https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/06/15/israels-big-new-shift-in-hamas-policy/ ]

-Background to Hamas’s Goals: Challenges, Successes, Competition: “Why would Hamas fire rockets and make the situation worse, knowing that Israel will hit Gaza hard? Hamas has long faced a dilemma as it tries to balance its roles as the government of Gaza and as the leading Palestinian resistance group to Israel. Neither seemed to offer a path to becoming the uncontested leader of the Palestinian national movement and ultimately defeating Israel. As the de facto ruler of Gaza since 2007, Hamas has succeeded in keeping power despite Israeli, US, and international pressure, as well as repeated Israeli military incursions. The isolation, however, prevents Gaza from growing economically and keeps the humanitarian situation dire. As a result, Hamas is unable to provide economic growth or other benefits to Gazans and demonstrate it is an effective leader of the Palestinians.”

   “At the same time, Hamas faces challenges when it attacks Israel. As the [2021 conflict again] demonstrate[s], Israel will not hesitate to hit Gaza hard in response to Hamas provocations. Israel and Hamas have squared off in major confrontations in Gaza in 2008-09, 2012, and 2014, as well as numerous small attacks and responses in between. Gaza has come off the worse for these, and Palestinian suffering has been enormous. Hamas killed few Israelis in these confrontations, but it has solidified its hold on power. The destructive Israeli response is intended to send a message that violence will backfire and make it harder for Hamas to portray its leadership of Gaza as a success.”

   “Hamas has also suffered as the Middle East has changed and hope for foreign support has declined. The Arab Spring, the civil war in Syria, and other political earthquakes made the Israeli-Palestinian issue less politically salient for many people in the region and around the world. Major shifts that once would have riveted world attention, like the US’ move of its embassy to Jerusalem, generated little meaningful outrage. The signing of the Abraham Accords, which formalized a peace between Israel and the UAE, was another nail in the coffin and was followed by peace deals with Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan. Despite the unresolved Palestinian issue and the problems in Gaza, the region was moving on.”

   “Hamas’s hostile relationship with…the leadership of the PA, which controls the West Bank, makes its dilemma even more difficult. Rivals for leadership of the Palestinian national movement, they differ on their willingness to negotiate with Israel, support for violence, and other fundamentals. Both sides see the relationship as zero-sum and often design their policies toward Israel as a way of gaining an advantage over the other.”

   “Israel’s hope is that, through isolation and military punishment, Hamas’s allure will diminish. This has worked, to a degree, in that poor living conditions in Gaza and the perks its leaders enjoy have tarnished Hamas’s popularity. Yet Hamas remains firmly ensconced in power in Gaza, and Israel and the PA fear that Hamas will also take power in the West Bank, either through elections or through a forceful takeover. This would be a nightmare for Israel. The West Bank is far closer to the biggest Israeli population centers (and often on higher ground), and a significant Hamas presence there could lead to far more dangerous rocket strikes and terrorist attacks on Israel.”

   “To prevent this nightmare, Israel has worked closely with the PA to suppress Hamas in the West Bank. The postponement of elections scheduled for April of [2021] has…set back Hamas’s hopes to win an electoral victory.”

   “Hamas, however, has one huge advantage: the weakness of its Palestinian rivals. The PA is corrupt, divided, and unpopular….Fatah…is less competent than Hamas and inspires little loyalty. Perhaps most importantly, [President] Abbas bet heavily on negotiations with Israel. The lack of negotiations, or even the chance of serious peace talks, raises the obvious question: How does Abbas and the movement he leads hope to end the Israeli occupation?”

   “The violence over Sheikh Jarrah is thus tailor-made for Hamas. The evictions in Jerusalem and the initial heavy-handed police response meant much of the world believes Israel started the latest round. Unrest in Jerusalem captures world — especially Muslim world — attention. Military strikes by Hamas allow it to claim it is defending Palestinians while the PA stands by amidst, or even abets, the occupation through its cooperation with Israel.” https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2021/05/12/hamas-tries-to-seize-the-day/

Human Rights Watch
-A 2021 report by Human Rights Watch “said it ‘investigated three Israeli strikes that killed 62 Palestinian civilians where there were no evident military targets in the vicinity.’”

   Concerning one strike, “Israel claimed that it was targeting an underground command center but admitted ‘to not knowing its size or exact location at the time of the attack’…HRW did not find any evidence of a military target at or near the site of the airstrikes, including tunnels or an underground command center under al-Wihda street or buildings nearby’…”

   HRW concludes that both “Israeli forces and Palestinian armed groups carried out attacks…that violated the laws of war and apparently amount to war crimes.” (HRW notes that Israel refuses to allow its international staff access to Gaza.)

-“Amnesty International has called for a ‘comprehensive arms embargo on Israel’ and urged states to immediately suspend all transfers of weapons and military equipment. Amnesty also calls for the same measures to be imposed on Palestinian armed groups, though neither the US nor any European states that arm Israel supply weapons to Palestinian resistance organizations.”

   Human Rights Watch takes a weaker approach: “Israel’s partners, particularly the United States, which supplies significant military assistance and whose US-made weapons were used in at least two of the attacks investigated by Human Rights Watch, should condition future security assistance to Israel on it taking concrete and verifiable actions to improve its compliance with the laws of war and international human rights law, and to investigate past abuses.”

   “Given the scope of the crimes it has documented, it is baffling why HRW would not just call for an arms embargo on Israel. It has done so for other countries including Ethiopia, Myanmar, Saudi Arabia, South Sudan, Syria and the UAE.” Likewise, “HRW does not call for targeted sanctions on Israel as it has in many of the aforementioned cases.” (“Palestinian armed groups operating in Gaza are already subject to sanctions by being listed as terror organizations in multiple countries.”)

   “[HRW] called for targeted sanctions in its report on Israeli apartheid published earlier [in 2021]. But why doesn’t it call for an immediate measure to help prevent the next episode of bloodshed in Gaza?”

