Has The War In Gaza Radicalised Young Palestinians?

(MENAFN- Live Mint) Among the banks, law firms and luxury hotels of central London, a piece of Palestine is rising. Born in an adjacent falafel joint, Palestine House has spread over five floors. Each depicts a different period of Palestinian history. The walls of one recreate the wooden latticework of a traditional inner courtyard; another, the smashed rubble of Gaza. Palestinian flags and banners protesting against genocide decorate the walls and pavement outside. By the end of the year Osama Qashoo, its founder, plans to open a journalists' club, a radio station, a startup hub, an exhibition hall and a cultural salon in the building.“Each bomb Israel drops on Gaza is an amplifier,” says Mr Qashoo, an exile from the West Bank city of Nablus:“We are the carriers making sure Palestine's story lives.”

Mr Qashoo is part of a new generation of activists among Palestinians whose sense of identity had been waning. They have been mobilised by the horrifying bloodshed and destruction in Gaza. They are dismissive of an ageing and discredited Palestinian leadership and seek new ways to pursue their century-long struggle. Mr Qashoo's vision of the route to a Palestinian state is a peaceful one. Others sound more resigned to bloodshed.“Forget the dumb doves,” says Zeina Hashem Beck, a young poet at a recital in support of Gaza in New York. Will the war in Gaza galvanise young Palestinians to new forms of struggle, or prompt further violence in their quest for a state?

The horrors of the past year are manifold. Nearly 42,000 have been killed in Gaza. Around 70% of Gaza's housing stock has been destroyed. Many feel that the shock is already as awful as the nakba (catastrophe) of 1948, when Israel was formed and around 15,000 Palestinians were killed and some 750,000 were driven from their homes or fled. Others compare it to the naksa (setback) of 1967, when Israel seized the West Bank and east Jerusalem. Measured by the numbers killed and the length of the conflict, the past year has been the worst in the Palestinians' recent history.

Israel again controls the lives of all 7m Palestinians in the land that was their ancestral home. In Gaza 2.2m Palestinians are as disorientated and fearful as they were in 1948. Polling by Zogby, a research firm, suggests that over half of Gaza's people have lost a relative and some three-quarters have been displaced at least three times during this war.

West Bankers liken their situation to that of pre-war Gaza. Checkpoints keep them locked under siege and shut out of Israel's labour markets. Strikes by drones, common in Gaza, frequently occur. Jewish settler violence has increased sharply since October 7th.

Meanwhile Israel's Arabs risk being reported to the police for empathising with their brethren in Gaza. When a 12-year-old Palestinian girl at a Hebrew-language school in Beersheva, in southern Israel, fretted about starving children in Gaza, her classmates threatened to burn her village. The education ministry accused her of incitement against the army and her headmistress suspended her.“We're fuming, but they make you think a thousand times before you open your mouth,” says an Arab politician in Haifa, an Israeli city often hailed as a model of co-existence.

With Palestinian voices muzzled by Israel, Palestinians who live abroad, half of the overall 14m-strong population, are shaping their national struggle. The 1m-odd who live in the West and Latin America see their role as responding there to the Palestinians' plight. Michigan, an American state with a large Arab electorate, is a swing state in America's presidential election. The diaspora is trying to reshape how people think of the conflict. As the peace accords signed in Oslo in 1993 slip into history, Palestinians are seeking to replace the idea of a clash between two national movements with a generational liberation struggle against“settler colonialism”.

At first, Palestinians hoped that this war, like previous conflicts in Gaza, would end swiftly. Western allies of Israel would force it into a ceasefire. Gaza would be rebuilt. Israel's prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, would fall. And the world might finally impose a two-state settlement, as they promised in the first weeks of the war. Palestinians in the West Bank and Israel hunkered down in anticipation.

A year on, that hope has faded. There has been no truce. Western governments have not forced Israel to relent. Iran and its proxies vowed to come to Gaza's rescue. But Israel has smashed Hamas and Hizbullah, and may clobber the Islamic Republic. Israelis show no sign of replacing Mr Netanyahu and his cabinet that includes Jewish supremacists. Many Palestinians fear that the displacement and hellfire in Gaza is a forerunner of the plans Israel's settlers and its army have for the West Bank. They feel“an existential threat”, says Omar Dajani, a Palestinian-American in Jerusalem.

Perhaps driven by the desire for a safe haven, the war has consolidated support for a Palestinian state. A Palestinian poll in September put support for a state based on the borders of 1967 at 60%, compared with 10% who backed a single state with equal rights for Jews and Palestinians. Mr Dajani, who is the Palestinian representative abroad of A Land For All, which champions a confederation of a Jewish and Palestinian state with open borders, says Palestinian (but not Jewish) support for the movement has collapsed over the past year. He worries he will be ostracised as“a normaliser”.“It's hard to imagine a rosy future with those who slaughtered your friends and family,” he concedes.

Palestinians seem even more divided about how to achieve statehood. For some, resistance can be peaceful. They see it in their determination to stay put. Palestinians have remained in their villages in northern Israel, even as Hizbullah has bombarded the area with rockets and Jewish Israelis have been evacuated.“There's always this fear,” says Ghousoon Bisharat, the editor of +972, a joint Israeli-Palestinian magazine based in Haifa,“that if you leave, you don't know if you'll be allowed back.” Others see it in the celebration of merely being alive.“Drinking this beer is an act of resistance,” says a 29-year-old tattooed Palestinian bartender, who left Jaffa in Israel for Ramallah, the Palestinians' seat of government in the West Bank.

But violence is also regaining its appeal.“This Israel understands nothing else,” says one Palestinian who founded a civil-disobedience movement two decades ago but has since lost faith in a peaceful approach. Contrary to Israeli claims that force will beat Palestinians into submission, survey after survey shows the reverse since Israel invaded Gaza. In a poll conducted in the West Bank by the Jerusalem Media and Communication Centre, support for“military resistance” grew from 40% in May this year to 51% in September, whereas support for“peaceful political action” fell from 44% to 36% in the same period. A pollster in Ramallah has similar figures: support for violence in the West Bank grew from 35% in September 2022, when Yair Lapid was Israel's prime minister, to 56% in September this year. The pollsters say that shift is most pronounced among Palestinians who are too young to remember the costs of the second intifada (uprising) and past Palestinian wars.

Hamas is the beneficiary. In a rare flash of democracy in the West Bank, support for their programme of military confrontation versus the preference of the Palestinian Authority (pa) for negotiations and engagement helped them win student elections last year in Bir Zeit and Hebron Universities in the West Bank. Hamas's ability to continue to inflict casualties on the region's most powerful army, waging its longest war, has bolstered its support. In Jordan last month the group's sister organisation, the Islamic Action Board, emerged as the largest party in a general election, with 22% of the seats. According to one poll, support for Hamas in the West Bank and Gaza has grown from 22% last September to 36% a year on.

Many who back Hamas seem aware of the consequences.“Most of my friends will be killed,” says a young resident of Jenin camp in the northern West Bank, despairingly. In August Hamas in the West Bank conducted its first suicide-bombing inside Israel in years.“People want to be martyred not because they get a load of virgins in paradise, but because they want to make their families and parents proud,” says a student leader in Nablus.

How much of the professed support for Hamas remains lip-service and how much a true commitment to perpetrate attacks is hard to tell. Many young Palestinians boast of their willingness to join the fight but pass their days in cafés doing little more than watching Hizbullah's promises to destroy Tel Aviv, broadcast on a loop by Al Jazeera, a seductive Qatari television channel. The eschatology of jihadism has not made a comeback; young Palestinians are less likely to support a sharia state than their parents are. And some Palestinians counsel against the futility of violence: each round provides a pretext for Israel to grab more territory, warns Maqbula Nassar, a journalist in Nazareth, the largest Arab city in Israel. There are reasons for Palestinians to eschew bloodshed. Despite the surging violence in the West Bank, many still have much to lose.

Still, few Palestinians doubt that a violent backlash is coming. As Iran was bombarding Israel with missiles on October 1st, at least seven people were shot and killed in Tel Aviv. Hamas has claimed responsibility, saying that the attackers were from Hebron in the West Bank. The Palestinians have no effective government. Hamas's days as an authority in Gaza seem over. A similar uncertainty hangs upon Mahmoud Abbas, the 88-year-old Palestinian president. And unlike their parents, most young Palestinians have no factional allegiance. In the coming months the pa could find it harder to control what little of the West Bank it still oversees, as settler and army attacks intensify and Palestinians retaliate. Without the political will to end it, few expect this cycle in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to be the most lethal-or the last.

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