After the 9/11 assaults, the US confronted a momentous alternative: ought to it interact in a narrowly focused counterterrorism marketing campaign, one designed to deliver Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda to justice, or try to struggle terrorism and remake the Center East via far more expansive wars of regime change?
The US made the latter alternative — and blundered into one of many best international coverage disasters within the nation’s 250-year historical past.
I worry that Israel is on the verge of constructing the identical mistake. Within the wake of the worst terrorist assault in its historical past — one which President Joe Biden described as being “like 15 9/11s,” given the size of the dying toll versus Israel’s smaller dimension — it’s poised to launch a floor invasion with the said goal of “toppling Hamas and destroying its navy capabilities.”
However a few of the means it has used to wage this warfare, together with shutting off water and electrical energy to Gaza, are morally indefensible — a lot as parts of America’s 9/11 response had been. Among the rhetoric on the Israeli aspect has tended towards the intense and the dehumanizing, as when Protection Minister Yoav Gallant mentioned, “We’re preventing human animals, and we act accordingly.”
Furthermore, each report out of Israel suggests the federal government has zero reply to the “day after” downside: what does Israel do in Gaza as soon as they’ve toppled Hamas’ authorities? That is the precise downside the US confronted in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the one which led it right into a strategic and ethical abyss — tons of of hundreds, maybe even tens of millions useless, and trillions of {dollars} wasted on wars that made the world much less safe.
However on the identical time, Israel can not merely do nothing. Governments have an obligation to guard their residents. With Israelis nonetheless sifting via proof of torture, and captives languishing in Hamas custody, almost everybody in Israel agrees that the nation should struggle to create an setting the place a repeat of this assault turns into unthinkable. Given the demonstrated nature of the Hamas menace, navy drive needs to be a part of that equation.
Two issues are true: Israel should do one thing, and what it’s doing now could be indefensible. So what’s the choice?
I put this query to anybody I may consider: a big group starting from retired Israeli officers to Palestinian intellectuals to counterterrorism consultants to students of the ethics and regulation of warfare. I learn every thing I may discover that on the subject, scouring reporting and the tutorial literature for higher concepts.
The reply that emerged was deceptively easy: make the fitting alternative the place America made the incorrect one. Israel ought to launch a focused counterrorism operation aimed toward Hamas management and the fighters immediately concerned within the October 7 assault, one which focuses on minimizing each civilian casualties and the scope of floor operations in Gaza.
“Go in for a couple of weeks or much less, looking for Hamas leaders and destroying tunnels, weapons caches, and so on,” says Dan Byman, a professor at Georgetown who research Israeli counterterrorism.
However this counterterrorism method should be paired with a broader political outreach designed to handle the basis causes of Hamas’ assist.
In her guide How Terrorism Ends, Carnegie Mellon professor Audrey Kurth Cronin examined roughly 460 terrorist teams to determine what brought about their collapse. She discovered that pure repression — attempting to crush them with navy drive — hardly ever works. And within the few instances that it does, like in Sri Lanka’s lengthy marketing campaign towards the Tamil Tigers, it tends to require an unthinkable degree of sustained and indiscriminate violence.
“Israel, as a democracy, is extraordinarily ill-suited for the long-term repression method to counterterrorism,” she informed me.
Meaning, as soon as the present warfare ends, Israel wants to start addressing the basis causes of Hamas assist. That begins with rolling again its de facto annexation of the West Financial institution — making life higher there to point out Palestinians that cooperation, not battle, is the pathway towards a greater future, and that Israel generally is a dependable companion in that future. Absent this political outreach, essentially the most counterterrorism can do is purchase Israel a while at the price of Palestinian life.
This twin method — counterterrorism now, paired with future political outreach to Palestinians — just isn’t good. Hamas is an antisemitic group devoted to wiping Israel off the map; Israelis are totally justified in wanting its regime eradicated. And even a extra restricted operation will nonetheless be horrible in human phrases — for each Israeli troopers preventing in an exceptionally harmful city setting and for Palestinian civilians each bit as harmless because the Israelis killed on October 7.
However the fact is that Hamas’ assault, and the disastrous choices on each side that preceded it, have painted Israel right into a nook the place it has no good coverage possibility. Of all of the potential choices, a centered counterterrorism technique is the most effective, most practical navy possibility out there on each degree — strategically, morally, and politically.
