The roots and nuances of the Israel-Hamas war

As I’ve watched the heartbreaking scenes of death and destruction during the last few weeks — of the monstrous attack by Hamas on innocent Israelis, of Gazan civilians desperately seeking water and shelter from Israeli bombs — my mind has often turned to a dear Palestinian friend in Gaza City whom I used to visit decades ago.

Mary Khaas ran kindergartens in Gazan refugee camps for the Philadelphia-based American Friends Service Committee. She used to drive her Palestinian teachers from their refugee camp into Israel to visit her Jewish friends at Nir Oz, a kibbutz that was full of Israeli “peaceniks” who believed in a two-state solution.

She also believed in two states, Israeli and Palestinian, together, and wanted each side to stop demonizing the other.

That was then.

On Oct. 7, Nir Oz was destroyed by Hamas terrorists, who brutally massacred more than 100 of its residents, burned down its homes, and kidnapped scores of men, women, and children. One of the people taken hostage was Yocheved Lifshitz, an 85-year-old grandmother who was just released from Hamas captivity. She might well have been among Mary’s many Jewish friends.

Mary Khaas died three decades ago. Yet my memories of her peace efforts remind me that the Israel-Palestine tragedy is more complex than any bumper sticker or simplistic slogan can capture. Hamas’ carnage and Israel’s military response have generated such heated emotions that facts that dispute accepted narratives just incite fury.

Irrespective, let me offer a few reality checks, along with propositions that flow from them, which might help you navigate through the rivers of rhetorical hate.

The Hamas attack did not occur in a vacuum but reflected the long tragedy of Gaza. The Gaza Strip — 25 miles long, between three and seven miles wide, and roughly the size of Philadelphia — is a sad spit of land along the Mediterranean that nobody wants. Israel captured it from Egypt during the 1967 war and has long wanted to get rid of it. Egypt doesn’t want it back. In Hebrew, “Go to Gaza” is the equivalent of “Go to hell.”

Densely packed with 2.2. million descendants of Palestinian refugees who fled Jaffa or the Beersheba area during Israel’s war of independence, Gaza is a morass of poverty and unemployment.

Before Hamas forcibly seized total control of the strip, driving the Palestinian Authority and its Fatah fighters out in 2007, Gaza was more open to the world.

A small but significant number of Israelis and Gazans — farmers, merchants, professionals, and intellectuals — had personal contact with each other, knew each other’s names and histories, and could debate how to end Israel’s occupation of the territory. Gazans could travel to the West Bank, Israelis got their cars fixed in Gaza City, and tens of thousands of Gazan Palestinians worked in Israel.

But since the Hamas takeover, Israel has blockaded the strip, leaving two million Gazans in what amounts to an open-air prison — with total Israeli control of all air, sea, and land borders except for one crossing into Egypt.

Local businesses such as flower, fruit, and juice exporters or clothing factories have been crippled by the blockade, leaving Gaza to live off international aid. Whether or not they back the Islamists, the population is at the mercy of authoritarian Hamas rule.

Such isolation — combined with the end of any peace process — breeds hatred and terrorism. This is just a reality.

That reality, however, provides no excuse for what happened on Oct. 7. If someone justifies what Hamas did as an act of liberation, they not only justify terrorism, but they endorse the military destruction of the Israeli state.

GoPro videos taken and posted by the attackers show the slaughter of children in front of their parents, babies riddled with bullets, burned bodies, and the semi-naked body of an Israeli woman paraded on a pickup truck through Gaza City. Documents found on Hamas bodies specifically directed fighters to kill and kidnap civilians. That is terrorism. Full stop.

The Hamas founding charter states directly that the establishment of Israel is “illegal.” It calls for an Islamic state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, to be achieved by military means, including deliberate slaughter and kidnapping of civilians. It specifically rejects the idea of a two-state solution. Hamas terrorist bombings of buses and restaurants in the 1990s were aimed at tanking the Oslo Accords that called for a two-state solution.

You can support Hamas as a “liberation movement” only if you believe the Israeli state should be destroyed and an Islamist Arab state created in its place.

According to international law, Israel has a right to self-defense against an attacker. Given Israel’s small size, if you compare the 1,300 Israelis murdered by Hamas on Oct. 7 to U.S. losses on 9/11, it would be proportional to the killing of 40,000 people at the World Trade Center.

Of course, just because you have the right doesn’t mean you can ignore the mounting cost in Palestinian civilian lives.

I reject the comparison of numbers — measuring how many civilians Hamas killed to how many Palestinian kids die from Israeli bombs. Hamas is operating in crowded urban areas and does hide within, alongside, and underneath civilian buildings in tunnels. That endangers schools, mosques, churches, and possibly hospitals. This is a war that Hamas started, and its strategy means that too many Palestinian civilians will be killed.

