The Roots of War

A year ago I left Israel, in early October, three days before the brutal Hamas attack that killed 1,200 Israelis and captured 250 hostages, triggering a tragic war that continues today. Who would have imagined it would last this long?

I made the trip as board chair of the Middle East Broadcasting Networks (MBN), a U.S. government-owned system of Arab language news outlets designed to bring unbiased news to a part of the world where governments or their cronies control most news organizations. I resigned from that position recently.

My trip to the Middle East a year ago took me to six countries I had visited before as a working journalist, but this time was different. I returned to America with changed views about the region. I had arrived as a strong supporter of Israel and its people. I returned thinking America must forge a more balanced posture toward the Arab and the Jewish people, despite my anger at Hamas’ horrific attack on innocent people. If you’d like to read about my Tour Before the Storm trip, click here.

The Israel that America deals with today is not the nation I knew when I first visited the country in the 1990s. And Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not the same leader I met as a Chicago Tribune reporter years ago. He now clings to power thanks to a right-wing government that proves the wisdom of America’s First Amendment which divorces the church from the state. President Joe Biden and whoever succeeds him must begin dealing with the Israel of today, and not the one in the alliance America struck years ago.

My trip didn’t lead me to believe America should abandon Israel nor embrace Hamas, which started the current chapter in this long-running war. Israel and its people remain a staunch ally in the region, and Hamas does not represent most Arabs. The people on both sides are so much better than their leaders. But Israel is the nation where the U.S. holds sway, and I was stunned at the extent to which Netanyahu and his right-wing allies now thumb their noses at America, despite the $310 billion that the U.S. Council Foreign Relations says America has poured into Israel since its founding in 1948.

We currently stand at a precipice where Netanyahu and the theocrats he relies upon to keep him out of jail on corruption charges could drag America into an increasingly brutal regional conflict that threatens another world war. America should do a better job of throwing its weight around.

What the general public knows about the war and the Netanyahu government is imperfect. Any reporting comes from a global media struggling to cover the conflict despite the heavy hand of censorship imposed by the Israeli military.

Many brave reporters risk their lives covering this expanding war, and some news organizations, such as Haaretz, a prominent Israeli newspaper, do an outstanding job. Yet all struggle to separate accurate information from tidal waves of misinformation. It’s a dangerous job. Some 130 journalists and media workers, mainly Arabs, have been killed in Gaza alone, according to Reporters Without Borders. In just one year of war, the death toll is nearly double the number of war correspondents killed in World War II.

The current headlines and broadcasts understandably focus on the relentless bombing, the human tragedy, the victories, the defeats, accusations of genocide, diplomatic starts and fits, and above all the hostages. Just over one hundred remain imprisoned in the chains of Hamas. Some 1,700 Israelis and more than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed. About 85 percent of the population in Gaza has been displaced from their homes, and Israel’s relentless bombing campaign of retribution has turned entire cities into piles of rubble.  

However, news coverage of the day-to-day violence overshadows any reporting on the root causes of the war: Israelis and Palestinians remain in conflict over borders designed to create two distinct Jewish and Arab states on land in Palestine occupied by Arabs in 1947. The United Nations proposed the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states with Jerusalem as an international city seventy-seven years ago.

The Dome of the Rock is an Islamic shrine at the center of the Al-Aqsa mosque compound on the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem, significant to both Jews and Arabs. Photo by Jonny Gios.

A battle over historical forces — that one can’t possibly cover here — preceded and survived the United Nations resolution and created the opaque contours of the current borders between Israel and the Palestinian territories. The borders have been modified and shaped by international negotiations, armistice agreements and several wars. Nevertheless, despite all of the talks and shooting, no permanent boundaries have been set or agreed upon by both sides, leading to contentious land claims and sovereignty disputes over what constitutes Israel and what constitutes the Palestinian territories, commonly known as Gaza and the West Bank.

These divides existed when I first visited Israel in the 1990s, but I was shocked during my recent travels by the extent of Israel’s aggressive backing of an Israeli movement to seize what are considered Palestinian lands. Known as “Settlers,” the movement amounts to Israeli squatters. They show up and occupy lands in Palestinian territories such as the landlocked real estate west of the Jordan River known as the West Bank. The settlements usually begin as small encampments but soon grow into large walled towns and villages crowned by concertina wire. They are heavily subsidized and armed by the Netanyahu government. America’s evangelicals also support them.

