What will finally break the cycle of violence between Israel and Hamas?
Sanwar comes out of his shelter, they believe, he will be so shocked by the destruction brought on Gaza because of his irresponsible decision to launch the vicious rocket attack on Israel cities, that he would think twice before doing it again.
This is quite reasonable, except that there is a major difference between the two cases. Hezbollah, while keeping its separate military apparatus, is still part and parcel of the Lebanese political system. In 2006, Nasrallah had to face the rage of the rest of the Lebanese, who were sick and tired of being dragged into a costly war with Israel against their will.
This is not the case with Gaza, where Hamas rules with an iron fist and where the people of Gaza have no voice. Furthermore, unlike in Lebanon, a country which has a lot to lose in a war with Israel, the people of Gaza have very little — or nothing — to lose. Poor, pressed between Israel and Egypt and crushed under Hamas’ tyrannical rule, they are indifferent and despairing.
Israelis, by the way, are not gloating when they see buildings in Gaza crumbling under Israeli air bombardment. But they stand by the right – indeed, the duty – to defend themselves when attacked.
The current operation, however, can open an opportunity to get out of the vicious cycle of violence with Gaza. Assuming that the current velocity of the Israeli response might generate some years of relative calm — maybe not 15 years like in the Lebanese case, but still – the world community must launch a Marshall Plan for Gaza, with Israel in the forefront. The wealthy Gulf States, which have just signed peace treaties with Israel, should join, too.
Needless to say, any assistance must be channeled toward Gaza’s reconstruction, not its rearmament.
When the people of Gaza have a lot to lose by fighting with Israel, and a lot to gain by living in peace with it, things will eventually change in our region.
Uri Dromi was the spokesman of the Rabin and Peres governments from 1992-1996.
Sometimes you wonder what they’re so afraid of. Not that the subject has ever been easy. No, as has often been noted in this space, this country has been positively Herculean in its effort to remain ignorant of African-American history. From schools trying to ban it to state laws restricting it, to textbooks telling lies about it, that history is something we have long resisted.
But if the subject was never easy, it has seldom been as fraught — as filled with political heat — as it is now. The New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning “1619 Project,” in which reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones had the temerity to reframe America’s story through the lens of slavery, seems to have tapped something primal in some of us, something that has moved them to spend two years condemning it, something that has states like Texas, Tennessee and Idaho rushing to pass laws banning schools from teaching critical race theory (which seemingly all conservatives fear and none can define), something panicky that is emphatically not explained by academic arguments over points of factuality.
For the record, I consider myself pretty wellinformed about Black history. But it is not lost on me that most of what I know was learned on my own after my formal education ended, that I somehow managed to graduate an elite private university knowing next to nothing about it.
Even at that, I was more fortunate than some. School only left me uneducated. It left them miseducated, i.e., taught things that were not true. In an inspired feat of enterprise journalism, Michael Harriot of The Root recently dug up the high school history textbooks that would have been used by many of those who grew up to deny the reality of systemic racism or seek to restrict the teaching thereof. The results are enlightening.
For instance, he reports that South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham likely read in “The History of South Carolina,” by Mary C. Simms Oliphant how “Most masters treated their slaves kindly. Africans were brought from a worse life to a better one.”
Meantime, Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Mississippi native, would have read John K. Bettersworth’s “Mississippi: a History” based on United Daughters of the Confederacy propaganda that held Africans to be so lazy, “It took two to help one do nothing.”
Not that this ignorance is solely Southern. No, it’s a national phenomenon.
And when the norm is to be taught little or to be taught lies, we shouldn’t wonder that people see a recreation of the 1921 Tulsa Massacre on
HBO’s “Watchmen” and ask why they never knew this happened. Or that a white guy on Twitter demands to know how African Americans can still live circumscribed lives, given that they’ve been “free for 150 years?”
They are ignorant because the powers that be have conspired to protect white people — and prevent black ones — from knowing too much about a story that embarrasses our national ideal. But what might America be if they didn’t?
We glimpsed an answer to that question as white people poured into the streets to join Black ones last year after George Floyd’s murder put a face to an evil African Americans have long testified to — and white people have long ignored. Suddenly, ignoring became impossible. As the resulting rainbow coalition illustrated, when we are forced to finally see our own humanity reflected in the eyes of the Other, paradigms tend to shift.
And walls to fall.
And change to stir.
And if you’re still wondering what they’re so afraid of, you can stop now.