Six months into Israel’s murderous war on Gaza, I spend my days in Ramallah reading the devastating news, feeling helpless and heartbroken. Yet one morning, I turned instead to Lyndsey Stonebridge’s excellent book on Hannah Arendt in which the author observed: “It is when the experience of powerlessness is at its most acute, when history seems at its most bleak, that the determination to think like a human being, creatively, courageously, and complicatedly matters the most.” I wonder whether those in Israel who feel powerless against the majority who want the continuation of the seemingly endless war; or us Palestinians, the victims of the full thrust of Israel’s might and expansionist agenda, are succeeding in doing that. So far, the evidence indicates that we are not.
By now several things have become clear. The first is the re-emergence in Israel of the Jewish ultra right; settlers and Jewish supremacists with their uncompromising expansionist agenda. It was as though this recalcitrant group was waiting for the opportunity to accelerate the pursuit of its colonial objectives. Already, not only is the Gaza Strip transformed but so is the West Bank, fragmented as it is by roadblocks and locked iron gates restricting access to villages, and settlers continuing to expel Palestinians from their land. As for Gaza, plans are already being prepared for settling the north by Israeli Jews.
