Today, Explained - What you need to know about Gaza

Episode Date: May 15, 2018

Sixty Palestinians were killed at the Israel-Gaza border yesterday, the day the U.S. moved its embassy to Jerusalem. Vox’s Yochi Dreazen breaks down the conflict, the history, and whether there’s a way forward. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today Explained is supported by Mattress Firm today. Mattressfirm.com is a website where you can save 10% off your next mattress purchase using the coupon code PODCAST10 and you can do that through June 5th. Today is Nakba Day. It's a somber anniversary of a day in 1948 when some 700,000 Palestinians left or were forced out of the new state of Israel. And Israel marks an anniversary too, just one day earlier. But there's a key difference for Israel.

It's a happy thing. It's all about Israeli independence. These night and day anniversaries, they're the perfect metaphor for what's going on right now in Israel and the Gaza Strip. Yesterday in Israel... We welcome you officially and for the first time to the embassy of the United States here in Jerusalem, the capital of Israel. Yesterday in Gaza. It is turning into a pretty grim day here in Gaza. Gazans have been protesting for six weeks leading up to today's anniversary,

and over a hundred people have died in those protests. It's one of the most desperate situations on the planet, and Jochi Driessen is here to help us understand it. He's the host of Vox's Worldly podcast. I think what we need to do really is talk about the embassy, talk about the protests in Gaza, why they've been going on for so many weeks and why they're so violent, and then talk about the history,

because you really can't understand either part of it, but especially Gaza, unless you understand the history that's led up to today. So why did the United States move the embassy to Jerusalem? When people say Jerusalem is the big issue, that's 100% true, because it has sort of everything. Is it going to be an Israeli capital, a Palestinian capital? Will it be both? Yeah. It has a religious fight. Who controls the old city? Who controls the Temple Mount?

And for the Palestinians, they believe there should be a Palestinian state, and its capital should be in East Jerusalem. Israeli leaders have agreed to this, at least in theory in the past. For the Palestinians, if they see the embassy move, America, nominally the one that's supposed to be mediating, has now gone all in with Israel. They're saying this is the capital just of the Jewish state and therefore we're screwed. And the capital we thought we were getting, we're not going to get. And that's the reason for the protests or just some of the protests? That's the reason for protests in the past, but that's not the reason for the protests happening in Gaza. They've been going on for weeks.

Thousands of Palestinians backed by Hamas returned to the border to protest. The volatile border was engulfed by plumes of black smoke coming from burning tires, a tactic to block the view of Israeli snipers. Meant to call attention to what Palestinians refer to ultimately as the Nakba, the catastrophe, which is today. Which is today. Which is today. For Jews, it's the celebration of the founding of the state of Israel. For Palestinians, that word in Arabic means catastrophe. And that's referring to the Palestinians, hundreds of thousands who either fled or were forced from their homes in the state of Israel was created. So over the Palestinians protesting in Gaza, this was like

weeks to lead up to the Nakba, to today, as a way of calling attention to what they see as a narrative of dispossession, of occupation, and of homes that they lost. They've been marching to the border and camping within sight of the border. From the Israeli point of view, you've got 10, 20, 30, 40,000 people alongside your border who might try to cross at any time. And that's what's led to Israel using deadly force. The death toll yesterday was the worst since a literal war

between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza in 2014. You have Palestinian women who have been shot, you have a guy in a wheelchair who was shot. You have just these really graphic, horrifying images of mostly unarmed protesters being shot. Most of the dead were killed along the border fence that separates the tiny, poverty-stricken Gaza Strip from Israel. Where tens of thousands of Palestinians held angry demonstrations yesterday, Israel responded with deadly force. It is important to stress that they were not all unarmed. You had Hamas, a group which is anti-Semitic,

has called for the destruction of Israel, helped organize these protests. So that's important to understand. They have thrown Molotov cocktails. They have rolled burning tires. In a couple of cases, Israel said that they were building bombs along the border. That said, you have Israelis who have been almost entirely unhurt, and now more than 90, close to 100 Palestinians killed, and many thousands of Palestinians wounded. I've seen what a bullet does to a human body when it's fired by a machine gun. When you hear wounded, it could be like, oh, they just got clipped on the arm. It's fine. And that's not what these bullets do. I mean,

if you're hit by a machine gun bullet, you could be paralyzed. You could lose a limb. You could lose a vital organ. The death toll is horrific. But when you've got thousands of wounded, it's also important to understand how bad it can be if you're wounded. So yesterday was brutal. What's happening today? A lot of people thought that today would be bigger than yesterday in terms of both the Palestinian protests and possibly the death toll that came from them. But protest organizers said the day would be set aside for funerals and the turnout for any new protests on the border with Israel would likely be low.

