Is change coming over a Palestinian state?

The National

27-07-2025

Each was serenely at odds with the screams, pain and anger that had accompanied the deaths of their owners.
It was a beautiful early spring day in 2001, and the Second Palestinian Intifada – or uprising – was now into its sixth month.
Hot and weary after an afternoon spent interviewing some Palestinians about where they thought the uprising was now heading, I had sought sanctuary from the tension of the streets in the West Bank town of Ramallah in the cool and calm of the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Centre art gallery.
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Here, only the tapping of shoe heels and gentle sputtering of the candles that lined the dimly lit gallery floor intruded on the quiet.
I had already witnessed so much killing in the years that I'd spent covering this battle of wills between Israelis and Palestinians.
But little did I know that day, as I made my way through this exhibition of photographs and objects entitled The Hundred Martyrs, that in the decades to come, the suffering and sacrifice would escalate to the unimaginable levels of today.
During my visit, the exhibition's curators told me how they had been inundated with requests from the relatives of other Intifada victims who wanted their loved ones' belongings and memories to be part of this temporary monument.
Each of the objects displayed underneath the photographs in transparent plastic cases represented individual shrines. Their value was not material, but purely symbolic in that they belonged to a 'martyr' – someone who had died directly or indirectly as a result of the uprising.
In each instance, curators' assistants had journeyed out through the Israeli checkpoints and cordons that surrounded Palestinian communities to collect these personal photographs and artefacts.
They stood alone as a testament to an individual life. Lives not just remembered, but preserved, along with stories equally powerful and emotive.
I remember that day stopping before the empty birdcage belonging to 15-year-old Nizar Eideh of Ramallah, who, on the morning just before he was shot dead in stone-throwing clashes with Israeli troops, released a bird he had bought a few days earlier, worried that the bird's mother might miss him.
Almost two-and-a-half decades later, photographs and objects, just like those in The Hundred Martyrs exhibition, continue to serve as mute witnesses to a generation of Palestinians in peril. One such image released just this past week shocked the world.
The harrowing photograph taken by journalist Ahmed al-Arini of 18-month-old infant, Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq in his mother's arms, bones visible from starvation and dressed only in a nappy improvised from a bin bag, is difficult to look at.
So much of what we see coming out of Gaza these past 21 long months has been difficult to look at, let alone absorb and comprehend.
As my good friend the Palestinian writer Raja Shehadeh – himself a human rights lawyer – observed recently, ultimately 'it will be our humanity, not international law that will judge and hold Israel and its allies accountable'.
I so hope Shehadeh is right, even if at times that humanity seems absent in the response of so many people right now.
That latest picture from Gaza of 18-month-old Muhammad reminds me of another from Gaza back during the Second Intifada.
In its own way, it too became a defining image. The 12-year-old boy in that earlier picture was also called Muhammad.
It was on September 30, barely days after the start of the Second Intifada, that Mohammed al-Durra was killed as his father tried to shield him after being caught in Israeli crossfire at Gaza's Netzarim Junction.
Caught on live television, the youngster's horrific death was broadcast around the world.
In Baghdad, they would subsequently name a street after this little boy. In Morocco, a public park. In Jordan, the Taekwondo Federation named their annual championship after him. In other Arab countries, postage stamps were issued carrying his picture.
The TV pictures of his death became a rallying cry for international action, and to this day, the circumstances surrounding Mohammed al-Durra's killing remain the subject of anger, controversy and debate.
Some Israeli officials even insisted at the time that it was 'staged' by the Palestinians, while one pro-Israeli American academic derisorily called the pictures nothing more than 'Pallywood cinema'.
Even in death, it seemed, little Mohammed al-Durra continued to be a target in this, a conflict where there must always be two stories.
As a journalist covering the Intifada at that time, I, like others, wondered just for a moment whether maybe, just maybe, something good might come from such a tragedy.
Perhaps at long last, from the haunted look on the face of this little boy, the realisation might dawn that the eye-for-an-eye score settling between Israelis and Palestinians could not continue forever.
In a recent article of his own, Raja Shehadeh asked two important questions. How is it that most Israelis do not acknowledge their humanity? How are they able to show no remorse for what their army is carrying out in their name?
Back during the time of both the First and Second Intifadas, many Israelis then too seemed able to live with the atrocities they heard and read about daily.
For some Israelis – sheltering just beyond the shadow of such bloodshed – the self-deception required to do so was made easier by the fact that the carnage was largely confined to the occupied territories and rarely trickled onto their own streets.
The attacks of October 7, 2023, by Hamas on Israeli communities subsequently put paid to that, of course, and today, both Israelis and Palestinians are living with the terrible consequences.
But even back during those early Intifada times, not every Israeli – as is the case today – turned the other way.
In the autumn of 1988, shortly after the start of the First Intifada, the Israeli novelist, A B Yehoshua, was so disgusted by the complacency of his fellow citizens that he said he now understood how so many Germans after World War Two could say they had never seen or heard of the Holocaust concentration camps.
