It’s a fair question, “What the hell is wrong with the people of Gaza?” after witnessing the atrocities of last weekend, including now-confirmed reports of murdered Jewish babies, some of them beheaded. But the question is much bigger than this week’s expanded conflict, which did not begin in a vacuum.
In 1949, the people of that sparsely inhabited strip — there were only 120,000 there at the time — found themselves on the Arab side of the armistice line between Israeli and Arab forces. Egyptian troops occupied Gaza and kept the local Palestinian Arabs under military rule for almost 20 years. Egyptian occupation certainly did no favors towards the development of a civil culture there.
Israel captured Gaza, along with Egypt’s Sinai peninsula, during the 1967 Six-Day War and began a military occupation of its own. When it came time for Egypt’s Anwar Sadat and Israel’s Menachem Begin to make peace, Jerusalem was happy to trade land to get it. The 1979 Egypt–Israel peace treaty transitioned the Sinai back to Egyptian control but, when it came to Gaza, Sadat said, in effect, “No thanks, Menachem, you can keep it.”
Even today, Reuters reports that Egypt “has rejected the setting up of safe corridors for refugees fleeing the Gaza Strip.” All 2.3 million Gazans can stay and get blown up, for all their Arab brothers in Egypt could care.
Something similar happened in the West Bank. Like Gaza, the ancient Jewish lands of Judea and Samaria remained on the Arab side of the ’49 armistice line and were held by Jordanian troops. Unlike Egypt and Gaza, Jordan annexed the West Bank. Israel conquered that area, too, in 1967, and Jordan seemed happy to be rid of it. When Jerusalem and Amman made peace in 1994, Jordani Prime Minister Abdelsalam Majali didn’t ask for any of the occupied Palestinian lands back in exchange.
It seems the Palestinians have long been a headache that other Arab countries were glad to be rid of. Israel hoped it’d gotten itself rid of Gaza’s Palestinians when it unilaterally withdrew from the Strip in 2005. What it got was a terror state next door, despite the people of Gaza getting out from under “Zionist oppression” and enjoying lavish financial and material aid from around the world.
While it’s true that the Arabs of the occupied territories haven’t exactly gotten a fair shake from anyone, whether Arab or Israeli, it’s also true that they’ve acted as their own worst enemies, “never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity,” as Henry Kissinger put it. It’s a short line from the creation of the Palestinian Liberation Organization in 1964 as a Soviet-sponsored nationalist-terrorist group to the people of Gaza electing Hamas as their “legitimate” government in 2006.
If Israeli occupation was no fun, the Palestinians cut off their noses to spite their faces when they legitimized Hamas rule. I want you to see now just one example of what being governed by Hamas means:
A few years ago, Gaza received new water pipelines thanks to foreign aid.
Hamas dug up the pipelines and turned them into rockets that they later fired at Israel pic.twitter.com/AC1bYOPQBg
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) October 12, 2023
Even if I were a Gazan in good standing, dedicated to the destruction of Israel, I imagine I’d be pretty upset if my local officials were tearing up the neighborhood’s water pipes. Sure, “Kill the Jews” and all that, but I’d still like some fresh water for taking showers and cooking meals for my kids. Admittedly, I weigh these options as a bourgeois 21st-century man from middle America, and so I lack the fine moral perceptions of a Rashida Tlaib or a Hamas freedom fighter hacking the head off a Filipino guest worker with a garden hoe.
So we return to the headline question: “What the hell is wrong with the people of Gaza?”
I don’t have an answer, or at least not a comfortable answer. The 20th-century French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss described Islam as “a barracks religion” where “women are excluded from social life and infidels from the spiritual community.” Islam is fine for regimenting young men but less so with tolerance and sharing.
It’s easy with a militaristic religion — and after years of neglect by your ethnic brothers and years more of occupation by the hated Jews — to decide to rip up water pipes to make rockets. From there, it’s easier still to launch them at civilians on the other side of a fence and then finally to get on with the delicious savagery of murdering Jewish babies.
All made possible, really, by the barbaric militarization of Gazan society by the Gazans themselves. Look again at the AP photo atop this article.
Israeli PM Golda Meir said many years ago, “When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons. Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.”
The day for peace has not yet come, that’s what’s wrong.
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ONE LAST THING: I use “Palestinians” because it’s a convenient term that everyone understands, but it’s historically inaccurate. Under Turkish rule, the Arabs of the dagger-shaped area that would someday become Israel were known as South Syrians, living in an Ottoman region called South Syria. It had been that way for centuries. “Palestinians” was what the Jewish settlers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries called themselves.
