The Gaza border protests enter their sixth week.
For several weeks now, thousands of Palestinians have lined up along the Gaza border fence in protest. Stones and Molotov cocktails have been flung, burning tyres have been rolled and attempts have been made to breach the barrier. The IDF has responded with crowd dispersals, rubber bullets and occasionally live fire, with 40 deaths so far.
But the promised break-through and subsequent flooding of Israel with millions of Gazans has not yet materialised – and events in Syria and elsewhere have gradually drawn the eye of the media away.
The so-called ‘March of Return’ began in late March, with protests planned to continue up to Israel’s 70th anniversary in May, when a new ‘intifada’ may be launched. This article puts some facts about the protests into historical context, and then reflects a little on their biblical significance.
Some History
The recent history of the Palestinian war on Israel is composed of sporadic attacks on Israeli citizens (stabbings, kidnappings, suicide bombings), interspersed with escalations of violence known as ‘intifadas’.
Both the First Intifada (1987-1993) and the Second (2000-2005) ended with Israeli agreements to compromise – first with the 1993 Oslo Accords, which created the Palestinian Authority (PA) and agreed a phased Israeli withdrawal from the so-called ‘Palestinian territories’, and secondly with Israel’s agreement to withdraw unilaterally from the Gaza Strip. The border fence was constructed in 1994 as part of the Oslo negotiations, to provide a security barrier limiting the movement of people and arms. It quickly became a hot spot for clashes.
The promised break-through and subsequent flooding of Israel with millions of Gazans has not yet materialised.
Since the relinquishment of Gaza and its wresting from the PA by terrorist group Hamas in 2007, the Strip has become a base for rocket attacks and tunnel warfare. But successful Israeli combating of these strategies has meant that Hamas is now resorting to higher-profile tactics, namely, people power.
Since 2007, the situation in Gaza under Hamas rule has deteriorated to the point, many say, of imminent infrastructural collapse. Relations between Hamas and the PA in the West Bank are extremely poor, and it is likely that the current protests represent a desperate, last-ditch attempt to draw global support.
Six Weeks of Violence
The ‘March of Return’ was timed to begin on what the Palestinians call ‘Land Day’, the anniversary of Israeli-Arab clashes over land in 1976 (it was also the start of Passover) and run until so-called ‘Nakba Day’ (‘Catastrophe Day’), or Israel’s independence day, with spikes each Friday.
Hamas has spent more than $10 million organising the protests, laying on free transport, meals and tented accommodation to encourage attendance. There are questions over how many of the protestors are peaceful1 as well as how many have come voluntarily.2
Firebomb kites have been causing extensive fires in Israeli farmland. See Photo Credits.
The IDF has repeatedly warned that those getting close to the fence and trying to break through will be fired upon, seeing this as a major attempt to storm Israel and attack civilians.3 Of the 40 killed so far, at least 32 had known terrorist connections – 80% of the fatalities. All those injured and families of the deceased receive financial rewards from Hamas.
Though many have been quick to label this a massacre of peaceful innocents, photos and videos from the border tell a very different story: Palestinians throwing rocks and fire-bombs, burning tyres, planting explosives, employing automatic fire and using children as human shields.4
Hamas promised 100,000 on Land Day, but only about 30,000 came. The four Fridays since have seen a much lower turnout – about 10,000 each time – and reports this Friday suggest even less, around 7,000. The threat is that a million will come for Nakba Day, but this estimate is likely also over-hopeful. But what they’ve lacked in attendance, protestors have made up for in creativity, including dramatic faking of injuries to get media attention,5 use of literal ‘smoke and mirrors’6 and, latterly, kites manned with pipe bombs and marked with swastikas, reportedly in honour of Hitler’s birthday.
Though many have been quick to label this a massacre of peaceful innocents, photos and videos from the border tell a very different story.
Despite all of this, left-wing media in the West have had a field day at Israel’s expense. To them, the Palestinians can do no wrong – they are the ultimate victim group, driven to violence by the aggression of Israel. This means that Palestinian terror is excused or ignored while Israeli defensive reactions are chastised with claims of brutality.
Why?
Through all the drama, the ‘March of Return’ - by Hamas’s own admission - has several goals. One is to provoke Israel to war. Another is to pressure the Israeli Government to the point of collapse.
