Ordinary Palestinians, Too, Are Fighting a Long War against Israel

Last spring, a group of students at Israel’s Shalem College asked a popular Arabic teacher her thoughts about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Daniel Gordis, the college’s vice-president, describes her sobering reply and its implications:

[The teacher is] a religious Muslim who wears a hijab, lives in one of the Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem, and is a graduate student at Hebrew University. She’s fun and warm, and a great teacher—the students like her a lot. . . . [One day, her students] told her that, since they’d never discussed the “situation” (as we call it here in Israel), they were curious how she thought we might someday resolve it.

“It’s our land,” she responded rather matter-of-factly. Stunned, they weren’t sure that they’d heard her correctly. So they waited. But that was all she had to say. “It’s our land. You’re just here for now.”

What upset those students more than anything was not that a Palestinian might believe that the Jews are simply the latest wave of Crusaders in this region, and that we, like the Crusaders of old, will one day be forced out. We all know that there are many Palestinians who believe that.

What upset them was that she—an educated woman, getting a graduate degree (which would never happen in a Muslim country) at a world-class university (only Israel has those—none of Israel’s neighbors has a single highly rated university), and working at a college filled with Jews who admire her, like her, and treat her as they would any other colleague—still believes that when it’s all over, the situation will get resolved by our being tossed out of here once again.

Read more at New York Daily News

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

 

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