The Middle East Has Locked Itself in a Slaughterhouse

Once again, the time of the assassins and their enablers in the Middle East is upon us. The long knives have been unsheathed, and their sharp blades have harvested thousands of civilians in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank, with the shrieks of lamentations mixed with the exhortations for more blood conveyed simultaneously from the chorus in the background. Israeli and Palestinian combatants have been locked in a deadly embrace for four weeks, as if they have decided finally to finish their epic 100 years of struggles and yearnings, dreams and delusions. They are on the killing floor of a slaughterhouse of their own design.

Listening to Israeli officials speaking in English and Hamas leaders in Arabic, one could easily use their words interchangeably. With absolutist certainties and blind convictions, and driven by unbridled intensity, they have hurtled their world and those who live in it—and those on its periphery—into uncharted chaos. The warriors for a redeemed Israel and a liberated Palestine have declared, with words and deeds, the death of innocence on the other side. No one is to be spared. Not even a child, much less any abstract ethical idea, has sanctity when the long knives are clanging.

Both sides rushed to resurrect their conflicting narratives and revived the clash of their memories. Empathy with those civilians suffering beyond the veil of self-righteousness is forbidden, even treasonous. And if you are an Israeli, don’t you dare contextualize the conflict, lest you help your enemies.

Incitement, demonization, and intimidation have followed in the wake of Oct. 7, along with groupthink, collective denials, and the extreme intolerance of even a hint of dissent, not to mention the trivialization of the histories and experiences of both peoples.

Some ranked Hamas’s butchery with the Holocaust, a shocking trivialization of the greatest crime against the Jews in modern times. Some on the other side denied that Hamas killed hundreds of civilians in cold blood and proceeded to call it resistance. Many Western governments, led by the United States, supported and even embraced wholeheartedly Israel’s vow to exact absolute revenge, an unconditional support that came to haunt them later when the extent of the retribution reached biblical proportions.

After four weeks of Israeli fury against Gaza killing what is estimated to be more than 10,000 people, including more than 4,000 children, while flattening whole neighborhoods in the densely populated strip, U.S. President Joe Biden and his advisors still refuse to call explicitly for a cease-fire.

When, on that quiet dawn of Oct. 7, Hamas’s bearers of death and destruction breached the walls beyond which Israel deluded itself that it could live in a lush oasis adjacent to a narrow strip of desolation (former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s infamous villa in a jungle), they also breached the old rules that they established during their four previous bloody encounters with Israel.

This time, they brought absolute terror home to Israel with absolute finality. And before the deep harvest of blood that they left behind could congeal, the Israelis—led by a government more extremist and more hostile to Palestinians and their aspirations for freedom than any other in their history—began a campaign to “eradicate” Hamas in Gaza, when that government ironically found itself standing firmly, for a change, on a high moral ground.

The world’s sympathy for the brutal loss of 1,400 Israelis, most of them civilians, initially gave the armed forces of Israel a coat of immunity against questioning the war aims or criticizing the tactics employed. Israel saw this sympathy as a license to use its most devastating, U.S.-made smart munitions to create deep canyons in Gaza City and Jabalia refugee camp, among other objectives in the name of hunting Hamas leaders, regardless of civilian casualties.

Before the war drew to the end of its first month, world sympathy with Israel turned to revulsion, as we have seen from the angry demonstrations from Amman to London, and Washington, D.C, to Mexico City. Amnesty International accused Israel of conducting “indiscriminate attacks, which caused mass civilian casualties and must be investigated as war crimes.” The U.N. children’s agency, UNICEF, called Gaza “a graveyard for thousands of children.”

From first blood on Oct. 7, it became clear that Israel and Hamas were cutting a new path of depravity. Speaking from the comfort of exile, unelected Hamas leaders promised more Oct. 7-style attacks to come, that “we are victims, and everything we do is justified,” as Hamas representative Ghazi Hamad said. Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, who left Gaza for Qatar two years ago, chillingly said that Hamas needs the blood of the women, children, and elderly of Gaza, so that “it awakens within us the revolutionary spirit, so it awakens within us resolve.” He called on the world to pressure Israel to stop “this new Holocaust” against Palestinians. Both leaders predicted the demise of Israel.

