"It Will Sow Hatred for a Century"
The Middle East Cycle of Violence Continues to Breed Intolerance
Seventy-five years have passed since the "Nakba," the sudden displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. For many, the current war in the Gaza Strip is awakening memories of that trauma. And they would like the world to take notice.
By Bernhard Zand in Amman, Jordan, and Ramallah, West Bank
People fleeing Gaza City on October 13 Foto: Mohammed Saber / EPAIn Amman, the capital of Jordan, it’s almost 7 a.m. when the sun rises over the Gaza Strip.
The road down below grows louder as traffic begins coursing through the streets of the city.
For the last four weeks, Salah Hourani has been unable to find rest before the break of dawn.
The whole night through, he lies in front of the television and stares at the horrific images coming out of the Gaza Strip: the Israeli bombardments, the civilian victims.
"I can’t sleep," he says, "for as long as darkness lies over Gaza."
Hourani was born in the Gaza Strip in 1964 in a refugee camp not far from the spot where the Israeli army this week marched through to the coast, separating the northern part of the coastal strip from the south.
Hourani was a child during the Six Days War in 1967, the Jordanian civil war in 1970 and the Yom Kippur War of 1973.
Later, as a young man, he experienced the First Intifada, the Palestinian uprising in the late 1980s.
And he was living in refugee camps the entire time, sometimes with his parents and sometimes with friends or relatives.
"Our fathers and mothers always sent one or two children to live elsewhere in times of war and crisis.
Just like many parents are now doing in Gaza, so that someone from each family survives in case all the others are killed."
Salah Hourani is now 59 years old, an elegant, slightly stocky man wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a light-colored hat to protect him from the sun.
He is a director, an actor and an intellectual, an educated and sensitive man whose life mirrors the last six decades of Palestinian history – the wars, the civil wars, the desperation, the fears and the anger.
And he decided to do something to counteract this desperation, this embitterment that is passed down from one generation to the next, creating more and more fear and anger.
Entertainer Salah Hourani says that Palestinian embitterment is passed down from one generation to the next. Foto: Bernhard Zand / DER SPIEGELThe events of October 7 and the five weeks that have passed since the Hamas terror attack have been traumatic for Israelis, and for Palestinians alike.
Approximately 1,200 Israelis were savagely murdered that day, most of them civilians, women and children.
It was a pogrom that, for many, awakened memories of the Holocaust.
The Palestinians, for their part – with hundreds of thousands of them having fled to the southern Gaza Strip in recent days – find themselves reminded of their own trauma, the Nakba, or catastrophe.
Starting in November 1947, the Nakba saw around 700,000 Palestinians flee or be driven out of their villages in present-day Israel.
Arabs fleeing their homes during the Nakba in 1948: This image is from the town of Acre. Foto: ullstein bildAccording to the Palestinian Health Ministry, which is controlled by Hamas, the number of people killed in Gaza in the current conflict has passed the 11,000 mark.
The Health Ministry’s numbers cannot currently be independently verified, but in previous conflicts, casualty numbers claimed by the ministry were largely confirmed by the United Nations.
What are the consequences of this catastrophe for the people who live in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank?
What about the many Palestinians in Israel and in the Arabian, European and American diaspora?
What does it mean for the Palestinian state, which is recognized by just 138 countries of the world?
Will the Middle East conflict remain insoluble for the next several decades?
Or is this war the kind of shock that could – contrary to past experience – serve to break the cycle of violence and pave the way to a peaceful future?
The events of the past five weeks have once again demonstrated just how useless predictions can be in the Middle East.
But perhaps an examination of the past can provide hints as to what might now await the Palestinians.
The Baqaa Refugee Camp in Jordan
Hourani spent a total of 25 years of his life in refugee camps, 16 of them in the Baqaa Refugee Camp in Jordan, which is situated in a valley some 20 kilometers north of Amman.
It was established in 1968 mostly to provide shelter to people who fled across the Jordan River following Israel’s occupation of Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank during the Six Days War.
"In the beginning, there were only tents," says Hourani.
"Then, barracks were built, and once people realized that they contained too much asbestos, concrete homes."
Hourani still remembers a time before the streets were paved with asphalt and the buildings were made of concrete.
The dusty roads, he says, would turn into a "carnival of mud" every time it rained.
The Baqaa Refugee Camp in Jordan Foto: Nicolas Maeterlinck / Belga News Agency / ddpThat past is one reason why he now tours refugee camps, kindergartens, schools and youth centers seeking to mollify and encourage Palestinians of all ages.
