[Prefatory Note: The interview conducted by Daniel Falcone was published under in CounterPunch on May 11, 2025 with the title On Genocide and Gazan Resilience is reproduced here unmodified except for the title. To call attention to question of ‘What comes next for the Palestinian people and Gaza,’ sometimes phrased as ‘the day after’ is an increasingly haunting question. A return to some version of Oslo Dipmomacy (as incorporating the global endorsement of ‘the two-state’ solution) is not an acceptable outcome for the Palestinians and obviously contradicts the embrace of an Israeli s one-state solution). The time has come for the Palestinian people, including about six million refugees who have for decades been denied their entitlement to a ‘right of return’, to be treated as integral to a sustainable peace and a central requirement of fulfilling their inalienable right of self-determination. Another fundamental issue relates to Palestinian representation, which should reflect the collective wishes of the Palestinian people living under occupation and some form participation by the Palestinian refugee communities. To legitimate such an outcome process requires circumventing ‘the primacy of geopolitics’ within the UN and global society in general, or its benevolent transformation.]
In this exclusive interview, renowned international law scholar and former UN Special Rapporteur Richard Falk engages with educator and journalist Daniel Falcone to examine the moral, political, and historical dimensions of Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza. The conversation is anchored by a viral social media post from Tam Zandman, a young Israeli who denounced what he described as the genocidal destruction of Palestinian life. Falk contextualizes Zandman’s testimony within the broader framework of Israeli state violence, addressing the normalization of moral indifference, the complicity of Western governments and media institutions, and the ideological underpinnings of the Zionist project, particularly its “Greater Israel” aspirations.
Drawing on a range of sources, including Noam Chomsky’s critiques of state terrorism and Mohammed Omer Almoghayer’s memoir On the Pleasures of Living in Gaza, Falk explores the systemic erasure of Palestinian voices, the instrumentalization of anti-Semitism to suppress legitimate criticism, and the enduring spirit of Palestinian resistance, or sumud, in the face of profound destruction.
Daniel Falcone: On April 10, 2025, Gaza-based journalist Motasem Dalloul commented on a widely circulated social media thread, describing it as “a shocking thread by [an] Israeli youth [that] discloses the reality about the genocide [that] has been going on in Gaza for 17 months.” In your view, how does this fit within the historical context of what you have described as “speaking a substantial truth about Israeli moral numbness and genocidal sentiments?” Could you elaborate on how such discourse reflects broader hegemonic narratives and state violence? The language around the topic was rather stark and reminded me of Chomsky’s analysis of Alan Dershowitz’s assertion in 2006, that called for the targeting of Lebanese civilians.
Richard Falk: Dalloul’s comments on Tam Zandman’s powerfully unrelenting condemnation of Israel’s real reason for what he calls the flattening of Gaza is moving and significant. Zandman’s words were written, as you observe, by a young self-described ‘citizen of Israel’ who emotionally explores the psycho-political infrastructure of Israel’s prolonged genocidal attack on the captive, totally vulnerable Palestinian population of Gaza. His Cri de Coeur arises from manifestly intense convictions and an anguished internal vantage point within Israel. What gives these words from Israel their quality of originality is their humanistic grounding, which contrasts with intense ethnic nationalism of Israeli mainstream dialogues, and even more the sub-conscious drive to destroy the Palestinian existence. The public show of Israeli moral concerns has been concentrated upon the fate of a small number of October 7 hostages mainly Israeli Jews.
Such a preoccupation has been accompanied in Israel by indifference, or worse, toward the fate of the Palestinians, including ‘Palestinian hostages’ seized without charges since the Hamas attack and severely abused in Israeli prisons. These personal tragedies are reduced to statistics of so-called ‘prisoner exchange’ releases that are part of ceasefire diplomacy devoted to pauses in the violence with Hamas commitments to release an agreed number of hostages. Seizing innocent civilians and holding them hostage is a war crime whether they are Israeli or Palestinians and this is true whether called ‘hostages’ or ‘prisoners.’ As with other aspects of media presentation, such one-sided labeling is itself a dimension of media complicity in covering up the one-sided sense of grievance with respect to Israeli captives held by Hamas.
What is most distressing to Zandman is that public discourse emanating from Israel about retaliation against barbarism, counterterrorism against Hamas, security concerns, and the recovery of hostages, obscures the grotesque clarity of the widespread pre-October 7 Israeli societal wish that was passionately in favor of the devastation of Gaza and the elimination of its people. For Zandman, this was for most Israelis, something worth pursuing for its own sake. It needed no pretext, much less a legal or moral rationale given this embrace of necro politics in Israel.
In keeping with such a background, the Netanyahu government made little effort to explain and justify recourse to genocide by claiming a ‘just cause’ when addressing Israelis. Such explanations were superfluous internally, and their articulation seem designed to strengthen external support from Diaspora Jews and the governments of liberal democracies in the West, especially the US, that desired a smokescreen of morality and legality to give a shred of legitimacy to the Israeli response.
Beyond this, Israel and its leaders were wary of condemnation by the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, not because they felt misunderstood, but because they deeply resented being internationally labeled as guilty of criminal behavior, especially of genocide, which challenged their insistence that only Jews were victims of mega-genocide, warranting a special recognition from others, identified as The Holocaust or Shoah. This concern about an external reputation is what led to Israel’s worldwide campaign of weaponized anti-Semitism to demonize its critics and proclaim its innocence, essentially a politics of diversion.
We are left with two bewildering issues: Firstly, is Zandman correct in his attribution of a toxic and lethal dehumanization of the Palestinian people that favorably disposed toward genocide, and would have been supportive of its enactment with the pretext of responding to the Hamas attack? In a sense, this is an empirical question that is difficult disentangle from the unpopularity of the Netanyahu government, the secular opposition to the rise of the religious right in Israel, and a tendency to go along with whatever the government proposed in the name of security. In essence, we might never know whether Zandman was fearlessly reporting an accurate account of the Israeli collective mentality with respect to the Palestinian people or was expressing his own acute frustrations about the refusal of Israel’s post-October 7 response to respect the constraints of law and morality.
Yet, without a doubt, his strong feelings are reactions to repressive responses to Israeli dissenters in this period as compared to the moral struggles evident about Jews in the Diaspora, who exhibit internal tensions, and need the comfort zone of the ‘two sides’ sensibility that has emerged in the West, including the media, to the effect that Hamas is guilty of a terrorist assault and deserves to be destroyed — and the view that Israel in its reacting, exceeded the limits set by law and morality. Both sides are hence responsible, and ‘day after’ arrangements should reflect this symmetry rather than reflect the asymmetric relevance of the pre-October oppressive governance in Gaza.
