No Guns in Palestine: A Personal Experience of the Conflict in Gaza

By The Middle East Peace and Justice Action Committee

February 2024

The Middle East Peace and Justice Action Committee (MEPJAC) supports peace and justice for all of the peoples of the Middle East, and is actively working toward that goal.  On Jan. 11th, International WILPF issued a statement in support of the ongoing case brought by South Africa, in which Israel is being accused of genocide against the people of Gaza. We do support the right of all peoples to self-defense, but we insist that all nations abide by the treaties to which they are signatories.

There is plenty of blame to go around in the current fighting, but there is a thin line between defensive and offensive actions, and we cannot condone the killing of innocent civilians by any side in a conflict.  We encourage our members to read the international statement, which can be found here. We also realize that many of our members have some difficulty in understanding the current conflict, and we hope you will read our eNews submission, and follow the link. We hope it will clarify some history and put the current fighting into perspective.

Longtime WILPF Middle East activist Barbara Taft has written an article for Disarmament Times, the publication of the United Nations NGO Committee on Disarmament, Peace, and Security. published on January 3, "There Were No Guns in Palestine” was written to counter much of the disinformation that is circulating about the current conflict between the State of Israel and the organization known as Hamas, she used her own experiences during 10 visits to the region between 1967 and 2009 to create an easy-to-read but comprehensive overview of regional history, who the parties are, what armaments each possesses, and the difficulty people in the West have in untangling the issues, which are often referred to as "confusing" or "complicated".  

Barbara, who was a co-author of our MEPJAC booklet entitled "Hamas at the Peace Table: Why?" in 2015, holds a Master's in Political Science and wrote her Master's thesis on "Nationalism, Legitimacy, and Sovereignty: The Case for Palestinian Statehood".  MEPJAC thought you might like to read the article and, hopefully, pass along the link.  Several folks who have read it say that it has helped their understanding of the conflict, and that it will help them to speak to others in an intelligent way about it. Here is an excerpt from the article. (It has no restrictions on reprinting, distribution, or excerpting from it, so please distribute the link widely.)

"There Were No Guns in Palestine" by Barbara Taft

"There were no guns in Palestine." During the bombardment of Gaza by Israel in October/November of 2023, those words came back to me.

I was sitting in the dining room of a small Palestinian home in East Jerusalem. It was the summer of 1985. My host, a Palestinian attorney, who had just uttered these words, had invited me to a lunch of homemade malfoof (small cabbage rolls stuffed with ground beef). He paused for a moment after speaking, to let the words sink in.

He went on to tell me that his home was typical of Palestinian homes. His statement about guns actually wasn't 100% true, he said. He thought there might be an old rifle somewhere in his house. He didn't even know where it was. In the 1940s, when he was a child, he recalled that his father had used it to shoot rabbits for the family's dinner. To his knowledge, he continued, most Palestinian families were like his: No guns.

From my own experience, having made four other visits to the Holy Land by then, what he said was largely true at that time. My! How things have changed!

I was in Jerusalem then researching a biography that I hoped to write and publish, of my late friend, Karim Khalaf, the former mayor of Ramallah, a largely Christian city in the West Bank, a few kilometers north of Jerusalem. Karim had been the victim of a car bombing on June 2, 1980, by members of the Israeli Terror Underground, which referred to itself as "Terror Against Terror" or TNT. They had targeted three West Bank mayors, planting bombs in the cars of Mayor Khalaf and Mayor Bassam Shaka of Nablus, and a third bomb on the garage door of Mayor Ibrahim Tawil of El Bireh.

At that time, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza had been under military occupation by Israel for about 13 years. The occupation was harsh. The earliest responses to this occupation took the form of protests, including letters to the Israel authorities, newspaper articles and public speeches, often at impromptu rallies. The Israeli response was to make the restrictions tighter.

Finally, in an attempt to placate the Palestinians' desires for self-determination, Israel allowed municipal elections. They soon regretted having done so, as some of the mayors elected were Palestinian nationalists and were strong proponents of self-determination. Their election gave them a platform from which to advocate for the things their people wanted most.

The bombings of the three mayors were not meant to kill, but to maim, to cause sufficient physical damage to deter the Palestinian leadership from speaking out. The Jewish perpetrators of these crimes were never tried. Some of them bragged, when they were later captured and accused of other crimes, about what they had done to the mayors.  Although this amounted to a confession, no trials ever occurred for the bombings.

Meanwhile, Israel's harsh crackdown continued to fall upon the Palestinian people. The mayors suffered, but not in silence. Mayor Bassam Shaka, whose legs had to be amputated below the knee, was placed under house arrest. He protested loudly, saying that he had every right to speak out. Additional harassment was the price he paid for speaking out. Karim Khalaf was exiled to the family's second home, in Jericho, where he was placed under town arrest. He spoke out, but not the same way that Bassam Shaka did. He often said, "When peace comes, believe me, it will be peace for everyone, not just peace for the Arabs or peace for the Jews. It will be peace for everyone". He died of a heart attack five years after the bombings.

It is ironic that this Israeli terrorist group viewed the outspokenness of the Palestinian mayors as "terror". …

To read the rest of the article, click here.