Gaza War: Perpetual Violence | nd-aktuell.de

I was born three years after the Nakba in the West Bank city of Ramallah, where my family was expelled from their home on the Jaffa coast. When I was growing up, I always heard about the lost land and the shock and horror of what had happened to us…” After studying in Beirut and London, Raja Shehadeh is now living as a lawyer in the place of his birth. As a lawyer, his father was one of the earliest advocates of a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. How he was murdered under unclear circumstances is still on his son’s mind to this day. The war in Gaza did not begin with the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023.

“What does Israel fear from Palestine?” – that can be answered with one word: violence. If you reverse the question, the same thing comes out. The Jews, who were persecuted in many places, have long wanted to have their own state. The British colonial power’s agreement to establish a “national home” for the Jewish people in Palestine, as Foreign Minister Balfour signaled to Baron Lionel Walter Rothschild on November 2, 1917, did not offer a solution for the Arabs living there, nor did the UN partition plan for Palestine of November 29, 1947. As if it were “an empty desert” that “waited 2,000 years for its original and true owners, the Jews, to return and repopulate it,” writes Raja Shehadeh, who wrote the violent denounces the expulsion of the Palestinians as well as their disenfranchised status in the occupied territories, which he compares to apartheid in South Africa.

“Why hasn’t the world put pressure on Israel to promote peace?” This is probably explained not only by the “interests of the weapons producers” and the compensation that might have to be paid to the Palestinians. But just as they have a right to have their interests taken seriously, Israel’s right to exist must not be questioned when it comes to peace. Precisely because there is “a gap between the European Ashkenazi Jews and the Oriental Mizrahi Jews,” Raja Shehadeh clearly sees the national-religious significance of “Eretz Yisrael.” “Israel is maintaining the conflict because it needs the conflict for its existence,” he quoted former Mossad chief Tardo Pardo as saying.

As the author accuses in many details of the violence against his people, he leaves it to us to think through the two sides of this almost insoluble conflict, to resolve a conflict within himself in the face of German guilt in the trauma that is further deepened by Palestinian resistance. “In the area where we live, we have to defend ourselves against the wild beasts,” Netanyahu is quoted as saying by Shehadeh. When he took office a second time in 2009, he pursued “a policy of strengthening Hamas at the expense of the Palestinian Authority” and “allowed Qatar to bring almost a billion dollars to Gaza.” If the October 7 attack was “well planned,” the Israeli response could actually have been predicted. And now the bloodbath in Lebanon…

“With over two million inhabitants in an area of ​​365 square kilometers, the Gaza Strip has one of the highest population densities in the world.” More than 70 percent are refugees or descendants of refugees, and almost half are under 18 years old. More than 40,000 were killed, two thirds of them women and children. According to the survey, however, “94 percent of Jews and 82 percent of the general Israeli population are of the opinion that the Israeli Defense Forces used the right (or not enough) firepower in the Gaza Strip.”

The International Court of Justice’s call of January 26, 2024 to “refrain from all acts that could fall under the Genocide Convention” is seen as a triumph in the book, as is US President Biden’s statement a few days later against settler violence and forced displacement. “On February 21, the Knesset approved the government’s resolution opposing any unilateral declaration on the establishment of a Palestinian state.” There is no alternative for the two peoples to live together, as Raja Shehadeh believes and refers to his father’s plan from 1967 that a Palestinian state should be founded along the 1947 partition borders, with a capital in Jerusalem. “Hope for a just peace”: But what if there are opposing views of justice?

I once again think of the words of the Israeli writer Amos Oz (1939–2018), about whom an insightful biography by Robert Alter has just been published. “The basis of Amos’s understanding of Jewish national existence is the conviction that the Jews were and will remain one people,” it says. He always doubted that a two-state solution would be able to resolve the conflict, but the idea that Israelis and Palestinians would have to come together “in a single state” and “learn to live amicably with one another” was, realistically speaking, even less practical. Simply because the majority of the population would “soon be Palestinian,” it would be the end of the Jewish state.

“We are not alone in this country.” But Palestinians should not deny the Israelis this right in the fight to be “an independent people in their own country”. An insoluble conflict. In such cases, Amos Oz said, there are two dramatic solutions. In the Shakespearean one, one side would win and the stage would be full of corpses. If things were like Chekhov, no one would get exactly what they wanted. Everyone is sad but alive. Human life as the highest value: when has politics ever cared about it?

Raja Shehadeh: What does Israel fear from Palestine? Of the hope for a just peace. Transl. v. Emil Fadel. Westend, 107 pages, br., 15 €.
Robert Alter: Amos Oz. Author, peace activist, icon. Suhrkamp, ​​223 p., hardcover, €26.