Gaza

A news story appeared briefly last week in the press and then vanished. It wasn’t much of a story, just a vignette really, but it has stayed with me ever since and feels, at least to me, as though it encapsulates the intractable nature of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians of Gaza. And yet…somewhere within its scant details I also see a bit of light, perhaps even some reasonable hope.

The story concerned two eight-year-old boys who somehow managed to slip across the border into Israel armed with a single knife between the two of them. They were apprehended and almost immediately, disarmed, then sent back across the border into Gaza. That’s the whole story.  

When asked what they had been hoping to accomplish, the boys explained that the plan was to be arrested and eventually sent to an Israeli prison. Left unexplained was why exactly they wanted that to be their fate. The media reports I read seemed to assume that the point was for the boys were baby terrorists hoping to become famous by murdering a civilian Israeli and then bravely by enduring life in an Israeli prison no matter how harsh the conditions. But it feels—to me, at least—at least possible that the idea was something else entirely and that the boys were attempting to get out of Gaza the only way they could think of—by getting themselves arrested and sent to an Israeli prison where they knew (or at least hoped) that children would be treated leniently and perhaps even kindly. Where there would be clean water, fresh food, and medical care. Where they might even just possibly have a school for underage inmates to attend.

So that’s my fantasy, developed within my own ever-hopeful brain as the protests at the Gaza-Israel border started up again on the one-year anniversary of their original outbreak. Over 40,000 Palestinians showed up for the anniversary rally, but the scene was really quite different from what we saw at the border a year ago. Within an hour, half the protesters had gone home. An hour after that, there were just a handful of stragglers left. The whole thing had a largely pro forma feel to it. Yes, some people did throw grenades or Molotov cocktails in the direction of the fence along the border, but the large majority of people who showed up for the protest stayed away from the border and did not risk provoking the inevitable Israeli response to any effort to cross the border illegally. The Health Ministry in Gaza, run by Hamas, claimed that two people, both teenaged boys, were killed during the protest and that hundreds were wounded. (They didn’t say by whom, but the clear implication was that Israeli soldiers had shot, yet again, at innocent protesters.) More to the amazing point was the presence, visible to all, of Hamas officials wearing day-glo orange vests stationed between the crowds and the border, and almost entirely effectively preventing anyone from rushing the fence or trying to cross into Israel. This was, by all accounts, something entirely new.

Partially, the credit goes to Egypt’s efforts to mediate a peaceful modus vivendi on the Gaza border. And another part surely goes to the IDF, which, by deploying a large number of soldiers at the border and providing them with serious support from the air, indicated clearly that it was going to do whatever it was going to take to prevent Gazans from crossing the border into Israel and harming Israeli civilians. But there is also the possibility that the Gazans themselves are growing weary of this endless battle with Israel and are yearning for the kind of normalcy that can only be a function of peaceful co-existence with Israel.

Supporters of Israel, and myself among them, never grow tired of pointing out that the residents of Gaza formally elected a Hamas-run government to lead them in 2007 and so must now bear the consequences of having terrorists for their political leaders. (There are no plans for any sort of new elections, the general disinclination of terrorists to cede power peacefully to others being one of the negative side-effects of installing a government led by terrorists in the first place.) The seemingly endless barrage of missiles aimed at civilian centers in Israel, the government’s willing to squander countless millions of dollars of aid money—by some estimates $40 million annually (click here for more on that sum)—to build the so-called “terror tunnels” whose sole function is to allow terrorists to cross unobserved into Israel, and the intensive indoctrination of Gazan children to think of Israelis as monsters and oppressors rather than nearby neighbors yearning to find a way to co-exist peacefully with the neighbors (which is the attitude of more or less every single Israeli I know personally or have ever known)—all of this makes most Israelis and supporters of Israel despair of there ever being any sort of resolution to the conflict.

It’s a small place, Gaza. The border with Israel is only thirty-two miles long. The border with Egypt is not even seven miles long. The whole place is a mere 141 square miles. (By way of comparison, Nassau County occupies 453 square miles of Long Island.) But 1.8 million people live there, which yields the figure of more than 13,000 residents per square mile. (Nassau County has fewer than 3,000 people per square mile.) So that’s a lot of people in just a very little space. Since throwing in their lots with Hamas, the Gazans have been under an Egyptian and Israeli blockade designed to prevent the smuggling of weapons into Gaza. That certainly sounds reasonable to me given Hamas’s openly proclaimed policy never to co-exist peacefully with Israel and their willingness to use the weaponry available to them to attack civilian Israelis inside Israel. But it also means the Gazans, for all they have the government they elected in place, are even less the masters of their own fate than they were before Israeli withdrew unilaterally in 2005 and inadvertently created the vacuum that Hamas was invited by the populace to fill.

And so we can frame this as a tale of two sets of two boys: the two seventeen-year-olds killed in the tumult at the border the other day as part of a pointless riot that had absolutely no chance to effect anything like meaningful change (and which merely put tens of thousands of people in harm’s way), and the two eight-year-olds armed with a single knife who somehow managed to enter Israel and whose plan was possibly—at least in my own fantasy version of the story—to be arrested and sent to a prison that would presumably feature at least some of the trappings of normal life. The teenagers killed at the border symbolize to me the pointlessness of violence and the dismal prognosis for Gazan residents if they prove unable to turn away from Hamas and embrace leaders eager and willing to live in peace with Israel. The little boys apprehended in Israel, on the other hand, represent some strange combination of daring and willingness to look across the border and see, not monsters or murderers, but young men fully human who only want to go home safely to their families and to live in peace. Obviously, I don’t know these little boys. I don’t even know their names. (Because of their age, their names were not released to the public.) But I’d like to think that they represent the Gazan version of the boy in Hans Christian Anderson’s story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” the one who saw what his eyes actually did see rather than what the grown-ups all around told him constantly told him he was seeing.

I was in Israel in 2005 during the Gaza withdrawal. There were people everywhere wearing orange ribbons to indicate their ill ease with the notion of withdrawing from Gaza other than as part of a larger peace deal with the Palestinians. And some of the televised scenes we all witnessed of Jewish people being forcibly removed from their homes were wrenching to watch…and that was a sentiment shared by all regardless of political persuasion or affiliation. But, in the end, it was what Ariel Sharon wanted. The Knesset approved the plan in February of 2005.  And before Rosh Hashanah it was all over and there was not a single Israeli in Gaza. It was a stunning act of hope on the part of Israel, a unilateral leap into an unknown future justified by the feeling that it could conceivably lead to Gazans taking charge of their own future and turning away from violence and towards peace. Within two years, Hamas was firmly in charge. And now, a dozen years later, the situation feels just as dismal as it did following the Hamas electoral victory in 2007. But hope is a funny thing—it becomes dormant but it never quite dies…and I continue to hope that cooler heads will eventually prevail, that Hamas itself will realize how much money it has wasted and how many lives the mindless violence it promotes has cost the Palestinian people with no appreciable gain at all, and that the people of Gaza themselves will follow the example of two little boys by looking into Israel and seeing not a hellish landscape populated by ogres and fiends, but a land flowing with milk and honey populated by people eager and willing to do what it takes to live in peace.