After being given a trillion dollars, the three major religions failed to prevent the Nightmare In Gaza.

John ‘The Nazarite’

History keeps repeating itself in the Middle East

Nov. 24, 2023 at 2:37 pm

 

By 

David Horsey

Seattle Times cartoonist

Israel and the Iranian-backed Palestinian militants, Hamas, are locked in a terrible asymmetric war between terror and technology.

Hamas set off this latest round of battle with a shocking attack against Israeli civilians that was so barbaric and obscene that it was surely designed to provoke the most extreme reaction from the right-wing Israeli government – a reaction that would provide Hamas with thousands of new martyrs for their cause among noncombatant Palestinians and inflame world opinion against Israel.

A more moderate and deft Israeli government might have followed a more careful, less violent, course, but the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has given Hamas exactly what they sought, using all the destructive power of Israel’s American-backed, high-tech military to decimate the Palestinian communities in Gaza.

In a conflict so steeped in hatred, revenge, fear and history, however, crafting a less polarizing, more humane response to Hamas terror would have been a seriously daunting task for even the wisest Israeli statesmen.

The roots of this war reach back much further than the displacement of Palestinians in 1948 when the Jewish homeland was established. Those roots stretch to the 1st century CE, when the Roman Empire destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem and began to scatter the Jews of Palestine to the far corners of the ancient world. What followed were centuries of oppression, expulsions and violence in multiple lands that culminated in the extermination of 6 million Jews in the Nazi holocaust.

Given that fraught history, Israelis cannot be blamed for fiercely defending the one small place on the planet where they can control their own fate. The unresolved problem, though, is that that small place – an area roughly the size of Western Washington – has other claimants: the Palestinians whose grandparents were moved out when the Israelis moved in and who have suffered their own decades of discrimination.

Israelis and Palestinians are two groups of people with two distinct histories of displacement who want to live on one particular piece of land. For 75 years, they have mostly done battle instead of bargaining for an arrangement in which they can share the land and live together. There are many, many complex reasons for that inability to resolve their conflict, but, perhaps, the core reason is that they simply do not want to live together, whether in a single state or two.

On the Israeli side, there is the fear of quickly being outnumbered in a single state where demographics would favor the Arab population. Jews know what it is like to be a minority and it has seldom worked out well for them.

On the Palestinian side, they do not want to be an underclass in a combined society with Israelis maintaining control of everything. They have already had too much of the demeaning experience of Israeli rule.

And extremists on both sides want none of this dreamy illusion of living together; they want it all for themselves and would love to see the other side driven into the sea.

As for the elusive two-state solution that practical diplomats keep pushing, few Israelis or Palestinians with the power to craft a deal appear eager to make the concessions necessary to turn that into reality. So, unless there is a fundamental change in this dynamic, it is hard to envision an end to a tragedy whose seeds were planted a long time ago.

See more of David Horsey’s cartoons at: st.news/davidhorsey

View other syndicated cartoonists at: st.news/cartoons

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David Horsey is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist for The Seattle Times. His latest book is “Drawing Apart: Political Cartoons from a Polarized America.”