Israeli oppression was expressed in many ways, including a punitive blockage in place since 2007, massive military incursions in 2008-09, 2012, & 2014, the widespread assessment by respected human rights civil society organizations (including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch) of the imposition of an apartheid regime throughout occupied Palestinian territories, and the endgame of the Zionist Project — taking the form of Greater Israel and involving the annexation of the West Bank, and the establishment of a territorial buffer zone.
Secondly, did the more than 18 months of a genocidal assault on Gaza alter Palestinian prospects for achieving basic rights in a negative or positive fashion? The negative argument arises from heightening the costs for Palestinians of remaining resident in Occupied Palestine or in Israel, as well as extending hegemonic control of such neighboring countries like Lebanon, Syria, Egypt and extending its military reach with respect to Iran. It also, despite the prolonged extreme genocide, retained the diplomatic support and strategic partnership of the complicit governments in the West, especially in confronting ‘the clash of civilizations’ dimensions of the conflict in which Israel has done the dirty work of the containment of radical Islamic influence in the Middle East. Such developments are viewed as safeguarding Western access to the energy resources of the region as well as providing security for commercial navigation and naval operations.
I wonder about your reference to Chomsky’s reaction to Dershowitz’s indirect endorsement about what became known as the Dahiya Doctrine, which underlay Israel’s deliberate recourse to disproportion and indiscriminate responses to any show of armed resistance in Lebanon and elsewhere. As such, it was both descriptive of Israel’s approach to its ‘security’ ever since its establishment in 1948, as well as being an early sign of the drift toward the Gaza genocide that has unfolded since October 7. Dershowitz has twisted and turned over the decades in his all-out effort to validate each-and-every Israeli use of force.
Daniel Falcone: While this analysis sheds light on the moral discourse surrounding Gaza, it risks being incomplete without addressing the situation in the (“Gazafied”) West Bank and the broader vision of the Zionist project, particularly the “Greater Israel” endgame you mention. Additionally, there seems to be limited recognition of Palestinian resistance and the enduring spirit of sumud (or “steadfastness”). How do these dimensions, territorial ambition, structural occupation in the West Bank, and the resilience of Palestinian resistance, further contextualize the discourse of moral numbness and the hegemonic violence you’ve described?
Richard Falk: In line with your initial question, I consider the wider issues associated with Zandman’s statement that pertain to the future of the West Bank and uncertainties about how developments pertaining to the devastation of Gaza since October 7 affect the Zionist endgame that appear to aim at establishing ‘Greater Israel’ (formally incorporating the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and now at least northern Gaza into the state of Israel), moves repudiating the two-state solution and further sustained by compliant regional adjustments in Lebanon, Syria, and most of all, Iran.
The issues raised in your question about how Palestinian resistance and sumud have been affected inevitably raise concerns about the limits of Palestinian resilience. Given the ongoing and prolonged fury of the Israeli violence, which continues to disregard even the most minimal limits of law and morality, the question is how much longer Palestine can maintain an active resistance mode of steadfastness, proportionate to their commitments not to leave their Palestinian homelands.
The destruction of remaining hospitals and safe zones has left international public opinion dazed and numb, which has been partially expressed by media complacency about reporting the underlying humanitarian emergency and daily atrocities, including the total prohibition of any delivery of food to starving. In food insecure Gaza, many are reduced to eating pet foods and native grass, while being reliant on polluted drinking water. The Trump/Musk continuous assaults on constitutional democracy in America, the incitement of a dangerous trade war, and the saga of a cruel campaign against pro-Palestinian immigrants and visa-holders, dominate Western news cycles ever since Trump reentered the White House for the start of a second term as president. As the peoples of the world have mobilized to condemn, by protesting what is going on in Gaza, the West Bank, and the Middle East, most governments avert their gaze either out of indifference or feelings of futility.
The level of suffering, the hopelessness of living amid rubble and disrupted ecological viability are posing a more serious test of sumud and resistance than even the nakba of 1948 when an estimated 750,000 Palestinian were driven from their homes and homeland, and permanently denied a right of return while witnessing from afar the bulldozing of their villages. Gaza became the home to many of these displaced from villages and towns in southern Israel, constituting a majority refugee population in Gaza numbering an estimated 75% of the whole.
This background helps explain why it is Gaza among the occupied Palestinian territories that has generated over the years the most formidable resistance initiatives, ranging from missile salvos that did little damage in Israel but gave rise to acute anxiety in the southern regions of the country, instigating the first intifada of 1987 mounting a formidable nonviolent collective challenge to the unlawful Israeli refusal to implement the Palestinian right to return to their pre-war homes in what had become Israel, and finally, the mounting in Gaza of the Great March of Return in 2018 that symbolized the refusal of Gazan refugees to submit any longer to Israeli captivity. Yet until after October 7, Israel had not avowed genocidal intentions, implemented in the most totalizing and sadistic manner, while enjoying the sustained backing of the US and its most powerful European partners.
The message that this genocidal assault communicated to the Palestinians is that the world was either helpless or afraid to stop this one-sided massacre generally misdescribed as a ‘war’ between Israel and Hamas. Israel sought to convince enough Palestinians in Gaza, as well as the West Bank, to heed the ultimatum directed at the Palestinian, and implicitly conveyed to the world: ‘leave or we will kill you.’
Zandman’s emotional outburst is a reaction to the Israeli mindset that endorses the flattening of the Palestinian reality, but there is no expression of concern about the cruel choice facing the Palestinian people as a result of this destruction of viable conditions of life in Gaza: sustain resistance amid continuous violence in a destroyed habitat lacking life support of food, water, medicine or seek the relative normalcy of life, although as an unwanted and feared refugee, likely denied human rights in the host foreign country. Yet despite the hardships, offering Palestinians a greater possibility of rescuing surviving children and families from enduring what must appear to many as a hopeless future, makes further steadfastness to the land seem increasingly suicidal.
Most Palestinians, whether in Gaza or elsewhere are not prepared even now to admit political defeat after a century of struggle that destroyed their dreams and made even hope of better days increasingly seem like a desperate act of will bordering on a collective death wish. Even if forced to leave, the Palestinian will to resist is likely to persist, although in more covert forms, possibly including a revival of armed struggle tactics by scattered militia groups as an alternative to being resigned to realities too overwhelming to confront any longer. The Palestinians face the danger of what might be described as ‘resistance fatigue,’ which if it emerges should be accompanied by an appreciation of a remarkably sustained narrative of Palestinian perseverance and heroic struggle against a ruthless and ideologically empowered adversary with its own narrative of historical and ethnic entitlement.
Daniel Falcone: You’ve suggested that this analysis should be read alongside Mohammed Omer Almogheyer’s recent publication with OR Books, On the Pleasures of Living in Gaza: Remembering a Way of Life Now Destroyed. Could you clarify how this work contributes to or deepens our understanding of the dynamics we’ve discussed, particularly in relation to Palestinian resistance and the lived experience of loss under the pressures of occupation and systemic violence? What does this reflection on everyday life before destruction offer to the broader conversation about moral responsibility and the overall historical narrative?
