For Palestine but against rationalisation

I don’t believe that ‘death to the Jews’ is a cry against poverty and oppression

The word ‘context’ was quickly smuggled into conversations that took place in the aftermath of the massacre of 1,400 Israeli civilians by the Palestinian group Hamas on the 7th of October. Of course there is always a context to things, and few reasonable person would disagree. But bringing it up is a question both of timing and emphasis. Most of us would feel queasy if, say, a member of our family were murdered and the first thing a friend wanted to do was talk about how the murderer had suffered at the hands of members of the same national, religious or ethnic group as our beloved. The implied meaning would be that the victim had ‘brought it on themselves’.

Yet this is precisely what has been said in recent years when Jihadist terrorists have killed (or attempted to kill) innocent civilians. It was said when a fatwa (death sentence) was issued by the Ayatollah Khomeini against Salmon Rushdie, it was said when terrorists crashed passenger planes into the Twin Towers, and it was said again when the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo were murdered by religious fanatics in 2015. As I wrote two weeks ago, sections of the left seem to be in the grip of a craven masochism, the core assumption of which is that if somebody in the world hates us then they must be right.

This masochism is both stupid and unhelpful: stupid because people that live outside of western countries are not helpless children incapable of exercising restraint; and unhelpful because wanton acts of violence nearly always set back the causes left-wing activists claim to care about. Apart from a few preening armchair revolutionaries on social media, does anyone believe that Israelis and Palestinians who support peace have not been severely weakened by the terrorist attacks of October the 7th?

It should be perfectly possible to reject such masochism yet also recognise that the Palestinians have a right to self-determination and a state they can call their own. Or to notice that in Benjamin Netanyahu, the Palestinians have an adversary who has no intention of giving it to them.

Indeed, Netanyahu’s theocratic and anti-Arab coalition government rejects the very principle of Palestinian statehood. It was after all Netanyahu who famously left the cabinet to protest against Ariel Sharon’s withdrawal from Gaza back in 2005. As to how this rejection of a Palestinian state plays out in the ‘reality on the ground’, Netanyahu’s government has aggressively expanded the building of illegal settlements in the West Bank since it came to power at the end of 2022. During the government’s first six months in office, Israel’s planning authorities have advanced or approved permits for at least 13,000 new housing units in West Bank settlements.

The United States bears a great deal of responsibility for the stateless dispossession of the Palestinians. It is with American money and support that Israel continues to flout UN resolutions requiring it to withdraw from land seized during war. The United States committed over $3.3 billion in foreign assistance to Israel in 2022, and the demolition of settlements will only occur when Washington begins to attach strings to these vast sums of aid. Forcing Israel to comply with international law - not stern words or tut-tutting - should be a prerequisite for sending the money.

If you occupy a people you will invariably end up visiting terrible cruelty on them. Especially if you promulgate the lie that Palestine was uninhabited (‘A land without a people for a people without a land’, as the old slogan phrased it) before the arrival of the early Jewish settlers. It was the liberal Zionist writer Ahad Ha’Am who more than a century ago observed that the settlers ‘treat the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, trespass unjustly on their territories, beat them shamelessly for no sufficient reason, and boast of having done so’. It seems little has changed.

Today, far-right MK Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister since 2022, claims that there is ‘no such thing’ as the Palestinian people. Hostility toward even the idea of a Palestinian state is part of the reason why Israeli politicians such as Smotrich and Netanyahu have sought to maintain the separation between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza - a division intended to thwart the establishment of such a state. One bleak irony of recent developments is that Hamas grew stronger under the auspices of a phoney peace that was originally facilitated to weaken the President of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas.

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Yet despite all of this ‘context’, I don’t believe that innocent men, women and children were slaughtered on the 7th of October because the Palestinians lack a state of their own. Let me put it more succinctly, I don’t believe that ‘death to the Jews’ is a cry against poverty and oppression.

Moreover, I think that those of us who believe in a two state solution and an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestine must face certain unpleasant facts. The first of which is that sometimes followers of political movements get drunk on the idea of mass murder.

This is why it is so unsatisfactory to hear progressives say that ‘peace’ in the Middle East is merely contingent on Israel calling a ceasefire in Gaza and withdrawing to the Green Line. Those things are worthwhile causes in their own right. But irrational and irredentist hatreds are not so easily assuaged, and irrational and irredentist tendencies have infected the Palestinian cause whether western activists are willing to admit it or not. Any fool can open a history book and see the progressive cliché that people ‘only turn to violence when they have no other answer’ is not just untrue but wilfully stupid, particularly in the case of violence against Jews. In what possible sense can it ever be said that pogromists had no alternative but to carry out their ghastly deeds?

When a person utters such banal formulations you can be certain they are merely ventriloquising what they’ve picked up elsewhere. The thought-terminating quality of such phrases - rather than their ability to illuminate matters - is precisely what constitutes their appeal.

The temptation to block out the irrational does have its obvious attractions. If everybody is acting rationally and in their own self-interest, a solution to the seemingly intractable conflict in the Middle East becomes a straightforward question of the powerful yielding to the powerless. By contrast, as soon as one acknowledges that certain forces on the Palestinian side may not be entirely willing to drop their animosity toward the Jewish people with the creation of a Palestinian state, one has to grapple with a raft of complexities that might not otherwise have arisen. These include the following: that Israel has legitimate security concerns and that many Israelis are haunted by the residual memory of the Shoah; that Arab Judeophobia long predates the establishment of the state of Israel; and that, to groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the murder of Jews is an end in itself. All of which is much less amenable to boilerplate formulations about giving peace a chance.

For what it’s worth, I do fear that the Israeli bombardment of Gaza will further inflame tensions in the Middle East and cause the deaths of many innocent civilians. It is also unlikely to bring about lasting peace. I’ve been reminded this week of the former Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol’s comments to a bombastic General Ariel Sharon, the latter flush with victory following the comprehensive Israeli defeat of the Arab armies during the Six-Day war: ‘Nothing will be settled by a military victory. The Arabs will still be here’.

Indeed they will, notwithstanding the disgusting exterminationist rhetoric currently emanating from some members of Likud. But besides that, another live issue in the Middle East is the virus of antisemitism - an ideological force that stirs up existential dread among Israelis and which stands apart from conventional political demands. Mass slaughter can occur as a result of a powerful occupying state deploying its arsenal of weapons on a besieged people. It can also occur for entirely irrational reasons. And when the latter occurs, the ‘context’ may have less to do with poverty and oppression and more to do with a political movement that is devoted to conspiracy theories and mad hatreds.

It shouldn’t be so hard to reconcile these - to my mind - rather self-evident observations. And yet here we are.