Abdullah Al-Arian is a Palestinian American associate professor of history at Georgetown University in Qatar. He is the author of Answering the Call: Popular Islamic Activism in Sadat’s Egypt and the editor of Football in the Middle East: State, Society, and the Beautiful Game. He is also the editor of the Critical Currents in Islam page on the Jadaliyya e-zine and a policy member of Al-Shabaka. In an interview with Diwan conducted via email in early December, Arian analyzed Israel’s ongoing and all-out military assault on the Gaza Strip.
Rayyan Al-Shawaf: We are now several weeks into the massive Israeli military response to the October 7 attack by Gaza-based Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad on southern Israel. What are the people of Gaza facing?
Abdullah Al-Arian: Having already endured a debilitating blockade since 2007 and multiple Israeli military assaults since 2008, the 2.3 million Palestinian residents of Gaza are now suffering an unimaginable combination of the most destructive bombardment campaign of a civilian population in recent memory and the slow death that comes with imposed thirst, starvation, and the total decimation of the healthcare sector. To date, more than 18,000 Palestinians have been killed by this combination of blockade and bombing, over 7,000 of them children. Nearly 50,000 people have been injured, with uncounted others still missing beneath the rubble of destroyed buildings. There is a growing consensus among scholars, legal experts, and human rights officials that Israel’s actions in Gaza amount to genocide.
Early indications, both in terms of the statements issued by members of the Israeli government as well as by the military’s actions on the ground, appeared to signal that Israel was pursuing a major ethnic cleansing campaign on the order of the Nakba of 1948, which resulted in the mass expulsion of an estimated 750,000 people—roughly 80–90 percent of Palestinians in the territory that would become Israel. Having failed to convince its American and European allies or any Arab state to accept the mass expulsion of Palestinians into Egypt as a matter of official policy, Israel now appears to be creating conditions whereby Gaza’s territory is significantly diminished through unprecedented destruction and a long-term military occupation.
RS: And what is happening in the West Bank?
AA: Events in the West Bank during this period have served as a stark reminder that Israel’s current military onslaught is not only directed against Gaza. From the beginning of the year until October 7, some 200 Palestinians had been killed in the West Bank. Between October 7 and now, Israeli soldiers and settlers have killed at least 275 Palestinians. These attacks have targeted everyone from elderly farmers tending to their olive groves to family members burying their loved ones in cemeteries. Israeli forces have reportedly arrested 3,580 Palestinians during the same period. Hundreds of Palestinians have been displaced, including an entire village. Based on declarations made by the settlers themselves, the intent is to drive Palestinians from their land, a goal openly shared by many members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet.
RS: How did we reach this situation? What, in brief, is the history of the Gaza Strip since Israel’s “disengagement” from the territory in 2005?
AA: It is crucial to understand that the territory we refer to as the Gaza Strip was a direct product of the events of 1948, both geographically and demographically. The boundaries of the territory reflect the armistice line that followed the establishment of Israel and Egypt’s assumption of administrative control over the remaining land (while Jordan assumed control over the West Bank). Overnight, Gaza also became home to a massive refugee population following the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes across all of historical Palestine.
Over the years, the refugee camps that were assumed to be temporary means of housing the Palestinians until they would be allowed to return to their homes instead became permanent structures due to Israel’s refusal to recognize the Palestinian right of return, in violation of international law. Today, 70 percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents are either survivors of the Nakba or their direct descendants. Furthermore, the Israeli military occupation of Gaza that followed the June 1967 War was particularly brutal. By the mid-1980s, the scholar Sara Roy maintained that the occupation reflected a policy of “de-development,” which she defined as preventing or undermining Palestinian socioeconomic growth, and in fact restructuring Gaza’s economy as an auxiliary of the state of Israel.
