The crowds at last weekend’s football league ties showed a massive appetite is there for inter-county games after Covid restrictions were lifted. There are plenty of enticing contests coming up over the next few weeks on the hurling front with the round 2 showdown between Limerick and Galway and the round 4 clash of Waterford v Tipperary among the stand-out ties. And keep an eye out for the form of Dublin, who enjoyed some eye-catching results in the pre-season and could take a leap forward in 2022.
2. Henry Shefflin era begins in Galway
All eyes will be on Galway as Shefflin takes his first steps as an inter-county boss. Like most managers, he’ll be looking to come out of the league with a good idea of his best 20 players ahead of the Leinster campaign. He cast the net wide during the pre-season, using 47 players, and will be hoping a couple of young guns put up their hands in the five games ahead.
It’s easy to forget that at the end of last year’s league Galway were widely considered the biggest challengers to Limerick’s throne. They’ve lost Joe Canning and Aidan Harte, yet their spine remains formidable: Daithi Burke, Fintan Burke, Padraig Mannion, Cathal Mannion, Joseph Cooney, David Burke, Conor Whelan, Brian Concannon and Evan Niland.
3. Will Limerick keep rolling on?
Their form in the Munster Hurling Cup suggests they will. An experimental Limerick outfit featuring a handful of regulars had nine points to spare over Clare in the final of the pre-season competition last month. They lost S&C coach Mikey Kiely but poached Cairbre O’Caireallain from rivals Tipperary in the off-season. Mike Casey returns from a cruciate injury, with youngsters like Colin Coughlan and Cathal O’Neill vying for first-team opportunities. There’s also interest in how the abolishment of water breaks will affect them, given the adjustments Paul Kinnerk could make after each quarter in the past two seasons.
Brian McGrath could have a big year for Tipperary.
Source: Morgan Treacy/INPHO
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4. Transition in Tipperary
The retirements of Padraic Maher and Brendan Maher, plus the knee injury that could keep John Bubbles O’Dwyer out for the league means Tipperary head into the league down a lot of experience and knowhow. Colm Bonnar will need to find a couple of replacements in his defence, with Brian McGrath an obvious candidate to nail down a starting place.
The return of Patrick Bonner Maher is a boost and John McGrath’s scintillating form in the club championship was also most welcome. The stars of Tipperary’s two All-Ireland U20 winning teams are getting older. Now is the time to find out if they can produce the goods at senior level. The league will tell a lot in that regard.
5. Cork’s response to All-Ireland final
A chastening defeat to Limerick last August and the subsequent All-Stars snub left a bitter taste in Cork’s mouth after a progressive 2021 season. They lost Eoin Cadogan, Billy Cooper and Colm Spillane to retirement, but Mark Keane joined the squad and Conor Lehane returned after a return to form with Midleton.
Kieran Kingston’s priority in the league will centre around finding athletes in the middle third to match Limerick, with the half-forward line of particular concern. They could do with a couple morale-boosting wins in the league give them momentum.
Clubmates Michael Fennelly and Henry Shefflin meet on the sideline in round 1.
Source: Ken Sutton/INPHO
6. Battle to survive in Division 1
The task facing Offaly in Group A is a difficult one. They open the campaign against Galway on Sunday, before ties against Cork, Clare, Wexford and Limerick. Having come from Division 2 and the Christy Ring in 2021, it’s a big challenge for Michael Fennelly’s young team. If they can stay competitive and avoid heavy beatings it will leave them in good stead for the Joe Mcdonagh Cup.
The same is true for Laois and Antrim in Group B, although with only one team going into the relegation play-off they have plenty to fight for. Antrim surprised many with a fine league campaign last year and Cheddar Plunkett spoke recently about his desire to prove the O’Moore County belong in the top tier.
7. Wexford start life after Davy Fitzgerald
Plenty of counties enjoy a first-year bounce when a new manager arrives at the helm and Darragh Egan will be aiming to hit the ground running in the league. He put together an interesting management team with the recent additions of Gordon D’Arcy and Billy Walsh to his set-up. Wexford are coming off the back of two poor seasons, yet the task of replacing Davy Fitzgerald cannot be underestimated.
It’s likely they’ll play without seven defenders for the first time in five years and that will take some adjusting for the players. The 2019 Leinster champions looked flat and open at the back in their one-sided Walsh Cup final loss to Dublin last weekend. Egan will be expecting a response against Limerick on Sunday.
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How will Wexford fare under Darragh Egan?
Source: Ryan Byrne/INPHO
8. Kerry and Kildare rise
The promotion race in Division 2A will be worth watching given the recent successes in Kerry and Kildare. The Kingdom’s pre-season win over Tipperary coupled with Kilmoyley’s run to the All-Ireland intermediate final are major positives for Stephen Molumphy as he prepares for his rookie league campaign.
Similarly, Kildare hurling has been steadily improving in recent years after relentless work at underage level. Their U20s beat Wexford last year while Naas lifted the Leinster intermediate title and will play Kilmoyley in Saturday’s All-Ireland decider. Promotion to the top tier in hurling would be another major sign of progress for the Lilywhites.
9. Fresh tactics and talent
Hurling’s evolution has been led by Limerick in recent years. To take down the Treaty, their rivals may need to bring something new rather than attempting to mirror their style. What fresh ideas might Shefflin bring to Galway or Bonnar to Tipperary? What did Cork’s management learn from the All-Ireland defeat to Limerick? What has Liam Cahill up his sleeve as he attempts to get Waterford over the line? Then there’s the young talent that will emerge in the weeks ahead and announce themselves on the national stage.
10. Managers’ approach
It will be interesting to see how managers approach the league given championship starts in mid-April. There may be less experimentation, although the last time a round-robin format took place the league wasn’t taken as seriously by many leading counties.
There’s also a sense that teams won’t want to make the Division 1 final given it takes place two weeks out from the beginning of the provincial openers. Plenty to watch out for.
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JUST TWO YEARS after suffering relegation from Dublin’s top-tier championship, the St Sylvester’s Ladies team are preparing for an All-Ireland final.
St Sylvesters’ captain Danielle Lawless [right] is gearing up for the currentaccount.ie intermediate All-Ireland final against
Source: Seb Daly/SPORTSFILE
Their new manager Anthony Cooke has been credited with much of their quick recovery, guiding them to an intermediate county final last October where they accounted for Castleknock to become champions.
A Leinster title followed in December after overcoming Longford Slashers before defeating Fermanagh champions Kinawley Brian Borus in the All-Ireland semi-final.
Their rapid rebirth is now just one win away from reaching the pinnacle of this grade and earning a shot at redemption in the senior ranks.
“He [Cooke] came in with new ideas and it’s something that we all kind of needed,” says St Sylvester’s captain Danielle Lawless ahead of the decider clash with Castlebar Mitchels on Sunday.
“He’s just been phenomenal, the hard work he’s put in on and off the pitch.”
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“I suppose we were kind of struggling with numbers.
“We had a few people leave the team, going away or working. I just don’t think the commitment was there and I just think Covid was a bit of a blessing in disguise.
“People got a break from football and a break from the disappointment and we came back fresher than ever, and this year has just been unbelievable.”
St Sylvester’s is blessed with inter-county talent. Sinéad Aherne, Niamh McEvoy, Nicole Owens and Kate Sullivan are four Syls players representing their native Dublin, while defender Kim White plays for the Down Ladies.
Aherne, McEvoy and Owens have played key roles in the Dublin side who who narrowly fell short of completing an All-Ireland five-in-a-row last year.
Unsurprisingly, their input is at the core of St Sylvester’s impressive progress through this year’s championship. In the All-Ireland semi-final, Aherne and Sullivan combined for 3-6 to help their side to a 12-point victory.
“She’s [Aherne] been on form all season and we can always rely on her. And the five other girls up front can be relied on as well so they all compliment each other.”
Remarking on the overall impact of all of St Sylvester’s inter-county contingent, Lawless adds:
“Just the experience that they bring to our team and new ideas. They’re always willing to help the girls and they improve us. We miss them when they’re gone but when they come back, we all compliment each other so it’s massive to have five superstars on our team.”
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Lawless describes the All-Ireland final as “uncharted territory” for Syls some 10 years on from their last great milestone when the club reached a Leinster final.
They don’t know much about their opponents Castlebar Mitchells, preferring instead to focus on their own strengths and what they can achieve as a team.
“We haven’t really thought about it. Winning the All-Ireland semi-final hasn’t even sunk in yet and I don’t think it will until the whistle blows and we’re standing on a pitch in an All-Ireland final. But it would mean a huge amount to our town.
“The support was phenomenal when we won Dublin and Leinster. I know that’s going to continue to the final so it will mean a huge amount to the community but definitely to the girls as well. We’ve never been here before.
“As a team, we’ve gotten a lot closer. We’ve all gone through this together so it’s been really good.”
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— GAA Higher Education (@HigherEdGAA) February 3, 2022
The Fitzgibbon Cup quarter-final line-up has been finalised tonight.
The last-eight stage will see NUI Galway hosting Waterford IT, IT Carlow play at home to UCC, while TUS Midwest travel to GMIT and UL host MTU Cork.
Tonight’s games saw UL hammer TU Dublin by 5-25 to 1-14 in Group D, which left TUS Midwest as runners-up in the group.
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MTU Cork fell to GMIT by 1-19 to 1-17 in Group C. Both sides were already through the three-team group, but GMIT’s victory saw them finish top with the Cork side in second.
SATURDAY’S HURLING SCHEDULE will commence for Tommy Guilfoyle in Dr Hyde Park.
He’s jumped on board as coach to the Roscommon senior hurlers this year, alongside new manager Francis O’Halloran, a pair of Clare natives trying to spread the hurling gospel.