Various American administrations, including Biden’s, have repeatedly demanded that the Israelis stop the settlers from encroaching upon Palestinian lands, but the Israeli government, now more than ever, staunchly back the Settlers, who claim they have a historical and biblical right to land they consider their ancestral homelands. The West Bank settlements are widely considered illegal under international law. Security measures imposed by Israel have turned the West Bank into a police state.

The Settlers can be just as abusive, violent, lethal, and dismissive of American concerns as the Arab rebels. I saw one Settler aggressively demand that an MBN film crew covering a story leave the scene, going so far as to knock down a camera on a tripod. When the reporter protested that he worked for an American news outlet, the Settler looked into the camera and yelled, “F--- America. F---  Biden.”

The Netanyahu government’s backing of Settlers not only flouts the desires of its main benefactor; it also breeds the mistrust and bloodshed that give terrorists such as Yahya Sinwar, the brutal and cold-hearted leader of Hamas, a steady stream of recruits to wage a war that he knows will kill thousands of his own people.

Netanyahu vows he will not end the war until he eradicates Hamas as a fighting force. Still, one Palestinian shop owner I interviewed in a major West Bank town demonstrates how Netanyahu’s goal is a pipe dream. By day he serves customers, by night he is part of the resistance. If Netanyahu wants to eradicate Hamas, he will have to kill many more Arabs in the country — a massacre that would stir international outrage. He seems to have no credible exit strategy for a war that now reaches into southern Lebanon, the stronghold of Hezbollah, the aggressive proxy of Iran, Netanyahu’s real target.

“There is only one force in the world fighting Iran right now,” Netanyahu told a group of American Jewish leaders in Jerusalem on Wednesday. “There's only one force in the world that stands in Iran's way to conquest. And that force is Israel. If we don't fight, we die. But it's not only our fight, it's the free world's fight, and I would say the civilized world's fight. ...they want to subjugate the world and bring it back to dark ages."

A major question is: Why has Netanyahu increased the pressure on Hezbollah and, therefore, Iran now?

In part, he is under domestic political pressure. Through constant attacks, Hezbollah, a Hamas ally, has driven thousands of Israelis from their homes in northern Israel south of the Lebanese border. They want to return. So do the people of southern Lebanon, driven from their homes by counterattacks and an invasion by Israeli troops. But Netanyahu also pokes Hezbollah, and thereby Iran, in the eye at a delicate time. He targeted and killed Hassan Nasrallah, the longstanding leader of Hezbollah, barely a month before Americans head to the polls to elect a president. The Middle East has now become a major campaign issue.

Netanyahu is no stranger to meddling in American politics. In a breach of protocol, he appeared before a joint session of Congress in March 2015 to lobby against President Barack Obama’s deal that imposed limits on Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Congress passed the Obama plan, but President Donald Trump withdrew America from the deal in May of 2018, paving the way for Iran to resume development of a nuclear weapon.  

Now Netanyahu engages in tit- for-tat attacks on Iran or its proxies and vows that the Islamic Republic “will pay for” a recent barrage of 180 ballistic missiles, most of which were intercepted by Israel’s air defense system with support from allies like the U.S.

President Biden, who condemned the Iranian attack, has urged Israel to temper any attacks on the Islamic Republic, particularly its nuclear plants. Any major attack on Iran puts Vice President Kamala Harris in a tough position in her race against Trump, who shares Netanyahu’s skepticism about Iran.  

How this will end is anyone’s guess. The stakes are huge. We are dealing with historic enemies that either have nuclear weapons or are on the threshold of making them. America, a nation with the potential to influence Israel, and countries such as Qatar, Egypt or even Saudi Arabia, all of whom hold sway in the Arab world, must use their considerable clout to forge a peace that will give both sides time to deal with the real issue: Internationally accepted borders everyone can respect before it’s too late.

—James O’Shea

James O’Shea is a longtime Chicago author and journalist who now lives in North Carolina. He is the author of several books and is the former editor of the Los Angeles Times and managing editor of the Chicago Tribune. Follow Jim’s Five W’s Substack here.