The violence is down not because there's some miracle peace deal, not because the sides are less full of hate towards each other, but because one side is burying so many dead. So if there's a minimal amount of violence and the protests are mostly non-violent, why is the Israeli government opening fire? For Israel, this is a security threat for two reasons. One, Hamas, this group that runs Gaza, the Hamas charter calls for destroying Israel. If you're Israel, you've had attacks where people from Gaza have tunneled under the border wall, popped up in Israel, killed soldiers.

And so you're afraid of that. That's a legitimate, I think, security fear for them. The other is if you have 40,000 people coming to the wall, you could have violence both in that attempt. You could have people try to set bombs off at the wall, fly kites that are on fire into Israel, which has happened in the last couple of days. There's one fear of could they kill soldiers at the wall? The bigger fear is do they get into Israel proper and start killing civilians? Why has Israel been shooting live rounds? I mean, couldn't they have just handled this differently? It's hard to imagine how much worse they could handle it. I mean, killing 50

people who are unarmed, who are women, who are children, who are shot in the back, could they have done, let's say, a buffer zone and make clear, protest all you want to, to this point. We're not going to do anything. We're not going to shoot. We're not going to fire. We're not going to try to stop you. Could they have used weapons that were not live bullets? Could they have used things like water cannons, things that were not what they're using? For sure. So if Palestinians are getting shot for going too close to the border, it's hard to understand why they're just walking into gunfire. I think for a lot of Palestinians who are living in Gaza, which is a place that has high, high unemployment, poverty, desperation, and is kind of encircled on all sides,

you don't have many ways of making your voice heard short of a big protest. And some would say Hamas, the group that runs Gaza, kind of wants the violence for this reason. But the easiest way to get attention is send a big crowd of people to the border, hope that there's violence, and if there is, blame Israel for it. Have you been to the Gaza border with Israel? Yeah, I've been to the border, along the border, and across the border. Could you kind of paint a picture for me? Tell me what it's like. Let's say you're on Google Earth and you're looking at the Mediterranean Sea and you just zoom in as much as you can.

On the bottom right corner, you'll see this little teeny bit of land, which is Gaza. Gaza, landmass-wise, is basically the size of the city of Detroit. The population is around 2 million, and it's squeezed and encircled on all sides. You have Israel, you have Egypt, and then in between you have the Gaza Strip. Gaza City is poor. Gaza City has still buildings that have been destroyed over the years that were never rebuilt. Gaza has refugee camps sprinkled pretty much everywhere. It's along the water.

Israel controls the water, and you can see Israeli naval ships from the beach. Part of it has a border wall with Israel, so Israel controls that border. Part of it has a border on the south with Egypt. Egypt controls that border, and Israel controls the airspace. So imagine just a little pocket of land right along a beach where every other side of it is walled in. And what's life like there if you live inside Gaza? You've got a power grid that has blackouts throughout the day.

Your sewage system is decrepit. Sometimes sewers don't work. It is a place where water runs out when it's 120 degrees in the heat. And where the beaches, and this is always what jumps out at me when I'm there, but the beaches are just empty and full of trash. And you don't go very far into Israel to see those same beaches that are full of life. That's always what jumps out to me when I go. It's just to realize that's the same place as you have in Israel a few miles away,

but it might as well be on Mars. You make Gaza sound like some sort of prison with, I don't know, everyone squeezed in and stuck on all sides. Is there a way out? The big issue in some ways for both Israel and Egypt are tunnels. The Hamas government that runs the Gaza Strip, they dug tunnels to the south into Egypt for smuggling. These were, for the most part, not to carry out attacks in Egypt. These were to bring in cigarettes, food, alcohol even. But with Israel, the notion is you dig a tunnel under the wall and you pop up. You're not going far. You're

not getting to Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, to the big cities, but you're getting into Israel. And once you're in Israel, then you have kind of free reign to start shooting people, to carry out attacks, to set bombs. They've already had attacks where Hamas fighters have used tunnels to get into Israel and kill soldiers. Israel has used multiple kinds of bombs to try to destroy the tunnels. And Israel is actually building an underground wall. And that just gives you a sense of how scared they are about this happening the way it's happened in the past. You don't make Gaza sound like an incredibly desirable place to be. Why is there so much fighting over it? Gaza is something that very literally no country wants.

