Janine Zacharia: Israel vs. Hamas: The Gaza Conflict and What Comes Next

After a period of relative quiet, Israel and Hamas found themselves in a summer rocket war that put the global spotlight once again on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Thousands of rockets and missiles were fired. The Israeli military destroyed an underground tunnel network built by Hamas. Gaza is in shambles. More than 1,800 Palestinians and 60 Israelis are dead. The United States leveled some of its toughest criticism at Israel ever for the killing of Palestinian civilians. What happens now? With decades of troubled history on both sides and a rising death toll, the possibility of a long-term peace agreement seems even further out of reach. Janine Zacharia, former Jerusalem bureau chief of The Washington Post, now a visiting lecturer at Stanford, will share her insights on why this conflict erupted now, explore what the sides hoped to gain (and what they did or didn’t achieve) and what it all means for the future of peace negotiations and the alliance between Israel and the United States.

Speaker Janine Zacharia is the Carlos Kelly McClatchy Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Communications at Stanford University.

[guyhaimi]

as someone who supposed to be an expert on this conflict, its just amazing how many time see been surprised...

[Peter-buqt]

A whole hour about "The Gaza Conflict" without mention of the fact that 70-80% of the Gaza Strip's current inhabitants are descendants of people who used to live in what's now southern and western Israel, were either expelled from their homes or fled the fighting during Israel's war of independence in 1948, and have always wanted to return to where they came from but have been barred from doing so by Israeli governments.  Does this background go unmentioned because it's already well known to American audiences?  In my experience, it is not well known.  Even when Janine Zacharia gives what she says is a summary of the Palestinian "narrative", she avoids saying where most of the people in Gaza came from.

In her prepared remarks, Zacharia tells us about what has gone through the minds of Ariel Sharon, Benjamin Netanyahu, Ehud Olmert, and some other unnamed Israeli official, as well as Barack Obama and John Kerry.  For additional drama, she tells us that Condi Rice almost fell off the treadmill she was working out on when she heard the news that Hamas had won the Palestinian elections in 2006.  Why doesn't Zacharia name any Palestinians, affiliated with Hamas or not, who might have thoughts of their own and might have made decisions of some kind or other?  The only Palestinian she mentions by name is Mahmoud Abbas, but only in a passive sense, when she says that it's possible he "may be bolstered" by this latest flare-up in violence between Israel and Hamas.

Another telling example of Zacharia's one-sidedness is when she talks about how "The way Israelis saw this conflict and the way the world saw it were very different."  Now of course this is useful for her audience to know; she is doing her job as a journalist.  But what about the way the people living in Gaza saw this conflict?  Without question, they've been affected by it much more than Israelis have.  So why doesn't she tell us about the way Gazans have been seeing this conflict, and how that might be different or similar to the way the rest of the world sees it?

[michael_julien]

Israel did not destroy the tunnel network. That was an incompleted objective. In fact it wasn't their objective at all, from what's been reported on the ground in Gaza.