More than 60 Palestinians, mainly unarmed protesters, were killed by Israeli troops at the Gaza-Israel border on Monday, bringing the total to more than 100 since the end of March. The question echoes: why did Israel rely mainly and immediately on lethal force against unarmed protesters?
Why didn't Israel use its sophisticated non-lethal crowd control techniques and instruments? Why didn't Israelis try to defuse the situation between March 30 and May 14 or do anything to mitigate the loss of life, which instead intensified, as Hamas obviously hoped?
These questions reveal a failure to understand the structural nature of the occupation and the essential relationship between Israelis and Palestinians.
Israelis hate to recognise it and Palestinians also usually shy away from the truth, both preferring to pathologise each other's supposed essential nature.
Yet this relationship is inherent in the very architecture of the occupation. These tragedies have happened before and they will keep happening as long as the occupation persists.
That has nothing to do with culture, politics or personalities on either side. Change all of those – or just imagine switching both sides, with Palestinians in the role of occupiers and Israelis as the occupied people – and each would adopt the role that the occupation scripts for them.
Each side blames the political culture and attitudes of the other for such tragedies. Palestinians cast Israeli troops as racists and brutal oppressors. Israelis claim that the dead Palestinians are mostly, if not all, terrorists or pawns manipulated by terrorists.
Each side ascribes to the other what the pro-Israel American lawyer Alan Dershowitz has cynically called a "dead baby strategy".
Palestinians claim that Israeli soldiers are happy to kill unarmed Arabs, including children. Israelis insist that Palestinians are trying to force and trick them into shooting unarmed people, including children.
Both are preposterous caricatures. No Israeli soldier, except the occasional psychopath, wakes in the morning plotting how many Palestinians they will be able to murder that day. No Palestinian, again except a few psychopaths, plots how to sacrifice their children or to take a fatal bullet while protesting unarmed at a border.
Yet both are plainly willing to do just that. Why?
The role of Israelis in the occupied territories, whether they admit it to themselves or not, is to discipline and control others through force – and ultimately deadly force, including against unarmed people – because the occupation cannot be enforced otherwise.
Israel has three choices: it could leave the occupied territories to their own devices; it could seriously negotiate a mutually acceptable peace agreement with Palestinians; or, for whatever reasons, it can maintain the occupation into the foreseeable future.
Israeli society has consciously and deliberately made the third choice, largely because it is not willing to make territorial sacrifices in East Jerusalem and the West Bank that would be required to end the conflict with the Palestinians.
Therefore, Israeli troops are transformed, structurally and inexorably, into the killers of unarmed people.
If the Israelis did not use lethal force in such moments in what is obviously a punitive manner and as a deterrent to larger and more sustained protests and a potential breach of the border with Gaza or the West Bank by any group of Palestinians with whatever intentions, the occupation would quickly collapse.
A few thousand soldiers cannot exercise a thorough regime of discipline and control over millions of people without being willing, when necessary, to kill them to reinforce the fundamental relationship of dominance and subordination.
Palestinians, by contrast, from time to time will inevitably rise up against Israeli rule. They might do it in an armed or unarmed manner, using terrorism or non-violence, or something in between. The essential Israeli response initially will be the same: they will be killed.
Both the most recent and the earliest history of the Israeli state demonstrates this irrefutably.
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Recent weeks, however, seem to suggest that if Palestinians ever used a massive and organised campaign of genuinely non-violent protest against Israeli rule – willing to die unarmed and without ever threatening, in any way, to harm, let alone kill, anybody else (a new and improved definition of "martyrdom") – the occupation would most probably fall apart.
Yet Hamas cannot lead a non-violent movement or even think a non-violent thought. Hamas leaders have been trumpeting bloodcurdling threats recently while simultaneously babbling about Gandhi and Martin Luther King.
Non-violent is not the same as unarmed and even if it were, everyone can see that Hamas remains, at heart, a profoundly violent, malevolent organisation.
But if Palestinians can find a resistance leadership that is genuinely non-violent in the manner of Gandhi and launched such a campaign, the occupation would certainly collapse.
The structural relationship of dominance and subordination and the violence inherent in the occupation would be exposed in a way that most Israelis and their allies could simply not sustain in the long run.
What would follow isn’t clear, but, everything would utterly change.
