Israel wants to slay the monster next door, but with this lethal bombardment, it is feeding it

Good is self-existent, evil is not. It is like a parasite living in and around good. It will die of itself when the support that good gives it is withdrawn: Mahatma Gandhi, Discussion with friends: September 4, 1947

The truth never dies but is made to live as a beggar: Yiddish proverb

NB: The writer of the piece beneath these comments is clearly in sympathy with the Israeli position on this conflict; which I am not. However I am well aware of the unspeakable crime of the Holocaust – which also took the lives of hundreds of thousands of the Romani and Sinti peoples. I think Zionism was not a good idea, because as a historian I believe nation-states with homogenous populations are crucibles of intolerant ideologies and ethnic cleansing. It is significant that thoughtful Israelis have called for the repeal of the recently passed nation-state law for being exclusionary. The second world war and the Shoah made Israel possible; but what few of the great powers kept in mind was the plight of Palestinians who were already living in the area. Moreover the League of Nation’s mandated territory of Palestine was not the property of the British Empire to dispose of as it deemed fit. Unfortunately the partition plan drafted by Count Folke Bernadotte of the UNSCOP was never implemented after his murder by the Stern Gang in September 1948.

Nonetheless Freedland’s argument needs to be heard: that the brutal sexual assaults on captured Israeli women by Hamas became evident with the hostage releases, and that this has been a further factor in the ongoing attacks. After violence takes over, there’s little point in attempting a comparison between different types of violence; because we have entered the domain of evil. And we need to remember that this kind of communal violence (which is the term we use in South Asia) reduces everyone to their religious identity – even Israeli peace activists became targets on October 7. Hamas men who committed horrific sexual crimes on October 7 embraced evil, and everyone who sympathises with the Palestinian struggle against this 56 year long occupation should recognise this fact unconditionally.

In 2009, during yet another assault on Gaza, in one of the earliest articles I wrote on Palestine, I stressed the need for non-violent resistance; and the continuing relevance of Mahatma Gandhi’s life and methods. This is because violence destroys the conscience and renders us captive to the reptilian mind within. To attack members of any, repeat any, community or ethnicity for the mere fact that they have a particular faith or identity is abhorrent and also stupid, because it assumes that every member of xyz community thinks, and is bound to think, the same way.

Violence has taken over in Israel and Palestine. It is spreading all over the world. It is brutality that has become the central issue, not the political issues that should be the crux. Sections of Israeli society are also exhibiting forms of depravity. It is horrifying that over 17,700 Palestinians have died (and who knows how many more lie buried under the rubble?), and 48,780 wounded; a large part of them women and children. It is cruel for an IDF spokesman to claim that two dead civilians for every dead Hamas fighter is something ‘tremendously positive’. It is this suppression of human conscience that lay behind Gandhi’s insistence that ahimsa, or non-violence was the only way out of the terrible political conflicts of our time.

I will remind all those who empathise with Zionism and Israel, that the sight of corpses of Palestinian babies rotting in their cots in Gaza is no less a manifestation of evil before God and humanity. The spiral of violence destroys our sense of chronological sequence; and even renders obscene the question of who started it. Because the effort to obliterate Palestinians physically and politically dates back (at least) to 1948, when three-quarters of a million of them were pushed out of their homes and villages by numerous acts of terror, including the Deir Yassin massacre of 1948; and the sabotage of Count Bernadotte’s partition plan by the fact of his murder. Arch-imperialist Lord Curzon, Britain’s Foreign Secretary in 1923, warned that the driving out of peoples (with regard to Greece and Turkey) was ‘a thoroughly bad and vicious solution, for which the world will pay a heavy penalty for a hundred years to come’: R.M. Douglas; Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War; p 71.

How right he was.

Nor, when speaking of brutalities committed by Hamas, should we forget the Sabra-Shatila massacre of 1982, enabled by the IDF and Ariel Sharon; or the Hebron mosque massacre of worshippers in 1994; or the brutal behaviour of settlers on the West Bank, who have redoubled their efforts to ‘cleanse’ this area of Palestinians. Nor can we forget the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a Zionist fanatic in 1995. Nor that Netanyahu actually propped up Hamas for years, in order to divide Palestinians; in the face of which it is difficult to take seriously American talk of entrusting Gaza to the Palestinian Authority.