-“Human Rights Watch’s framing suggests that Israel and Palestinian resistance groups in Gaza bear equal responsibility for war crimes and that their alleged crimes are equal in scope and severity. It draws a false parity between a colonial power with one of the world’s strongest military arsenals, on the one hand, and stateless guerrilla fighters in a besieged and repeatedly battered territory, on the other.”

   “Armed groups in isolated Gaza lack the capacity to develop precision-guided weapons like that used by Israel to target civilian infrastructure.” Nevertheless, “[HRW] faults groups in Gaza for launching ‘unguided rockets and mortars towards population centers, violating the prohibition against deliberate or indiscriminate attacks against civilians.’” (HRW “did not substantiate the implied claim that Palestinian resistance groups aimed toward Israeli population centers and not military targets…” Worth noting that a “video released by the Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, appears to show Palestinian fighters deliberately aiming at an Israeli military jeep. An Israeli soldier died as a result of that anti-tank guided missile fired from Gaza.”)

   “HRW repeatedly states that Palestinian groups fired rockets toward Israeli ‘population centers.’ But the report does not use this same phrase concerning Israeli fire in Gaza, which is one of the most densely populated places in the world.”

   “It is hard to see why that same logic wouldn’t apply to Israel’s 1,000-kilogram bombs dropped anywhere in densely populated Gaza. By this reading, any Israeli fire into Gaza would be directed toward Palestinian ‘population centers.’ The same is true of 155mm artillery shells. Israel lobbed hundreds of those shells into Gaza in May [2021], as it has during previous assaults on the territory. Such artillery systems can only be aimed to fall within a circle whose radius may extend hundreds of meters from the intended target. This is a point HRW made in…2007…Yet in its report on Israel’s attacks on Gaza in May [2021], HRW nowhere acknowledges the inherently indiscriminate nature of the weapons used by Israel – a glaring double standard.”

-“Human Rights Watch, to its credit, has recently called for an approach [to the Israel-Palestine conflict] centered on human rights and accountability rather than the long moribund ‘peace process,’ to which world powers still cling.”

   “The rights group has acknowledged that the pursuit of ‘Jewish Israeli control over demographics, political power and land has long guided [Israeli] government policy.’ In some cases, HRW said, Israel’s violations of Palestinian rights in pursuit of this goal ‘are so severe that they amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.’ The group briefly mentions this context in its report on alleged war crimes perpetrated by Israel and Palestinian armed groups in May [2021]. Yet HRW insists on a ‘both sides’ framing, despite the disparate death toll and destruction, to say nothing of the vast disparity in firepower. This suggests a moral equivalence between the resistance of a besieged people living under occupation and a colonizing power that seeks the absolute surrender of its subjects’ national and indigenous rights.”

   “The tactics of Palestinian groups shouldn’t be ignored. But unequals should not be treated equally, to borrow a phrase from international law scholar Richard Falk. Falk wrote after Israel’s 51-day attack on Gaza in 2014 that the ‘primary human impact…was to leave Gaza bleeding and devastated, while Israel endured minimal damage and dramatically less destructive impacts on its societal order.’ Then, as now, ‘Israeli damage was repaired almost immediately. In contrast, Israel’s refusal to allow ample reconstruction materials to enter has left substantial parts of Gaza in ruins, with many Gazans continuing to lack adequate shelter, remain homeless and understandably traumatized.’”

   “HRW will point to its criticism of both sides to deflect accusations of anti-Israel bias and anti-Semitism. Indeed, Israel has long sought to undermine the group’s work by denying it access to Gaza and deporting the head of its Jerusalem office.”

   However, the “both sides” approach achieves a false balance. While it protects HRW from criticism, it sacrifices justice. “The utter lack of…justice creates the conditions for the alleged war crimes condemned by HRW.”
https://electronicintifada.net/content/how-human-rights-watch-favors-israel/33721  (4 Aug. 2021)
https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/07/27/gaza-apparent-war-crimes-during-may-fighting

Iron Dome: Funding and The Lobby
-In September 2021, the House of Representatives easily passed a bill (420 -9) to provide $1 billion for Israel’s Iron Dome, which was used extensively during the 2021 conflict. (The $1 billion is in addition to the $3.8 billion the US already gives Israel every year, and “is going to a country that has a higher per capita GDP than France, Japan, and the UK.”)
   “The unanimity of the [28] Jewish congresspeople underlines a widespread political understanding: Jews are for Israel….[P]oliticians know how to count noses, and campaign contributions too…[Once you understand] that American Jews are for military aid to Israel, it’s very hard to oppose that aid as a Democrat. Because Jews are so important to the Democratic Party.”
   “Jews vote Democrat at about 3 to 1, nearly as reliably as African-Americans. Their turnout rates are very high. And they are a key voting bloc in a few states, notably Florida, New Jersey, and New York, and they are important in a dozen or more congressional districts from California to Illinois to Michigan to Virginia.”
   “It’s obviously not just voting. Jews are far and away the wealthiest group by religion in our society (44 percent of households made over $100,000 in 2016, well above the national average of 19 percent and well ahead of Hindus and Episcopalians). And Jews give to Democrats….The role of Jewish Democratic donors is ‘gigantic’ and ‘shocking,’ two experts told J Street in 2016 (J.J. Goldberg of the Forward and Stephanie Schriock then the head of Emily’s List respectively). [According to] The New York Times…: ‘Of the dozens of personal checks greater than $500,000 made out to the largest PAC for Democrats in 2018, the Senate Majority PAC, around three-fourths were written by Jewish donors.’” This arithmetic is an old story. “Joe Biden wants to do nothing to alienate the Jewish warchest/rightwing Israel lobby in his efforts to hold the Congress and the White House for Democrats. Nancy Pelosi feels the same way.” https://mondoweiss.net/2021/09/the-israel-lobbys-crushing-win-on-iron-dome/

