Notes from Zoe Marie Bel

It is my belief that most Israelis and most Palestinians do not want to be "enemies" or for atrocities to befall each other's children. I wrote this poem because birds can move between worlds and express themselves there with an ease that humans cannot. So here I send out a bird, both literally in the lines of this poem and figuratively in the act of writing them, to say what I really, really wish were being said more loudly throughout this conflict. I wish for Palestine's children everything I wish for my own.
 

 

Additional notes from Zoe Marie Bel at December 3rd 2023

Note upfront on the distinction between Hamas and the Gazan population

The thoughts below ('Note added on December 2nd') refer to the civilian population of Gaza. They do not refer to Hamas, the terrorist organization presently governing Gaza, an organization whose hatred of Israel is part of its very DNA. Let me be clear that we don't owe terrorists any consideration in our choices.

Unfortunately, in water-cooler conversations about this conflict, I keep hearing claims that "all Palestinians support Hamas", "Gazans voted for Hamas, therefore are complicit", or "sympathy with Palestinians is sympathy with terrorists". These claims are never accompanied by evidence (for example, numbers showing that Hamas sympathizers - let alone Hamas fighters - comprise a majority of the Gazan population) or by legal principles that are real and not imagined (for example, the principle that if a civilian emotionally supports our enemy, our responsibility to protect that civilian in wartime is thereby annulled. That is decidedly not real.)

I do have facts, so let me share them here:

• In 2006 Hamas triumphed in legislative elections in Gaza thanks to a plurality, not a majority, of voters. (Source.) Plain English: they received 44% of the vote, which was only 3% more than the second-ranking party, Fatah (which renounced terrorism in 1988, and has not been classed as a terrorist group by the United States since that year: source). A year later, after a violent rift with Fatah and the West Bank–based Palestinian Authority, Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip. (Source.) With Hamas refusing to participate in the electoral process, there has been no election in Gaza ever since. Summary: A nudge toward power from a minority of voters, then control violently seized and not relinquished. That cannot reasonably be called the will of the people.
• We are obliged under international law (specifically, the 'Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War') to protect the civilians of a population we are attacking. That's not 'civilans who are rooting for us', or 'civilians whose views we approve of', etc., etc. - that's civilians, period. This is a legal principle of enormous merit that we should proudly defend, given that a civilian does not - and never should - become a combatant through their opinion alone. Otherwise, every person in front of their TV whooping support for one side or another thereby becomes a soldier over whose conduct and demise martial law applies. That's absurd and dystopian. In fact, the 'Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War' is clear, in Article 5, on when a civilian shall lose entitlement to protection under this Convention. (Note: Loss of entitlement refers only to that "individual protected person"; nothing whatsoever negates civilian rights collectively: "No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited." - Article 33) An individual person loses entitlement to protection, states Article 5, through "activities hostile to the security of the State" (my italics). We can get into a separate debate about what each of the words means - and who decides - but the important one for the purposes of these notes is activities. We do not inflict violence on people for what they think. A view is not an activity. Nor is expressing it non-violently. Cheering in the street at atrocities Hamas has committed is not to participate in those atrocities. Repugnant? Utterly. Removes a civilian's right to protection in wartime? Absolutely not. ("Without prejudice to the provisions relating to their state of health, age and sex, all protected persons shall be treated with the same consideration by the Party to the conflict in whose power they are, without any adverse distinction based, in particular, on race, religion or political opinion." - Article 27) Actions alone determine whether a civilian may reasonably be viewed as a combatant. Summary: Even if public opinion in Gaza were strongly supportive of Hamas, that does not in itself negate the protection of its civilians demanded by international law. (Let me express this point another way: Perception is not permission. Imagine what kind of world this would be if we were legally entitled to kill those we think want us dead, regardless of their actions.)
• With those principles stated, and with their view of Hamas duly recognized as irrelevant to their rights under international law: there is no evidence that a majority of the Gazan population support Hamas. In fact, polls steadfastly show the opposite, including this one in July 2023 from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. That poll reports, "the majority of Gazans (70%) supported a proposal of the PA [Palestinian Authority] sending 'officials and security officers to Gaza to take over the administration there, with Hamas giving up separate armed units,' including 47% who strongly agreed. Nor is this a new view — this proposal has had majority support in Gaza since first polled by The Washington Institute in 2014." Summary: It is verifiably false to claim that most Gazans and/or Palestinians support Hamas.

In other words: "The vast majority of Palestinians are not Hamas. Hamas does not represent the Palestinian people." President Biden said that. It is both an offense against truth and an offense against human welfare to conflate Hamas with the Gazan or Palestinian population.
 

Note added on December 2nd

Wouldn't it be tragic if, for all that we hear about the hate carried by one side toward the other in this conflict (and in particular carried by Palestinians toward Israel), it turned out that that hatred were more fictional than real? What if that hatred were misinformation amplified by those on both sides who benefit from it? And the rest of us, not knowing any better and fearful for ourselves and our families, passed it along as fact?

I write this in the tentative glow of these lines I encountered in my reading this week:

"The 2006 election, in which just 191,000 Gazans (8.3% of today's population) cast a ballot in favor of Hamas, is often touted as proof that Gaza's population supports terrorism. Lesser known is that exit polling showed that 83% of voters in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem supported peace with Israel, and 75% believed Hamas should change its policy toward Israel." (Source.)

Would you have guessed that? I wouldn't. Not from the number of times I've heard tell that Palestine's animosity for Israel is all-consuming and inexorable. Sixteen years have passed since those exit polls, and perhaps you will argue that the hostility alleged to smolder in the Gazan population has set in throughout those years and is now much closer to the scale reported. (Even here, though, the evidence I have found is not on your side. For example, in The Washington Institute for Near East Policy poll of July 2023 that I have already cited, "half (50%) [of respondents] agreed with the following proposal: 'Hamas should stop calling for Israel’s destruction, and instead accept a permanent two-state solution based on the 1967 borders.' That's considerably less than the 75% of 2006, and is neither a majority nor a minority. But no one can reasonably call that evidence of all-consuming, inexorable hostility toward Israel.)

Here is what I know. Any and all contemplation of Gaza must be contextualized in the fact that almost half (47.3%) of its population today are children (source). So whatever polls do or might say, and whatever significance you personally hold to a vote held 16 years ago, almost one in every two Gazans are not represented in those numbers. Let's take a minute to remember why we don't include the feelings of children in our measures of a population's position: because they're still figuring things out. And, whether they admit it or not (teenagers, eh?), they're still looking to us to help them do that.

And so I say, louder and more urgently than ever before: It is my belief that most Israelis and most Palestinians do not want to be "enemies" or for atrocities to befall each other's children. It strikes me that some of the worst things we do are committed when we center in our choices a sense of being hated. That conviction pre-justifies actions that might otherwise horrify us.

No more talk of hatred. We must center the children. The Israeli children, the Palestinian children, both at once, side by side, centered in every choice. They are looking to us to figure this out. And we must look at them – all of them – as we do so.

 

Want to reproduce this poem somewhere else?

Please contact me first. I generally support the sharing of poetry, so chances are good I'll be receptive to your idea.