Hamas has upended the status quo
A woman mourns as bodies of her relatives are carried for burial from the al-Aqsa hospital morgue in Deir al-Balah, Gaza on 24 October.
Omar Karmi writes in The Electronic Intifada on 28 October 2023:
As Israel enters phase two of its attack on Gaza, there is much speculation as to what the Israeli military will face on the ground.
The answer depends on the extent to which Hamas foresaw what Israel’s response would be to its 7 October Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.
That in turn begs the question why Hamas did what it did when it did.
Hamas officials have said they saw little choice but to act. Having seen Palestinian aspirations to end Israel’s occupation regress over the past decades amid international apathy, something had to change.
“We knocked on the door of reconciliation and we weren’t allowed in,” senior Hamas leader Musa Abu Marzouk told The New Yorker earlier this month.
“We knocked on the door of elections and we were deprived of them. We knocked on the door of a political document for the whole world – we said, ‘We want peace, but give us some of our rights’ – but they didn’t let us in. We tried every path. We didn’t find one political path to take us out of this morass and free us from occupation.”
Certainly, the background to the attack bears out Abu Marzouk’s explanation.
Seventy-five years after being forcibly displaced from Palestine in 1948, 56 years of living under military occupation, 30 years of a “peace process” that has merely allowed Israel to consolidate its occupation in the West Bank, and 16 years of a Gaza blockade that has rendered normal life and a normal economy impossible there, generations of Palestinians have lived and died without any hope for a better future.
The West’s acquiescence with Israel’s dangerous delusion that it could manage its occupation indefinitely has been equally instrumental in the current situation.
Despite unanimous international consensus behind a two-state outcome since the Oslo accords were signed in 1993 – shared by the US, the UK, the EU, the UN, the Arab League, the African Union, Russia, China – there has never been any serious pressure on Israel to draw down its occupation, roll back its settlement project and end its military rule over Palestinians of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.
If not now?
Quite the contrary. Even as the circumstances on the ground for Palestinians deteriorated dramatically, as Israeli leaders were quite clear that they opposed Palestinian statehood, as settlements expanded and extremist settlers were empowered to go on violent rampages, as human rights organizations all over the world denounced Israel as an apartheid state, as Gaza’s population sunk deeper into the mire of poverty and de-development, as out-and-out racists populated the most senior positions of the Israeli government, the West remained uninterested to the point of complicity.