Two wrongs...

Yesterday, as the world focused on the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestians were streaming back to their destroyed or damaged homes in the north of the Gaza Strip.

The images of both events being beamed simultaneously around the globe could hardly have provided a starker or more telling juxtaposition. It wasn't meant to be this way. Under the terms of the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas the internally displaced Gazans were due to make their return journey on Sunday. However, when Israeli hostage, Arbel Yehoud, was not released as expected, Israel accused Hamas of violating the agreement and checkpoints to the north remained closed. They opened instead on Monday, releasing the reverse exodus, thus coinciding with Holocaust Memorial Day (officially International Holocaust Remembrance Day). Someone hadn't thought it through - the 'optics', as they say, were not good.

I'm sure many will have found this unfortunate clash of events as deeply unsettling as I did. It begged so many uncomfortable questions that I found myself unable to write about it yesterday; the emotion was simply too raw and needed processing. Having slept on it - a disturbed night I might add - I'm still conflicted but at least clear that I need to write about it rather than self-censoring out of fear of offending sensibilities at such a painful moment for the Jewish community. 

As yesterday's ceremonies in Poland and around the world highlighted, that community has suffered egregiously. However, that does not - nor should it - exempt the community from a rigorous examination of Israel's actions in Gaza. In fact, if anything, the Jewish community's uniquely terrible (though sadly not unique) experience of genocide and other acts of gross inhumanity places a clear obligation upon it to act as an exemplar of restraint. While holding Jews, and the Jewish state, to a higher set of principles may be deeply unfair, it is surely an inevitability of this lamentable history. 

Life isn't fair - something to which Jews, of all people, can attest - but having been victims of persecution for millennia they are bound to be criticised if they then inflict disproportionate suffering on others. Like it or not, they are held to a higher account as a result of their troubled history and hypocrisy will not be readily forgiven. Rather than seeing that as an unfair burden, they should, I suggest, embrace the imperative it imposes upon them to sieze the moral high ground and lead by example. The elderly survivors who spoke so movingly at Auschwitz yesterday clearly understood that.

This is not to say that the Israeli state should not have retaliated against Hamas for its despicable attack on 7 October 2023. No-one could have expected them to turn the other cheek in the face of such a shocking assault and, under international law, they were perfectly entitled to respond, though in a proportionate way. Instead, the government of Benjamin Netanyahu far exceeded the strict limitations imposed by international law and the rules of war, not to mention morality. It transgressed them shamelessly and it is to be hoped will eventually be held answerable. 

Because it is disingenuous to claim there was no other way to punish Hamas than by launching an indiscriminate strike against a defenceless population. The fact that the Israel Defence Force (IDF) was able to eliminate Hamas and Hezbullah leaders and operatives with such surgical efficiency in Lebanon and Tehran, using exploding mobiles, pre-placed explosive devices and intelligence-led precision bombing, demonstrates that other methods than mass-destruction were readily available to Netanyahu. 

That he chose not to employ them in Gaza suggests that the systematic destruction of infrastructure in the Strip, with the death of some 47,000 civilians, was a deliberate policy decision. To hope to be spared scrutiny or accountability after the grotesque provocation of the 7 October attack may be understandable but Israel's asymetrical response shows that another agenda was in play, namely ethnic cleansing. It was not only morally and legally indefensible but ineffective in its own terms as it was bound to act as a recruiting sergeant for Hamas. The number of triumphant Hamas fighters present at the release of four female Israeli hostages last Saturday proved this. Hamas had not been crushed and the ramifications of Israel's actions will reverberate for generations.

The foundation of the modern state of Israel in 1948, resulting in the displacement and dispossession of millions of Palestinian Arabs in what they refer to as the Nakba or Catastrophe, is deeply problematic, to put it mildly. But it is a fait-accompli and, as a consequence, the so-called 'two-state solution' must be made to work. The world may have turned a blind eye to Israeli intransigence, enabling the current chaos in the Gaza Strip, West Bank and wider region, but the problem has not gone away. In fact it has just got much worse.

If the lessons of the Holocaust are not learned, we are all the losers.

Popular posts from this blog

A knight's tale - creative non-fiction

England - 1088 'What's a king without a kingdom?' 'A man, sire. And a man fights for what's his.' The king had been thinking aloud and the thirteen year-old lad's unexpected reply to his rhetorical question caught him off-guard. It was a bold response but, rather than being angered, he felt chastened by it. It was profound coming from one so young and junior in his service though prompted, he knew, by genuine love and loyalty rather than impertinence.  At a moment of grave peril so early in his new reign he valued candour, a commodity in short supply at court. He had followed his father, the Conqueror, as King William II less than a year earlier and now faced widespread rebellion. At such a time he could ill afford self-pity, much less self-doubt. He blamed himself for allowing a brief moment of self-indulgence in front of his page.  Since receiving the devastating news at Eastertide of his brother Robert's challenge the lad had been his closest companio...
Read more

Looking to Africa - long read

As I sit here on an island just off the coast of North-West Africa I can't help pondering the future of that vast and seemingly unknowable continent, so near and yet so far. I'm writing this in Tenerife, one of the eight Canary Islands forming an archipelago off the coast of Morocco and Western Sahara - tantilisingly close and yet a world away from the 'mainland' of continental Africa. As an Autonomous Community of Spain, the Canaries form an outpost of the European Union (EU). Yet, despite their proximity to Africa, their outlook, politically, culturally and economically, is resolutely European. Africa may as well be Mars, though only a narrow gulf of the Atlantic Ocean separates these offshore islands from their continent. I say resolutely European but that resolve may, little by little, be weakening. There is a growing sentiment, especially, though not exclusively, amongst young Canarians, that they have been sold a pup. True, the economy is superficially buoyant, du...
Read more

On old age

"The fact is that when I come to think it over, I find that there are four reasons for old age being thought unhappy: First, that it withdraws us from active employments; second, that it enfeebles the body; third, that it deprives us of nearly all physical pleasures; fourth, that it is the next step to death."  Writing his essay,  De Senectute (On Old Age), in 44 BCE, Marcus Tullius Cicero went on to refute these four supposed reasons in characteristically robust and forthright manner. Cicero wasn't one to sit about moping in his own old age; he remained actively engaged in the political life of the Republic whose survival, in the face of tyranny, he championed so fiercely.  Cicero was nine years younger than I am now when he met his untimely end yet he considered himself already an old man; or, rather, his society judged him to be so. His second point about age enfeebling is more germane. Physical decline had not yet impacted him but, six years on from my retirement, I ...
Read more