What is the Gaza Strip? Here’s why it’s key in the Israel-Hamas war.
Even though Israel gave up control of the Gaza Strip, it has kept a land, air and sea blockade on Gaza since 2007. The result has been damaging for Palestinians, with the United Nations saying in 2009 that the blockade from both Israel and Egypt had been “devastating livelihoods” and causing gradual “de-development” in Gaza. Israel has argued that the blockade has served to keep control of Gaza’s border, prevent Hamas from getting stronger and protect Israelis from Palestinian rocket attacks.
The blockade has faced criticism by human rights groups and the United Nations, which consider Gaza to still be under Israeli military occupation. The United Nations estimates that the blockade has cost the Palestinian territory’s economy nearly $17 billion over roughly a decade. The International Committee of the Red Cross has gone one step further in recent years to say the blockade violates the Geneva Conventions — a claim that Israeli officials have rejected.
The population in Gaza is extraordinarily young. UNICEF has estimated that there are roughly 1 million children living in the Gaza Strip, meaning that almost half the people in Gaza are children. Almost 40 percent of the population is under the age of 15, according to the CIA.
More than 1.4 million of the residents of the Gaza Strip are Palestinian refugees, according to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).
As ever, I feel I must preface any conversation about Gaza or Palestine, as I have learned to do over the many years I’ve been involved with and interested in the people and places of the region, with a statement: the attacks on Israelis last weekend were unconscionable. I do not condone violence of any kind inflicted on civilian populations. There is never justification for civilian casualties.
I fear that Gaza is going to turn into a mass civilian casualty event in the very near future, as though it hasn’t been one for a very long time. Death has always happened asymmetrically in this region: Israelis kill far more Palestinians than Palestinians kill Israelis. It’s horrifying — and having lived there, having witnessed it first-hand, I promise you the horror is not understated.
Implicitly or not, the Israeli justification has always been the legacy of the Holocaust. “Never again” is Israel’s unofficial mantra. Understandably so, right? The Holocaust was horrific on a scale that’s nearly unimaginable. The generational trauma of the population of Israel (and of Jewish people around the globe) is both understandable (if unrelatable) and deserved.
But the Holocaust has become justification for the preservation of the State of Israel, and consequently for the wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian population. Civilians have been indiscriminately killed in Palestine for generations, all in the name of Israeli sovereignty.
Israel is in an impossible position. Many Palestinians want Israel wiped off the map because Israel forced them out of their ancestral homeland, land they had lived on for hundreds or thousands of years. Much of this Palestinian anger has become entangled with some truly wretched antisemitism, yes, but I cannot in good faith say that Palestinians hate Jews for the same reasons the Nazis did. Yes, some Palestinians do, and certainly the government of Iran does, but many Palestinians just want to go home, in the same way so many Native Americans want their ancestral homeland back, a cause toward which I am sympathetic. (Though remember, Native Americans can travel freely off the reservations and throughout the United States, whereas almost all Palestinians are forbidden from traveling into Israel — or from leaving Palestine at all. They are confined, unable to leave.)
But if Israel uses the attack of last weekend to slaughter Palestinians indiscriminately, it will (if it hasn’t already, in the eyes of many) lose the moral high ground. It will lose, if it hasn’t already, the goodwill and support of so many people around the world.
Goodwill cannot be measured. It’s intangible, ineffable. And it is more valuable than the billions of dollars America sends to Israel each year.
Israel must proceed with the utmost caution as it prepares to invade Gaza. If that goodwill is lost, I fear not just for the future of Israel, but for the future of Jewish people everywhere.