Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

With Hamas at the Helm, A Fearful Future

File: JANET ZHU/THE HOYA

I look back at the past few weeks I spent in Israel and the West Bank in both awe and frustration. Amid visits to Ramallah and Bethlehem, I managed to reconvene with family and spend time with my new baby sister, Noya. She will soon be two years old, and I often wonder what kind of reality she will soon be growing into, as a child of the region.

If you would have asked me this question 10 years ago, I would have said that Noya would be living in a far more peaceful era — an era when Israel is out of Gaza and the Palestinian Authority would be in full control of the strip’s resources, shaping its future institutions and economy freely.

Blossoming industries of agriculture and tourism would prove the Palestinians’ commitment to responsible state building, and Israeli officials would likely reciprocate by handing over the West Bank in another similar unilateral withdrawal. From that point forward, people on both sides would be able to live their daily lives with peaceful tolerance.

Reality, however, took an unfortunate turn for the worse.

Soon after Israel’s disengagement from Gaza in 2005, the Palestinian leadership lost its control over Gaza to the extremist terrorist organization Hamas, which exiled moderates and turned the entire strip into a stronghold of terror.

And then came the rockets — thousands of them.

Israeli civilians had to become accustomed to a new terrifying reality of finding shelter within less than 30 seconds of an alarm sound. In a few years, Israel along with the generous help of the United States was able to develop a sophisticated short-range anti-missile system named Iron Dome, which identifies, prioritizes and thwarts missiles aimed at the heart of civilian populations, with a success rate of over 85 percent. This system proved to be of extremely high value, as it provided Israel’s population with a much-needed sense of security that in turn increased its administration’s forbearance towards any costly ground operations within the Gaza strip.

These operations, which often raised the death toll on both sides, were regrettably necessary in the past to relieve the Israeli population from Hamas’ indiscriminate rocket firing, which has taken place in public spaces such as schools, hospitals and mosques.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, Hamas also uses civilian homes to store ammunition and firearms, forcing Palestinian families to serve as a front for an extremist cause that many are not interested in at all but are too terrified to oppose.

In this current round of retaliation, the conditions are not so different. Rockets are fired incessantly into the heart of Israel, to the point where they are capable of reaching my own doorstep in Jerusalem — an extremely fragile city that has known its fair share of tragedy in the past month, after the savage murder of Palestinian teenager Mohammed Abu Khadir by a group of rogue Israeli extremists.

The ground started boiling up a couple of weeks earlier, after three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped and murdered inside the West Bank, near the city of Hebron. Ugly incitement in the form of revenge was soon to follow from within certain circles of Israeli society. As blood was being shed on both sides, Hamas decided it was better to add more fuel to the fire rather than to try to put it out, and so it orchestrated this full range of rocket attacks that we now see almost everywhere across Israel.

At this point in the conflict, Hamas has managed to not only shoot rockets on its own people in the West Bank and Jerusalem, but also to damage a crucial power grid that supplied electricity to more than 70,000 Palestinians in Gaza, with repairs too dangerous to take place so long as the rockets keep showering down.

It has become clear to all that with Hamas in control of the Palestinian people, nothing but death, tragedy and losses will come to both sides in the region.

Until Hamas decides to act in a responsible manner and stop its radical incitement against Israel, we will not relent from fighting its heinous crimes against humanity while minimizing Palestinian civilian casualties as much as possible. Israel is not seeking revenge, and it is not hasty on entering Gaza again.

My greatest fear, now, as I think back on little Noya is that she will grow up in a far more grim future that holds only more violence and hatred on both sides. It breaks my heart to think of her hearing the sirens for the first time, certain only of their strong sense of panic and terror. I don’t want her to become vulnerable to hate speech and fear of the other, and I can hope only that her future environment will encourage her to respect her neighbor.

Nitzan Gabai is a rising junior in the School of Foreign Service originally from Jerusalem. He is a special adviser to the Georgetown Israel Alliance and previously served in the Israel Defense Forces.

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  • A

    AlexSep 9, 2014 at 9:40 am

    With Israel at the helm, a fearful future:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uL-GmYBNDqY

    Reply
  • N

    NedJul 17, 2014 at 2:22 pm

    Reply
  • K

    karimJul 16, 2014 at 10:43 am

    Well written. The whole region is going through a major crisis.

    Reply