If the Palestinian National Movement Is to Succeed, “Armed Struggle” Must Go

“Without ‘armed struggle,’” wrote two Palestinian journalists in an essay published in the New Yorker last summer, the Palestinian “national movement had no clear ideology.” Robert Nicholson responds to this observation, taking as an example the case of three men named Jabareen who killed two Israeli policemen in July and were then shot and killed by police:

How could the Jabareens have possibly thought killing Israeli police officers would advance their cause? Didn’t they realize these senseless murders would make Israelis even more vigilant? Didn’t they understand that Palestinian violence has never worked since the time of the British Mandate? Apparently not. But the Jabareens aren’t alone. . . . Palestinian culture gives mythical power to the word shahid (“martyr”), making it impossible to contemplate gritty compromises like the 1947 partition plan and other peace deals. Far better to die in purity.

If martyrdom is the greatest Palestinian virtue, tatbi’a, or normalization, is the greatest Palestinian sin. A normalizer is a Palestinian who accepts Israel, cooperates with Israel, or suggests that Palestinians should get used to a Jewish state living next door. . . . This basic inability to cope with the fact of Israel is a major obstacle that needs to be overcome. . . .

The starkest difference between Israeli and Palestinian political culture is self-criticism. Israelis never stop criticizing each other and their policies; Palestinians almost never do, at least in public. . . .

The current position of the Palestinian Authority is that the future state of Palestine will be free of Jews—Judenrein, as [the Nazis] used to say. This is a position that Christians like me cannot endorse. Jews are an ancient people who belong there as much as [Arabs] do. . . . The real Palestinian martyr will be the one who stands up and delivers this bold message to his people, even if he is killed immediately afterward.

Read more at Providence

More about: Israel & Zionism, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Palestinians

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF