Death and Terror in Gaza

The killing of 60 people in Gaza on Monday should be met with horror and outrage by anyone concerned about the fate of Israel. The Likud government rationalizes such violence by the need to "protect Israel's borders," but such rhetoric is ghastly in its absurdity. Any brief application of logic to the situation reveals that claims to "self defense" on the part of Israeli leaders must be disingenuous.

There is no doubt that Hamas staged deliberately provocative demonstrations, mobilizing innocent people to transgress the fence running along the "Green Line" between Palestinian Gaza and Israel. But Israel and the US courted controversy over the location of the "border" when they opened a new embassy in Jerusalem, a city that the Israeli government itself acknowledges does not fall entirely within its sovereign territory. Indeed, the new US embassy itself straddles the "Green Line," the integrity of which was supposedly at issue in Gaza.

The Israeli government (along with its US allies) knew that it was launching a new provocation in the decades-long struggle over territorial sovereignty in Israel-Palestine. By moving to efface the boundary between East and West Jerusalem, Likud deliberately incited a response from the Palestinian side. The "fence rush" in Gaza was an obvious and predictable reaction to the opening of a US embassy in Jerusalem. It is ludicrous to suggest that the Israelis did not anticipate such a contingency or prepare for its occurrence.

The slaughter of sixty people that transpired on Monday, therefore, must have been planned and strategic. It was meant to broadcast a message to Palestinians and the world: the current Israeli government respects no authority concerning the boundaries of Israel but its own unilateral fiat, and will accept no legal, moral or ethical constraints on its exercise of that prerogative. In other words, the killing of sixty people by the IDF was an act of state terror.

The malicious folly of such a policy cannot be overstated. Rhetoric about "protecting Israel's borders" will win assent from those who are ill-informed about the history and parameters of the Israel-Palestine question. But this act in Gaza will fatally undermine Israel's position among informed observers of the conflict, even those most sympathetic to Israel and its founding mission. As an example, a non-Jewish colleague, one who has visited Israel on more than one occasion at the invitation of the Israeli government and is very sympathetic to the cause of Israel in particular and the Jewish people more generally, referred me in the wake of the Gaza killings to Bernard Avishai's essay in the New York Review of Books calling for a bi-national Israeli-Palestinian Confederation to replace a moribund "two-state solution." This is where Likud is leading Israel: a point at which all of the political capital necessary to maintain support for the Zionist project among even its strongest advocates and allies has been squandered.

Benjamin Netanyahu and his government have sown the wind, and many are poised to reap the whirlwind on their behalf. As Bernard Avishai suggested, it was difficult if not impossible to see how a two-state solution could be redeemed in the wake of the move of the US embassy. After the killings in Gaza the questions surrounding Israel have become even more dire. If the Likud government continues to pursue such an irredeemably sanguinary strategy, not merely the security of a two-state solution, but that of the Jewish community itself, in Israel and the world at large, must eventually be compromised.