by Justine Hemmestad
11-30-23
Last week, a truce deal was made between Gaza and Israel. Israel gets some of its citizens back that Hamas took hostage, and Hamas gets a 3 day ceasefire, which can become longer if more hostages are returned. My friend Itamar Ben David says that as a rule, he’s against any negotiations with terrorists. America takes an identical stance in order to deter the use of ransoms. The Defense Technical Information Center website states: “United States presidents and allied leaders have long stated through policy that they will not negotiate with terrorists.” However, Itamar asserts that this time is different - Israelis are furious with the failure of their government to keep them safe, and with Prime Minister Netanyahu who they feel is the “architect of this disaster because of his very long time policy with Hamas.” Netanyahu, “neglected the southern front for almost 15 years and allowed rockets to ruin the lives of these people, while allowing Hamas to build its power without doing anything about it. He sacrificed the southerners to prevent any deal (that would never happen) in the West Bank,” says Ben David. “The second time [Netanyahu failed the hostages, was when] the south was abandoned and neglected on October 7th.” Ben David adds, “I tend to say that neglecting these hostages for a third time could break the trust of Israelis in their country.” To put the background of the hostage deal into context, I turn to the recorded lectures of Dr. Henry Abramson, who serves as a Dean of Touro University in Brooklyn, New York. Also the recipient of the excellence in the Academy Award from the National Education Association, he is the author of several books. Dr. Abramson says that what the Israelis call the 1948 War of Independence, the Palestinians call the Nakba, or Catastrophe. The War led to the establishment of the state of Israel, and the displacement of 700,000 Palestinians into refugee camps. Dr. Abramson asserts that the IDF had no reason to stop the Arabs from leaving their homes because it resulted in more territory to “allow them to achieve their objectives of securing roads and more defensible boundaries.” In 1967, the 6 Day War was fought, in which Israel gained territories and annexed East Jerusalem as well as Golan Heights in the north. Israel did not annex the Gaza Strip at that time because it would mean that 6 million non-Jews would be absorbed into the Jewish population, which would take away from the Jewishness of the Jewish state (meant to be a safe haven for Jews to return to if persecuted elsewhere around the world). Dr. Abramson says that Israel’s goals are 1) to establish a Jewish state in their ancestral homeland, and 2) to establish a democratic state. To this end, when Israel annexed the lesser populated regions, they thought they would be exchanged for some kind of eventual peace deal. Security Council Resolution 242, he says, was issued a few days after the 6 day war. However, Dr. Abramson also says that both sides failed to understand the complexities of the other; and Palestinians especially, “failed to understand just how desperate Israelies were after the Holocaust.” Palestinians instead wanted Jews to live as guests in their country. “Egypt,” Dr. Abramson says, “was unwilling to take back the Gaza strip with its high concentration of restive Palestinians, many of whom showed an affinity for the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization which later would spawn Hamas.” Egypt felt the population was too destabilizing. The Palestinian Liberation Organization then, “took the lead in articulating what they wanted for themselves, rather than allowing the Arab states in the region dictate what would be the fate of the Palestinians.” They were armed, they believed in a one state solution - Palestine, only - and the violence they would employ to achieve that was unacceptable to Israel. The PLO sought to gain attention for its cause through terrorist activities like plane hijackings and bombings throughout Europe and the Middle East, as well as the massacre of Israeli Olympic athletes at Munich. The 1st Intifada of 1987 was a grassroots movement in which “the Palestinians themselves in Gaza and the West Bank began to rise up spontaneously on their own and the character of their uprising was different from anything they had done before.” It was a symbolic attack on the IDF, but one in which the Palestinians began to adapt the model of Israel as the oppressor and they were able to draw attention to living as second class status. The figurehead of the PLO, Yasser Arafat, took part in the 1993 Oslo Accords, just as the Soviet Union support was collapsing under its own governmental shift. Yitsak Rabin, the then Prime Minister of Israel, made peace with Arafat, though “the PLO itself could not handle the fractious nature of its population.” The PLO “had already lost much of the narrative which had been taken over by Palestinians in the West Bank,” says Dr. Abramson. Recordings reveal that Arafat never took the Accords seriously, and the disputes of all peoples involved persist to this day. As Itamar Ben David says of middle east populations, “you don’t get to choose your identity, you are born to it and you will die carrying that identity,” which may explain the friction then, and now. But even with this explanation (and before I learn of the more recent interactions between the Palestinian and Israeli populations), I need additional perspective to understand how it applies to what the hostages themselves may be going through - so I asked my friend Zevi what he thinks about the states of captivity and homecoming in regard to the hostages. Zevi has recently lived in Israel and possesses the ability to take a step back from that which he cares so deeply about while still carrying the depth of his love for the people and space within him, wherever he goes. He understands that he becomes what he cares about, or receives. This, he says, is the true state of home. Captivity is separation, and isolation, from this deep sense of understanding. Captivity is narrow-mindedness and disbelief. He says that, “Because unity is the true nature of reality, home is always there. If we have the necessary courage, humility and bravery, we can drop into that state and return home, whenever and wherever we are.”
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