Almost a year ago, I sat a few hundred metres away from Israel's border fence with Gaza listening to a retired Israeli army officer talk about how Hamas had tricked the Israelis into delivering truckloads of cement to the enclave under the pretext that it was being used to rebuild Gaza after yet another Israeli demolition job.
Yet if there was any building taking place, it didn't alter Gaza's skyline. No-one seemed to notice.
Months passed, the mild former army officer related, and imagine the trouble when it was discovered that instead of going up, Hamas had gone down, building tunnels under the wire fencing erected by the Israelis to demarcate, and blockade, the territory that shares borders with Israel and Egypt. These tunnels would be used to attack Israel.
The incongruous sounds of Sixto Rodriguez issued from a little boombox set up at the lunch kiosk a few metres away from where we, a group of South African journalists, were resting at this stop on our itinerary. Our military lunch-guest told his tale of Israeli complacency and Hamas trickery in a self-deprecating way, which seemed wisest, with an embarrassing story that spoke of an intelligence failure of damning proportions.
Seems no harm was done. The Israelis, in their inimitably practical way, simply extended the fences underground.
Since the subterranean fortifications had been introduced, things had settled down. It was almost peaceful on the Gaza border.
Gaza's unenviable reputation as the world's largest prison was safe. Also safe, equally fortified, was the conventional wisdom among Israelis and their government that the people of Gaza are “not interested in building”. They could have turned it into Singapore, is the standard Israeli sneer, the unflattering comparison between the Asian supercity and the patch of desert intended to feed the stereotype of the lazy, duplicitous Arab.
Instead of imitating Singapore, the Gazans continued to support radical leaders and groups, such as Hamas, which wants an Islamist state in the entire region, including the present State of Israel. This rejection of Israel, stated with varying degrees of finality over the years, helps promote the Israeli line, part myth and part truth, that even if they wanted peace they cannot find anyone in Palestinian ranks to negotiate with.
And lately, the Israelis had started to believe they may not have to, after all.
We sat at our little lunch table, listening to Rodriguez and the Israeli army veteran and his tales of war and peace. He claimed to have known Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. An Israeli spy balloon floated up ahead, a reassuring hi-tech eye.
I recall this glimpse of Gaza as the Israel Defence Force (IDF) masses thousands of troops at that benighted territory, readied for a threatened incursion and energised by extremist talk from their prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his cabinet. They have promised almighty revenge for last weekend's murderous Hamas attacks on Israeli settlements bordering Gaza. And true to their word, hundreds have already been killed in Gaza in retaliation.
When the dust has settled, little will have changed. Yet things can never be the same again
No doubt the Israelis will exact a terrible price for the killing of their people and another bloody chapter in Gaza's sad history will be written. When the dust has settled, little will have changed. Yet things can never be the same again.
The place where we were having lunch was the Black Arrow memorial near the Gaza border, where in February 1955 Israeli paratroopers led an incursion against Egyptian forces after an Egyptian-sponsored fighter killed an Israeli settler. Eight Israeli soldiers died and 38 Egyptian troops were killed in an attack ordered by the chief of staff of the IDF, Moshe Dayan.
Just a year after the Black Arrow incident, in 1956, an Israeli security officer named Roi Rotenberg was killed in an ambush in a wheat field at Nahal Oz kibbutz, the scene of multiple deaths this past weekend. At Rotenberg’s funeral, Dayan delivered a eulogy considered one of the most important speeches by an Israeli public figure in the 75-year history of that country.
He said: “Let us not cast the blame on the murderers today. Why should we declare their burning hatred for us? For eight years they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we have been transforming the lands and the villages, where they and their fathers dwelt, into our estate ... Let us not be deterred from seeing the loathing that is inflaming and filling the lives of the hundreds of thousands of Arabs who live around us. Let us not avert our eyes, lest our arms weaken.”
It wasn’t the first or only time that Dayan had referred to Arab hatred for the theft of their lands in the creation of Israel in 1948. Yet modern Israelis have been lulled into thinking that the “Palestinian problem” is no more. It needn’t be bothered much about. Yesterday’s problem. The hatred has abated, evaporated.
Netanyahu, in an interview in August, dismissed the potential problems the unresolved Palestinian issue might pose in Israel's attempts to “normalise” ties with its neighbours in the region. He shrugged it off, describing it as “a checkbox that you have to check to say you're doing it”.
Yet no matter how confidently it presumes to stride into the future, the past cannot be escaped. In recent years, Israel has normalised relations with several Arab countries and the prospect of a deal with the equally murderous rulers of Saudi Arabia is in sight, or at least it was.
On my fleeting visit to Israel, I was unsettled and frankly puzzled at how Israelis could think the limited freedoms afforded Palestinians were sufficient. Or that they met even the minimum standards of human dignity and liberty that is the birthright of every man and woman on the planet, Hamas or no Hamas.
In this presumed safe zone created by Israeli suzerainty and overwhelming military force, Israelis have been lulled into accepting and offering a freedom for Palestinians that is qualitatively less than their own, and which they would expect.
They have forgotten that Dayan recognised the establishment of the State of Israel would create a hatred that would never recede. He said as much.
The Israelis, with the most right-wing government in their history and an obnoxious and dangerous leader at the helm, are once again at a crossroads.
As Dayan predicted, Israel is reaping a harvest of hatred. His response would have been more war, but in a world unrecognisable from that which he knew, how will Israel react now?
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