They’re having a puck around at 9am in the Roscommon county ground, to acclimatise themselves to the surroundings before Sunday’s league opener against Tyrone.
Guilfoyle, a long-serving stalwart in Clare hurling forward lines, will be on the sideline for that Division 3A fixture but in between he’ll be back home immersed in local hurling matters.
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The plan is hit the road and by Saturday lunchtime be parked up at the Gaelic Grounds in Limerick. He’s on co-commentary duty for Clare FM, this is a game close to his heart. His alma mater St Joseph’s from Tulla partake in a moment of history, their first appearance in a Dr Harty Cup final, the premier Munster hurling colleges competition.
There will be a healthy representation of players from his own club Feakle. The semi-final win over Waterford’s De La Salle took place in Mallow and saw another day of hurling double-jobbing.
After that mid-afternoon game, he was headed to the Connacht GAA Air Dome in Mayo to witness Roscommon win a pre-season provincial league final at the expense of Sligo.
It’s a hectic time but covering so many miles on the road is worth it as he sees the impact in East Clare of this novel hurling journey.
“It’s been building since Christmas really, winning the quarter-final and the semi-final and now this unique occasion.
“The last day, the game was on the Saturday and the lockdown finished on the Friday, so we were back to normal opening. Someone described Tulla on Saturday evening as like Paddy’s weekend, there was a carnival atmosphere around the town.
“The crowd have played a big part in it. They’ve got great support from local clubs and businesses.
“I’ve been at colleges games own the years but the after the quarter-final, the emotion and joy on the field, I never saw that level before. Parents, past pupils, grandparents, teachers, ex-teachers. There was a big sing-song on the field, I never saw it after a game.
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“Just relief and great joy. So many outside people that weren’t parents or pupils to turn up to a game, and for it to take off with a school team. Saturday afternoons, watching St Joseph’s Tulla is the place to be.”
The final hurdle to be surmounted is on Saturday after a campaign filled with milestones. St Joseph’s had never won a game before in the Dr Harty Cup, that was their modest aim at the outset this season. Their team had climbed steadily through the ranks and have flourished in this knockout format, clipping the wings of St Colman’s Fermoy, CBC Cork and De La Salle Waterford.
The victories have been founded on stirring comebacks and the remarkable free-taking expertise of forward Sean Withycombe, who has hit 1-38 in their last three victories.
“Sean’s father is a Kerryman, he’s very proud of that,” says Guilfoyle.
“It’s the sum of the team more so than individuals. In the quarter-final, the corner-back Dara Ryan popped up with a score when all looked lost. The inspiration and the winnings have come from different areas.
“It’s very much player driven. That comes from a great belief amongst themselves where they’re never beaten.
“This is a once in a generation team based on the strength of the clubs around. They wouldn’t have a conveyor belt coming every year. Down the years Tulla would be looking in the road to Flannan’s, the aristocrats of hurling. I suppose Tulla were wondering, ‘Could it be us?’ ”
Feakle and St Joseph’s Tulla player Adam Hogan.
Source: Lorraine O’Sullivan/INPHO
It is a team anchored by three local clubs – Tulla, Feakle and O’Callaghan Mills supply 12 of the starting side between them. There was one player apiece from Clooney-Quin, Crusheen and Broadford in their starting fifteen for the semi-final.
They have been powered by a strong spirit and sense of unity in their playing group. Life off the pitch has illustrated to Guilfoyle how the players look out for each other and the locality is there to provide valuable support.
“What really bonds this group together is Ronan O’Connor and Oisin O’Connor, the brothers from Feakle, they’ve had a double tragedy in the last couple of years. They lost their father Pat to a farming accident and last year they buried their mother Denise, she died of cancer. It was tragic and such a tough blow for them.
“There has been great support from the school, the teachers and all the parents of their team-mates, not alone when it happened but continue to do so. The lads live just up the road from me. Their fellow players and school mates have really stuck together, in its own way it has really bound them together.
“I remember being around the house at the funerals and the most striking was the amount of students that were there for the few days. The school continues to oversee the supply of dinners and stuff like that. Ronan is the captain, he was on the Clare minor team last year.
“It shines through very strongly that they are a very united bunch. The hurling has been a great outlet for them. The support has been brilliant from everyone and continues within the parish and the clubs and more importantly, the school.”
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Galway’s Aidan Harte.
Source: James Crombie/INPHO
On the hurling front they have plenty expertise guiding them. Terence Fahy is the Clare U20 hurling manager. Tomas Kelly steered Inagh-Kilnamona to last year’s county senior showpiece in the Banner county. Aidan Harte has come across the border from Gort, bringing with him a wealth of playing experience in Galway colours which included the highlight of contributing to their 2017 Liam MacCarthy Cup win.
That trio of teachers adds profile to the sideline, opponents Ardscoil Rís have people of similar stature in current Clare senior Paul Flanagan, former Limerick senior Niall Moran and Clonlara’s Cormac O’Donovan, the supplier of a famous match-winner in Clare’s 2009 All-Ireland U21 final glory.
Ardscoil Rís coach Niall Moran.
Source: Ryan Byrne/INPHO
“The Clare connections add to the intrigue,” says Guilfoyle.
“I’d be a past pupil of Tulla, we had great teachers down the line. We won All-Ireland colleges B back in the ’80s. Seanie McMahon that went on to play for Clare centre-back, his father Michael was involved. John Stack was another great man that put in a lot of effort.”
“The lads now have great experience and know-how. The new school was built seven or eight years ago, and there’s an all-weather pitch there, that all helps and this team has that new identity.
“Let’s hope they can do themselves justice on Saturday. Play the game rather than the occasion because Ardscoil have been there before and they have that winning tradition.
“There’s great excitement around. Everyone wants to be a part of this.”
Dr Harty Cup final: St Joseph’s Tulla v Ardscoil Rís, Gaelic Grounds, 1pm – Saturday 5 February.
Early on in the pandemic, global health experts envisioned a nightmare scenario: Covid-19 vaccines are created, but they go almost exclusively to rich countries that can afford to buy them. People in poorer countries are left to get sick and die.
To prevent this, the experts set up an international initiative called Covax, designed to make sure every country in the world gets access to vaccines regardless of its ability to pay. In the fall of 2020, Covax set a clear goal: Buy 2 billion doses and make them available to nations in need before the end of 2021.
But we’re now nearly five months into the year, and Covax has delivered just over 68 million doses. In other words, it’s only 3.4 percent of the way to its goal.
The nightmare has become reality. Around 1.5 billion vaccine doses have been administered around the world — yet only 0.3 percent have gone to low-income countries. And in places like India and Brazil, thousands of unvaccinated people are dying every day of Covid-19, even as many Americans revel in their vaccinated status.
“People keep asking me, ‘What keeps you awake at night? The variants?’ Christ, no! It’s human behavior — the unwillingness to share!” said Bruce Aylward, a senior adviser at the World Health Organization (WHO) who works on Covax. “How do other people sleep at night? They should be so energized to fix this!”
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If the epidemiologist and his colleagues at Covax have not managed to avert global vaccine inequity, it’s not for lack of trying. They’ve gotten lifesaving doses to 124 countries from Argentina to Zambia, and they’ve pushed wealthy countries to help them do more.
“Covax has been an essential tool. I think that’s pretty indisputable,” said Kate Dodson, the vice president for global health at the UN Foundation. But, she added, “They’re struggling right now.”
So what explains Covax’s struggles? What are the biggest obstacles getting in the way?
The experts I talked to identified three main problems: Money, vaccine supply, and global willingness to share have all been too constrained. But, the experts emphasized, these are solvable problems. And there are things everyday individuals can do to help.
“The money was insufficient, and the money was late”
The WHO is one of three groups leading Covax. The other two are Gavi, a public-private partnership that spearheads immunization efforts in developing countries, and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, an international collaboration (formed as a Gates Foundation initiative after the West African Ebola epidemic) to make vaccines available quickly when outbreaks happen.
All three groups have collaborated to make Covax into a unique not-for-profit financing mechanism. It’s designed to work kind of like a mutual fund, but for vaccines. The idea was that high-income countries would pool their money to fund research and development for a diversified portfolio of vaccine candidates. That investment would up the chances that they’d land on an effective vaccine, and it would also serve to fund free vaccine doses for 92 lower-income countries that couldn’t afford to pay.
It sounded like a win-win. But for it to work as planned, enough rich countries had to buy into Covax and commit to getting their doses through the fund.
Instead, many governments made separate bilateral deals with companies like Pfizer and Moderna, locking up in contracts the vast majority of doses slated to be produced in 2021. That robbed Covax — which didn’t have much money on hand in the early stage of the pandemic — of the opportunity to buy vaccines for less wealthy countries.
“The main issue is that the money was insufficient, and the money was late,” said Amanda Glassman, director of global health policy at the Center for Global Development, a nonprofit think tank based in London and Washington, DC. “If they’d had all the money in March 2020, we’d be in a different space in terms of the delivery. There was more wiggle room in March through July of last year to reserve doses if they’d had the money in place.”
Covax was stymied in its ability to buy. And even now, it still doesn’t have the funding to buy enough vaccine doses to cover 20 percent of the population in each low-income country — the health care workers and most vulnerable groups — by the end of 2021. To achieve that, it needs to raise another $2.6 billion.
Aylward was clear that that remains Covax’s foremost obstacle. “The first thing we need is money,” he said.
You might wonder how much good it would do for Covax to have more cash on hand right now. With so many doses already locked up in contracts, would extra money get shots into arms any faster?
The experts I spoke to acknowledged that it wouldn’t enable people in low-income countries to get shots tomorrow, but it would certainly bump up the timeline. For some populations, it could mean being immunized in the third quarter of 2021 rather than the fourth; for others, it could mean the difference between early and mid-2022.
