How the war killed my mother

Tareq S. Hajjaj

May 16, 2024

Today, I sit in Egypt with my wife and son. I thought my mother would be with us. Rest in peace, my beloved. I am so sorry I couldn't save you.

 

The old woman sits on her bed next to the window. Although she cannot see it, the warm sun of her homeland drenches her in light. She places her head in her hands, thinking out loud about how she spent her entire life trying to escape Israel’s bombs. In the background, the same window that brings in the light also lets in the constant buzzing of the warplanes and drones, punctuated by shelling and bombing. Though she cannot see them, she hears every boom, and feels the ground every time it shakes.

That old woman by the window was my mother.

For the past five years, I was her primary caretaker, as she suffered from blindness and a host of other medical conditions, including heart disease and a broken hip. I spent almost every night for the past five years lying awake at night, worried that she might need me.

She always used to say “forgive me,” out of guilt, but I always responded by telling her that she was my treasure, that she was the reason for every blessed and good thing in my life.

My family and I have been displaced five times so far during the ongoing war against Palestinian existence in Gaza. We are a family of eight siblings, and I am the youngest. Everyone is married, and some of my nieces and nephews are even older than me.

We all used to live in the same building in our home in al-Shuja’iyya, Gaza City. There were 23 of us in that building, and 22 more living in the surrounding neighborhood. The war separated all of us in October. By November, the entire building had been destroyed. Throughout everything, my elderly mother stayed with me, close in my arms, as she had done my entire life. 

Our fourth displacement was to Rafah, where we stayed alongside 1.7 million other Palestinians. My mother, myself, my 1-year-old son Qais, and my wife Timaa arrived at an abandoned house in Rafah with my father-in-law’s family of four. The rest of my extended family, my siblings, nieces, and nephews — everyone who used to see my mother every day for our entire lives — were scattered across Gaza.

In February, two months after we arrived in Rafah, my mother fell ill. By a stroke of luck and tenacity, I was able to get her seen by a doctor amid the bombings and the ground invasion and the overwhelmed hospitals. The doctor prescribed her medications that were nowhere to be found in all of Rafah. As I carted her between hospitals and medical centers, none of which were equipped to take her in as a patient, her situation continued to deteriorate. They gave me some available medications, but nothing was working. Eventually, she stopped sleeping at night. Then she was no longer able to walk by herself.

I called my brother Osama for help. He came from Khan Younis immediately.

We took her to the European Hospital, just on the border of Khan Younis and Rafah. It was the closest hospital and the only major functioning hospital in the south. When the doctors examined her, they ordered her to be admitted.

In a situation unique to Gaza, and unimaginable to other people, it was because of her worsened health condition and her admittance to the European Hospital that she was finally able to reunite with my nieces and nephews — her grandchildren — who she hadn’t seen in months due to the fact that we were in Rafah while they had been sheltering on the hospital grounds.

When she arrived at the hospital, my family saw her for the first time since the war broke out. They ran to her and hugged her.

Despite the circumstances, it was a joyous moment. At the time, she did not know that my eldest brother had been injured after the home they were in was bombed, trapping him and his family under the rubble for an entire night before they were rescued. She didn’t know that her brother, my uncle, had been killed, or that our family home had been destroyed. These are the things I had to keep from her for fear of what the news might do to her. For months, I believed that all of her fears, all the terrifying moments she had lived through, the displacement, the constant terror of the bombs — all of that would be too much for her tired heart.

And that day in the European Hospital, I think I was right. When someone told her about my brother’s injury, her sadness was inconsolable.

By the end of that day in the hospital, I had to make an impossible choice — either stay at the hospital and leave my wife and son behind in Rafah, or rejoin them and abandon my mother in Khan Younis. I tried to strike a balance and left my mother with my brother Osama. Every morning for the next several weeks, I left my family in Rafah in the mornings, and before the evening, I left my other family at the hospital in Khan Younis and went back to my family in Rafah.

