Twenty-five years ago, I interviewed a Palestinian family in the Jabaliya refugee camp in the Gaza Strip and returned for weeks to meet them amid the cinder block homes in that forlorn patch of sand along the Mediterranean that is among the most densely populated places on earth.
Fatima Al-Ashqar spoke achingly of her son, Eyad, who was killed in 1988 at age 14 in the early months of the first intifada, the stone-throwing uprising by Palestinian youth against Israeli occupation that ignited in Jabaliya. She later had another son she named Eyad after the first.
Like other mothers in Gaza, Al-Ashqar channeled her hatred of Israel and thirst for revenge into having more children as a kind of army to fight Israel with sheer numbers. “Let the Israelis give us the West Bank and Jerusalem, and we will stop,” she said. “The mothers of the martyrs are very fertile and fruitful. If you plant one martyr, you will get 500 more.”
The tragedy of Gaza is that it has remained stuck in time, like the Mideast peace process, with no prospects for relief. Largely cut off from the world and beset with border closures, militant Hamas leadership, human suffering, collapsing infrastructure and high unemployment, Gazans’ rage and resentment continue to fester through the generations.
To break this cycle, President Joe Biden and the U.S. will have to re-engage with Israel and the Palestinians more intensely. Biden has a lot on his hands, but if he is serious about peace, the U.S. must play a stronger role than the administration seems to have done so far. America’s European and Arab allies need to help, as well, but ultimately it will be up to the combatants to negotiate a political solution. Military force can’t accomplish that. American leadership is key.
A cease-fire is holding so far after the Islamic terrorist group Hamas fired more than 4,300 rockets into Israel and the Israel Defense Forces attacked more than 1,500 targets in Gaza. The extremists and hard-liners still have the upper hand in that region and remain dedicated to relentless pursuit of their competing claims over the same blood-soaked stretches of land.
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For any possibility of success, Israelis will have to move beyond the conservative leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who continues to support right-wing settlers intent on gobbling up more of predominantly Arab East Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank. Likewise, the Palestinians will need to ditch Hamas, which is intent on no less than the destruction of Israel, and move beyond the caretaker leadership of current Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who has not been able to move peace forward.
Thirteen Israelis and at least 248 Palestinians died tragically, scores of them children, in the latest violence. Hundreds more were wounded, and over 90,000 Gazans were displaced from their homes during the fighting. An estimated 2 million Gazans live in a strip of land that is 6 miles wide and 22 miles long. Refugees there have been living in camps under United Nations care longer than any other UN refugees in the world.
Without dealing with the root causes of the conflict, the prospects for a long-term peace, a two-state solution or a viable agreement on a fair and just sharing of the Holy Land among the two peoples seem further away than ever. This is the fourth war between Israel and Gaza since the late-2000s and the worst one since 2014.
Nature abhors a vacuum, a phrase attributed to Aristotle, and it’s especially apt for the Middle East. If things don’t move forward toward a political solution, the region inevitably falls back into violence. Israel faced rocket fire from Lebanon and Syria in the latest round as well. Despite increasing frustration in the U.S. and globally, this latest brutal cycle ended after 11 days, but the result is the same.
While the last U.S. administration made progress with the Abraham Accords, opening the prospect of new ties between Israel and the Arab world, nothing meaningful on the political front has moved negotiations forward for Palestinian demands in years. Extremists on both sides are the only winners.
The terrible loss of life in Israel and Gaza is heartbreaking, but both sides have lost faith that the other is interested in meaningful peace negotiations on the broader issues that have remained unresolved for years: a solution for Palestinian refugees, the obstacle of Jewish settlers, final borders that keep Israel secure and whether and how to share Jerusalem, with its holy sites for Muslims, Jews and Christians, as the capital of Israel and a future Palestinian state.
Even the prospect of a two-state solution envisioned in the 1993 Oslo Accords is in grave doubt now — and along with it the chance for a just and lasting peace that gives Israelis their rightful security and Palestinians basic rights in their homeland.
A quarter century has passed since I told the story in these pages of the Al-Ashqar family. At the time, extremists on both sides were killing the prospects for Oslo’s successful implementation. In 1995 and 1996, terrorist suicide bombers from Hamas and Islamic Jihad were blowing up bombs in Israel and passenger buses in Jerusalem and killing civilians at a horrifying pace. And a right-wing Jewish extremist assassinated Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, a warrior-turned peacemaker trying to end the unholy war between Israelis and Palestinians once and for all.
Strong leadership is a vital ingredient lacking today. In Israel, the giants are gone — leaders such as Rabin, Shimon Peres and Ariel Sharon. On the Palestinian side, so is Yasser Arafat, who despite his terrorist history had the authority, and for a time the will, to make big decisions for his people.
In their 2019 book about Israeli leadership, “Be Strong and of Good Courage,” authors Dennis Ross and David Makovsky quoted a telling remark from Sharon in his later years: “My generation (of Israelis) is the last one that is not afraid to make big decisions. I fear the next generation will be led by politicians and they won’t decide.”
Sharon was right. Worse, the current generation of leaders on both sides seems to be losing interest. Without new leaders there supported by their people, and strong American leadership, this unresolved cycle of rage and destruction may be doomed to go on indefinitely.
Storer H. Rowley, a former national editor and foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, teaches journalism and communication at Northwestern University.
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