Gaza: is it right that it should face the same fate as Carthage?

Public opinion is rarely so volatile as it is when the issue is Israel/Palestine. I would guess that back in 1948, when the nascent Jewish state was fighting for its life against the combined forces of much of the Arab world, the people of Britain were almost entirely supportive of its cause. The horror story of the Holocaust was fresh in their minds and the fact of a post-war Israel was in any case rooted in the Balfour Declaration of 1917. 

True, there was some residual resentment over the many acts of terror perpetrated by the underground Irgun movement during the preceding British mandate, including the attack on the headquarters of the British mission in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in which 91 people died. But as the plucky Jewish irregulars first held out against the Arab armies and then defeated them, the sense was that history was at last moving in such a way as to prevent a second Holocaust, and thank God for it. 

Nineteen years later, emotions in the UK were equally stirred when, during the Six Day War launched against Israel by Egypt, Syria and Jordan, the intended victims ended the fighting as victors, occupying not only East Jerusalem but the whole of the West Bank and Gaza (Trans-Jordan/Palestine), the Golan Heights (Syrian) and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. It was incredible. Israel was now a hero nation – proof that David really could slay Goliath. 

This pattern was repeated in 1973, when the Yom Kippur war, that at first looked deeply threatening to Israel, ended once more in a triumph for Jewish arms.   

It was after 1967 that much changed. The whole of Palestine fell under occupation. Its people, with the help of their Arab neighbours, had been fighting not, for the most part, to drive the Jews into the sea (though some certainly felt that way), but to recover lands lost to them in more than twenty years of conflict. 

It ought not be forgotten that all of what we call Israel today, including the attenuated statelet achieved in 1948 was formerly Arab land and had been for the best part of two-thousand years. The native Jewish population was small and scattered, most of their brethren – the Diaspora – having been separated from the homeland since the defeat by Rome of Jewish armies in a series of hard-fought battles between 66 and 135 AD. 

It was, first, the promotion of Zionism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, then, crucially, the impact of the Holocaust that, over time, persuaded close to half of the world’s deeply traumatised Jews to return home (to make Aliyah) and to reclaim their lost inheritance. 

If you were a Jew, both the logic and the necessity was reinforced by scripture. They believed themselves to be God’s chosen people. But if you were a Palestinian, the issue, in a very short space of time, was that you were being evicted from your fields and homes to make room for settlers, most of them European, backed by Western sentiment and American money. 

There was little opportunity for an accommodation to be reached. The Jews just kept on coming and the more they came, the more the Arab peasantry was shoved aside or reduced to servitude. The Palestinian cause was not helped by the narrow-mindedness and corruption of the Al-Fatah leadership, but the truth is that land for peace was a lie. Settlement was the reality. 

Gaza was always a particular case. Controlled by Egypt from 1948 to 1967, it was occupied and partially settled by Israel until a negotiated withdrawal in 2006. Densely populated and with a strong sense of itself, it quickly fell under the sway of Hamas, a violent Islamist grouping motivated to the exclusion of all else by its visceral hatred of the “Zionist entity”. 

Having narrowly won the only election it ever fought, Hamas set about transforming Gaza, with its 2.4 million people crammed into a space smaller than the Isle of Wight, into an Islamist dictatorship. From time to time, having allied itself with revolutionary Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement, it would launch assaults on Israeli territory or send ageing Katyusha rockets in the general direction of Jewish settlements. 

Israel’s response, with the cooperation of Egypt, was to blockade the enclave by land and sea, so that imports of every kind were heavily restricted, no one could enter or leave without permission and fishing boats were obliged to keep within sight of land and the Israeli navy. Gaza survived, but it suffered. Enclosed within a wall of steel, its inhabitants grew increasingly bitter. 

Last weekend’s assault by militants bent on murder and mayhem was not the first of its kind, but it was easily, in every sense, the most far-reaching. Rockets rained down on Israel. Young people attending a “rave” in the desert were shot to pieces. More than a hundred hostages were taken, some of them later paraded through the streets to be spat on by onlookers. 

What grand strategy, if any, lies behind it can only be wondered at. All that is certain is that the targets were all and any Jews that could be found, women and children included. It was like the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in reverse. More than one thousand Israelis died. 

Now we await the full measure of Israeli retaliation. Air force jets have already reduced much of Gaza City to rubble. There is no electricity, not even for hospitals. All outside, supplies of food and water have been cut off. And the Israeli Army, now 300,000-strong, with more reservists joining every day, is poised to engage in a wholesale land assault. Benjamin Netanyahu, mired in corruption, has vowed that the gates of Hell are about to open for Hamas. The ordinary people of Gaza must get out, he says, by way of Egypt, because Gaza, as we have known it, like Carthage of old, is about to cease to exist. 

It is easy to pick sides in this unfolding tragedy. The two are deeply entwined in each other’s guilt and misery. If you ask me what the way out is, I cannot tell you. I have no idea. But if anyone tries to persuade you that, after a great wrong, justice is about to be done on the planes of Gaza, I would beg you to think again.  

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life