It’s crucial for Covax to get more funding now because it will need cash in hand to buy more of the vaccines that are starting to coming online, such as Novavax (an American-made vaccine) and Sinopharm (a vaccine created in China and recently approved for emergency use by the WHO). By June, Covax needs at least $1.6 billion above currently secured funding in order to lock in doses for 2021 and early 2022, a Gavi spokesperson said. Otherwise, the doses may get snatched up by wealthy countries just like they did in 2020.
“Supply is incredibly tight”
The second huge challenge facing Covax is the simple fact that vaccines and the raw materials needed to make them are still in short supply.
That’s partly because rich countries bought up a lot of the early vaccine supply, as noted above. But it’s also because the pandemic itself sometimes makes it hard to stick to a production schedule.
The main supplier to Covax is the Serum Institute of India, which produces the AstraZeneca vaccine. But with Covid-19 raging in India, the supply has been necessarily turned to domestic use. Export restrictions mean that Covax is receiving much less vaccine than expected and has had to delay its shipments to countries.
As Dodson said, “Supply is incredibly tight for Covax.”
It’s a good illustration of why we need a global plan to increase the scale and security of vaccine production.
“We need a way to — faster than it’s ever been done before, globally, in concert — work to dramatically increase the number of vaccine doses that are going to be available in 2021 and early 2022,” said Ruth Faden, a founder of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, who co-drafted the WHO’s Values Framework for vaccine allocation. “Really what you would want to see is an Operation Warp Speed at the global level.”
That won’t be an easy operation to pull off, because it’s not just a matter of building more plants with more production capacity in more countries. It’ll require coordination on a number of underlying factors — transferring technological know-how and personnel to countries in need, sending raw materials to prevent manufacturing bottlenecks, and loosening intellectual property rights. (The Biden administration’s decision to support patent waivers for Covid-19 vaccines will hopefully help with the latter.)
Aylward emphasized that it’s not enough to just scale up production — a good part of that production needs to be earmarked for Covax. As companies learn how to optimize their capacity, he wants them to give Covax the right of first refusal on any vaccine they produce in excess of their original targets.
“We need people to share”
Last but not least, Covax needs wealthy countries to share.
That can mean sharing doses that have already been delivered. The US, for instance, currently has about 73 million doses sitting in its stockpile. But ideally, wealthy countries should donate doses even before they arrive on their shores.
“We don’t want them to receive doses and then say ‘You know what, we decided we don’t want this, we’ll give this to you,’” Aylward said. Transferring doses after they’ve been delivered can be tricky because of the need to guarantee that “chain of custody” is intact — that cold storage requirements, for example, were at no point interrupted. “We need people to share their space in the queue.”
In other words, when new vaccine doses come online, rich countries should not take up all the space at the front of the line to receive them. If they’ve already contracted with the vaccine maker, their contract is essentially holding their place in line — but they can, and should, offer that place to a country in more urgent need.
The US can certainly afford to do this. By July, Duke University researchers estimate, the country will likely have at least 300 million excess doses — and that estimate is assuming that the US will retain enough doses to vaccinate the vast majority of children. In other words, every eligible or soon-to-be-eligible American could get vaccinated, and there would still be 300 million doses left over — practically enough to give an extra dose to every person in the country.
A surplus of that magnitude is so staggering that not sharing it with the world starts to look morally unjustifiable.
What’s more, Aylward said countries shouldn’t focus only on donating excess doses. If they wait until they’ve vaccinated every eligible citizen, they’ll spend several more months immunizing people who are at relatively low risk, while adults at high risk in countries like India go unvaccinated. Instead, rich countries should act more like Sweden, which recently decided to donate 1 million of its doses — one-fifth of its current supply — even though just over 30 percent of its population has received a shot.
Do you have $7? If so, Covax wants your help.
This month, the WHO Foundation launched a fundraising campaign called “Go Give One,” which urges individuals to donate $7 to buy a vaccine dose for someone in a low-income country through Covax.
“There was huge popular demand among private individuals to contribute to address this important global issue, so this campaign gave an outlet to that demand,” a Gavi spokesperson said.
Faden said that if enough people were to contribute, it could potentially make a significant difference. “If you can come up with the money — say, $7 — then of course you ought to do it,” she said. “At this point, it’s everyone’s responsibility. Everyone should be invested as a matter of obligation to global justice. Literally as a matter of duty.”
But she was clear that retail fundraising — getting small donations from many individuals — is not going to net Covax the billions of dollars it needs. That’s really a job for governments, and it requires the leaders of the world’s wealthy countries to step up.
Dodson personally donated to Go Give One and also ran a Facebook fundraiser for the campaign, which raised $1,000. “I feel really proud,” she told me. But she thinks the campaign’s main power may lie in its potential to catalyze government spending. “When governments see everyday individuals saying, ‘We care about vaccine inequity, and we’re willing to put our pocketbooks against it,’ then that can help spur more political will.”
She also believes that advocacy in this arena is underfunded, though it can move the needle in a big way — as we saw when activist groups pressured Biden to back patent waivers. Arguably, donors could have a bigger impact by donating to an advocacy group than by donating to Go Give One, though this field is so new that it’s hard to know for sure.
For donors who prefer to invest in advocacy, Dodson and Glassman both recommended three groups: Global Citizen, the ONE Campaign, and the Pandemic Action Network.
“To the extent that advocacy movements help reduce the political cost of doing the right thing and create political benefits, I think it’s a good thing,” Glassman said. “And the amounts of money at stake that they could potentially influence are large, especially in the United States.”
Aylward, for his part, is hoping that more individuals and governments will start to show concern for the world by investing in Covax. “You’ve got this beautiful machine,” he said. “Put it to work.”
Throughout the Gaza conflict, President Joe Biden has been about as supportive of Israel as its leaders could have hoped. He has issued statements supporting its “right to self-defense,” blocked UN Security Council resolutions calling for a ceasefire, and even chose to move forward with a previously approved US arms sale to Israel worth $735 million.
In short, it seems like the US-Israel alliance is as strong as ever. But beneath the surface, there are signs that the relationship isn’t what it once was. Despite Biden’s firm stance, the US and Israel may be heading for a divorce in the long run.
The most visible of these signs is the rising discontent with Israel among progressive Democrats in Congress. The left flank of the party, represented by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has been unsparingly critical of Israel — with Ocasio-Cortez and her allies in the House, like Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib (who is of Palestinian descent), calling Israel an “apartheid state.”
But even some more centrist Democrats with strong pro-Israel bona fides are taking a harder stance. Rep. Greg Meeks (NY), chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, initially called for a pause on the new arms sale; Sen. Robert Menendez (NJ), chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has suggested Israel is not taking enough care to avoid killing civilians in Gaza.
“If you don’t follow congressional statements on this stuff over time, it is really hard to explain how remarkable this is,” writes Yousef Munayyer, a nonresident fellow at the Arab Center think tank in Washington, DC.
The Democratic position on Gaza reflects a long-running process of partisan polarization of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The US-Israel alliance, which has its origins in Cold War geopolitics, has been a bipartisan endeavor for decades. But a series of factors — including the actions of specific leaders like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and deeper political trends in both countries — has created a partisan imbalance. Republicans have become more pro-Israel than ever, while Democrats are becoming more and more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.
“People are becoming increasingly aware of the indefensible human rights situation on the ground in Gaza,” Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) told me via email. “This includes a diverse coalition of progressive Jewish-Americans, Muslim-Americans and others who see our humanity as directly tied to one another.”
Historically, the cornerstone of the US-Israel alliance has been bipartisan support — both on Capitol Hill and among the American public. You need both parties to continue approving US aid to Israel in Congress; you need policy continuity in the White House to ensure unchanging US support in international forums like the UN. The more partisan Israel becomes, the weaker the alliance gets.
Unless something fundamental changes, it’s easy to see how the US-Israel alliance could continue to unravel in the long term. Biden may be the last Democratic president to give Israel a blank check during a war.
How the US and Israel became so close
The US and Israel weren’t always close allies.
When Israel (along with France and Britain) invaded Egypt in 1956, the United States condemned the Israel attack. And the US actively worked against Israel’s clandestine nuclear program for years.
Even when the US did come to support Israel, it was more about cold strategic calculation than anything else. American presidents and strategists came to see Israel as a useful tool for containing Soviet influence in the Middle East, which was significant among Arab states, and used its diplomatic and military support to weave Israel firmly into the capitalist bloc.
This strategic justification came down with the Berlin Wall. Yet US aid to Israel kept flowing after the Cold War, as did diplomatic support — propelled largely by US policy toward the Middle East and American domestic politics.
In the post-Cold War era, the US saw itself as a guarantor of regional peace and stability in the Middle East — even, and perhaps especially, when it upset that stability through actions like the invasion of Iraq. In its self-appointed role as Middle East manager, Washington cultivated alliances with some of the region’s status-quo-oriented powers — places like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, and Israel.
Moreover, every post-Cold War president through Barack Obama saw solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a priority for Middle East policy, believing (to varying degrees) that solving the conflict was both a moral imperative and important for improving regional political dynamics. America’s alliance with Israel was supposed to help, positioning the US as one of the only international brokers Israelis felt like they could trust.
But US domestic politics was equally important. Polling data shows that, for the past several decades, supporting Israel has been popular with a clear majority of American voters. Key constituencies in both parties — Jews on the Democratic side, evangelicals on the Republican side — have been especially vocal in Israel’s defense, willing to devote resources and activist demonstrations to support pro-Israel policies.
Historically, Israel’s image as “the only democracy in the Middle East” has been especially important in cementing the American pro-Israel consensus — giving a sense that America wasn’t just justified in supporting Israel, but obligated to do so in order to defend a beleaguered democracy. “It is the existence of a shared identity and transnational values that is the foundation of this relationship,” Michael Barnett, a professor at George Washington University, wrote in 1996.
