Why a close watcher of the Gaza crisis dares to see a sliver of hope

Episode transcript

Ned Temko:  I think the challenge inside the Middle East but [that] oddly enough seems even more difficult sometimes outside, is just to remember the basic humanity of both sides. To be able to keep two images in your mind at the same time, not as any sort of political equivalent, but just as a human equivalent. 

Clay Collins: That’s The Monitor’s Ned Temko, a veteran foreign correspondent, analyst of global affairs, and writer of the Monitor’s “Patterns” column. 

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Collins: The situation on the ground in Israel and Gaza is, of course, fluid. For the latest, you’ll want to head over to CSMonitor.com. 

But first, stick around. Ned’s three most recent Monitor stories looked at the prospect of regional spillover of the conflict, at the role of morality in warfare, and at the long term hopes for peace. He joined us earlier this week to talk about those issues and more. 

This is “Why We Wrote This.” I’m Clay Collins. Welcome back, Ned.

Temko:  Good to be here, Clay.

Collins: When you last came on this show, August 2022, it was our pilot season. Ukraine was front and center. And you and I went deep on your approach to finding patterns in seemingly disparate global events. You talked about another kind of connection making, “the communality,” as you put it, “that marks out people’s simple human response.”

So now we have this brutal October 7th cross-border attack by Hamas on Israel, and the heavy, ongoing counterpunch by Israel in Gaza. While one human response has been horror over the noncombatants, especially children, caught in the middle, in many cases the human response has been to pick a side. You know, we saw, for example, these quick hardline perceptions and assumptions about that hospital blast. It’s sort of “pick your narrative.” That can be a dangerous oversimplification, can it?

Temko:  It can, and that’s a through line of this conflict over the decades, but particularly at times of hot battle. Words become weaponized. And one of the frustrations and challenges of writing about the Middle East conflict, particularly now, is that it’s a lot more complex and nuanced than either side would have us believe.

It’s particularly now, an especially painful conflict for both sides, and one that has  stripped back decades of conflicting narratives, I suppose, to their bare essentials. Both sides feel immensely vulnerable, immensely uncertain, and immensely angry, and that makes it even more complex.

Collins: There’s so much context in the framing here. I mean, comparisons were immediately drawn to 1973 and the Yom Kippur War because of the timing: almost exactly 50 years earlier. That was a coalition of Arab states attacking Israel. This current, and also looming, show of force by Israel against Hamas, with civilian displacement as one possible outcome has some people citing naqba, the “catastrophe” of 1948, from the Palestinian viewpoint. And there’s talk now in the West Bank where it’s restive of, you know, a new intifadah simmering. 

This is a story of relentless cycles. It’s still, as you wrote, about fundamentally competing views. So what’s really different this time?

Temko:  I think everything’s different this time, but the main difference is in the original catalyst for this latest fifth round of fighting between Israel and Hamas in the last 15 years, and that is the attacks of October 7th. Because these are sides that have basically traded fire on Hamas’ part, rocket fire into Israeli towns and villages and cities, and periodic responses by the Israeli military, almost formulaic, which end up with the Egyptians typically negotiating a ceasefire, which holds for a couple of years.

There is nothing, in my 40 plus years of covering both sides, that has been so wantonly violent against civilians, intentionally, as the October 7th attacks. It helps explain the ferocity of the intended Israeli response. I think psychologically and emotionally, it’s deeply changed how Israelis feel about their own army, their government, about the Palestinians, certainly about Hamas. And on the Palestinian side, as you point out, it’s kind of revived this sense of displacement because something like a million Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to the south of the Gaza Strip in anticipation of a major Israeli ground thrust into the north of Gaza.

It’s a very volatile situation. And I think it has in a sense made the stakes of this latest round much higher. You have on the Israeli side at least a declared determination to eradicate Hamas’ military power, its political hold on the Gaza Strip, none of which is going to prove easy, some of which may prove simply impossible. And on the Palestinian side, you have a building up of decades of increasing hopelessness of finding a kind of stable political dispensation that will end Israeli dominance and occupation. The great irony in Gaza’s case is that Israel itself pulled out in 2006, pulled out its troops and its settlements. But economically Israel and Egypt both have essentially blockaded Gaza, and Hamas has basically insinuated itself into every area of social, cultural, economic decision making and power in Gaza. There seems very little horizon for civilians to look toward as a stable and more hopeful future.

Collins: What’s your sense of what Hamas’ expectation was, given that Israel was certain to hit back harder, because they have the capacity to hit back much harder? And what’s Israel’s long term calculus? What would it mean to “win” in Gaza?

