Yonatan Mendel
Toward the end of October 2023 I was taking a taxi home in Tel Aviv. Just after we entered Shapira neighborhood, near the central bus station, the driver turned on the radio to the ongoing terrible news from the south. The Israeli ground operation in Gaza had just begun; there were heavy fights around Beit Hanoun. The newscaster mentioned the Israelis and foreigners whom Hamas had, earlier that month, kidnapped to the Gaza Strip—at the time they numbered 251—before moving on to the next item: clashes were underway between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian militants in Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank. “It is so hard to build, and so easy to destroy,” the driver said, looking at me in the rearview mirror. “So easy to destroy what?” I asked. “You know,” he said, “everything. The peace we had here. Now, they will get nothing, no work, no peace.”
I didn’t answer. Any conversation was bound to end in heavy silence, and I preferred skipping directly to the heavy silence part. Yet that nonconversation captured something essential about the way Israelis perceive “the conflict.” Many in Jewish Israeli society do not grasp, and do not want to grasp, that there is a connection between the eruption of violence on October 7 and the fact that the conflict’s core issues—occupation, settlements, borders, security, water, Jerusalem, refugees, sovereignty, freedom of movement, the existence of a Palestinian state—have never been settled. Many Israelis seem to think that the state’s deceitful formulas of “living with the conflict,” “managing the conflict,” or bypassing it with the illusion of peace (as did the Abraham Accords signed during the first Trump presidency), combined with military superiority, had created a tenable status quo that came to an end on October 7, 2023.
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