For one month I lived through that agony, every time saying goodbye to my son like it was the last time. And every night, I lived that same agony when I said goodbye to my mother. Would I survive the night and see her again tomorrow?

As the days went on, the hospital was not a hospital anymore. It was flooded with displaced families who had taken over all the unoccupied patient rooms and beds. Even the corridors were full of people, sleeping on blankets and whatever they could find. It was not a healthy environment for anyone, let alone patients. The floors were dirty, and kids who had spent months in hospital corridors with nothing to play with now made toys out of medical waste and ran barefoot in the hospital and its grounds. All the while, my mother couldn’t see any of these things, but she could hear the commotion, the sound of the bombs raining down in the distance, and the din of the crowds and the cries and screams of the injured around her.

A group of doctors were able to give her minimal medications, and I began to feel that it was a mistake to move her to the hospital. But then again, I feared that I would regret it even more if she died at home, helpless and with no medical care. She needs the care, I told myself. This is the only option we have.

Three weeks in, her kidneys started to fail. Doctors said they would try their best to avoid reaching the point of needing dialysis, “because there is no chance she will be able to handle kidney dialysis,” one doctor told me. Her body was too weak to endure the process. It was the same reason a doctor gave us many years ago when we sought treatment to try and save her eyesight.

The first couple of days after they put her on medications for her kidneys, she did not get any better, but she didn’t get worse either. I started to come to the realization that she could not stay here anymore. I considered her psychological health first and the toll it was taking on her physical health. I told her dozens of times that we should go back to Rafah, to the house where our family was, but she said no. 

“As long as they treat me, I will stay. I may get better and will be able to walk again, I’m very sick and tired,” she said when I insisted that we return to Rafah. “I will not forgive you if you take me out without finishing my treatment.”

And so she stayed there.

And I kept going back and forth between the European Hospital and my family in Rafah. I didn’t consider the fact that the army was shelling Salah al-Din road and slowly encroaching upon Khan Younis.

She was my mother. I couldn’t leave her, even for a single day. She is the only person who loves me more than herself. In Islam, we believe that our mothers are our keys to heaven, and that paradise lies at their feet. I know this to be true. My mother was the key to my prayers being answered, the gate between myself and God. She was and always will be the reason I have had good fortune in my life.

And even though she is my mother, sometimes I feel like she is my little daughter. I knew that she was getting older and sicker, and so I wanted to give her the best moments I could, even in this horrible war.

So I did not miss any opportunity to see her, not a single day — except for one. It was a dreadful day when I had to stand in lines for hours to access an ATM in Rafah, where there were only three ATMs and practically no cash for 1.7 million people.

That was the one time I didn’t see my mother — not just during the month she spent at the hospital, not just during the war, but during my entire life in Gaza. I missed her that day.

The day after, she went into a coma.

Alongside her kidney problems, she suffered from a stroke, the second in just a few years. She needed to be intubated and given special nutrition that had to be administered through a feeding tube which the hospital did not have. The doctor wrote the prescription for the supplement — Ensure Plus — and asked me to go out and find it. I hoped that my search through Rafah’s pharmacies would not leave me empty-handed. I was disappointed.

When it became hopeless, I went back to the doctor in frustration and asked him how a hospital so large could not secure nutrition for its patients and how he expected me to find it. The doctor understood my anger. He knew what I was losing, and he knew that it didn’t have to be this way. 

Day by day, with no proper food or treatment, her body stopped responding to medications. Doctors started saying that there was nothing they could do. She spent 10 days in a coma, breathing, opening her eyes, sometimes not responding to anything. But even though she was not responsive, her body was shaking every second with the sound of every bomb, every scream of every person in the hospital. Once again, the fear that put her here was still taking its toll. 

I started to say goodbye to her for 10 days. Every day I took every moment to keep her in my arms. I wanted to feel her warm face next to mine before it got cold. I was storing her smile in my mind and the feeling of her gray hair between my fingertips. I felt every day of my entire life pass before me, as I held her hands all day and lay next to her in her hospital bed. 

