Israel / Palestine one year on
The absence of imagination continues
This piece was written before the death, on 17th October, of Hamas leader, Yahya Sinwar. It goes without saying that one less psychopathic maniac in the world leaves it a better place. But I worry that as long as another, Benjamin Netanyahu, remains in office, the plight of innocent civilians in the region, is unlikley to improve.
Back in January, almost three months after the Hamas attack on southern Israel that killed 1,139 people, I wrote about what needed to change to bring the ensuing conflict to an end. Some readers suggested that piece was rather too theoretical, by which they meant, I think: no chance. It seems they were right. Today, on the anniversary of that attack, the situation is far worse than anyone can have imagined.
As I said in that earlier piece, there is no hope of a lasting peace while both sides are led by maniacal psychopaths. As someone who has equal sympathy with innocent victims on both sides, it is utterly depressing that Benjamin Netanyahu has now been able to extend the war across Israel’s northern border into Lebanon with apparent impunity. Don’t get me wrong: I have no doubt that if things were the other way around, if it was Hamas who possessed huge military and intelligence advantages, they would have been equally ruthless in their determination to remove Israel from the map, and kill as many Jewish people as they could.
It was the American writer Adrienne Rich who said:
‘War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to 'feel good' about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure.’
I can’t imagine anyone, beyond the leaders on either side, feeling good about what has unfolded in Israel, Gaza and now Lebanon, over the last twelve months. But Rich was right: it is the failure on the part of their leaders to imagine a peaceful and secure future for both Israelis and Palestinians that condemns all sides to the horrors of endless war.
The most depressing thing I’ve read recently was this piece by the Israeli-American historian and former IDF commander Omer Bartov in the Guardian. Earlier this year he returned to Israel and was shocked at the reaction of old friends to the conflict in Gaza:
‘The impression that I got was consistent: we have no room in our hearts, we have no room in our thoughts, we do not want to speak about or to be shown what our own soldiers, our children or grandchildren, our brothers and sisters, are doing right now in Gaza. We must focus on ourselves, on our trauma, fear and anger.’
As Bartov points out, there is no chance of hundreds of thousands of Israelis turning out to protest against their governments persecution of the war, as they did in 1982 after the massacre of thousands of Palestinians in Lebanon at the Shabra and Shatila refugee camps. As a consequence of the 7th October attacks, many liberal, educated Israelis have either learned, or been been obliged by a force residing deep in their psyches, to suppress the natural sense of empathy they previously felt towards their Palestinian neighbours. It also means that the only real restraint on Netanyahu - the threat of being removed from power by his own people - no longer exists.
If I were an Israeli, I would be deeply concerned by Netanyahu’s approach. As I said in my earlier piece, this is an unwinnable war. Each strike on targets in Gaza and Lebanon makes it even easier for Hamas and Hezbollah to recruit gullible young people to wage war against Israel, in all likelihood for generations to come.
By extending the conflict now, Netanyahu clearly has the upcoming US election in mind, for it’s unlikely that whoever wins, he will be allowed the latitude he currently enjoys. Nonetheless, it’s very difficult to see the suffering of innocent Gazans and Lebanese civilians, nor the deeply felt anxiety of Israelis, being relieved any time soon.
In an excellent piece for Project Syndicate, Richard Haass writes:
‘Wars are as much political as military undertakings. It is possible to win a war on the battlefield and still lose it. Israel has done precisely that in Gaza, by choosing to fight a conventional war against an unconventional foe without a plan for what comes next.’
Netanyahu, like his counterparts in Hamas and Hezbollah, is clearly not interested in peace, nor in the only viable diplomatic way out: a two state solution in which an independent Palestinian state is established in the occupied territories. Last week, the Jordanian Foreign Minister, speaking on behalf of the Muslim-Arab Committee which represents 57 countries, told the UN that Israel’s neighbours are prepared to guarantee Israel’s security once the occupation ends and terms for a two-state solution are agreed.
This will not happen until a moderate, peace-seeking government takes over in Israel. If it did, and such a government were to signal its desire for peace under a two-state solution, the jihadists of Hamas and Hezbollah would find it much harder to recruit young men willing to fight. And the extremists in Iran who support them would have the wind taken out of their sails.
Yesterday’s Observer editorial gave a balanced view of the situation, but I have to take issue with one sentence in the first paragraph in:
‘It’s a moment to reflect on – and unreservedly condemn – the unfathomable hatred that led the young Palestinian men of Gaza to perpetrate such appalling, inhuman acts.’
Of course, every decent person must condemn the Hamas attacks. But I struggle with the idea that the Hamas fighters’ hatred is ‘unfathomable’. It’s only unfathomable because most of us, like the Observer’s leader writers, have had the good fortune to grow up in a secure, stable country with abundant opportunities. We have also been spared the sense of deep historical injustice gnawing away at our pliable minds as we grow up. Here, again, there is a failure of imagination.
We know how easy it is for young people to be brainwashed into committing such heinous crimes. We know that acts driven by unfathomable hatred are a feature of all wars. Instead of throwing our arms up and claiming not to understand how human beings could possibly behave so brutally, we should recognise that this is what happens in war, and use this understanding as motivation to work towards an end to all wars. Bringing an end to war requires us not just to imagine the possibility of peace, but also to be honest about the reality of human behaviour.
As things stand, the war between Israel and its enemies will continue for years, perhaps not with the intensity of the last twelve months, but it will continue. And the casualty figures will remain grossly uneven unless Israel’s overwhelming firepower can be reined in. This can only happen by restricting the supply of weapons to the Israeli government. And this will only become a viable option if the western nations who are supplying those weapons join Israel’s Arab neighbours in making a commitment to defend Israel’s territorial integrity. (Though even that might not be enough to persuade Netanyahu, who clearly still believes he can win the war in such a way as to guarantee Israel’s long term security, and redraw its borders to permanently include the occupied territories).
Such a commitment would require large numbers of foreign troops on the ground in Israel, and unprecedented region-wide diplomatic efforts. It would require the United States and Iran to put aside their differences and work together to bring lasting peace to the region. This may all sound extremely unlikely, but as long as we can imagine the possibility of a solution, there is hope. It’s only when our imagination fails absolutely that endless war becomes inevitable.