2022 CONFLICT
-“On 5 August 2022, Israel launched what it described as a pre-emptive military offensive on the Gaza Strip [which lasted three days], targeting Palestinian Islamic Jihad and its armed wing the Al-Quds Brigades. Israeli authorities said the offensive was in response to threats of attack.”
   “According to the UN, 49 Palestinians were killed as a result of the fighting. Amnesty International’s assessment is that 33 of these, including 17 civilians, were killed by Israeli forces. Of the remaining 16…killed, AI concluded that 14 were civilians. The organization gathered sufficient evidence to conclude that seven of these were killed by a rocket launched by Palestinian armed groups; it was unable to conclude which party was responsible for the seven remaining civilian deaths. These seven civilians were killed in four attacks, after which remnants of weapons were immediately removed, preventing AI’s researchers from accessing material evidence. [T]his removal matches the pattern identified in past cases where Palestinian rockets misfired.”
   “In this conflict, rockets launched by Palestinian armed groups did not cause deaths or serious injuries among Israeli civilians.”
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/10/israel-opt-investigate-war-crimes-during-august-offensive-on-gaza/

-During the 2022 conflict, “The IDF conducted some 147 airstrikes in Gaza and Palestinian militants fired approximately 1,100 rockets towards Israel. The operation, ordered by Prime Minister Yair Lapid and Defense Minister Benny Gantz…followed a raid in Jenin…, in which Israeli forces arrested Bassam al-Saadi, a leader of the PIJ…” More arrests followed.
   “The initial attack included the targeted killing of Tayseer al-Jabari, a military leader of [PIJ]. On the second day, the PIJ commander of the Southern area of the Strip, Khaled Mansour, was also targeted and killed. PIJ stated that the Israeli bombardments were a ‘declaration of war’ and responded with retaliatory rocket fire towards Israel.” “The clashes ended with a truce that was confirmed by both sides on…7 August 2022.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Gaza%E2%80%93Israel_clashes

-“PIJ has a strong presence in West Bank cities like Jenin and Nablus. During the period between March and May [2022], attacks by Israeli Arabs and Palestinians killed 17 Israelis, most of them civilians…As a result, the IDF increased its raids against armed Palestinian factions throughout the West Bank. By July, at least 30 Palestinians were killed…” Tensions continued to rise and “Israeli communities in southern Israel were placed in lockdown…as a security precaution against potential attacks from Gaza, as, according to Israel, the PIJ had positioned anti-tank missiles and snipers at the border to kill Israeli civilians and soldiers.”
   “Israel characterized [its] airstrikes as a ‘preemptive measure’ to stop PIJ from taking revenge for the arrest of al-Saadi…”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Gaza%E2%80%93Israel_clashes