This context is useful to keep in mind as we track events since 2005, when the Palestinian Authority (PA), at the behest of the George W. Bush administration during its short-lived democratization drive, decided to hold legislative elections in order to bolster support for the Fatah-led PA, which many Palestinians saw as little more than a corrupt and pliant subcontractor of the Israeli occupation. Instead, Hamas surprised many observers not only in its decision to contest the PA in elections after rejecting the legitimacy of the PA for over a decade, but in winning a plurality of seats, thereby earning the right to form a government and represent the Palestinians in any future negotiations.
Israel and the United States instantly condemned the outcome of the elections and began taking measures to overturn the results. In 2007, a U.S.-sponsored coup by Fatah was thwarted in Gaza, allowing Hamas to consolidate its control there further, while Fatah in turn shored up its rule in the West Bank. Israel’s policy from that point forward has been fairly clear. In essence, it is to maintain Palestinian political divisions, deepening what had previously been a largely geographical divide under Israeli occupation. The already debilitating conditions governing Palestinian life in Gaza worsened dramatically when Israel announced a blockade of the territory. Israel severely restricted the entry and exit of people and the importation of goods and resources in what became an open-air prison. According to state documents released in 2012, Israel used its control of food imports into Gaza to regulate Palestinian calorie intake at just above starvation levels.
Furthermore, the Israeli government adopted a military policy referred to as “mowing the lawn,” a grim euphemism to describe its periodic incursions into the besieged Gaza Strip. These incursions were ostensibly intended to weaken the military capacity of Hamas, but invariably led to the catastrophic destruction of major population centers and the killing of thousands of Palestinians. Beginning with Operation Cast Lead in 2008–2009, Israel has conducted four of these military campaigns. In 2018–2019, Israel responded to a series of peaceful marches at Gaza’s border by shooting at Palestinians who had gathered near the border fence that separated refugees from their former homes. Up to 266 Palestinians were killed in the demonstrations and 30,000 injured. By 2023, half of Gaza’s population had never known any life other than that of blockade and bombardment, with seemingly no end in sight.
RS: If Israel eventually concluded that, to prevent a Palestinian state, it was in its interest for Hamas to govern Gaza, as opposed to the PA, why did it keep the territory under siege, thereby breeding resentment and hostility on the part of Hamas itself?
AA: It was not so much that Israel favored Hamas in particular as much as it was a policy of maintaining deep political divisions among Palestinians more generally. A fractured Palestinian polity, maintained across ideological, political, socioeconomic, and geographical lines, has prevented the development of a coherent, unified liberation project for all Palestinians. This has been part and parcel of Israeli policy since its founding. Consider the various legal systems that define the Palestinian experience today: Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Israel are all governed by entirely different sets of laws, policies, and practices. These parallel systems serve as a major obstacle to the formation of a unified Palestinian political project.
Nevertheless, Hamas rule in Gaza has served other purposes for Israel. Given its status as a terrorist organization in the eyes of key states in the international community, the persistence of Hamas allows Israel to continually tap into a “global war on terror” narrative, whereby it mobilizes international support to combat terrorist financing, solicit military, diplomatic, and intelligence support, receive automatic endorsement of its frequent military incursions, and ultimately find justification for imposing a security order on the entire population of Gaza as a potential threat. Israel has successfully employed all of these methods while simultaneously seeking to confine Hamas within the borders of Gaza, thereby diminishing the actual threat it poses, a calculation that appears to have been upended on October 7.
Another consideration worth noting is that, once Israel made the decision to abandon its territorial claims on Gaza in 2005 (a decision that has seemingly been reversed in recent weeks), Israeli leaders could shift the entirety of their state’s expansionist project to the West Bank and East Jerusalem. In fact, Hamas officials openly stated that the group’s October 7 attack came, among other things, in response to the escalation of the killing of Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem by Israeli soldiers and settlers.
RS: Israel as a whole was clearly traumatized by the October 7 attacks, with its government stating that its goal is now to destroy Hamas in Gaza. Has the United States struck a bargain of sorts with its close ally, whereby it supports virtually anything the Israeli military does in Gaza in return for Israel no longer blocking the establishment of an independent Palestinian state encompassing most of the West Bank and all of Gaza?