Israel should be taught the teachings of America’s expertise after 9/11. If it doesn’t, it dangers making the gravest mistake of its historical past — and inflicting untold hurt to tens of millions of harmless Palestinians.
The navy case for counterterrorism
Gaza is, on the entire, a comparatively urbanized place, with massive inhabitants facilities together with Gaza Metropolis within the north and Khan Younis within the south. We all know for a incontrovertible fact that Hamas relies in these cities and has constructed an intensive community of tunnels beneath them to facilitate motion. This creates what navy analysts name a four-plane battle setting — with Israeli troopers having to observe for threats within the sky, the buildings, the road, and beneath floor.
Clearing and holding this type of setting poses an immense problem for the Israel Protection Forces (IDF). Their troopers would want to maneuver very slowly with restricted air assist, deliberately placing their very own lives in danger — or else danger completely huge civilian casualties. Success additionally requires good intelligence, however the truth that Hamas managed such a horrific shock assault on October 7 means that Israel’s understanding of militants within the Strip — together with their defenses — could also be a lot weaker than extensively appreciated.
Army consultants usually consider the IDF may surmount these challenges. It’s a succesful navy, by far essentially the most highly effective within the Center East, with superior expertise and troopers who’ve educated for operations like this.
However the most important downside, and the most effective argument towards regime change in Gaza, is that Israel has no good reply for what occurs subsequent.
Let’s say Israel does handle to grab management over Gaza. It might’t instantly depart, as then Hamas would shortly reconstitute itself as a governing entity. It might’t set up a puppet regime after which depart, because the just lately brutalized Gazan inhabitants would topple a collaborationist entity with out IDF troopers stationed in Gaza participating in fixed and bloody repression.
Meaning an Israeli regime change operation would all however inevitably result in an indefinite Israeli navy occupation of Gaza and prolonged counterinsurgency marketing campaign. This seems to be what Gallant, Israel’s protection minister, proposed in a Friday cupboard assembly, during which he outlined Israel’s warfare plan in three levels: defeating Hamas in an invasion, eliminating remaining “pockets of resistance” (i.e., counterinsurgency), and eventual “creation of a brand new safety regime within the Gaza Strip [and] the elimination of Israel’s accountability for day-to-day life within the Gaza Strip.”
This is able to be very similar to what the US tried after toppling the Taliban in Afghanistan or Saddam Hussein in Iraq — besides with a fair larger diploma of problem and a smaller probability of success.
The US navy is significantly stronger than the IDF, didn’t have to fret about defending a border from terrorist assaults within the homeland, and was coping with a civilian inhabitants that hated them roughly 100 occasions lower than Gazans — even the various who don’t assist Hamas — presently hate Israel, which has immiserated them since 2007 via a crushing siege and has steadily killed Palestinians amid its numerous conflicts with Hamas.
“There have been numerous Iraqis who had been glad to see Saddam gone — particularly Shiites and Kurds,” says Marc Lynch, an skilled on Arab politics at George Washington College. “However on this case, there’s no group like that in Gaza which views Israel as something aside from evil.”
Hamas, in fact, is aware of all of this. It’s potential they might even provide token resistance to the preliminary regime change operation with a view to be higher ready for an insurgency down the road.
“What Hamas is de facto interested by is eight months from now,” says Hussein Ibish, a senior resident scholar on the Arab Gulf States Institute. “They will choose off Israeli troopers, a couple of at a time, seize them, kill them.”
And the extra Israel fights, the extra probably it’s that the warfare escalates past anybody’s management — with critical penalties for Israeli safety.
The 9/11 assaults had been designed to impress the US into overreaction, pulling it into unwinnable international conflicts and bleeding its treasury dry. Some consultants on Hamas assume the purpose of the militant group’s assault, the sheer brutality of concentrating on total households, was to have an analogous impact on Israel: to impress a very violent response that would widen the warfare to a regional conflagration.
“Designed to elicit a response so ‘disproportionate’ from Israel that it could draw worldwide condemnation and overshadow recollections of Hamas’ personal violence, the operation may — by Hamas’ reasoning — deliver others to its aspect,” writes Devorah Margolin, a fellow on the center-right Washington Institute for Close to East Coverage. “Such escalation may embody a possible warfare with Hizballah within the north, uprisings within the West Financial institution, inside struggles fomented by Arab residents of Israel, and concentrating on of each Israeli and Jewish targets overseas.”