Temko:  Hamas surely knew, although I imagine they didn’t expect to prance so easily over the border barrier and find it so lightly defended in the south of Israel, but Hamas’ clear intention and expectation would have been that Israel would strike back harder. Because politically, the harder Israel strikes back, the more central Hamas can make its narrative of being the only Palestinian organization that can really stand up and fight Israel. And the calculation of Hamas is, as long as Hamas survives it all, it’s a win. To put it as delicately as possible, Hamas’ primary concern isn’t the wellbeing of civilians in Gaza. It is a political calculation, and I think so far they think they’re the winner. The only way in which they lose is if Israel actually achieves its aims of eradicating Hamas as a power center in Gaza. 

That brings us to your second question: Does Israel want to do so? Certainly on the surface that is the aim. It’s got pretty much wall to wall political support among the people of Israel for hitting back very hard. There is a sense that what happened on October 7th was so unsettling, so traumatic, that Israel needs to respond with great force. The rub in that ointment, and there are many, I guess, is whether that’s possible, even if militarily they can degrade Hamas’ position significantly, which I imagine they can. Not only is there a huge political risk, either in bringing in other actors, specifically Hezbollah in Lebanon on the northern side of Israel, and the worst case scenario, Iran itself. There’s certainly the likelihood of considerable civilian casualties, which would undermine or could undermine international support and sympathy for Israel as this goes on. 

The real question is what happens the day after. And there’s a lot of consternation inside Israel itself over whether that’s been sufficiently thought out, or whether there is a credible answer. And that’s certainly a concern in Washington and the Biden administration, which is one reason they’ve been trying, and to an extraordinary degree succeeding, in kind of putting the brakes. Not saying no to Israel on a ground invasion. I don’t think the Americans think that’s necessarily possible or it’s their place. But I do think they’re pushing hard on the details and they’re trying to say: Look, after 9/11, we were enraged, rightly. And we felt a unified instinct, impulse, to hit out at those who had attacked us. But we discovered that it’s a lot more complicated than we anticipated. We ended up in two major wars. And yes, we did get al Qaeda, but it sired an even more deadly offshoot, ISIS. And so be careful before you go in.  

Collins: Ned, what would you counsel U.S. readers to keep in thought with regard to this conflict? 

Temko:  This is unique in my coverage of Israel over the years. There is a real trauma, real rage, over what happened. There’s a lack of head space among many Israelis for the kinds of political debates over the future of Israeli Palestinian relations, over how and when and how hard any Israeli military attack should be. 

I think the challenge inside the Middle East but, [that] oddly enough seems even more difficult sometimes outside, is just to remember the basic humanity of both sides. I think our challenge is to be able to keep two images in your mind at the same time, not as any sort of political equivalent, but just as a human equivalent. And that is the terrible civilian suffering on October 7th. So that image on the one hand, and equally the image of Palestinian civilians who are suffering either through lack of resources or under bombardment as a result of the Israeli response. Both of those on a human level are tragic.

Collins: This is, like all stories, a human story. The Monitor is an organization whose brand is credible hope. Is there any way to report or opine with anything approaching hopefulness, given how intractable this particular conflict has been and given how lasting peace just seems so perpetually elusive? 

Temko:  I will surprise you by saying that I am hopeful. I’ve had the good fortune not only to have covered this for a very, very long time, but to have covered both sides. I got to know both sides of this conflict on a human level. And if I can make the case for hope, unlikely though it seems now, I think it’s the following, that all the other options to this decades long conflict have been tried. Some resolution has sometimes been close, and I’ve covered that as well, but always ultimately failed. I think what’s different this time around is the immediacy, the visceral sense in which people on both sides have felt that this conflict is inescapably part of their lives, and not in a good way. That there is, for each of them, a dawning realization that their own interests in a stable, secure existence, in which they have a future, depends on some sort of resolution of this core dispute. And I don’t think it will come quickly. In a way, this, in the short term, makes it more difficult. But there’s also a realization that, at a very bare minimum, the 15 years’ sort of time out of serious diplomacy to try to find a resolution has to come to an end. And that realization is shared by not just the Israelis and the Palestinians, I believe, but by the Americans, by key American allies in the Arab world. I do think the political deck has been reshuffled on all sides of this region, and I think that’s the reason that there is space for difficult but credible hope. I’ve always believed that, to misquote Churchill about the Americans, the combating sides in the Middle East will ultimately do the right thing – after they’ve tried everything else.

Collins: Well, thank you, Ned, so much for being here and for working so hard to bring light to a story that generates so much heat.

Temko:  Thank you, Clay.

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Collins: Thanks for listening. You can find more, including our show notes with links to Ned’s work and to his earlier appearance on this show, which is really worthwhile, at CSMonitor.com/WhyWeWroteThis. This episode was hosted by me, Clay Collins, produced by Jingnan Peng and Mackenzie Farkus. Noel Flatt was our sound engineer and is the composer of our original music. Produced by The Christian Science Monitor. Copyright 2023.