Deluge, page 1
© 2024 Jamie Stern-Weiner
All essays © their respective authors
The editor is grateful to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace for permission to reprint selections from Nathan J. Brown, “Hamas Strikes Out Into the Unknown,” carnegie-mec.org (9 October 2023) and “There Might Be No Day After in Gaza,” carnegieendowment.org (3 November 2023).
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First printing 2024
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paperback ISBN 978-1-68219-619-9 • ebook ISBN 978-1-68219-620-5
“What was will not be”
—Israeli Minister of Energy and Infrastructure Israel Katz
On October 7, 2023, Hamas-led militants from Gaza attacked civilian communities and military installations in southern Israel.
Hamas called the operation Al-Aqsa Deluge.
Contents
Foreword – Avi Shlaim
Acknowledgments
Some Key Dates
Map
Introduction
PART I. CONTEXTS
1 Israel’s War on Gaza – Avi Shlaim
2 Econocide in Gaza – Sara Roy
3 Is Hamas to Blame for the Failure to Resolve the Israel-Palestine Conflict? – Colter Louwerse
4 Rule Number One of Nonviolent Resistance: It Can’t Work If It’s Misrepresented as Violent – R. J.
PART II. CATACLYSM
5 Targeting Civilians: Its Logic in Gaza and Israel – Yaniv Cogan
6 Just Like That: Life and Death in Gaza – Ahmed Alnaouq
7 Nothing Fails Like Success: Hamas and the Gaza Explosion – Khaled Hroub
8 The Quiet Front: Reflections From the West Bank – Musa Abuhashhash
9 All Shook Up: Regional Dynamics of the Gaza War – Mouin Rabbani
10 Into the Abyss – Nathan J. Brown
PART III. SOLIDARITIES
11 Breakthroughs and Backlash in the Belly of the Beast – Mitchell Plitnick
12 Palestine Solidarity in Britain – Talal Hangari
13 Sins of Commission: How Europe Was Bounced into Supporting Israel’s War Crimes in Gaza – Clare Daly MEP
Notes
Further Reading
Some Key Terms
List of Contributors
Foreword
Avi Shlaim
The powerful military offensive launched by Israel on the Gaza Strip in October 2023, or Operation Swords of Iron to give it its official name, was a major landmark in the blood-soaked history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It was an instant, almost Pavlovian response to the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7. That attack caught Israel by complete surprise, and it was devastating in its consequences, killing about 300 Israeli soldiers, massacring more than 800 civilians, and taking some 250 hostages. Whereas previous Hamas attacks involved the firing of rockets from the Gaza Strip on southern Israel, this was a ground incursion into Israeli territory made possible by breaking down the fence with which Israel had surrounded Gaza. The murderous Hamas attack did not come out of the blue as many believed. It was a response to Israel’s illegal and exceptionally brutal military occupation of the Palestinian territories since June 1967, as well as the suffocating economic blockade that Israel had imposed on Gaza since 2006. Israel, however, treated it as an unprovoked terrorist attack that gave it a blank check to use military force on an unprecedented scale to exact revenge and to crush the enemy.
Israel is no stranger to the use of military force in dealing with its neighbors. It is a country that lives by the sword. Under international law, states are allowed to use military force in self-defense as a last resort; Israel often employs force as a first resort. Some of its wars with the Arabs have been “wars of no choice,” like the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948; others have been “wars of choice,” like the Suez War of 1956 and the invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Wars are usually followed by the search for a diplomatic resolution of the conflict. When one examines Israel’s record in dealing with the Arabs as a whole, however, the use of force appears to be the preferred instrument of statecraft. Indeed, all too often, instead of war being the pursuit of politics by other means, Israeli diplomacy is the pursuit of war by other means.
When talking about the Arab-Israeli conflict, one needs to distinguish between two levels: the interstate level and the Israeli-Palestinian level. The interstate level refers to the relations between Israel and the neighboring Arab states. The Israeli-Palestinian level refers to the relations between Israel and the Palestinian people who are a non-state actor. In essence this is a clash between two national movements over the same piece of land. This is the heart and core of the conflict. Historically, Israel has preferred to negotiate with conservative Arab leaders, like President Anwar Sadat of Egypt and King Hussein of Jordan, rather than with the leaders of the Palestinian national movement.
The Oslo Accord of September 1993 was an exception to this rule. It was an agreement between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Israel, the first agreement between the two principal parties to the conflict. As such it may deserve the overused term “historic,” although it did not touch the root cause of the conflict. All the key issues in dispute, the “final status issues” as they are sometimes called, were deferred to negotiations in the last year of the stipulated five-year transition period. These are the status of Jerusalem, the right of return of the Palestinian refugees expelled from their homes in 1948, the status of the Jewish settlements on occupied Palestinian land, and the borders of the Palestinian entity. All these issues remain unresolved to this day. Palestinian frustration with the lack of political progress toward independence sparked two intifadas, or uprisings, one in 1987 and the second in 2000. Israel, under the Labor government that signed the Oslo agreement, opted to repackage rather than to end the occupation. Under the Likud governments that followed, Israel reneged on the promise to exchange land for peace. Under both Labor and Likud, Israel seemed intent on “managing” rather than resolving the conflict with the Palestinians.
