RECKONINGS: What we talk about when we talk about peace processes

PLUS: Banksy in Palestine

Jul 03, 2024

Horizon line

Al-Jazeera’s live tracker is where I look at the casualties for the first time since the war began. An Agence France-Presse photo of a dusty Gaza road dated a few weeks back takes up most of the screen. The Israeli military has ordered the people in the picture to leave Rafah, the caption says, on the border with Egypt. In the blurry foreground, a little boy holds up a colorful soccer ball as a lopsided Peugeot weighed down with mattresses comes up on the right. The boy is smiling, but forehead lines and the blurred dark hollows of his eyes edge his age uncannily toward that of the grey-haired man with the cane behind him. A guy in a black puffer jacket rides on top of a large bicycle cart loaded with supplies and looks back on the encampment-lined pathway full of other vehicles, primitive carts, and pedestrians. I wonder whether he’s avoiding looking at the people picking through hills of debris behind him. I follow his gaze into the vanishing point of the photo and wonder about everything he’s seen so far.

I’ve glimpsed so much information that it sometimes grows obscure. The images and clips and timelines and charts and stories and maps and international perspective that should help me get clear don’t. They download, settle, and rearrange in my mind daunting statistics and protests and suppression and religion and land and plundering and resistance in the face of perpetual peril and carnage. But they don’t make sense of things. They don’t let me see beyond the vanishing point in the picture where converging lines are supposed to form a type of conclusion.

POOR SHADOWZ by Grave Lordz (Prod. B.B.Z Darney), 2022

Tomb of the Patriarchs

Canaanites of the Bronze Age, 3500 to 1200 B.C.E. We know that Palestinians and Israelites both came from the land of Canaan. And in the ancient Palestinian city of Hebron, once a Canaanite royal city, about 30 miles east of Gaza at the Tomb of the Patriarchs, some believe biblical couples like Abraham and Sarah and even Adam and Eve are buried. Muslims and Jews both venerate their common ancestor Abraham there. I close my eyes and imagine hearing the hushed murmurings at the Tomb of the Patriarchs, a million quiet conversations with Abraham where peace is a perennial topic. But bloodlines and religious commonalities have receded into a background frequency. Bulletproof glass divides the Tomb of the Patriarchs.

This is about land. A land that until about a century ago saw Muslims, Christians, and Jews coexisting. Around that time, there were two national identities emerging: the Palestinians individuating from their Arab ethnicity and the Zionists from European Jews. During World War I, when the British forced out the Ottoman Turkish who’d ruled Palestine for four centuries, the tide turned. The British and French had already made a secret pact to divide up the Middle East. The Brits promised the Zionists they could make a homeland in Palestine, where the Romans had ousted the Jews centuries before. And they promised the Arabs a kingdom of their own. I was haunted reading that “A land without a people for a people without a land” is a slogan Zionists used1 as they streamed steadily from Europe into Palestine—a blatant refusal to recognize the Palestinians, or an indication of the intent to expel them.

Stick-up kids

A bright yellow, orange, and blue CIA map of the proposal2 makes me sick for the Palestinians. It’s 1948 and the United Nations aims to split up British Palestine. The Mediterranean coastline, the Jordan River, Jerusalem and Bethlehem, the shoreline of the Dead Sea—it’s all carved up. A junior high textbook illustration intends to put a period on several developments: the British trying to slow Jewish immigration into Palestine, the redoubling of that immigration as Jews fled the Holocaust to their promised land, sectarian violence over the land, and the Jewish militia’s double-hand punch to imperialism and the Arabs. Israel declares itself a nation, the cheery orange sections on the map granting them 56 percent of Palestine. It’s the dawn of the Cold War and within 11 minutes the U.S. issues preliminary recognition. Three days later, the Soviet Union is the first country to declare Israel a nation with legitimate rights.

