THE RIGHT OF ISRAEL

 

 - by Giuseppe Savagnone*

  Just a group of terrorists?

 In the face of the savage violence of Hamas's attack on Israel, the horror and unconditional solidarity of almost the entire Western world appear fully justified. A solidarity that immediately extended to the Jewish state's reactions to its attackers. 'Israel has the right to defend itself', was the phrase that resounded on the lips of politicians, of intellectuals, and which Pope Francis also made his own.

  There is, however, something unsaid in this incontrovertible statement that should be clarified, and that concerns the recipients and modalities of this defensive action.

  "We will crush terrorists, like Isis," Netanyahu promised. The question, however, is whether we are really only in front of a group of terrorists, of whom the two million people living in the Gaza Strip, controlled by Hamas (one million two hundred thousand are Palestinian refugees) would be "hostages", as Giuliano Ferrara claimed at the torchlight procession for Israel.

  In reality, the recent history of Gaza strongly casts doubt on this narrative. The Israelis (who in 1967 had wrested it from Egypt in the 'six-day war') withdrew in 2005, leaving it under the control of the Palestinian National Authority, with which the Tel Aviv government, in the Oslo accords, had made a pact back in 1993. But in the elections held the following year, in 2006, it was not this more moderate fringe that won, but the extremist Islamic movement of Hamas, which has been in power ever since.

  An outcome due to the growing discredit of the Palestinian Authority, which, under the leadership of the former President Abu Mazen, has long since lost all determination in claiming the rights of the Palestinian people and is increasingly drowning in corruption. So much so that today, even in the West Bank, the other territory of Palestine where Abu Mazen is still in power, he has avoided calling new elections for years because all the polls predict, should they take place, the sure victory of Hamas.

  Not even in Gaza, in fact, have there been new elections since 2006. And it is certainly not a liberal regime, as demonstrated by the systematic repression of women's rights - along the same lines as Iran, the Shiite Islamic state to which Hamas is closest - and of all opponents in general.

  A people of despair

 But to rally behind its government the people of the Strip came to the rescue, against its own intentions, precisely Israel which, in reaction to the 2006 election results, imposed a total embargo on the region, with a suffocating control of people and goods entering or leaving, leading to a disheartening condition of dependence and a further impoverishment of the inhabitants.

  The International Red Cross declared the illegality of this policy, which entailed 'collective punishment for the people living in the Gaza Strip' - two million human beings -, turning it into what the non-governmental organisation Human Rights Watch called 'an open-air prison' last year, but to no avail.

  Thus, social anger - exasperated by these ruthless measures and the Palestinian Authority's culpable inertia - pushed the new generations into the arms of Hamas, which ended up expressing the despair of a hopeless people. In the end, today it is this people that is the real target of Israel's 'defence' action.

  It is, after all, also for logistical reasons. 'We must liberate Gaza even with bombs, even with tanks, even with the army', Giuliano Ferrara shouted to roaring applause in his fiery speech.

  But in a territory that is among the most densely populated in the world, with two million people crammed into an area of 360 square kilometres, the bombs are inevitably destined to hit mostly civilians. The toll of six days of air raids on the Strip is more than 1,500 dead, including 500 children.

  So it was with the embargo imposed by Israel in 2007. So it is now for the total blockade of fuel, water and light with which the Jewish State has responded to the Hamas attack. It is not only the 'terrorists' who are suffering, but the poor people, men, women and children, who are at the point of exhaustion. Even hospitals report that they can no longer operate their equipment, starting with operating theatres and incubators to save the lives of newborn babies, without electricity.

  It is strange that so many acute Western observers - journalists, political personalities, intellectuals - rightly horrified at the 'slaughter of the innocent' perpetrated by Hamas, have nothing to object, indeed in many cases applaud, this massacre of Palestinian children and women.

On this line of ruthless violence towards the population is also the latest order given by the Israeli military command, which ordered the evacuation within 24 hours of the north of the Strip. In this way, the poor people of this area - one million human beings, many of whom had already been driven out of their land, taken by the Israelis, and were living there as refugees - are forced, from one day to the next, to abandon their homes, their poor jobs, their world.