In 2005 a right-wing Likud government, under the leadership of Ariel Sharon, decided to withdraw unilaterally from the Gaza Strip. This was part of a broader strategy designed to defeat the Palestinian struggle for national liberation by separating the West Bank from the Gaza Strip. Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, won a decisive victory in the Palestinian legislative elections of January 2006 and proceeded to form a unified Palestinian government, but Israel continued to practice the imperial tactic of divide and rule. Once in power, Hamas lowered its sights from a unitary, Islamic Palestinian state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea to a Palestinian state along the 1967 lines.
All of Hamas’s peace overtures were rebuffed by Israel and its Western allies. Israel, the US, and the European Union persisted in viewing Hamas as a terrorist organization despite its clean victory in the 2006 elections. It is no exaggeration to say that Israel blocked every avenue to a peaceful settlement of the conflict. Prime Minister Ehud Barak did offer to the Palestinians a two-state solution in 2000 and so did Ehud Olmert in 2008, but the terms they offered did not meet the minimal Palestinian demands. These demands, it is important to stress, were anchored in UN resolutions and a broad international consensus.
Deadlock on the diplomatic front led to periodic clashes between Hamas and Israel. This is not a conflict between two roughly equal parties but asymmetric warfare between a small paramilitary force and one of the most powerful militaries in the world, armed to the teeth with the most advanced American weaponry. The result was low-intensity (but for people in Gaza, still devastating) conflict which took the form of primitive missiles fired from inside the Gaza Strip on settlements in southern Israel and Israel Defense Forces (IDF) counter-insurgency operations designed to weaken but not to destroy Hamas. From time to time, Israel would move beyond aerial bombardment to ground invasion of the enclave. It launched major military offensives into Gaza in 2008–2009, 2012, 2014, 2021, 2022, and 2023.
Israeli leaders used to call these recurrent IDF incursions into Gaza “mowing the lawn.” This was the metaphor to describe Israel’s strategy against Hamas. The strategy did not seek to defeat Hamas, let alone drive it from power. On the contrary, the aim was to allow Hamas to govern Gaza but to isolate and weaken it, and to reduce its influence on the West Bank. Israel’s overarching political objective was to keep the Palestinian Authority and the Hamas government geographically separate so as to prevent the emergence of a unified leadership. In this context, Israel’s periodic offensives were designed to degrade the military capability of Hamas, to enhance Israeli deterrence, and to turn the civilian population of Gaza against its rulers. In short, it was a strategy of managing the conflict, of avoiding peace talks, of using the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah as a sub-contractor for Israeli security on the West Bank, and of containing Palestinian resistance within the open-air prison of the Gaza Strip.
This strategy lay in tatters following the Hamas attack on a military base and Israeli civilians around the Gaza Strip on October 7, 2023. The scale and ferocity of the attack clearly demonstrated that Hamas was not deterred by the military might of the IDF. The cruelty and savagery that accompanied the killing of civilians shook Israeli society to the core. Cries for revenge reverberated throughout the land. What were previously viewed as annoying pinpricks were overnight transformed into an existential threat. Despite deep political cleavages inside Israeli society, a consensus emerged that Hamas had to be destroyed and that the threat to Israel’s security emanating from the Gaza Strip had to be removed once and for all.
The change in the popular mood was reflected in an abrupt change in government policy. The three declared war aims of the Israeli government in Operation Swords of Iron were: to destroy Hamas as a political and military organization, to bring back the hostages, and to prevent the Gaza Strip from posing a threat to Israeli security ever again. After October 7, there was no more talk about mowing the lawn. What has not changed is the Israeli addiction to occupation, its hugely exaggerated trust in the utility of military force, and its dogged refusal to give peace a chance. The simple truth that without peace they cannot have security was lost on the government and the great majority of Israelis.
The chapters in this volume were written while Israel’s war on Gaza was still in progress. The aim of the volume is to place this war in its proper historical context and to provide a preliminary assessment of the many different aspects of the war. When one initiates a war, one knows how it will start but one does not know how it will end. Here we are trying to explore how and why the war started and to examine developments in its initial stage. We cannot predict how the war will end nor what its long-term consequences might be. What is clear beyond doubt, however, is that this war constitutes a turning point in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Collectively, we hope to have shed some light in this volume on what is one of the most protracted, bitter, and intractable conflicts of modern times.
Avi Shlaim
Oxford
December 2023
Acknowledgments
The editor is grateful for the assistance of Yaniv Cogan, Fionn Dempsey, Norman G. Finkelstein, Célestine Fünfgeld, Alex Nunns, Mouin Rabbani, Avi Shlaim, and the OR Books team.