He puts on puppet shows, performs role plays and holds workshops.
"It’s about empowerment of the marginalized," he says, "and building up self-confidence to develop the ability to control impulses."
A major focus, he says, is "deradicalization," reducing the anger that grows in the camps.
Hourani walks into a school that he once attended himself and where he held an event just under a year ago.
On the director’s desk is a wooden donation box with the word "Gaza" on it.
The reception is cool.
Another Western journalist who wants to talk about the Hamas attack on October 7, the school director says.
You want to talk about the babies who were "allegedly" beheaded?
Who, she demands, is talking about what is happening to the babies in Gaza?
What about what happened 13 years ago to her father, who was so badly injured during an Israeli operation against an alleged militant that he died a short time later?
The director is far from an exception.
Few here are interested in talking about the depraved Hamas attack.
These days, around 130,000 people live in the Baqaa refugee camp, and it is so densely constructed that from above, it looks like a single gigantic sheet of concrete.
While Baqaa is one of the largest Palestinian camps, it is just one of dozens that popped up following the successive waves of Palestinian refugees from 1948 to 1967 – in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.
The majority of Palestinian refugees remain stateless today.
Israeli tanks in the West Bank in 1967 Foto: AP / ullstein bildThese camps, with their roughly 1.5 million registered inhabitants, symbolize the fossilization of a conflict whose origins lay 50 years in the past even when Salah Hourani came to Baqaa at the end of the 1960s.
Like so many conflicts of the 20th and 21st century, it was born out of World War I.
At the time, the Ottoman Empire controlled the Middle East, and once it became clear that the empire would not survive the war, the colonial powers of England and France began thinking about how they wanted to configure their Arabian provinces.
In summer 1915, the British high commissioner in Egypt established contact with the sharif of the holy city of Mecca.
He delivered vague promises about the establishment of an Arab nation-state stretching from the Taurus Mountains to the Red Sea and from the Mediterranean to the border of Iran.
This promise encouraged Arabian leaders to join the war on the side of the British, seeing it as an opportunity to free themselves from the Ottomans, who had ruled over them for the last 400 years and brutally crushed any Arab nationalist movements.
At the same time, though, Britain was negotiating with France, which also laid claim to parts of the Ottoman-Arabian provinces.
In a secret treaty hammered out by the British diplomat Mark Sykes and his French counterpart François Georges-Picot, London and Paris agreed that the region including Beirut, Damascus and Mosul should go to France after the war, while the Ottoman provinces of Baghdad, Basra and Palestine would be administered by Britain.
Without informing the Arabs or the French, London also made a third agreement.
In the late 19th century, Zionism had begun to emerge, a movement that aimed to establish a Jewish state and was born out of the increasing number of anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe.
That state, envisioned as a safe haven for Jews, was to be established in Palestine, where there had been a small Jewish presence for thousands of years.
London sympathized with this movement, and in November 1917, British Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour issued the Balfour Declaration, which promised the Zionist Federation "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people."
The Sykes-Picot treaty of 1916 and the Balfour Declaration of 1917 are the founding documents of the modern Middle East.
They are responsible for the creation of the region’s five countries and the seemingly eternal non-country: Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel – and Palestine.
For many Arabs, and especially for Palestinians, these agreements are still today viewed as documents of an epochal betrayal.
London, as became clear after the end of the war, never seriously considered allowing the development of a vast, Arab nation-state. Instead, the region was divided up in accordance with the desires of the colonial powers.
In 1920, the only recently established League of Nations proclaimed a French Mandate, including Syria and Lebanon, and a British Mandate, made up of Palestine and Transjordan.
While some Arab leaders, encouraged by promises of receiving their own nation-state, had declared their readiness to welcome Jewish immigrants to the Holy Land, that willingness quickly evaporated after 1920.
The Arabs east of the Jordan River also didn’t get the nation state they had so longed for.
Still, three monarchies were proclaimed in Iraq, Syria and Transjordan – along with, in 1926, a republic in Lebanon.
At the very least, they held out the prospect of lasting statehood.
But when it came to the British Mandate for Palestine, residents faced the looming prospect of having to share the territory with another people.
London continued to encourage the migration of the Zionists but did nothing to promote the development of Palestinian statehood.
The early 1920s saw the first bloody clashes, initially between Arab and Jewish demonstrators and militias, and later between the two adversaries and the British.
By the end of the 1930s, the conflicts had already cost the lives of thousands of people.