Palestinians and their Arab neighbors fight back immediately. But Zionist soldiers with modern weapons and European training massacre around 15,000 Palestinians and forcefully expel over 700,0003, including a little girl named Leila Khaled whose family fled days after her fourth birthday. The Zionists’ heavy-handed orange marker redrafts the map to claim 80 percent of the land, with Palestine’s West Bank going under Jordan’s control and Gaza under Egypt’s. A land without a people and a people without a land.

STICK UP KID by Natural Resource (NJ), 199X (demo)

In my quest to comprehend the incomprehensible, cause and consequence is a beacon. But genocide demands deeper signaling, a reversal of processing: result then reason.

Revolution airport

September 1970, the Jordanian desert, three passenger planes are laid out like children’s toys. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) has designated an abandoned airstrip as Revolution Airport and skyjacked four European flights. Palestinian militants, PFLP sympathizers, hijack a fifth plane. Three of the five planes have made it to Revolution Airport. The PFLP express that they’d been shocked at the outcome of the Six-Day War, three years earlier. They do not want to hurt civilian hostages but want to exchange them for political prisoners held in Israel and Europe, now including Leila Khaled, a PFLP hijacker who’d been captured. The Leila Khaled, now twenty-six, whose family had been forcibly displaced to Lebanon in 1948. The PFLP is anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist. This is a fight against Israeli occupation. A dramatic, violent act would paint for the world a compelling picture of the theft and oppression taking place in their own land.

1000 WHISPERS by illogic (Prod. Blueprint), 2004

June 1967, the Six-Day War between Israel and surrounding Arab states had seen Israel seize part of Syria, the West Bank, Gaza, and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula just below. Israel occupied territories the Palestinians had been promised. The Palestinians had become a colonized minority in their own land. People whose livelihoods are deeply bound to the natural resources no longer had control of their own drinking water.4 They had to live under Israeli rule, uproot their families and emigrate, or fight back.

The PFLP had formed in December of that year as a faction of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). They’re secular and rooted in Marxist ideology. Cold War politics would factor into U.S. involvement in the skyjacking negotiation process—Nixon would bomb PFLP headquarters near Revolution Airport before allowing the balance of power to tip toward the Soviet Union. His secretary of defense claimed weather wouldn’t permit the attack—an excuse, he would later admit, to avert catastrophe.5 All of the hostages walked away unharmed. The planes, empty on the tarmac, were blown up by the PFLP.

After Israel’s 1967 victory, the PLO had fought for all of the pre-1948 territory—no Israeli state. They eventually yield, saying they will accept the divided land—anything to be self-governing—but the changes don’t come. And Israeli civilians by then had begun settling illegally in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. As the PLO, PFLP, Fatah, the Palestinian Authority, and Hamas slowly take shape in my mind, it’s clear how complex Palestine’s internal politics are, and how little I know. I’m curious why their collective voices are drowned out in all the news. I hear the loud voices of the U.S. and Israel, of colonists, annexers, oppressors. I see a little bit past the vanishing point—I understand why it could take skyjackings to make the world see.

Open-air prison

My mind goes back to today’s Gaza. Open-air prison, I hear over and over in the media. A satellite map makes the abstract real, showing the refugee camps all up and down the strip and two remaining border crossings on either end that only a limited number of people can cross. A double barrier with observation towers every two kilometers is equipped with remote-control machine guns instead of real Israeli soldiers. Can it even be called open-air given that Palestinians don’t control their own airspace?

I strive for clear perspective while guarding the gates of my eyes and ears, and images in a story of refugees sheltering among cages of starving animals in a Gaza zoo are too much. The most well-situated zoos give me knots in my stomach. Open-air prisons. I later hear a public radio story about an international group called Four Paws and listen carefully as an Egyptian veterinarian describes rescuing animals from war zones.6 Three baboons have escaped from one of the Gaza zoos, he says. I celebrate their freedom and feel dread at the same time. Dr. Amir Khalil has been to Gaza before, and each visit requires diligent intelligence gathering and coordination. Routes must be planned so as not to raise hopes of local people who could mistake them as food aid workers. He describes the painstaking measures to reach, care for, and transport the animals to safety. He says the team is risking their lives because animals have their function, as humans do, and their innocent lives shouldn’t be hidden in the shadows of the crisis—that a humanitarian crisis involves more than humans. Fighting for humans and leaving animals to die is not humanity, he says.

Thinking of the Gaza zoo animals jolts me into the reality of the disconnect between nature and the human will that comes with war. But Khalil’s story turns that on its head. He’s seen fighters on both sides lower their weapons to let the animal transports through.

Sadat’s eternal Egypt

It’s June 1980, and Walter Cronkite is interviewing Anwar Sadat along a classic tourist route in Egypt.7 As the president relays how his grandmother taught him the only thing eternal is land, his connection to it is clear—his sense of peace seems clear, and I see why many loved him. The film says ancient Egyptians thought human consciousness lived in the heart rather than the brain, and Sadat seems to embody that with a compelling mix of humility and assuredness.

In the interview, Sadat showed a tomb he’d constructed for himself. His grandmother had told him a man must build his own home and his own tomb, this way he has independence no matter what happens. But Sadat wished to be buried on Mt. Sinai, in a simple tomb. A 1979 article8 says his sights were fixed on Mt. Sinai and on plans to construct a shrine to peace there, where followers of the three monotheistic religions could pray, unified. No bulletproof glass.

Sadat was assassinated in 1981 by Egyptian religious extremists.

In a video about the 1978 Camp David Accords9 the U.S. brokered with Israeli Prime Minister Begin and President Sadat, leading to Israel relinquishing the Sinai Peninsula and making peace with other Arab nations, Jimmy Carter’s characterization of Sadat confirms my impressions. A man who despite huge difficulties with the negotiations reasoned with the heart of his ancestors. My thoughts drift down an unrealistic trail of equanimity in the region, if only he were alive today. But I have to rein in my affection for Sadat—I know how these things go. The accords came with large aid packages to both countries. Financial ties can cause havoc—I’ve seen it destroy people close to me. But worse, Palestine hadn’t been invited to the negotiating table. The Camp David Accords and peace treaty that followed didn’t accomplish Israel’s withdrawal from the West Bank or give Palestinians the autonomy laid out in the deal. The treaty had tipped the balance of power ever further toward Israel. Sadat’s assassination is believed to be over agreeing to the treaty.

As I learned about this leader and felt the loss, a sense of irony didn’t escape me. How many people with visions of unity like Sadat had have gone down the wrong path or been killed by catering to the systems of the West?

The Oslo Effect

September 1993, another American-brokered peace deal: the Oslo Accords, this time with the PLO’s Yasser Arafat and Israel’s Yitzhak Rabin. It aimed to curb violent protests over Israeli illegal settlements and promote the two-state solution. It came with the usual fanfare—there would be another Nobel Peace Prize like Sadat and Begin had been awarded for the Camp David deal.

February 1994, dawn, in the middle of the holy month of Ramadan. Something seems off to Muslim worshipers entering the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, at the Tomb of the Patriarchs—the Israeli military is separating the women from the men as they enter. Soon, a Brooklyn-born ultra-Zionist—a doctor in the Israeli Army—enters with an IMI Galil assault rifle and opens fire, slaying 29 worshipers knelt on the floor bowing in prayer.

November 1995, Israeli Prime Minister Rabin, a military man whose life some say symbolizes the trajectory of Israel itself, is shot in the lung by a Jewish religious extremist with a Beretta semi-automatic pistol as Rabin presided over a large peace rally in Tel Aviv. But Israel’s far right wasn’t alone in their rage over Western peace deals.

February 1996, Bus 18, a commuter line in Jerusalem, was hit twice within a week by suicide bombers from an organization called Hamas that had formed in the decade after the Camp David Accords and became the voice of a constituency of Palestinian resistance after Oslo failed.

Another U.S.-brokered deal had been signed in political and civilian blood. More alarm bells rang out for U.S. diplomacy reform.

THE BIG PAYBACK by The Psycho Realm, 1997 Sony Music Entertainment Inc.

But Hamas, through a doctrine of holy struggle and martyrdom, would fight Israel until the end. Their lamb of sacrifice in the name of Abraham, some say: the people of Gaza.

Soundtracks for disasters

September 2001, I awoke to the fact I’d been living in a protective bubble. Though Bin Laden was among the chorus of extremists condemning the U.S.’s unconditional support of Israel, I feel conflicted trying to use the results-then-reason approach to understanding 9/11.
I didn’t have hip hop in September 2001, and I couldn’t stand watching the TV footage. Sitting on my bedroom floor I made cassettes of the breaking news from the radio. I grasped onto Mozart’s Laudate Dominum10 from one of the stories. The CD I’d bought sits unopened in a box, as if its cellophane wrapping could seal in everyone’s sorrow from back then. My emotions listening to a few renditions now are evidence I still don’t understand the occupation and genocide of the Palestinians.
Aware or not, I’ve always relied on music to guide me, besides everyday inspiration. Each track in this essay brought insights into the unknowable, worked as an emotional channel, and offset the countless disturbing sounds and images I allowed myself to take in.
I watched a clip of a bereaved Palestinian man in the back seat of a car calling out with all his might to Allah, his friend echoing him between sobbing embraces. It sounded like the most sad song. Witnessing all these private moments can feel intrusive—grief-stricken loved ones in a ghostly coat of explosive dust pleading over dead bodies splayed out in the streets, quiet prayer services. I battle with feelings of inadequacy in those places—filling the birdbath or doing some other mundane chore, or late at night in bed—knowing that bearing witness isn’t enough. 9/11 had brought me face to face with my responsibility to educate myself—memorizing words from the Dead Sea Scrolls didn’t equate to understanding what the Dead Sea means to the people there. Technology has changed everything since 2001, and I vow to be as deliberate as back then, more reliant on the music—and ever more questioning.

Jerusalem stories

Jerusalem is at the heart of much of the Israel-Palestine conflict, claimed by both as their capital. It had been declared a neutral, international zone by the UN according to the yellow and orange map. But right after the 1967 Six-Day War, the Israelis razed 160 homes to begin their settlements and build a plaza at the Western Wall11, also called the Wailing Wall, where Jews pray and leave written notes in the wall’s crevices.

I suddenly remembered that I’d given a typed letter with a list of 116 things I love about my dad and some family photos to a close friend who placed it into the Western Wall on February 24, 2019. According to Jewish law the notes are considered sacred texts and when removed twice a year are buried in the ancient necropolis, Mount of Olives. I resolve that in solidarity I’ll forgo visiting these sites I’m learning so much about until free access is returned to Palestinians. I wonder if I’ll ever rest my eyes on them.

Jerusalem’s Zion Square holds an even less peaceful story. An unassuming plaza that could be in any cosmopolitan city has seen things since 1948. Explosives planted under the seats of its cinema; a Palestinian teen beaten unconscious by a mob of Jewish kids; fifteen people killed by a booby-trapped refrigerator bomb.12 And a middle-aged conservative named Benjamin Netanyahu leveraging into a political movement the rage of the Israeli right protesting the Oslo peace process that threatened to disrupt their growing settlements.13

Dollars, no sense

What were all the peace processes supposed to accomplish if they created unending cycles of hate? The Oslo accords didn’t ban the current settlements or entirely forbid new ones. So much doesn’t add up. Why is the U.S. underwriting all this? Frustration and emotional stress built up, and a rare, massive headache even threatened to stop the writing process a couple days.

