OPINION: Jewish supporters of the Palestinian cause have been played
Andrew Garfield spent years on peace missions to the West Bank. Now he believes Hamas has exploited Western goodwill while rejecting any path to coexistence
I always thought of myself as being on the Left, both here in the UK and in Israel. I have always believed that Israel could not rule indefinitely over millions of Palestinians and that a Palestinian state alongside Israel was the only solution. I still believe that is the case and still believe that Israel needs to acknowledge to both the Palestinians and the wider world the pain that the creation of a Jewish majority state has caused in order to move forward.
But ironically it was what I have seen on peace missions to the West Bank which has shifted me radically to the right on Israel-Palestine at least. As time has gone on, I have become steadily more convinced that I and other Jews who have lent their support to the Palestinian cause are being played.
Walking through Bethlehem, just yards from the notorious Separation Barrier, I was struck by the number of Palestinian houses which have keys embedded in their gates (a symbol of the keys to the homes in Israel that they determined one day to get back.)
I have met Palestinians who believe in peaceful coexistence, and it takes a lot of courage for them to speak out. But what no one wants to face up to is the fact that the majority of Palestinians and their noisy backers in the pro-Palestinian movement worldwide are still holding out for a maximalist solution in which the clock goes back not to 1967 but to pre-1948, if not further.
Even the moderate Palestinian leadership struggles to accept any legitimacy in Jewish claims to the land. They cling to the mistaken view that Israel is a foreign implant which will either weaken of its own accord and suffer internal strife or lose the support of the West and collapse.
Hamas’ variant is to seek to accelerate the process by drawing Israel into wars which it has set up to cause maximum civilian casualties on its own side, wagering often rightly that Western governments will eventually be forced by growing public outrage to intervene. Key to that strategy was mobilising the international community and weaponising lawfare with the ultimate aim of weakening Israel until it can no longer properly defend itself.
There is reason why Netanyahu is in power and the Israeli Right are running rampant. Hamas has successfully undermined every peace initiative over the last 40 years and terrorised its own population into refusing any kind of idea of peaceful coexistence. Whatever was left of the Israeli peace camp, and there wasn’t much, finally died on October 8.
The destruction of the peaceful communities in the Gaza envelope and the brutality wrought on the peace activists in particular were, for many, the final straw.
While Western media daily fuel the narrative of Israeli villainy, Israelis haven’t been so quick to forget the crowds who gathered in Gaza to cheer the arrival of the bloody hostages on 7 October. Recent hostage testimony about fears of being lynched by “innocent Gazan” civilians, the torture and sexual abuse meted out by their captors, or Gazan doctors operating on them without anaesthetic has, if anything, hardened determination to avoid a ceasefire, which leaves Hamas in place.
Israelis are tough as old boots. But they have had to be. If they had always played nice and done what they were told, Israel would never have come into existence, let alone survived to forge the start-up nation that is more prosperous and happier than the UK is today.
Mrs Thatcher used to say the facts of life are conservative, and it is nowhere truer than here. The Israeli Left have had their idealism punched out of them by sheer stubborn experience. In 2000, in Camp David, Israel offered the Palestinians everything they were supposed to be demanding. The response was the Second Intifada, in which thousands of Israelis (and Palestinians) were killed.
Terrible as it may seem, Jabotinsky’s doctrine of the Iron Wall, which stated that the Arabs would only come to accept Israel once it had proved it could not be defeated militarily, unfortunately has more than a ring of truth. The Abraham Accords, which have survived the current conflict, would appear to bear that out.
Arab governments are exasperated with Palestinian rejectionism but mindful of the support the cause still commands among the Street. They want Israel to get Hamas out of Gaza but are understandably unhappy at the daily cost in Gazan lives.
Israelis rightly fear that a premature end to the conflict just puts the whole process back on rinse and repeat. When it comes to Ukraine, the West has no problem agreeing with Zelensky that Russia will simply use a ceasefire to restock and regroup and come back again. Yet the West seems unable to comprehend Israel’s concerns about a ceasefire that enables Hamas to regroup and try again in a few years’ time. Then we will be back to Israel periodically “mowing the lawn” and still getting it in the neck.
It may be unrealistic, but what if this round of conflict might actually be the one opportunity to finally break free of the 100-year-old cycle of death and destruction that Israel and the Palestinians have never managed to escape?
Hamas will fight to the last Palestinian and want to take us all down with them. The scenes of dead and wounded coming out of Gaza are heartbreaking. I can understand completely why people simply want this madness to stop and why, to them, pressuring Israel seems like the quickest way to get it done.
But the clamour against Israel in the media and political circles in the West won’t change the calculus of Netanyahu’s government one jot. But what it will do is bolster Hamas’ conviction that they can hold out longer than either Israeli or Western public opinion. It will also prolong both the war and Palestinian suffering. We cannot allow ourselves to be mugs in that game.
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