Any regime change operation, then, will drag Israel right into a nightmare: an occupation, measured in a few years moderately than months, that may result in extra of its troopers useless and sap big quantities of navy assets that might be deployed elsewhere. It could flip the battle with the Palestinians, already a critical safety downside for Israel, right into a regional nightmare without end. This can do untold injury to Israel’s standing on the worldwide stage, doubtlessly supercharging the worldwide Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) motion it so fears.
So if not regime change, then what? Yagil Levy, a scholar of the IDF on the Open College of Israel, suggests “the plain conclusion” is “to attract up way more modest goals for a floor operation, and ideally to keep away from such an operation totally.”
The target wouldn’t be toppling Hamas, however moderately severely weakening its navy capabilities, deterring it and different organizations from near-term assaults, and taking away Hamas’ leverage by rescuing Israeli hostages.
Engaging in the primary two targets requires comparable means: killing Hamas fighters, particularly its management, and blowing up its weapon techniques and tunnels. The extra Hamas takes injury, the tougher will probably be — in literal organizational phrases — for it to launch any extra terrorist assaults within the instant future.
And the extra it suffers, the extra probably will probably be deterred from attempting anything within the close to time period — as arduous as it’s to think about a company that performed the October 7 assaults being deterred by something.
Teams like Hamas must make strategic calculations about their capabilities to operate as a company; its leaders must make calculations about how a lot of a danger to their very own lives their choices create. This imposes a level of means-ends rationality on even organizations with millenarian or genocidal finish targets — a part of why Hezbollah, which has no scarcity of enmity towards Israel, has not launched a full-scale warfare within the north. Deterrence is feasible with Hamas too, albeit not simple.
“For deterrence to work, Hamas casualties must be very excessive,” Byman tells me.
The third objective, bringing house hostages, might show particularly troublesome given Israeli intelligence weaknesses. The perfect hope lies not in an amazing invasion — which might telegraph to Hamas that Israel is coming and provides them time to execute their prisoners — however via shock particular forces raids. Nobody ought to delude themselves: the chances usually are not good for such a method to deliver house many of the hostages. However once more, it’s higher than a full-scale regime change invasion.
Put these collectively, and the broad outlines of an alternative choice to regime change turns into clear. Israel shouldn’t attempt a full floor invasion that goals to place tanks within the streets of Gaza Metropolis. As a substitute, it ought to make use of airstrikes and particular forces focused at high-value Hamas targets paired with restricted mass floor operations — if any.
This technique will rely closely on Israel making certain it has high-quality intelligence about what’s happening in Gaza. It should nonetheless contain important airstrikes, which can inevitably kill civilians — the sort of dying that has already outraged folks world wide. Israel has each a strategic and ethical crucial to maintain this to a minimal, which is why taking the time to make sure it has the absolute best intelligence is important.
Victory can nonetheless be outlined as “destroying Hamas,” however understood much less as eradicating the group totally than as eliminating the weather of Hamas answerable for the assault. Particularly, this implies the killing and seize of Hamas’ prime leaders in addition to the overwhelming majority of foot troopers who perpetrated atrocities on October 7, alongside parallel efforts to rescue as many hostages as potential.
Such accomplishments wouldn’t solely be symbolic victories for Israel, however sensible ones: with that many Hamas leaders and troopers useless, the group would have problem executing one other main assault anytime within the close to to medium time period.
Natan Sachs, the director of the Middle for Center East Coverage on the Brookings Establishment, compares such a coverage to Israel’s early- to mid-2000s marketing campaign of concentrating on Hamas leaders for assassination — one so efficient that, at one level, the group refused to publicly title its new chief for worry that he’d be killed.
Sachs, together with many Israelis, believes this coverage contributed to the tip of the Second Intifada. Whereas focused killings clearly didn’t destroy Hamas totally, they did play a job in weakening its capability to plan and execute assaults within the close to time period — and will accomplish that once more.
“When it comes to prevention, [you need] a dramatic degrading of the Hamas navy construction and the Hamas political wing harking back to the assassination campaigns of the mid-2000s,” he tells me.
It isn’t politically unattainable for Israel’s management to scale all the way down to such a marketing campaign. A ballot of Israeli Jews suggests roughly half assist reoccupying all of Gaza, whereas the opposite half assist a much less aggressive method. This probably undercounts Israeli opposition to reoccupation, because the survey excluded Arab residents. This group makes up 20 % of Israel’s inhabitants, and is way extra vital of its use of drive towards Palestinians for apparent causes.
Not simply apparent causes: good ones. As we’ve seen, any Israeli operations in Gaza carry with them immense human prices for Palestinians. Which makes it essential not simply to assume when it comes to Israeli safety wants, however in balancing these wants towards the ethical crucial to keep away from mass struggling and dying amongst Palestinians.
And on that essential metric, a extra slim counterterrorism marketing campaign is vastly superior to a vast warfare of regime change.
The ethical case for counterterrorism
Bradley Strawser, a former US Air Pressure captain, has an uncommon job: he’s an ethical thinker working for the US Navy. His title is professor of philosophy within the protection evaluation division on the Naval Postgraduate College; his precise job description is instructing America’s particular operators struggle wars as ethically as potential.
After I requested Strawser how he would method the present battle between Israel and Hamas, he mentioned that it was important to carry two concepts in a single’s head on the identical time.
First, that Israel had not solely a proper however an ethical obligation to reply to Hamas’ vicious assault on its civilian inhabitants.
This may occasionally not appear apparent, as a ceasefire would definitely result in some instant discount in civilian struggling. Certainly, a brief ceasefire to offer humanitarian reduction earlier than additional Israeli escalation may effectively be a good suggestion.
However an indefinite ceasefire is politically unattainable in Israel — no main faction may countenance it — for causes that talk to the very function of getting a state. Governments owe their residents an obligation of safety, to maintain them protected from exterior threats. If Hamas just isn’t militarily degraded and deterred by the tip of this operation, the Israeli state can have failed on this fundamental process.
“Even with all of the historical past, and even with their culpability and failures and the way they’ve [wronged Palestinians] for many years, that is self-defense towards horrific aggression. It’s a must to reply,” Strawser says.
Second, that irrespective of how barbarous Hamas’ conduct, Israel can not itself ignore the legal guidelines and ethical codes governing warfare in response. Whereas civilian casualties are a horrible inevitability in warfare, there are clear ethical guidelines that any state should observe — even when dealing with a brutal enemy who disregards all of them like Hamas. Unfettered, a contemporary navy just like the IDF may trigger carnage on an much more horrific scale than it already does.
“Should you’re going to turn out to be the monster you struggle, what’s the purpose of preventing the monster?” Strawser asks.
The dilemma he poses — Israel should act, but it surely should accomplish that inside ethical limits — is the guts of the ethical case for changing a regime change technique with counterterrorism. It’s a manner, maybe the one manner, to fulfill Israel’s legit safety wants with out crossing the road into brutality.
A regime change operation, one which sends IDF tanks into the city core of locations like Gaza Metropolis within the north, would inherently threaten civilians within the densest components of the Strip, excess of the present bombing offensive. Although Israel has warned residents of the northern Gaza Strip to go away, that is exceptionally troublesome to perform in follow.
They can’t get out totally: neither Israel nor Egypt will settle for mass numbers of Gazans into their borders. Inside Gaza, they’ve hassle getting south: armed Hamas fighters have warned them to not depart, and the roads themselves are troublesome and harmful due to Israeli airstrikes. Neither is it apparent they’re keen to flee: given the historical past of Palestinian dispossession at Israeli palms, they’ve legit purpose to fret that they are going to by no means have the ability to return in the event that they depart.
As long as there are massive numbers of Palestinians the place Israel desires to invade, there’s nearly no manner for it to struggle with out huge civilian casualties.
Furthermore, it issues morally that Israel has no clear endgame. If the post-invasion scenario is nearly definitely going to be a bloody insurgency, one that would strengthen Hamas in the long run, Israel would want — morally talking — to make the case that it has a reputable plan for attaining civilian safety within the postwar setting. It could be profoundly unjust, and merciless, to both depart Palestinian civilians in anarchy or topic them to an painful occupation and years of bloody counterinsurgency.
Among the ways Israel has resorted to in preparation for such an expansive warfare — most notably the cutoff of electrical energy, water, and humanitarian provides — are themselves clearly indefensible.
It’s extensively accepted that it’s immoral to deliberately starve civilians as a part of a tactic to weaken your opponents: this type of siege has, in latest historical past, been used solely by the world’s most vile regimes (like Bashar al-Assad in Syria). If you concentrate on the warfare towards Hamas as a complete existential warfare, it opens the ethical door to a way more expansive set of potential ways designed to facilitate this far more expansive goal — a few of which quantity to atrocities.
In ethical phrases, then, the case for limiting Israel’s ambitions is pretty easy: nothing it may hope to perform with a regime change operation can outweigh the hurt it should do to civilians within the course of.
The truth is, there’s an excellent case that there’s much less stress between morality and navy necessity in Gaza than it appears. A counterterrorism marketing campaign would probably produce higher strategic outcomes than a bigger invasion partly as a result of it kills fewer civilians, denying Hamas horrific imagery it may use to recruit extra fighters or provoke exterior forces like Hezbollah to return to its assist.
“A very powerful factor [strategically] is to separate Hamas, as a navy group, from the Palestinian inhabitants,” says Kurth Cronin, the Carnegie Mellon professor.
What drive Israel might use, permissibly, must be tightly restricted and designed to perform possible ends. Regime change just isn’t certainly one of them — nonetheless comprehensible it could be for Israelis to need Hamas annihilated.
The political case for counterterrorism
Unprecedented disasters, like Hamas’ October 7 atrocity, drive political leaders and analysts to rethink their assumptions: what had been completed prior to now to deliver us to this unthinkable place? On this case, that ought to immediate some reflection on the various Israeli insurance policies — not simply in Gaza, however towards the Palestinian folks — which have labored to strengthen Hamas in the long term.
The reality is that kinetic counterterrorism can’t be the be-all and end-all of Israel’s response to Hamas’ assault. At the easiest, it may purchase Israel a while: make it arduous for Gaza militants to launch any extra large-scale terrorist assaults, and deter them from doing so, for a matter of years.
But this type of periodic time-buying has traditionally been substituted for a broader political method to Hamas by Israeli management. The speculation, euphemistically known as “mowing the grass,” went like this: you weaken Hamas via bombings, they get stronger, you must struggle them once more, repeat advert infinitum.
Beneath Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in energy for 13 of the previous 14 years, “mowing the grass” created the room for an inertial political method to Gaza. His governments largely left the foundations of Hamas rule alone, even propping them up, to preserve the established order of a divided Palestinian management that foreclosed the potential of a two-state answer to the battle.
Periodic terrorist assaults and even low-scale battle was a value that Israel was keen to pay for a freer hand within the West Financial institution and normalized relations with Arab dictatorships. Palestinian struggling beneath Israel’s blockade and periodic violence was, on this considering, not likely Israel’s downside.
The October terrorist assault has shattered this phantasm, exposing the false safety on the Israel-Gaza border for what it was. Most Israelis have concluded this implies they’ll’t tolerate a Hamas regime in Gaza — which is, in a deep sense, appropriate. However navy drive alone isn’t a very good technique for ending Hamas. To actually defeat the group, you can not play its recreation of escalating brutality. You might want to handle the political grievances that, per polling, underpin its assist in Gaza.
“Hamas grew and was strengthened when Israel was occupying Gaza on the bottom for 38 years,” says Yousef Munayyer, a Palestinian American political scientist. “The said objective of eliminating Hamas is unlikely to be completed. However even in some fairytale world the place this occurs, except you handle the underlying political situations that introduced us right here, you might be successfully simply rewinding the tape on this horror movie.”
Put otherwise: whereas destroying Hamas may not be a possible navy goal, it’s (on an extended time horizon) politically potential. Hamas needn’t be the everlasting and inevitable chief of the Palestinian folks; different factions may rise and displace it, together with ones with real commitments to peace and mutual coexistence.
Many issues have to alter for this to occur. However the first, and arguably most essential, is that Israel should change its method to the West Financial institution.
The Palestinian Authority (PA), and the reasonable Fatah get together that controls it, is sclerotic, corrupt, and authoritarian. It’s more and more seen by Palestinians as an Israeli quisling, giving rise to latest mass demonstrations in West Financial institution cities the place protesters chanted for the autumn of PA President Mahmoud Abbas.
