Does Israel want Trump’s ‘eternal peace’ with Gaza?
Off the back of Donald Trump’s vision for “eternal peace” in Gaza and the broader region, The Economist’s Middle East correspondent offered a sobering view of the Israeli position. It may not be as firmly in the peace camp as many would hope.
Having recently spent a few days in Israel, Nick Pelham noted the opposition to the military operations in Gaza. He met a doctor and her friends who were receptive to a parliamentarian denouncing “the slaughter in Gaza as genocide”. He saw a religious group begging “forgiveness for Gaza’s starvation”. He found some Jewish activists in Jordan valley who were protecting Bedouin shepherds from settler attacks. And he ran into protesters who poured paint on the doorstep of the Israel Defence Forces’ chief-of-staff and pleaded with reservists and conscripts to refuse to fight in Gaza.
But then there is the other side.
Worshippers in Jerusalem’s Old City brandished weapons and one of them told Mr Pelham, they would be used “to kill more Arabs”.
Young families wore T-shirts emblazoned with chilling messages such as “Our land” and “Death to the enemy”.
Before the Western Wall, Mr Pelham observed young Jewish men chasing Muslims off the streets. The Muslims were also marking their own religious occasion, the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday.
Mr Pelham wrote that when he tried to ask some young Israelis about the plight of Palestinians in Gaza, “they were uninterested”. And many of them consider “Binyamin Netanhau, Israel’s prime minister, soft”.
It is a chilling picture of a society coarsened by conflict.