I know that death is coming for all of us. We do not know how and when, but sometimes we can see the signs. I witnessed the death of my father two years ago. I thought after that that I would get to spend more time with my mom, but every day in that hospital, I grew more devastated with time. When I started to give up hope that she would live, I started to at least hope that I could bury her next to my father in the cemetery in Gaza. But I knew this was even more unlikely than her making a full recovery.

My mother, my beautiful, sweet beloved mother, the one who makes me believe that good deeds will always come back to me in different and more generous forms — I wished she would never die. But these days in Gaza wishes rarely come true.

At 2 a.m. on March 4, my nephew called me from Khan Younis. I was sleeping in Rafah.

“My condolences,” he said. I asked, “for whom?” He told me that she had passed away. I couldn’t believe it. How could she die without me holding her hand?

“How?” I demanded of my nephew. I was trying to tell him that I was there all day. I kept asking him, “You’re not serious, right?”

Then my brother Osama called me. He confirmed her death and tried hard to make me believe that she was in a better place.

Oh, Mom, I tried my best. I tried so hard to get you out of Gaza, to get you to any hospital in Egypt, but I couldn’t. I tried to get you the medication and the supplements you needed, but I wasn’t able to. Oh Mom, even dying in a decent grave is impossible. Cemeteries are full and now people bury their loved ones in temporary cemeteries near the hospital. Some people bury their loved ones in the medians between the highway, or on the side of the road. Will that be us? Will I have to put you inside a plastic bag and bury you under the ground on the roadside, in a makeshift grave built of stones and covered in cement?

My thoughts tortured me the rest of the night.

Everybody around me was sleeping. It’s three in the morning, and I can’t move from Rafah to Khan Younis. It’s not safe. I will find no one to drive me, and it is too far and dangerous.

As the sun slowly started to creep in through the window, the reality of losing my mother began to settle in. I slowly lay down on my mattress, covering my head with my blanket, and I couldn’t hold my tears any longer. Every moment in my life with my mom began to fill my mind.

I recall how hard my mother worked her entire life to have her big family and give us a good life. I recall every moment as a child when I would lie down next to her head on her pillow and she hugged every part of my body. I recall that year when I tried my best to teach her how to write her name. She never got the chance to receive an education, but she taught me how to be a human. She taught me how to have mercy in my heart and how to forgive. And she taught me how to be a good son.

The last week of her life, when she wasn’t responding to anything around her, I was talking to her as usual, and I told her, “If you are listening, please just move your finger.” And she did.

So I told her everything I wanted her to know. I told her that I prayed that she would survive, even if it meant I would spend my entire life serving her and taking care of her. I told her how I was lucky to be her son and how much I loved her. I told her that I registered her name on a list to go to Egypt and that we were waiting our turn.

Today, I sit in Egypt with my wife and son. I thought my mom would be with us. I never imagined she would choose a different destination.

Rest in peace, my beloved. I am so sorry I couldn’t save you.

 

How do we tell the story of the Nakba when the plot hasn’t ended?

Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani

May 15, 2024

Elias Khoury’s new book encapsulates the symbiotic relationship between literature and the Nakba, exploring its nature as a continuum of calamities.

In 2013, Elias Khoury, the renowned Lebanese novelist and public intellectual, delivered a speech from Beirut via Skype to a group of 250 Palestinian activists. The activists had just established an encampment in the E1 area of the occupied West Bank, located between Jerusalem and Jericho, as an act of resistance. They called their encampment “Bab Al-Shams,” after Khoury’s novel of the same name.

In contrast to the activists, Khoury has never lived in Palestine, nor has he ever even been granted the opportunity to visit. Nevertheless, he told the activists: “I will not say, ‘I wish I were with you,’ for I am with you … This is the Palestine that Yunis envisioned in the novel Bab Al-Shams.”