JENIN 2023 INCURSION: GAZA-LITE
-Overview: “On 3 July 2023, the Israeli military conducted a major [two day] assault on the Jenin refugee camp in the Palestinian city of Jenin, located within the Israeli-occupied West Bank. The Israeli government stated that the goal of the operation, named ‘Operation Home and Garden’, was to target militants within the camp.”
   “The attack began with drone strikes on what the IDF called ‘terrorist infrastructure’…The airstrikes were followed by the deployment of troops who remained inside the camp [for several hours]. The fighting persisted for approximately 14 hours after the Israeli forces entered the camp. [A]round 2,000 soldiers…participated in the operation. The military blocked roads, seized control of houses and buildings, and positioned snipers on rooftops. Military bulldozers were utilized to clear paths through narrow streets to facilitate the movement of Israeli forces, resulting in damage to buildings.”
   “The attack…resulted in the deaths of at least 12 Palestinians and injuries to 100 others. The military emphasized that the operation is ‘one in a series’…Up to 500 Palestinian families were forced or had to leave their homes due to the Israeli assault.”
   “The assault was the largest incursion and deployment of aerial force against militants in the West Bank in 20 years, since fighting during the Second Intifada.”
   “Security forces destroyed several arms factories and a munitions pit under a mosque containing hundreds of explosives and weapons. The operation came after two rockets were fired at Israel from the Jenin area on June 26, landing inside PA territory and causing no casualties.” “[The government] simply cannot countenance a West Bank capacity to manufacture and fire rockets into Israel.”
-Breeding Ground for Resistance: “The [Jenin refugee] camp suffers from high rates of poverty and unemployment, and faces difficult living conditions, largely due to Israeli sanctions affecting up to 80 percent of Jenin’s economy. It has been a frequent location for many incidents in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.”
   “In 2023, the refugee camp has been repeatedly targeted by Israeli forces due to the Israeli government’s belief that it shelters militants responsible for attacks inside Israel….The [3 July 2023 Israeli] incursion took place amidst increasing violence in the West Bank, which included another violent clash in Jenin two weeks prior, a rocket incident originating from the area, the first Israeli drone attack in the West Bank since 2006, and attacks by settlers on Palestinian villages. Furthermore, there was growing domestic pressure to respond to a series of attacks on Israeli settlers, including a shooting incident in June that resulted in the deaths of four Israelis.”
-Aftermath: Revenge: “On 4 July, nine people were injured in the city of Tel Aviv following a vehicle-ramming and stabbing attack by a Palestinian man. Hamas claimed the attack was ‘heroic and revenge for the military operation in Jenin’.” On following days, a few low-casualty responses also occurred.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_2023_Jenin_incursion
https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-749898
-Why Inevitable: “The only army that controls [the West Bank] and can go into any square inch…and arrest anyone they want, including officials with the PA…is the Israeli government….But the [Palestinians] under this control lack basic rights.”
   “So, how do you deal with a population like that? [T]here are basically five options. Option number one is you could give them citizenship in the state in which they live….[T]hat’s not on the agenda…Option number two[:] give them citizenship in their own…sovereign Palestinian state….[This option] has no real support among any major political party in Israel…The third is you can control these Palestinians through a…Palestinian intermediary that does the policing. And you…only go in [when necessary] in extreme circumstances….It’s how you rule [non-citizens or subjects] in a colonial context….Four, you can control them directly. You can have your army [police] all the villages and towns and cities. And number five is you can expel them.”
   “[I]srael is moving through options one, two, three, and four, and moving closer to option five, which is expulsion…[I]srael takes over the West Bank in 1967. From 1967 to 1987, it can do a version of four [direct rule]…Yes, there are mayors, there are these village leagues, but there’s no large-scale Palestinian kind of policing subcontractor and Israel doesn’t really need it. There is Palestinian resistance, certainly, but Israel doesn’t need that because there’s no massive uprising across the entire West Bank. And so, the cost of direct control from 1967 to 1987 are manageable…Then the critical break is the First Intifada in the late 1980s, in which there’s a huge Palestinian uprising…It’s too costly to [continue] direct rule. It only works when the population is quiescent…[So Israel] moves to options number two and three [with the Oslo process]. Option two is you solve the problem by giving Palestinians their own state. So, Palestinians are doing their own security, their own control. You don’t have to worry about this population because they are in another country called Palestine….And option number three is you maintain overall control, but you create a security subcontractor or a form of indirect rule. So, they’re still under your control, but you don’t have to do the dirty work every day because you have a Palestinian subcontractor who’s doing it.”
   “The Palestinian Authority was created in the Oslo process, so now Israel had a subcontractor across the entire West Bank. The Palestinians wanted it to be the embryo of a state. Some Israeli leaders might have wanted that. Many others definitely did not. The point is it didn’t become a state. Another intifada…breaks out in 2000. At the end of 2004, when it’s put down, there’s another effort to…strengthen the PA. [O]ver time, it becomes clearer…that [Israel’s employing option 3] indirect rule.”
   “The problem is that the PA as the security subcontractor in this form of indirect rule loses legitimacy…[Palestinians] see it’s not bringing [them] freedom or much of anything. It’s not leading them towards their own state. And [so the PA] starts to lose control.”
   Past Israeli governments have made limited (largely unsuccessful) gestures to buttress the PA — more job permits to work inside Israel, more freedom of movement. But the 2023 right-wing government considers “the PA as the enemy. And so, on the one hand they need the PA as the security subcontractor. On the other hand, they kind of humiliate it and weaken it at every turn by just massively increasing settlement growth, for instance. And so, the PA is growing weaker and weaker. And what happens in Jenin is a sign of that, because now the PA has lost control over Jenin. There are Palestinian armed groups that are in control of it, so the PA can’t even play the security subcontractor role in this particular part of the West Bank….It’s very unlikely to restore control. But Israel can’t do direct control in Jenin or [the bulk of the West Bank]. It’s just too costly for Israel to keep its army there on the ground in Jenin fighting pitch battles day in and day out. So, what are they doing? They basically go into Jenin and blow up a lot of stuff, and kill a lot of people, and arrest a lot of people, and try to degrade the armed infrastructure…And then they get out with the understanding that they’re going to keep having to do that. If that sounds familiar, it should, because that’s what Israel does in Gaza. It can’t control Gaza on the ground. It’s too costly. And so, it kind of goes in now and then and does a lot of destruction, kills a lot of people…‘mowing the lawn.’”
   “Jenin, and the West Bank in general, is not nearly as self-enclosed as Gaza. So, the potential for resistance is much greater…[I]n Gaza [Israel] can basically…attack from the air. And the second really important difference between Jenin and the West Bank in general, and Gaza, is the Israeli right really wants that land in the West Bank. Remember, they’re building massive settlements all over the place, enclosing Jenin and all these other Palestinian cities with Israeli settlements.”
   “[Y]ou have a dynamic in which every time Israel goes in with one of these operations [it] produces a response of more Palestinian armed resistance [and this, in turn, radicalizes Israelis who demand] a sustainable answer….[Accordingly,] more [Israeli Jews may move] into the Smotrich [expell them] camp…Of course, Israel has in its political DNA this history of a mass expulsion at its founding [and another] in 1967, and smaller scale expulsions…And [expulsion] is already the stated preference of most of the people who vote for the parties in this Israeli government. If you look at polls, you find that between a third or half of Israeli Jews support some version of expulsion…[I]f you’re talking about Likud voters, let alone people who vote for parties like Ben-Gvir and Smotrich’s, these are people who already say they support expulsion of Palestinians. And even in addition to Smotrich, who’s talked about this, to Itamar Ben-Gvir in the government who’s talked about this, you have prominent Likud leaders: Yoav Gallant, the defense minister; Avi Dichter, the former Shin Bet head who’s the agriculture minister; Tzachi Hanegbi, the national security adviser….They’ve all basically talked about the potential need for another Nakba. Prominent religious figures like the Lubavitcher Rebbe talked about this when he was alive. The historian, Benny Morris.”
   “[I]f you want [forced mass expulsion] not to be possible…you actually need to take actions to make it so. And you would need to make very forceful statements that if something like this were to happen, it would break the US-Israel relationship, that the US would no longer be willing to subsidize Israel under those circumstances.” (10 July 2023)
https://peterbeinart.substack.com/p/jenin-and-the-logic-of-expulsion

HAMAS’S EVOLUTION
-“The decade before the [First Intifada] had witnessed advances for the long-established Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, known in Gaza as al-Mujamma al-Islami. It had been granted informal recognition by Israel in 1978 in the wake of the Sadat initiative and was led by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin…Like other Islamist movements it had been influenced by the 1979 Iranian revolution and the Muslim response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Unlike the PLO, Yassin focused not on fighting Israel, but on promoting Islam by building mosques, schools, health-care institutions…”
   “Echoing the practice in Arab countries like Egypt and Jordan, the Israelis initially promoted the Islamists as a counter-weight to the PLO and the Communists, or at least turned a blind eye to their…activities….In 1980 Mujamma activists had burned down the offices of the Palestine Red Crescent in Gaza, run by [a] left-wing nationalist. Cafes and video shops were favourite targets…In 1981 the Brotherhood beat Fatah in student elections in the West Bank and Gaza….‘The fundamentalists had indeed sapped the strength of the PLO in Gaza’, noted…Israeli writers…‘But they soon surpassed it in indoctrination towards fanatic zeal; which from Israel’s standpoint was far more menacing than anything the nationalists could show for their efforts.’” (Ian Black, Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017, Atlantic Monthly Press, New York: 2017, 289-291. Hereinafter, “Black 2017.”)

