Israel and Palestine: 30 wasted years

Here is how the high command of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) laid down the rules for “remotely” killing suspected Palestinian activists in the densely populated Gaza Strip after the surprise Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

Israeli forces were told that up to 20 Palestinian civilians could be killed in a strike against a single suspected member of Hamas, even one of the lowest rank and importance. For a more “senior” Hamas member, the permissible number of non-combatants who could be ‘accidentally’ killed in the process went up to 100.

The order went out only hours after the attack, when there were not yet any IDF troops on the ground in Gaza and all strikes had to be remote, but most strikes have remained remote right down to the present because using drones and artillery keeps Israeli casualties very low.

The drone operators or artillery gunners who delivered the high explosives did not choose the targets themselves. An AI system called Lavender did that, using a network of surveillance devices that generated tens of thousands of likely targets, some known by name, some just “acting suspiciously.” Human operators spent about 20 seconds confirming each one.

This is how more than 74,000 Palestinians in Gaza (around a third of them children) have been chosen for death in the past three years. The system even has a code name for the innocent majority of the dead: NAZA, an acronym from the Hebrew phrase for “collateral damage”.

Most of the above information comes from anonymized IDF operators of the system, as recorded anonymously by Israeli filmmakers Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham in the documentary film NAZA, which recently won a special jury prize at the Venice International Film Festival. Israeli casualties in this war have been far fewer, but they too are mostly civilian.

Of the 2,000 Israelis who have been killed in the Gaza war, more than half were civilians, mostly murdered in or near their homes on the first day. Israeli military losses have been quite low, as usual, but they do add up to as many as have been killed in all Israel’s other wars since 2000. Palestinian losses are nearing the total of all Palestinians and other Arabs killed in the wars since 1948.

All of this serves no purpose whatever. Nothing has budged since Netanyahu and the Likud Party on one side and Hamas on the other killed the peace process in 1995.

That process was well underway by the mid-1990s. Like the dozens of other new countries that had emerged from the wreckage of the European empires and learned to live within their new borders during the previous 50 years, Israel seemed to be on the brink of normality.

At that time, the Zionist project to build a national Jewish state was already a done deal for most Israelis. They were nationalists, like the dominant population in any modern state, but the Palestinians could not be forced to vanish and most Israelis were not very interested in further territorial expansion if peace was on offer instead.

The Palestinian leadership had also accepted that there could be no final victory and that the future had to be the “two-state solution” in which Israeli and Palestinian states lived unhappily alongside each other forever. Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin had already been to Washington to seal the deal.

Inevitably, there were dissident groups on both sides who wanted to go on fighting until an imaginary total victory, and the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by a far-right Jewish student in 1995 forced an early election to replace him. The Hamas group, which had broken away from the PLO because it opposed a compromise peace, saw the election as a way to stop it.

Hamas sabotaged the peace deal by launching an intensive terrorist bus-bombing campaign during the election to convince Israeli voters that peace with Palestinians was impossible, and the right-wing, anti-peace Israeli candidate, Benjamin Netanyahu, took full advantage of it. He won the election and the peace deal died.

Thirty years later, the prospect of peace has receded far into the distance. Netanyahu has been prime minister more than half the time since 1995, and may even win a new term in office in this month’s election despite his failure to stop Hamas’s surprise attack three years ago or to destroy it in the subsequent war.

Israel has drifted so far right in the intervening years that none of plausible rival candidates is interested in seeking peace with the Palestinians, either, and the PLO is a corrupt and useless shambles. Everybody is stuck, the foolish war with Iran is dragging on pointlessly, and there is no light on the horizon.

Gwynne Dyer’s new book is Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers.