It’s happening now: “An unprecedented attack from Gaza spurs Israeli airstrikes, gun battles. Israeli civilians, soldiers held captive; hundreds feared dead across Gaza, Israel”.

Coincidentally, the next article I read in The New York Review of Books (probably behind a paywall) was “Heading Toward a Second Nakba”. (According to the United Nations, “the Nakba, which means “catastrophe” in Arabic, refers to the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Before the Nakba, Palestine was a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society”.) 

The article, published last month, provides some of the context for today’s violence. Here are excerpts:

In effect, the second Nakba is already underway.

It is happening slowly, piece by piece, and largely under the radar. Here’s an example. The beautiful village of Ein Samiya, not far from Ramallah, was for years subject to continuous settler harassment. First the Civil Administration issued a demolition order for the village school—by far the most impressive and important building there. An array of European sponsors had supplied the funds to build it. The villagers went to court, and on August 10, 2022, the Jerusalem District Court decreed, unsurprisingly, that the school could indeed be demolished. In January the High Court of Justice put a freeze on executing this ruling; but on August 17, 2023, the army destroyed the school.

Meanwhile, over recent months, attacks by settlers intensified. They frequently invaded the village, beat and stoned its residents, and brought their own sheep into the Palestinians’ fields, thereby destroying the growing crops—in short, they routinely terrorized their Palestinian neighbors. The army and police, as usual, did nothing to stop any of this. What finally broke the villagers’ spirit came after a night when armed settlers came into the village, supposedly looking for sheep that they claimed had been stolen. They couldn’t find any. The next morning, one of the villagers took his flock out to graze. A policeman turned up, arrested him, announced that the entire flock—thirty-seven sheep—had been stolen, and handed it over to the settlers. Meanwhile, settlers blocked the access roads to the village and stoned Palestinians trying to reach their homes. This went on for five consecutive days.

I was there on May 24, 2023.

I saw the last Palestinian trucks leaving with the few possessions the villagers could salvage. The entire village—twenty-seven extended families, over two hundred people—evacuated their homes… I’ve seen rather a lot of heartbreaking scenes in the Palestinian territories over the years, but the flight from Ein Samiya was one of the hardest to watch. It goes without saying that the villagers’ lands have now been appropriated by the settlers, with the collusion of the army, the police, the courts, and, not least, the government.

The fate of Ein Samiya is shared by many other Palestinian sites. In the South Hebron Hills, thirteen villages are in imminent danger of expulsion, with the backing of the High Court of Justice; the excuse is that they are located within an arbitrarily imposed training zone for the army. Al-Khan al-Ahmar, slightly east of Jerusalem, was on the verge of being destroyed—the army bulldozers had already begun their work—when the International Criminal Court in The Hague declared that a war crime was being committed. That stopped the destruction for the moment, though government ministers have been demanding that the army finish the job. The village of Ras al-Tin, not far from Ein Samiya, was emptied of most of its inhabitants after savage acts by the army. (Among other things, soldiers emptied and confiscated the large water tanks that made life sustainable in the stony desert hills.) Denying water to Palestinian shepherds in the Jordan Valley, where temperatures in summer can pass 120 degrees Fahrenheit, is a standard tactic employed by the army…. These are random names from a longer list.

In Nathan Thrall’s words, a “hidden universe of suffering” touches “nearly every Palestinian home.” There is no way to justify any of it, unless one thinks that ensuring eternal Jewish supremacy over all of Palestine, and with it an Israeli version of apartheid, is a worthy objective. The moral foundation of the State of Israel has been severely compromised, perhaps beyond repair, and exchanged for the horrific reality of the occupation, which is further entrenched with each passing hour.

To perpetuate that reality is, to no small extent, the real rationale of the antidemocratic legislation limiting the power of the Supreme Court that the Netanyahu government pushed through the Knesset on July 24, despite weeks of huge demonstrations against it. Right-wing fanatics think, with some reason, that the Supreme Court is the last remaining obstacle to the annexation of the territories (although its record on Palestinian matters is far from good). Hence the attempt to undermine the court, indeed to sabotage the state’s entire legal system and thus to give the government almost unlimited power to do whatever it pleases. In the face of overwhelming opposition to this move from critical sectors of Israeli society … and from abroad, the legislation abolishes the so-called reasonableness clause, which gave the Supreme Court the authority to overrule government decisions on grounds that they are patently unreasonable—for example, when the prime minister appoints to a ministerial position a politician repeatedly convicted for taking bribes (this is not a theoretical example).

The Supreme Court will pronounce on the legality of the new law; major figures in the government, including the Speaker of the Knesset, have announced in advance that they will not honor the court’s decision if it invalidates the law, and Netanyahu has more than hinted that he, too, will defy the court. Israel is in the throes of a constitutional crisis (in the absence of a constitution), and the threat to democracy, coming from the government and the slim right-wing majority in the Knesset, is without precedent in the country’s history.

For [those Palestinians] who have suffered unthinkable losses, there will be no release from pain. As long as the occupation continues on its self-destructive course, there will be many more innocent victims… It is obvious, though many refuse to see it, that the only way Israel can survive in the long run is to come to terms with the Palestinian national movement—that is, to make peace, an honest and generous peace.

I am certain that some form of mutual accord is still possible, though I may not live to see it. Palestine is in disarray, after decades of Israeli occupation and the deliberate erosion of Palestinian civil society and institutions by Israel; but there are still serious Palestinian partners for peace, including some whom many of us have known…. On the grassroots level, in the villages, most Palestinians want what most Israelis want—a livable life, without war. They also rightly want, and some day will certainly achieve, equality and an end to the current regime of discrimination, oppression, and constant threat. As my shepherd friend Jamal likes to say, “We were born to live in peace with one another. We think that hell lies somewhere beneath the earth, and heaven lies above us. But in fact people create their own hell on earth, when paradise, right here, could be ours.”

Unquote.

The author is David Shulman, Professor Emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was awarded the Israel Prize for Religious Studies in 2016. He is a longtime activist in Ta’ayush, the Arab-Jewish Partnership, in the occupied Palestinian territories.