The community of Bab Al-Shams lasted a mere two days before the Israeli army dismantled it. Undeterred, Palestinians attempted to rebuild it, calling it “The Grandchildren of Yunis” — this time, named after one of the novel’s central protagonists — only to see its swift destruction once again. After this second demolition, Khoury remarked that “the village may be erased, but literature cannot be.” This insight, vividly encapsulates Khoury’s view of the necessarily symbiotic relationship between literature and the Nakba.

Rarely do writers have the honor of seeing their words quite literally transform into reality, at least in their lifetimes. The establishment of Bab al-Shams, brief though its existence was, exemplifies the way in which Khoury enacts the evocative power of literature that he identifies in Ghassan Kanafani, one of his most prominent literary forebears. In an essay commemorating the assassinated writer and thinker, Khoury emphasizes Kanafani’s role as the first chronicler of Palestine after the Nakba and shows the crucial role of literature in imagining the nation. Khoury, it must be said, is part of this tradition himself.

The establishment and destruction of Bab Al-Shams also echoes the dispossession of the Nakba, an echo surely not lost on Khoury, who has spent much of the last 20 years writing about the “continuous Nakba” — the ongoing cycle of violence committed against the Palestinian people. The Nakba, as he and all Palestinians contend, was not a single event that occurred in 1948, but rather a persevering process of dislocation and violence.

Witnesses of their era

Last year, Khoury published a book in Arabic titled “Continuous Nakba,” a compilation of 12 essays and articles, including the speech he delivered to the Palestinian activists in 2013. The book stands as a tour de force, powerfully intertwining the political discourse on the Nakba with the realms of literature, culture, and language. Khoury adeptly integrates literature into the grammatical narrative of the Nakba, portraying it as present continuous rather than past perfect (“the Nakba is happening,” not “the Nakba happened”).

Khoury has authored 15 novels to date, which have been translated into multiple languages (I have translated eight of his novels into Hebrew). His literary works explore various writing techniques and narrative forms, while challenging the notion of storytelling itself.

Khoury’s vast knowledge of Palestine was amassed mainly through the stories of others, both fictional and not. While in primary school in the 1950s and ‘60s, Khoury learned about the Nakba from his Palestinian friends who had arrived in Lebanon as refugees. His empathy toward the Palestinian plight only grew over time, having spent his high school years teaching in refugee camps in and around Beirut. At the age of 19, he joined the fedayeen (Palestinian guerilla fighters) in Jordan until the events of “Black September” in 1970, when the Hashemite kingdom fought and expelled the resistance groups. After this, Khoury fought alongside the Palestinians in the civil war in Lebanon.

His immersion in Palestinian life is inseparable from his literary career. As part of the research process for his 1998 novel, “Bab Al Shams” — now considered the ultimate literary work about the Nakba — Khoury went to refugee camps around Beirut and Sidon (such as Shatila, Burj el-Barajneh, and Ain al-Hilweh), conducting painstakingly in-depth interviews with hundreds of Palestinians about the fall of the Galilee and Haifa to Zionist forces.

Through this research process and in his writing, Khoury makes clear that he views writers as crucial witnesses of their era. In his novels, Khoury delves into fragmented stories and memories of the Nakba, whether it be the events of 1948 or the “continuous Nakba”: whereas “Bab Al-Shams” is mainly about 1948, much of his last novel, “Man in My Image,” the third volume of “Children of the Ghetto,” is set in 2002, in the refugee camps of Nablus and Jenin.

Khoury is not only a gifted novelist; he is also a well-known intellectual, often addressing the public on the ideological implications of linguistic hierarchies, the idea that the language we use to describe events reflects and perpetuates real-world power structures — all in the service of interpreting and diffusing his ideas about the continuous Nakba.

He does this relentlessly, to the point that it sometimes seems that the concept applies to him personally: for Khoury, continuous Nakba is a state of mind. He lives this continuity, writes constantly about it (one of the fruits of which is this most recent book), and digs into its meaning through time and place. Like Shehrezad of “A Thousand and One Nights,” who tells stories every day in order to live, each day Khoury tells yet another story of the Nakba.