In the latter respect Hamas has won some PR points. Painting the protests as peaceful makes any kind of forceful response immediately look disproportionate. Indeed, if the fence were to be breached, as has happened before, it would lead to a diplomatic crisis for Israel, forced to fire on civilians marching ostensibly for freedom. However, an internal Israeli collapse remains highly improbable.
A more realistic goal is to engage the IDF in a war of attrition that will detract resources and attention from its northern border, where the threat of war from an Iran-backed Hezbollah is very real and imminent. In fact, Iran’s relationship with Hamas in Gaza suggests co-operation towards this end.7
Hamas’s least realistic goal is to break down the borders and march en masse into Israel, flooding it with millions of descendants of Palestinian refugees. Claiming the Land remains a fundamental part of Palestinian mindsets, which conceive of it as theirs by divine right, which is why Hamas rhetoric over the last few weeks has consistently used the phrase “right to return”.
However, the unrealistic nature of this goal is not the point – it reflects something ideological, and spiritual, which is important to understand.
The Right to Return?
The claim to a ‘right to return’ hinges on the argument that Palestinians, as the indigenous people of the area, were cruelly and unfairly forced to flee their homes in 1948 when Israel was created. Factually, of course, this is hotly disputed.
The refugee crisis in Gaza was indeed created in 1948, at Israel’s birth. However, contrary to popularly accepted propaganda, this was not due to Palestinians being forced off ‘their land’ by ‘settler-colonialist’ Jews. Nor was it due to any kind of ethnic cleansing on behalf of the Israeli authorities.
The claim to a ‘right to return’ reflects something ideological and spiritual which is important to understand.
The very claim that Palestinians were somehow a coherent people in 1948 and represented the indigenous population of Israel is bogus.8 But that aside, the majority of Palestinians who fled in 1948, ending up in refugee camps in Arab-controlled territories, did so because they were fleeing the coming war on Israel, which the surrounding Arab countries were sure would be won in a matter of days. Many residents were deliberately evacuated by Arab leaders. Israeli authorities made efforts to persuade people to stay – but with little success.9
Even PA leader Mahmoud Abbas admitted that the refugee problem was a crisis of the Arabs’ own making:
The Arab armies entered Palestine to protect the Palestinians from the Zionist tyranny, but instead they abandoned them, forced them to emigrate and leave their homeland, and threw them into prisons similar to the ghettos in which the Jews used to live.10
Against all odds, Israel won the 1948 war, with Egypt left occupying the Gaza Strip.11 Since, it has become in the strategic interest of Palestinian leaders to keep their people languishing, to garner international support for their cause and to stir up anger and desperation among ordinary Palestinians. This hypocrisy is written from an insider perspective in testimonies such as ‘Son of Hamas’, by Hamas ‘prince’ Mosab Hassan Yousef.
Do the Facts Matter?
Of course, factual arguments aren’t as important as ideology when it comes to the Palestinian cause. Although a large part of their international appeal rests on people thinking otherwise, the ‘right to return’ does not actually refer to a few thousand refugees reclaiming small parcels of land here and there across Israel that they once used to call home.
Neither is Hamas today’s version of the US civil rights movement - those who imply otherwise are imposing Western logic onto an Islamic issue.
The ‘right to return’ is actually a broader reference to the pan-Arabic re-claiming of the whole Land of Israel – by whatever means necessary - until Israel as a state ceases to exist and its Jews (and Christians) have either been eradicated or subjugated to Islam. This has less to do, then, with specific Palestinian lived experience and more to do with general Islamic enmity towards Jews and the religious imperative to ‘liberate’ the Land from Judaism/Christianity and for Islam, “from the river to the sea” as Hamas loves to put it. According to the Palestinians, the Land is ‘waqf land’ – land eternally belonging to Islam and only temporarily ‘occupied’ by Jews.12
The ‘right to return’ has less to do with specific Palestinian lived experience and more to do with general Islamic enmity towards Jews and the religious imperative to ‘liberate’ the Land for Islam.
In short, the ‘March of Return’ is about the obliteration of Israel. It’s a literal walking out of anti-Zionism – the belief that the Jewish state has no right to exist and that Jews have no claim to the Land.
Of course such an obliteration is not only based on lies, it is also practically impossible, as the Bible makes clear that Israel has been resettled permanently in the Land – never to be uprooted again (Amos 9:15).