Current and former Israeli leaders, parliamentarians, and security officials called Palestinians “monsters;” Defense Minister Yoav Gallant intoned that “we are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.” For Israeli President Isaac Herzog, there are no innocent people in Gaza: “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible” for the Hamas attack, he said. The decision to deprive Gaza of food, fuel, and electricity, coupled with ordering half a million Gazans to evacuate the northern part of the strip to the southern part, closer to the Egyptian borders, conjured up memories and images of Palestinian forced into exile from their ancestral homes during the wars of 1948 and 1967.

These fears gained more credence when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the widening of the conflict as Israel’s “second war of independence.” To many Palestinians, the declaration sounded like an ominous threat of a second Nakba, the Palestinian word for “catastrophe” used to refer to when more than 700,000 Palestinians were expelled by Zionist paramilitary units or fled from their homes during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, which Israelis refer to as their war of independence. This was the genesis of the Palestinian refugee crisis. Palestinians and Arabs are still haunted by painful memories of how the “temporary” refuge of Palestinians in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria became a permanent one.

The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is now being discussed openly and officially in Israel, using Hamas’s horrific crimes to justify the mass expulsion of people who were expelled before. A leaked 10-page document, dated Oct. 13, and issued by Israel’s Ministry of Intelligence, a small government body that produces policy research and options, recommended the forcible and permanent transfer of the entire 2.2 million Palestinian residents of the Gaza Strip to Egypt’s Sinai desert.

Usually, actual governments’ plans aren’t born out of such so-called theoretical and hypothetical exercises. These recommendations, however, are being proposed in the middle of a war, and while hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been rendered homeless and dispossessed.

In the aftermath of the war, attitudes on both sides will become more absolutist and more fanatical, if that is possible. Besides, political dysfunction in a divided Israel will prevent any serious discussion of political arrangements with Palestinians. The weakness and political dysfunction among Palestinians will guarantee a similar outcome. Religious zealotry and rising messianic attitudes in recent years in Israel, as well as the rise of the Islamist Hamas, mark a major, ominous shift in the trajectories of both Israel and the Palestinian national movement. The secularism of yesteryear has been replaced by religious exclusivism and atavism.

Israel will break Gaza, but it will not own it afterward and certainly will not rebuild it. Politically, Israel will bequeath Gaza and the aching hearts of what is left of its people for the United States, the European Union, the United Nations, and a hapless Arab world to figure out some sort of a trusteeship that will relieve Israel of responsibility. Rebuilding the strip? Netanyahu would ask, ‘What are Arab Gulf states for?’

After the war, Biden will retreat to his domestic arena to survey a not-so-promising electoral map. Already in Israel, the long knives are being sharpened for Netanyahu, who is seen by a growing number of Israelis as a dead man walking. The Palestinians will be in a sullen mood nursing their wounds in Gaza, with what is left of Hamas leaders hopefully living in permanent exile or held to account, and the aging president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, living his last days in Ramallah in comfortable isolation and without any authority. The heads of Arab states, particularly Egypt and Jordan, would breathe a sigh of relief for surviving another storm while watching, with greater anxiety, the palpable rage of their populations.

This dearth of leadership, poverty of imagination, and lack of political and moral courage among all leaders involved, guarantees that the immediate future of the region is very likely to reflect its bleak recent past. Already, it has been seven years of drought of any Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking, spanning the four years of former U.S. President Donald Trump’s hostility toward the Palestinians and the three years of Biden’s benign neglect.

Unless the deadly embrace of the occupied and occupier—a relation that can only be maintained by coercion and repression—is finally and fully broken, with Palestinians gaining their full freedoms, Palestinian violence and Israeli coercion and repression will continue in one form or another.

In 1956, the famed Palestinian novelist Ghassan Kanafani wrote a short story titled “Letter from Gaza,” in which the protagonist refers to Gaza as the “amputated town.” He writes to his friend to say that he has decided not to join him in “green California, far from the reek of defeat which for seven years had filled my nostrils.” He is staying in Gaza because his beloved niece, Nadia, has lost her leg in an Israeli raid. He ends his letter by pleading with his friend to “Come back, to learn from Nadia’s leg, amputated from the top of the thigh, what life is and what existence is worth.”

Today, the amputated city has lost all her limbs.