Richard Falk: As you suggest, Zandman shares his alienating experience as an Israeli, reacting with bitterness and moral outrage at the surrounding consensus in the country for carrying out an extremist’s genocide in Gaza, and welcoming the occasion of retaliation as dispensing with the need of Israel to construct a justifying rationale or make a public display of shame and regret. At the same time, Zandman does not attempt an assessment of the Palestinian posture of resistance in its many forms, or whether their complementary ideas about Israel and Israelis are infused with their own ‘flattening’ scenarios. My experience of knowing many Palestinians, including several Hamas leaders, has exhibited a surprisingly non-vindictive contrast, fervently seeking paths forward for both peoples without showing signs of waiting for an opportunity to give way to ‘a revenge syndrome.’ Of course, history teaches us that to whom evil is done internalize the trauma, but never forget, and are often scarred in ways that do erupt in hostile incidents, even can erupt as well-organized collective forms of violence.
In my experience, the greatest sources of anti-Semitism in our world are hard-core Zionist Jews and Evangelical Christians, both defaming in their attitude toward Jews who challenge the excesses of the Zionist Project, and not Palestinians who despite their prolonged and abusive subjugation retain a surprising degree of empathy for Jews as a people and Judaism as an ancient religion.
On this basis, I urge people to read Mohammed Omer Almoghayer’s newly published On the Pleasures of Living in Gaza; Remembering a Way of Life Now Destroyed. The book gives an unforgettable account of what made even growing up in Occupied Gaza such a fulfilling human experience. Despite poverty, abuses, humiliations, and periodic military incursions, Gaza’s modes of resistance rested on the satisfactions of community, family closeness, friendships, weddings, the delights provided by landscapes and beachfronts, as well as sharing meals, helping those in need, thirsting after normalcy, walking along the coast, falling in love.
Given these everyday pleasures, brought to life in these pages by Almoghayer’s gift of storytelling and his deep reverence for Gaza’s ancient heritage as kept alive in makeshift museums and current recourse to art and culture — it is notable that despite decades of Israeli dominance, Palestinian cultural expression is still seen through books, public intellectuals, and artworks, far more internationally known and admired than that any produced in Israel during the same period. This is partly because Israel was not provoked to reactive creativity by the conditions of its existence to concentrating their creative energies in the arts. Talented Israelis were more intent on pushing the modernist boundaries of technological innovation, especially as it could be applied militarily.
Almoghayer, long known to the outside world as one of Gaza most trustworthy and fearless journalists, is at the same time very sensitive to the hardships imposed on the people of Gaza due to the punitive blockade imposed in 2007 and extending far beyond security concerns to include such civilian items as chocolate, pasta, artistic and fashion materials, and basic building materials. Such hardships included keeping Gazans ‘on a diet’ so that they could go on living, yet only at subsistence levels. As well, Israel restricted harshly Palestinian entry and exit from Gaza contributing to its prison atmosphere. Much Israeli recrimination toward Gazans resulted from the political strength shown by Hamas in the 2006 elections and the success of Hamas in defeating coup efforts by the collaborationist Fatah (aided by Washington) to take control of the Gaza governing process.
I initially encountered Almoghayer during my first year as the UN Human Rights Council’s Special Rapporteur on Israeli Human Rights Violations in Palestinian Territories Occupied Since 1967. It occurred in 2008 after Almoghayer received the coveted Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in an overseas ceremony. On his return home to Gaza, he was brutally beaten by border security personnel not only for winning the award, but more so for bringing to light Israeli human rights abuses in his role as a young journalist in Gaza. I recommended that the UN censure Israel for this high-profile human rights violation, but nothing came of it, and Almoghayer went on with his journalistic career that included academic writing on issues that touched on the Palestinian future in an edited book on the failures of Oslo diplomacy. Almoghayer’s courage as a witness never inhibited him from truthful yet risks reportage.
The book is also a personal memoir. What should raise Western eyebrows is his harrowing negative account of a scary experience with IS (Islamic State) terrorists who seized Almoghayer, threatening his life if he didn’t join their extremist movement and torturing him while holding him in captivity. When finally released, Almoghayer makes clear that it is this kind of tactics and extremism that casts a darker shadow over the Palestinian struggle than does the abusive Israeli occupation and should have no influence whenever Palestinians get the chance to exercise their inalienable right of self-determination.
Almoghayer has not given up hope despite the rubble, the trauma, and the terrifying ordeal. In a stirring epilogue that squarely faces the reality of a Palestinian catastrophe far worse than the terrible 1948 nakba. Despite all, he believes Palestinian sumud will triumph by achieving at some future unspecified time a democratic outcome by establishing a viable sovereign state of their own, premised on mutual and equal respect for the human rights of the contending ethnicities. He does not pronounce upon whether it should be one state for the two peoples or separate states, but its legitimacy will depend on the realization of equality and dignity for all citizens and residents. If you read only one book on Palestine and the worldview of Palestinians read On the Pleasures of Living in Palestine perhaps in conjunction with one Palestinian film, From Ground Zero.
Daniel Falcone is a teacher, journalist, and PhD student in the World History program at St. John’s University in Jamaica, NY as well as a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. He resides in New York City. Richard Falk is Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, Chair of Global law, Queen Mary University London, and Research Associate, Orfalea Center of Global Studies, UCSB.
a Call by Palestinian Universities on Gaza and the future that is calm, clear, strong, persuasive, and sensible, but will not be heeded in Tel Aviv or Washington without an unrising by people representing civil society/
Global Justice in the 21st Century 
GAZA: Ordeal & Destiny
30 Jun[Prefatory Note: I post below two items pertaining to Gaza—my short poem, and a collection of responses to the question “What is the Future of Gaza” by a clever online publication, called ‘One Question,’ which true to its name poses a single question to a number of people presumed to have something to say in response, is the creation of Cihan Aksan and Jon Bailes. I only learned about this format because I am among the respondents represented below. My current concern is that while the world of states, and even the UN, has virtually abandoned the people trapped in Gaza, we who support their empowerment and liberation, must not lose faith in their future, nor weaken our emotions of empathy so long as their ordeal persists.]
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Great March of Return and the Unspeakable
This wordless borderland
Where love and atrocity meet
Where free fire zones
Fill pools with blood
Overflowing hatred
Climb forlorn fences
Call forth silences
Of heart and mind
Words of rage
Rightless rights
March and return
Return and march
Tears are not enough
Nor outrage nor silence
When tending the wounded
Become a capital crime
It’s time to say
This world is doomed
27 June 2018
Yalikavak, Turkey
One Question
Gaza
28th June 2018 Cihan Aksan And Jon Bailes <stateofnatureblog.com/one-question-future-gaza>
One Question is a monthly series in which we ask leading thinkers to give a brief answer to a single question. This month, we ask:What is the future of Gaza?
