It took a day or two longer than usual but the diasporas and their supporters have started the usual arguments over whose fault the butchery is while standing over the still unburied corpses. From Twitter to open letters at Harvard to “Fuck the Jews” rallies in Sydney, volume and ignorance form an ugly golden ratio.
Assigning blame is at the heart of the shouting. But when was this death spiral between Hamas and Israel initiated?
Two phrases from my earlier life bang through my head: Inciting incident and sufficient cause.
I majored in philosophy and sufficient cause and its relationship to necessary cause (or condition) was one of those concepts I just couldn’t wrap my head around. It was needlessly abstract. If sufficient cause y occurs it implies necessary cause x preceded it, but x may not be sufficient to cause y, maybe it is g. This is absolutley useless in trying to understand historical events and what caused them, which was my main interest academically anyway. You can understand why I didn’t pursue an academic career.
The term inciting incident, something I learned about in my on-again, off-again decade as an actor, has more relevance. The inciting incident is the event that launches the protagonist in a drama into the action of a story.
In the current crisis, Hamas’s slaughter of 1200 people, mostly civilians, in southern Israel is the inciting incident but what is its sufficient cause? And is Hamas a protagonist or an antagonist? What was the incident that incited Hamas?
And on and on going backward.
Here’s my own reverse timeline of inciting incidents. You can decide which is the sufficient cause of what happened last weekend and the violence to come, as Israel’s army prepares to go on a search and destroy mission in Gaza.
Were the clashes from 2021 going back to 2018, between the IDF and various militant groups inside Gaza, not all linked to Hamas, inciting incidents?
The Land Day protests of 2018 which saw 168 Gaza Palestinians killed and thousands injured?
The 2014 war, the last time the IDF entered Gaza?
In retrospect, these are all skirmishes with varying body counts on both sides and are neither sufficient nor are they inciting incidents.
The election of Hamas to govern Gaza in 2006, after a political struggle with Fatah inside the Palestinian authority, and a subsequent war with Israel? But Hamas could never have taken over if Israel hadn’t withdrawn militarily from the Gaza strip in 2005. In any case, rockets were being built and fired into Israel almost immediately. An IDF soldier, Gilad Shalit, was abducted and eventually exchanged for 1,000 Palestinians held in Israeli jails, thus establishing a base price for prisoner exchange.
Ariel Sharon’s walk across the Temple Mount in September 2000 which led to the second intifada and a shift in Palestinian attitudes about Hamas? The group was founded in 1987 furing the first intifada. It grew out of the Muslim brotherhood and had a hard time initially gaining a foothold amongst Palestinians. Palestinian society was comparatively secular in the 1980s and 1990s. But as the second intifada and the new millennium began, all across the Arab world the secular, post-colonial, broadly left-wing Arab nationalist politics that guided the first generation after the colonial era were eclipsed by politically radical Islam. The ideology of Hamas, Islamist to its core with “martyrdom” operations an essential part of its political program, became more than just a fringe party.
Were the Oslo Accords, signed in 1993, the inciting incident? So many factions on both sides were against them and violence increased, including the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and the massacre of 29 worshippers at the Tomb of Abraham mosque in Hebron by messianic Zionist Baruch Goldstein. Goldstein was a supporter of Meir Kahane’s Kach party, which was subsequently banned. Today, another former Kach supporter, Itamar Ben-Gvir is Minister of Security in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. He reportedly keeps a portrait of Goldstein in his living room.
Netanyahu’s willingness to form a coalition with Ben-Gvir’s party and give him the security brief in order to regain office and then immediately try to neuter the Israeli Supreme Court ( a policy Ben-Gvir advocates) was the inciting incident for the weekly Saturday night protests that began in Tel-Aviv last January and only stopped last weekend following the Hamas rampage.
You can list so many big, bloody events that have occurred with sad regularity over the decades: the first intifada in 1987, the 1982 invasion of Lebanon with the Sabra and Shatila Massacres. Kim Ghattas wrote about that event in the Financial Times this week.
My own thought on the inciting incident for all that has followed is 1974 when the Arab League and the UN decided to appoint the PLO as the “sole legitimate representative” of the Palestinians.
Yasir Arafat’s Fatah faction, still committed to armed struggle to eliminate Israel, took over the PLO. In retrospect, this condemned Palestinians in exile and under occupation to an undemocratic path into the future. Parties with different views on the way forward could not develop. The idea of return to Palestine became more than an aspiration, it became an unchallenged political doctrine. Even as the decades went by and Israel won war after war and became immovable.
In New Lines magazine, an essential publication for those interested in the Middle East, Arwa Damon wrote of a young Palestinian woman in Lebanon:
She is stuck, her identity forever tied to a land that remains off-limits, unable to even begin to forge a new one as Lebanon, like all other Arab countries, does not give Palestinians nationality or the same rights as its citizens. There are no “first generation” Palestinian Lebanese, Jordanians or Syrians like there are “first generation” Americans and Europeans, children of refugees and immigrants who are able to build a new identity, as difficult as that may be, and start to put down roots in new homelands.
For many Palestinians the real inciting incident is still the foundation of Israel itself. Osama Hamdan, a spokesman for Hamas based in Beirut, said as much in a wild interview with Britain’s Channel 4 news Monday night
75 years after Israel was founded and recognized as a nation-state by the fledgling United Nations, too many Palestinian leaders still cannot accept the presence of a Jewish state today in what they regard as their land any more than they could accept a Jewish presence in, for example, 1929 when Mandate Palestine was a multi-ethnic part of Britain’s portfolio of properties carved out of the Ottoman empire.
In April 2001, as the second Intifada was just getting underway I went to Israel to make a radio documentary about Jerusalem, as the final issue that remained to be hashed out under the Oslo process. The second intifada was just cranking up, the Oslo process was about to die, and al Qaeda’s airplane plot was in its final planning stages so most of what I reported ended up being out of date within months but the one thing of lasting news value was an interview with a young Palestinian at Orient House, the PLO’s headquarters in Jerusalem. He told me about the sticking point in negotiations: the right of return based on UN Resolution 194. I knew about resolution 242 which called for Israel to withdraw to its 1967 borders and end the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza but as he explained, UN 194, enacted in 1948, called for Palestinians to be allowed to return to the areas they lived in at the time of the partition of Mandate Palestine.
“You can’t be serious” I said, forsaking all journalistic etiquette. Going back to the 67 borders will be hard enough given the growth of population in Israel but this was ridiculous. The negotiating demand to go back fifty years then, now is an expectation of turning back the clock 75 years.
Israel was created by the same historical forces that have created nations since civilisation began. A group of people out of necessity, either famine or war or economic need, conquer somebody else’s land. They settle it, defend it, deepen roots in it. Previous populations are displaced or they become subsumed into the new state.
Since World War 2 this process has happened very rarely. Watching a new nation created in this way is like seeing a volcano erupt from the sea and create a new island. It is frightening to observe this process through modern eyes. It is impossible to accept when the group creating the new nation is a people you hate.
Israel has done little to ease tensions by maintaining its occupation of the West Bank and its control of Gaza for 55 years and too often responded with unnecessary, disproportionate force to protests against that occupation.
Perhaps if a real democratic process had gone on among Palestinians over the last 75 years and if successive governments of Israel had shown more magnanimity to those they had defeated in war on four different occasions in the first 25 years of the state’s existence a different situation would have evolved.
And violence begetting violence, with each incident inciting another incident until 1200 mostly innocent civilians were butchered—the existence of Israel the sufficient and only cause—would not have taken place.