Peace in the Middle East feels out of reach amid rage of war

It’s hard to ­believe that it’s now a full year since that ­terrible day when Hamas launched its ­attack on Israel killing roughly 1200 ­people and taking 251 people hostage.

What followed also profoundly shocked the world. Israel’s invasion of Gaza, its near evisceration of the coastal enclave and killing of 40,000 Palestinians, the vast majority women and children, has already left an indelible scar on a region where bitterness, tragedy and loss has repeatedly defined the lives of those that live there.

As a I write, Gaza’s nightmare is ­anything but over. In neighbouring ­Lebanon, meanwhile, whose people are also no strangers to the horror of war, ­Israeli forces are bombarding and ­invading their country, trapping millions in a rerun of the past evoking haunting memories of 1982 and 2006.

Yes, dates do matter in the ­Middle East and it was around 4pm on ­Monday, ­December 8 1987, as four Gaza ­workers were returning home from day jobs in ­Israel that an Israeli army tank ­transporter ploughed into a line of cars killing the four men and injuring seven others.

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Israeli Radio broadcasts said it was an accident, but in the volatile Jabaliya refugee camp – “Gaza’s Soweto” – where three of the four dead men had lived, the rumour mill had already gone into ­overdrive.

The Israeli driver of the truck was said to be the cousin of one Shlomo Sakle, a 45-year-old Jewish salesman from the Northern Negev town of Beit Yam. Two days earlier Sakle had gone to the Gaza Souk looking for cheap merchandise when an unidentified Palestinian came up behind him and plunged a knife into his neck. Sakle managed to stagger just a few yards before collapsing in the ­backstreets where he bled to death.

In the supercharged atmosphere that was then Jabaliya, for many ­Palestinians it naturally followed that the truck crash had been a deliberate and ­premeditated act of Israeli revenge. Whatever the ­explanation, in effect the fuse of rebellion had been lit and was burning down fast.

Within hours the barricades went up. Oil drums and tyres, sewage pipes, rocks and old furniture blocked the roads across Gaza. Israeli army patrols found themselves increasingly ambushed by hundreds of stone-throwers, but their top brass remained unperturbed.

Classes at City Inn Junction - Ramallah, West Bank 1988.“It’s nothing. You don’t know them. They’ll go to bed and tomorrow report for work,” one regional Israeli army ­commander patronisingly told a ­journalist at the time. How wrong he was.

The “war of the stones” otherwise known as the first Palestinian intifada, one of the great popular mass uprisings of our time, had erupted.

A “day of rage” the Palestinians called those relentless clashes with Israeli troops on the streets in Gaza and across the West Bank. To the outsider, ­including foreign correspondents like me, there seemed at times almost something absurd about this deadly ritual.

Occasionally, it almost verged on black comedy, like one day when I watched a group of hungry Palestinian rioters, stones in one hand and sandwiches in the other, eating and fighting at the same time. Or, when a local ice-cream seller, his vending tray bedecked in ­Palestinian flags, turned up to offer the Shebab (youth) other refreshments.

An “irresistible force colliding with an immovable body”, was how Israeli ­writer Amos Elon described this ­seemingly ­endless battle of wills, that at times took on an almost surreal quality, deadly ­serious though it was and still is.

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In my mind’s eye, looking back now on those early intifada clashes it’s as if they have all meshed into one long day of rage. In the decades since, they have also ­morphed into levels of killing and ­destruction on a scale that back then would have been difficult to envisage but that some observers most certainly could see coming and warned of.

Just before the start of the intifada, another Israeli author, David Grossman, wrote in his searing account of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, The ­Yellow Wind, about how Israelis had lived for so long “in a false and artificial ­situation based on illusions, on a teetering ­centre of gravity between hate and fear, in a ­desert void of emotion and ­consciousness”. Someday, Grossman warned, “it will ­exact a deadly price”.

As tomorrow marks those savage days of October 7 and start of the all-out war that now grips whole swathes of the ­region and impacts profoundly on ­Palestinians, Israelis and Lebanese alike, its perhaps worth pausing to consider Grossman’s warning.

Casting my own mind back to those early volatile days is to fully realise now how the many Israelis I spoke with then seemed to live in this emotionless “­desert” that Grossman described.

It was as if Gaza and the occupied West Bank were home to millions of ­invisible people. Only rarely did a few more ­enlightened and curious Israelis venture to ask: “What’s it like there?”

War of the Stones - West Bank 1988 For many Israelis I met, the ­humiliation, grinding poverty, curfews, movement controls and extrajudicial killings, which were the everyday life of most ­Palestinians, might as well have been taking place on the far side of the moon for all they cared. As Elon so ­accurately put it, “self-deception became a prerequisite for survival”.

But October 7 last year finally stripped away that deception, presenting many ordinary Israelis with the stark reality of that exacting “deadly price,” that ­Grossman predicted.

Barely three months after the start of the intifada, Elon pointed out that the status quo, which Israel’s Likud politicians had long regarded as the best of all possible worlds, “is shattered forever”.

But if that was such an inflection point, what then to make of October 7 and the events that have subsequently unfolded in Gaza and Lebanon?

Far too often in the past, complacency both in Israel itself and across the wider international community meant that the ticking timebomb of pent-up frustration, fear, hatred, revenge and sheer hopelessness borne out of the Palestinians plight was ignored.