Egypt kind of had it, didn't want it. Israel, even when it was occupying it, didn't want it. It's so poor and just so full of wreckage and poverty and depression. If you owned it, you'd have to figure out some way to provide jobs and some way to rebuild a power grid and some way to rebuild a water system and a sewage system. It's not like Jerusalem where you had Israel trying to conquer parts of it, Jordan's trying to conquer it.

That's not what's happening with Gaza. With Gaza, they're just trying to keep it bottled up. So the least desirable piece of land in the Middle East is right next to the one everyone's been fighting over for centuries. How did that happen? That's next on Today Explained. Today Explained is supported by Mattress Firm. You can find Mattress Firm all across the country and also on the internet at mattressfirm.com.

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On their latest episode, they talk to an Iranian journalist about what daily life is like for women who have to wear hijabs. Call Your Girlfriend drops every Friday at callyourgirlfriend.com or wherever you get your podcasts. The history of this is really important. And if you think back to 1948, which were both Israelis and Palestinians as sort of the key date, the UN votes to recognize Israel,

the new state of Israel. The resolution of the Duck Committee for Palestine was adopted by 33 votes, 13 against, 10 abstentions. Israel's Arab neighbors invade. Israel wins. So for Jews around the world, this is seen as like the moment that Israel was created and made safe. Palestinians see it very differently. They call it the Nakba, the catastrophe,

because hundreds of thousands of Palestinians either fled or were kicked out of the homes they had. That's the kind of status quo until 1967. In 1967, Israel conquers Gaza. At that point, Gaza was controlled by Egypt. Israel conquers it. Israel also conquers the West Bank and part of Jerusalem, which had been controlled by Jordan. The key dates are 1948, because that's the Nakba, when Palestinians leave or are forced out. 1967, when Gaza is conquered by Israel.

And then 2005. So what happens in 2005? I was in Israel for this, and this was kind of batshit crazy to see happening in real time. And then 2005. So what happens in 2005? I was in Israel for this, and this was kind of batshit crazy to see happening in real time. The prime minister of Israel then was Ariel Sharon, and he ordered a unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. The moment Palestinians in Gaza have only dreamed of. After 38 years, Israel's troops are gone. Jewish settlements they protected, now Palestinian again.

Israeli settlements were torn down. People were pulled, screaming out of their houses. They took our people out and gave the Arabs this building. Look, this beautiful area. They think that there will be peace. No peace. With Arabs, there will be no peace here. That's all.

It was very divisive within Israel, but his feeling was, Gaza is not important to Israel strategically. You've got the army killing people, having soldiers killed to protect what he saw as a kind of radical group of settlers who decide to live in Gaza, and that, frankly, it just wasn't worth it to Israel. As we decided to withdraw, except that he made what I think was a fundamental, enormous, catastrophic mistake, he could have said to the moderate Palestinian government, we are giving you this land so they could then say to the Palestinian people, because of negotiations, because of peace, we've gotten back half of Palestine. He didn't do that.

That meant that Hamas, which is considered a terrorist group by much of the world, was able to take power and turn Gaza into a large Hamas-controlled military base. Hamas has carried out dozens upon dozens of terror bombings in Israel. They've blown up buses, restaurants, hotels. It's really something where if Sharon had negotiated, if he had let the Palestinians kind of celebrate it as a win, it would have been brilliant. And he chose not to do that. And Hamas is in power to this day. It is. Israel withdrew in 2005. There were elections in 2006 that Hamas won. They've controlled it ever since. There was a brief period of a civil war of sorts between Hamas and Fatah. Fatah runs what's now called the Palestinian Authority, the main Palestinian group that controls the West Bank and that's been negotiating with Israel for decades now. And when it ended, you had basically two Palestine. You had Gaza controlled by Hamas, the West Bank controlled by the Palestinian

Authority, and the two didn't in any way really connect. So if Hamas is a terrorist group, why did Gaza choose them over the Palestinian Authority? The Palestinian Authority is pretty much hated by most Palestinians. It's seen as corrupt, as out of the loop, as run by the same group of old men who have run it forever. Hamas is seen as not corrupt. And they do a lot of charitable works. They run food kitchens. They run homeless shelters.