  A counter-terrorism that looks like terrorism

 But with this we are also faced with the answer to the second question, that of how. A few days ago, an out-of-the-blue newspaper headlined: 'Counter-terrorism is triggered. It looks a lot like terrorism'. Where the difference between war and terrorism is that the former is still subject to rules, established internationally, and targets enemy military personnel in order to destroy them, while the latter has no rules and, rather than defeating an army, aims to terrorise the civilian population.

  Now, in reality, this is the tactic of Hamas, which certainly cannot compete with Israel's military apparatus, but - as it did in the last attack - aims to strike the adversary by sowing fear. However, the tactics of the Jewish State are also very similar to this, as it knows full well that it cannot strike at the heart of the Hamas fighters - protected by a network of 45 km of fortified underground tunnels - with its air raids, but inflicts on the Palestinian population, in addition to the bombs, a series of hardships and inconveniences, in the hope (which has turned out to be fallacious, as we saw earlier) of detaching it from the armed organisation, without realising that it is playing its own game.

  Also part of this style is the Israeli air force's use of weapons banned by international conventions, such as white phosphorus bombs, which are banned by international conventions because they cause terrible burns and, in those who survive, serious illnesses.

  If the Jewish children burned by Hamas arouse our horror, no less so does the thought that there are so many Palestinians suffering the same fate these days. A tragic symmetry of monstrosities, which, absurdly, is not reflected in the assessments of Western public opinion, rightly shocked by the former, strangely insensitive to the latter.

 The importance of memory

 But the dramatic events of these days must be understood in the light of a history, which certainly cannot be invoked to mitigate the absolute condemnation of the atrocities committed by Hamas, even if it helps to understand their origin.

 A history that begins in 1947, when a United Nations General Assembly resolution established the constitution and coexistence of a Jewish and a Palestinian state. Jerusalem was to be an international zone.

 Although neither Palestinians nor Israelis ever accepted this partition, the former because they felt robbed of a land they had inhabited for almost two thousand years and from which they were now driven out, the latter because they saw in it the possibility of a return to their origins and wanted it all.

 In reality, more than seventy-five years later, that resolution remains unfulfilled. The Palestinian state never came into being and the territories that should have been itss, according to the UN resolution, are illegally occupied by Israel, except for the Gaza Strip and part of the West Bank, which do not even have territorial continuity. As for Jerusalem, it was proclaimed capital of Israel in 1980.

  What is more, in the territories that still remain to the Palestinians and are under its control, the Israeli government has in recent years multiplied new settlements of settlers, further violating the UN resolution.

  Since 2002, then, the Israeli government, in a decision condemned by the Court of Justice and the European Union, erected a fortified wall more than 300 km long separating the most important Palestinian territories in the West Bank from Israel, separating families and communities living and working on either side of the wall.

  The United Nations has explicitly declared these obvious prevarications illegal on several occasions, but neither Israel nor its allies - first and foremost the United States - took any notice of them.

  Lately, then, President Netanyahu - grappling with heavy accusations of corruption and needing, in order to escape prosecution, to strengthen the consensus of the extreme right, has endorsed others, this time going against the advice even of President Biden, who vainly tried to dissuade him. Then the deluge. Which, however, as should be clear, did not come 'out of the blue'.

To fight monsters

'The sleep of reason breeds monsters', wrote Goya. On both sides, many have been unleashed in this ruthless conflict, with appalling human costs. One does not solve the problem by erasing memory and reducing everything, as one tries to do, to a phenomenon of 'terrorism'.

  Hamas is not Isis, because it has behind it a people whose rights have been recognised by the UN and systematically trampled upon.

 In turn, one cannot claim to start, as Hamas does, from the premise that Israel has no right to exist. Only a mutual recognition - which for a moment seemed to have been achieved in Oslo - can constitute a real solution.

  It is necessary to strengthen, on both the Israeli and the Palestinian side, the fringes - which do exist - of reasonable people capable of reopening dialogue. Any justification of inhuman behaviour, on either side, is a favour done to the monster party.

  *Writer and Editorialist. Responsible for the website of the Pastoral Care of Culture of the Archdiocese of Palermo, www.tuttavia.eu