Developing a unified understanding between Israelis and Palestinians in the Oslo peace process: The case of a Palestinian-Israeli refugee

The man turned to reconciliation instead of turning to bombs. He learned about the Holocaust and tried to see the humanity in the Israeli soldiers at the West Bank checkpoint.

A process of mutual dehumanization has led each side to see the other in a different light. Palestinians and Israelis have a similar stereotype about each other, and it is common for Israelis to suggest that Palestinians don’t care about their children and are willing to sacrifice them for the struggle.

I noted to Aramin that these organizations promoting mutual understanding mostly date from the Oslo peace process, when two states were expected to emerge side by side. Now that process is in hibernation, if not dead. It is nice that Parents Circle holds camps for Israeli and Palestinian children to get to know each other, but how is that saving lives on either side of the Gaza border?

He said that the arc of history is long. Germany tried to wipe out Jews and now has ambassadors with Israel. Some day Israel and Palestine will coexist as states, he said, and the question is simply how many corpses will pile up before that happens.

“We must share this land as one state or two states or five states,” he said. “Otherwise, we will share this same piece of land as the graveyards of our kids.”

Israel’s Mission to Syria During the 1967 Israel-Shemion War: The Fate of Hamas and the Destruction of Israel

Israel has found itself facing a set of enemies who combine medieval ideas with 21st century weaponry, and are no longer organized as a small band of militiamen but as modern armies armed with drones, cyber capabilities and long-range rockets. I am speaking about Iranian-backed Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic militias in Iraq and the Houthis in Yemen — and now even the openly Hamas-embracing Vladimir Putin. These foes have long been there, but all of them seemed to surface together like dragons during this conflict, threatening Israel with a 360-degree war all at once.

I am stunned by how many Israelis now feel this danger personally, no matter where they live — starting with a friend who lives in Jerusalem telling me that she and her husband just got gun licenses to have pistols at home. They are not going to take their children into a tunnel. Hamas has made many Israelis afraid to travel far from the Gaza border.

But Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza entails urban, house-to-house fighting that creates thousands of civilian casualties — innocent men, women and children — among whom Hamas deliberately embedded itself to force Israel to have to kill those innocents in order to kill the Hamas leadership and uproot its miles of attack tunnels.

If Netanyahu has his way, Biden will not be able to help Israel build a coalition of U.S., European and moderate Arab partners to defeat Hamas.

Kiryat Shmona is located on the border with Lebanon. The father of a family that had fled the northern border with Israel said his family was one of thousands that fled after Hezbollah and Palestinian militias in southern Lebanon started to retaliate against each other.

When might they go back? They had no idea. Like more than 200,000 other Israelis, they have taken refuge with friends or in hotels all across this small country of nine million people. It only took a few weeks for Israelis to start driving up real estate prices in central Israeli towns. Without even attacking Hamas, that is mission accomplished for Hezbollah. Along with Hamas, they are managing to shrink Israel.

I asked Liat Admati, 35, a survivor of the Hamas attack who ran a clinic for facial cosmetics for 11 years in Be’eri, what would make it possible for her go back to her Gaza border home, where she was raised.

She wanted to go back to feel safe. “Before this situation I felt I have trust in the army. I think the trust is broken. I do not want to feel like we are covering our bodies in shelters and walls all the time, even though there are people who can do that one day. At this point, I have no idea what the solution is.

Before Oct. 7, she and her neighbors thought the threat was rockets, she said, so they built safe rooms — but now that Hamas gunmen came over and burned parents and kids in their safe rooms, who knows what is safe? “The safe room was designed to keep you safe from rockets — not from another human who would come and kill you for who you are,” she said. She concluded that she was dispiriting that some Gazans working on the kibbutz gave Hamas maps of the layout.

There are a lot of Israelis who listened to the recording, published by The Times of Israel, of a Hamas gunman who took part in the Oct. 7 onslaught, identified by his father as “Mahmoud,” calling his parents from the phone of a Jewish woman he’d just murdered, and imploring them to check his WhatsApp messages to see the pictures he took of some of the 10 Jews he alone killed in Mefalsim, a kibbutz near the Gaza border.

I killed many with my own hands. He says your son killed Jews, according to an English translation. “Mom, your son is a hero,” he later adds. His parents can be heard seemingly rejoicing.

This kind of chilling exuberance — Israel was built so that such a thing could never happen — explains the homemade sign I saw on a sidewalk while driving through the French Hill Jewish neighborhood of Jerusalem the other day: “It’s either us or them.’’

This conflict has come back to its biblical roots. This seems to be a time of eyes for eyes and teeth for teeth. The policy will be waiting for the mourning after.

Really? Consider this context: “According to Israel’s official Central Bureau of Statistics, at the end of 2021, 9.449 million people live in Israel (including Israelis in West Bank settlements), the Times of Israel reported last year. “Of those, 6.982 million (74 percent) are Jewish, 1.99 million (21 percent) are Arab and 472,000 (5 percent) are neither. The West Bank has a population of 3 million, and the Gaza population is less than two million.

So, Netanyahu is saying that seven million Jews are going to indefinitely control the lives of five million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza — while offering them no political horizon, nothing, by way of statehood one day on any demilitarized conditions.

Netanyahu was lambasted by the public for digitally stabbing his army and intelligence chiefs in the back at the height of the war. I apologize for the things I said following the press conference and for being wrong, he wrote. I fully support the heads of [Israel’s] security services.”

The damage was done. How much do you suppose those military leaders trust what Netanyahu will say if the Gaza campaign stalls? What real leader would behave that way at the start of a war of survival?

The society is superior to its leader. It’s sad that it took a war to get that home. Ron Scherf is a retired member of Israel’s most elite special forces unit and a founder of Brothers in Arms — the Israeli activist coalition that mobilized veterans and reservists to oppose Netanyahu’s judicial coup. Brothers in Arms organized aid workers, military men, and volunteers immediately after the Hamas invasion, because they didn’t want this incompetent government to know they were there.

It’s a remarkable story of grass-roots mobilization that showed how much solidarity is still buried in this place and could be unlocked by a different prime minister, one who was a uniter, not a divider. I was told it would be overwhelmed by the power of what we lost when we went to the front.