An old foreign correspondent friend of mine, once based in Jerusalem, has turned to blogging. As the story he used to cover flared up once more, he wrote: “This conflict is the political equivalent of LSD – distorting the senses of all those who come into contact with it, and sending them crazy.” He was speaking chiefly of those who debate the issue from afar: the passions that are stirred, the bitterness and loathing that spew forth, especially online, of a kind rarely glimpsed when faraway wars are discussed. While an acid trip usually comes in lurid colours, here it induces a tendency to monochrome: one side is pure good, the other pure evil – with not a shade of grey in sight.
But the LSD effect also seems to afflict the participants in the conflict. They too can act crazy, taking steps that harm not only their enemy but themselves. Again and again, their actions are self-defeating.
Start with Israel – and not with the politicians and generals, but ordinary Israelis. Right now they are filled with the burning sense that the world does not understand them, and even hates them. They know Israel is being projected on the world’s TV screens and front pages as a callous, brutal monster, pounding the Gaza strip with artillery fire that hits schools, hospitals and civilian homes. They know what it looks like – but they desperately want the world to see what they see.
In their eyes, they are only doing what any country – or person, for that matter – would do in the same position. They ask what exactly would Britain do if enemy rockets were landing on our towns and villages. Would we shrug our shoulders, keep calm and carry on – or would we hit back?
But it’s not the rockets that frighten them most. Israelis focus more on the hidden tunnels dug under the Gaza border, apparently designed to allow Hamas militants to emerge above ground and mount raids on Israeli border villages and kibbutzim, killing or snatching as many civilians as they can. Israel’s Iron Dome technology can zap incoming rockets from the sky, but what protection is there against a man emerging from a tunnel in the dark determined to kill you? The fact that tranquillisers and handcuffs were reportedly found in those tunnels, ready to subdue Israeli captives, only leaves Israelis more terrified.
This is why they wanted their government to hit back hard: remember, it was the discovery of the tunnels that prompted the ground offensive. Some Israelis see the terrible images of Palestinian suffering – children losing their limbs, their lives or their parents – and they want the world to see it as they do: that Hamas shares in the blame for those cruel deaths, because it does so little to protect its civilians.
You might discount the argument that Hamas fights its war from civilian areas (replying that it’s hardly going to locate itself in open ground, wearing a target on its back). But the UN itself has condemned Hamas for stashing rockets in a UN school. And in the quiet years, when Hamas finally got hold of long-demanded concrete, it used it not to build bomb shelters for ordinary Gazans, but those tunnels to attack Israel, and bunkers for the organisation’s top brass.
I know that every one of those points can be challenged. The point is not that they represent unarguable truth but that they come close to how many – not all – Israelis feel. They believe they face in Hamas an enemy that is both explicitly committed – by charter – to Israel’s eradication, and cavalier about the safety of the Palestinian people it rules. They fear Hamas, its tunnels and its rockets, and they want security.
But here is where the madness kicks in. Israelis want security, yet their government’s actions will give it no security. On the contrary, they are utterly self-defeating.
That’s true on the baldest possible measure. More Israelis have died in the operation to tackle the Hamas threat than have died from the Hamas threat, at least over the past five years. Put another way, to address the risk that hypothetical Israeli soldiers might be kidnapped, 33 actual Israeli soldiers have died. Never before have international airlines suspended flights into Israel’s national airport. But they did this week, a move that struck a neuralgic spot in the Israeli psyche: if disaster struck, there’d be no escape. (That’s long been true of Gaza, of course.)
Before the current round of violence, the West Bank had been relatively quiet for years. Friday saw a “day of rage,” with several Palestinians killed and talk of a third intifada. An operation designed to make Israel more secure has made it much less.
If that is true now – with the prospect of an uprising encompassing not just the West Bank but some of the 1.7 million Palestinian citizens of Israel as well – it’s truer still in the future. For every one of those Gazan children – their lives broken by pain and bloodshed three times in the past six years – will surely grow up with a heart hardened against Israel, some of them bent on revenge. In trying to crush today’s enemy, Israel has reared the enemy of tomorrow.
Security requires more than walls and tanks. It requires alliances and support. Yet every day Israel is seen to be battering Gaza, its reservoir of world sympathy drops a little lower. And that is to reckon without the impact of this violence on Israel’s own moral fibre. After 47 years of occupation and even more years of conflict, the constant demonisation of the enemy is having a corrosive effect: witness the “Sderot cinema”, the Israelis gathering in lawn chairs on a border hilltop to munch popcorn and watch missiles rain down on Gaza. No nation can regard itself as secure when its ethical moorings come loose.
The only real security is political, not military. It comes through negotiation, not artillery fire. In the years of quiet this should have been the Israeli goal. Instead, every opening was obstructed, every opportunity spurned.
And the tendency to self-harm is not confined to Israel. Hamas may have reasserted itself by this conflict, renewing its image as the champion of Palestinian resistance. But it’s come at a terrible price. After an escalation that was as much Hamas’s choice as Israel’s, 800 Palestinians are now dead, 5,400 are injured and tens of thousands have been displaced. For those Palestinians yearning for a state that will include the West Bank, that goal has been rendered even more remote: what, Israelis ask, if the West Bank becomes another Gaza, within even closer firing range of Ben Gurion airport?
This is the perverse landscape in which both Israelis and Palestinians find themselves. They are led by men who hear their fear and fury – and whose every action digs both peoples deeper into despair.
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