Gaza: the endgame?
I first reported from Israel/Palestine more than forty years ago, and I certainly do not claim to have any answers. But at least I still have my eyesight — and I know what I see.
The key to understanding Israel’s indicted war criminal prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is that he does not believe — has never believed — that the Palestinians are entitled to a State of their own.
You could even say, judging by his actions over seventeen years as Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, that he does not believe that the Palestinians themselves are entitled to exist.
Once you understand that, everything else makes sense. Why has Israel gone back to war in Gaza in flagrant violation of the supposed ceasefire deal that he so reluctantly signed up to just two months ago? Because Netanyahu wants to crush the Palestinians once and for all.
That’s what he really means when he says he wants to crush Hamas. It’s also why he embraces Donald Trump’s crazed vision of a Gazan Riviera emptied of Palestinians and populated instead by bronzed tourists sunning themselves on Mediterranean beaches, buying their holiday homes in high-rise Trump apartment blocks and spending their US dollars in Trump casinos and Trump hotels.
(If you have a strong stomach, and haven’t seen it yet, here’s the video, apparently made as satire but shared by Trump himself, envisaging the future that Trump and Netanyahu dream of.)
There are terms that accurately describe what Netanyahu is up to. Take your pick.
Ethnic cleansing: defined by the UN in 1993 as ‘rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area.’
Genocide: defined in the UN Genocide Convention as acts ‘committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.’
And it goes beyond Gaza. In the West Bank, Israeli settlers, often aided and abetted by the Israeli army, are conducting pogroms against the Palestinians, attacking their villages and destroying their crops. According to a United Nations report published just this week, more than six hundred Palestinians were killed on the West Bank between November 2023 and October 2024, and ‘the line between settler and State violence [has] blurred to a vanishing point.’
According to the report, more than fifteen hundred Palestinian structures were demolished, resulting in the forcible displacement of more than four and a half thousand people. It adds: ‘The transfer by Israel of parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies amounts to a war crime.’
Some of this might sound familiar to students of American history. Take the Lenape people, for example, the indigenous Americans who once occupied what is now New York. Or the Apalachee, who once called what is now Florida their home.
Where are they now?
There are estimated to be well over 100,000 Americans living in Israeli settlements in occupied east Jerusalem and the West Bank, and at least some of them see themselves as Jewish inheritors of the American settler tradition. In the words of the old Zionist slogan, they say they are claiming ‘a land without a people for a people without a land.’
But of course it never was a land without a people. After all, who exactly was living in Jerusalem when the golden-domed Dome of the Rock was built in the seventh century? (Not by accident, it was built on the site of the ancient Jewish temple which had been destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE.)
Who was living in Gaza when the Great Mosque of Gaza was built, first as a Philistine temple (the one supposedly brought down by Samson, who is said to be buried beneath it), and then as a Byzantine church?
When Hamas launched its murderous attack on Israel in October 2023, it knew that Israel would respond with its customary disproportionate use of military force. But it grossly underestimated the scale of Israel’s fury and may well have extinguished once and for all any last slim hope of a Palestinian homeland.
To insist, as Western leaders still do, that the only acceptable outcome of the current conflict is the establishment of a sovereign, independent Palestinian state, living side by side with Israel, makes as much sense as insisting that Vladimir Putin must accept a sovereign, independent Ukraine on his doorstep.
It is to ignore reality and to indulge in wilful blindness. It gets us nowhere.
I first reported from Israel/Palestine more than forty years ago, and I certainly do not claim to have any answers. But at least I still have my eyesight — and I know what I see.