AA: Notwithstanding some comments intended to temper the widespread outrage among Democratic Party voters, nothing we have seen over the past seven weeks would suggest that President Joe Biden’s administration has made serious attempts to put the question of Palestinian statehood back on the table or that the Israeli government would even be receptive to those efforts.
In reality, the so-called “two-state solution” has not been given serious consideration since at least 2000. Some would go further and argue that the parameters of the 1993 Oslo Accords made the prospect of Palestinian statehood improbable, if not outright impossible. What has been clear is that Biden has continued in the tradition of the previous three U.S. administrations in gradually diminishing the question of Palestinian self-determination while simultaneously granting Israel carte blanche as it continues to expand into Palestinian land. Any look at the current map of the Israeli settlement presence—some 700,000 illegal Jewish settlers live in the West Bank and East Jerusalem—would lead to no conclusion other than that a Palestinian state is untenable.
Nor does the political will exist in either the United States or Israel to facilitate the establishment of such an entity, despite Biden’s recent words. In fact, when also considering Israel’s stated intention of maintaining an occupation in Gaza for the foreseeable future, the momentum is clearly shifting in the opposite direction. The tragic fact of the matter is that the two-state solution is only ever trotted out to detract from serious discussion of the one-state reality and more recently, the atrocities being perpetrated in Gaza. This is particularly true as U.S. public opinion has shifted considerably in supporting calls for a ceasefire—in direct opposition to the administration’s policy.
RS: How do you see the long-term future of Gaza? Direct Israeli occupation in the immediate aftermath of this onslaught, perhaps, but then what?
AA: It is difficult to talk about the future while the present destruction continues unabated. We don’t know when it will end or how catastrophic the state of Palestinian life will be in its aftermath. Still, it seems clear that large segments of Gaza will likely be unlivable for the foreseeable future. Also, Israel appears determined to shrink Gaza’s inhabited territory through direct military occupation of certain segments of the strip, particularly those from which large numbers of residents have already been expelled, and keeping the population there to a minimum. While this may serve to restore Israel’s security in the short term, it does not appear that Israel, nor its backers in the United States and Europe, have any idea what a long-term vision for Gaza looks like—apart from continued occupation and siege, a situation that was already unsustainable prior to the current moment.
We also cannot talk about the future without talking about the children of Gaza. This onslaught has affected children in more profound ways than perhaps any conflict in the world in the past half-century. What future do Gaza’s children have, with tens of thousands of them having been killed, physically maimed, or emotionally traumatized by this military campaign? From parks and schools to hospitals and markets, the destruction of structures necessary to sustain a basic standard of living will affect Gaza’s children the hardest for many years to come, so much so that a spokesman for the UN Children’s Fund has called Israel’s campaign a “war on children.”
Ultimately, on the political level, the future of Gaza cannot be separated from the broader Palestinian question. Owing to unprecedented levels of global outrage, there will likely be renewed efforts for a political resolution in the months and years to come. On that point, one thing is certain: If this initiative does little more than attempt to build on the failures of the Oslo Accords, it will be dead on arrival. Even if the United States and Israel manage to drag a beleaguered and discredited PA leadership into it, for the Palestinian people the process that has led only to further theft of their land, the de-development of their society, and the entrenchment of occupation will be a total nonstarter.
The better option would be to dispense with a discredited peace process that is centered on spurious notions of Palestinian statehood, and that has only further entrenched the one-state reality currently governing Israelis and Palestinians. Instead, the starting point for any solution should be recognizing that the settler colonial state governing two peoples according to differing sets of laws, policies, and practices—something the United Nations and an increasing number of international human rights organizations have termed “apartheid”—has led to the dispossession and oppression of one group by another. Only upon dismantling those racist and discriminatory structures, and the ethnonationalist project that binds them, can there be a future built upon justice and equality. The tragedy is that in the United States, and certainly in Israel, there is no political will to do this.