With responses from: Ramzy Baroud; Richard Falk; Sara Roy; Abdalhadi Alijla; Norman Finkelstein; Toufic Haddad; Atef Alshaer; Helga Tawil-Souri; Hagar Kotef; Joel Beinin; Magid Shihade; Ran Greenstein; Richard Hardigan; Salman Abu Sitta.
Ramzy Baroud
Journalist, author and editor of Palestine Chronicle. His latest book is The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story(Pluto, 2018). He has a PhD in Palestine Studies from the University of Exeter and is a Non-Resident Scholar at Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, University of California Santa Barbara. His website is www.ramzybaroud.net.
The ongoing siege on the Gaza Strip was interrupted by three major Israeli wars: in 2008/9, 2012 and 2014, with a total death toll that exceeded 5,000. Tens of thousands were wounded and maimed, and hundreds more were killed in the in-between, so-called ‘lull’ years. Coupled with a hermetic blockade, Gaza cannot rebuild most of its destroyed infrastructure, leading the United Nations to conclude that the tiny but overcrowded enclave will become ‘uninhabitable’ by 2020. In many ways, however, and tragically so, it already is.
The future of Gaza will follow the same path of horrific wars and a suffocating siege if no new positive factors are injected into this dismal equation. Without a regional and international push to force Israel to loosen its grip, or to find alternative routes to assist the isolated Strip, misery will continue, even beyond 2020. ‘Uninhabitable’ or not, Israel has no plans to allow Gaza’s 2-million inhabitants, mostly refugees from historic Palestine, today’s Israel, to lead normal lives.
It is important to note that Israel is not solely responsible for Gaza’s current fate; Egypt and the Palestinian Authority (PA) are also culpable, each with its own agenda. Egypt, which shares the Rafah border crossing with Gaza, wants to ensure that Hamas, which it perceives as an extension of the Muslim Brotherhood Movement, is isolated and weakened. The PA, which is controlled by the largest Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) faction, Fatah, is also hell-bent on defeating Hamas. Fatah lost a parliamentary election to Hamas in 2006, and does not wish to repeat that perceived folly by allowing another democratic election to take place.
Thus, the Palestinian political rift is important for all parties involved: Israel needs to demonise Hamas and, by extension, all of Gaza; Egypt wants to marginalise any strong Islamic political tide, and the PA in the West Bank wants to keep its rivals at bay. Despite Hamas’ regional politicking, it has so far failed to break away from its isolation. Gaza is, therefore, not a victim of Israel alone. True, the latter owns the largest shares in Gaza’s desolation, but other Arab and Palestinian parties are greatly invested and equally keen on keeping the hapless Strip on its knees.
If the status quo persists, a backlash is on the way, not just in terms of another deadly Israeli war to ‘downgrade’ the defenses of Palestinian resistance, but also in terms of social and political upheaval in Gaza and the West Bank. The large protests against the PA in Ramallah in recent days were violently suppressedby PA police and thugs, but West Bankers are growing angry over the subjugation of their Gaza brethren. Meanwhile, the mass ralliesat the Gaza-Israel fence are an indication that Gazans are seeking alternative methods to fight back, even at the price of a high death and injury toll, as has been and continues to be the case
.
Richard Falk
Professor Emeritus in International Law, Princeton University; between 2008-2014 he served as Special Rapporteur for Occupied Palestine on behalf of the UN Human Rights Council; his most recent books are Power Shift: On the New Global Order(University of Chicago, 2016) and Revisiting the Vietnam War(University of Cambridge, 2017).
It is important to understand some essential features of the distinctive place of Gaza in the wider context of the Palestinian struggle for elemental rights. Perhaps most fundamentally, unlike the West Bank and Jerusalem, Gaza is not considered part of the ‘promised land’ that forms the substance of the Zionist Project to form a Jewish State that corresponds with its understanding of the scope of biblical entitlement.
At the same time, Gaza has a long history of centrality in the Palestinian national experience that stretches back before the time of Mohammed, and thus the inclusion of Gaza in Palestine’s vision of self-determination is vital. This collides with Israel’s desire to maintain a Jewish majority state, which would make it desirable for Gaza to be absorbed or at least administered separately by either Jordan or Egypt.
Gaza, more than the West Bank, has also been the center of Palestinian resistance, being the site where the First Intifada was launched in 1987 and where Hamas came to govern after it prevailed in internationally supervised elections of 2006 and in a struggle for governing authority the following year.
The intense hostility between Hamas and the PLO has fractured Palestinian political unity, weakening Palestinian diplomatic leverage, and making it more plausible for Israel to claim it has no Palestinian ‘partner’ in the search for a peaceful solution.
Such a background helps us understand why Gaza has experienced massively destructive attacks by Israel in 2008-09, 2012, and 2014, as well as the recent border massacre in response to the Great Return March that is the latest example of Israeli reliance on excessive violence and cruel tactics to crush Palestinian resistance.
Gaza also partakes of the wider fate of the Palestinian people, which in the time of Netanyahu and Trump seems extremely unfavorable, with respect to relief from the ordeal of a suffocating blockade that has lasted more than a decade and control policies designed to achieve de-development of the Gazan economy. In this regard, the safest prediction is a continuation of the cycle of repression and resistance with no change of basic circumstances. Even the Israeli expansionists do not seek to absorb Gaza, although its offshore deposits of natural gas might create a future temptation.
The longer vision of a Gazan future is clouded at present. Ideally, Gaza would participate in a single secular state embracing the whole of historic Palestine. Increasingly, the impracticality of the two-state solution has focused Gazan hopes either on a long-term ceasefire or a genuine peace process that establishes a single democratic state.
Sara Roy
Senior research scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University, specialising in the Palestinian economy, Palestinian Islamism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She is also co-chair of the Middle East Seminar, jointly sponsored by the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and co-chair of the Middle East Forum at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Her books include: The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-development (Institute for Palestine Studies, 1995, 2001, third edition 2016 with a new introduction and afterword and Arabic edition forthcoming in 2018); Failing Peace: Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict (Pluto Press, 2007); and Hamas and Civil Society in Gaza: Engaging the Islamist Social Sector (Princeton University Press, 2011, 2014 with a new afterword).
The question itself reflects the problem. It speaks to Gaza as separate and apart – severed from Israel, the West Bank, and the world. In this regard, Israel has been stunningly successful; it has not only removed and contained Gaza geographically, economically and legally; it has convinced us to understand and accept Gaza as something distinct and awful, unenduring, and therefore undeserving of a normal, worthwhile existence.
Gaza’s temporality has always defined Israel’s approach to the territory because Israel has never really known what to do with Gaza. Gaza has always been unruly, guilty of what for Israel is indefensible and unforgiveable: defiance. This accounts in part for Israel’s brutal treatment of the territory including a blockade now in its 12thyear, which has destroyed the local economy. Gaza was – and remains – the center of Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation and the injustice that sustains it.