But in recent years, these foundations have started to crack.
At both the elite and public level, Americans have become skeptical of the strategic wisdom of deep involvement in the Middle East. The Biden administration has sought to deemphasize US involvement in the region, reflecting the rising consensus that it’s been a quagmire distracting America from the more pressing challenges posed by a rising China. Simply put: Maintaining strong relations with Middle Eastern allies like Israel is seen as less important to America than it was in the recent past.
At the same time, the public consensus that the US should take an unconditional pro-Israel stance has weakened.
A March 2021 Gallup poll found that, for the first time in nearly 15 years of polling, a majority of Democrats favored “putting more pressure on Israel” to make compromises for peace with the Palestinians.
It’s this last trend that should particularly trouble policymakers in Jerusalem: They need Democratic support to keep the aid flowing and ensure strong diplomatic support in bodies like the UN.
But there are deep reasons behind the growing Democratic skepticism about Israel — ones that are likely to widen the divide rather than narrow it in the coming years.
Why Democrats and Israel have started to drift apart
The most significant reason for a widening gap between Israel and the Democratic Party is also the easiest to grasp: The center of Israeli politics has moved far to the right as Democrats have moved to the left.
The Israeli left’s public support plummeted in the early 2000s, after the peace process it had championed collapsed into the violence of the Second Intifada — the bloodiest conflict between Israelis and Palestinians in decades. When Benjamin Netanyahu became prime minister in 2009, he and his Likud party continued to move to the right — reflecting fundamental changes in Israel’s political center of gravity.
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The center-left Labor party, historically the dominant force in Israeli elections, now holds a mere seven of 120 seats in the Knesset (parliament). The left is so weak that, prior to the Gaza war, it was ready to agree to a deal that would hand the premiership to Naftali Bennett — a far-right firebrand who wants to annex parts of the West Bank.
Israel’s occupation of the West Bank has deepened significantly under Netanyahu, with settlements expanding at rapid rates in the past 10 years. The justification that shielded Israel from charges of operating an “apartheid state” — that the occupation was temporary, to end with the creation of an independent Palestine — has become harder to maintain.
All of these developments have undermined the traditional values-based argument for US support for Israel that has been crucial to maintaining the alliance in the post-Cold War era.
“We’ve always been for two states. Still are,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) wrote on Twitter. “The defining ‘shift’ has been that the Netanyahu government and the Republicans have effectively abandoned the idea of a viable Palestinian state.”
But it’s not only Israel that’s changed: Democrats are also considerably more progressive than they used to be.
The median Democrat is more left-wing across the board than they were even 10 years ago. And there’s some evidence that the constituencies that make up an increasingly large share of the Democratic Party — African Americans, Latinos, and younger voters — are less sympathetic to Israel than the general population. Jewish Democrats, that traditional bastion of American pro-Israel sentiment, have soured on Israel under Netanyahu: A Pew survey released in May found that nearly twice as many Jewish Democrats believe the US is “too supportive” of Israel than believe it’s “not supportive enough.”
J Street, the liberal pro-Israel lobby that supports increasing pressure on Israel to end the occupation of Palestinian territory, regularly attracts leading Democratic politicians to their annual conference. Many also boycott a similar event by AIPAC, J Street’s more powerful and more rigidly pro-Israel cousin.
Moreover, two political tendencies with pro-Palestinian bents — democratic socialism and social justice activism — have become more ideologically influential inside the party. In left-wing circles, support for Israel is often described as support for imperialism and white supremacy.
There’s a reason critics of Israel in the House like Omar have used the phrase “Palestinian lives matter” in discussing the current crisis: It’s pressing on the Democratic attachment to Israel at of one its weakest points. Democrats and Israel are just in drastically different political places, and it makes a once-natural connection much harder to sustain.
What an unraveling alliance looks like
The notion of a weakening US-Israel alliance might sound fuzzy, maybe even fanciful. How can you describe an alliance that still leads to billions of military aid every year as one under stress?
Yet a closer look at the past 10 years reveals places where the bipartisan consensus on Israel has started to crack. And much of the blame, ironically enough, can be laid on two of Israel’s most prominent advocates — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former President Donald Trump.
The two men have worked deliberately to polarize the US-Israel relationship, identifying Israel’s cause with the Republican Party’s. Their behavior was both cause and consequence of the alliance’s weakening: consequence in the sense that they were partially reacting to a perceived Democratic drift away from Israel; cause in that they significantly exacerbated said drift — which would not have happened at the same pace without them.
Netanyahu clashed with Obama repeatedly throughout their mutual time in office, frequently on the peace process and settlement construction. Their personal relationship was famously icy; one senior Obama aide once told a reporter that Netanyahu was a “chickenshit.”
Of course, allies disagree with each other on policy all the time, even bitterly: Think about the bitter spat between the United States and France in the run-up to the Iraq war. But Netanyahu escalated his feud with Obama far beyond normal disagreement, taking actions that functionally aligned the government of Israel with Obama’s domestic opponents — the Republican Party.
During the 2012 election, Netanyahu all but openly endorsed Republican Mitt Romney in his bid to unseat President Obama. In 2015, Netanyahu worked with congressional Republicans to orchestrate a speech to a joint session of Congress opposing the Iran nuclear deal — an effort to help Republicans whip votes for legislation undoing Obama’s signature foreign policy accomplishment.
From Netanyahu’s point of view, the strategy of meddling in US politics on the Republican side made sense. He thought Obama’s efforts to limit settlement growth and bargain with Iran was damaging to Israel; allying with Republicans was his best bet for countering what he saw as hostile behavior.
But at the same time, picking sides so aggressively in your ally’s domestic politics shows a lack of confidence in the alliance itself: a sense that the relationship’s health is conditional on which faction is in power. Netanyahu’s actions reflected not only specific disagreements with Obama, but a feeling that the Democratic Party as currently constituted couldn’t be trusted to safeguard Israel’s interests.
Democrats, for their part, have viewed Israel far more negatively in opinion polling after Netanyahu’s meddling than before it. If the structural trends pushing Democrats and Israel apart were a low-grade fire, the prime minister dumped gasoline on it.
“I think [rising partisanship on Israel] had a lot to do with the prime minister playing a critical role in lobbying the US Congress on the Iran deal,” Shibley Telhami, a professor at the University of Maryland who studies American attitudes toward Israel, told the Times of Israel in 2018. “You have a right-wing government in Israel, and that government is seen to have embraced the Republican Party in the US.”
During the Trump presidency, the identification of Israel with the GOP accelerated further. Netanyahu embraced Trump, going so far as to put up giant campaign posters in Israel with his face on them. Trump, for his part, publicly embraced the Israeli right — appointing a far-right ideologue ambassador to Israel, moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, leaving the Iran nuclear deal, and proposing a “peace plan” that gave the Israeli right everything it wanted.
While this may have seemed like a deepening of the US-Israel relationship, it actually served to factionalize the alliance further: to make “supporting Israel” into something that Republicans do, a position aligned with the most hated man in Democratic politics. It helped open the floodgates for the congressional criticism we’re seeing now.
“Donald Trump politicized US support of Israel,” Halie Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, told my colleague Alex Ward.
Partisanship is the most powerful force in American politics today. Once an issue becomes understood in two-party terms, partisans of each faction feel powerful psychological pressures to line up on opposite sides.
Netanyahu and Trump made conscious choices to reframe Israel in these terms, thinking that it would benefit their own political positions and advance their own policy priorities. But now we’re seeing the longer-term consequences. A Democratic Party already set up to be skeptical of an alliance with Israel is growing rapidly more skeptical of Jerusalem’s good intentions.
So far, it looks like Biden is the most significant short-term force standing in the way of this realignment. It’s not exactly clear why he’s coming down so firmly on Israel’s side, but so far the gap between him and congressional Democrats is fairly striking.
Then again, Trump’s early Israel policy was much more moderate than the right-wing position he embraced later in his term. It’s possible that, down the line, Biden will adjust to the new Democratic consensus on Israel in the way that he’s adjusted to the party’s more progressive stances on race and economics.
But even if that doesn’t happen, policies that used to get unanimous votes in Congress — approving US foreign aid to Israel, resolutions supporting Israel’s right to self-defense — will no longer sail through without controversy. Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN) introduced a bill earlier this year putting human rights conditions on US aid to Israel. It has 19 co-sponsors and has been endorsed by J Street.
When I spoke to Matt Duss, Sen. Bernie Sanders’s foreign policy adviser and a veteran Israel-Palestine policy hand, he told me that this weakening of the alliance is inevitable only “if Israel continues on the current political trajectory.” It’s Israel’s leadership that has chosen to expand the settlements and respond to Hamas rockets with such overwhelming force; it’s Israel’s prime minister who chose to align his country with the factional interests of the Republican Party.
If Israel’s leadership undoes those choices and moves to a different path, the cracks in the US-Israel alliance could plausibly be repaired.
So that’s the big question: Is Israel capable of and willing to change? Or is it really willing to sacrifice its relationship with the world’s only superpower on the altar of permanent occupation?
Weeks ago, the Indian capital ran out of space for its dead.
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New Delhi’s public parks and parking lots were converted into sites for mass cremations of Hindus, Sikhs, and Jains. Cremations are an important Hindu funeral ritual, but Indian crematoria declared that they were out of wood for pyres, and burial grounds for the city’s Muslims and Christians reached capacity.
As the current wave of India’s Covid-19 epidemic has claimed tens of thousands of lives and infected hundreds of thousands each day, aerial photographs of grounds strewn with burning logs and piles of ash have made their way to the front pages of international newspapers and spread across social media.
On roads outside overflowing hospitals, desperate people await beds for relatives dying in their arms, and the bereaved break down. Inside, photos capture patients preparing to face their fate even as health care workers go about the work of keeping them alive. Then there are the pictures of front-line workers performing final rites — lighting pyres and lowering bodies into graves — of those they don’t even know.
These smoky compositions, punctuated by PPE-adorned figures, will be the defining images of India’s coronavirus nightmare. As an art critic, my work revolves around seeing and responding to images through language. Now, I find myself at a loss for words, dwelling on banal details outside the frame — how did people get to the hospital, where are the homes they return to, how are cremation workers processing the sheer number of pyres they must light?
One feature all these photos have in common is the haunted eyes above masks, expressing the range of emotions humanity is capable of feeling, from listlessness to devastation. Then there are the chilling ones, of endless queues of body bags waiting to be attended to. For many of us, this feels familiar — to be Indian is to be always in a crowd, jostling for space in our populous nation — albeit with a macabre, tragic twist.
But even as these photographs call the world’s attention to the apocalyptic situation in India, they have triggered a backlash, one that has highlighted Western media’s past failings in covering the subcontinent and its people, framing them as poor and backward.
Photojournalists have been attacked for taking pictures of mass cremations and capitalizing on “Hindu suffering,” foreign correspondents were harassed for commenting on them, and some accounts claimed that they are proof of Western media’s “cultural insensitivity” toward Indian deaths. The thrust of much of the criticism is that by taking and distributing these images of mass funerals, the foreign press is exploiting the Indian people’s trauma and encroaching in particular on Hindu cremation rituals.
Certainly from the outside looking in, the visual evidence of the destruction wrought by Covid-19 is graphic and disquieting. Yet for many of us who are in India, close to the catastrophe, the images are stark encapsulations of our daily experience sourcing oxygen and beds for both people we love and anonymous strangers.
In the throes of firefighting, one is unaware of the extent of the horror. The photographs remedy that. The stricken eyes and body bags communicate a warning: It could be me, my relative, my friend, the neighborhood shopkeeper, the nameless lady I’d often see on my metro route. Everyone knows someone who has succumbed to the disease; sorrow is in the air, much like the virus.
Some of the criticisms are good-faith attempts to protect the dignity of the dead and their families and seek context alongside images of mass cremations. Media organizations are in the midst of a reckoning over the publication of images of death and trauma of Black and brown people, especially amid criticism of the circulation of images of police brutality against African American communities; dehumanizing images of migrants and their children; and visual coverage of war and violence in non-US countries. And both within India and in the wider diaspora, some have voiced concern that these images of mass funerals and mass grief “show India in a bad light.”
It’s important not to forget, for example, how the 2012 Delhi gang-rape case was framed in terms that suggested India was uniquely patriarchal and misogynistic, rather than one among many societies, including those in the West, where violence against women is normalized to varying degrees. There is thus in South Asia founded mistrust of European and American news media directing a patronizing and colonial gaze at our nation.
But in the case of India’s coronavirus epidemic, images from the crisis are a crucial safeguard against Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s pro-Hindu nationalist regime that seeks to hide these bodies, to hide the truth, lest its criminal neglect be exposed before the world. We have, in a short period of time, experienced periodic pogroms and other political forms of death. For many of us, these photographs bear a moral imperative to be taken and viewed.
India’s public health crisis has been fueled by the government’s mismanaged response, including ignoring scientists’ warnings of a new and more contagious Covid-19 variant, and allowing potential superspreader events such as religious festivals and election campaign rallies. Officials have gone as far as to try to discredit reports that Covid-19 cases spiked as a result.
Despite the scale of the tragedy unfolding within the country, wrote Arundhati Roy in the Guardian, Modi’s government seems mostly focused on image management, denying that the nation faces oxygen shortages, and overstating its success in quelling the virus.
Indians still do not know the full extent of the havoc wreaked by the virus because of what one expert calls a “massacre of data,” with hospitals, public officials, and even families believed to be undercounting and suppressing the number of cases and deaths. In January at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Modi boasted of launching the world’s largest vaccination program, aimed at inoculating 300 million Indians within months. As of mid-May, 140 million people have received at least one dose, but only 40 million are fully vaccinated.
The administration has also attempted to conceal the truth about its actions by falsely questioning the accuracy of the photos published in the international media and attempting to curtail journalists’ movements. In late April, the Indian government ordered Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to take down posts critical of its handling of the pandemic. (They complied.)
It has encouraged the spread of dishonest rhetoric, which frames these images and their consumption as racialized voyeurism. On the contrary, the images coming out of India are part of its democratic citizenry’s desperate and hard-won attempt to reveal the scale of the state’s negligence, despite a press that has been suppressed by the Modi administration over its seven years in power.
Arguments on social media or in opinion pieces by pro-Modi messengers that images of Hindu cremations are culturally insensitive are not based on the truth. There is a long, uncontroversial history of media coverage of Hindu cremations: the funerals of public figures like Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru were media spectacles covered in the global news media, and these pyres were photographed and filmed without protest. In most practices of caste Hinduism, there is no bar on viewing funerals (except for some problematic prohibitions against women and Dalits from accessing upper-caste crematoriums).
In fact, grief is not traditionally understood as a private emotion — until the mid-19th century, cremation sites or “shamshan ghats”were open and unpoliced. Characterizing these images as Hinduphobic or as having “mocked and exoticized” Hindu rituals is wrong; those concerned with the impression of Hinduism abroad might be better served helping to end the caste system, seen plainly in the fact that Hindu funerals involve labor by men from oppressed caste communities forced into front-line work without appropriate PPE kits.
Even if some might be advocating for the takedown of these images in good faith, others are advancing the regime’s cause by adopting the language of cultural sensitivity. Characterizing honest reportage as racism, xenophobia, and ignorance is a shrewd strategy of ideologues to shut down deserved critique of India’s current far-right government.
Given how rapidly and globally images are disseminated, these visual testimonies of India’s agony and its government’s shame are forcing the international community to pay attention in real time. If anything, the fact that the Modi government and its supporters want these images suppressed should be reason to seek them out.
Photographing and looking at images of the dead and those whom they leave behind is a complicated process with few ready answers. It must always be a careful and compassionate exercise, centering the wishes of those who’ve passed away and those who knew them best. The Indian journalists taking these photographs are deeply affected by this thankless task, and seeing the photos has been difficult for those of us for whom this nightmare is playing out in our backyards. However, viewing images of death in India is an act of empathy and solidarity during a worldwide disaster; some of us have it worse because we elected the wrong people.
I believe that in this case, the claim that these videos and photographs violate the dignity of the dead is neither morally tenable nor historically accurate. Rather, it is the safety of those still living that is at stake if the true scale of this state-enabled humanitarian crisis in India is not brought into the world’s view.
With input from Tanvi Misra.
Kamayani Sharma is a Delhi-based writer and researcher. She is a regular contributor to Artforum, Momus, the White Review and the Caravan, among others. She runs South Asia’s first independent visual culture podcast, ARTalaap.
Israel unquestionably has the military advantage in its ongoing conflict with Hamas. But in the fight to control the public narrative of the conflict, Israel’s edge seems to be slipping.
In previous rounds of conflict, the Israeli government was often able to capitalize on its widely followed official social media channels, as well as statements by leaders, to help shape the narrative in its favor, portraying itself as a nation unjustly under attack with the sole goal of defending itself.
But this time around, Palestinians speaking out against the Israeli occupation and its overwhelming military bombardment of Gaza have had far more success in telling their side of the story on social media — eroding Israel’s edge in the battle of perspectives and gaining a rapt audience in the US.
From making solidarity videos on TikTok to using Twitter to organize international protests to posting videos to Instagram showing Israeli airstrikes on Gaza, Palestinians and those around the world sympathetic to their plight have made social media a central weapon in the narrative fight against Israel. Those weapons are deployed on many fronts: using different platforms to target multiple audiences — in the region and around the world — while also using apps to coordinate actions among themselves.
The majority use it to counter the Israeli government’s claims and promote a pro-Palestinian narrative, though some take to social media to praise the actions of Hamas.
“It’s like a TikTok intifada,” said Michael Bröning, executive director of the German think tank Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung’s office in New York, using the Arabic term used to describe previous Palestinian uprisings.
Social media played a central role in past Israel-Gaza wars, where clips on YouTube and messages on Facebook and Twitter aimed to report events in real time. But the emergence of new platforms like Telegram and TikTok have allowed more — and younger — people to engage with this flare-up online. And now that social media platforms are a key delivery system for news consumption, many on the apps can experience the complexities of the region in real time, muddying the usual easy storylines.
“There is a penetration of the mainstream narrative,” said Marwa Fatafta, a Berlin-based policy analyst at Al-Shabaka, a Palestinian-focused think tank headquartered in New York City. “People are able to see with their own eyes, without being censored, what’s going on minute by minute.”
But Palestinians have also found the proliferation of social media to be a “double-edged sword,” in the words of two experts. Far-right Israeli Jewish mobs have reportedly coordinated attacks on Israeli Arabs via the messaging app Telegram, for example, and lies hyping the Palestinian “threat” have spread wildly on WhatsApp. “Palestinians are coming, parents protect your children,” read one message.
“We’re getting more unfiltered perspectives from the Israeli side,” said Emerson Brooking, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council think tank in Washington, DC, and co-author of LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media. The ultimate result is that “it’s not two sides presenting their perspectives. It’s much messier and much less centralized than it was before.”
That messiness has allowed Palestinian voices and their stories to emerge during the crisis while weakening the usual monopoly the Israeli government has on messaging. It’s an asset Palestinians don’t want to lose.
“We’re the weak ones. Social media — our cameras and our videos — is one of the only means that we have. They have the weapons and the laws and the infrastructure,” said Inès Abdel Razek, advocacy director for the Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy. “Palestinians just want to explain why this is happening and contextualize.”
Palestinians are winning the online war against the Israeli government
The online activism of Mohammed El-Kurd, whose family in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah is slated for eviction from their home by right-wing Israeli settler organizations, made him an instant celebrity. A poet, he’s used his facility with words and social media — namely Instagram — to make his case against Israeli occupation and for the residents of his area.
Now, news organizations around the world ask him for interviews, providing him a platform to make his case — and that of Palestinians more broadly.
“It’s not really an eviction, it’s forced ethnic displacement, to be accurate, because an eviction implies legal authority,” he told CNN last week, describing the attempt to evict his family from their home in Sheikh Jarrah. “While the Israeli occupation has no legitimate jurisdiction over the eastern parts of occupied Jerusalem under international law, it also implies the presence of a landlord.”
The day after his interview, Israeli forces removed him from Sheikh Jarrah — a moment captured on social media.
The rancor from Israeli authorities may have stemmed from the fact that El-Kurd managed to distill the Palestinian position on a sensitive issue in American media, where the Palestinian plight is heard less often than the Israeli one.
Meanwhile, Palestinians in Gaza keep uploading videos showing their experience under bombardment. One TikTok video from last week, which has been “liked” over 4 million times, purportedly shows Gazans running after an airstrike. Another popular TikTok video featured images of crying Palestinian children and the destruction of a high-rise building after an Israeli attack.
It’s not just images of suffering that dominate Palestinian-focused TikTok, though. Beauty bloggers like Miryam Beauty are posting videos in which they paint their face the colors of the Palestinian flag, a way to show support for that cause without having to say a word.
These uploads allow Palestinians battling with police in East Jerusalem, withstanding Israel’s attacks in Gaza, and watching the conflict from afar to speak with a common voice. “Palestinian sentiment has been awakened and unified,” said Fatafta. “There’s a new sense of identity and new sense of understanding and solidarity with Palestinians.”
There’s another reason for the Palestinian success online, American University’s Thomas Zeitzoff told me, namely that their plight against state violence reminds many in the US of the Black Lives Matter movement. That’s led progressives in Congress, for example, to explicitly link what they’re seeing online to the fight for racial justice at home.
“We must recognize that Palestinian rights matter. Palestinian lives matter,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) wrote last week in the New York Times.
Celebrities, who tend to avoid sensitive global conflicts, have also waded in. Two of them are Gigi and Bella Hadid, supermodels whose father is Palestinian. Gigi posted to her more than 66 million Instagram followers last week that “You cannot pick & choose whose human rights matter more.”
It seems that celebrities and politicians lifting Palestinian voices have brought the issue into the mainstream. The US fashion Instagram account @diet_prada posted a cartoon asking its nearly 3 million followers to “Stand with the oppressed” — and calling Israelis the “oppressors.”
Of course, that narrative still has to compete with pro-Israel content on social media platforms. The problem for Israel is that, when it comes to official government accounts, at least, attempts to sway the conversation to the pro-Israel side often ending up doing just the opposite.
Israel’s social media game is weak right now
Israeli government accounts on Twitter, Instagram, and elsewhere, which have millions of followers, make it easy for the official line to reach an audience. But that’s not always a good thing.
Take this thread post from the state of Israel’s verified Twitter account, which includes rows and rows of nothing but rocket emojis — 12 full tweets’ worth.
Once you get to the bottom of the thread, it becomes clear that the emojis are meant to represent all the rockets Hamas has indiscriminately launched into Israel, threatening and killing the nation’s citizens.
But in the midst of a conflict that has also seen an overwhelming Israeli aerial bombardment of Gaza, seeing the country’s official Twitter account tweeting nothing but rows and rows of what at quick glance can also look an awful lot like warplanes struck the wrong chord with many on social media, including some who perhaps didn’t bother to scroll all the way down to the tweet explaining the thread.
Others simply objected to what seemed like a blatant attempt to focus solely on Hamas’s actions devoid of any context. Some of the responses were brutal:
It was far from the first time an official Israeli account stepped in it.
An Instagram post from the Israel Defense Forces’ official account showed two stacked photos of a high-rise building in Gaza. The first, labeled “Before” in Hebrew, showed the building standing tall. The second, labeled “After,” showed the building as a pile of rubble. The text accompanying the images extolled the IDF’s “significant achievement” of destroying yet another multi-story tower in Gaza, which it said was “used by terrorist organizations.”
Here, again, though some supporters praised the post, many people were disgusted by the bragging tone.
“[E]very time i think there’s a limit to the sheer joy someone can take in human suffering, the IDF social media manager bursts through,” one Twitter user wrote.
And then there’s Gal Gadot, the Israeli actress famous for portraying Wonder Woman, who tweeted that while “Israel deserves to live as a free and safe nation, Our neighbors deserve the same.”
Gadot disabled comments on the tweet for all the vitriol she received, with some claiming the former Israeli military soldier was putting out “propaganda” for her country. Still, this was a far more measured comment than what she wrote in 2014 during the last time the Israeli government fought against Hamas.
“I am sending my love and prayers to my fellow Israeli citizens,” she wrote on her official Facebook page at the time. “Especially to all the boys and girls who are risking their lives protecting my country against the horrific acts conducted by Hamas, who are hiding like cowards behind women and children.”
So even when celebrities weigh in or official social media account take a more straightforward approach and attempt to show the plight of Israeli citizens living under constant rocket attack from Hamas, the results often fail to stir the same level of sympathy and outrage simply because Israel’s overwhelming offensive and defensive military capabilities — including its powerful Iron Dome system, which intercepts a huge percentage (though not all) of the rockets Hamas fires — creates a vast disparity in the number of deaths and injuries suffered on both sides.
As of Thursday, the death toll was over 200 for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank and over 10 in Israel.
Official social media accounts of governments everywhere often struggle to come across as genuine or humorous or anything but stiff, scripted propaganda. But when you’re the occupying power with a staggeringly powerful military in the middle of a bloody war where the bulk of the casualties are on the other side, it’s hard to come across as the good guy, even if there is genuine suffering on your side, too.
Israel is at least doing better with Western and English-speaking social media users than Hamas is. Phillip Smyth, a Soref fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy in Washington, DC, told me Hamas doesn’t target that audience online. “A lot of their social media is aimed internally,” he said, though the militant group occasionally makes videos to taunt Israel. “There’s a constant propaganda stream that Hamas runs.”
In part by design, then, Hamas’s social media efforts aren’t reaching certain Palestinians following the conflict. “I don’t see that Hamas is using social media effectively because it’s not getting to me,” said Dana El Kurd, an assistant professor at the Doha Institute of Graduate Studies in Qatar. “It’s just not out there, and I consider myself pretty plugged in.”
Still, Israel struggles now to outcompete everyday Palestinians on social media, despite the weakness of Hamas.
It’s why few experts believe the Israeli government’s attempts to influence the narrative in their favor will prove more impactful than what Palestinians are saying online. “It’s not an equal war,” Gabriel Weimann, a professor of communication at Haifa University in Israel, told the BBC on Saturday. “From the Israeli side you see a counter flow, which I must say is less powerful, not organized at all, and if you ask me less persuasive.”
“Maybe because in Israel nobody thought that TikTok would be a powerful or important platform,” he continued.
Put together, experts I spoke to are unanimous that 2021 is the year Palestinians proved they could compete with the Israeli government in the narrative battle.
But if Palestinians taste victory, it’s certainly not as sweet as could be.
The Palestinian rise on social media is contested by Israelis
While Palestinians can use social media for their purposes, so can everyday Israelis — and that’s not always great for the Palestinian movement.
Using Facebook and Telegram, Israeli Jewish mobs have reportedly organized violent campaigns against Israeli Arabs. Some groups succeeded, including a mob last week vandalizing Arab-owned property in the city of Bat Yam before beating up a driver who’s believed to be Arab. “We’re watching a lynching in real time,” a reporter watching the scene unfold said off camera. “There are no police here.”
Importantly, there are also incidents of Israeli Arab mobs targeting Israeli Jews in multiple cities, including beating a man in his 30s in Acre into a life-threatening condition.
These and other instances show that certain social media platforms can “serve as a quasi NextDoor app for communal violence,” said American University’s Zeitzoff. They’re also exposing the deep divisions within Israeli society.
There’s also a misinformation problem.
Prominent Israeli officials and figures, including a spokesperson for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, shared a 28-second video on Twitter and claimed it showed Palestinian militants shooting rockets at Israelis from a civilian area. But that video was actually from 2018, and the militants were likely in either Syria or Libya, not Gaza.
However, Arieh Kovler, an Israel-based political analyst who studies misinformation, told me he’s not sure Israeli leaders are purposely misleading their audiences. He said everyone’s too busy to check the veracity of the videos they’re sharing — there’s a war going on, after all. What’s more, people often share videos that, for them, represent a truth they believe.
Kovler mimicked that thought process: Maybe Hamas isn’t shooting rockets from within a crowded population center, but it’s seems like something they’d do, so I’ll share the video anyway.
Kovler also doesn’t think the misinformation problem is as bad as portrayed. He runs a 90,000-person Facebook group called “Secret Jerusalem” where residents and tourists can post details about the city. Kovler said he’s rarely had to remove misinformation on his page relating to the current conflict, noting he had to do so much more often when members posted anti-vaccination content during the pandemic.
Still, the fact that everyday Israelis can coordinate against Palestinians, share their own views, and spread misinformation is just one challenge facing Palestinians in the narrative fight online.
And some of the posts from nongovernmental pro-Israel accounts can be quite compelling. One particularly striking TikTok purports to show an Israeli soldier protecting a Palestinian woman from rocks thrown by other Palestinians in the West Bank city of Hebron.
Still, most experts see Israel as likely to continue losing the narrative war. “This more complex information environment will work to Israel’s detriment,” said Brooking, the Atlantic Council fellow.
Of course, the narrative victory means very little if it doesn’t stop Israeli bombs from falling.
Aja Romano and Rebecca Jennings contributed to this report.
With the ceasefire came relief. The shelling had stopped. People were visiting each other, feeling happy, Salwa Tibi, a Gaza program representative for CARE International, said.
Earlier this week, Tibi hadn’t been sure if she would see the next morning, or the morning after that, so heavy was the bombardment from Israeli airstrikes. This week, Tibi’s daughter, pregnant for the first time, gave birth in the hospital, Tibi’s granddaughter, Naya, entering the world to the sound of shelling for hours and hours.
The Egypt-brokered ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, the Islamic militant group that controls Gaza, ended the immediate violence, the most pressing need for a territory that had been besieged by Israeli airstrikes for 11 days.
Humanitarian aid groups in Gaza had been struggling to respond to a ballooning emergency. Fuel, food, water, and medicine are all scarce in Gaza. Israeli airstrikes have blown up roads and other critical infrastructure. And the violence had prevented humanitarian groups and workers from being able to reach the people most in need.
Gaza is no longer an active war zone, but the emergency hasn’t fully abated. Israeli airstrikes have toppled high-rise buildings and turned homes and apartments to rubble. Israel said it was targeting Hamas and its networks, including rocket launchers and tunnels, but those targets are often intertwined with schools, clinics, and residential buildings.
According to Gaza’s Ministry of Public Works and Housing, before the ceasefire, about 230 buildings containing more than 991 housing and commercial units were destroyed, with hundreds more severely damaged. More than 72,000 people were displaced in the past week, and about 56,000 — about half of whom were children — sought shelter in schools run by the United Nations Refugee and Works Agency (UNRWA).
Some of those people are expected to start returning to their homes now that the fighting has halted. But clean drinking water remains scarce because of damage to some of Gaza’s water and sanitation facilities, and because of a lack of fuel to run these systems. About 800,000 people don’t have ready access to safe piped water, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination for Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
Electricity is also in short supply; during the bombardment, electricity would come on for just a few hours a day. Those shortages also affected hospitals, which have been relying on generators for incubators, surgeries, and treatment of injured patients. Medical supplies and equipment are stretched.
That is taxing a health care system already strained by the pandemic, which must now treat the coronavirus and the traumas of war. There are also increasing fears of another coronavirus spike, because the violence forced some to crowded shelters and halted the territory’s vaccination campaign.
International aid organizations and humanitarian groups are rushing to meet this need — and to prepare for the rebuilding process.
The reality of the past two weeks is also settling in. Though Israeli officials repeatedly said they sought to minimize civilian casualties, the death toll is stark: more than 240 Palestinians killed, including more than 60 children, according to the Hamas-affiliated Gaza Health Ministry. More than 6,700 have been wounded, according to the World Health Organization.
“The bombs aren’t dropping, and everyone’s relieved to get on with their lives,” Jack Byrne, Palestine country director for Anera, an organization that works with Palestinian and other refugees in the region, said.
“But the reality of what happened, of the people who died, is hitting people now after the relief of this stopping,” he added.
Gaza has been pushed to the brink
About 2 million Palestinians live in the Gaza Strip, a tiny strip of land just 140 square miles that’s wedged between Israel and the Mediterranean Sea. It’s one of the most tightly populated places on the planet.
Since the Islamist militant group Hamas seized control of Gaza in 2007, Israel has imposed a blockade of the flow of commercial goods into the territory that has decimated the economy and denied Palestinians basic necessities. For this reason, Gaza is often described as an “open air prison.”
The periodic outbreak of war between Hamas and Israel has exacerbated the crisis. Israel has launched several military operations in Gaza, including an air campaign and ground invasion in late 2008 and early 2009, a major bombing campaign in 2012, and another air/ground assault in the summer of 2014.
Gaza, then, has been stuck in a state of crisis, which this latest round of fighting made more acute. Many international, regional, and local NGOs and UN-funded agencies, like UNICEF and UNRWA, a longstanding agency that works with Palestinians refugees in Gaza and the region, maintain a permanent presence, providing economic development; agriculture; and women, youth, and mental health programs, among many others.
Now, for most, the mission has shifted to trying to meet the most urgent needs of the people in Gaza.
The truce between Israel and Hamas has started to allow for the increased flow of goods, which had slowed during the fighting because of border closures.
The conflict had also complicated the ability to deliver aid at all, or fully assess what was happening on the ground. Hozayfa Yazji, area manager in Gaza for the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), who spoke to me before the ceasefire, said the insecurity had left “no way to assess the situation, to find a secure road for our humanitarian workers so they can do the work.”
The ceasefire has removed the biggest obstacle to delivering aid. Food, first-aid kits, medicines, and fuel are now arriving mostly unimpeded. But now groups are rushing to deliver aid as soon as possible, and to make sure they can find the families who are the most in need.
Gaza’s health care system is also being tested. It was already overstretched before the outbreak of fighting, because of the wear and tear of the 14-year blockade and because the territory had just experienced a Covid-19 surge.
Aid workers said medical facilities lacked basic supplies and equipment, like blood bags. Two prominent doctors — the head of internal medicine at Al-Shifa Hospital, who trained other doctors, and a neurologist — were killed in airstrikes last week.
According to the World Health Organization, 19 health facilities have been damaged in the Gaza Strip. A primary health care clinic in northern Gaza was destroyed, and an Israeli airstrike damaged a Doctors Without Borders (MSF) trauma and burns care clinic last weekend. Nobody at the clinic was hurt, but according to MSF, the bomb tore down the room where the clinic sterilizes its medical equipment. The clinic, which normally serves about 1,500 patients a year, had to close.
Natalie Thurtle, MSF medical coordinator in the Palestinian territories, said the closure meant that less serious injuries would have to be offloaded to hospitals, which also had to deal with more critical injuries, including people wounded by airstrikes.
Concerns about a resurgence of coronavirus are also increasing. A blast destroyed Gaza’s only lab to process an already limited number of Covid-19 tests. With tens of thousands displaced, many sought safety in crowded schools or shelters, or moved in with other family members, making social distancing impossible.
The violence also interrupted Gaza’s small Covid-19 vaccination campaign. The World Health Organization is sending about 10,000 doses of China’s Sinopharm vaccine. But even with that incoming aid, many humanitarian workers fear the chaos and confusion and the still precarious position Gaza is in may give Covid-19 a chance to resurge.
A ceasefire will help critical aid get through. But the damage is already done.
An end to the fighting is the first step, but it won’t fully stem the crisis already underway. The humanitarian crisis persists.
“The population of Gaza is not going to be able to recover easily from this,” MSF’s Thurtle told me.
Tens of thousands of Palestinians have lost their homes; critical infrastructure, already fragile, has to be rebuilt. These are also just the visible signs of a trauma Gaza recently went through, and has before, multiple times.
And humanitarian groups said another generation in Gaza will now be traumatized by war. More than 40 schools were damaged during the bombardment, according to OCHA. The NRC was already providing psychosocial support to about 75,000 kids between ages 5 and 15.
Of the dozens of children killed in Gaza, at least 11 were already involved in their programs, some of them siblings. Ivan Karakashian, Palestine advocacy chief for the Norwegian Refugee Council, told me the NRC will now provide emergency education and mental health support to kids who are currently in shelters or staying with host families.
“Children have been suffering terribly after 12 years of closures and four armed conflicts,” Damian Rance, from UNICEF’s Palestine office, said. “And really, what we need to do is allow a reprieve and some respite, so we can at least pick up the pieces and try and rebuild.”
There is desperate need, but there is also a sense of déjà vu: Gaza has been here before. The truce is just a temporary fix. Without resolving the underlying crisis, every time there’s a cycle of hostilities, Karakashian said, “we just seem to be building and rebuilding and rebuilding again.”
The economic situation, always precarious, will crack even more. The moment they make progress, Yazji told me, something happens, and you have to go back and reconstruct all that work, everything again from scratch.
“We will start doing our work again and to start to rebuild again, to support the kids the children and their teachers, their parents — and then something new happens,” Yazji said.
The ceasefire announced Thursday between Israel and Hamas will hopefully end the worst of the violence that in the course of 11 days killed well over 200 people, the vast majority of them Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
In the narrowest sense, Hamas and Israel have both accomplished their immediate goals. Hamas got to portray itself as the defender of the Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem, where much of the unrest began in recent weeks, and prove its capacity to hit most of Israel with its rockets. Israel, meanwhile, can say it has degraded Hamas’s military capabilities, in particular the underground network of tunnels from which it operates.
Yet the ceasefire does nothing to address the underlying conditions that have fueled the decade-and-a-half standoff between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, nor the issues that sparked this latest round of fighting.
Living conditions in Gaza, long grim, will continue to deteriorate absent a dramatic change to the blockade that restricts most freedom of movement and goods; it has been in place in its current form, imposed by Israel and Egypt, since 2006.
Beyond Gaza, Palestinians continue to face a deeply fragmented, restricted political situation. Those in the West Bank live under a patchwork of authorities — the Palestinian Authority in urban enclaves, a mixed regime in other populated areas, and direct Israeli military control in about 60 percent of the territory where Israeli settlers also live.
In East Jerusalem, Palestinians are legal residents of the city — which Israel considers united under its sovereignty — but generally lack full citizenship. Inside Israel, Palestinian citizens, who make up about 21 percent of the country’s population, face structural inequalities and political marginalization.
