Gaza – A Wound in the World…

The parallels between the history of the island of Ireland, and the history of Palestine and Israel, has led many here to take a side on the Middle East that best matches their own experiences and, frankly, use it as a proxy for our own division. A visitor to our shores from the region, upon seeing the serried ranks of Israeli and Palestinian flags in various parts of Belfast, commented that such vicarious conflict amounted to ‘pissing through another man’s penis’. Safe to say, we have an keen interest in what is going on over there because of what happened to us over here.

Many of our regulars will have noticed that here on Slugger, there haven’t been many posts on the unfolding catastrophe in the Middle East, relying on people being able to have their say in the public forum of Open Sunday. Partly its because this is a website focused on Irish politics (specifically northern Irish politics) and partly because we haven’t had many submissions on the topic. The moderator team has removed any post relating to Israel-Palestine in any other discussion as being off-topic, as per existing rules, with the potential to derail and corrupt any other discussion. That policy will remain in force.

But mostly it is because in the face of such misery, the Human urge to turn away is irresistible. The cycle of carnage in the Middle East is so absolutely appalling that it takes fortitude to keep looking at it.

However, from time to time, we do have to look at it. We are all witnesses after all and so today we will open a thread but the rules will be strictly enforced (if in doubt read our Comments Policy).

Putting up a dedicated post on this issue is rolling the dice on whether the discussion that inevitably follows will be nuanced and educational, or a screaming match between those convinced of the unchallengeable morality of their cause. (Comments of the later sort are prone to being deleted because they inevitably cross the line into crass generalisations of other people’s positions, and contribute nothing to the ultimate debate).

So, to recap, as of April 5^th, just over thirty-three thousand people have been killed as a result of Israel’s offensive in Gaza, most of whom are women and children. These figures are sourced from the Hamas-controlled health ministry in the strip which the Israeli government does not accept is giving an accurate count but which is regarded as accurate by the UN. The Israeli motive in not accepting the death toll is of course self-evident, and makes their rejection of the offered figure appear cynically self-serving.

This is probably an undercount. Thousands of bodies are likely buried under the rubble of Gaza’s destroyed buildings and it is not beyond the realm of possibility that the true death toll could end up approaching forty thousand people by the time this is all over. That would be nearly 2% of the pre-war population and is equivalent to four-fifths of the population of Lisburn.

If you wish to wrap your head around numbers that are increasingly hard to fathom, simply picture eighty percent of everyone in Lisburn being dead to appreciate the scale of the carnage that has arrived in Gaza. And if the numbers are now too great to be truly relatable, you don’t have to look hard to find some individual stories for whom the appellation ‘heart-rending’ isn’t strong enough.

There is the story of the two boys who endured agonising surgeries in the United States to help correct serious birth defects that would otherwise have killed them, whose cheeky demeanor won the hearts of the medical team who desired nothing else but to give them a shot at a better life.

Both children, their brother, their father and six other relatives were wiped out by an Israeli airstrike last November. All that effort, all that suffering, all that hope extinguished in the blink of an eye.

Or the story of Hind Rajab who begged for rescue amidst the bodies of her family whilst battle raged around her, and for a few days many in the world held out the impossible hope that she could be rescued, the fog of war enough that we could for a moment deny that she was almost certainly dead. We prayed for a miracle, but there was none to be had, only her silent testimony that the world had utterly let her down.

So, it’s cut and dried right? Virtuous Palestinians slaughtered by bloodthirsty, genocidal Israelis? One side purely good, one side purely evil?

It’s not that simple though, it’s never that simple.

Twelve hundred Israelis were murdered on October 7th in an event that has traumatized Israel, some in a manner that should horrify everyone who cares to look. One Hamas terrorist actually phoned his parents to brag about murdering ten people in the same manner you or I could phone one of our parents to proudly announce we’d gotten a new job.

As of April 5th, one hundred and thirty-four Israelis remain in captivity in Gaza.

Around fourteen of these hostages are women or girls who are credibly reported to being subjected to horrendous sexual abuse by their captors.

The youngest hostage, Kfir Bibas, has spent nearly half his life in captivity in Gaza, should he still be alive.

Tens of thousands of Israelis have been driven from their homes in both the north of Israel and the area around Gaza as those regions are no longer safe due to attacks from Hezbollah and Gaza respectively, and they yearn to go home.

Many people who instinctively side with the Palestinians have the knee-jerk reaction of minimising Israeli suffering, the sub-text being that ‘they deserved what they got’ due to the crime of the continued occupation of the Palestinians or even the belief that the state of Israel and its people are illegitimate. However this is the same “communal blame” approach that Israel is rightly being strongly criticized for.

So, whom should we side with, really? The IDF claim to be the most ‘moral army in the world’ is an absurdity, worthy only of derision. But Hamas are not freedom fighters, they are a bunch of brutal religious zealots whose goal is to not to free the land, but to impose their own tyranny from the river to the sea in a manner only the Taliban could approve of.

Neither of them is worthy of support.

Support needs to be given to those who are in pain. People on both sides are suffering, but while it must be acknowledged that the suffering on the Palestinian side is several magnitudes greater than the suffering on the Israeli side and that the onus is indeed on the Israeli government to halt their campaign, that does not mean Israeli suffering must be shoved aside and ignored.

Netanyahu appears to be following the trend of would-be Strong Man leader, and seems more interested in self preservation than in the wellbeing and security of Israel. Mounting opposition at home is being checked by a focus on war.

Hamas are not the freedom fighters some are painting them as, they haven’t allowed an election since 2006, and rule via a brutal regime of violence and intolerance. In fact, if you accept the theory that the overarching Hamas strategy is to undermine Israel’s legitimacy in the eyes of the world by provoking the slaughter of their own people (a theory given credence by Hamas refusing to allow the civilian population access to its tunnel network as shelter), then we are faced with the appalling possibility that Hamas and Netanyahu are actually engaging in the greatest Arab-Israeli collaboration in history, the mass death of Palestinian civilians, each for their own cynical purposes.

And as ‘The Onion’ memorably pointed out several years ago, the extremists on both sides actually agree on a solution to their long running dispute…

 

We are witnesses to all this, and we should be doing whatever we can to get the violence to stop. But is incumbent upon all of us, particularly those of us here in Ireland familiar with long running disputes and intractable division over incompatible futures, to stress that there is no perfect resolution. No ultimate win for our favoured side.

The reality is that the Palestinians will never be defeated, but they will never be victorious. The Israelis will never win, but they will never surrender their state either.

Both seek a total victory that is neither achievable or desirable.

Only in recognizing the futility of the demands of the maximalists, in rejecting those who argue that they if they shed enough blood they can have it all, will a path to peace ever emerge. A path to that most difficult of worlds, anathema to maximalists and fundamentalists.

A world of compromise.