Extra: Eyes for an Eye

PARIS — When the unthinkable burst onto TV screens Saturday, I flashed back to Hebron in 1996. My AP dispatch began: “After four deadly days, Jews and Arabs have forced down the lid on Pandora’s Box, but few Palestinians speak of the ‘peace process’ without a sneer or a sigh.”

And now this.

Reporters who have watched Holy Land horror over generations were stunned, like everyone else, at Hamas’ cruel coordinated onslaught that caught Israeli intelligence off guard. But few were surprised that smoldering hatreds had finally flamed into a likely unwinnable war.

A thundering artillery prelude killed 700 men, women and children in Gaza by Tuesday as the death toll in Israel reached 900. Armored columns amassed at the border to roll in.

Israel might cripple Hamas, but the fallout could be worse. Across the world, people are befuddled by contradictory sources, mistaken impressions and unshakeable bias at opposing extremes. The threat of Middle East war — and spiking antisemitism — is hard to exaggerate.

The need to fight back hard unites fractious Israeli parties. But in Washington, self-serving Republicans and a speaker-less House hamstring a road-tested president who pledges support to a close ally while trying to push it toward lasting coexistence with Palestine.

————

This one is tough. Real friends on Facebook post heart-stopping anguish, with pictures of happy young people now in Gaza terrified of captors who threaten beheading or an errant shell from their own defense forces. One shows long lines to donate blood.

Adva Yaffar has no word about her 85-year-old grandmother, a Holocaust survivor kidnapped in her golf cart. One friend wants a fast investigation to see why Israel was so blindsided. “We are fine but sad and furious at our corrupt and incompetent government,” she wrote. “Bibi should be the first to go.”

Rosenblum is a giveaway. As a kid, I put lunch money in little blue boxes to plant trees in Israel. If hardly religious, I value my roots and can tell a Haggaddah from Häagen-Dazs. This is a time to say that if Jews had a pope, it would not likely be from the Likud — or the Republican — Party.

All that said, I’m above all a reporter committed to facts as I see them.

Reality is never just opposing sides but rather separate individuals, each with their own ideas of how things should be. Jews found a homeland on ground contested for millennia. Lines on a British mandate map defined Israel. The rest was Palestine. Simple. That got complicated fast.

Almost immediately, fledging Israel was fighting for its life. The balance shifted in 1967. Gamal Abdel Nasser sent tanks from Egypt, vowing to wipe Israel off the map. Six days later, the Sinai was littered with boots shed by his soldiers hurrying home. And then all the rest.

On that September in 1996 I took the West Bank highway to Hebron with a sidekick, Jerome Delay, an Associated Press photographer skilled at skirting Israeli roadblocks. We screeched to a halt among rock-throwing kids. When their arms got tired, they approached our Land Rover.

“Why did you stop?” one asked. Because, we said, we want to listen to you. The mood changed fast. They were incensed because an Israeli patrol had earlier paused there and fired hard plastic bullets randomly, some hitting a house atop a nearby hill. We drove up to check.

Ibrahim al-Zamareh was sputtering with rage. His wife, Insherah, had just come back from the hospital with a bandage over her right eye, blinded by one of those “rubber” bullets. She groaned in pain on the sofa. Their son-in-law, in a Toronto Blue Jays t-shirt, glowered.

“Look!” al-Zamareh said, pointing to a photo of his son, ambushed and killed by extremist Jewish settlers the year before, not long after Palestinians abandoned their first intifada uprising.

“We stopped intifada because we wanted peace,” he said. “If we have to start again, we are ready to go 100 years. We believed in this process. We put flowers in our gun barrels and forgot all our martyrs. Then this Netanyahu came and damaged it all…”

————

Benjamin Netanyahu was prime minister until 1989. He soon returned to office and pushed hard to colonize the West Bank with modern gated towns meant to last. He abandoned Gaza as ungovernable but kept it fenced in under heavy surveillance.

After 2016 he flourished under his long-time friend, Donald Trump. Backed by fanatic Zionist zealots in his cabinets, he doubled down on a single-state Israel, with Palestinians as a permanent underclass. That fanned smoldering embers.

As it happens, the news broke on early Saturday while I was reading dispatches — entries in the upcoming Bayeux-Calvados War Correspondents Prize — by a reporter and photographer who walked the long narrow enclave from the Erez entry point to the Egyptian border at Rafah.

Gazans, from hardscrabble farmers to wealthy families, described the frustration of being governed by Hamas authorities who use them as pawns while trapped in humiliating apartheid by the Israeli military and border guards who let only a select few through the gates.

Many object to the term, apartheid. But I covered South Africa in the bad old days. It is much worse in Gaza and the West Bank. In 1981, I made my own first tour of the 25-mile strip, just over twice the area of Washington, D.C.

A father I met explained with bitter acceptance the galling fait accompli. Arab states offered little aid, some using Gaza’s squalor to highlight lack of Israeli concern. As with the West Bank, Gaza peace talks got nowhere because of intransigence by hardliners on one side or another.

His son, perhaps eight, stared up at me. We had no common language, but the look in his eyes was enough: “If you think I’m going to put up with what my old man does, you’re crazy.”

The next year, waiting to tag along on Ariel Sharon’s Lebanon invasion, I interviewed a young woman at a northern beach town. She worried that Israeli soldiers could be killed. “We Israelis aren’t like the Arabs. We care about our sons and brothers.”