Which means that the foundations of the Middle East conflict had already been laid before the country of Israel was even established.
With the beginning of World War II, the situation in Palestine grew quieter – while in Europe, the most consequential catastrophe in the history of the Middle East conflict took shape.
The horrors of the Shoa, the murder of millions of European Jews at the hands of the Nazis, increased willingness around the world to guarantee the Jewish people a "national home."
On November 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed the Partition Plan, which foresaw the end of the British Mandate and the establishment of two independent nations, one Jewish and the other Arab.
The Jewish representatives accepted the plan, but the Arab representatives rejected it.
The very next day saw armed fighting between Arabs and Jews, resulting in the Nakba, the flight and displacement of around 700,000 Arabs from their villages and cities in Palestine.
Many Israelis view the events that took place between November 1947 and May 1948 as the consequence of an emigration that was partly voluntary and partly caused by civil conflict – a trivialization of history that has since been amended by Israeli historians.
For Palestinians, the Nakba is the greatest trauma suffered by their people – an event that, for many, is at the core of their identity.
The camps that sprung up at the time are still – 75 years later – referred to as refugee camps and their residents are registered refugees, which is why they continue to receive aid from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNWRA).
Even if the erstwhile camps have long since become cities.
In many residences belonging to Palestinian refugees, keys still hang on the wall to former homes that stood on what is now Israeli territory and from which their families fled during the Nakba.
Homes to which they dream of returning one day.
There's also a key hanging above the door to Salah Hourani’s apartment in Amman.
"I'm from Ramla," he says, even though he’s never been to the city of his ancestors, nor would he be allowed to settle there.
"But that’s where our house stood.
One of my grandfathers was a farmer, the other was the imam at the local mosque."
Hourani says he would do anything for Jordan, since every Palestinian who grew up in a refugee camp there has full rights to citizenship in the country.
"But I don’t want to.
I will never give up my Palestinian identity.
I want to go back."
Israel declared independence on May 14, 1948.
And the next day, Israel’s Arab neighbors set their armies in motion and the erstwhile civil war became the first, large Middle Eastern war.
It ended around 10 months later with a surprising defeat for the Arab alliance – and left Israel in control of the entire territory foreseen by the UN partition plan for a Jewish country in addition to around 60 percent of the territory that had been reserved for an Arab country.
The Gaza Strip came under Egyptian control while the West Bank was controlled by Jordan.
The Palestinian Nakba turned into a catastrophic defeat for the surrounding Arab countries, and more would follow.
After years of tensions between Egypt and Israel, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser mobilized his military in 1967.
Israel responded with a massive preemptive strike – and within just six days, was able to take control of the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt, the Golan Heights in Syria, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
Suddenly, Israel found itself in control of the last two areas that had originally been earmarked for a Palestinian state.
By July 1967, the first Jewish settlements had popped up in the Golan Heights, with more following in September near Hebron in the West Bank.
Ramallah: Administrative Capital of the Palestinian Authority
Ramallah, the administrative capital of the Palestinian Authority, is only around 70 kilometers as the crow flies from the Sheikh Hussein Bridge across the Jordan River from Jordan.
But the drive up through the West Bank takes two-and-a-half hours.
The Israeli army has established checkpoints at numerous intersections and blocked off roads that were passable even just a few months ago.
The zig-zagging route frequently passes hills where Israeli settlers or playing children can be seen.
The buildings of Ramallah seem almost within reach, but it's an illusion.
Instead of being able to take the direct road, yet another settlement must be circumvented.
There are now around 150 Jewish settlements in the West Bank, all of them illegal under international law.
They are home to around 500,000 Israelis, some 5 percent of the country’s population.
"Where were you when all these settlements were being built?" asks Umm Tamer, who is wearing a headscarf, a long, blue gown and sneakers.
She doesn’t wait for a response: Her questions are more accusations than queries.
"Do you not see how many of our farmers have been shot by the settlers this year alone?
Is our blood not red enough?"
Umm Tamer means "mother of Tamer," and she doesn’t want to provide her full name.
She is a 36-year-old teacher and mother of six – and a politician with Hamas.
The military arm of Hamas, the Qassam Brigades, has established an authoritarian regime in Gaza over the last 16 years.
But its political arm is part of the political landscape in the West Bank.
In 2021, Umm Tamer wanted to run for office as part of the Islamist list called "Al-Quds Mawedna," which can be roughly translated as "See you in Jerusalem" – with both Israelis and Palestinians laying claim to the holy city.
