Ideas always come to me from the world when I need them most. Like every other political philosopher in the world I have been reflecting upon the implications of Hamas’ attack on southern Israel. What can one say that has not been said before about this seemingly endless dance of destruction between Hamas and Israel? Palestinians, like all people, have the right to resist the unbearable oppression under which they have been forced to live since 1948. They have the right to elect whatever party they think best serves their interests. Western governments’ are hypocrites when they decry the loss of Israeli life while for decades ignoring the murder of Palestinians. All of these well-worn truths circulate every time the Gaza cauldron boils over and they do nothing to change the reality on the ground.
The reality on the ground is going to rapidly get worse even than one’s worst imagination about what Israel’s response would be. Today is Thanksgiving day in Canada, a day usually marked by drinks that begin mid-afternoon and Turkey dinners. In Gaza, it was the day that Israel announced a an absolute, total blockade of the strip: no electricity, no water, no food, no medicine. The strategy is clear: the population will be starved into breaking with Hamas or dying of lack of food or water or bombardment. One could predict that reprisals for a humiliation as deep as Hamas inflicted on Israel would be severe, but the policy announced today is literally medieval. “We are fighting human animals,” the Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant announced, “and we are acting accordingly.”
The language comes as no surprise. The Netanyahu government is composed of open racists who have long dreamed of a pretext to crush all Palestinian national liberation struggle if not expel the Arab population of Israel and the occupied territories outright. Shockingly, Hamas has given them this pretext. All oppressed people have the right to resist oppression and to choose the means by which that resistance is pursued. But it is the most lunatic, abject, political stupidity to launch an invasion of a state with vastly superior military means under the assumption that a spectacular assault by a few hundred guerrillas will be a crushing blow.
As Gilbert Achcar wrote:
“And whereas it is not difficult to understand the “enough-is-enough” logic behind Hamas’s counter-offensive, it is much more doubtful that it will help advance the Palestinian cause beyond the blow to Israel’s self-confidence mentioned above. This would have been achieved at a hugely disproportionate cost for the Palestinians.
The very idea that such an operation, however spectacular it was, could achieve “victory” can only stem from the religious type of magical thinking that is characteristic of a fundamentalist movement like Hamas. The distribution by its information service of a video showing the movement’s leadership praying to thank God on the morning of 7 October is a good illustration of this thinking. Unfortunately, no magic can alter the fact of Israel’s massive military superiority: the result of Israel’s new ongoing war against Gaza is certainly going to be devastating.”
Slogans and spectacular symbolic operations are one thing. Military and geo-political reality are another. Israel has the means not only to seal off the Gaza strip but to bomb it for a century if it chose to do so. Hamas has no allies anywhere capable of restraining Israel. The EU has cut off all aid to Palestine. China and India are not going to support Islamist movements in any meaningful sense. Russia will certainly try to exploit the tensions for its own purposes in Ukraine, but given what it did to Islamic Chechnya in the second Chechen war, any support it offers the Palestinians would be cynical at best. Hamas’s hopes that Hezbollah will intervene from the North are likely to be dashed. And to put an exclamation point on why such intervention would be a bad idea, the US has just repositioned an aircraft carrier battle group off the coast of Lebanon. Given that there are Americans held in Gaza, American intervention from the air cannot be ruled out. Likewise, Iran is unlikely to get further involved. Iran’s leaders are thugs but not stupid. When they take a break from ordering their laughably named “morality police’ from beating teenage girls to death for showing their hair, they will realise that any attempt to overtly intervene on the ground would risk a massive Israeli response. Does anyone doubt that that Israel would use nuclear weapons against Iran if it felt seriously threatened?
Achcar is once again astute in his analysis:
“On the other hand, if Hamas’s leadership had been betting on Lebanon’s Hezbollah—and Iran behind it—to join the war at a level that would really put Israel in jeopardy, this bet would be very risky indeed. For not only it is far from certain that Hezbollah would take the high risk of massively entering a new war with Israel, but such a situation, if it were to happen, would inevitably bring Israel to resort unrestrainedly to its massive destructive power (which includes nuclear weapons), thus bringing about a catastrophe of historic magnitude.”