Some Key Dates
November 1917: British foreign secretary Lord Balfour declares, “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”
1936–1939: The Arab Revolt in Palestine.
November 1947: The United Nations (UN) General Assembly adopts Resolution 181 (II), which approves the partition of Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state.
May 14, 1948: Establishment of the State of Israel.
May 15, 1948–January 1949: The first Arab-Israeli war (the War of Independence/Nakba). Israel expands its territory and drives some 750,000 Palestinians into exile. About 250,000 Palestinians flee to Gaza, which comes under Egyptian administrative control.
December 1948: The UN General Assembly adopts Resolution 194 (III), which resolves “that the [Palestinian] refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practical date.”
February–July 1949: Arab-Israeli armistice agreements establish demarcation boundaries. They eventually come to be internationally accepted as Israel’s legal borders.
October 1956: Britain, France, and Israel invade Egypt. Israeli forces occupy Gaza and carry out summary executions as well as large-scale massacres. The UN estimates that between 447 and 550 civilians are killed in the first three weeks of Israel’s occupation of Gaza.
June 5–10, 1967: Israel engages in armed hostilities with Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, and achieves a resounding military victory. The West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip, as well as the Syrian Golan Heights and Egyptian Sinai, come under Israeli military occupation.
November 22, 1967: The UN Security Council adopts Resolution 242. This comes to be called the “land for peace” formula for resolving the conflict: Israel must fully withdraw from the territories it occupied in the 1967 war, while neighboring Arab states must unequivocally establish peaceful relations with Israel.
1971: To crush resistance in Gaza, Israel displaces thousands of Gaza residents and bulldozes broad paths through the Strip.
June 1982: Israel invades Lebanon to destroy the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Up to 20,000 Palestinian and Lebanese, overwhelmingly civilians, are killed.
December 1987: The first Palestinian intifada (uprising) breaks out in Gaza. Palestinians across the occupied Palestinian territories enter into mass civil revolt against Israel’s occupation.
February 1988: Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, issues its first communiqué. The group is established as the militant arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine.
November 1988: The PLO officially recognizes the State of Israel beside a Palestinian state in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza.
September 1993: The PLO “recognizes the right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and security” while Israel “recognize[s] the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people.” This begins the “Oslo peace process.”
August–September 2005: Israel unilaterally evacuates all settlements and military bases from Gaza (the “disengagement”) but retains control over Gaza’s borders, waters, airspace, and population registry.
January 2006: Hamas wins a majority of seats in PA legislative elections. Israel imposes an economic blockade on Gaza, while the US and EU apply sanctions to the new government.
June 2007: Hamas consolidates its control of the Gaza Strip, while Israel tightens the blockade.
December 27, 2008–January 18, 2009: Israel unleashes “Operation Cast Lead” in Gaza. Thirteen Israelis and approximately 1,400 Palestinians are killed.
July 8–August 26, 2014: Israel unleashes “Operation Protective Edge” in Gaza. About 2,200 Palestinians and 73 Israelis are killed. Eighteen thousand homes in Gaza and one house in Israel are destroyed.
May 2017: Hamas publishes a “Document of General Principles and Policies” to supersede its Charter. The Document designates establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel, with the return of Palestinian refugees, “a formula of national consensus.”
March 2018: Tens of thousands of people in Gaza begin weekly demonstrations against the siege and for their rights as refugees. Between March 30 and December 31, 2018, at least 189 demonstrators are killed and 6,103 injured by live ammunition.
May 2021: Hamas fires rockets from Gaza, citing Israeli encroachments in East Jerusalem. More than 250 people in Gaza and 13 in Israel are killed in the ensuing escalation, which ends with a ceasefire after eleven days.
Introduction
On October 7, 2023, hundreds of Palestinian militants burst the gates of Gaza, overwhelmed military installations, and rampaged across southern Israel. The operation was shocking in its boldness, the ensuing massacre for its brutality. But the conditions that led to the Hamas attack were long-standing. Gaza is a speck of coastline that is among the most densely populated areas on earth. Some 75 percent of its inhabitants are refugees driven from their homes to make way for the State of Israel in 1948, and their descendants. Israel occupied the Strip in 1967 and de facto annexed it without extending rights of citizenship to the inhabitants. After Palestinians revolted against Israeli military rule, in 1987 (the first intifada), Israel crushed the uprising and then strengthened its grip on Gaza through various forms of confinement. By 2004, the head of Israel’s National Security Council could describe Gaza as “a huge concentration camp.”1 In January 2006, the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, won democratic elections in Gaza and the West Bank. Israel and its allies responded by subjecting the occupied Palestinian population—already enduring the “worst economic depression in modern history”—to “possibly the most rigorous form of international sanctions imposed in modern times.”2 After Hamas consolidated control in Gaza the following year, Israel tightened the screws further as it put Gaza under a comprehensive closure that has been enforced with varying degrees of intensity ever since.3
