Disaster

I haven’t been in Palestinian areas of the West Bank since the beginning of the war. This is very unusual for me, because before the war I was in Palestinian cities and towns all over the West Bank every week. I spent this evening with one of my best Palestinian friends who I haven’t seen for many months. He is a businessman who business takes him all over the West Bank, all the time, even during the past almost ten months.  He is from the West Bank and his wife is from East Jerusalem.  Just recently, the Israeli authorities renewed his permit that allows him to live with his wife and three daughters in Jerusalem. He hasn’t been legally allowed to live with his family for most of the months since the beginning of the war. It took him three hours today to travel from Ramallah, where he has his office, to his home in Jerusalem. He is fortunate because now he can cross the checkpoint legally. I spent several hours listening to him as he described the horrific reality that millions of people in the West Bank live everyday now almost ten months.

Israelis cannot imagine the despair that has become the overriding emotion of our neighbors. Despair is now turning into rage. People have lost hope and life is becoming unbearable. Almost 200,000 people who before the war earned their livelihood in Israel have had no income for almost ten months. There are places all around the West Bank that he described as becoming like Gaza before the war. People have the sense that they are living in a cage with no escape. They have no work, no money to feed their families and they sit around all day watching the news. What they are seeing on their television is not the news and the pictures that Israelis see. They are watching Palestinian lives being destroyed, innocent civilians, women, men and children been massacred by Israeli bombs, the entire Gaza Strip being demolished. I hear from my friends in Gaza every week how they are suffering and experiencing death and losing everything that they have. They are watching the Israeli army now destroying life in the West Bank as well.   There are even now shortages of electricity and cuts in water supplies all around the West bank as well. Young Israeli soldiers enter villages and with uncontrollable violence enter homes, destroy property, steal money, humiliate people in their own homes and in their cars. The violence not only comes from settlers, it also comes from the Israeli soldiers. Settler violence knows no bounds and it is spreading to new areas every day. And there is no one who can protect them.

My friend is a man of peace, someone who has been part of peace activities. He used to do a lot of business with Israeli companies and had many Israeli friends. He has educated his young daughters to be peaceful and to want to live in peace with Israel. He does not watch the news at home, because he wants to protect his daughters, but even though they are under the age of ten, they grown afraid of Israelis and they too have feel hate them. He takes his daughters to a park near their home in Jerusalem in which young Israelis play also. His daughters refuse to go and play with the Israelis – they say, the Israeli kids might kill them.

He said that everyone hates the Palestinian Authority, some even more than they hate the Israelis. Palestinian Authority offices are empty, employees are only receiving a small part of their salaries and the bosses tell the workers to come in only one or two days a week.  The employees of the Palestinian Authority hate the Authority as much as everyone else in the West Bank. No one is paying their taxes because they don’t have money and they don’t want to give anything to the Authority. Palestinian security personnel, police, preventive security and others sit around frustrated and talk about using their weapons to fight Israel. He said that people used to complain that the Palestinian Authority didn’t provide services, didn’t build schools or fix roads and now they want the Palestinian Authority to provide them with guns. People who were peaceful and only wanted to live a normal life have no reason to think about normal living. They think about arming themselves, to protect their families and to use those weapons to fight Israel. Israel, he said is creating monsters who will eventually break out of their cages and turn their rage against Israel.

He comes from a small peaceful village in West Bank.  There is now a violent settlement next to his village, expanding and confiscating land from the village. The settlers, with weapons even threaten the Israeli soldiers who are afraid to confront them. The settlers have erected a gate that prevents the villages to get to their farm land. They enter the village during day and night and create havoc and destruction. There is no one to call to help them. Israel is now demolishing Palestinian homes, not only in area “c” but also in area “b” and even in area “a”. Israel has separated electricity lines that provide electricity to settlements and in areas such as Tubas there are daily cuts in power. Now the settlements have electricity and many Palestinians are suffering constant cuts of electricity – just like in Gaza even before the war.  The same is happening with the water supply all around the West Bank. Even in cities such as Bethlehem, water flows only a few hours a week. Businesses all around the West Bank are closed. His own business is suffering and he has shut down most of his operations. My friend is owed a lot of money by many of his clients. They give him checks to pay their debts, but their bank accounts are empty and the checks build up with nothing behind them. Every day that he stays in business he is losing money. But it is not about the money, he will survive, it is the loss of hope that tomorrow might be better.

