Hopeless in Gaza

There is no way out

... Promise was that I

Should Israel from Philistian yoke deliver;

Ask for this great deliverer now, and find him

Eyeless in Gaza at the Mill with slaves ...

—John Milton

I remember the first time I heard the air raid sirens in Israel. It was at the start of the first Gulf war. I was in the basement of the King David Hotel with a bunch of other journalists, talking to Bibi Netanyahu—some politicians always can find the places where journos gather—who was wearing a blue track suit and impeccable white sneakers, casual as you could be in an impending war. The sirens announced the coming of Scud missiles from Iraq; we were hastened to safe rooms, with our government-issue gas masks. I was also carrying a razor and shaving cream—the banality of ego—in case my beard prevented a tight seal when I put on the mask. Happily, the mask fit…and when I looked around the safe room, blurred in plastic sheeting, I saw elderly Jews, people who had likely survived the Holocaust, huddled together, wearing gas masks in case the Scuds had chemical warheads. And I was infuriated: not this again! Not Jews under threat from poison gas—but at least, this time, we had masks. And this time, too, we had strength. There would be no chemical weapons, my friend Shai Feldman assured me: “Saddam knows we have the ultimate deterrent capability.” That is, nukes. So, a spray of random missiles, minimal damage.

But the image of the elderly Jews stayed with me. It was about the old people in those days. Israel was—for me—the place of refuge for my people, a safe room, not perfect, blurred by the plastic sheets of faction, but safe.

It is a different place now. The Holocaust survivors are mostly gone. Tel Aviv is a hip, Mediterranean city, a party town. My daughter was just there, for the first time, a few months ago; she joined in the anti-Bibi demonstrations. My daughter…I imagine she would have been tempted to go to that Rave, just north of Gaza. This time it wasn’t the elderly, but the young people slaughtered and taken hostage like Samson in John Milton’s poem, taken hostage like this:

The family of Shani Louk feel similarly helpless. The 22-year-old posed for a mirror selfie just before parting for the rave, her long dreadlocks partially covered by a headscarf, looking coyly to the side, eyelids flecked with eyeliner.

“She loved to party,” said her cousin Tom Weintraub Louk, 30. Family members desperately tried reaching Louk and her Mexican boyfriend when the news broke.

Then they saw the video posted online.

“We recognized her by the tattoos, and she has long dreadlocks,” Louk said.

In the video, the woman is facedown in the bed of the truck with four militants, apparently being paraded through Gaza. One holds her hair while another raises a gun in the air and shouts, “Allahu akbar!” A crowd follows the truck cheering. A boy spits in her hair.

While her cousin appears lifeless, the family is still holding out for news. “We have some kind of hope,” Louk said.

Some kind of hope? I don’t have all that much. In the New York Times, two columnists I admire, Bret Stephens and Tom Friedman offer differing visions. Stephens, younger, more militant, who once worked for The Jerusalem Post, is all aggression, with the hope of a positive outcome:

Israel has a clear interest not just in punishing Hamas but also in ending its rule for good. But how can it do so without either allowing it to descend into anarchy or reoccupying the territory, which Israel doesn’t want?

The answer is to turn Gaza into a zone of shared interests. Despite its anti-Israel public statements, Saudi Arabia has long distrusted Hamas because of its close military ties to Iran. Egypt sees Hamas as the Palestinian arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, which it ruthlessly suppresses at home. The ailing Palestinian Authority views Hamas as its principal rival for power. And the United States long ago designated Hamas as a terrorist group.

Could Israel finally dislodge Hamas from power and invite Saudi Arabia, Egypt and maybe the United Arab Emirates to deploy a substantial peacekeeping force to the strip? That would serve Israel’s interests in toppling an enemy and the Arab states’ interests in diminishing a rival.

Good luck with that. The truth is, no one wants Gaza. It is an endless, eternal mess. The Egyptians once controlled it, and were happy to let the Israelis take over. The Israelis tried settlements there, but eventually withdrew in the hope—a rare moment of optimism—that the Palestinians would run the place peacefully. I visited the Israeli settlements in Gaza, experimental farms growing lush crops of vegetables. Israel turned those farms over to the Palestinians; the Palestinians willfully destroyed them, a metaphor for the addicted, self-destructive anger of the Palestinian leadership.

Tom Friedman is older, has seen a lot more than Stephens. He learned his trade in the anarchy of the Lebanese civil war, in which a rich, sophisticated society was reduced to rubble by faction. In recent months, he’s been warning that Israel is in peril—split by faction, crazy settlers impinging on Palestinian lands on the West Bank; selfish Heredim, ultra-Orthodox Jews living a medieval fantasy, who refuse to serve in the military; and those young people, high-tech and fun-loving on the Mediterranean coast, where it’s possible to lose track of the violence that is only an Iranian missile away. Friedman is not very optimistic now, and I’m with him. Israel’s Gaza campaign will be long and brutal. There will be atrocities. The feckless left will have their bleeding hearts on their sleeves for the Palestinians; the feckless right, including American evangelicals rooting for Armageddon, will want to see Gaza bulldozed. There may be spillover. There may not be enough Patriot missiles and artillery shells to supply both the Israelis and the Ukrainians.

There will be another fantasy exploded, Bibi’s fantasy that Israel could steamroll Palestinian dreams. As Haaretz, a repository of journalistic sanity, opined:

The prime minister, who has prided himself on his vast political experience and irreplaceable wisdom in security matters, completely failed to identify the dangers he was consciously leading Israel into when establishing a government of annexation and dispossession.

There are no easy ways out, obviously. There may be no plausible ways out. I have longed believed that a two-state solution was the only way. That would mean the shuttering of some Israeli settlements on the West Bank; it would mean a redrawing of the maps to acknowledge the reality of long-established settlements like Ariel and granting the Palestinians patches of Israeli territory in return. It would mean acknowledging East Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine. It would mean an international authority providing security at the holy sites in the Old City. It would mean—Bret Stephens is right—the end of radical Hamas control in Gaza.

There were times when I was less than totally pessimistic about that sort of solution, especially the times I spent with moderate Palestinian and Israeli friends. Civility will do that to you: raise the possibility that common humanity—common Semitic humanity—might win in the end over the witless passions of religious extremism.

But stack those hopes against the ravages of the rave near the Gaza border. 260 young Israelis dead. Perhaps 100 taken hostage. I think about Shani Louk, with her dreadlocks and tattoos and her Mexican boyfriend. She lived a delusion of cosmopolitan normality, a delusion of safety and the mindless freedom of a weekend rave.

I have lived my life in the stubborn belief that the lesson of history was a staggered march toward progress and tolerance. Perhaps that was a delusion, too.

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