In the September issue of The Tattler, the article “Israel, Palestine, and the Controversies” analyzed the arguments made by those debating the Israel-Palestine conflict. While the article sought to be more analytical than argumentative, I felt that the arguments posed were extremely one-sided, and glossed over the Israeli point of view, strictly focusing on arguments made against Israel. I am the son of Israeli immigrants to the United States, and my whole extended family still lives in Israel. I am fluent in Hebrew, and speak it at home. While I am extremely proud of my heritage, and being Israeli is a large part of my identity, I recognize the flaws in the Israeli government and policy. To go one step further, I absolutely detest Benjamin Netanyahu (the Israeli prime minister), and I disapprove of almost all of his actions. Nevertheless, I feel that it is extremely unfair to look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict solely from the Palestinian viewpoint, which is how I felt about the aforementioned article.
For starters, I feel that one mistake that both the article and Western people as a whole make when analyzing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that they often confuse elements of Israel’s conflict with Gaza, and Israel’s occupation and possible annexation of the West Bank. I believe that it is highly misleading to conflate the two. The latter is inhumane, oppressive, and horrible both from a humanitarian standpoint and in terms of ever resolving the conflict. On the other hand, the conflict with Gaza cannot be so easily put in a nutshell that paints one side as in the wrong and the other as the victim. As such, when using the term “Palestine” as the term for either Gaza or the West Bank when analyzing a conflict with Israel, it misleads the audience to believe that the peoples of the West Bank and the peoples of Gaza are the same people, participating in the same conflicts.
The Gaza Strip is a small strip of land just south of Israel’s southern shore on the Mediterranean Sea. Home to 1.8 million people, Gaza is governed by Hamas, a terrorist organization that effectively serves as a military government. Hamas has governed Gaza since 2006, a year after Israel completely pulled out the region, both militarily and diplomatically. However, Hamas has served as a militant organization that has attacked Israel in many different forms since the 1980s. For the last 15 years, Hamas has consistently fired hundreds of rockets into Israel every year, targeting population centers both near and far, from my mother’s hometown of Ashkelon, the nearest coast city, all the way to Haifa on the north coast of the Mediterranean. This violence is the reason why every single industrial or residential home and building is required to have a missile-proof room with extra thick walls and reinforced ceilings. Every Israeli school has a large underground bomb shelter and practices escaping to the shelter in cases of an air-raid siren in a similar fashion that we practice fire drills.
To protect itself, Israel developed the Iron Dome missile interception system and was put into use for the first time in 2011. The Iron Dome is a missile interception system that intercepts and destroys missiles that are calculated to be headed towards population centers. Even so, the Iron Dome is not always successful, as whole missiles as well as fragments from intercepted missiles hit populated areas many times a year. In its first three years of use, the Iron Dome intercepted 1200 rockets and missiles fired from the Gaza Strip. The mere existence of the Iron Dome speaks to the level of constant threat Israeli civilians are under nearly every day.
The part where Israel receives criticism is in their retaliations to missile attacks from the Gaza Strip. Immediately following outbursts of rockets launched from Gaza, Israel responds with a flurry of attacks on military headquarters, arms factories, and missile launch sites. Historically as well as recently, more Palestinian civilians are killed in violence between Israel and Gaza than Israelis, a statistic that is often used to suggest that Israel is much more forceful and inhumane in their attacks. However, that suggestion is false, as not only does Israel pre-broadcast their intended locations for attack, Hamas uses and openly takes pride in the use of human shields. Hamas places missile launch sites in public centers, and near public buildings, publicly admitting to firing missiles from as little as 200 metres away from schools and hospitals. Then, when Israel broadcasts their intention to strike, Hamas does not allow civilians to leave the area of intended attack, resulting in civilian deaths technically from Israeli strikes, yet in reality as results of horrifying tactics used by Gaza’s own government.
This misinterpretation of the situation and the conflation of the complicated situations in both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank leads to people confusing Israel’s conflicts and retaliation against Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza as violence against an occupied territory, which Gaza is not. Additionally, this leads people to equate the humanitarian crisis in Gaza with the occupation of the West Bank, and while Israel’s settlement and occupation of the West Bank is inhumane, Israel is not to blame for the humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip, as Hamas siphons international aid into military funds.
In the article from the September issue, I felt that the Israeli perspective was largely ignored in many of the arguments. It also gave far too much credit to arguments that are backed up by the Hamas version of accounts, which should not be treated as credible, as Hamas is a terrorist group whose mission and only interest is to eradicate the State of Israel, and not to care for and protect the people it governs. When discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it is extremely important to distinguish between the conflict in the West Bank from the conflicts with Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Finally, it is essential that a variety of perspectives are considered, as it is misrepresentative of the long and complex conflict to simply level accusations at Israel.