This is Palestine, in Your Inbox, trying to make sense of the madness. An earlier version of this piece was published by Evergreen Review on November 3rd, 2023.

Why the Israeli Military has a 100% failure rate “eradicating” Palestinian violence

On October 28, 2023, Israel announced its ground forces had invaded Gaza with the goal of “eliminating Hamas.”

Two weeks later, it is too early to know who has the upper hand in the fighting. But if the Israeli military plans to “eliminate” Hamas, as it claims, military analysts agree it has to fight in the tunnels. And while Israeli forces have a clear military advantage above ground, experts seem divided on who has the military advantage below ground (here & here).

Meanwhile, support for war in Israel had already diminished considerably before Israeli troops had even set foot in Gaza. While 65% of Israelis supported a major ground offensive as of Oct 19th, that percentage dropped to 49% a week later. Today, the percentage is likely even lower.

And although we do not yet know if the Israeli public has the stomach for a prolonged, deadly war underground in Gaza, we do know about Israel’s long history of failed attempts at eradicating Palestinian violence.

In 1956, Israel also declared its intention to “eradicate” Palestinian militancy in the Gaza Strip. Recall that from 1949 to 1951, Palestinians entered Israel in the thousands, the overwhelming majority unarmed, returning home after the war, as refugees so often do. To Israel, the Palestinians were not refugees, they were “infiltrators,” and more than a thousand defenseless Palestinians were slaughtered by the Israeli military when they attempted to return home in the first two years after the guns fell silent in 1948.

Unsurprisingly, violence bred violence. Palestinian fighters picked up arms in response and carried out dozens of attacks in the coming years, including committing a number of atrocities. In April 1956, for instance, Palestinian militants infiltrated Israel from Gaza and attacked the Shafrir synagogue, killing six Israeli children.

Expectedly, the Israeli military’s response was brutal and disproportionate. From 1949 to 1956, Israeli forces killed somewhere between 2,700 and 5,000 Palestinians. The vast majority of the victims were unarmed, but it wasn’t enough to stop the cross-border raids.

By 1956, the Israeli military set itself the goal of “eradicating” Palestinian militant resistance from Gaza. It invaded Gaza and occupied the Strip for six months, from October 1956 to March 1957. Israeli forces killed thousands of Palestinian fighters and executed hundreds.

On November 3rd, 1956, Israeli forces entered Khan Yunis. Here is one account of the incident:

There were two massacres of civilians who had been seized in this way, one in the central square of Khan Yunis, with the execution by machine gun of victims lined up along the wall of the old Ottoman caravanserai, and the other in the refugee camp, where the victims were also shot. The corpses were left for hours, sometimes overnight, before the families were permit- ted to recover the bodies. UNRWA later assembled a list it regarded as ‘credible’ of the names of 275 people who were executed on 3 November 1956, including 140 refugees. Palestinian sources count 415 killed and fifty-seven disappeared.

While the Israeli military did in fact stop the raids out of Gaza, it simply pushed Palestinian militancy to the West Bank, where fighters carried out some seventeen attacks in the next three years.

The Khan Yunis slaughter left a generation of kids traumatized. One of the 8-year old boys who survived the massacre was Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi. A few decades later, he co-founded Hamas.

But long before the rise of Hamas emerged a more imminent challenge. After a cease-fire was reached in Gaza, Egypt worked with a UN force to root out the Palestinian militants, including two young commandos named Yasser Arafat and Abu Jihad. In 1959, they established an organization called Fatah, an Arabic acronym for Palestinian National Liberation Movement. That organization became Israel’s chief adversary for the next four decades.

Israel may have killed most of the fedayeen in Gaza in 1956, but it failed to kill the idea that Palestinians have a right to live in Palestine. And if they were denied that right, they would seek it through force. The idea that refugees have a right to return to their homes after a war, so it seems, had more vitality than Israel realized.

And, over the course of the next two decades, Fatah and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) carried out hundreds of attacks against Israeli targets in their attempt to claim that right by force.

By 1982, Israel had had enough with the PLO, much as they had had enough with the fedayeen, and decided to invade Lebanon, where the PLO was based. Israel’s goal was to “destroy the PLO infrastructure in Lebanon, especially in all the territory south of Beirut. Success of such action could deal a mortal blow to the PLO.” In short, as in Gaza in the 1950s and Gaza today, Israel sought to eradicate Palestinian violent resistance.

Israel managed to drive the PLO out of Lebanon. It also occupied the country’s south for two decades to ensure they didn’t come back. But, expectedly, Israel didn’t eradicate violent resistance. Instead, its invasion and occupation of Lebanon led to the establishment of a new movement, carrying a new flag, backed by a new regional power. Instead of eradicating militant resistance, Israel exacerbated it.

Today, that movement, Hezbollah, is Israel’s most formidable military adversary. It has already joined the current escalation in violence, carrying out seven cross-border attacks on Israeli military targets on October 27 and firing a number of missiles into Israeli territory on October 28. On November 5, Hezbollah launched rockets deeper into Israeli territory than at any point since the 2006 war.

By 1987, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza had become increasingly brutal: Israel had killed on average thirty-two Palestinians every year during the prior two decades, and it had expelled thousands more Palestinians from their homes. Then, in December 1987, an Israeli truck driver killed four Palestinians in Gaza, and Palestinian nonviolent protests broke out as a result. Expectedly, Israel resorted to more violence to quell the protests, killing 142 Palestinians in Gaza in the first year of the uprising while suffering zero casualties.

And, also expectedly, Israel’s violent suppression of Palestinian protests led to even more violence. In response, Hamas transitioned from a charity organization to a militant group, and began carrying out attacks against Israeli civilians.

Alas, every few decades, Israelis believe they can eradicate Palestinian resistance with overwhelming force, and every few decades, Israelis wake up only to discover that the violence has gotten worse.

To eradicate Palestinian violence, Israel must address the root causes of it. Palestinians believe they did not lose their right to live in Palestine just because they were violently ethnically-cleansed from it in 1948. Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and besieged Gaza believe similarly that they have never lost their right to live in the West Bank and Gaza free from Israeli violence, apartheid, occupation, and siege. If history has shown us anything, it’s that Israel will have to address those issues if it wants to prevent the next October 7th.