Israeli-Hamas war: humanity defined as ‘us, not they’. Yet the two are similar.

by michael | Feb 15, 2024 | news

Israeli-Hamas war.

After stating he will not allow a Palestinian state alongside Israel in the West Bank, the current prime minister of Israel (Mr. N), asked this non-rhetorical shrug-of-the-shoulders question: “What can we do?”

It is a question that reveals both cynicism and indifference. The indifference is to the harm done to Palestinians. The cynicism comes from a will to doom Israelis and Palestinians to more decades of violence and a man-made fate of Sisyphean proportions. But the good news is that that doom can be avoided because it is man-made. What is lacking is political and moral will, on both sides. The South African case before the Hague is an opening, if the two sides can stop arguing at each other from inside their own silos.

If a member of one side could sit inside the other’s silo, they would hear some of the same concepts that their side uses. For example, it is an unspoken curiosity that persons on both sides (successive Israeli and Palestinian governments and those who say they speak for the latter and those who have imposed their will upon them) use the same or similar words and concepts about themselves and at each other. There are at least six sets of words or concepts that need urgent consideration.

In order to explain that statement, I have chosen three authors who each penned recent essays published by Al-Jazeera. These are the articles: “Watching the watchdogs: The 5 Ds of US Middle East policy” by Mr. Rami G Khouri, “This past week, we all became South Africans” by Mr. Andrew Mitrovica, and “Gaza will be the grave of the Western-led world order” by Mr. Saul J Takahashi. They are all from Al Jazeera and discuss the Israel-Hamas war. Their comments are like each other, as well as to others around the world who have marched in crowds or spoken or written about the conflict. I will focus on the words and concepts, as they are the same from one to another.

The first concept is that each side cannot see/feel/know the other as a human, like them. If one sees the other as human, the human possession of Chesed/Love/Rhama can expand our perception of what is human and renovate behaviour. If the ‘other’ is only an ‘animal’, a ‘thing’, ‘disease’ or non-human entity, then indifference will enable repugnant and irrevocable, but repeatable, death-dealing. After all, the opposite of Chesed/Love/Rhama is not hatred; it is indifference. Indifference destroys the capacity to see another human being in our sights.

According to the second concept, each side has a history that has molded individuals to deny the humanity of the other. The experiences of Nakba (colonization, land theft) and Sho’ah (‘we will not disappear into the sea’) are both described with the same word in English, utter destruction (though banal in comparison). Each group, each person, has had the horrors of a collective experience embedded into their social and genetic code. Our three authors used words like; modern legacy, generational horror, crimes yesterday today and tomorrow, several decades ago, last half century, three decades. But they only used them as descriptors of Israeli culpability; they ignored similar culpability of the side they defend.

That concept leads into another. Events from history, clouded by the unwillingness of participants to name their ancestors’ responsibility for such events, allow them to justify similar actions and events today against the other. Thus, history repeats because each event today both reminds and justifies current behaviour.

For example, the people who march or those who write columns against the Israeli government ignore that Israel did not precipitate these specific events. Instead, commentators remember the patterns of old events which they overlay on today’s events and blame all of Israel for all of it. Commentators assume that Israel is guilty of all the events that have occurred; they are therefore guilty for, somehow, causing October 7. Cries of condemnation of Israel, genocide, the colonization of Palestine, land theft and so forth, ignore the fact that Hamas precipitated this round of the same pattern.

Mr. N’s statement reveals the same clouded memory. Every state has its founding myths, Israel included. Some Jews took actions against their Arab neighbors before 1948, killing innocents and frightening entire villages through threats and/or violence. Israeli historians have documented these actions, not without backlash. But who reads them? Either Mr. N and his political supporting cast have and ignore them or have not bothered to work their way through them. If based on the myths of memory and one’s unreflective absorption of those myths, why would one read an uncomfortable stripping away of myth? Myth makes wonderful, heroic stories, but historical nuance brings the wisdom that history is messy and no one is innocent. ‘What can we do?’

The third concept shared between Palestinians and Israelis is that each has or had an inextinguishable desire for self-determination. Beginning in the 1880s with pogroms in Russia, Jews started emigrating all over the world, including to Ottoman Palestine. From then to the end of WWII, tectonic events occurred, during which some Arabs and some Palestinians sometimes attacked Jews, some of whom sometimes responded in kind. One of our commentators pointed out that white European colonial racism arrived with some Jews when they emigrated to Palestine. Maps of the period clearly demonstrate an example of this racism in that Palestine looked like a vast, blank space, ready for colonization.

Palestinian desire for self-determination had a difficult birth because of the creation of the State of Israel and the previous decades of conflict between them. It is for historians to argue about data, stats and facts and counter-facts regarding how and how many Palestinians were driven from their homes in what is now called the West Bank. The arguments about those events hide the necessary detail. Since 1948, generations of Palestinians have lived in refugee camps, and this has now led to a fully grown desire for self-determination that cannot be ignored any longer.

