“Mogadishu on the Mediterranean”
Five urgent messages from one day in Jerusalem, Israel/Palestine.
Today was the first day of a nine-day trip to Israel/Palestine with a delegation from Americans for Peace Now that I am traveling with, and each of the five people we met with shared messages of great urgency. Here are my quick takeaways from each.
First, Noga Tarnopolsky, a freelance journalist who writes mostly for Western media, and who is a very close observer of Bibi Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, made two very important points. She told us she hates it when she hears people describe October 7th as the worst single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Instead, she said we should think of it as the worst single-day act of terrorism in modern history. Israelis, she said, are still living in trauma not just because many of them carry the epigenetic memory of Jewish persecution, but because the sheer size of the slaughter, per-capita, means that they can’t escape knowing people who were affected. Worse, Israel hasn’t had a day of national mourning. Netanyahu hasn’t even ordered flags flown at half-mast. He is incapable of expressing genuine empathy.
This explains the deep hatred for Netanyahu that surfaces easily among Israelis, and not just those in the opposition. Several of my cousins who live here, who are not political at all, told me over the weekend that they’d like to kill their prime minister. One said she wanted to line his whole government up and mow them down with a machine gun. Tarnopolsky said this comes from a sense of “extreme betrayal.” These are people “who don’t have a political home right now.” It makes for a very dangerous, volatile mix.
Her second point was about the shifting impact of the Gaza war, and not just the rage that is simmering among Israeli and West Bank/East Jerusalem Palestinians about the slaughter of their people there. Something is changing, she said, since last Thursday’s stampede and massacre in Gaza City, when an aid convoy disintegrated in violence. “There is more coverage of the suffering in Gaza now” in the Israeli media, which until now has done a terrible job of covering the war, she said. And while information about the civilian catastrophe in Gaza is available online, the average Israeli is “busy, upset, has a kid in the Army and speaks Hebrew. They don’t have time at the end of the day to go search for alternative news from other sources.” But in part because Israelis themselves are not satisfied with the inconclusive answers the IDF is giving about what happened last Thursday, when more than 100 Palestinians were killed during the chaos, at least some by nervous Israeli troops, the media coverage has changed. Let’s hope that’s a positive sign.
Second, Shelly Tal Meron, a member of Knesset for the opposition Yesh Atid party who has focused her attention on women’s rights, gave us a more in-depth reason to understand the “we’re still in October 7th” sense of the moment. The sexual violence that occurred that day is continuing to reverberate here. There are 19 girls under the age of 21 still in captivity in Gaza; no one yet knows what their stories will be. (Tell that to the people denying that Hamas employed rape that day.) And every few days another survivor, or a released hostage, finds the courage to speak more about their experience. So not only was October 7th like a 9-11 multiplied by ten, or fifteen, the continued torment of the hostages and slow release of information from survivors means the trauma itself is not in the past. She, like many Israelis, wants the government to prioritize the hostages’ return over “winning” the war. And she reinforced my own sense that if Hamas wanted to topple Netanyahu’s government, all it has to do is release the hostages. That would open the floodgates—“the outrage will take a different dimension,” she said.
Our third speaker was also a member of Knesset, Aida Touma-Suleiman, a Palestinian with the Hadash party since 2015. Her message was angry and for good reason. She condemned the crimes of Hamas on October 7th, but she also decried the more than 110,000 killed or injured or missing in Gaza since then. “I don’t know if it’s all denial or grief, but I don’t understand how Jewish people can be silent about this,” she told us. The trend lines in Israel are not moving in a positive direction, she warned. “Yes, it’s the duty of any government to protect its citizens,” she said, “but this [the Gaza war] is not that, it’s a bloody war of ethnic cleansing.” It sure looks that way. She argued that since October 7th, the Israeli government is accelerating its efforts to impose Jewish sovereignty over the West Bank. Twenty Bedouin villages have been emptied. “They are preparing to demolish 20 buildings near Nablus.” And dissent is being silenced.
Perhaps the scariest development she noted was the thousands of Israelis who have been issued guns by security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir in recent months. They may lack any training in how to use them safely, and now they carry them everywhere. In Akko, a mixed Arab-Jewish city that is her hometown, she sees parents with guns in the playground where she takes her children. “You know better than me how dangerous that is,” she told us Americans. Now, she argued, is the time to put more pressure on the Biden Administration to change course; as the 2024 election gets closer, she noted, “you will have to support Biden over Trump.” And if we don’t act more now, “you will not recognize this society—it is changing a lot.” Messianic settlers who effectively “annexed Israel into the West Bank” are now entering mixed cities like Akko with the same purpose—to take over space and to push Palestinians out.