But the election never took place.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who last stood for election in 2005, cancelled the vote.
Umm Tamer has a few more questions: "Don’t you always talk about democracy?
Why don’t you insist that we finally be allowed to vote?
Because we would have won a landslide victory in the election?"
Umm Tamer lives in a modern high-rise in the neighborhood of Bira, not far from the headquarters of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO).
The PLO was established in 1964 and was led for decades by Yasser Arafat, who died in 2004.
Since then, it has been under the leadership of his successor Abbas, who is now 87.
What does Umm Tamer think about what the secular PLO has achieved for the Palestinians in almost 60 years?
She again responds with a question of her own, this one openly sarcastic: "Is that a serious question?"
Arafat, she admits, was popular as a leader of the resistance.
"But what has become of this PLO?
What were their slogans?
Peace.
The end of the occupation.
The right to return."
None of it, she says, has been achieved, and all the negotiations have been for naught.
"We resigned ourselves to UN Resolution 242, which was at least supposed to guarantee us the borders of June 4, 1967.
But what did we get out of it?
More settlements, more arrests, more land grabs.
The history of this conflict did not begin on October 7.
The negotiations led to nothing.
The only thing left to us is resistance."
She doesn’t want to say anything more about the brutal Hamas terror attack on Israeli civilians.
The rise of Islamist Hamas is directly linked to the failure of the peace process.
The first Oslo Accord was signed in 1993, granting the Palestinians limited autonomy.
It seemed at the time like the first step toward a timely end to the conflict.
Since then, not just the PLO, but also the Palestinian Authority, which acts as the de facto government, have had their headquarters in Ramallah.
But even after 30 years, the city has a provisional feel to it, from the empty lots in the center, where garbage collects, to the Arafat Mausoleum and the Mukataa, from which the government operates.
"All of our sovereign headquarters are temporary.
The time will come, God willing, to move all of them to Jerusalem," Mahmoud Abbas said when he opened the PLO offices.
That was in 2010.
Even a woman who long followed the course laid out by the old leadership no longer has any illusions about what has been achieved.
The 77-year-old scholar Hanan Ashrawi was once a member of the PLO Executive Committee and a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council before she then became minister of higher education and research for the Palestinian Authority.
"Many mistakes have been made," she says, referring to the Palestinian side.
"The Oslo process was disastrous.
The years of not holding an election, the desire of the parties to cling to power.
Their only motive was self-preservation."
But that’s just one part of it, she says.
The other side is the actions of the Israelis, the ongoing occupation and the dehumanization of the Palestinians.
"Israel has never been held accountable for the Nakba.
That’s why the wound won’t heal and continues to fester."
And Europe, she says, with its view of the situation weighed down by history, is also making a solution more difficult.
"They conflate Israel with the victims of the Holocaust.
They cover for Israel because of their own feelings of guilt.
We are paying the price.
But we didn’t have anything to do with the Holocaust.
That was a European tragedy."
The Holocaust, she says, is accepted as a fact around the world, and rules pertaining to victim compensation are included in the legal systems of some countries.
"But to this day, we can’t have closure about the Nakba.
Nobody even acknowledges it."
Ashrawi says she finds the images coming out of Gaza to be so unbearable that they are affecting her psychological health.
She says she has woken up at night and had to throw up.
"I want this bloodbath to come to an end."
Hanan Ashrawi, a scholar and the former minister of higher education and research for the Palestinian Authority Foto: Debbie Hill / UPI Photo / IMAGOIt is difficult to find anyone in Ramallah at the moment who doesn’t display some signs of distress or even trauma over the course of a long conversation.
Discussing the past is difficult enough and talking about the present is often impossible.
Thinking about the future is frequently seen as an imposition.
"We are in a state of shock," says Ashrawi.
"Which future scenarios should we be addressing?"
Ehab Bessaiso is, like the Christian Ashrawi, a member of the Palestinian educated elite.
He feels just as at home in the Middle East as he does in the West, his Arabic is as polished as his English.
But when the subject turns to Gaza, he grabs a notebook and begins sketching out a map.
His agitation can be seen in the vehemence with which he draws the lines, and their indentations push several pages deep into the tablet.
The map shows the Gaza Strip, and its proportions – a product of Bessaiso having studied architecture – are precise.
Bessaiso was born in Gaza City in 1978 – not as the child of a refugee family, like Salah Hourani, but as the son of a family with deep roots in the city.
