Israel’s real problem is not its legislation, laws or institutions

At 6 am, Palestinian soldiers, if you like to call them that, crossed the barrier wall from the Gaza Strip which is essentially a prison for them. They have nothing to lose, so the price they are willing to pay is the ultimate one. (Israel is calling this a war and that happens when you fight an army.)

Gaza is the biggest open prison in the world and it's been under blockade for 20 years. Nobody's speaking about that. But, if you live in Gaza, you don't have any way out, no airport, no sea port, no travel abroad; you can't leave unless you have authorisation from the Israelis.

In the same way, nobody from the outside world can enter Gaza. So, Israel really has a chokehold on Gaza for the last 20 years. It’s like this: people just can't live there. They don’t have adequate water, electricity is available for about three days a week and even that's not stable. There are no jobs for them; over 50 per cent or 60 per cent of the people are unemployed. That is no way to live a decent life. People need their freedom and it doesn't matter whether we label them terrorists or extra-terrestrials, we all cherish life.

What happened on day one

From the little we know on day one, it seems a large number of fighters broke through the barrier wall and entered several Israeli army bases and literally conquered them. They took 20 to 30 IDF (Israel Defence Forces) soldiers and some civilians, and went back to Gaza. At the same time, they also went into a dozen cities and villages in southern Israel that surround Gaza. They are reportedly holding them hostage inside buildings there. It seems they are keeping the hostages in a police station that they occupied.

The Israeli state had been caught completely off guard. 

This is not a price which Israel or ordinary Israelis are accustomed to paying. Israel is a prosperous country that has made a lot of its wealth on the back of military funded technology. A technology, which ostensibly, has completely failed now. The comfort level that Israelis have and the complacency that comes along with comfort is what lies behind this failure on their side. So, there will be a reprisal, because they will not want to accept that truth. And, surely, for the next few weeks, Gaza would be carpet-bombed and most probably occupied again by Israel, meaning hundreds of Palestinian families will lose their lives, if not thousands, including children, women, and the elderly.

The Palestinian situation 

The question then is when will all this end? Probably, until the price is unbearable. The “Palestinian problem” if I borrow the term from how the Jews were perceived in Europe a century ago, or the Palestinian situation, is not going to disappear.

It started on the 50th anniversary of the war of 1973. It seems as if it was very carefully planned by the Palestinians to mark this day. To remind Israel that nothing has changed in 50 years. There is only less security as long as the occupation persists.

Israel has always refused peace. I mean real and honest peace, the kind that meets your enemy at eye level. I understand the reason behind the existential fear for Israelis, the collective trauma of the Holocaust informs and drives their every move. And their struggle for survival and for freedom, like the Palestinian struggle for freedom, is legitimate but it is driven by fear. And, instead of stepping up to overcome this fear, the continued occupation and humiliation of Palestinians is cementing more fear and trauma in people on both sides for generations to come.

The Palestinians, if you offer them a fair deal, will probably accept it gladly. Nobody wants to live the way they live. But, until Israel doesn't realise that and come to make a peace agreement, this is the way things will continue to happen. October 7 was an extraordinary day, but there will be many other extraordinary days in the future as well, if no peace is reached. Human history is one of war and oppression, but it is also one of overcoming oppression and struggles for independence.

The history of Hamas

One needs to take a step back in history in order to understand Hamas in the first place. The reason Hamas has existed for the past 25 years is that that's when it was created. The only real organisation that really represented the Palestinian people since 1967 is the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO).

Hamas is a more recent phenomenon for us, which began its life in the 1990s. And in a way, it was a construct of Israel. They supported Hamas, financially too. This is not a secret. As a policy of divide and conquer, they created Hamas to make a rift inside the Palestinian nation. Palestinian people were caught between two big factions – the religious Hamas and the secular PLO. They were politically divided into two. So, the PLO governs the West Bank, while Hamas governs Gaza. Israel has always worked hard to weaken the PLO and strengthen Hamas and hence de-legitimise the Palestinian struggle for freedom by painting it in colours of extremism and religion.

If there were fair elections across Palestine, in today’s circumstances, Hamas would win all of them. That's exactly why Israel is preventing the elections because it needs Palestinians to be at war with each other. The common people now support Hamas because they see them as not a collaborator of Israel or as corrupt as the weak Palestinian Authority.

The Palestinian Authority has become a puppet government run by the Israeli Secret Service. It absolves the Israeli state from carrying the burden of occupation on a day-to-day basis, and sub-contracts it to the Palestinian Authority.

Israel could have always finished Hamas off; even now, Benjamin Netanyahu insists they would wipe it out. But in a way, it's against Israel's interest to finish Hamas completely because then we will only have the PLO, and then there will be more unity amongst Palestinians. Hamas is really just an expression of people’s need for freedom, if not Hamas, it can very easily be some other group.

The hope of religion

People turn to God when real life doesn't offer any hope. Spirituality offers that in a beautiful way. The more impoverished and the harder life becomes, the more Palestinians will support the cause of a religious political party like Hamas.

Let's not forget that Israel itself is a religious country. There's no separation between state and religion. The biggest coalition partners in Israel are religious parties run by Rabbis. Israel is a Jewish country and is defined by its religious character. 

Religion plays a very big role here, and the most extreme Israeli government in the country’s history is full of cabinet members who are not a million miles away from the ideology of Hamas, but it's just the other side of the same coin. But people on the street in Palestine don't view Hamas as terrorists; they view them as more honest because they're not corrupt and they fight for their freedom.

In a cozy chat over a cup of coffee, of course, they would prefer the PLO to have fought this fight since Palestinians are originally very secular people.

Israel is at the crossroads, having spent the past months engulfed in a constitutional crisis because of legislative reform that would render the Supreme Court impotent and ostensibly turn it into a semi-democracy. But Israel’s real problem is not its legislation or laws, or institutions. All of these, along with the absence of a real democracy, emanate from one thing and one thing only and that is the occupation of Palestine.

But for that to be resolved there needs to be a price Israelis are not prepared to pay and we are still far from that.

(Adam Zuabi is a Palestinian independent filmmaker and artist.)