-“The brotherhood’s focus on gradual Islamization at the expense of immediate resistance [to occupation] created significant resentment. This was not limited to the nationalists who were heeding the call of the PLO’s armed struggle. [Brotherhood leader Sheikh] Yassin implemented a strict hierarchical structure within the Islamic Association that created a great deal of frustration from within its own member base, particularly among the younger generation. Largely driven by such frustrations, a splinter organization called Islamic Jihad broke off in 1981….In contrast to the brotherhood’s pragmatic engagement with Israel, Islamic Jihad remained categorical in its rejection of dealings with Israel and focused on confronting the occupation rather than on building Islamic institutions to serve the longer-term battle.” (Baconi 2018, 17-8)
   “The Iranian revolution of 1979, where a Western-friendly regime was overthrown by an Islamic revolution, enhanced the appeal of Islamic revolutionary movements. So did the creation of [Hezbollah] as a Shia Islamic military organization mobilizing to fight the Israel occupation of south Lebanon.” (Baconi 2018, 18)
   By the mid-1980s, accepting that “Islamization and resistance were not in conflict and did not need to take place sequentially”, “Yassin and his colleagues began secretly stockpiling weapons in Yassin’s home in Gaza in preparation for [resistance activities].” (Baconi 2018, 19)

-“In 1987, the outbreak of the First Intifada changed everything. The first grass-roots revolt by ordinary Palestinians attempting to ‘shake off’ a twenty-year Israeli military occupation. The Intifada entailed protests, strikes, boycotts, and stone-throwing at Israeli soldiers. Hamas…was founded the same month, emerging directly out of Yassin’s al-Mujamma charity. Offering a religious alternative to the secular PLO, Hamas sought to assume the Intifada’s leadership. Despite Hamas’ hyperbolic rhetoric (their founding charter called for the annihilation of Israel), Yassin indicated an initial willingness to negotiate, but under the condition that Israel first ‘acknowledge the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination and right of return to their land.’ Israel snubbed the effort and continued to suppress the protests.”
   “The First Intifada resulted in 1,200 Palestinians dead, 15,000 imprisoned, and over 130,000 injured—many resulting from an Israeli government policy of deliberately breaking the bones of protestors. During the same period, 180 Israelis were also killed. Witnessing the brutal suppression of these largely non-violent, popular uprisings would radicalize Hamas’ view of the conflict and see the group embark on its descent into violence.”
https://www.juancole.com/2023/11/hidden-history-hamas.html

-By the Second Intifada (2000-2005), “Hamas’s conviction was that suicide-bombing could ultimately compel Israel to relinquish its hold on the territories. Ceasefires were only offered in return for such a concession. Hamas’s leaders had no interest in reducing violence solely for the possible cessation of settlement activity and a return to the situation prior to September 28, 2000, when the intifada erupted. Until the end of occupation could be achieved, Hamas’s publications proclaimed, ‘martyrs would create earthquakes underneath Sharon’s feet.’ True to its word, in the early summer of 2001 Hamas launched its ‘Ten Bombers’ campaign.” (Baconi 2018, 44)
   “Simultaneously, Hamas diversified its resistance techniques. The ‘ten bombers’ mission coincided with the ‘from martyrs to mortar fire’ campaign… This entailed firing rockets from the occupied territories into Israeli settlements as well as into Israel. The first of these rockets was fired from the Gaza Strip on April 1, 2001. Hamas viewed these opertions as relatively ineffective compared to suicide bombing…” (“Compelled to act [by Israeli and US pressure], Arafat mobilized to restrain the resistance front, creating tremendous tension among the factions.”) (Baconi 2018, 45)
   “Hamas’s offer of a conditional ceasefire led to reduced operations by the movement in the second half of June 2001. Until absolute calm was reinstated, however, Sharon ensured Israel’s military grip would not be loosened, as targeted assassinations persisted. On July 31 Israel assassinated two Hamas leaders in the West Bank city of Nablus, killing four other Hamas members and two children in the operation. Describing the Nablus attack as a turning point in Israeli policy, whereby targeted assassinations expanded to include political members, Hamas called on Sharon to ‘assume responsibility’ for his actions. A week later, on August 9, Hamas carried out an enormous suicide operation at the Sbarro Pizzeria in the middle of Jerusalem, killing 15 and injuring more than 90. Hamas’s decision to break the calm on its military front and launch this attack was strategic. Primarily, it gauged that its constituents favored retaliatory operations at this time given the hardship they were enduring under Sharon’s military doctrine. The attack was also timed to derail diplomatic initiatives that were beginning to gather pace after the Mitchell Report. The horrific nature of the Sbarro bombing prompted Sharon to mobilize on the same day. The Israeli army attacked the Palestinian security forces… By the end of the summer, attrition appeared ongoing.” (Baconi 2018, 46-7)

