To care for Palestinians you must care for Israelis

There is something notably lacking in a broad subset of the discussions held on the protracted conflict raging in the Holy Land; particularly by people who claim to champion the Palestinian cause. Its absence makes it very difficult to understand, or even speak properly about, the cycle of violence that persists in the region. What is so often ignored is the reality of Palestinian terror, or ‘political violence’ as wikipedia calls it, against civilians within Israel.

The world was shocked by the extent to which civilian blood was shed on October 7th; this shock only highlights how few people were aware that the targeting of civilians within Israel proper (as opposed to the West Bank or Gaza) is a constant occurrence. While people complain that Israel fails to distinguish between civilian and military targets, the Palestinian cause has never even proposed that it should make such a distinction. This is because, at its root, large swathes of the movement consider the very existence of the state of Israel to be an injustice — not the occupation of the West Bank, or the encroaching settlements, or the blockade of Gaza. Ignoring the obvious challenges this belief presents to the peace process, it creates a situation in which resistance-action, supposedly for the benefit of the Palestinians, actually harms them by damaging Israeli faith that there is a partner for peace in the region.

The average Israeli has no interest in ‘maintaining the occupation’ or ‘oppressing non-Jews’, though this seems to be a prevalent narrative in anti-Zionist discourse. Israelis are real people and would rather get on with their lives. The reality of a mandatory draft is that nobody wants to do the work. Nobody likes fighting. Nobody wants to get hurt. The 18-year-olds called up consider it slave labour. But when the average Israeli waits at a bus stop they can never know which incoming car is going to plow through the crowd. When they get on a train they never know who is going to choose that very moment to begin a suicidal shooting spree, or try and stab them in the back. These fears are not unfounded. Since 2000 almost 1,500 Israeli citizens have been killed in terror attacks. It’s important to note that many of these attacks do not occur in the occupied territories. Many take place in Tel Aviv, Israel’s centre of progressive, left wing, thought. These attackers are not locals defending their land from settlers, but individuals that chose to cross the border into Israel to perpetrate violent acts. If they consider themselves refugees, or expelled, they are so from a place they have never actually lived, attacking people who have never lived anywhere else. It is this fear — that at any moment even the Israelis that condemn the occupation, hate Bibi, deplore the settlements, and care deeply about Palestinian rights, could be attacked in the streets — that motivates the average Israeli to serve in the IDF.

The occupation, therefore, represents for Israelis the potential for control over what would otherwise be their own wanton slaughter. It manifests, in practice, as series of control points (borders, checkpoints) and as the constant activity of security forces (IDF, Police, ISA) to thwart potential attacks. It is well known that this infringes on Palestinian freedoms. What is not well known is that for every attack that succeeds tens if not hundreds are thwarted. It’s very difficult to find data on how many attacks are prevented every day, for obvious reasons, but soldiers that serve in the West Bank report constantly foiling plots to kill Israelis — claims supported by the caches of weapons/explosives confiscated from the houses raided. There is constant complaint and criticism regarding IDF raids in the West Bank, but very little consideration of why soldiers would choose to put themselves at risk by entering dangerous territory, unless there was an actual strategic purpose. That purpose is the identification and prevention of these violent acts of terror. Ultimately, it is effective.

Now, in practice, I don’t think that Israel can hide behind its guns for ever. Control with a choking, vice-like, grip is not a long term solution, and only peace can bring true security. But naivety on the behalf of Israelis will bring neither peace nor security. Israelis have to contend with constant threats to their lives, and so asking them to stop the occupation is asking them to leave themselves wide open to attack. The width of Israel, at its middle, is less than 15km. It is incredibly easy to get to Tel Aviv from the West Bank. The border fence itself is incredibly porous, and while it is effective in reducing these attacks, it can’t stop them entirely. This risk means that steps towards peace must come from the side of the Palestinians. They have to prove that if Israel weakens its security apparatus it won’t pay in dead Jews. If you want to expand Palestinian freedom, you have to show that it won’t cost Israeli lives. The Palestinian authority has failed, profoundly, to limit the terror that emanates from the West Bank, leaving Israel to mange it in a process that only tightens tensions and breeds violence.