He meticulously delineates a catalog of tragedies, ranging from the small-scale to the monumental, all of which comprise the continuous Nakba. These include not only the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, but also the establishment of Palestinian ghettos within the new Jewish cities, the imposition of military governance on Palestinian citizens of Israel, the proliferation of settlements, the plight of unrecognized villages, etc. (Even the inclusion of “etc.” in Khoury’s oeuvre can serve as a semiotic symbol of the Nakba’s continuity.)

The Nakba thus transcends the individual events that took place; it represents a continuum of calamities across various scales, forming different repetitions yet interconnected parts of an ongoing process. This, he writes, is what fuels perpetual resistance, as it is not confined to the past but is, instead, a present-day lived reality.

Dismantling linguistic myths

“Continuous Nakba” is the culmination of the years Khoury has spent analyzing and writing about Palestinian life and history. In it, he essentially offers a new version of “The Meaning of the Nakba,” a book published in October 1948 by the Syrian historian Constantine Zurayq and the first to name “the disaster” of that year as “the Nakba.” Khoury now presents “the meaning of the continuous Nakba,” thereby transforming our understanding of the Nakba from being a singular event into an enduring process. He traces a lengthy trajectory that commenced in that pivotal year and has continued through various “winding forms” to “the present day.”

Khoury asserts that Zurayq helped articulate the Palestinian predicament to the Arab world, while the intellectual Edward Said did so on the global stage. Khoury, too, stands in this tradition, with his works and engagements with political audiences bringing the literary world’s attention to the Palestinian issue.

One particularly fascinating engagement was an address that he gave in 2015 before the European Parliament (included in the book). It was about harnessing one’s intellectual strength, the breadth of one’s horizons, and the desire for an honest dialogue with those whose deafness prevents them from hearing the Palestinian voice.

He starts the lecture by analyzing the word “misunderstanding” and its relationship to Palestinian existence. To do so, he told the story of a creepy encounter between a Palestinian farmer from the village of Sa’sa’ and Israeli soldiers who stormed his village and demolished its homes on Feb. 14, 1948. (Khoury depicts this event in his novel “Stella Maris.”) One of the Jewish soldiers aims his weapon at an elderly Palestinian man who inquires in Arabic, “Eish hādhā?” (“What is this?”). The soldier responds, using the Hebrew meaning as his second word, “Hādhā esh!” (“This is fire!”), and then fires upon him.

Khoury elucidates for Arab readers unfamiliar with Hebrew the origin of this bilingual collision: while these expressions may sound alike phonetically, they reveal what is known in French as a “faux-ami,” or false cognate. However, Khoury firmly asserts that behind the misunderstanding (which in itself breeds uncertainty and terror) lies a multitude of exclamation marks. Thus, alongside the question marks, Khoury provides a succinct chronicle of the exclamation marks, namely a roadmap of the Israeli colonial project, illustrating how it effectively converted the Palestinian into “the Jew of the Jews” or, in other words, the victim of the victim, as poignantly depicted in the literary trilogy “Children of the Ghetto.”

Throughout that speech, Khoury challenged and deconstructed the narratives that have historically marginalized the Palestinian voice. By dismantling and debugging linguistic myths that obscure oppressive realities — terms like “the peace process,” “the partition plan,” “the Hebrew David and the Arab Goliath” — Khoury not only sheds light on historical truths but also exposes the ongoing destruction of the present. His refusal to accept superficial peace agreements highlights the importance of addressing root causes rather than settling for temporary solutions that perpetuate oppression.

Khoury’s address to the European Parliament was a virtuoso performance by an artist — an artist of words, of ideas, of the relationship between politics, literature, and life. He reckons with literary representations that change reality. He sees a war of understanding against misunderstanding, of recognition against lack of recognition, and of representations against misrepresentations — a war in which he is an enlisted soldier.