His childhood, he says, was marked by the First Intifada.
He talks about firefights, nighttime curfews and school closures lasting several weeks.
After completing a degree at Birzeit University near Ramallah, he earned his Ph.D. in Britain.
He became a member of the secular Fatah Party before going on to become government spokesman and then the Palestinian Authority culture minister for four years.
Gaza Strip: What Next?
"Of the 2.3 million people who currently live in the Gaza Strip, around 1.5 million are from families who were displaced in 1948 and lived for several years in tents," says Bessaiso, pointing to his map.
"Does anyone in the West have any idea of the pent-up frustration, anger and fear?"
Now, the strip has been reduced by half, he says, drawing an angry line where the Israeli army recently pushed through to the Mediterranean.
"Hundreds of thousands are now being pushed into this tiny speck of territory!"
Not to mention the bombs and the shortages of water, electricity and food.
"This war, too, will end at some point," says Bessaiso.
"But it will sow hatred for a century."
A photo of macabre heroism has been circulating recently on social media channels, its composition so professional that it almost seems as though it could have been produced by artificial intelligence.
It shows four children holding up a boy whose arms are raised above his head, hands balled into fists.
In the background are the ruins of bombed out buildings in the Gaza Strip.
The message of this widely shared image – whether fake, posed or only partially authentic – is clear: The next generation of violence is already on its way.
Concerns that there could be a kernel of truth in the image’s message are rife even among the most level-headed of Palestinians.
Former Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad recently published an essay in the U.S. periodical Foreign Affairs called "A Plan for Peace in Gaza ."
The first step, he wrote, "must be to halt the dash toward the abyss."
Israel’s declared goal of eliminating Hamas is "unattainable," he writes, adding that efforts aimed at eradicating Hamas infrastructure would also produce thousands more civilian deaths in Gaza.
To prevent such an outcome, he argues, Hamas must unconditionally release all of the Israeli civilians it is currently holding hostage.
Given that some captives were freed in October, Fayyad writes that "it is realistic to expect" additional releases.
The next step, he argues, is the fundamental reconfiguration of the Palestinian Authority.
In its current manifestation, he says, the PA is hardly in a position to keep growing anger in the West Bank under control, much less take over responsibility for the Gaza Strip.
A key goal, Fayyad writes, must be the "immediate and unconditional expansion of the PLO to include all major factions and political forces, including Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad."
Finally, he argues, Israel must formally recognize the Palestinians’ right to a sovereign state on territory that has been occupied by Israel since 1967 – and both sides must issue "an ironclad mutual commitment to nonviolence.”
Only then could a multiyear transitional phase begin – at the end of which Palestinian elections could be held.
The political scientist Khalil Shikaki, who teaches in both Ramallah and in the United States, says that the current war in Gaza is "unprecedented in 120 years of conflict between Palestinians and Jews."
So far, Shikaki says, it hasn’t yet produced the same number of refugees as the Nakba.
"But that cannot be ruled out either, as the war has only lasted five weeks."
What might happen next?
Other states will only participate in a solution if there is a clearly defined "endgame," the political scientist says.
"No one in their right mind would agree to go to Gaza without knowing what the endgame is."
Israel, he says, isn’t yet ready to name such an objective.
"Because whether it is the Arab states, the international community or the Palestinian Authority, the goal can only be the end of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, meaning a deal with Israel that would revive the two-state solution."
For now, Shikaki says, he doesn’t have much faith that such an outcome is realistic.
"The only thing that could possibly make the Israelis rethink is that they themselves have no exit strategy for the day after they have reoccupied the whole Gaza Strip.
If they continue what they are doing now, they will have to settle there for a very long time.
And no one will want to replace them."
Salah Hourani, the entertainer from the refugee camp in Jordan, also believes that the most likely result of this conflict is more hatred, more fear and still more violence.
"In our mosque in Baqaa, we had a teacher who beat his wife," he says.
"He also beat me, which is why I stopped going."
Like Hourani, the teacher was a Palestinian refugee from a village in the West Bank.
His name: Abdullah Azzam.
He spent a few years in Jordan before going on to become famous as the spiritual mentor of Osama bin Laden, the founder of the terror organization al-Qaida.
Azzam, considered by intelligence experts as "the father of global jihad," was killed in a 1989 attack in Pakistan.
"If Azzam hadn’t abused me, I might not have turned away from him," says Hourani.
"I might have followed him to Afghanistan.
I was certainly filled with enough anger and fury."
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