–“The reality on the ground was entirely altered [by the 9/11 attacks]. The balance that had sustained the war of attrition…shifted in Israel’s favor. The 9/11 tragedy paved the way for President Bush’s ‘War on Terror,’ a key foreign policy doctrine that would have transformative implications for the Middle East. [T]he Bush doctrine divided the world between good and evil…Overnight, the Second Intifada came to be presented as Israel’s ‘War on Terror.’ Arafat condemned al-Qaeda’s actions, as did Hamas…Nonetheless, evoking the US-Israeli special relationship, Sharon portrayed the Palestinian armed factions as Israel’s own al-Qaeda. In a post-9/11 Bush administration, this analogy carried a great deal of weight….This parity overlooked Hamas’s articulation that its military operations were perpetrated solely to end Israel’s illegal occupation. It also elided Israel’s own lethal operations within the occupied territories…” (Baconi 2018, 47)
   “With the commencement of the War on Terror, attempts to present Palestinian armed struggle as a constituent of global terrorism were formalized. Less than a month after 9/11, the PFLP, a secular Palestinian faction, assassinated Israel’s tourism minister Rehavam Ze’evi in retaliation for Israel’s assassination of its own leader Abu Ali Mustafa. This attack prompted Israel to launch an ‘all-out war on the terrorists,’ a major offensive on October 18 to reoccupy most urban centers in the West Bank. … Counter to Sharon’s aspiration to destroy the prospect of Palestinian statehood, President Bush delivered a speech at the UN in November where he recognized the Palestinian right to self-determination in a state of their own. Concurrently, the Bush administration embraced Sharon’s rhetoric and asserted Israel’s right to defend itself against terror.” (Baconi 2018, 48)
   “Sharon’s intensive and violent military surge within the occupied territories triggered another wave of suicide bombing by Hamas and Islamic Jihad….While some of these were responses to Israel’s assassination of Hamas leaders, others were a continuation of the attrition marking relations between the two parties. Nonsuicide attacks also proliferated. Paradoxically, while Israel’s offensive targeted the PA’s infrastructure, pressure was sustained on the increasingly ineffectual Arafat to rein in the factions. The PA moved to arrest Hamas members and attempted to place both Yassin and Rantissi under house arrest in Gaza, causing violent clashes between Hamas’s supporters and Arafat’s forces. Hamas condemned the PA’s readiness to undermine the armed struggle in accordance with American and Israeli demands…” (Baconi 2018, 48-9)
   “Hamas’s defiance was unsustainable. Attempts to justify its actions as being a response to a lethal occupation, and all its offers of ceasefire, were inconsequential as Sharon launched another ‘war against terror’ in December 2001. This entailed expansive air strikes against the Palestinian security posts in Ramallah and Gaza City as the Israeli army mobilized around the governmental headquarters to place Arafat under confinement. The dangerous escalation on the PA prompted Hamas to draw back its military wing [and, in early December 2001, declare a unilateral ceasefire for operations within the Green Line. This was] the first of many occasions that Hamas would be forced to stop its armed struggle to defuse an explosive domestic situation.” (Baconi 2018, 49)
   “On January 3, 2002, a few weeks after Hamas’s unilateral ceasefire began, Israel seized in the Mediterranean Sea a marine vessel, Karine A, which was loaded with weapons ostensibly heading to the Palestinian territories. Despite Arafat’s denial of any prior knowledge of the vessel…Sharon declared Arafat a ‘bitter enemy to Israel,’ one who had dealings with ‘terrorist states’ such as Iran, from where the weapons allegedly originated. For the Bush administration, Karine A was the final straw. Embracing Israel’s War on Terror, the US severed contact with Arafat and extended what amounted to a carte blanche for Israel to sideline [Arafat] and destroy Hamas itself. With American approval, as Hamas largely held fire, Israel launched two major operations in February and March 2002…The Israeli army carried out full ground and air invasions against Palestinian villages and towns, and used its military arsenal to make expansive incursions into densely populated refugee camps throughout the West Bank. Close to three hundred Palestinians, thirty-one members of the Israeli army, and nine Jewish settlers were killed.” (Baconi 2018, 50)
   “Unlike previous Israeli operations, these two primarily targeted Hamas…While Hamas’s rationale, articulated through its balance-of-terror framework, was that its violence deterred Israeli offensives, these operations suggested otherwise. Hamas’s extensive campaign of suicide bombing throughout 2001 had failed to elicit any concessions from Israel.” Nevertheless, Hamas declared that resistance was fundamental to liberation. This declaration concerning resistance “mirrored the PLO’s steadfast dedication to armed struggle in the 1960s and 1970s. Unlike the PLO’s early days, however, Hamas had already limited its immediate military goal to the liberation of the occupied territories rather than of the entirety of the land of historic Palestine.” (Baconi 2018, 50-1)
   “As Israel’s operations unfolded in the first two months of 2002, Hamas did not carry out any suicide bombings…Compared to eight suicide bombings by other factions, including al-Aqsa and the Islamic Jihad, Hamas relied on nonsuicide operations, resulting in nine Israeli deaths….By the end of January 2002, the firing of ‘Qassam 2’ rockets into Israel was featuring more frequently in the movement’s publications….On March 9, at the height of Israel’s second operation, Hamas carried out its first suicide bombing since its unilateral ceasefire in December. The Jerusalem attack, which killed eleven and injured fifty, took place at Cafe Moment, about 100 meters from the prime minister’s residence.” (Baconi 2018, 51)
   “As the US formulated its plans toward Iraq, Saudi Arabia pointed to the volatility that Israel’s continued intransigence had on the region. Taking its own measures to end the violence of the Second Intifada, Saudi Arabia offered what became known as the Arab Peace Initiative (API) in March 2002. This was an ambitious and far-reaching proposal for full normalization between Israel and Arab states in return for the former’s withdrawal from the occupied territories and the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital.” (Baconi 2018, 52)
   “The PLO accepted the proposal…With its offer of normalization, the API fell far short of Hamas’s conviction that resistance could force Israel to relinquish the occupied territories without additional Palestinian concessions, in the form of recognizing the State of Israel. Despite cracks beginning to appear in its military strategy, Hamas remained committed to armed struggle as a means of defending against further Palestinian concessions. Khaled Meshal would later explain that this commitment was because of a deep-seated conviction that even if Hamas turned to nonviolent resistance or diplomatic engagement, Israel would not ease its attacks. Israel’s dismissal of Hamas’s unilateral ceasefires merely strengthened these convictions. On the same day [27 March 2002] that Arab leaders (without Arafat, who remained confined by the Israeli army) convened in Beirut to discuss this proposal, a Hamas suicide-bomber detonated explosives at a Passover Seder dinner in Netanya’s Park Hotel in Israel, killing sixteen celebrants and injuring ninety. The chosen timing clearly underscored Hamas’s strategic use of suicide bombing to derail peace initiatives….The military plans that Sharon had shelved in the first year of the intifada were pulled out. These became the foundations for ‘Operation Defensive Shield,’ which the Israeli army launched the next day.” (Baconi 2018, 52-3)
   “Defensive shield was a powerful incursion aimed at ‘dismantling the terrorist infrastructure.’ By the time it concluded, Sharon had effectively pulverized the economic, social, and political fabric within the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In two months, more than three hundred Palestinians and thirty Israeli soldiers were killed. Hundreds of Palestinians were injured, thousands detained, and thousands of homes demolished. Most of the PA’s infrastructure as well as Arafat’s headquarters in Ramallah were destroyed. As the offensive unfolded, suicide bombings took place almost daily [by Islamic Jihad, al-Aqsa Brigades and Hamas]. [T]he attacks were aimed at derailing the API, retaliating against Israeli operations, and disproving Israel’s claims that Defensive Shield was a success. … [R]ather than deterrence, by June 2002 Hamas’s [resistance] actions had caused Israel to escalate its response and avoid any political engagement with the resistance factions or the PLO. … Through [a second operation launched on June 18] ‘Determined Path,’ Israel reoccupied all the major cities in the West Bank, placing close to 700,000 Palestinians under twenty-four-hour curfew. Sharon’s cabinet also began putting together plans for building a wall to separate the Palestinian territories from Israel.” (Baconi 2018, 53-4)