Hussein Ibish is a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington
The rules on fostering in the UAE
A foster couple or family must:
- be Muslim, Emirati and be residing in the UAE
- not be younger than 25 years old
- not have been convicted of offences or crimes involving moral turpitude
- be free of infectious diseases or psychological and mental disorders
- have the ability to support its members and the foster child financially
- undertake to treat and raise the child in a proper manner and take care of his or her health and well-being
- A single, divorced or widowed Muslim Emirati female, residing in the UAE may apply to foster a child if she is at least 30 years old and able to support the child financially
Our legal columnist
Name: Yousef Al Bahar
Advocate at Al Bahar & Associate Advocates and Legal Consultants, established in 1994
Education: Mr Al Bahar was born in 1979 and graduated in 2008 from the Judicial Institute. He took after his father, who was one of the first Emirati lawyers
Ms Yang's top tips for parents new to the UAE
- Join parent networks
- Look beyond school fees
- Keep an open mind
The National's picks
4.35pm: Tilal Al Khalediah
5.10pm: Continous
5.45pm: Raging Torrent
6.20pm: West Acre
7pm: Flood Zone
7.40pm: Straight No Chaser
8.15pm: Romantic Warrior
8.50pm: Calandogan
9.30pm: Forever Young
How to apply for a drone permit
- Individuals must register on UAE Drone app or website using their UAE Pass
- Add all their personal details, including name, nationality, passport number, Emiratis ID, email and phone number
- Upload the training certificate from a centre accredited by the GCAA
- Submit their request
What are the regulations?
- Fly it within visual line of sight
- Never over populated areas
- Ensure maximum flying height of 400 feet (122 metres) above ground level is not crossed
- Users must avoid flying over restricted areas listed on the UAE Drone app
- Only fly the drone during the day, and never at night
- Should have a live feed of the drone flight
- Drones must weigh 5 kg or less
NO OTHER LAND
Director: Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor, Hamdan Ballal
Stars: Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham
Rating: 3.5/5
How to help
Send “thenational” to the following numbers or call the hotline on: 0502955999
2289 – Dh10
2252 – Dh 50
6025 – Dh20
6027 – Dh 100
6026 – Dh 200
Banned items
Dubai Police has also issued a list of banned items at the ground on Sunday. These include:
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Political flags or banners
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Bikes, skateboards or scooters
In numbers: PKK’s money network in Europe
Germany: PKK collectors typically bring in $18 million in cash a year – amount has trebled since 2010
Revolutionary tax: Investigators say about $2 million a year raised from ‘tax collection’ around Marseille
Extortion: Gunman convicted in 2023 of demanding $10,000 from Kurdish businessman in Stockholm
Drug trade: PKK income claimed by Turkish anti-drugs force in 2024 to be as high as $500 million a year
Denmark: PKK one of two terrorist groups along with Iranian separatists ASMLA to raise “two-digit million amounts”
Contributions: Hundreds of euros expected from typical Kurdish families and thousands from business owners
TV channel: Kurdish Roj TV accounts frozen and went bankrupt after Denmark fined it more than $1 million over PKK links in 2013
Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
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Asia Cup 2018 Qualifier
Sunday's results:
- UAE beat Malaysia by eight wickets
- Nepal beat Singapore by four wickets
- Oman v Hong Kong, no result
Tuesday fixtures:
- Malaysia v Singapore
- UAE v Oman
- Nepal v Hong Kong
What can you do?
Document everything immediately; including dates, times, locations and witnesses
Seek professional advice from a legal expert
You can report an incident to HR or an immediate supervisor
You can use the Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation’s dedicated hotline
In criminal cases, you can contact the police for additional support
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Cryopreservation: A timeline
- Keyhole surgery under general anaesthetic
- Ovarian tissue surgically removed
- Tissue processed in a high-tech facility
- Tissue re-implanted at a time of the patient’s choosing
- Full hormone production regained within 4-6 months
COMPANY PROFILE
Name: Kumulus Water
Started: 2021
Founders: Iheb Triki and Mohamed Ali Abid
Based: Tunisia
Sector: Water technology
Number of staff: 22
Investment raised: $4 million
Real estate tokenisation project
Dubai launched the pilot phase of its real estate tokenisation project last month.
The initiative focuses on converting real estate assets into digital tokens recorded on blockchain technology and helps in streamlining the process of buying, selling and investing, the Dubai Land Department said.
Dubai’s real estate tokenisation market is projected to reach Dh60 billion ($16.33 billion) by 2033, representing 7 per cent of the emirate’s total property transactions, according to the DLD.
Read more about the coronavirus
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Engine: 4.0-litre flat-six
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Januzaj's club record
Manchester United 50 appearances, 5 goals
Borussia Dortmund (loan) 6 appearances, 0 goals
Sunderland (loan) 25 appearances, 0 goals