The recent protests along the fence isolating Gaza from Israel, which at times exceeded 30,000 people, were a nightmare for Israel, a harbinger of things to come. No doubt one issue plaguing the Israeli government right now is how better to control Gaza.
This question, I am told, is at the heart of the American peace plan (especially since the West Bank has effectively succumbed to Israeli rule). Controlling Gaza in the future, however, will be no different from the past. Gaza will continue to be treated as a humanitarian problem requiring nothing more than subsistence relief. Defining the parameters of Israel’s policy toward the territory, an Israeli defense official was clear and succinct: ‘No development, no prosperity, no humanitarian crisis.’
Gaza’s future must be informed by its past; yet, its lived reality has no connection to a past or a future. The majority of Gazans have no memory of Gaza before the destruction. History – both recent and far – is not so much absent as it is vacant, and without that history to navigate a way forward, there are no prospects worth thinking about or expectations worth having. People are so consumed by the present that mundane needs have become aspirational. The future is beyond conceptualisation.
If Gaza has a future outside incarceration, it lies in ending its liminality and present state of exception. It lies in admittance and inclusion. And it lies in returning to Gazans what they want most – a predictable, unexceptional life.
Abdalhadi Alijla
Palestinian-Swedish researcher and writer. Since April 2018, he has been an Associate Fellow at the Post-Conflict Research Center in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He is a member of the elected Executive Committee of the Global Young Academy for 2018-2019, Director of Institute for Middle East Studies, Canada (IMESC), and Regional Manager of the Varieties of Democracy Institute (Gothenburg University) for Gulf countries. His work has appeared in OpenDemocracy, Huffpost,Qantara, Your Middle East, Jaddaliyaand other media outlets.
Gaza has two futures: the future that the Palestinians living in Gaza are looking for, a Gaza open to the world with no fear, and the future that seems to be their destiny, which is the current reality of a life filled with misery. When I left Gaza more than a decade ago, I knew that I was leaving a place which seemed like another planet behind me, where the unemployment rate was high, Palestinian internal division was deepening, and the Israeli siege had only just started. Today, the situation in Gaza is catastrophic, literally.
The Palestinians of Gaza are paying the price for Israel’s occupation, and the detrimental policies of both Hamas and Fatah. The recent incidents in Ramallah and the Gaza strip, where Hamas and Abbas’s forces broke up protests taking place in opposition to the sanctions against Gaza by the PA, has proven that both political entities are acting as de-facto, Israel-delegated authoritarian forces.
The Palestinians of Gaza look for a bright future where they can move freely, study and have access to health care without being dehumanised. The future Gazans want is the future where ICT incubators flourish, and industries that have been destroyed by Israel, such as textiles, will return. The future of Gaza should be without the occupation, the siege, and political division.
The other future, which I see as the most probable, is the continuation of the suffering and dehumanisation of the Palestinians of Gaza by settler colonial Israel, as well as the negligence of the Palestinian leadership with respect to the demands of their citizens for unification and elections. This future is the one that nobody wants except the Israeli occupation. It is the future characterised by high rates of suicide, a slaughter every four years, and miserable economic and societal conditions.
Norman Finkelstein
Received his PhD from the Princeton University Politics Department. He has written many books, including The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering(Verso, 2000), and most recently, Gaza: An Inquest into its Martyrdom(University of California, 2018).
T
he modern history of Gaza begins in 1948 with the massive influx of expellees from the newborn state of Israel. In 1967, Gaza came under a brutal Israeli occupation. Israel alleges that it withdrew from Gaza in 2005, but the consensus among legal specialists – including top Israeli authority Yoram Dinstein – is that Israel remains the occupying power. In 2006, after Hamas won ‘completely honest and fair elections’ (Jimmy Carter), Israel imposed a medieval-like blockade on Gaza. In the meantime, Israel has visited not fewer than eight ‘operations’ on Gaza since 2004. After the last massacre, Operation Protective Edge (2014), President of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Peter Maurer, went to Gaza and observed, ‘I’ve never seen such massive destruction ever before.’
UN agencies have now pronounced Gaza ‘unlivable.’ ’I see this extraordinarily inhuman and unjust process of strangling gradually two million civilians that really pose a threat to nobody,’ UN humanitarian coordinator for Gaza, Robert Piper, observed last year. Echoing him, UN Human Rights chief, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, recently deplored the fact that Gazans have been ‘caged in a toxic slum from birth to death.’
On March 30, the people of Gaza initiated weekly mass demonstrations to break the illegal siege. Human rights groups report that the marches have been overwhelmingly peaceful. But more than 110 Gazans have been killed and more than 3,700 injured (many permanently) with live ammunition by Israeli snipers. ‘Israeli forces’ repeated use of lethal force in the Gaza Strip since March 30, 2018, against Palestinian demonstrators who posed no imminent threat to life,’ Human Rights Watch concluded in a major investigation, ‘may amount to war crimes.’
What is the future of Gaza?
Sara Roy of Harvard University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies has observed that ‘innocent human beings, most of them young, are slowly being poisoned by the water they drink, and likely by the soil in which they plant.’ Experts say that before long Gaza will be overrun by typhoid and cholera epidemics. It is impossible to predict the future except to say, if the international community doesn’t act, Gaza won’t have one.
A 2015 UN report by New York State judge Mary McGowan Davis called on Israel to lift the blockade ‘immediately and unconditionally,’ while the European Parliament in 2018 called for an ‘immediate and unconditional end to the blockade.’ If Israel isn’t compelled to end the illegal and inhuman siege, the judgment of History will not be kind. Will it one day be asked, why was the world silent when Gaza was crucified?
Toufic Haddad
Completed his PhD in Development Studies at the School for Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London in 2015, and has recently engaged in postdoctoral research for the Arab Council for Social Sciences, exploring the political economy of siege and resilience in the Gaza Strip. Author of Palestine Ltd.: Neoliberalism and National Liberation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory(I.B. Taurus, 2016).
The future or Gaza needs little prognostication: what after all could be the future of a territory of 360 km2crammed with two million people, two thirds of whom are refugees; whose water is entirely poisoned; whose civilian infrastructure has effectively collapsed; where food dependency exceeds 80 percent, and unemployment is the highest in the world? In 2017, the UN advanced its own 2012 prediction that the territory would become ‘unlivable’ by 2020, declaring the territory had already passed this dubious threshold.
Gaza has long been a ‘humanitarian catastrophe’ well documented by the not-so-small cottage industry of local and international organisations designated to confer such designations.
And here lies part of the problem: the perpetually deteriorating humanitarian and developmental conditions that have come to define the ‘Gaza ghetto’ continually frame their subject matter as an object of international humanitarian appeal, or as a festering security dilemma.