It goes without saying, of course, that Yehoshua's comments went straight to the heart of the Israeli psyche and generated a bitter backlash. But whether Israelis liked it or not, the irrefutable evidence of widespread human rights abuses against ordinary Palestinians was there to see for anyone who took the time to go and look for themselves.
In today's digital world, of course, there is no need to do that, for images like those of Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq inevitably manage to seep out into our consciences.
This happens in part thanks to the courage of Palestinian journalists. It happens also despite an Israeli ban on international reporters having access to Gaza. It means too that we cannot ignore the mass starvation before our eyes.
AS I write this, one in three Gazans goes multiple days without eating. Malnourished mothers can no longer produce milk to breastfeed their children, the injured are unable to heal, and hospitals have run out of nutritional supplements to treat countless emaciated infants like Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq.
Just a few days ago, countries, including Britain and many member states of the European Union (EU), condemned the 'drip feeding' of aid.
But let's call this man-made starvation for what it really is, given that any inadequate provision of aid to civilians on terrain that is, in effect, under occupation is a war crime. In response, Israel says such criticisms are 'disconnected from reality.'
But for so long now – going back decades – it has been Israel that has chosen to block out the uncomfortable reality of what it was becoming.
Those journalists like myself and others, who have watched this perverse metamorphosis, began witnessing the tell-tale signs years ago.
Once again, by way of example, I need only cast my mind back to one of many instances during the Second Intifada.
It was April 2002, during what the Israelis – using a characteristic misnomer – had dubbed 'Operation Defensive Shield' that I watched hundreds of Palestinian men herded together under guard by soldiers in armoured personnel carriers in the al-Amari refugee camp in Ramallah.
Blindfolded, their hands still bound behind their back, my colleague and I watched as Israeli soldiers wrote a number on each of the prisoners' forearms before the men were then forced to sit silently in the baking sun with guns trained on them, each waiting their turn for interrogation.
Such methods repeated time and again in the following days outraged some Israelis, who felt they were reminiscent of the Nazis during World War Two. As increasing evidence emerged, many Israelis were compelled to speak out.
Yosef (Tommy) Lapid, a member of the Israeli parliament, leader of the Shinui Party and a former concentration camp victim, confronted Israeli General Shaul Mofaz during a meeting of the Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee, saying that, as a Holocaust survivor, he found the IDF methods intolerable and shocking.
In a letter to Dr Shevah Weiss, the chair of Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum, Mohammed Barakeh, an Arab-Israeli Knesset member, put into words the thoughts of many over Israel's tactics during the ongoing invasion of the West Bank at that time.
'In these wretched days, I've asked myself more than once how, within such a short period of history, the victim has become the murderer, and a people who, perhaps, suffered more than any other from arbitrary repression and refugee status, is capable of meting out the same fate to others,' Barakeh grimly noted.
From what I witnessed in Ramallah and elsewhere during those days, it was evident that the Israeli army's 'tactics' made a mockery of its claim to believe in 'purity of arms'. More recently in Gaza, this contradiction has been borne out time and again.
This weekend, as France prepares to declare its recognition of a Palestinian state and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer comes under increasing pressure to do the same, his Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition government appear undeterred.
Speaking recently about French president Emmanuel Macron's insistence that recognising Palestine was a 'moral duty', Israel's defence minister, Israel Katz, pledged Israel would further tighten its grip on the West Bank.
'They will recognise a Palestinian state on paper – and we will build the Jewish-Israeli state on the ground,' he said. 'The paper will be thrown in the trash can of history and the State of Israel will flourish and prosper,' Katz attested.
Bold words, but ones that as a long-term observer of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I believe have an increasingly hollow ring. Instead, I'm of the view that we are fast approaching a critical juncture in this seemingly interminable battle of wills.
Yes, I know talk of a 'turning point' has been mooted many times in the past, but there is just an inkling that the political ground is shifting on both sides of what the Israeli writer Amos Elon once described as an 'irresistible force colliding with an immovable body'.
Forget the River Jordan, for it's the Rubicon that is being crossed here for both Palestinians and Israelis alike.
Given what has unfolded in Gaza, there is no going back to the way things were for either side and that in itself could lead to a tectonic political shift.
Much of the world now sees through Israel's victimhood veil, and Netanyahu's use of war to keep himself in power has all but run its course.
As for the Palestinians, they must seize the opportunity to capitalise on any growing goodwill like never before and endeavour to do what they have failed to achieve for the past 30 years – unity.
As for the international community, to repeat Raja Shehadeh's words, 'it will be our humanity, not international law' that will in the end win the day.
All these remarks might seem out of step with the political moment, but the irrefutable fact is that there will be no peace until there is a Palestinian state. To that end, I for one can't help but sense a whiff of change in the air. Insubstantial yet, perhaps, but undeniable, nonetheless.