The fourth concept is that both the Palestinian and Israeli peoples have a bred-in-the-bone, ancient connection to the same land-unacknowledged by each about the other. There have been both Jews and Palestinian peoples in that land for centuries. Again, historians argue about how to figure the numbers. But the argument, again, obscures the fact that commentators work very hard to deny the evidence of existence for either group’s ancestors before 1900.

It is also important to note that Jews for centuries, generation after generation, remembered that their ancestors came from that land, and that they practise a faith that keeps many elements that date to the first century bce. Some Jews emigrated back over the centuries. For example, when Jews were being slaughtered in the centuries before 1900, Ottoman rulers invited Jews to come back to the Ottoman Empire.

The last two ‘concepts’ are how each views retaliation. The fifth, then, is that each believes collective punishment is an efficient tool for both discouragement of future behaviour and punishment/revenge.

Hamas is but the latest group that shows this view. Since every action, time, and place involving Israel has caused suffering for ‘us,’ it is justified to consider all Israelis/Jews alive today as legitimate targets. Israeli bulldozing individual Palestinian homes in the West Bank or turning Gaza back into a field of stones, regardless of consequences to the Palestinian people, shows the same view.

If the Israeli government saw all Palestinians as human beings, as valuable as any Jew, and not just numbers on a page or dots from the sky, they could start turning back from the unequal devastation that has killed 40,000. Understanding the humanity of their enemy would be possible for Israelis if they imagined their own homes being bombed and had to pull a dead toddler out with a leg left behind in the ruins. Mr. N: how many Palestinian lives are worth one Israeli/Jewish life? Right now, that figure is around 400. Mathematics from hell on earth.

The last concept is that each side has their own ‘supporters and enablers’. Commentators refuse to note that it was Hamas who started this conflict; as such, Hamas is complicit for those 40,000 deaths. By orders of the Israeli government, their soldiers are directly responsible. Commentators also condemn the US, Canada, Britain and other countries as enablers and supporters of ‘the Israelis’.

But the commentators say nothing of Iran, a country that has for decades not only wreaked horror on Israel but also on other Arab countries by themselves or by their proxies. In fact, Iran has for decades used the Palestinian people as an excuse to do so. The commentators refuse to demand the prosecution of Hamas, an extra-national entity, for its ‘crimes against humanity’, while also ignoring Iran’s role as an enabler and supporter of various groups to kill every Jew possible.

Mr. Khouri made a curious statement. He wrote: the U.S. has “…kept most autocratic Arab governments dependent on US security and economic help to survive; and suppressed democratic aspirations and movements for socioeconomic justice in Arab states.” This is quite a claim.

It raises questions. Which Arab governments and how many? To what $$ level? Before or now? If there are any Arab ‘dependants’, why would they sacrifice self -determination under a regime they distrust or even hate? If the U.S. has done this in the past (e.g., under the Shah or the butcher of Baghdad) for oil, do they do it today?

And, most important, if such dependant Arab States take U.S. largesse, isn’t it then the responsibility of that government to build ‘democratic aspirations and movements for socioeconomic justice in Arab states’ rather than putting the monies in the pockets of cronies? It is necessary to reflect on history and present-day examples with nuance before accepting Mr. Khouri’s statement. Otherwise, it, like so many statements from these three authors, is a mere statement; emotion laden, non-factual assertions that would not pass a college-level logic or evidence test.

‘What can we do?’ asked Mr. N.

You and your coterie of personal enablers can regrow your stunted, blunted and ignored moral sense and expand it to include all humans, e.g. Palestinians. And you can resettle into Israel the settlers you have sent into the West Bank as personal shields/early warning outposts against incursions and for expanding Israeli territory. And you can cease bombing the hell out of Palestinians, their homes, and their children. And you can take the same legitimate moral outrage against the actions of Hamas and use as a cypher to analyze your continued actions in Gaza.

There are other questions that relate to human issues.

Who will help rebuild Gaza? Israel? Will oil-rich wealthy Arab states help? Will the U.S., Canada and other ‘enablers’ put their $$ into helping the Gazans? Will that grand enabler, Iran, help? Will the members of Hamas and other terrorist organizations so intent on wiping out Israel put aside their swords and make use of ploughs?

And which of all these participants will continue that support well into the future?

When I say “rebuild,” I mean starting over completely, on the ground but also supporting the Gazans to deal with the unthinkable emotional impact of their experiences.

The big question, of course. Once the Israel’s boot Mr. N and his government out and form a more democratic and humanity driven government, will Israel and Arab countries (or most of them) take the two-state solution and make it happen, regardless of which side tries to derail it?

If there is to be any hope to rise out of the dust and blood, let it be the will to see each other as human and work to give surety for everyone to ‘live under their own vine and fig tree and no make them afraid.’

(Originally submitted to Al Jazeera, but denied.)