It is this dual approach that bears much of the blame for Gaza’s tortured predicament, because the ‘problem of Gaza’ is ultimately a political problem. And it has been the deliberate attempt on behalf of these actors to avoid or suppress the political nature of Gaza that has led to its persistent worsening situation.
What after all is ‘the Gaza Strip’? The territory has no natural precedent, and can only be understood as a rump territory created in the wake of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine’s southern and coastal plains during the creation of the state of Israel.
Gaza’s concentration of historical and political injustices is too long to document in 400 words. The resulting ‘open air prison’ the territory has become is a scourge on the conscious of humanity.
Absented in the statistics documenting Gaza’s travails is the untold story of how this ugly brother of the West Bank consistently generated the Palestinian movement’s political vanguard, organising for refugee return, statehood and national liberation. While today this movement is led by Islamo-nationalists (Hamas), years ago this mantle fell to communists, Nasserists, Left nationalists (PFLP), and secular nationalists (Fateh).
The myth that this predicament can continue ad infinitum, solved through ‘technological fixes’, aid and yet more sophisticated military means – from drones and remote controlled machine guns, to underground walls, is precisely that – a myth.
Eventually Palestinians and their allies will develop means to more effectively counter their predicament, be this violently or nonviolently.
The question then becomes how much blood is to be shed before then, and perhaps more importantly, what history will write about those who perpetuated this bloodshed, by design or by default.
Atef Alshaer
Lecturer in Arabic Studies at the University of Westminster. He has written several research papers and monographs, including Poetry and Politics in the Modern Arab World(Hurst, 2016); Language and National Identity in Palestine: Representations of Power and Resistance in Gaza(IB Taurus, 2018); the co-authored The Hezbollah Phenomenon: Politics and Communication, with Dina Matar and Lina Khatib (Hurst, 2014); and an edited volume, Love and Poetry in the Middle East(Hurst, 2018).
Known as the biggest open air prison, Gaza’s future lies in it being totally liberated. Besieged and battered by three devastating wars and constant attacks by Israel, ruled by Hamas without any regimes nearby to cooperate with its partisan rule, Gaza is left to fend for itself in the face of a world that seems content to look at it as an abyss, the ultimate brainchild of Israel and its ideology of racist Zionism, with its irrational and irresponsible American patronage.
Much has been written about Gaza, but little has been done to alleviate its suffering, that of two million people trapped for more than a decade in 365 square kilometres. It is crowded as well as poverty-stricken, and lacking in opportunities for its vibrant and often educated youth. It is depleted of humane prospects for the future, yet Gazans continue to resist and innovate in their resistance; and the latest manifestation of this is the Great March for Return, held to commemorate the 70thanniversary of the Palestinian Nakba, the dispossession from historic Palestine.
The past of Gaza has been tragedy and resistance and so is its present and so will be its future. The only meaningful future for Gaza is for it to be reunited with historic Palestine within a one democratic state solution, where every citizen from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea has equal political and human rights. Short of that, Gaza will remain deadlocked between uncaring Egypt on the one hand and deadly Israel on the other. Alas, it will continue to be without an open border to connect it to the outside world, and without viable infrastructure reinforced with fair political solutions that address the root cause of its wretched state. This is anchored in the liberation of the whole of Palestine from the Israeli occupation and its entrenched mind-set of apartheid.
I
t is utterly sad that Gaza lacks a future that befits its extraordinarily warm and movingly steadfast people, notwithstanding the pain. Gaza was once part of the fabric of the Mediterranean world. Wrenched from its natural bosom, Gaza will most unfortunately remain a suffering shadow of its former prosperous self.
Helga Tawil-Souri
Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University where she is also the Director of the Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies. She co-edited Gaza as Metaphorwith Dina Matar (Hurst, 2016), and teaches and writes on technology, media, territory and politics in the Middle East, with a focus on Palestine-Israel.
That the question of a future of Gaza separate from Palestine makes sense already foretells a destination. Gaza has been severed: from Palestine, and from the world; while that world either supports Israel’s leading role in Gaza’s undoing, or, at best, throws up its arms in despair or in disregard, and lets Gaza sink into an abyss.
There is no doubt – looking at the past five, then, twenty, fifty, seventy years – that Gaza gets progressively worse. Based on that calculation, the future is grim: dispossession, destitution, misery, abjection; more of the past seven decades, for a growing population whose age is younger, who has never known anything outside of the man-made disaster called Gaza.
In the immediate future, Israel is hell-bent on making Gazans disappear… How, I’m not sure. The coming years and decades are too painful for me to ponder.
So my thoughts move along the measure of centuries instead. I think of the Maya (or the Mycenaeans): disappeared civilisations about whom we rely mostly on archaeologists to reconstruct an understanding, while we treat their ruins as playgrounds on which to take holidays along pretty seasides. Gaza might become a tourist destination with beautiful beaches in three or four-hundred years. But unlike with the fate of the Maya, or the Mycenaeans, our task today is to document – so that centuries from now, Gaza’s fate is not sealed as yet another disappeared culture.
There should be records, notes, reports; recipes, stories, biographies, pictures. Accounts and illustrations about life with constant military machines flying overhead and life forcefully severed from outside contact except virtually. Recordings, compilations, archives of sub-local dialects, idioms, performances, prayers, songs, architectural details, engravings, memories (of those who remember ten, twenty, seventy years ago). Details of weddings and burials and surgeries performed in the dark and the din of generators; figures, measurements and reports of babies orphaned, footsteps taken, high school graduation ceremonies held, regardless of physical and psychological scars wreaked.
Centuries from now, the disappearance of Gaza will be a permanent stain on humanity’s conscience, a moment of failure when society allowed a mighty victim to do away with a group of individuals because of the circumstances they were born in. There will be records that this disappearance wasn’t a miracle, a freak series of natural causes (as what presumably befell the Maya), or an inexplicable migration of millions of people. No, in Gaza, it was a protracted, painful, relentless sociocide, and the world clapped along or shed a tear, but not more. And we would have the records.
Hagar Kotef
Senior Lecturer in Political Theory and Comparative Politics at SOAS, University of London. Her book Movement and the Ordering of Freedom (Duke University Press, 2015) examines the roles of mobility and immobility in the history of political thought and the structuring of political spaces.
’m writing these words as the future of Gaza seems to oscillate, once again, between a bright (?) economic future promised by the new American peace-enterprise, and yet another round of the ongoing ‘cycles of fighting’, as they are officially termed. In recent days, we have seen increasing attacks on ‘Hamas’ infrastructures’ (which in Gaza often means simply ‘infrastructure’), retaliations on Hamas’ part, and an inflated rhetoric that we know too well from previous rounds. (Is there a future for a place that seems to be situated within a cyclical temporality?)
Trying to predict the future would therefore be foolish, but I am also not sure I want to use this question as an opportunity to imagine. As a Jewish Israeli, this is not my imagination to unfold, not my space to occupy.