All these acts are a huge burden of monstrosity, and they need to be kept in mind by all commentators and op-ed writers, who tend to forget that antisemitism is historically a Christian form of bigotry, emanating from the Gospel according to Matthew; according to which Jews owned the responsibility for the crucifixion of Jesus. Also to be recalled is that Arabs are a semitic people; and that all three Abrahamic faiths are semitic. Here’s an informed comment about a supposedly antisemitic slogan: It’s Time to Confront Israel’s Version of “From the River to the Sea”

I address Mr Freedland specifically now: terrible things have happened at the hands of the ‘Free World’ (yes, I’m aware of what communists in power have done); stretching from Vietnam to Iran to Chile to Iraq to Afghanistan; resulting in millions of lives lost. Napalm and atom bombs and depleted uranium; all this, all in the name of freedom and democracy. Terrible things have happened in South Asia, millions displaced in 1947-48; a series of assassinations and pogroms; the Pakistan Army’s attacks on East Bengalis in 1971; prolonged civil war in Sri Lanka, violent attacks on Indians by other Indians in 1984, 2002, 2023 (Manipur); all these events were no less horrific than the crimes of Hamas. How quickly they are forgotten by our rulers and op-ed writers..

Establishments take note of such things or fail to do so, depending on political convenience. But we ordinary people have to notice everything, merely in order to preserve our sanity. As significant a figure as a former Mossad chief has spoken of the Israeli treatment of Palestinians as a version of apartheid. A thoughtful man indeed, I only wish there were more like him. I say this in complete agreement with the retired senior American officer whom Freedland cites: “The most important terrain on the planet is the six inches between the ears.”

What is transpiring now is yet another example of the dehumanisation of non-European peoples by Western establishments (with honourable exceptions). They stand forth before the world as shameless racists. Millions of Europeans can see what is happening, and are demonstrating for a cease fire. I salute them, as also those brave Israelis who are opposing the actions of their government. Freedland suggests humanitarian relief by the IDF could be a ‘signal to Palestinians that Israel’s fight is not with them as a people but with Hamas alone.’ How is that possible, given that Israel’s fight with the Palestinian people began 75 years ago? Is it reasonable to think that hundreds of thousands of survivors of this carnage and their relatives will be amicably inclined towards Biden, Netanyahu and the establishments they represent?

I am sad to say the repercussions of this slaughter will last this century and beyond. It will not lead to any good end. Final solutions never do. And they are never final.

May God have mercy on us all – DS

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Jonathan Freedland

In searching for an answer, a helpful place to start might be the area that is among the most painful. For many weeks, campaigners have urged the UN and others to pay attention to the now extensively documented evidence of sexual violence perpetrated by the men of Hamas on 7 October. The bodies of dead Israeli women and girls told a clear, consistent and harrowing story, now supplemented by testimony from those who lived through those events. I spoke with the director of the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel who confirmed that the organisation has information that there are both witnesses to and survivors of sexual violence on 7 October. A police interview with a woman known as Witness S, who was at the Nova music festival where more than 300 were killed, includes details that are too appalling to be repeated here: suffice to say she describes a frenzy of sexual torture and mutilation that makes the soul sink.

This is one reason why Israel is still fighting Hamas, and why Hamas is still firing rockets at Tel Aviv, indeed a direct reason in one specific sense. Last week, a series of rolling truces came to an end. Both sides blame each other, but Israel insists that Hamas refused to go through with the promised release of 10 female Israeli hostages. Both the US and Israeli governments suspect that a factor in that refusal was Hamas’s fear that the women would testify to sexual abuse at the hands of their captors. “We know why they are not returning them, and they know that we know,” one Israeli official told the Ynet news website. The assumption is that Hamas fears losing face in the eyes of a section of Muslim and Arab opinion that, while ready to condone armed action against Israelis, would condemn sexual brutality.

That runs alongside the conviction within Israel that a series of moral red lines were crossed two months ago, and so the familiar pattern of previous, limited confrontations between Hamas and Israel could not apply this time. This feeling centres less on the numbers killed than on the manner of their killing: the sadism and the cruelty of it, the torture of children and elderly people, and the rape of women and young girls.

“There’s a monster that grew up on the other side of the fence,” Ilana Dayan, one of Israel’s best known TV journalists, told me this week. “It brutally invaded us, not only territorially: it violated us. It raped us, butchered us, slaughtered us, kidnapped us, kidnapped our kids, kidnapped our grandmothers, kidnapped our soul. And all of a sudden we realised this monster has to be dealt with.”

That goes a long way to explaining why a consensus exists from right to left in Israel behind the stated goal of this war, namely the defeat, if not dismantling, of Hamas as a fighting force capable of governing Gaza: Israelis need the monster next door to be slain. …

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/08/israel-bombardment-hamas-gaza

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