HOLLOW POINTZ by Adlife (Prod. Stu Bangas), 2024 A1 Records

I look over two charts with red and gold bars and spikes showing how much cash and military aid the U.S. has given Israel over time.14 Since 1946, just before the UN partition plan to split up Palestine, the U.S. has given Israel $310 billion. Egypt comes in second, receiving a little over half that amount in the same period. Red spikes form a U shape on the other chart, showing how military aid to Israel skyrocketed both before and the year after the 1978 peace deal—$12.4 and $14 billion, respectively—then it hovers way lower until this year, where it jumps again to a projected $12.5 billion. Palestine wasn’t among the ten countries on the chart. A chart showing U.S. Palestinian refugee funding through the UN from 1950 to 202015 shows $6.25 billion in total aid, with $0 in aid for the years 2019 and 2020, under Donald Trump.

But an unlikely person was facilitating aid to Palestine: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Bibi’s containment plan

Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, who has said he wants to be remembered as Israel’s protector, had already washed his hands of the peace process when he became prime minister. In the prior decade he’d been Israel’s UN ambassador—he knew peace processes well. And the terms of the U.S.’s special relationship with Israel had been in place a long time. Netanyahu’s current ambassador only a few weeks ago ran a UN charter document through a tiny shredder in front of the UN assembly when they proposed letting Palestine become a member.16

To anyone looking objectively, Netanyahu’s disinterest in peace and hatred of Palestinians is clear. Israel’s threat to Palestine’s existence is clear. I’ve now seen the dismantling of its society—schools, businesses, homes: gone. Bolstered by U.S. support, the imbalance of power dictates that violent groups like Hamas are no existential threat to Israel.

Isolate and crush is a phrase that Khaled Elgindy, author of Blind Spot: America and The Palestinians from Balfour to Trump (2019, Brookings Institution Press), used to describe Israel’s strategy. I grew more angry as the objective became clear: two weak governments—Hamas in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank—kept just barely competent. In them, Netanyahu says he would have no one to negotiate peace with.

Donald Trump and Joe Biden both made attempts to normalize Middle East relations via Israel. Trump, having earlier named Jerusalem the undivided capital of Israel, hosted the ceremonious Abraham Accords, where the United Arab Emirates bargained for Israel to forgo annexing some regions of the West Bank in exchange for investment opportunities. And fifteen days before the October 7th attacks, Netanyahu held up a map to the UN General Assembly showing a “new Middle East”, illustrating Biden’s plan to broker agreements between Israel and Saudi Arabia, in a rapidly changing landscape. Palestine wasn’t pictured on the map, just Israel and its neighbors.

Palestine was excluded from both deals—more signals that people just didn’t care. When a scholar pointed out that Palestine didn’t advocate for itself by speaking up to the U.A.E.17, supporter of a free Palestine, I was skeptical, knowing of the mechanisms suppressing Palestine’s leadership, a tire iron swiftly taken to anything resembling a cohesive voice.

I experienced a growing sense of dread as strategic acts toward cleansing the land of Palestinians emerged from the history and current reliable news sources. A land without a people became a haunting refrain.

I was stunned listening to a Haaretz interview18 of former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert from February as he laid out evidence that Netanyahu appears to be aiming for “Armageddon, that will make it possible to expel many of the Palestinians in the West Bank”. And that he’d been “arrogant” in his assessment of Israel’s security ahead of October 7th.

Other facts point beyond arrogance. The New York Times had reported last December that the government of Qatar had been sending suitcases containing millions of dollars, monthly, into the Gaza Strip and that some of the money went to Hamas.19 The article asserts that the Prime Minister not only knew about the payments but encouraged them, reasoning that the now billions in cash delivered in suitcases would “keep Hamas focused on governing, not fighting”.

But why, if Netanyahu was truly focused on security, haven’t the settlements been stopped in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Not only do settlements violate international law, but the fifty-year occupation provokes and pushes Palestinian citizens to the brink. Two long Palestinian uprisings—the intifadas of the late 80s and early 2000s—painted for the world an increasingly violent and hopeless picture of perpetual militance on both sides. A picture of cemented identities.