The point of departure should therefore be the imagination of people in Gaza, and the recent demonstrations at Israel’s buffer zone provide an opportunity to listen. Those demonstrations entailed a demand for a future: a demand to be set free of the siege that has lasted (depending how and what one counts) at least 11 years, but also, through the name ‘the Great March of Return’, a demand to change the terms through which this freedom is understood.
It is not just a demand for basic human conditions: electricity for more than four hours a day, drinking water (96% of the water in Gaza is not drinkable), the right to fish, to work, to reconstruct demolished homes, the right to move, to see family members, to receive education, medical treatment; it is also a demand for a political language, a space, where the people of Gaza have a place not just as humanitarian subjects but as political actors. This demand, I believe, calls us to question initiatives such as the new American enterprise, but also to reflect on the terms of the question itself. As a question about the future of Gaza it undermines, I believe, precisely this latter – political – call for a future.
The future of Gaza should be integral to the future of Palestine, and any effort to separate the two questions already surrenders itself to the terms Israel has worked so hard to construct. Since 1967, and increasingly after the disengagement of 2005, and then the rise of Hamas and the division of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in 2007, Israel has been doing everything within its capacity – politically and militarily – to separate the future of Gaza from the future of the West Bank.
The recent attacks of the PA on demonstrators supporting Gaza show that the PA itself has accepted this division (if only as a tool to re-gain control over Gaza). The American enterprise seems to already take the isolation of Gaza almost for granted. When we ask about the future of Gazawe have already given up the question of the future of Palestine or have excluded Gazans from this question. We need to ask a different question then, or ask the question differently.
Joel Beinin
Donald J McLachlan Professor of History and Professor of Middle East History at Stanford University. From 2006 to 2008 he served as Director of Middle East Studies and Professor of History at the American University in Cairo. In 2002 he served as president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America. He has written or edited eleven books, most recently, Workers and Thieves: Labor Movements and Popular Uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2016).
The Palestinian Great March of Return exposed both the diplomatic impasse over Israel/Palestine and the emergence of a new political alignment in the Middle East. The campaign, which began on March 30, was initiated by politically unaligned young men and women of the Gaza Strip as a protest against their miserable futures. They did so independently of both Hamas and Fatah, which have become increasingly corrupt while failing to improve their lives or to advance Palestinian political and human rights. Demonstrators demanded that the decade-long siege by Israel and Egypt be lifted and called for the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes – highlighting the origins of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, rather than its post-1967 consequences.
On May 14, as President Donald Trump’s coterie of hardline Zionist funders and supporters, represented by Sheldon Adelson and anti-Semitic evangelical Protestant preachers John Hagee and Robert Jeffress, celebrated the inauguration of the future US Embassy in Jerusalem, Israeli forces shot dead over 60 Palestinians and injured over 2000. Beyond verbal denunciations, the only practical response by any Arab state was Egypt opening its border with the Gaza Strip for the month of Ramadan, allowing a limited number of Palestinians to exit. The reason for the measured response of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt is that they have been forging an alliance with Israel directed against Iran.
While several secret meetings between Israelis and Emiratishave been reported, Saudi Arabia is reluctant to openly acknowledge its alignment with Israel. Israel is pursuing a more public relationship. Before Saudi Arabia and Russia kicked off in the opening game of World Cup 2018, the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s official Arabic Twitter account wished Saudi Arabia ‘best of luck!‘
By withdrawing from the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran, President Trump signalled willingness to follow Israel’s lead in pursuing realignment of the Middle East around an anti-Iranian front. Palestinians may become collateral damage of this agenda, first and foremost the 1.9 million residents of the Gaza Strip, which may become ‘unliveable’ by 2020 according to a UN report. However, the Saudis and Emiratis, who have recently bailed out Egypt to the tune of $8 billion, could easily become the lead funders for the rehabilitation of Gaza if they became convinced that their anti-Iranian project requires it.
Magid Shihade
Assistant professor of International Studies at Birzeit University. His book, Not Just a Soccer Game: Colonialism and Conflict among Palestinians in Israelwas published in 2011 by Syracuse University Press. His recent articles include: ‘Global Israel: Settler Colonialism, Ruptures and Connection’, Borderlands, 2015, and ‘Education and Decolonization: On Not Reading Ibn Khaldun in Palestine’, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, & Society, 2017.
In thinking about the future of Gaza, one has to consider the history of modern Palestine, and the founding of the Israeli settler colonial state in 1948, which has led to a process of elimination of the native Palestinian society, through displacement, separation, maiming, encampment, caging and killing.
The Israeli state is a racialised and racist state which affects not only the native Palestinians but also Jews of non-western origin, and migrants from Africa and Asia. Since its founding it has been engaged in violence against the native Palestinian population, and peoples in neighbouring states. It has also been engaged in wars, arms exports and support for criminal regimes, creating havoc around the world. Like all settler colonial states, its impact can be seen locally, but more than other cases it has been a global issue from the start.
Thus, while the Israeli state must be seen as a European settler colony (like the US and others), its specific features must be considered. Its uniqueness lies in its claims to represent world Jewry – implicating Jews wherever they live, forcing them to take a stand either as supporters of Zionism, or as detractors of a racist ideology and state – as well as in its self-image as the West’s front against Asia and Africa. But it is also unique because it has created millions of Palestinian refugees since 1948, who live in many countries and have gained the support of the local populations. And, by being part of the western global exportation of arms and violence, it has created mass opposition around the world.
In short, the Israeli state and its policies towards Gaza and Palestine must be seen in their global context, and in their connection to the rise and dominance of racist western capitalist, colonial, and imperialist policies. They are part of a larger structure that has been at war against the most vulnerable at home and abroad, those who are considered ‘Other’ or disposable, and against nature and its limited resources.
So, the future of Gaza-Palestine is part of the future of the world. It is the future of surviving the current conditions, created by the many who have been negatively affected by them, and needs a global framework. In thinking about the possibility of a better future, one is reminded of the concept of asabiyya(social solidarity) defined by the 14-15th century scholar Ibn Khaldun. In his analysis of how societies manage to survive, Ibn Khaldun argued that some form of common feeling is needed among the members of a group. And this cooperation between people is not just an ethical issue, but a practical one.
Taking that concept to a global scale, one can imagine the majority of people having in common a respect for human lives, human dignity, equality, fair pay for labour, quality of life, the right to mobility, and a world where natural resources and the environment are respected, without which we cannot survive. For Gaza-Palestine to have a better future, we are responsible for working to create a different and a better world for much of its population.
Ran Greenstein
Associate professor of sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. Among his publications are Zionism and its Discontents: A Century of Radical Dissent in Israel/Palestine(Pluto, 2014), and Identity, Nationalism, and Race: Anti-colonial Resistance in South Africa and Israel/Palestine(forthcoming).
