The Gaza Strip is one of the most hopeless places I have ever been in my life.
Most of us will never step foot there, but if you’ve been, you won’t forget it. The corrugated tin roofs perched on rickety huts that people call home in the sprawling refugee camps. The open sewage. The poorly paved roads. The lack of basic infrastructure. The undernourished children.
But most of all there is the despair and anger in the eyes of adults, that always seems close to the surface. I was there as a young reporter in the late 1980s and again in the 1990s as violence flared anew. That persists today, as the attack on Israel that broke out this weekend made clear.
What is so striking, tragic in fact, is the obvious reality that Gaza could be a gem. This strip of land crowded with 2 million people — many still categorized as refugees five decades after the conflict in question — sits along the Mediterranean Sea, where it’s easy to envision a thriving port. A fishing industry. Resorts with beautiful beaches and tourism. An international airport.
None of that has ever happened for Gaza.
Instead, the current Islamic authoritarian government — Hamas (officially categorized as a terrorist organization by the United States) — spends its limited resources on other matters. On Saturday, it mustered its strength and treasure and focus to launch an attack on Israeli civilians. To slaughter 260 young people attending a music festival in the desert. To hunt down families on farms and kill them in their homes. To – if early reports are to be believed – rape women. To take more than 100 hostages, including the elderly, people with dementia, tiny children.
The mind reels at the barbarism on display, and true to horrific form, celebrated in some Palestinian quarters and, officially, in Iran. Also at the hopelessness of the gesture, because Hamas cannot vanquish Israel, of course. Cannot eliminate the Jewish state, as is its stated intention. And its attack only invites retaliation by one of the best equipped armies in the world.
As the Al-Jazeera anchor asked an Israeli expert on its air on Saturday: “How humiliated are Israelis right now?” As if that was the point.
It is folly, in fact. But it is the kind of folly that has defined this conflict, defying common sense and good intentions for 50 years and a dozen administrations.
This is an action that will live in infamy, and stain the Palestinian cause yet again. It will probably spell the end of Hamas, as Israel will not rest until it has eliminated every member of this organization that so brutally attacked its civilians. This new cycle of violence, after so many cycles before it, will – I fear – convince the last pie-eyed optimists that peace is not possible between Israel and Gaza.
You cannot begin to understand this one action without understanding the hubris, greed and entrenched emotion around what belongs to whom; whose victimhood is more virtuous; and what injustice is the real injustice.
I began my journalism career with the hope of understanding, and then explaining and telling both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I studied Hebrew, then Arabic, and jumped into the then-Palestinian territories (now Palestine) to seek to understand the root of the problem. If the world could see for themselves, if the stories could be told, I thought, a reasonable outcome would happen.
But it’s not a communication problem, it turns out. It’s a political problem by people who do not want to solve it. This was true for too many years for Yasser Arafat. It is true for Hamas.
In the ensuing decades, Israel has shifted from spunky underdog in the minds of many, to flawed regional power, to evil oppressor. None of those identities are right. Israel is complicated and full of disappointments, an exercise in the dastardly human condition.
But Hamas – I can’t find the gray there. They mirror the nihilism of Al-Qaeda, ISIS and the like. They have shown their colors.
My 89-year-old father is in Israel, visiting with my older brother and his family for the Jewish holidays. I am not that worried about them; they are in the middle of the country.
Instead, I worry for the death of hope. I mourn for the dead and wounded, for the kidnapped, the tortured. And I mourn for the suffering that will be visited on so many Palestinians who have no control over their own destiny. I mourn for the despair in the hearts of so many who would dream of peaceful coexistence.