The scale of my naivete became clear uncovering a recent article where the UN Human Rights High Commissioner reveals that in the year leading up to October 7th, Israelis installed a record 24,300 new housing units in the occupied West Bank. They’d deliberately escalated the land grab. Some Israeli settlers are now dressing in military clothing, carrying military weapons, he says—harassing, attacking, even shooting at point-blank range.20. Among the de facto militants are extremists like the Hilltop Youth, whose doctrine states that Palestinians are “raping the Holy Land and should be expelled”21.

WE’RE SOLDIERS by Phat-Trac feat. Backdraft Militia (Prod. Phat-Trac), 2004

Mowing the grass

The haunting feeling crept up again, reading in the same Times article that Netanyahu confirmed to a credible Israeli journalist the intent to prop up Hamas in Gaza “as a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank” because a divided government would exempt him from negotiating a Palestinian state.

Israel had been so concerned about hostility when Hamas won control of Gaza in 2007 that they’d blockaded the Gaza strip, sealing them into the open-air prison. The wars went on. And yet the suitcases of cash.

Netanyahu’s defense minister had warned him that Hamas was growing its military force and suggested a preemptive strike. The Haaretz journalist Amos Harel stated that Hamas was using the Qatari money to dig tunnels under the blockade, buy rockets, and make weapons—making itself into a regional power, beyond Gaza.22

I was unsettled reading that the defense minister’s memo to Netanyahu had said this strike would be assurance of a “final showdown” with Hamas. This corroborates Olmert’s assertion, and my unclear suspicions, that should “Armageddon” take place, Israel could justify expelling Palestinians from the West Bank—in addition to Gaza.

Bibi Netanyahu didn’t want a preemptive strike. He had his containment strategy: allowing the suitcases of cash and executing what he called “mowing the grass”. Mowing the grass meant initiating regular rounds of violence with Gaza, allowing things to be kept at the status quo.23

HEAT EM UP by Dell-P (Prod. DJ Flash), 2024 WordSmith Entertainment

Occupied Vegas

Looking at Palestine from within a borderless internet space, images of street-level devastation meld with graphics like a one-minute Turkish video showing Gazans’ migration since October 7th. I’d seen other images comparing the 25-mile-long strip and its cities to U.S. cities: Gaza’s the same size as Las Vegas but with three times the population, one post says. I squeeze my eyes shut at the thought of 37,000 people in Vegas killed in seven months, others running for their lives, groping through blacked-out casino labyrinths. Some sheltered in high-rises, toilet- or bed-bound because of the bad water. A skirmish took place over dried-out prime rib from an abandoned buffet. Filthy, shelled jetliners lay grounded on dusty tarmacs. Escaped white tigers ambushed occupying soldiers.

Nowhere Safe for Palestinians, 2024 Turkish Radio and Television Corporation

LONG DAYZ by Paul Ray (Prod. 33 1/3), 2008 PR Records

My quest to see past the vanishing point has me crossing borders of states, cities, and villages in my sleep but always brings me back to individuals.

Young martyrs

I watched stunned as British documentarian James Miller, 34, exposed the everyday lives of three kids in Gaza.24 Faceless Israeli tanks playing a perilous game of duel with rock-throwing 12-year-old boys, their faces like angels. The boys making hand grenades after school, taking care to score them for maximum destruction. The boys playing Arab and Israeli, building a fire barricade in the rubbled streets and shooting each other with crude wooden M16s. The boys hanging out in a bunker with ski-masked rebel fighters, learning to hold rocket launchers. The boys’ assuredness of the impossibility of peace with Israelis and determination to become martyrs, their extreme humility a startling converse of Sadat’s ancient Egyptian consciousness. A soft-voiced discussion of Israeli weaponry between two young girls in a massive gutted graveyard, a fighter plane bolting across the sky, bisecting their thoughts. The girls standing prepared with a white flag late into the night with their family, the growling drone of Israeli bulldozers increasing on approach, destroying homes in search of Hamas militants—mowing the grass. I saw no reprieve. This was their life. This was 2004, a growing concentric circle in the slow wake of the peace processes.

