Current events in Gaza feel like Groundhog Day.
After the horrific attack by Palestinian Hamas militants in southern Israel a month ago that killed 1,400 Israelis and resulted in the kidnapping of more than 200 hostages, hardline Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched a relentless bombardment of the strip that has already killed many thousands of Palestinians, as well as 59 UN staff and 36 journalists. Homes, hospitals, mosques, churches, schools and the Jabalia and Bureij refugee camps have all been bombed.
Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant said “we are fighting human animals”, before calling for a total blockade of Gaza. To eliminate Hamas, a daily brutal aerial bombardment has continued in which as many as 165,000 Palestinian homes have been destroyed, and an estimated 1.4-million people internally displaced.
After being criticised for being slow to demand a ceasefire the UN has finally found its voice, cautioning against “mass ethnic cleansing”, condemning “crimes against humanity”, and warning against a “risk of genocide against Palestinians”.
While lambasting Hamas’ attacks as unjustifiable and calling for the release of Israeli hostages, UN secretary-general António Guterres noted that “the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced and their homes demolished”. An enraged Israel accused Guterres of “blood libel” and called for his resignation.
Navi Pillay, the most internationally respected SA UN official, having served as UN high commissioner for human rights, speaking in her current role as chair of the UN-mandated independent commission of inquiry on the occupied Palestinian territory, called for the protection of Palestinian and Israeli civilians and argued that the root cause, of the conflict involving systematic discrimination against Palestinians, must be urgently addressed by ending the Israeli occupation. She further requested the International Criminal Court to investigate crimes in Palestinian territories.
Israel would do well to heed the lessons of America’s two decade failed counter-terrorism campaign. After the attacks on the US that killed 3,000 Americans in September 2001, the truculent George W Bush administration launched a global “war on terror” in which it cautioned that whoever was not with the US was with the “terrorists”. Two wars were launched into Afghanistan and Iraq, which resulted in 440,000 civilian deaths while utterly failing to eliminate terrorism in both countries. Washington has spent an estimated $4-trillion on both wars and endured a humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, leaving the Taliban to take power shortly after.
Grievances that fuel terror
The grievances that fuel terror thus need to be tackled for any effective counter-terrorism strategy to succeed. Israel’s siege of Gaza will surely create a new generation of aggrieved terrorists. Equally worrying for the West is that, having struggled enormously to mobilise diplomatic support in the Global South to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last February, the unconditional support of most Western states for Israel is now laying bare the double standards of an Orwellian international system in which some states appear to be more equal than others.
Israel’s main weapons supplier — the US — has sent two aircraft carrier strike groups to the region in an unsubtle attempt to intimidate Iran, a supporter of Hamas and Lebanon’s Hezbollah. The pro-Palestinian “Arab Street” is growing restive at its 22 feckless governments. In a recent nonbinding vote at the UN General Assembly, 120 countries demanded the protection of Palestinian civilians and an end to the Israeli siege on Gaza, 45 states abstained, while only 14 were against.
The vote eloquently demonstrated Washington and Tel Aviv’s diplomatic isolation. Israel must thus temper anger with wisdom. Its American ally has seen this movie before in Afghanistan and Iraq. We all know how it ends.
• Adebajo is professor and senior research fellow at the University of Pretoria’s Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship.