They run jobs programs. And so if you're the average Gazan, and I've spent enough time there to talk to quite a few, Palestinian Authority, remote, corrupt. Hamas, fought Israel, runs food kitchens, gives you jobs, and you can sort of understand why they would choose Hamas. So Hamas is elected in Gaza. They bring in these social programs, and there's hope that things get better. Have they gotten better?

No. The other thing Hamas has done is fire rockets into Israel from within the Gaza Strip. Israel has gone to war in the Gaza Strip because of that. The most recent was in 2014. Overnight, Israeli forces fired flares into the skies above Gaza as they pummeled the strip with artillery. All that before Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he was sending ground forces into Gaza. The goal, he says, to take out the extensive network of underground tunnels that lead from Gaza into Israel. Rockets had been fired by Hamas into Israel from Gaza.

Israel sent in tanks, aircraft. It was a very, very, very violent conflict. And when I visited Gaza both before and after that war, you still saw buildings that were wrecked. You still saw streets that were wrecked. Israel's attacking Gaza because it's been firing rockets. Gaza's firing rockets because they're walled in and stuck. Who started this? In a kind of chronological sense, the blockade really slammed in after the rockets started to be fired. But the broader question is fair. I mean, the broader question of if Israel had pulled out

and following the pullout had also opened up the airspace and the ports and the roads, might the rockets not have been fired in the same way? Yeah. I mean, it's a very valid, fair read of it. Israel has no more settlers living in the Gaza Strip, but the Gaza Strip is still encircled. I mean, it's walled off on all sides. And so if you're living in the Gaza Strip, you don't feel as if you're no longer occupied.

You still feel like you're occupied for the simple fact that you, in a very literal sense, cannot leave. Is the solution as easy as like, let up the blockade for a little bit, free up Gaza's borders? There have been attempts in the past by Israel and by others to say, okay, we're going to let in these types of ships and these types of trucks and these kinds of cars. And it hasn't really gone anywhere. I think that in Israel, the fear of terror, the fear of being hit, it's irrational at this point. It just leads to Israelis thinking, whatever the government says has to be done, do it. Without question, there are approaches they could take that are not seal everything. But the people who are saying take those approaches are basically silent. And the people who are saying, no, no,

no, no, no, anything you do is a risk. That's the voice that's winning out right now. There's obviously just two very different narratives at play here. What specifically are they? The Israeli narrative would be, we, Israel, said we'd pull out. We did. We left behind greenhouses, other kind of businesses that could have been used by the Palestinians. Those were destroyed. And they've been firing rockets into Israeli cities and towns ever since. A Palestinian narrative would be, yeah, you pulled out, but you never stopped occupying us. If you had, we'd have our own ports and our own airspace, and we'd be able to drive in and out. And because we can't, your occupation is still there. They would say, we voted in the government. We were democratic,

like you always say you want people to be. And after we voted in the government, you don't like who we voted in, so you've been punishing us ever since. And that's where they don't link up. Hamas was elected. So when Palestinians say, we elected this government, and then you decided to punish us for the vote, that's true. Hamas is also a terror group that's built on anti-Semitism. So when Israel says, we're not going to recognize this violent group, that's also true. Both sides are to blame in different ways. And in some ways, to me, the better question is, which side at any given moment is making it worse? And sort of like, do you turn the dial more towards the Israel side, more towards the Palestinian side? When you're talking about dozens of people being shot to death, who are for the most part protesting peacefully, you turn that dial more towards the Israel side.

What happens next? I mean, it feels like this is reaching a boiling point. Is something going to change? I mean, Gaza is something that even when people were trying to optimistically say there could be a peace deal between Israel and Palestine, nobody knew what to do with Gaza because it's so poor that even the Palestinian Authority, which has the West Bank, itself doesn't necessarily want to have Gaza. It's depressing to say this, but the status quo is terrible. The status quo can also endure for a very, very, very long time. For a long time, you had Arab leaders say, it's all about the Palestinians. And they don't say that anymore. For them now,

it's all about Iran. And so when people in Gaza say, we're forgotten, that's true. They are. It's 2 million people who are living functionally in a prison, and I don't see if that changes or how or when. And because there is no obvious way to bring about some better life, they're trapped. Yochi Drizen is the foreign editor at Vox. I'm Sean Ramos-Firm. This is Today Explained. Thank you. country. Use the coupon code PODCAST10 if you go online to get 10% off a mattress before June 5th, and if you don't like that mattress, they'll take it back within 120 days. Thanks.