If you haven’t been following, Hamas, the military arm / guerrilla fighters of Gaza launched an invasion into southern Israel. You can read about my take on it here. After Lebanon exchanged fire with Israel on the northern border, and with exchanges of violence in Ramallah, Hebron, and Jericho today, it will be a misnomer to call this conflict the “Israel-Gaza War”. This is not only a fight with Gaza. Israel has a particularly pernicious relationship with Palestinians, who they see as an obstacle to their own security and prosperity. This key point, that Israel views the Palestinians as an obstacle to their prosperity, is quite important to understanding the various sub-plots in this current outbreak of violence and war. Follow me as I highlight some of the key sub-plots that will appear in the news coverage.
Sub-plot 1: the fight for “the narrative”
Let me take the opportunity to clear-up my stance, in agreement with Francesca Albanese, the UN special Rapporteur for the Occupied Territories: It is possible to support both the Israelis and the Palestinians. However, when we see the news, we will be inundated with a pernicious kind of moral outrage – but one we should think is not warranted, what Ms. Albanese calls selective moral outrage.
Much of the western media will call this recent instance of eruptive violence terrorism. Mr. Robert Wood, the alternative US Ambassador in the UN Security Council today called Al Aqsa Flood, “a simple act of terrorism.” And, in a certain definition, such acts are terrorism. On that reductive understanding, Palestinian eruptive violence will be condemned, as most Western leaders have done. However, to focus primarily on eruptive violence and not on the contextual structural violence that would help us understand the conflict is to adopt a narrative that perpetuates the whole conflict. Acts of eruptive violence should be condemned, but not necessarily the people. Empowering the Palestinian Authority, who have peacefully led the West Bank for about 20 years, might do something to deal with eruptive violence, but there is no doubt that the Palestinian Authority has been hamstrung for years.
The Palestinians have experienced structural violence. During the Arab Israeli war of 1967, the UN order Israel to return land it took by force in the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights. For decades now, Israel has kept the Golan Heights, has expanded more than 300 settlements that act as colonies in the West Bank, and has turned Gaza into a blockaded strip of land approximately the geographical size of Washington, DC. Israel and has attempted to control everything that goes both in and out – food, medical supplies, and people. This is structural violence. It is colonial, oppressive, and erodes a recognized people of its recognized right to self-determination. Structural violence should be condemned, but not necessarily the people.
No narrative of this story will be credible if it does not account for both the eruptive and structural violence in Israel.
Sub-plot 2: the two different wars with two different objectives
Israel, for its part, is rightly concerned with its security and prosperity. Part of Israel’s recent regional objectives play a part. Since Donald Trump moved the US Embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, Israel has been on the path to perhaps the most significant regional diplomatic initiative for Israel, the normalizing of relations with the majority Sunni nations in the region: Sudan, Morocco, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Saudi Arabia. The most significant of these are the UAE and Saudi Arabia, a combination of wealth and power that would primarily entrench Israel’s long-term security and prosperity. However, this normalization would, in effect, try to sweep the Palestinians under the proverbial rug. Thus, Israel has the objective of bringing the Palestinians under heel, at best, and perhaps wiped out completely. Now, more than ever, Israel will conduct this war, absent of international intervention, by trying to eliminate Palestinian opposition. The country with the largest influence on Israel is the United States, who has a significant interest in the normalization of relations between Israel and its Sunni neighbours. The US will send overwhelming military force in accordance with these wishes. In order to cloak this agenda, many in the US government, including in the Republican Party, will attempt to paint the Palestinians with the agenda of the Iranian Ayatollah – that they want to eradicate Israel from the face of the planet. However, by all reports, Iran was surprised by the Al Aqsa Flood.
The Palestinians, on the other hand, are fighting for self-determination in the long term. The Palestinians have been and will be fighting a guerilla war. This is a freedom-fighting group of people in the tradition of the Vietcong. What does this mean? It means that a victory in this war will be the end of the occupation of Israel from legally Palestinian land. It will mean the cessation of settlements in the West Bank, the opening up of Gaza’s borders, and, in the best-case scenario, the return of the Golan Heights. But despite these dreamy goals, Palestinians want to be a self-determining people. They will have to curb eruptive violence, but the question that is posed here is whether the world supports the Palestinian’s right to self-determination.
Saudi Arabia will be key to which narrative will emerge.
Conclusion
In substantial ways, the two subplots overlap. For example, the Palestinians have taken civilian hostages. However, perhaps the Palestinians have a point at focusing on the 1000+ Palestinians who are detained without trial in Israel, that they are, indeed, hostages. Are they not hostages as well, hostages that were abducted during structural violence rather than in eruptive violence?
But I invite you to take seriously both the narratives that are employed in the coming days, and also the diverse political and military objectives.
Day 1: https://idealsandidentities.com/2023/10/07/the-al-aqsa-flood-a-k-a-the-israeli-gaza-war/
Day 3 continued: https://idealsandidentities.com/2023/10/09/al-aqsa-flood-day-3-continued-israel-is-telling-us-that-its-a-genocide/
Raymond Klassen - Ideals and Identities 
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