However, Israel has made it nearly impossible for Palestinians to evacuate to safety, ordering them to flee south and then bombing the roads and towns that they flee to. If the Israeli aim is to flush Hamas leaders and weapons out of deep tunnels where only bunker busters can reach, it is unclear what the unprecedented level of bombing is meant to achieve.

As the Biden administration is requesting, Israel should take a humanitarian “pause” in bombing so that Gazans could move south securely, and then establish safe zones where civilians can sleep without fearing their families could be dead before morning.

America should be exerting more pressure on Israel to permit a regular flow of trucks full of humanitarian supplies to enter from Egypt. Whether or not Hamas is hoarding fuel, it is unacceptable for Israel to prevent fuel supplies from entering Gaza and reaching hospitals before their systems shut down.

Two cheers for White House pressure that convinced Israel to delay its ground offensive — at least until this weekend. U.S. officials wanted more time to prepare American forces in the Mideast, and to try to organize the release of hostages as well as humanitarian safe zones in Gaza.

Disappointingly, U.S. efforts have failed to secure the safe zones or permission for hundreds of Palestinian-Americans to leave Gaza for Egypt via the Rafah crossing.

Biden needs to be much more forceful about both.

But the delay likely did Israel a favor, giving officials more time to think through their next move. In their rush to compensate for the failures that enabled Hamas killers to run wild, Israel’s political and military leaders didn’t seem to have a clear plan to achieve their overpromised goal of destroying Hamas.

A Marine officer who was awarded the Silver Star for bravery in the Second Battle of Fallujah told me bluntly that, when an army engages in urban warfare, “What you wind up doing is destroying everything.” That means that rather than take huge casualties going through every house, it is simpler to destroy every house. This could mean the utter destruction of Gaza City along with residents who couldn’t manage to flee.

Meantime, the well-prepared Hamas will have booby-trapped and wired every road, alley, and entrance, hoping it can suck Israeli forces into another debacle. Israeli officials are predicting a long war; if the U.S. and Iraqi retaking of Mosul from ISIS is any example, that could mean a war of six months or more.

President Joe Biden rightly fears a long war could force Iran and its Lebanese proxy force Hezbollah to open a second front, even though neither seems eager to go beyond limited engagement with Israel.

A long war could also cause the West Bank to explode. Biden rightly criticized “extremist” Jewish settlers for “pouring gasoline on the fire” by their increasing attacks against local Palestinians.

Most unnerving is that, according to Israeli news reports, the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has no clear plan for what comes after a hoped-for dismantling of Hamas. Some Israeli officials are talking about setting up a buffer zone inside Gaza, closing off all exits, and leaving leaderless Palestinians inside to cope with the ruins. That is a sure formula for the reemergence of Hamas or a successor, forcing Israel to reoccupy the strip. The time to think about the day after is now.

Netanyahu is not equipped to lead this war to a successful conclusion. He has lost the trust of most Israelis by dividing the country over an attempt to gut Supreme Court powers, and then presiding over a massive security and intelligence failure.

Moreover, the government is failing miserably to reach out to families of Hamas’ victims and survivors of destroyed villages. The pro-democracy network that organized massive demonstrations for months against Netanyahu’s attack on the Supreme Court has now shifted gears into a massive effort to fill in where the government has failed.

Volunteers find housing, provide clothes and necessities, and send flowers to funerals and food to bereaved families. Psychotherapists offer free services to survivors and the families of the kidnapped. If Netanyahu stays in power, it’s hard to imagine how he can manage a successful war.

» READ MORE: I traveled through Israel and the West Bank, and one thing’s clear: The two-state solution looks dead — but no one has a better alternative.

Most importantly, the Netanyahu government has zero interest in putting the two-state issue back on the negotiating table. To the contrary, it seeks de facto or de jure annexation of the West Bank and massive expansion of Jewish settlements there.

However, as Biden stressed on Wednesday, there’s no going back to the status quo before Oct. 7. “When this crisis is over, there has to be a vision of what comes next,” he said. The president called for a two-state solution and said that would require “a concentrated effort for all the parties — Israelis, Palestinians, regional partners, global leaders — to put us on a path toward peace.”

It is hard to imagine how a peace process could restart — let alone two states emerge — after all the death and pain already experienced by Israelis and Palestinians, and when the war to destroy Hamas has barely begun. But the events of the past weeks have revealed the steep cost of denying Palestinians any political horizon.

The dreams of peace held by my friend Mary Khaas seem more unreachable today than when she lived. For them to come true would require the demise of Hamas, a boost from the Arab world, and very strong backing from Washington.

It would also require a new government in Jerusalem and the emergence of new Palestinian leaders. Leaders — on both sides — with the guts to challenge their own extremists and take risks for peace. Leaders with the singular courage of a Mary Khaas.