How to Heal the Wound of Gaza

The world is bleeding. Life force is leaking from a thousand wounds, and maybe the most serious hemorrhage is that issuing forth from Gaza.

The wound of Gaza festers with hate, despair, and cruelty, leaching those poisons through the body of the world. Hate infects nearly every conversation about what is happening there; hate, and the dehumanization of the Other, whether that “other” is the Palestinians or the Jews or simply the people who hold a different opinion. The savagery one sees in online comments mirrors the savagery that Hamas dealt on October 7^th, the savagery against the Palestinians that preceded it, and the enormously greater savagery that Israel has unleashed since.

Last week Israel’s IDF rescued four hostages from Nuseirat in Gaza, sparking effusive celebration throughout Israel. At least 270 Gazans were killed in the rescue, nearly all civilians, a majority women and children. Celebration of this latest war crime is possible only if one does not value all human life equally; it is possible only if partisan prejudice is stronger than humanitarian ethics. Such is the festering spiritual wound that saps the global body politic of hope, life, and faith in humanity.

Concurrent with the Gaza bloodbath is another of comparable magnitude unfolding in Sudan, along with millions of other horrors on smaller scale, down to the household. Each mirrors the others. What makes Gaza special is that all the world’s eyes are on it. If there can be peace in the Holy Land, there can be peace everywhere else too. No one on earth, in any situation, could ever again say that peace is impossible.

Yet peace indeed seems impossible in Palestine, more distant and more hopeless than ever before.

After spending several months educating myself on the history of the conflict, I have come back to my initial instinct that peace does not depend on establishing a correct view of history. It lies outside the justifications that each side has. And so I would like to propose a practical peace plan that allows each side to keep the history they tell themselves. Each side gets to continue believing they are right. They get to keep that. Something else, though, will need to be surrendered.

To those who say this proposal is unrealistic, I answer that peace itself is unrealistic. It requires a break from the normal course of events, a disruption in the age-old drama of strike and counterstrike, crime, punishment, and revenge, in which the occupants of the roles of victim and oppressor may change, but never the roles themselves. What is “realistic” is that the story plays out as usual. There is an element of miracle when warring parties choose peace. Peace fundamentally requires choice, requires will, to alter the otherwise automatic cycle of bloodshed, hate, and dehumanization.

Nonetheless, however unrealistic this proposal may be, it is not impractical. Here are its core principles:

1. Amnesty in exchange for disarmament.

2. Massive global humanitarian and peacekeeping presence.

3. Dignity, hope, and equal rights for all who live in the Holy Land.

Missing from this list are punishment, vengeance, justice, and the righting of historical wrongs. The first two must be sacrificed. The others will emerge indirectly.

The idea is simple, though its execution might need to proceed in phases: a progression of trust-building steps under close international supervision. The basic points are as follows:

• Both sides agree to a complete, permanent ceasefire.

• Hamas releases all hostages and relinquishes its weapons.

• Israel grants amnesty to all Hamas fighters and frees all Palestinian prisoners.

• International institutions like the ICC and ICJ grant amnesty to all Israeli war criminals.

• Regional powers (Qatar, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc.) agree to stop arming Hamas and other militant organizations, a commitment enforced by international monitors.

• These nations also contribute to an international corps of peacekeepers who enter Gaza to dismantle the tunnels and ensure both sides abide by the truce.

• A massive humanitarian influx follows the peacekeepers — tens of thousands of aid workers to feed, cloth, and heal the survivors of the war and rebuild Gaza’s homes, schools, and infrastructure.

That is not all. Palestinian militancy draws on despair—the perception that there is no hope for dignity and equality through peaceful means. Therefore, any peace plan must include a path toward those ideals. Young men in particular turn toward violence when they see no viable future. Yet at this point a traditional two-state solution is impracticable. Israeli settlements have carved the West Bank into a collection of discontinuous Bantustans. Nor is a traditional one-state solution acceptable to most Israelis, as it would make Jews a minority in the new state, just under half the total population.

There are, however, creative solutions that transcend traditional conceptions of the nation-state. One of them is Two States, One Homeland, a confederate system in which all peoples, Israelis and Palestinians, Arabs and Jews, have full freedom of movement and equal political rights from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Borders will separate Israel and Palestine as they would in a two-state solution, but there would be no walls, no armed checkpoints… Jewish settlers in the West Bank could remain there as citizens of Israel but residents of Palestine and subject to its civil authority; vice-versa for Palestinians living in Israel. All would enjoy full legal rights. Jerusalem would be a unified city, the capital of both Israel and Palestine, a city of peace and pilgrimage under the joint stewardship of the religions that hold it holy.

This plan asks a lot of the people currently locked in conflict. It asks them to forgive the unforgivable. Each side believes they are in the right, and that the other has committed unforgivable crimes. In truth, both sides have. The point here is not that each side bears equal culpability for the current situation. The point is that whatever the objective historical merits of a given side’s case, each believes in its own rightness. Therefore each will have to render a sacrifice to the God of Peace. The sacrifice is of the other side finally having to admit that it was wrong. The sacrifice is of the monsters on the other side ever being punished. The sacrifice is of the righting of certain historical injustices. The path to peace requires the release of such goals.