Israel can assist the PA in a single apparent manner: by releasing its grip on the West Financial institution. Beneath Netanyahu, and particularly his present far-right governing coalition, Israeli settlements have expanded and settler violence has elevated. Israel’s navy occupation, all the time suffocating, has more and more turn out to be a noose round West Financial institution Palestinians’ necks.
A part of the considering, said explicitly by present Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, is that Israel can snuff out Palestinian resistance by destroying their hope for a state.
“Terrorism derives from hope — a hope to weaken us,” Smotrich argued in a 2017 paper. “The assertion that the Arab craving for nationwide expression within the Land of Israel can’t be ‘repressed’ is inaccurate.”
It’s now clear that impact runs within the different course. The extra Israel represses Palestinians, the weaker its reasonable management turns into — and the extra assist for violent resistance rises. Smotrich’s method has not solely failed morally, but it surely has failed strategically: the one worst terrorist assault in Israeli historical past occurred beneath his watch, as he used his powers to implement his desired coverage within the West Financial institution.
To really cease terrorism, Israel must reverse strikes towards de facto annexation of the West Financial institution. It must stop settlement enlargement, take steps to enhance the West Financial institution economic system, crack down on settler violence, and cut back the community of checkpoints that presently make life extraordinarily troublesome for peculiar West Financial institution residents.
That is one of the best ways, politically, for Israel to make use of the momentary calm {that a} profitable counterterrorism marketing campaign will purchase it. The time instantly after a warfare is the time when it’s least probably for a brand new one to begin once more. Israel then has a window to try to do one thing that would actually hit Hamas the place it hurts: its place because the main political energy within the Palestinian orbit. Present Palestinians that violence can be met with violence, however peace met with cooperation.
Discredit Hamas, and undermine the foundations of its energy, by giving Palestinians a gap to pursue a greater path.
For a very long time, it appeared like transferring to a extra conciliatory coverage within the West Financial institution was politically unattainable. After the Second Intifada and Hamas takeover of Gaza within the 2000s discredited the peace camp, the Israeli polity gave the impression to be shifting ever-rightward. Political scientists discovered that terrorist assaults particularly performed a significant position in growing assist for right-wing events.
You’d assume that may imply the October terror assault would speed up this rightward shift. However in keeping with present polls, the precise reverse is going on.
One latest survey discovered that, had been elections held now, Netanyahu’s Likud get together would lose 40 % of its seats in Israel’s parliament — and its governing majority. One other ballot of Israeli Jews particularly discovered that three-quarters believed the present authorities bore both “nice” or “very nice” accountability for the assault.
“There received’t be a flip to the left. However there might be, for lack of a greater time period, a flip to the unconventional middle,” Sachs, the Brookings skilled, tells me. And such a centrist authorities, he believes, can be way more keen to unwind the assorted intricate authorized steps taken to perform de facto annexation beneath Netanyahu.
There may be, briefly, an opportunity that the fitting’s utter failure to offer for Israeli safety creates a gap for a brand new political method: one premised not on repressing the Palestinians via sheer may, however by preventing terrorism and build up a peaceable Palestinian different on the identical time.
Within the longer run, Israel ought to transfer towards stress-free the post-2007 siege on Gaza that so punishes Palestinian civilians, and critically return to the two-state negotiating desk. As long as each Israelis and Palestinians stay between the river and the ocean, peace can solely be discovered via coexistence: by giving folks on each side good and fulfilling lives that creates situations for residing aspect by aspect.
A really efficient technique for preventing Hamas thus can not merely quantity to returning to the established order ex ante: it requires addressing the legit grievances of the Palestinian folks, which Hamas exploits for their very own vicious functions.
Proper now, Israel must defend itself. But it surely must do it inside acceptable ethical bounds, and never in service of revenge or blind rage. As an American, I do know all too effectively how the place that path leads.
However peculiar Israelis, fortunately, don’t look like performing like People did after 9/11: they’ve proven themselves remarkably keen to criticize their very own authorities’s method and blame it for permitting the catastrophic Hamas violence to occur. They need to maintain on to this intuition: adopted to its logical conclusion, it would really result in a greater future for Israelis and Palestinians alike.