And Israel, whose civilians remain under the threat of Hamas rockets and fearful of the group’s advances in weaponry, is no less likely to respond harshly in the future to rocket fire than it was at the beginning of May. The vast majority of Israelis view Hamas as an unrepentant enemy with no intention of pursuing peace with Israel, and believe it would use any easing of the blockade to further arm itself and threaten Israeli civilians.
With these conditions still in place, the series of events that led to this latest flare-up, though extreme, could easily repeat itself in some variation in the future.
It’s therefore worth taking a closer look at those specific events, and the conditions that produced them, in order to understand where the conflict might go after the ceasefire, and what the prospects are for some kind of resolution to the seemingly endless cycle of violence.
Three Jerusalem flashpoints converge
The city of Jerusalem has for decades been a major focal point of the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and both Israelis and Palestinians claim it as their capital.
But three specific sites in and around the old city of Jerusalem emerged as flashpoints in the weeks leading up to the recent outbreak of hostilities: Sheikh Jarrah, a neighborhood in East Jerusalem; the Damascus Gate, a northern entrance in the wall of the old city; and al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam’s third-holiest site, located on what is known as Haram al-Sharif (the Noble Sanctuary) to Muslims and to Jews as the Temple Mount (Har HaBayit), the site of the biblical Jewish temples.
Sheikh Jarrah
Sheikh Jarrah is an East Jerusalem neighborhood located just outside the old city that for weeks has been the site of mass demonstrations by Palestinians protesting the imminent evictions of six Arab families from their homes by Israeli courts, to make way for Jewish activists who claim ownership of the land.
The homes in question were built by the Jordanian government in the 1950s for Palestinian refugees from Israel, after Jewish residents fled the neighborhood during the 1948 war and found refuge in Israel.
Israeli law provides Jewish Israelis the chance to reclaim property lost during that conflict — including in Sheikh Jarrah. But it offers no reciprocal right to Palestinians, including Palestinian citizens of Israel, who lost their homes. In general, Israeli authorities and right-wing NGOs have been working for years to change the demographic balance of the city in favor of Jewish Israelis.
Aryeh King, a far-right activist who is currently deputy mayor of Jerusalem, told the New York Times last week that installing “layers of Jews” throughout East Jerusalem is specifically aimed at making its division impossible. “If we will not be in big numbers and if we will not be at the right places in strategic areas in East Jerusalem,” he said, then future peace negotiators “will try to divide Jerusalem and to give part of Jerusalem to our enemy.”
Naturally, the Palestinians who have lived there since the 1950s strongly oppose these attempts to evict them. The Sheikh Jarrah case has gone all the way to the Israeli Supreme Court, which was originally scheduled to announce its ruling on May 10.
That these looming evictions could spark wider unrest was entirely foreseeable. On May 4, Daniel Seidemann observed on Twitter that the two “radioactive” issues of Jerusalem and displacement, which are combined in Sheikh Jarrah, “go to the core of Palestinians and Israelis identity,” and warned they could prove explosive.
And sure enough, they did.
To avoid further inflaming the situation, the Supreme Court delayed its ruling the day before it was scheduled, but by that point it was too late. Demonstrations in Sheikh Jarrah already included violent clashes with police and extreme right-wing Israeli activists had come to provoke the clashes further.
Damascus Gate
Meanwhile, Damascus Gate, at the northern end of the old city, also became the site of recurrent protests and police crackdowns in recent weeks. During the month of Ramadan, Muslims in Jerusalem often gather on the steps surrounding the Damascus Gate plaza in the evenings as they break their fast.
But Israeli police limited such gatherings this year for fear of unrest, erecting barriers on the steps to prevent large gatherings. Many came anyway, and on successive nights throughout Ramadan, Israeli police drove them away using stun grenades and other heavy-handed tactics. The police then made an about-face, removing the barriers, but the images of ongoing clashes had already fueled tensions.
Al-Aqsa Mosque
The tension reached its apex in and around al-Aqsa Mosque. Starting in particular during Laylat al-Qadr, one of the holiest nights of Ramadan, and increasing in the following two days, Palestinian demonstrations there had joined those in Sheikh Jarrah and Damascus Gate, and amassed rocks and other simple projectiles in the mosque, in part in preparation for expected confrontations with right-wing Jewish activists who were scheduled to visit Temple Mount.
Israeli police, in a remarkable move — seen by many Israelis as an astounding error and by many Palestinians as a deliberate provocation — entered the mosque itself, during Ramadan, throwing stun grenades and making arrests. More than 200 Palestinians were reportedly injured along with 17 Israeli police officers, in images that reverberated across the Muslim world.
On their own, the Sheikh Jarrah evictions touched on fundamental Palestinian fears, evoking the legacy of the Nakba, the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the 1948 war.
Combined with the simmering tensions fueled by the Damascus Gate crackdowns and then images of a violent police raid on al-Aqsa, a central religious and national symbol, Palestinians across the West Bank, Jerusalem, Israel, and Gaza shared a sense of national and religious outrage.
And then Hamas got involved.
Unrest in Jerusalem turns into a war in Gaza
On the evening of May 10, Hamas issued an ultimatum to Israel to withdraw, by 6 pm, all police from Haram al-Sharif. This was a brazen move, meant as a show of force toward its far stronger enemy. And just after 6 pm, Hamas followed through on its threat, launching six rockets toward Jerusalem.
Up to that point, the younger, grassroots demonstrators in Jerusalem had dominated events, with the main Palestinian political factions — Fatah, the secular party that, through the Palestinian Authority, governs enclaves in the West Bank (though Israel remains in control of most of the territory) and Hamas — noticeably absent.
By launching these rockets, Hamas placed itself back at the center of events, attempting to co-opt Palestinians’ anger and portray itself as the defender of al-Aqsa, a Muslim symbol that Hamas, an Islamist movement, is keen to highlight.
Hamas’s rivalry with Fatah may have also played a role here. In January, the Palestinian Authority announced it would hold elections this summer for the first time since 2006. These would have included both Fatah, led by PA President Mahmoud Abbas, and Hamas, as well as other smaller Palestinian factions.
But on April 26, Abbas, fearing he would lose, canceled the elections. That left Hamas no political process through which it could gain power in the West Bank, and may have pushed it to seek other means to capture attention on the Palestinian national stage, showing its relevance and the irrelevance of Fatah.
Israel then responded to those rockets with more than 100 airstrikes on Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (another Islamist militant group active in Gaza) targets. Twenty-four Palestinians were killed, including nine children, though Israel claims that six of the children were killed by rockets fired by Palestinian Islamic Jihad that fell short of their target.
The following night, Hamas surprised Israel with its ability to launch large numbers of rockets to far greater effective range than in the past, putting most of the Israeli population under fire. A few rockets got through Israel’s Iron Dome defense system and hit Israeli cities.
The Israeli response was been massive and overwhelming, killing more than 200 Palestinians, including many civilians and more than two dozen children, in Gaza, where residents have little refuge; 13 Israelis were killed by rockets and missiles fired from Gaza.
This violence all takes place against the backdrop of a longer conflict that has seethed between Israel and Hamas.
In 2005, Israel withdrew its troops and settlers from the Gaza Strip, as part of its “Disengagement” from Gaza and the Northern West Bank. Hamas subsequently won the Palestinian elections in 2006 and took sole control of the Gaza Strip in 2007, expelling forces of the Fateh-led Palestinian Authority. Israel placed intense restrictions on the movement of people and goods in and out of the territory, and Egypt, which borders Gaza from the south, followed suit.
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Since then, three devastating wars between Israel and Hamas and the crushing blockade have left Gaza in a state of deep humanitarian crisis (for more on the situation in Gaza, see this report we co-authored with Hady Amr and Ilan Goldenberg in 2018). The crisis was deepened further this year by the coronavirus pandemic.
The past year has seen efforts to improve the economic situation, especially in the energy sector, with support from the Palestinian Authority and Qatar, and with Israel’s and Hamas’s tacit cooperation, but the humanitarian situation and the prospects for about 2 million Gazans remained very grim even before the latest fighting began.
None of this will be solved by the ceasefire.
What happens now?
Recent weeks have blurred the lines used for decades to delineate this conflict.
Some aspects of the violence are horrifyingly familiar, of course: This is the fourth major conflict between Israel and Hamas since 2006, with Israeli strikes causing mass devastation in Gaza each time.
But in Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Israel itself, Palestinians who have long been divided by their physical geography and by the specific circumstances experienced in those different places are mobilizing in ways not seen in decades, including in a general strike on Tuesday that took place across all these territories.
The international perception of Israel’s role in this violence has also shifted, as solidarity with Palestinians grows among Democratic leaders and constituencies in the United States.
These changes mark a departure from previous conflicts, but they do not, in and of themselves, alter the fundamental dynamics between the main players.
Hamas remains entrenched in the Gaza Strip, in full control of the area but with little prospect of extending its power to the West Bank. Israel remains adamant, and is even emboldened, in its desire to block Hamas’s ability to arm itself — meaning that its blockade of the Gaza Strip will likely continue. And Palestinians continue to face varied forms of political fragmentation and discrimination in Jerusalem, in the West Bank, and within Israel, though in very different ways.
So while the fire may cease, the underlying conditions that sparked it remain unsolved.
There are no easy fixes in the short term, but a lot can still be done. The Israel-Hamas stalemate is deeply entrenched, but as we argued with colleagues in 2018, there is a chance to change it, modestly but meaningfully, through tacit understandings among Israel, the PA, and Hamas, with support from the US, Israel, Egypt, and the UN Special Representative in Jerusalem.
The broader context, detailed above, would require much more: a real shift of Israeli policy on the Palestinian issue writ large, and a Palestinian leadership able and willing to put its own affairs in order and to deal with Israel productively.
Kevin Huggard is a senior research assistant at the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. Natan Sachs is the director of the center.