Vol. 144: Gaza, minus illusions

… and who’s the real villain?

Look, I’m as relieved as you are that those 20 surviving Israeli hostages are finally back home safe and sound after two years in Gazan captivity. Except…

Those Israeli hostages, who committed no crime (aside from choosing the wrong ancestors), were released from custody in exchange for 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and detainees, including 250 who were serving life sentences for offenses like attempted murder and involvement in attacks that killed Israelis.

Perhaps this latest show of Israeli magnanimity will inspire those newly released convicts to gratefully turn over a new leaf, beat their swords into plowshares, and joyously set about rebuilding their homes (reduced to rubble by Israeli missiles) while finding creative jobs in Gaza’s booming economy. I would simply point out that the last time such an exchange occurred— of more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners for a single Israeli hostage in 2011— one of the released Palestinians was Yahia Sinwar, the Hamas leader who subsequently masterminded the October 7 slaughter of innocent Israelis two years ago. Now Sinwar is dead, but who is to say that another potential Sinwar isn’t among this latest batch of released criminals?

Also…

Sharon’s withdrawal

I’m amazed that the real villain of the Gaza tragedy has escaped public notice. No, not Hamas, which slaughtered 1,200 Israeli civilians and abducted 251 hostages on October 7 while continuing to make life miserable for its own 2 million Gazan subjects. And no, not Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose determination to destroy Hamas has led to some 2,000 Israeli casualties, at least 60,000 Palestinian deaths, and Gaza itself reduced to debris.

I’m thinking of the late Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who started this this whole mess in 2005 by unilaterally withdrawing Israeli troops from Gaza and dismantling 21 Israeli settlements there without a peace agreement or direct negotiations with the Palestinian Authority or any search for a potential Gazan peace partner. In 2006, the angry and confused Gazans (not unlike angry and confused Americans in 2024) voted for Hamas, which promptly seized power permanently and eliminated elections altogether— with the encouragement of Israel, which thought a strong Hamas would weaken the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank.

Sharon, meanwhile, suffered a stroke in January 2006 which left him in a permanent vegetative state until his death in 2014. But prior to his stroke, Sharon’s philosophy in all his dealings with Palestinians was consistent: “In your face.”

How’s that working out for Israel? Just wondering.

Also….

That two-state ‘solution’

Leaders of goodwill on both sides of the Israel-Palestine gulf agree, with rare unanimity, that a two-state solution is their ultimate goal. But can anyone recall a two-state solution anywhere that wasn’t an unmitigated disaster?

Have you noticed, for example, how peacefully Ireland’s Catholics and Protestants got along after they were officially separated in 1921? Were Turks and Greeks in Cyprus, or Christians and Muslims in Lebanon, more secure after a green line was imposed between them? Does no one recall that when the former Yugoslavia was broken up into ethnic states in the 1990s, each new state’s first order of business was a combination of ethnic cleansing and warfare against any new neighboring state that might object to said cleansing?

Perhaps the warm relations between North and South Korea, or between the former East and West Germany— which separated Communists from capitalists— don’t provide appropriate parallels to Jewish Israel and Arab Palestine. But the division of British India into Hindu and Muslim states in 1947 comes mighty close. So, let’s consider the results from that subcontinent:

The initial partition into India and Pakistan resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths. Since then, more than 15,000 Muslims and Hindus have died in three wars fought over a glacier. Another 40,000 to 100,000 (depending on who’s counting) have died in the insurgency in the disputed province of Kashmir.

Oh, did I mention that both countries, to protect themselves from each other, have now armed themselves with nuclear weapons?

Today, pundits and diplomats generally agree that the partition of India in ‘47 was a terrible mistake. Why, then, do these same pundits and diplomats insist that partition of Israel/Palestine is a brilliant panacea?

Who’s happier?

But surely, you object, my logic suffers from a serious flaw: If a separate Pakistani nation hadn’t been created as a refuge for Muslims, the slaughter might have been even worse.

Really? Are Pakistan’s 230 million Muslims noticeably happier, safer, more prosperous, or more spiritually fulfilled than the 160 million Muslims who stayed in India?

Yes, yes, you reply, but we don’t live at the end of history. Once India and Pakistan resolve their border disputes, then Hindus and Muslims will coexist peacefully in their separate neighboring nations.

Color me dubious. When you impose a border between antagonistic peoples, I submit, you create border disputes that will never be resolved.

Saddam’s rockets

The reason isn’t merely that separating hostile peoples deprives them of the opportunity to appreciate each other as humans, or that it exacerbates their mutual prejudices and fears until, inevitably, each side concludes that it must destroy the other group before the other group destroys them.

On a more pragmatic level, bunching people in separate distinct homelands makes it much easier for them to bomb each other than it would be if they all lived together willy-nilly.

During the first Gulf War in 1991, remember, Saddam Hussein sought to elicit sympathy from Arab leaders by firing rockets into Israel. But he took care to aim those rockets only at Haifa, an overwhelmingly Jewish city. Hussein spared Jerusalem and Tel Aviv because he knew that in those places he might kill as many Arabs as Jews, thus confusing the whole point of his exercise. Jerusalem and Tel Aviv were safer from Iraqi bombs precisely because Arabs and Jews there live in relatively close proximity to each other.

Come to think of it, if those 21 Israeli settlements in Gaza hadn’t been dismantled in 2005, would Netanyahu be bombing Gaza with such reckless abandon now?

Philadelphia’s Know-Nothing riots

If you’re seriously interested in peace and security for Israelis and Palestinians, you could do worse than study the experience of Philadelphia’s Catholics and Protestants in the 19th Century.

At a time when anti-Catholic passions ran high, the Catholic parish of St. Augustine, seeking isolation as a means of self-protection, built a church in Kensington, far removed from the city’s Protestant neighborhoods. But the organizers of another Catholic parish adopted the opposite strategy: In 1841 they built St. Patrick’s Church just off Rittenhouse Square, in the midst of a Protestant community. Such proximity, they astutely perceived, was the best way to protect their church from being set on fire: If St. Patrick’s burned, so would the surrounding wooden frame Protestant homes.

So what happened during the anti-Catholic Know-Nothing riots of 1844? St. Augustine’s in Kensington was burned to the ground. But in Rittenhouse Square, Protestants and Catholics banded together successfully to protect St. Patrick’s from arson.

These downtown Protestants and Catholics detested each other— forgive me, but I’ve forgotten why— but one thing they hated even more was the prospect of losing their homes over a theological dispute.

What, you ask, could be worse than living in close proximity to strangers who hate you? One thing: Living across the border from strangers who hate you.

When Robert Frost wrote, “Good fences make good neighbors,” he intended it ironically. Too bad poetry isn’t taught at schools of government and diplomacy.

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s new memoir, The Education of a Journalist: My Seventy Years on the Frontiers of Free Speech. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com