Eyeless in Gaza*

As if the daily images of mass destruction coming out of Ukraine weren't distressing enough we are now seeing similar horrific news coverage from the Gaza Strip as Israel blockades its population of over two million Palestinian Arabs, cutting off all power, water and food supplies and indiscriminately bombarding tightly-packed residential areas.

These attacks are being mounted by Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in retaliation for rocket attacks and a shocking incursion over the border by Hamas, the ruling faction in Gaza, internationally considered a terrorist group. Hamas militants scaled the border fence to attack a music festival being held in the Israeli desert some three miles from the frontier, killing hundreds and taking dozens of hostages back into Gaza. The speed and surprise nature of these audacious attacks by Hamas caught the Israeli authorities completely unawares and have severely dented the formidable reputation of Israel's intelligence services and the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). They were seen to be asleep on the job.

I'm no Middle East expert but I am alert to the enormous sensitivities around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and issues of Israel's right to exist. Given these it might be wiser to say nothing - fools rush in where angels fear to tread - but surely no commentator on current affairs can watch and remain silent? Indeed, no human being could do so in the face of such monstrous inhumanity, on both sides.

And there's the rub. In this long-running and poisonous conflict one almost feels obliged to take sides. Although my sympathies tend to lie with the Palestinian people (though not their leadership) I feel similarly about the Israelis. The best I can come up with to explain my hesitancy, inability even, to unequivocally support one side over the other is that two wrongs do not make a right. In that sense, both sides are arguably as sinned against as sinning.

If this sounds like moral equivalence, or even a cop-out, I can only plead my status as an interested layman. As I say, I am not an expert nor am I a professional historian, but I am, I hope, an empathetic person trying to make sense of a fiendishly complex and fraught situation that goes back decades, if not millennia. One is expected to be pro- or anti- one side or the other - and there is precious little, if any, goodwill on either. 

For a UK citizen, there is, too, the nagging knowledge that Palestine was a British Mandate from 1923 to 1948 and we messed up badly. For Europeans, the scheme to solve its post-war guilt about the Holocaust by basically offshoring its antisemitism, making it the Arabs' problem, should also be a matter of enduring shame.

However, I was moved by the humanity displayed by a young Israeli volunteer in an interview on the BBC News channel this morning. Alom was taking a truck of humanitarian supplies to communities affected by Hamas' rocket attacks. He was awaiting his military call-up and said he would fight for his country but, he added in tears, he felt for the Palistinian civilians and just wanted to live in peace with those he described as "neighbours". He also wept as he said that Israel was his country and, following the Nazi Holocaust, the Jews had nowhere else to go. It was heartrending testimony from an eighteen year-old contemplating a bleak future with a touching sense of common humanity.

For his part, Benjamin Netanyahu has formed a government coalition with a far-right grouping markedly lacking in any such feelings in a move which Yair Lapid, the opposition leader, described in stark terms. He said: “Netanyahu has become a puppet on a string of messianic extremists.” That same view was echoed in a recent British television interview with Ehud Olmert, a former Israeli Prime Minister. 

The outlook is not encouraging but, in the face of Israeli obduracy and its flouting of international law, the international community, as ever, sits on its hands and fails to condemn. And with US Presidential elections next year, the realpolitik is that we can't expect Joe Biden to take a lead in any way which might risk alientating his own Jewish vote. Meanwhile, the Palestinian Gazans are trapped between Israel and the sea, waiting to be shot at like fish in a barrel.

For them, as for Milton's blind Samson, Gaza is "Prison within Prison".

* John Milton: Samson Agonistes 1671

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