The borders around the 140-square-mile Gaza strip are guarded heavily by both its neighbors, Israel and Egypt, and the sea lanes are blockaded. Israel has lately managed to stop the rockets that the Palestinian radical group Hamas, which runs Gaza, has been firing into its southern cities. Israel claims, too, to have come up with a system that by next year will allow it to close the tunnels through which terrorists have long smuggled arms and goods. On the last day of March, though, 30,000 Gazan protesters massed at five sites near the border. Gazan organizers billed this as the first episode in a mounting series of protests to climax in a Great March of Return on May 15, the 70th anniversary of the state of Israel. When people moved across the 300-yard buffer zone towards the Israeli border, soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces shot 18 of them dead.
The IDF argue they were defending their country’s border. Palestinians (and much of the elite press in Israel and abroad) counter that there was no real threat from a dirt-poor entity that lacks even clean drinking water. Is this an act of legitimate defense or an atrocity? It is the wrong question—or, rather, it is an emotional way of asking the question of whether the border (and the country it protects) is legitimate or not.
Much of the argument has concerned intentions—as measured by the role Hamas took in the clash. Palestinians say that the demonstration was a civilian one, run by a march committee, that there were no major breaches of the border on March 31, and that the IDF fired tear gas at a disabled man approaching them in a mobility scooter. Israelis, by contrast, say the men they shot had made five attempts to break through the border and had laid booby traps in at least three places. Several men had breached Israeli barriers the day before. Most of them were fighters for Hamas. Hamas acknowledges that at least half a dozen of the dead were its fighters, and it provided buses that took the protesters to the border.
But the role of Hamas in the demonstration does not necessarily matter to the case for self-defense. The division between a peaceful protest and a forceful uprising can never be taken for granted. Satyagraha—the concept behind the massive nonviolent demonstrations that Gandhi introduced to the world—is an ambiguous principle. Human nature being what it is, any large group of people with a cause should be understood, potentially, as a weapon. That is how Hamas understands it. “A peaceful protest is a new form of resistance,” one of its members wrote in the online magazine Filastin, “but we have not forgotten other forms of resistance, primarily the military one.” A “demonstration” such as the one that took place on March 31 is always the demonstration of a weapon.
Demonstrating a weapon is not the same as firing it. But everyone who marches is carrying it. No matter how “innocent” or powerless these thousands are, they are marching to renegotiate the border. No matter who manages to breach the border, whether it be a 7-year-old girl or a crippled man in an electric buggy, Hamas will be the beneficiary of the principle of breachability thereby established. The very best reporting on the Palestinian marches has been that of Gil Yaron in the German daily Die Welt. Yaron quoted Issam Hammad, 52, founder of the march committee, who envisions a political pilgrimage that will grow until millions of Palestinians from neighboring countries somehow gravitate towards the Gaza strip. “We’ll give the order, and everyone will rush them at the same time,” Hammad said. Part of what Israelis and Palestinians were fighting over on March 31 was whether this weapon would prove effective—and whether it would prove risk-free—before Hammad’s promised millions showed up.
Al Jazeera, Human Rights Watch, and the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz treated the encounter as if it were a matter of two individuals meeting on a street, insisting that the “protesters posed no threat to Israeli soldiers positioned across the border.” But the issue is not whether soldiers are threatened. It is whether the border is threatened, whether it is legitimate, and therefore whether the country it defines is legitimate.
This is not a question that can be opened up to an “independent investigation.” It is not a question that can be decided on considerations of “proportionality,” as if it were a joust. The New York Times, in an editorial highly critical of the IDF, admitted that the Palestinians at times have been “feckless at pursuing peace.” Perhaps, rather, they’re effective at pursuing hostility. The Palestinians are not out protesting because they’re incompetent peacemakers or bad people. They are protesting because they believe the land behind the border they are facing has been stolen. They are making that case the only way they can. The IDF is rebutting it the only way it can.