   “After close to two years of weathering the full might of Israel’s army, the PA had been utterly decimated. Out of its remnants, Bush sought to create a democratic Palestinian state. Doing away with the Mitchell Report’s recommendations, Bush embraced Sharon’s stance and adopted a sequential, rather than a parallel, approach to the conflict. This meant that the ever-elusive goal of Palestinian statehood and Israel’s withdrawal were made contingent on reforming the PA to produce leaders who ‘do not support terrorism.’…While diplomatic wrangling on the final draft of the roadmap [for peace] would take another year, [in summer 2002 Bush] formalized attempts…for Palestinian regime change.” This led to Fatah, Hamas, and other factions discussing Arafat’s reform plan “as well as ceasefire options…” (Baconi 2018, 54-5)
   “Hamas’s leaders rejected what they called the ‘Americanized reform.’ Still, they calmed their military front unilaterally…A few hours before Hamas purportedly agreed to formalize a prospective ceasefire, Israel assassinated al-Qassam’s leader Salah Shehadeh on July 22 [2002]. He was killed alongside 13 others, including 9 children. Palestinians saw [the killings] as proof that Israel was intent on undermining the delicate transformation  the PA was trying to orchestrate….This chain of events, to be repeated several times in the following months, indicated both Hamas’s readiness to suspend its armed struggle while engaging in domestic negotiations as well as Israel’s commitment to sustaining a military disposition toward the Palestinians. It is unclear whether a ceasefire would have in reality been implemented successfully. [H]amas’s leaders…refused to end suicide bombings within Israel unless Sharon ended his attacks on Palestinian civilians….[Indeed,] Sharon took unilateral measures to strengthen Israel’s hold on the territories while forcefully quashing any form of protest.” (Baconi 2018, 55)
   “As Hamas resumed its suicide bombings in the fall of 2002, a few days after Shehadeh’s assassination, Israel relaunched extensive operations in the territories… Sharon’s escalation ran counter to America’s attempts to calm the conflict ahead of its planned invasion of Iraq in March [2003]….Violent confrontations on the streets in Gaza between Hamas and the Palestinian forces were perceived by many as the precursors to a civil war.” (Baconi 2018, 55-6)
   “The volatility of the situation hastily prompted the convening of the Cairo National Dialogues in November 2002…As Hamas engaged in these talks, for a period of almost five months, it again suspended its suicide bombings. Ideologically, it had every incentive to retaliate, as Israel provocatively carried out 26 assassination attempts specifically targeting its members during that time.” (Baconi 2018, 56)
   “The Cairo talks were fraught. Hamas rejected the notion that armed struggle must end as a prerequisite for the withdrawal of Israeli troops. It viewed this formulation as one that legitimized Israel’s military action by suggesting it was merely a response to armed struggle rather than a natural extension of the occupation. Hamas’s leaders put forward compromises. Rather than cease its armed struggle unilaterally, Hamas maintained that it would stop targeting Israeli civilians in return for mutual guarantees from Israel. The Egyptian mediators overseeing these discussions communicated Hamas’s offer to Israel’s defense minister, Shaul Mofaz, seeking a commitment for a mutual ceasefire. Hamas’s conditions were rejected, however, effectively ending the Cairo talks in January 2003 without an agreement.” (Baconi 2018, 56-7)
   “In March 2003, a US-led coalition invaded Iraq….Underscoring the link that the Bush administration had drawn between Iraq and the Palestinians as dual beneficiaries of democratization, major restructuring of the PA was completed that same month. Mahmoud Abbas, a senior PLO leader who was favored by the Americans and Israelis for his explicit condemnation of armed resistance, became the Palestinian prime minister. This post was created specifically to curtail Arafat’s presidential power. … Abbas was a product of the recalibrated PLO, a person committed to the notion that self-determination would have to come through diplomatic negotiations with Israel.” (Baconi 2018, 57)
   “Soon afterward, on April 30, the Quartet finally [released] a set of parameters entitled the ‘Roadmap for Peace in the Middle East.’ … Instead of adopting the sequential approach, whereby the onus fell on Palestinians to de-escalate the conflict, the final version of the roadmap offered a more balanced strategy. While Palestinians were charged with completing their reform effort, preparing for elections and ceasing violence entirely, Israel was obliged to freeze settlement activity and withdraw its troops to the lines they had accommodated prior to the eruption of the intifada. [A]bbas adopted the roadmap… Sharon’s Likud party accepted the document with fourteen reservations that effectively emptied it of any content….Sharon indicated that before resurrecting the diplomatic process, Palestinians must first dismantle ‘the terrorist organizations.’” Thus the peace process awkwardly followed a sequential formula. (Baconi 2018, 57-8)
   “To meet the Palestinian obligation of ending violence, Abbas [in mid-2003] reached out to the factions to restart and formalize the ceasefire discussions…” Al-Aqsa Brigades would accept a unilateral ceasefire; “Hamas begrudgingly acquiesced to ceasefire discussions.” Hamas indicated a willingness to test “a conditional ceasefire for a few weeks, where the onus would be on Israel to release prisoners, stop home demolitions, and end targeted assassinations. This was a clear sign that Hamas’s demands had been tempered… Abbas stressed the need for Israeli cooperation before finalizing his agreement with Hamas. He implored Sharon to meet his obligations under the roadmap as he tried to shatter the illusion that violence could be controlled while Israel maintained its aggressive policies and settlement building.” (Baconi 2018, 58-9)
   “On June 10 [2003]…Israel carried out an assassination attempt on Rantissi in Gaza, once again ensuring that no ceasefire could emerge….Hamas swiftly executed a suicide attack in Jerusalem on June 11 [that] killed seventeen and injured close to sixty. The speed and scale of Hamas’s retaliation suggested that the movement had indeed been actively restraining earlier attacks as negotiations with the PA proceeded. They also underscored Sharon’s success in provoking responses from the movement, thereby ensuring no progress could be made on the political front. [However,] The assassination attempt failed to derail the domestic discussions entirely. After negotiations with other factions, Hamas announced on June 29 the suspension of all operations against Israel for a period of three months in return for an Israeli cessation of aggression, lifting the siege on Arafat, and releasing prisoners. Hamas’s ceasefire took hold unilaterally as Israel continued incursions into Nablus, Jenin, and Hebron and maintained targeted assassinations…” (Baconi 2018, 59)
   “The ceasefire held for July and August [2003] as the PA maintained pressure on Hamas to either disarm or extend the ceasefire by three additional months, which the movement rejected….[I]sraeli targeted assassinations dropped significantly following Hamas’s declaration of a ceasefire. But without progress on the peace front and with no signs that Israel might be willing to relinquish its hold on the territories, talk of disarmament was futile.” (Baconi 2018, 60)
   “On August 15, [2003] Israel assassinated a leader of Islamic Jihad. Four days later, in alleged defiance of leaders’ commitment to the ceasefire, a renegade Hamas bomber carried out an attack in Jerusalem killing 23 people and injuring more than 100. Following Hamas’s operation, the Israeli army was immediately given instructions to target Hamas’s leadership and all its cells in response. A few days later, Israel assassinated Abu Shanab, the force behind Hamas’s adherence to the ceasefire.” (Baconi 2018, 60)
   “Stressing that his credibility had been undermined by Israel’s intransigence and America’s refusal to pressure Israel to formally implement the roadmap, Abbas resigned on September 6 [2003]. Three hours later, Israel carried out an assassination attempt on Sheikh Yassin. Days later, it launched another assassination attempt on Mahmoud Zahhar, a senior Hamas leader based in Gaza, killing his son but failing to kill him….Hamas retaliated…with two suicide attacks on September 9, one in Jerusalem…” (Baconi 2018, 61)
   “By this point, the Palestinian political establishment had entirely collapsed and Sharon had expanded control over the territories….By the end of the intifada’s third year, Hamas, like the PLO before it, had come to understand the limitations of its armed struggle…Rather than prompting an end of the occupation through attrition, Hamas instead was repeatedly compelled to cease its armed struggle to safeguard the domestic front and to ease Israel’s military retaliation.” Even despite Hamas’s offers of unilateral ceasefires, “Abbas failed to elicit any concessions from Israel. “Any sense that Hamas was using armed struggle to end Israel’s occupation…was circumvented, as Israel positioned its response to the Second Intifada as an existential battle….Meanwhile, Hamas’s deep doubts that Israel would ever willingly let go of the territories were strengthened…[and therefore it] began looking for ways to make its project of jihad [more] effective…” (Baconi 2018, 61-2)

