Directions: Read the given passage carefully and answer the questions that follow by selecting the most appropriate option.
The Israeli response to the Hamas attack has been to order the evacuation of the northern half of Gaza, to enforce it by a blockade, by the cutting off of food, water and electricity as also by the massing of 3,00,000 troops on Gaza’s border. The objective presumably is to occupy the northern zone and expand space for new settlements. The Palestinians see it as such and recall the manner in which the state of Israel came into existence on May 14, 1948 when 6,56,000 Arabs inhabited of the Mandate Territory of Palestine were made to flee by what the historian, Paul Johnson, called (History of the Jews, p.521) as ‘the scientific use of terror to break the will of liberal rulers’. Palestinians were thus made to pay for the genocide of Jews in Europe which was committed by Germans, not Arabs.
Nor should the ideological motivation, particularly of the present Israeli leadership, be overlooked. It has repeatedly equated the Palestinians with the Nazis who should be eliminated. This is a reiteration of what Vladimir Jabotinsky, a respected predecessor in right-wing Zionism said in 1923: Zionism ‘is a colonizing adventure and therefore it stands or falls by the question of armed force.’ He predicted that the Palestinian will not leave his land unless confronted ‘by a wall of Jewish bayonets so that a new race, proud, generous and cruel, shall arise.’
The reality of this perception has been reinforced by decades of connivance by world powers. Innumerable United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolutions have remained unimplemented. Each reiterated the earlier ones and some even indicated new goalposts; each sought to explain away the guilt of the culprits. Resolution 2334 of December 2016, for instance, outlawed all settlement activity and reiterated the desirability of implementing the two-state solution.
A departure from the UNSC route was attempted in September 2020 by the Abraham Accords seeking, piously, to ‘end radicalization and conflict’ while ignoring the causes of both. An expectation of expanding the ambit of both has not materialised.