Spectral figures

Elias Khoury’s work consistently acknowledges and pays tribute to his predecessors and compatriots, such as Mahmoud Darwish, Walid Khalidi, Edward Said, and Ghassan Kanafani. In many ways, he represents a link between past and current generations embodying the struggle for Palestinian rights and dignity. He has highlighted Darwish’s significance in narrating the Nakba, and by weaving his own experiences of displacement and exile into his poetry, Khoury not only honors Darwish’s literary prowess but also recognizes the personal and collective trauma embedded in the Palestinian narrative, following in Darwish’s footsteps.

Similarly, Khoury’s recognition of the historian Walid Khalidi, and his efforts in reconstructing the historical map of Palestine, acknowledges the importance of reclaiming and preserving Palestinian history in the face of attempts to erase or distort it. And Kanafani, with his poignant storytelling and unflinching portrayal of Palestinian life under occupation, also receives warm acknowledgment from Khoury.

Khoury’s rare and profound engagement with Hebrew literature underscores his enduring commitment to understanding the “other” and fostering literary dialogue. He does so, in part, by acknowledging the inherent challenge of engaging with a literary tradition that often erases the Palestinian narrative and rejects the dialogue Khoury seeks.

Despite its purported leftist orientation, Hebrew literature, in practice, plays a role in obscuring the Nakba, justifying or silencing it. Kanafani once asserted that literary Zionism preceded political Zionism, and Khoury builds on this argument, particularly by applying it to the work of A. B. Yehoshua.

Yehoshua’s short story “Facing the Forests,” for example, metaphorically silences the Palestinian narrative by focusing on a Palestinian man with no tongue, perpetuating the idea that Palestinians are spectral figures, not full subjects themselves. No Hebrew writers today possess a depth of understanding of the Arab world comparable to Khoury’s immense knowledge of Hebrew literature and the Jewish world.

Yet Khoury’s criticism is sharply nuanced and complex. He is also critical of Kanafani for employing a similar silencing technique: Khoury asks why the Palestinian men in “Men in the Sun,” (published, incidentally, the same year as Yehoshua’s story), remain voiceless, dying silently in a water tank crying for water. Khoury responded by writing a novella — about the poet Waddah Al-Yaman, who dies silently in a box to spare his lover, the Caliph’s wife, from embarrassment — in order to explain and critique the trope of the silenced Palestinian.

A timeless thesis

“Continuous Nakba” was published shortly before the current war began, but Gaza has occupied a major place in Khoury’s analysis long before October 2023. He repeatedly highlights Gaza’s transformation into a locked and confined enclave, often describing it as a “ghetto” with no apparent outlet except eruption and resistance

In his article “In front the Gates of Gaza” (which unfortunately is not anthologized in the book), Khoury delves into the intricate link between Palestinian refugees in Gaza and Jewish settlements in the areas surrounding Gaza (often known as the “Gaza Envelope”) — a link violently exposed on October 7.

In that essay, Khoury explores General Moshe Dayan’s 1956 eulogy, delivered at Kibbutz Nahal Oz, for an Israeli soldier who was killed by Fedayeen. Khoury writes:

“When Dayan eulogized the Israeli space in Nahal Oz, he eulogized the ‘Zionist dream,’ which turned out to be a nightmare. He recognized early on the moral deadlock of Israel in front of the gates of Gaza, and in the face of the question of Palestine as a whole … for seventy years the refugees have not stopped knocking on the gates of Gaza, which are locked with hatred and death, and they will continue to knock on them until the locks are broken, and Palestine will reach out its hands to its people who return to it invaded by the water and mud of the earth, and build from their death a gate to life.”

The retaliatory war in Gaza today, with its devastating toll on civilian life and infrastructure, is painful proof of Khoury’s words.

In light of the current Israeli assault on the Strip, Khoury’s work, and especially this recent book, poses a profound question: How do we read a story when we know that its plot has not yet come to an end? How do we tell the story of the Nakba when it is not over? How do we recognize when we have reached the conclusion?