There was hope at the other extreme. On Thursday nights in Tel Aviv, liberal lawyers in love crowded bars to talk about more than politics. When pressed, many mocked ultra-religious “black hats” in Jerusalem who called Palestinian sympathizers “self-hating Jews.” In sum, ominous even back then.

————

Hamas’s surprise brutality blasts past any human norm. Horrific is a tepid cliché for slaughtering 260 young people at a desert rave on a joyous holiday or seizing a Holocaust survivor in her wheelchair as a hostage bargaining chip. Israel’s blind rage is easy to understand.

It dwarfs 9/11, a one-time aerial sucker punch plotted from a world away by a few jihadis. It killed 3,000 Americans. Israel lost 800, one by one. Adjusting for population, Israel lost 10 times the lives. But Pearl Harbor? Terrorists justify it as a war of liberation, not conquest.

Plainly, the crux of the plan was to expose impregnable Israel as vulnerable. If Hamas provoked a maddened overkill, global opinion would shift against Israel — and Jews — while spurring Iran-backed militias, perhaps Iran itself, to join the fight.

Sam Kiley, an old hand at covering guerrilla war, pegged it on CNN. Hamas counted on Israeli generals for a massive riposte, relying on sympathy in America and Europe for the good guys. But much of the world would see that David and Goliath had reversed roles.

It was monstrous but so far effective. Hamas leaders hunker in shelters with more than 100 hostages, not in the office towers and other buildings that artillery reduced to rubble. In the first hours, hundreds of dead and thousands of wounded were “collateral damage.”

Defense Minister Yoav Gallant set the tone. "We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly," he said. "I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed."

The next day, Stephen Sackur on BBC’s “Hard Talk” grilled Knesset member Danny Danon, head of the defense committee, ex-ambassador to the U.N. and a long-time aide to Ariel Sharon.

Sackur relayed widespread charges of collective punishment, stopping short of adding the obvious. That’s what Germans did in World War II. Danon said Israel’s priority was protecting Israelis. Yes, some civilians might be hurt, but they were warned to get out the way. It was not a siege, he added. Supplies could come in from Egypt, as if the Egyptians would open the border.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres spoke grimly as troops amassed for a ground invasion, accusing Israel of flouting international law. “Civilian structures must never be a target,” he said. U.N. shelters were overrun, he added, and people urgently needed basic supplies, food and medical care.

Israel needs security, Guterres said, but Palestinians must see an end to occupation. “This does not come in a vacuum,” he said. “The vicious circle of bloodshed must stop…Palestinians must see a clear perspective for the establishment of their own state.”

————

In America, Republicans twist facts to blame Democrats. They claim Iran paid for the war with $6 billion Biden unblocked in a prisoner swap. That money, only for humanitarian aid, has not yet dispersed. Antony Blinken put it diplomatically: “They are misinformed or misinforming.”

Either way, that obscures the point. Trump rejected the Iran nuclear deal with inflammatory insults. More than about arms, it edged an ancient, multifaceted nation back toward normalcy to loosen the hold of a medieval theocracy. Instead, it is a bitter foe that bankrolls jihadist.

Hamas has evolved on its own. Security analysts say it now communicates without phones, eluding Israeli eavesdropping, and thwarts informants by operating in tightly isolated cells. Its commandos broke through the fence with a bulldozer and captured Israeli transports.

The greatest damage to Israel might be new scrutiny that tarnishes its gleaming image among so many American voters. For decades, it has been a democratic anchor point in a tough neighborhood. It receives $3 billion a year in military aid. Biden just ordered warships and combat aircraft into the eastern Mediterranean, while promising yet more backing for Israel.

But news media are looking harder at a chorus of outage by local and foreign journalists who cover the West Bank.

In mid 2021, fed-up young militants, some in their teens, formed the Jenin Brigades to oppose harsh Israeli control in the old city and around a sprawling refugee camp. Sam Kiley’s attached CNN piece explains what they do and why.

Last year, an Israeli soldier shot Shireen Abu Aklah of Al Jazeera in the back despite big blue letters reading, “PRESS.” She was a long-time popular figure, and colleagues raised hell. Israel first blamed Palestinians, then a stray Israeli round. But investigations showed otherwise.

In May this year, the Washington-based Committee to Project Journalists reported that the Israel Defense Forces killed at least 20 journalists over the past 22 years, but military investigators have held no one to account.

For now, a suffering Israel, mourning an indescribable atrocity, has a war to win. Politics are on hold, and so are massive weekly rallies opposing Netanyahu’s hardline faction assault on the courts and democracy.

In the past, Yasir Arafat and Palestine Liberation Organization factions only demanded a separate but equal state. Hamas wants it all, from the sea to the Jordan River. Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert says war is unavoidable, but afterward fresh peace talks are essential.

As tanks roll toward Gaza, Israel is united. “This will change the Middle East,” Netanyahu told Israelis. He did not say how.

————

https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/28/middleeast/palestinian-militants-jenin-west-bank-intl-cmd/index.html

https://cpj.org/reports/2023/05/deadly-pattern-20-journalists-died-by-israeli-military-fire-in-22-years-no-one-has-been-held-accountable/#:~:text=Deadly%20Pattern%3A%2020%20journalists%20died,one%20has%20been%20held%20accountable.