The Palestinians in Gaza need better friends
18 November 2024
The Palestinians in Gaza need better friends - people who will help them avoid dying from the current war.
Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Drunk was a campaign by the Ad Council and the U.S. Department of Transportation that aired from 1993 to 2001. Its message was that true friends don’t just do what is asked of them (“let me drive home”) but act in their friend’s best interest. When our friends want to drive home inebriated, we stop them, even if they get mad at us.
For Palestinians, I would change this campaign to “Friends don’t let their friends self-destruct.” For 76 years, Palestinians in the Middle East, and most prominently in Gaza, have been bent on self-destruction. Instead of building a prosperous society, they have intensified their suffering and weaponized it. They have attached bombs to themselves to demonstrate their hatred of Israel. They have elected terrorists as their government. They have allowed terrorists to operate out of their residential areas, schools, mosques and medical facilities with little resistance, knowing that they might be killed in retaliation when the terrorists attack Israel. They have turned Gaza into a military base, with terrorist tunnels, weapons, Israeli hostages and militants dispersed throughout.
On 7 October 2023, the Palestinian government of Gaza launched an attack on Israel, killing 1,200 Israelis (the equivalent of 40,000 Americans) and taking 250 Israelis hostage (the equivalent of 8,000 Americans). The hostages are still in captivity and the Palestinians are still firing missiles into Israel. It is obvious to many of us that in a similar situation, any country would attack these terrorists, no matter how embedded they were within the “civilian” population, and would continue the attack until the hostages are released and the missile attacks end.
True friends of Palestinians should urge Palestinians to pressure their government with letters and protests to release the hostages and end the missile attacks. Perhaps Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian-American activist in Congress, should go to Gaza to mediate.
The people of Gaza must know where the hostages and weapons are. Gaza is 140 square miles, the size of Detroit or Seattle, but with 2 million residents. With such a high population density, there is little room to hide hostages or weapons. The Palestinians, who are very smart as physicians, lawyers or business people, should be able to create a mechanism to allow Palestinians in Gaza to communicate to the outside world where the hostages are so they can be freed. Friends of Palestinians should be urging them to do so.
Neither the Palestinians nor Israel are going away. They must find a way to coexist. This means that Palestinians must reject terrorism and the Israeli government must accept a nonterrorist Palestinian state. Most Israelis believe in this future and are pressuring their current Prime Minister. But it is hard to find Palestinians or friends of Palestinians who are publicly committed to a nonterrorist future for the Palestinians (but see here).
Palestinians need friends who urge them to reject terrorism to build better lives. It is a tragedy that four generations of Palestinians in Gaza have suffered due to a Palestinian thirst for revenge after losing the 1948 war. Palestinians have the brainpower and work ethic to transform their country into a success story emulating Israel and the Gulf States. Instead, Gaza has a 64% poverty rate because Palestinians and their friends are promoting and tolerating this continued hatred.
I am working for a prosperous, nonterrorist Palestinian country but I am not an Arab. Are there Palestinians or friends of Palestinians willing to push the Palestinians to release the hostages and end the war?
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