Witnessing what is happening in Israel and Palestine is deeply saddening and profoundly angering. We are confronted by a terrible act carried out on behalf of the whole Palestinian people by an organisation which does not have the support of the whole Palestinian people. Its callous viciousness, its complete rejection of the general call amongst Palestinians for peace must be acknowledged even by the Palestinians’ supporters.
By imposing such a cruel fate on the Israelis it has ensured an even more cruel fate for the people of Gaza. It has acted knowing how the Israelis would respond. This cannot be right. And the great irony is that in the course of their attack Hamas forces will have inevitably murdered, captured or bereaved some of the many Israelis who understand, despite a lifetime of being conditioned by Zionist propaganda, that Palestine’s call for freedom from Israel’s oppressions is just, fair, and should be heeded.
But ultimately, Hamas is not reponsible for this. What it has done, as unconscionable as it is, is a logical, maybe the only possible, outcome of the evils Israel has imposed on Palestine in the last seventy-five years and which it has spent the last nine or so months exacerbating with its extended military and civilian drives, both bringing violence and death with them, into Palestinian territory .
Israel’s response to the Hamas attack is not original to the event. It is simply and extension of what Israel has been doing to Palestine regularly and as a matter of policy since its inception in 1948. All the Hamas attack will achieve will be to confirm Israel’s supporters in their certainty that Israel is justified in doing what it does and has always done. These will not question the morality of Israeli policies nor the violently oppressive means it has always employed to make those policies work.
Israelis now are bound to mourn their dead, and fear for their futures. They are human, it would be inhuman not to acknowledge their grief. I feel it myself, along with all those Jews around the world who have been affected as never before by these events.
But then, even as my heart goes out to all those Israelis who are suffering these new cruelties, I cannot help feeling that it is a relatively few Israelis, in this relatively short space of time, who will have suffered the same degree of fear, of loss, of grief, and of anger, that their government, unopposed, has been provoking in every Palestinian for the entirety of their lives.
If Israel’s fresh agony is barely supportable, then how is the historic agony of the Palestinian people to be measured? If the Israelis directly affected by the Hamas assault are having to find in themselves the patience to see this terrible crisis through, then what incredible forbearance has it taken for the Palestinians to survive the constant assault on themselves and their lands by Israel for the last three-quarters-of-a-century?
This agony is a new experience for Israel: it is the norm for Palestine. That is the great lesson to be learnt from what is happening today and has happened every day in Palestine for as long or longer than most Palestinians have been alive.
If only Netanyahu and his government had the compassion to realise that, and the ability to reflect on themselves with some degree of humility. If only they could appreciate and respect that too many Jews have supported Palestine’s cause for it to be said that Israel speaks for every Jew. If only they could bring themselves to understand that they are destroying human beings whose lives have worth and whose pain is no less then the pain any Israeli, any Jew, is experiencing right now. But they do not. They never have.
They are unworthy to rule a nation, and unfit to carry out the role they have been granted by the great powers, who have their own consciences to scrutinize, to defend that nation. It’s a simple question:
If Hamas is wrong to be doing what it is doing – and it certainly is – then how can it be argued that what Israel is doing and has always done is right?