Serious critics must also add that attacking military targets is one thing, gunning down unarmed teenagers attending an all night rave is indeed barbaric. Anyone who believes that such tactics can advance a liberatory cause is both politically deluded and morally bankrupt: ends do not justify any means whatsoever. Liberation and vengeance are distinct. Vengeance is born from hatred, justified or not. Liberation is born from the need to live freely: free to create democratic institutions that give voice to the collective goals of people, but also free from ancient hatreds that imprison the emotions and imaginations of people and poison their relationships with each other.
Dancing in the desert is not a capital offense. Singular individuals are not responsible for historical crimes such that they can be legitimately gunned down in cold blood. No North American or European commentator sitting in the safety of their study with their teenage kids or young adults safely at university or exploring their world should be excusing such self-undermining political insanity. No one but lunatic fundamentalists could convince themselves that a rampage against a rave would not unleash the full murderous fury of the Israeli Defence Force. No one but a crazed fundamentalist could contort the idea of an all-powerful, all-perfect deity into a petty human imbecile who wants one group of humans that It created to kill another group that It also created. As ye sew, so shall ye reap, in Israel and Gaza, round and round it goes, occupation breeds resistance, resistance breeds reprisals, reprisals breed resistance, and on and on it goes.
That is not to say that resistance is not fully justified and that the root cause of the violence is Israeli occupation. As horrific as the civilian costs were, one must not shy away from the truth that the conflict is caused by the refusal of Israel to seriously negotiate the creation of a geographically, economically, and politically viable Palestinian state. The question is: what are the most efficacious means for struggling for that state.
Achcar is again insightful:
“Against an oppressor that is far superior in military means, the only truly efficient way of struggle for the Palestinian people is by choosing the terrain on which they can circumvent that superiority. The peak in Palestinian’s struggle effectiveness was reached in the year 1988 during the First Intifada, in which the Palestinians deliberately avoided the use of violent means. This led to a deep moral crisis in Israel’s society and polity, including its armed forces, and was a key factor in leading the Israeli Rabin-Peres leadership to negotiate the 1993 Oslo Accords with Yasir Arafat—however flawed these accords were, due to the Palestinian leader’s indulging in wishful thinking.”
As always, the primary victims of Hamas’s “heroic” thinking are the mothers and children of Gaza. When I see their tears all I can think about is that they would rather have their dead child alive, happy, in school , playing with other children, than in heaven with the boble martyrs of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. If they want to martyr themselves so be it. But they should do so by means that do not cause the vast majority of Gazans trying to get on with their lives in impossible circumstances to die with them, vaporized by a bomb dropped from an invulnerable plane.
So what was the idea that found me just when I needed it? I was reading a collection of poems by Adrienne Rich last night, and in her notes on the poems she quoted the eccentric Catholic philosopher Simone Weil. “The love of a fellow creature in all its fullness consists simply in the ability to say to him: “What are you going through?” I would only add: and take their response to heart.
If the Israeli, before they vote for far right racists in the misguided belief that only the most hard-hearted killers can protect them, would ask the mother in Gaza “What are you going through,” and really listened, perhaps they would could understand, on a human level, why that mother might support people who want to kill Israeli children.
Ultimately, this dance of death will not cease with a political solution, because a political solution requires trust, and trust requires that people ask each other (and mean it) “What are you going through?” Somehow some people on both sides of this conflict are going to have to find the impossible courage to tell their leaders to stop shooting and ask each other: “What are you going through?” And if the Israeli side listens then they will have to prove that they have listened by ending the occupation and creating the conditions for the construction of a viable, prosperous, free Palestinian state.
It seems impossible that two peoples locked in a seeming battle to the death could ever become neighbors and friends to each other. But between 1939 and 1945 Britain and Germany were locked into another battle to the death, raining incendiary bombs on each other’s cities just as Israel is doing today. Human beings can overcome almost any past, eventually, but only once they risk listening to each other.