Lessons from the past for an Israeli intellectual
Sara Roy warned as early as 2013: “If Palestinians are continually denied what we all want for ourselves — an ordinary life, dignity, livelihood, safety and a piece of land where they can raise their children — then the inevitable outcome will be greater and more extreme violence from all factions, both old and increasingly new. What looms is no less than the loss of an entire generation of Palestinians. If this happens — perhaps it already has — we will all bear the cost.”
By Shmulik Lederman • Translated by Sol Salbe
Several matters have been on the minds of the Extreme Centre (Right) in Israel this week. We started with the recognition of the Palestinian state by countries like France, Canada, and Britain. This is a reward for Hamas! They cried out, look, the Hamasniks themselves are claiming this as a victory for Hamas. You are right, that is how Hamas presents it and will continue to present it, and that will convince quite a few people. But wait, what brought some of Israel’s best friends to recognise a Palestinian state? They needed some kind of fig leaf to cover up their assistance to Israel throughout the murderous war it has been waging in Gaza for two years, in the face of international public opinion and at home.
Who supported this war? You [the Israeli people]. What is the obvious conclusion, from your point of view? — *You* are the ones who granted Hamas that reward, *thanks to you* it will be able to present the recognition of a Palestinian state as justification for everything it has done and is doing. Will you take responsibility for this? Of course not, you lack that muscle in your body for taking responsibility.
Then we moved on to the original revelation about Israel’s international isolation, which of course is unjustified and stems from a combination of pure antisemitism and the tissue of lies and propaganda being disseminated by Hamas and Qatar. But still, maybe it’s worth our while to end the war even if it’s not a “total victory.” No shit, Sherlock. Who could have seen this coming.
Here’s another revelation that you’ll encounter in another year or two: calling it international isolation is a bit of an understatement, and it’s something that is not going to go away even if tomorrow Israel would invest its entire wealth in reconstruction of every single house and building in Gaza and in the new state of Palestine. Because of what we did, and are still doing in Gaza with your support, the stain of Genocide will continue to mark us for the foreseeable future. Gaza will be used as a central reference for every conversation about how far human evil can reach, and Israelis will have to explain to almost everyone they meet and to their own children what they did when Israel was destroying Gaza. We earned that stain fair and square and it’s on you. I mean, it’s on all of us, but hey — you supported it. Will you take responsibility for it? Of course not, after all, somewhere in July 2025 you said that Gaza shouldn’t have been totally starved out, it should have been almost totally starved out.
Then came Sinwar’s recording about how the “March of Return protests” in 2018–2019 were intended to allow Hamas and the “Shabab” [the boys] to invade Israel, abduct soldiers, and reach the kibbutzim. And how lucky we were that we didn’t listen to the Leftists and shattered the knees and lives of so many Gazans to pieces, whether or not they had anything to do with Hamas’s plans. Walla, you’re right, this risk management in Gaza worked great for us. It’s almost easy to forget that how we responded to the “March of Return protests” and more generally everything we did in Gaza and beyond was part of the path that led to October 7.
Personally, since October 7, I have been tormented by the thought of all the other things we could have done, all the other paths that were not chosen, that could have perhaps prevented the atrocities committed by Hamas in the Gaza border region and the atrocities that Israel is committing in Gaza. To get stuck into them even more than we already did — in the year before, in the decade and a half before, in the last sixty years, in the last hundred years — is definitely one answer.
I admit, however, that sometimes before going to bed I am also bothered by what one of the most important experts on Palestinian society in Israel, Matti Steinberg, predicted and did not know in 2021, against the backdrop of the Guardian of the Walls Operation in Gaza:
“Following the crushing failure of the parliamentary path… the alternative of the military path advocated by Muhammad a-Def won by default within Hamas… The catalysts provided by Israel in Jerusalem (in Sheikh Jarrah, at the Nablus Gate, and above all — in the Al-Aqsa Mosque Square in the midst of the Ramadan period… fell into the hands of the military approach like ripe fruit… Regarding the Gaza Strip, Hamas has reached the point that it ‘has nothing to lose’… Economic improvement or the promise of such improvement is not enough to create a feeling that there is something to lose as long as the population is under Occupation or subject to a foreign dictates… In the absence of another option that provides a response to the collective national need in the form of independence and sovereignty, there is no deterrence.”
Steinberg added further:
“Israel’s military and technological superiority is not Hamas’s greatest enemy. Hamas’s sworn enemy is a genuine diplomatic process that will lead to a two-state partition agreement with the Palestinian mainstream based on Fatah and the Palestinian Authority… The vast majority of the Palestinian public (including those in Gaza) supports this political path provided that it has a real and imminent prospect. Hamas is very afraid that public support will slip away from it and that it will be forced to make difficult decisions that will split it. Therefore, it is doing everything it can to torpedo this possibility. Hamas’s loyal ally in this matter, consciously or otherwise, is unfortunately the Israeli government… Strategically We have been carrying out Hamas’s wishes for a generation.”
I am also somewhat haunted by what one of the most prominent Gaza researchers, Sara Roy, wrote in 2018 about the extensive tunnel system that Hamas is rumoured to be building. If the tunnel system does indeed exist, Roy wrote, “the conclusion that follows from this imposes Horror: To destroy the tunnels… Israel… would have to destroy entire neighborhoods [in Gaza]. It also follows that the Hamas leadership hope that Israel would not go to such an extreme, but it appears willing to take the risk.
Based on conversations with her sources in Gaza, she attributed this to the turn Hamas underwent after Operation Protective Edge in 2014: Faced with the international community’s lukewarm response to the destruction Israel inflicted on Gaza and its refusal to work with Hamas, as well as the tightening of the siege, Hamas’s military wing gained more and more influence in the movement, as reflected in the election of Sinwar as the movement’s leader in Gaza in 2017. It is unclear what Sinwar’s election will bring, Roy wrote, but “one thing is clear: Gaza is at a boiling point.”
Roy warned as early as 2013:
“If Palestinians are continually denied what we all want for ourselves — an ordinary life, dignity, livelihood, safety and a piece of land where they can raise their children — then the inevitable outcome will be greater and more extreme violence from all factions, both old and increasingly new. What looms is no less than the loss of an entire generation of Palestinians. If this happens — perhaps it already has — we will all bear the cost.”
And she also mentions what a Gazan acquaintance testified in 2015 following Operation Protective Edge:
“What has also struck me is the extent to which the war created a different picture of Israel. Before, Gazans were surprisingly nuanced in their analysis. This was especially true among the generation that had experienced working inside of Israel. Now… I interviewed [people who] are Fatah. They lost everything. They no longer believe in the possibility of coexistence. The scale and indiscriminate nature of the attack… the calls from the Israeli public to ‘finish the job’: this destroyed any hope.”
But what bothers me most is the way Roy summed it all up, a decade ago:
“By refusing to seek proximity over distance, we calmly, even gratefully refuse to see what is right before our eyes. We are no longer compelled — if we ever were — to understanding our behavior from positions outside our own, to enter… into each other’s predicaments and make what is one of the hardest journeys of the mind. Hence, there is no need to maintain a living connection with the people we are oppressing, to humanize them, taking into account the experience of subordination itself… We are not preoccupied by our cruelty nor are we haunted by it. The task, ultimately, is to tribalize pain, narrowing the scope of human suffering to ourselves alone. Such willful blindness leads to the destruction of principle and the destruction of people, eliminating all possibility of embrace, but it gives us solace.”
