An Israeli journalist and historian will discuss the conflict between Israel and Gaza during a talk Monday night, November 11, at Missouri State University. Gershom Gorenberg, a contributing journalist for The Atlantic, the Washington Post, the New York Times and other publications, will present “The Day After in Gaza: How to end the War and Move Forward?” from 5 to 7 p.m. in Karls Hall, Room 101. The public is invited to attend.
The war began on October 7, 2023 when Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel, took 251 people hostage and killed more than 1100 others. In response, Israel invaded Gaza on October 27, 2023. Since then, the death toll in Gaza has surpassed 43,000. Several of the hostages taken by Hamas on October 7 of last year have been killed. As of August 28, 117 had been returned alive to Israel.
Gorenberg said the period since the Hamas attack has felt like 100 years.
“I don’t think that when the war began,” he said, “anybody believed that we would be having a conversation in November of 2024 about the ongoing war.”
Gorenberg said the unspoken assumption was that the conflict would be much shorter than it has been.
When asked if he knew why the conflict has gone on so long, he said that’s a tough question because a great deal that’s happening in the Israeli government is secret.
“Information that we get about negotiations, for instance,” he said, “is based on leaks. Those leaks are very often being used to either manipulate public opinion or even to send messages to the other side, and so we actually know much less than what’s actually going on.”
Repeated attempts at cease fire negotiations between Israel and Hamas have broken down, and both sides have conflicting positions on what is necessary to end the fighting, according to Gorenberg.
NPR reported Monday that Israel’s ousted defense minister Yoav Gallant told family members of the hostages that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was responsible for holding up a ceasefire deal in July that could have led to getting their loved ones home.
Gallant, who was fired last week, wanted to reach a ceasefire deal and bring the hostages home, said Gorenberg, “said that it was a moral imperative for Israel to free the hostages.”
Gallant also believed there was nothing further that Israel could accomplish militarily in Gaza. He insisted that Israel come up with an explicit “day after” plan for who was going to have civilian control of Gaza, said Gorenberg. Prior to the war, Hamas was in control.
There was leaked information that Gallant favored a civil administration tied to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, led by the more moderate Fatah Party, Gorenberg said, and Netanyahu rejected that and making plans for a civilian government after the war.
Gorenberg said one explanation for that rejection, which is believed by the greater Israeli public, is that Netanyahu fears the end of the war for his own political reasons since “the public accounting for the catastrophic failure to be prepared for war will come at the end of the war.”
But he said Netanyahu also has opposed having the Palestinian Authority, run by Fatah, regain control of Gaza.
Gorenberg believes that for the war to end, there needs to be a deal to release all of the Israeli hostages. That would be painful for Israel, he said, since it would require releasing a much larger number of Palestinian prisoners, some of whom have been convicted of multiple murders. And there needs to be a ceasefire that’s accompanied by the creation of a new civilian government in Gaza made up of Palestinians other than Hamas.
Ultimately, for the conflict to end, he believes there needs to be at least a long term goal of a two-state outcome.
“There are two national groups who have the same homeland,” he said. “They can continue to fight forever or they can come to a compromise where each of them gets part of that homeland.”
As difficult as that will be to achieve, he said, it’s a much more practical outcome than forcing the two groups to have a single state, which he believes will result in continued conflict between them.