For the last 70 years Gaza has been stranded between Israel and Egypt in a state of limbo. Not wanted but not given up; dominated but not subordinated; always controlled from the outside but left to its own devices from the inside; separated from the rest of Palestine but linked to it; incorporated into the system of domination but not integrated socially and politically.
Does its future have to look the same as its past and present?
To avoid that, it needs to reverse course, to become re-integrated with the rest of Palestine, to overcome the image of the bogeyman it has acquired in Israeli eyes.
Why has Gaza been such a problem for its neighbours? It epitomises the Palestinian situation; most of its population are refugees who regard pre-1948 Palestine as their true home after generations of life in exile. Yet, unlike other refugees, its people live within the boundaries of historical Palestine, a few miles away from their ancestral land. For three decades they could hop on a taxi and in an hour find themselves in Ashkelon or Jaffa, able to see the sights and work but not spend the night there, let alone return on a permanent basis. For the last two decades even this symbolic relief has been blocked, increasing the sense of isolation and desperation.
What can be done to change the future? First, Gaza must cease being a bone of contention between rival forces. The PA must stop punishing its people for making the ‘wrong’ electoral choice; Hamas must stop using it as an alternative political centre. Both sacrifice the interests of the people for the sake of power. This is replicated on the broader scene, with regional forces using diplomacy and money to play one faction against another. Internal Palestinian unity is essential for a move forward.
Reaching out to Israeli constituencies is another necessary step. Gaza’s only viable future is with the rest of Palestine and that means Israelis are essential to the picture. They must be seen as part of the solution not only part of the problem. A strategy that gathers progressive forces on a platform of individual and collective equality, redress and justice for all, is needed. Only through political dialogues among all population segments can a common solution be developed, aided by global solidarity that is guided by local actors.
Richard Hardigan
University professor based in California. He is author of The Other Side of the Wall(Cune, 2018). His website is richardhardigan.com, and you can follow him on Twitter @RichardHardigan.
The quality of life in the Gaza Strip is appalling. According to a 2017 studyby the Israeli NGO B’Tselem, the unemployment rate hovers at 44% (61.9% for those under the age of 29). 80% of Gazans depend on humanitarian aid, while 60% suffer from food insecurity. 96.2% of the Strip’s water is contaminated and undrinkable. Electricity is cut for all but a few hours every day. Raw sewage is pumped into the sea. And the situation is only worsening. A reportissued by the United Nations in 2015 predicted that the Gaza Strip will be uninhabitable by 2020.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has calledthe situation in Gaza ‘one of the most dramatic humanitarian crises that [he has] seen in many years working as a humanitarian in the United Nations.’
The crisis in Gaza is entirely man-made. It is a result of the Israeli blockade of the enclave, which began in 2007 after Hamas’ election victory that followed Israel’s unilateral withdrawal in 2005. Israel insists the purpose of its blockade is to diminish Hamas’ capacity to maintain or increase its weapons arsenal, but a quick scan of the items it bans – which includes such goods as chocolate and potato chips – reveals the mendacity of its claim. In fact, a US diplomatic cable quotedIsraeli officials as saying they wanted to ‘keep Gaza’s economy on the brink of collapse.’
Since the imposition of the blockade Israel has also engaged in three major assaults on Gaza, the consequences of which were devastating. Thousands of Palestinians – most of them non-combatants – died; tens of thousands of homes were destroyed or badly damaged; schools, hospitals, factories, farms, mosques, and infrastructure such as power and water plants were hit.
Israel’s policy vis-à-vis the Gaza Strip is to raise the level of suffering of the civilian population to such an extent that it will have no choice but to overthrow the Hamas government. But this is a serious miscalculation. Over the last decade Israel’s harsh measures have given Hamas the opportunity to cement its stranglehold on power. Only by easing its restrictions on the embattled enclave and allowing for its reconstruction can it hope to create an environment in which an extreme political movement such as Hamas cannot thrive. If Israel continues on its current path, the civilian population will eventually reach its breaking point. And when it does, the Gaza Strip is going to explode in a paroxysm of violence, the consequences of which will be devastating not only for the Palestinians, but for Israel, as well.
Salman Abu Sitta
A writer and activist on Palestinian refugees and the Right of Return. He has authored over 300 papers and articles and five books including the encyclopaedic Atlas of Palestine 1948and the expanded Atlas of Palestine 1917- 1966published in 2010. He is founder and president of the Palestine Land Society, UK, for the purpose of documenting the land and people of Palestine. The society website has a wealth of information at www.plands.org.
Gaza is the symbol of Palestine. Gaza is the part of Palestine which never willingly raised a flag other than that of Palestine. Gaza represents the conscience of the Palestinian people, which can express itself freely (most of the time), unlike in other regions in Palestine, under Israeli rule.
Gaza is not only the symbol but the centre of resistance to the occupation of a homeland. In Gaza, the first commando operations to liberate occupied Palestine started in 1950. In Gaza, demonstrations against settling Palestinians in Sinai in 1954 and 1955 were met with killings and jail sentences. The cry of the people in the streets was ‘we want to return home, not further exile.’
In Gaza, the first popular movements to liberate occupied Palestine started just after al-Nakba. Fatah, Arab Nationalists, Muslim Brothers and Communists each vied to find the best strategy to liberate Palestine throughout most of the 1950s.
In Gaza, the first democratically elected Palestine Legislative Council was formed in 1961. From Gaza, the first Palestinian delegation travelled to New York in 1962 to address the UN on behalf of the Palestinian people. All previous representations at the UN had been made by Arab League members.
Why is Gaza Strip the most crowded place on Earth?
During the British Mandate on Palestine (1920- 1948), Britain, in contravention of its obligations to bring independence to Palestine, allowed European Jewish settlers to come to Palestine. During this period, the settlers, with British collusion, managed to control only 6% of Palestine. Armed and trained by the British, these Zionist settlers (later called Israelis) depopulated 675 Palestinian towns and villages and occupied by military force 80% of Palestine in 1948/49, after the unceremonious British departure.
Nowhere are the effects more striking than in southern Palestine. The southern half (50%) of Palestine was totally ethnically cleansed by the Israelis and the inhabitants of 247 villages have been pushed into 1.3% of the territory. That is the Gaza Strip. They now live in 8 refugee camps at a density of 7000 people/km2.
They literally see their land and homes across the barbed wire. Their land is still empty; the settlers’ density is only 7 people/km2.
The longest standing resolution in UN history since 1948, UNGA resolution 194, calls for the return of the refugees to their homes.
Three generations of refugees, as the youngest eloquently demonstrated in April and May 2018, insist on their Right of Return. There can never be any peace in the region without the right of 7 million Palestinian refugees to return to their homes, now occupied by 2% of Israelis.
The future of the whole region resides in Palestine. And the future of Palestine resides in Gaza. And the future of Gaza is in the Right of Return. And that calls for justice, well over due.
Tags: Future of Gaza, Gaza, Gaza Massacre