Notably, the book was published before the emergence of the new/old Israeli discourse around the “Second Nakba” — a term utilized by Israeli officials in recent months to refer to the war on Gaza and which, inadvertently, validates Khoury’s central thesis. In this light, the book has proven to be timeless, rather than ahead of its time, in that it addresses perennial issues and enduring realities faced by Palestinians.

Khoury’s exploration of the continuous Nakba challenges the prevailing discourse, and its significance lies in its ability to provoke critical reflection and dialogue on the Palestinian experience, both past and present. It is pressingly important now — and it always will be.

 

Who tried to pull the rug on Netanyahu, and why?

Alastair Crooke

May 14, 2024

The release of hostages in Gaza hinged on two key demands – a complete halt to the war and full Israeli withdrawal. The agreement’s implications and the underlying fears within Israel are deep-seated, reflecting a complex and fragile situation.

The core issues at the heart of release of hostages held in Gaza were two: A complete cessation to the war and full withdrawal of all Israeli forces.

Netanyahu’s position was that whatever the hostage outcome, the IDF would return to Gaza and that the war there might continue for ten years, he said.

These were the most sensitive words in Israeli politics – with Israeli politics electrically polarised around them. The continuation or fall of the Israeli government could hinge on them: The Right had warned that they would quit the government unless the invasion of Rafah were green-lighted; the Biden position, however, was communicated to Netanyahu by phone as not just ‘no Rafah light’, but rather, ‘Rafah zero’.

Then these explosive words – cessation of military operations and complete Israeli withdrawal – burst forth in the final text as agreed by the mediators in Cairo; and subsequently in Doha, on Monday, taking Israel by complete surprise. CIA Chief Bill Burns had represented the U.S. in both sessions, but Israel had chosen not to send a negotiations team.

Multiple Israeli sources confirm that the Americans gave no ‘heads up’ of what was coming: Hamas announced the bombshell agreement; Gaza erupted in victory celebrations, and huge protests besieged the government in Jerusalem, demanding acceptance of the Hamas terms. It was tense. There was a whiff of civil war to the huge protests.

The Israeli government alleges that it was ‘played’ by the Americans (i.e. by Bill Burns). It was. But to what end? Biden was adamant that a Rafah incursion must not proceed. Was this Burns’ means to achieving that objective? Using ‘sleight of hand’ in the negotiations (inserting the ‘red-line’ words) into the text without telling Tel Aviv in order to get to ‘yes’ from Hamas? Or was it to precipitate a change of government in Israel? Its policy on Gaza whas beenas imposing a very heavy election campaign toll on the Democratic Party.

In any event – after the Hamas bombshell announcement – the IDF went ‘Rafah light’, taking the empty Philadelphia corridor (in breach of the Camp David Accords), incurring few casualties, but keeping Netanyahu’s government intact.

Maybe the little deception ‘to get Hamas to ‘yes’’ was viewed in Washington as a clever ploy – but its consequences are uncertain: Netanyahu and the Right will share dark suspicions about the U.S. role. Washington has shown itself (in their view) as an adversary. Will this episode make the Right more determined; less ready to compromise?

In this context, the base division within current Israeli politics is salient. A small plurality of Israelis (54%) believe that there is legitimacy in comparisons between the holocaust and the events of 7 October. And we can see that the conflation of Hamas with the Nazi party is increasingly common amongst Israeli (and U.S.) leaders – with Netanyahu describing Hamas as “the new Nazis”.

Whether we agree or not, what is being said here through this categorisation is that a plurality of Israelis harbour existential fears that the gathering storm surrounding them is the start to a ‘new holocaust’ – which, in turn, implies that the ‘Never Again’ amorphism translates into a binary kill or be killed injunction (drawing on Biblical texts for Talmudic validation).

To understand this is to understand why those few words inserted into the negotiation proposal were so explosive. They implied (in the view of half of Israelis) that they would have no option but to ‘live’ or ‘die’ under the threat of renewed holocaust (with Hamas predominant in Gaza and Hizbullah in the north).