It must also be noted that, purely numerically, the Palestinians have suffered greater losses — this whataboutism is exactly the reason conversations about Palestinian violence either go nowhere or never begin in the first place — but Israeli violence does not spawn in a vacuum, and it is not maintained for it’s own sake. Terror attacks within Israel proper are common enough that the average Israeli fears a regular threat to their person. This is the perception that underlies support for parties like the Likud and continued support for the occupation, even from those who criticise its moral and legal standing. Israel is a democracy, and Israelis will vote in accordance with their own interests. While peace is a priority, security is paramount, therefore fearful Israelis will vote for aggressive security measures. In this way Palestinian violence hurts Palestinians more than anybody else. And this is why it doesn’t matter who has lost more. It is the justified perception of danger that motivates Israeli voters. Violence radicalises the Israeli population. This became abundantly clear on October 7th, but began long before. It’s been frequently claimed that the war in Gaza will bring about a new generation of terrorists, but people tend to forget the inverse of this claim: October 7th destroyed the faith of many Israelis in a peaceful solution. It crystallised the worry that there are people, merely kilometres in every direction, that want to kill every single Jew in the region. Israelis don’t see Palestinians as fighting for their ‘liberation’ in the now occupied territories. They see them as fighting to destroy the entire Jewish state. Under such conditions why would any Israeli want to dismantle the occupation? They have been told, verbatim, by the Palestinian leadership and civilians alike that the IDF is the only thing keeping them alive. You cannot ask them to sign their own death warrant.

If Palestinians were to constrain their ‘resistance’ to the West Bank (this means not shooting a single rocket from Gaza) for any reasonable amount of time, Israelis that live within the green line could start to feel a sense of security that would allow them to support withdrawal, like they did from Gaza in 2005. If the average Israeli could say to themselves, in good faith ‘I live in Israel, not Palestine, and therefore I have nothing to fear from people trying to liberate Palestine,’ it would change perspective of the entire country. Unfortunately, this is not the reality. The pro-Palestine movement does not want to create a Palestinian state next to Israel, but rather a Palestinian state instead of Israel. Even the more moderate Palestinian leadership, Fatah, encourages violence against Israel, with their pay-for-slay program. This means that in practise there is no good faith movement from within Palestine working to create the conditions under which Israel could remove the occupation without endangering its civilians.

The average Israeli is well aware of this. How could they not be? You’d be hard pressed to find somebody who hasn’t lost a friend to these attacks. But the international community is completely unaware because shootings and stabbings in Israel proper are so regular they hardly make the news.

This is the lived reality of Israelis, and their half of the story matters too. If peace is actually your objective, and you believe that dismantling the occupation and creating a Palestinian state will bring about that goal, then you should advocate for the creation of a situation in which it is in Israel’s interest to take action towards those ends. To show Israelis that this future is possible. But violence against Israeli civilians acts as a direct counter to these goals. You will never convince the Jews to allow themselves to be vulnerable by trying to murder them. Supporting Palestinian violence as ‘resistance’ only degrades the situation for the Palestinians themselves. Real peace will come when the Palestinian people decide to condemn violence from within instead of paying for it with international aid and celebrating it with sweets. To reiterate: violence against Israeli civilians doesn’t represent resistance to the occupation, but resistance to the existence of the Israeli state. And the Jews have nowhere else to go, so they will never stop fighting back.

The lived reality of diaspora Jews is that everywhere they have been, they have been subject to oppression, expulsion, and calls for extermination. While the rest of the world may have (at least officially) left this in the past, in Israel this reality persists; the explicitly stated aims of groups like Hamas and Hezbollah are to destroy all of Israel. Their calls for the destruction of the state of Israel come loud and clear. Polls in Palestinian Territories show that the majority of the civilian population believes in this goal. They do not recognise the validity of the existence of any Jewish state between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean Sea.

There is no end to the criticism Israel deserves, and as long as there is state sanctioned violence, no matter the potential justifications, there ought to be those who keep a sharp eye on the state and censure it. This provides a valuable incentive to do better. With that said, Israeli violence serves the purpose of protecting Israeli lives. Palestinian violence serves no other purpose than endangering Israelis. There is no realistic argument to be made that it protects Palestinians, or that will make things better for them or bring them any closer to a day where there is peace in the region. The notion of violent resistance is merely the progeny of the single minded preference for war over peace that the Arab world has displayed for over 70 years now. It is clearly not serving the Palestinians. It’s time to try a different tactic. There must be a movement within the Free Palestine camp to condemn Palestinian violence and support a moderate, non-violent, path towards a two state solution. Quite simply, until Israelis do not fear for their lives in the streets of Tel Aviv, Palestine will never be free.