The Unquiet American
Our fourth meeting was probably the most important one of the day and the reason I am rushing this post out. A U.S. official based in Jerusalem joined us for lunch. Speaking on background, he painted a stark picture. There has been a surge in settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank since October. New “rapid response” units there set up by the IDF are essentially settler militias. They are very few investigations of their actions, so they operate within a “culture of impunity.” And while the Biden Administration’s imposition of travel restrictions and sanctions on a handful of violent settlers has been a promising intervention, “more tranches of designees could be announced and organizations could be named too,” this official said, referring to groups like the “hilltop youth” and La Familia, a violent soccer gang aligned with the far-right.
“Settler violence and terrorism are two sides of the same coin,” the official said. “Could Israel turn this off if it wanted? Of course it could.” They pointed to how the government uses administrative detention to hold without trial Palestinians it deems dangerous. “There’s no reason they can’t do that with settlers too.” The official said they’d like to see the new Biden sanctions extended to include financial flows to the settler movement, since “material support” for violent settlers is indeed covered by the White House’s executive order.
Asked about the situation in Gaza, the U.S. official didn’t mince words. They told us that since October 7th they’d worked on three main priorities. First, getting US citizens there out. About 450 out of about 600 have been aided. Second, making sure that the Israelis don’t over-react to the attack. “I’m not sure how successful we’ve been,” they said drily. And third, getting humanitarian aid in. They talked about how Secretary of State Antony Blinken worked late into the night on one of his eight visits to the region pushing the Israelis to up the number of trucks from 3 a day to 20-30, but admitted it was still a disaster. And the post-war situation, the official said, was likely to be grim. “This is going to cost billions and billions to rebuild,” they said. “The most likely scenario [for Gaza] is Mogadishu on the Mediterranean.”
“The only people with a long-term strategic plan here is the settler movement,” they noted. That was the perfect segueway to our final interlocutor of the day, lawyer Daniel Seidemann, an expert on Jerusalem’s history and development who works closely with Peace Now. With him we got a fast in-depth seminar on how the intermeshed religious communities of Jerusalem were being pushed toward a conflagration by what he called “religious pyromaniacs.” We started at his office, where he showed us a new three-dimensional model of the city mapping 450 of its holy sites (see below) that shows how Jews, Muslims and Christians all intermingle. “No one [religion] can say that we exclusively own Jerusalem.” The map leaves out settlements and Jewish religious sites built after 1948, he noted.
For a while after the 1967 war, when Israel conquered the Old City and East Jerusalem, it avoided changing the status quo. Israeli flags flew only briefly over the mosques captured in the Six Day War, since Moshe Dayan, Israel’s defense minister ordered that they be immediately taken down. “We don’t need a holy war,” Dayan declared. Still, Israel annexed East Jerusalem and bult ten new neighborhoods, adding 230,000 Jews to its Palestinian population. But this was not done by displacing Palestinians from their homes.
That is now changing. “What was unthinkable has now become thinkable,” he said, pointing to settler efforts to encircle Palestinian East Jerusalem with building takeovers, new “national parks” and sites dedicated to celebrating nationalistic symbols. The problem today, he told us, “is the ascendancy of those who weaponize faith. Often it is incendiary.” The first organization to pay attention to his work, which started in the early 1990s when religious settlers started to lay claim to the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan, was the Pentagon. “They were the first to understand, because they were used to seeing pictures of the al-Aqsa mosque of Jerusalem on the walls of sheikhs in Afghanistan,” he said.
The good news, he says, is “the border still exists.” On Yom Kippur, when all of Jewish Israel shuts down, checkpoints go up across Jerusalem that restrict Palestinians to driving only in their part of the city, which shows that most of the time the two national groups drive on different streets, send their kids to different schools, and so on—and the Israeli authorities are well aware of where to draw the lines. And if the old 1967 border, the so-called Green Line on maps, still exists in social practice, then it can be redrawn as a political boundary. Driving around the eastern quadrant of the city, Seidemann showed us how geography might still be destiny. Thanks in part to the vigilance of groups like Peace Now and activists like Seidemann, governments like the United States had still managed to block Israel from effectively cutting the West Bank in half, preventing a future Palestinian state from being one contiguous body.
We have not yet crossed the point of no return, when a two-state solution becomes impossible, Seidemann was telling us. But the ingredients for an explosion and a rapid devolution of the status quo are all in place. As the US diplomat also noted, right now the international community has almost no one inside the Israeli government to talk to, let alone listen, beyond elements of the army and the Shin Bet, who both understand that the occupation is the biggest threat to Israel’s security. And now we wait for Ramadan to come next week, and wonder if ordinary Muslim citizens of Israel will be allowed to exercise their civil right to pray at the al-Aqsa Mosque. The religious pyromaniacs who are in leadership positions in the Israeli government, like Ben-Gvir, and their counterparts in Hamas and in Iran, are hoping for a confrontation. God will be of no help if that happens.
Powerful update !!
Thanks Micah for such a rich and substantial report. Stay safe. Looking forward to more dispatches.