Background: Iran and Hamas’s Rockets
-“Iran first established ties with Hamas and PIJ [Palestinian Islamic Jihad] in the 1980s. Iran has since provided funding, weapons and training to the militant groups. Iran has transferred several types of artillery rockets — including Fajr 3 and Fajr 5 rockets as well as M302s originally made in Syria — to Gaza. Since 2006, Tehran has increasingly focused on supplying its regional allies and proxies, including Palestinian factions, with the knowhow and equipment to produce rockets locally. Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commanders have publicly said that their priorities are to improve their allies’ ability to operate Iranian-delivered rockets and build rockets and missiles.”
   “Hamas and PIJ have significantly improved their tactics as well as their ability to launch large quantities of rockets. The pace of rocket launches and the firing of whole volleys against far-away targets — including Tel Aviv (70 km or 45 miles from Gaza) — in May 2021 was unprecedented.”
   For more information on Hamas’s rocket arsenal go to: https://iranprimer.usip.org/index.php/blog/2021/may/19/irans-rockets-palestinian-groups

Jeffrey Rudolph, a college professor, was a regional representative of the East Timor Alert Network and presented a paper on its behalf at the United Nations. He was awarded the prestigious Cheryl Rosa Teresa Doran Prize upon graduation from McGill University’s faculty of law; has worked at one of the world’s largest public accounting firms; and, has taught at McGill University. He has prepared widely distributed quizzes on Israel-Palestine, Iran, Hamas, Terrorism, Saudi Arabia, US Inequality, the US Christian Right, Hezbollah, the Israeli Ultra-Orthodox, Qatar, China, and Egypt. These quizzes are available at, https://detailedpoliticalquizzes.wordpress.com/

Comments can be sent to: Israel-Palestine-Quiz@live.com

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