I got very still and quiet as I saw James Miller’s own white flag fall into the dark night before the camera. An Israeli sniper in an armored personnel carrier outside the girls’ home fired a warning shot, then killed him with a single bullet to the neck.

TOASTERS by Recognize Ali (Prod. Nickel Plated), 2024 Greenfield Music, Vinyl Perpetual Stew Records

Converging lines

Failed peace processes, skyjackings, hush money gone wrong, mowing the grass, assassinations, sacred site massacres, suicide bombings, grenade- and white-flag armed children, murdered journalists, everyday people pushed to the brink of insanity: I’d seen past the vanishing point, but these grim consequences couldn’t be the end. Could this conflict go on for centuries like others in history? What was the upper limit of the killing for the Israeli military right now? What could a viable solution to the conflict look like?

Listening to Khaled Elgindy’s perspective across a few interviews252627, the Middle East Institute senior fellow opened my eyes to striking things that the U.S. and other players seemed to be missing about diplomacy and foreign policy.

The U.S.’s bear-hug diplomacy toward Israel meant a public show of solidarity, doling out unconditional aid so that Israel can feel secure, but in private, cautioning them about their strategies. Yet selectively—even disregarding international law, like with Israeli settlements or the blocking of critical aid to refugees. I was familiar with the bear-hug approach—not only does it not work, but like financial ties, it’s destructive.

The other dysfunctional aspect of U.S. diplomacy, per Elgindy: a focus on reformation of “the bad guy”. Peace processes weren’t working hard at ending the occupation—they instead set their sights on reforming Palestine’s institutions, economics, and security. All in support of Israel’s security.

The bear-hug strategy Elgindy talks about is the US lavishing so much love on Israel that they would feel secure enough to take so-called risks for peace. $310 billion over decades of a special relationship has not achieved that to any meaningful degree. In fact, it has cost tens of thousands of lives. It dawned on me that Bibi, as the US’s ill-guided protege, had enacted a type of bear-hug diplomacy by allowing the suitcases of Qatari cash into Gaza. And just like US efforts to both embrace and restrain Israel, it had not worked with Hamas. Hamas played into Bibi’s hands, and it has backfired to an extreme criminal degree.

Many Israelis are calling for a new election. And in the U.S., Jewish-Americans recently spoke out for peace and against the powerful AIPAC pro-Israel lobby, saying they’ll vote in this election cycle for candidates the AIPAC is working to undermine.28

Other players rest unseen, watching, strategizing based on very inflammatory foreign policy decisions the U.S. is making.

THE GRAY MAN by Body Bag Ben, Vega7 The Ronin, 2024 Body Bag Productions / Fat Beats

The bad guy

Prime Minister Olmert had pointed out that even if Israeli forces killed every last Hamas member, there are still five million Palestinians whose rage will shape politics for a long time to come. A clue to Israel’s own political climate came from hearing that Olmert himself had been jailed on corruption charges during a term as Jerusalem’s mayor but has always maintained innocence. An internet search of Israeli prime ministers shows his portrait sandwiched with two others between Netanyahu’s first two terms. Between washing floors in the jail, he wrote a book29, Searching for Peace: A Memoir of Israel (2022, Brookings Institution Press). He’d tried his hand at the peace process, but it fell through, and if I hadn’t already seen it, he makes it clear in the interview that Israel-Palestine relations changed irrevocably on October 7th.