What kind of life will the more than two million people in Gaza have when the war is over? What kind of life will the Palestinians in the West Bank have tomorrow? He told me what I have heard from many other Palestinians – the hero of the children of Palestine today is Abu Obaida – the spokesperson of Ezzedin al Qassam(Hamas military forces) in Gaza. It is not limited to Palestine – Abu Obaida is the hero of children in Jordan, Egypt and in many other parts of the Arab world.   He asked “What is Israel creating here?” Israel doesn’t understand that it is losing the war because they may think that they are killing Hamas in Gaza but they are not. They are creating more and more people all over Palestine who feel that they have nothing to lose and that the only solution is to kill the Israelis. This feeling is not limited to Palestine. He used to do a lot of business with Turkish companies. He said that the hatred against Israel is so strong now even in Turkey that Turkish companies won’t sell to him because they refuse to have their good travel through the Israeli ports.

My friend said that they understood Israel when they attacked Gaza after October 7. He said that the Hamas leaders and those who killed and kidnapped Israelis deserved to be killed by Israel, but that was almost ten months ago.  What has Israel achieved by killing tens of thousands of people in Gaza – noncombatants, people who hated Hamas even before October 7? What has Israel achieved by destroying all of Gaza and turning two million people into homeless people who lives have been destroyed?  What does Israel expect to happen the day after the war?  Will people want to live in peace with Israel after all of this – he asked me. He said that he sees Israeli television news from time-to-time. No one in Israel sees the reality that Palestinian see in their own lives. They don’t need television – they have relatives and friends in Gaza. What they see on Palestinian and other Arab news stations is not what Israelis see. Israelis have no idea of the suffering and the pain that they have caused.

Israel has lost this war and Israelis have no idea how badly they have lost. The war of revenge that Israel is fighting in Gaza has crossed every moral red-line that is imaginable. My friend used the word “unimaginable” throughout the evening. He is correct, it is unimaginable. In our pain and trauma caused by the brutal atrocities committed by Hamas, we Israelis have lost any kind of moral code that may have existed before October 7. Our soldiers are called heroes and we feel that they are protecting us. We talk about the great sacrifices that they are making every day in Gaza and we mourn for those who are killed in action. But those who send them into battle for what we have called a “just war” have gone too far and for too long. Most of those people who we are killing and are destroying their lives are facing atrocities committed by Israel. Those who survive will be there tomorrow. They were our neighbors and they will remain our neighbors. That is the reality. But our vengeance is creating monsters and no one is in our government in Israel, and maybe no one in our army and security forces is thinking about what happens when the war is over. What kind of tomorrow are we offering to the millions of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank? What kind of tomorrow are we offering to ourselves and to our children. What kind of future are we creating?

We all need a re-start.   All of our leaders must go – ours in Israel and those in Palestine as well. They have failed us miserably. They are destroying us. If Israel’s few remaining friends in the world really care about Israel and the future of this country, they must help to put an end to this war.  We don’t need friends who fuel the war and the hatred that we feel and that we create. The final task of the current government of Israel must be to end this horrible war, bring the hostages home and then go to elections. They cannot continue to represent us anymore. The criminals of this war on all sides must be brought to justice by their people who they have mis-served. The only way forward is for us to feel remorse. What has been done on October 7 and every day since has been done in our names – Israelis and Palestinians. These leaders have abused their power and they must be brought down. And we, as human beings, must begin to display our humanity by refusing to allow the killing and destruction to continue to be done in our names.  This is the only way of creating a future here in this land that is worth living for.