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In fact, so complacent had the Israelis been that as far back as December 10, 1987, just a few days after the intifada flared into life in Jabaliya, Defence Minister Yitzhak Rabin refused to cancel a trip to the United States, on the grounds that the disorder was insufficiently serious.

It was then too that a now familiar pattern developed. for while in the US, amongst other duties, Rabin was to ­settle a price with the Americans for the buying of 70 of the world’s then most ­sophisticated weapons – F-16 fighter planes.

Fast forward almost four decades to today and those US weapons continue to flow, fuelling unprecedented levels of ­killing and destruction.

Not long after Rabin returned to Israel from that trip he was to tell Israeli troops in the West Bank town of Ramallah to use “force, power, beatings” to suppress the Palestinians. The then more liberal Jerusalem Post decried the minister’s ­“jarringly brutal language”.

But Israeli soldiers took Rabin’s “break their bones” advice literally. In the ­territories it was not uncommon to meet Palestinians disabled for life by the blows they received during these beatings.

Palestinians erect barricades during intifada - West Bank 1988Ironically, many of the firms that ­manufactured the truncheons and clubs used in these beatings employed mostly Palestinian workers from the Gaza Strip.

“Our task now is to recreate the ­barrier of fear between Palestinians and the ­Israeli military, and once again put the fear of death into the Arabs of the ­territories so as to deter them from ­attacking us anymore,” demanded Rabin.

Today’s level of violence as the world has witnessed, has moved on from the mere breaking of bones. Now what is ­being enacted is a fully-fledged effort egged on politically by ultranationalist right wing elements within the ­government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to break the Palestinian people’s will to resist once and for all.

But for every such action in the Israeli- Palestinian conflict, there is an equal and opposite reaction, a continual cycle of ­resistance then repression then resistance again. No sooner does each side seem to have found its threshold of acceptable ­violence and suffering than it hardens into another bloody phase.

We have seen this over the past year as the destruction wreaked on Gaza moved on to Lebanon. As I write, the Israeli bombs that continue to fall on Gaza now also fall on Beirut, the Bekaa and Tripoli.

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It was in Beirut’s southern suburbs back in 2006 when Israel and ­Hezbollah went to war the last time, that I came across 60-year-old Zakia Hammad, ­cowering along with other Palestinian women and children, in a dank claustrophobic bunker in the Palestinian refugee camp of Bourj el-Barajneh.

Like everyone else in the camp, Zakia was trying to escape the Israeli shells and bombs that thudded terrifyingly ­outside. Over the next hour or so Zakia told me the story of how she had lost all her children to the previous wars that had wracked Beirut and Lebanon, including one daughter who was 12 years old when she was blown to pieces.

“I was two years old when the ­Israelis kicked my family out of Palestine,” she told me, before adding that she still dreamed of returning one day to the land of her birth.

As we spoke, a little boy and girl came hurrying down the stairs into the ­bunker, breathlessly telling their mother how they had seen a woman cut and covered in blood from flying glass caused by the ­explosion of an incoming Israeli bomb.

I still remember that moment and how Zakai glanced towards them. “All my ­children are gone, dead and now look at us,” she continued, tears glazing her eyes.

This is why dates matter in the Middle East, for they act as reminders marking the passage of time and the suffering that all too often goes with it. This is the sixth time in the past 50 years that there has been an Israeli “incursion” of this kind into Lebanon.

Somehow, throughout those five ­decades of civil war, invasions, ­political turmoil and economic instability, ­Lebanon has always managed to cope, to rebuild and reset. But this latest onslaught comes when the country’s economy was already in a parlous state.

So where does all this leave the Middle East and Israeli- Palestinian conflict now? Is this really a pivotal moment or just another phase in the bitter cycle that has bedevilled the region?

SEEN from Israel’s perspective there’s little doubt that it seeks to eliminate Hamas and Hezbollah once and for all. But as in the past, its widening military campaign is only sowing increasing anger among those in the Middle East sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. This makes achieving peace in the future that much harder.

What’s more, in Gaza where a year ago the latest spiral of violence began, Israel cannot achieve its military aims because it doesn’t have a political aim to address the question of Palestinian ­nationhood.

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For so many Palestinians like Zakia Hammad who I met in Bourj el-Barajneh in 2006 and Ali Naji, a teacher in the ­El-Buss refugee camp in the southern Lebanese city of Tyre, who I was to meet a few days later, war has cast a shadow over their lives for almost as long as they can remember.

For them and other Palestinians as well as Israelis and Lebanese, war must feel like a malevolent wind that blows, ­disappears then returns again. That’s why dates matter in the Middle East.

Sitting that afternoon back in 2006 ­chatting with Ali Naji, I jokingly complained about the problem I was ­having completing a book on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict I was writing at that time.

How will I ever get it finished when events in Gaza, the West Bank or here in Lebanon constantly overtake what I write? I asked the elderly teacher.

“The answer to that is simple,” he ­replied with a wry smile. “There is no ending to your book until the Palestinians have a home of their own.”

Right now most Palestinians and Israelis can scarcely begin to think of a day when their lives will be at peace as both sides remain trapped in a vortex of sadness, anger and recrimination.

Tomorrow, we will pause to remember those shocking events of a year ago in ­Israel and subsequent carnage ­inflicted on Gaza and Lebanon. As we do so, ­perhaps Ali Naji’s words about ­Palestinians having a home of their own should take on a renewed resonance for all of us.