So astute is Elgindy’s point that the U.S. was misguided in thinking the split in Palestinian leadership was an asset—that they’d have someone to negotiate with in the West Bank. But this wouldn’t allow a unified voice of the Palestinian people at the negotiating table. Elgindy is saying that the “invisible members of the negotiations” are Palestine’s internal politics, but that Palestine hasn’t been allowed a voice of opposition. The people who elected Hamas—the people in the open-air prison—were all but considered one with the terrorists. Yitzhak Rabin at the Camp David Accords could barely bring himself to shake hands with PLO leader Yasser Arafat—he’d considered him a terrorist all along.

THE BAD GUY by Tony Montana, SCARFACE (dir. Brian De Palma), 1983 Universal Pictures

Anwar Sadat had worked with the opposition movements in his own country, releasing extremists imprisoned under his predecessor, even opening the political process some.

My heart leaps hearing Prime Minister Olmert propose what seems like a sound solution: a ceasefire, obviously, then having Egypt facilitate negotiations. He talks of a new axis of moderate Arab states, including Palestine. I could feel the tension leaving my body imagining Palestine within an axis of moderate Arab states—and thinking about a moderate axis of anything. As a reserved person, a few purposeful outspoken voices in my life are imperative; it’s one reason I’m so taken with hip hop. In my immediate personal and business environments, more and more, I’m drawn to equanimity and a balance of power.

I hope for all of this and more for Palestine, but it’s clear a ceasefire right now seems a great risk for Bibi, despite the U.S.’s decades of support. And pulling back settlements, to Bibi, far riskier.

No, I’ve sensed that there can be no pauses for Bibi. Pausing, for Bibi, means people can stop and reassess. Pausing, for Bibi, means Hamas could regroup. Pausing could mean facing criminal charges and a legacy cut short. Elgindy had a similar take.

TURN THAT DOWN by Tru Trilla, Guilty Simpson, Skyzoo (Prod. Frost Gamble), 2024 New Dawn Records

No more words

As of this writing, 38,430 Palestinians and 1,139 Israelis have been killed since October 7th. The count includes 15,000 kids killed in Gaza and another 137 in the West Bank.30 The kids from the Gaza documentary would be in their thirties now. As I wondered what happened to them, remembering the present-day protests and suppression shaping a new generation of journalists and lawmakers provided perspective. There are people paying attention, here and around the world, on or off their phones. People curious, like the documentarian, willing to bear witness and bring messages to the rest of the world. No skyjacking, no bulletproof glass.

Words of conclusion aren’t coming easy. There’s still so much to learn, and things are changing rapidly. I accept that there’s no going back to October 6th. Some say a two-state solution could still work, and I can’t disagree. As for peace processes—well, processes by definition go on and on. My heart senses the inevitability of more revolution, more wakeup calls. For Palestinians to have autonomy, security, and land unbroken by settlements, I envision specific resolutions drawn up with the voice of Palestine’s majority—as determined by Palestine—at the drafting table. The idea of having Egypt lead some future negotiations seems like a glimmer of hope; the U.S. isn’t alone in its interest in Middle East peace. The U.S. could continue unconditional support of Israel’s occupy-isolate-and-crush doctrine, reckonings forever lurking in the shadows. Or they could lift pressure from the scale, step back, and cooperate internationally in finding steps toward coexistence. Restoration for Palestinians might begin with a pause, and the beginning of an end will require justice.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this essay do not necessarily reflect views of the featured artists.

Peace to Palestine, Lebanon, and Israel. Peace on Earth.

Thank you so much to all the artists. Your work brought deeper understandings of this very complicated situation and guarded my sanity.

Banksy photos: https://banksy.co.uk/

This month’s UNDERSCORE: MC Abdul of Palestine says it all.

SHOUTING AT THE WALL by MC Abdul, 2021 MC Abdul / EMPIRE

Nassar, Jamal. “The Camp David Accords and the Fundamental Rights of the Palestinian People.” UN.org, United Nations, 15 Mar. 1982, www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-204960/.

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