Bible Lens
Whilst of course Israelis don’t get everything right and few yet know their Messiah, it is indisputable that God has set them back in their Land, re-gathering them from around the world in fulfilment of his word, and protecting them miraculously from incessant onslaughts ever since.
It is also indisputable that the Palestinians, dreadfully abused by their own leaders and indoctrinated to hate Jews, are fundamentally setting themselves against God. Though each are loved by the Lord, and he sees the complexities of their individual predicaments, the sum of their activism represents and channels demonic hatred of God’s covenant people and covenant Land. The Bible makes it clear that ultimately this is completely futile (e.g. Ps 2) and worse – brings a curse (Gen 12:3).
Scripture does not clearly predict this current protest (really just the latest manifestation of a very long-running campaign), but it does foresee various attempts to make war on the Jewish state.
As successive storm-clouds gather and burst in the Middle East, it is not difficult to see that the Palestinians are aligning themselves with those Arab nations, such as Iran, that actively plan to wipe Israel off the map. Again, the scriptures make clear the end of those who come against Israel in this way: shame and perishing, becoming like the “whirling dust” (Ps 83:13).
The Bible foretells that the nations of the world will one day gather to make war against Israel (Zech 12). Undoubtedly, the Palestinian ‘cause’, complex though it may be, has done a huge amount to spread anti-Israel hatred around the world, and to deceive many into believing that Israel’s very existence is illegitimate. Thus, however far away we are from the coming global war on the Jewish state, these protests are helping to lay its foundations in people’s hearts, today.
However far away we are from the coming global war on the Jewish state, these protests are helping to lay its foundations in people’s hearts, today.
Watchmen on the Walls
In keeping track of this unfolding drama, it’s important that we do not become passive onlookers, for there is much we can do.
We can use the opportunity to avail ourselves of the facts and disseminate and defend the truth, engaging people in conversation and challenging wrong assumptions and bias.13 There are many resources and books available to this end, with more being reviewed on Prophecy Today UK in coming weeks.
We can make sure that we ourselves have built up our own understandings of the conflict from the bedrock of Scripture, more than from media reports. What we see in the flesh is symptomatic of an invisible spiritual battle that the secular media cannot comprehend.
And, not least, we can pray: that Britain will choose her side in this conflict wisely, that God will work to protect his people and Land in ways that bring great glory to his name, and that he will have a huge harvest amidst all the chaos – including from among the Palestinian people.
Fill their faces with shame, that they may seek your name, O Lord. Let them be confounded and dismayed forever; yes, let them be put to shame and perish, that they may know that You, whose name alone is the Lord, are the Most High over all the earth. (Psalm 83:16-18, NKJV, emphasis added)
References
1 Snapshots from Gazan media outlets are illuminating in this respect: see here.
2 E.g. see here.
3 Read this article for a helpful analysis from an Israeli strategic viewpoint.
4 A case is currently before the International Criminal Court to prosecute Hamas in this respect.
5 The unofficial term for this is ‘Pallywood’. E.g. see these rehearsals and this page under ‘Myth: Israel is shooting people in the back or while they are running away.’
6 Mirrors to blind IDF soldiers and huge piles of tyres set ablaze to create a smokescreen covering attempts to storm the fence. The resulting tyre shortage in Gaza was blamed on Israel.
7 See here.
8 Most Arabs living in Palestine before 1948 were immigrants from surrounding countries. Zionist pioneers brought prosperity in the 20th Century, attracting more in-migration. The uniting of these into a coherent ‘Palestinian’ people group happened in the mid-20th Century, chiefly out of opposition to the new Jewish state.
9 Those who did stay enjoy full citizenship rights today and a much higher standard of living than in surrounding countries.
10 Falastin a-Thaura, March 1973. Quoted here. There was unavoidable collateral damage during the 1948 war and some inexcusable instances of Jewish aggression. However, Israel denounced these latter events and sought to compensate victims. For more on this issue, we recommend this page as well as Sandra Teplinsky’s book, ‘Why Still Care About Israel?’ (2013, Chosen Books).
11 Read a brief history of the Strip here.
12 See here (Article Eleven) and here.
13 CUFI are currently encouraging people to email the Foreign Secretary, urging him to condemn Hamas’s behaviour.