The other portion to Israeli opinion is less apocalyptic: They believe that some return to Occupation and the status quo ante might be possible, especially were the U.S. to succeed in persuading Arab States – jointly with Israel – to eliminate Hamas from Gaza, and to agree to police a de-militarised and de-radicalised Strip.

Cynically viewed, perhaps the practice of ‘mowing the lawn’ (as the periodic IDF incursions to kill militants are euphemistically known) might be less frightening than the notion for Israelis of having to fight an existential war. In this context, 7 October would be viewed as an outsized ‘lawn mow’, but not something requiring a more radical shift of Life-Style.

That the representatives of this current in the Israeli War Cabinet did not resign from government on learning of Netanyahu’s subsequent rejection of the Hamas proposal – may be connected to the fact that Saudi normalisation with Israel is now not in prospect – Saudi normalisation being the pillar from which some return to the status quo ante might be achieved.

All of which calls into question the motive of War Cabinet members who call for Israel to accept Hamas’ terms. Whilst empathy for hostage families is understandable, it does not address the underlying crises – beyond wishful thinking about the Arab world joining together in an anti-Iranian unity, and digging Israel out from its occupation conundrum.

This might give consolation to the White House facing its own electoral difficulties, but it is hardly a sustainable strategy.

The Hamas agreement bombshell likely has fed into two other factors that are colouring sentiment in Israel: Netanyahu, renowned for his political soothsaying, and holding up his intuitive finger to the wind, detects, he says, the Israeli electorate sliding to the Right. He is becoming more confident that he can win the next Israeli general election.

The first factor is the student protests unfolding across the West; and the second is the threat that the ICC might issue arrest warrants for the PM and other prominent leaders.

David Horovitz, the editor of Times of Israel, writes that:

“the underlying goal of the encampments and marches at Columbia, Yale, NYU and the other campuses is to render Israel indefensible — in both senses of the word – and thus deprive Israel of the diplomatic and military means to survive the ongoing effort at its destruction – as effected by Iran and its allies and proxies. At the root of this strategy is, of course, the oldest of hatreds”.

In other words, Horovitz is identifying a majority of the student protestors not so much as having human empathy for the plight of Gazans, but as being purveyors ‘soft-power’ holocaust. Horovitz concludes that “if those enemy states, terrorist armies and their facilitators get done with Israel – they’ll be coming for Jews everywhere”.

The last element concerns the putative arrest warrant being issued by the ICC. Netanyahu has a huge ego, perhaps more than most politicians; yet there is no doubt that in spite of the anger directed at him for the errors of 7 October, he is indisputably the standard-bearer for that segment of the Israeli electorate that believes – like Horovitz – that Israel is facing a concerted effort to destroy the Zionist state.

The arrest warrant, therefore, is perceived as more than just an attack on an individual, but more as a part of that wider effort (per Horovitz) to misrepresent Israel and to deprive it of the diplomatic means to defend itself.

Needless to add that this is not the view across the rest of the world – yet it serves to point out how inward-looking, how isolated and fearful the Israeli public is becoming. These are warning signs. Desperate people do desperate things.

The reality is that Israel has attempted to establish a late-era settler-colonisation on lands with indigenous population. The first phase of revolt versus colonialism errupted in the post-WW2 era. We are now living the second stage of global radical anti-colonial sentiment (manifesting strategically as BRICS), but targeting today financialised colonialism posing as the ‘Rules-Based Order’.

Israelis habitually hang out two flags on special occasions: The Israeli flag and next to it, the U.S. flag. ‘We are American too: We are the 51st state’, Israelis would say.

‘No’, the young American generation of today says: We will not identify with suspect genocidal tendencies against an indigenous people.

No wonder some of the ruling élites are desperate to outlaw the critical narratives. If Israel is the target today, might tomorrow the narratives be critiquing Washington’s facilitation of colonial massacre? Did they (the Biden Team), perchance, toy with pulling the rug from under Netanyahu – to preserve the status quo in Israel a little longer (until at least after the U.S. Elections)?