That is why amnesty is a key element of this peace plan. Amnesty is the political equivalent of forgiveness, and forgiveness is the wellspring of peace. Why? Because forgiveness means to drop the wish, intention, and plan that the one who has wronged you come to harm. You may feel justified, but still you do not seek revenge. You do not seek to punish. Rarely does anyone cease hostilities because someone has convinced him that his cause is not justified. It is hard to convince someone they are wrong. It is much easier to appeal to the part of them that, right or wrong, does not want to harm another. Of course, no one can force anyone, let alone the Jews and Muslims of Palestine, to forgive each other. But since we are talking about the political level, amnesty is all that is needed as a first step. Not only does it give war criminals an alternative to a fight to the death, but it disrupts the cycle of vengeance that makes future war inevitable.

It is unlikely that either Israelis or Palestinians will shed the historical narratives in which they are right and other side wrong. I have tried and mostly failed to change the mind of one man (Robert F. Kennedy Jr.) immersed in a “pro-Israel” narrative. He can meet any point by recourse to what I consider a “potted history,” a body of tendentious pseudo-scholarship and curated facts constructed within an alternate universe of Zionist institutes, centers, university departments, and think tanks. Doubtless, he believes that I am similarly deluded in my recourse to authors like Rashid Khalidi, Ilan Pappe, Norman Finkelstein, and Max Blumenthal. If I can’t change the mind of one man, who isn’t even a party to the conflict, what hope is there to achieve peace by that route? We have to appeal to something beyond reason. We have to appeal to the revulsion that says, “I don’t care if the slaughter is justified, it has to stop anyway!” What does a child bleeding under the rubble know of justifications? I have given up on changing Kennedy’s mind on this issue, but I have faith in the goodness of his heart and its power to orient him toward peace.

Human beings can persuade themselves of the most absurd narratives, especially when those narratives offer a moral identity and exploit the need for acceptance and belonging. Among the most primal of these is the narrative that directs the rampaging mob upon its victim. War propaganda elaborates that primal narrative of sacrificial violence, dresses it up in all kinds of reasons and ethics. It takes huge courage to defy the mob. One who does so risks being the next victim of its fury. Well, courage literally means a capacity of heart. Certainly there are those so suffused with hatred that their hearts have no capacity anymore for compassion. Some of them are in positions of leadership in the world. To the extent their hearts are closed, they may only respond to pressure, self-interest, and force. But most people, even among the political class, have enough heart capacity that they are capable of compassion.

That is where hope lies. It lies in what I have called forgiveness — abandoning the goal of harming the other no matter how justified, and looking to the future rather than the past. The plan I have outlined is only realistic to the degree that people on all sides are capable of courage. It is realistic only if we can recognize that aspect of human nature and call it into expression. That is the essence of peace leadership. A peace leader can still hold opinions about which side is right and which is wrong, but he or she acts from something higher. And over time, as a function of the humanizing of the other side, those opinions inevitably soften.

Let me be clear: forgiveness does not mean forgetting or pretending something didn’t happen. It doesn’t mean enabling the abuser or allowing injustice to continue. Therefore, concrete, verifiable steps toward security, dignity, and human rights must accompany political amnesty.

It may seem that the peace plan I’ve outlined requires a lot more sacrifice on Israel’s part than on the Palestinians’, who would finally achieve the goals of decades of struggle: dignity, equal rights, and a homeland. In fact, the Jews of Israel would gain something just as important—the goal to which the war in Gaza is supposedly dedicated—security. It is no measure of security to constantly oversee a captive population, a powder keg of resentment always on the brink of exploding in hopeless rage. Unrelenting vigilance is not true security. True security is neighborliness, good relations, ease. Besides, Israel’s stated war aim (which is in large part a pretext for a long-standing goal of ethnic cleansing) of “eliminating Hamas” is impossible. With every massacre, with every air strike, with every suspect disappeared into Israel’s prisons, a new Hamas member is born in the person of the victim’s son or brother or nephew. More broadly, the repressive policies undertaken in the name of security fuel the fires of resentment that necessitate those very policies.

Certainly, there are elements within Palestine that seek not dignity, equality, and a homeland, but instead the extermination of the Jews. Likewise, there are elements within Israel that seek not security, but rather an ethnically-cleansed Greater Israel. If these anti-Semites and Judeo-fascists have their way, there will never be peace in the Holy Land. Such people rise to power in a general context of war and hate, and they feed off each other. They depend on each other to exist. They drive each other to new extremes of savagery.

Because such people are in power today, international intervention is essential to resolve the present conflict. Those people, especially in Israel, represent the broad attitude of the public, a majority of whom say in polls that the IDF is using too little firepower in Gaza. Israel will not stop the war on its own, nor reverse the oppressive policies that stoked it. The world must stop allowing it. The United States in particular must stop providing the weapons that allow its continuation. A total offensive weapons embargo to all parties to the conflict is enforceable if regional and global powers are serious about it. With the addition of other sanctions, the world can force those whose hearts are closed to agree to halt the war, temporarily. But peace is more than the cessation of hostilities. There must be a path forward to resolving the conditions that bred war in the first place. That is why a bold transformation of the Holy Land along the lines of Two States, One Homeland is indispensable.

Some may say that only the victims of violence — not an outside observer like myself — have the right to disavow vengeance. What moved me to write this essay, though, was just that, an account I read somewhere of a Palestinian man in Gaza who was dying from injuries he sustained in Israeli captivity. Most of his family had been killed as well. Nonetheless, he said, “I forgive Israel. I forgive those who have done this.” Maybe he understood that there is a higher kind of justice than punishment or vengeance, a higher kind of justice than righting past wrongs. It is to prevent future wrongs, not just to one’s own people but to all people. If that can be achieved, then none of the victims of this horrible war will have died in vain.