Heartbreaking, gut-wrenching and complicated

It has been distressing to watch the news from Israel and Gaza over the past six weeks.

Events in southern Israel on 7 October were shattering – not just because of the death and violence wreaked on that Saturday morning, and the ongoing threat to those poor souls taken hostage, but also because of the consequences that were so certain to follow. And which have followed. The news from Gaza in the subsequent weeks has been profoundly distressing.

It is also unbelievably complicated. Everything I knew – or thought I knew – about current and recent events turns out to have layers of nuance. So many layers that I’m not sure how many days, weeks or years of research would be needed to satisfy my desire for clarity. 

What follows is a summary of some understandings that I have come to. I won’t say “facts” because I am bound to be challenged, but I have tried to be factual. And I have avoided history: 1948, 1917, 732 BCE or any of the many, many other milestones in the story of Israel, Palestine and their antecedents.

Israel as an occupying nation

One reads a lot about Israel’s “occupation of Palestine” and its treatment of Arabs as second-class citizens, to the point where some describe Israel as an apartheid state – an accusation that Israel and its friends find deeply offensive and fervently deny.

I start here because these statements (whether true or false) set a context for current attitudes. For some people, these statements serve to justify the anger felt by Hamas prior to 7 October. And, for a small minority, they even justify the actions that Hamas took on that day.

To understand the occupation question, you have to view the territory in three parts:

• Gaza, which Israel withdrew from in 2005. That is worth repeating: Israel withdrew from Gaza, unilaterally, in 2005. Its troops were removed, along with Israel’s settlements and its citizens. The land was handed over to its Palestinian residents. Since 2007, Gaza has been governed by Hamas.

• Israel proper, in which the Israeli government accords all citizens, whether Jews or Arabs (or anyone else), equal status. There is an automatic right to become a citizen if one is Jewish, which is not accorded to others. But once citizenship has been granted, there are no special rights for Jews and there is no second-class status for those who are not Jewish.

• The West Bank, on the opposite side of Israel from Gaza, has been occupied since 1967. It has been controlled by Israel and, in part, by the Palestinian Authority since the Oslo Accords of 1993. It is not controversial to say that, as a territory under occupation, the West Bank’s occupants do not enjoy the same freedoms that are enjoyed by citizens of a state in charge of its own sovereignty. A “two-state solution”, explored at various times over several decades, would end the occupation. But negotiations, perhaps most notably at the Camp David Summit in 2000, have failed to reach an agreement.  

But it is more complicated than that.

Gaza had fallen under the control of Hamas in the aftermath of the 2006 elections to the Palestine Legislative Council which, at the time, was the legislature of the West Bank as well as Gaza. Hamas won 44% of the votes and 74 of the 132 seats. But one-third of those elected were, at the time of the election, prisoners in Israel and, under the Palestine Constitution, unable to take up their seats. This left neither Hamas nor the previous governing party, Fatah, with enough seats to form a government. Attempts at forming a coalition were met with sporadic fighting, resulting (in June 2007) in Hamas' takeover of Gaza and Fatah governing in the West Bank.

So the occupied territories of the West Bank are on the opposite side of the country from the fighting. Over in Gaza, where the fighting is taking place, the territory had (until this current war) been devoid of Israeli troops and devoid of Israeli residents for around 18 years. And for the last 16 years, it has been governed by Hamas.

But it is still more complicated than that.

With Gaza being governed by a terrorist organisation (or if anyone from the BBC is reading this, “an organisation designated as a terrorist group by many Western Governments”), Israel and Egypt have restricted imports into that country. Land imports are closely monitored by both Israel and Egypt and there is a blockade by air and sea. Despite these restrictions, Hamas appears to have made weapons out of equipment intended for peaceful purposes, such as water pipes. Israel considers that this justifies the restrictions.

Under international law, the existence of these restrictions imposes an obligation on Israel and Egypt to ensure that life-sustaining supplies can get through. But, since 2005, Gaza has not been occupied by Israel in any sense that most ordinary people understand that term.

Disparity in the deaths

Almost from the moment that news started to emerge that Hamas had launched an attack on Israel, commentators were reaching for the death statistics and seeking to draw inferences. Take this example from Matt Carr, a writer on terrorism:

Before this week’s raid, 10,757 Palestinians were killed since 2000, compared with 1,346 Israelis, according to the United Nations. Of these, 2,345 Palestinians were children, compared with 143 Israeli children. Anyone care to explain that disparity?

Well, the most likely explanation is that, when Hamas fired rockets into Israel, many of them – but not all – were blocked by Israel's air defence system. But when Israel fired rockets back, they tended to hit a target.

In an ideal world, both sides would have stopped long ago. One can only speculate as to why Hamas continued to shell Israel once it knew what the result would be. But, then again, one can only speculate on the motive behind the attacks on 7 October when Hamas must have known what the result of that would be. The death statistics since that day have been all too distressing. Even if the numbers claimed should prove to be an overstatement, it is clear that the scale of the suffering has been heartrending.

Faced with the continuing disparity in the number of Palestinians killed compared with the number of Israelis, too many people have reached, all too easily, for the words “war crime”. But those who understand the rules of war are far more circumspect. Speaking to the Times newspaper, David Scheffer, former US ambassador-at-large for war crime issues and a co-founder of the International Criminal Court, warned against rushing to judgement (£):

Israel’s performance as a military entity on Gaza territory … will be subject to future scrutiny for years to come…. I would not leap at broad characterisations of what the IDF [Israel Defence Forces] is doing in Gaza as some kind of body of war crimes. It may be that …. But it’s very difficult for us to sit here and say that, whereas it’s not that difficult to describe what happened on October 7 as war crimes and crimes against humanity.

If a timescale of years seems unnecessary when there is evidence that so many civilians have died already, the following passage may assist, taken from a speech to the House of Lords by Lord Verdirame, a law professor in the Department of War Studies at Kings College, London:  

Israel has described its war aims as the destruction of Hamas’s capability. From a legal perspective, these war aims are consistent with proportionality … [Proportionality] does not mean, even when scrupulously observed, that civilians will not tragically lose their lives in an armed conflict.

[For an introduction to the law of armed conflict, as it relates to Gaza, I recommend this by Joshua Rozenberg.]

Reaction at home

I write from the UK. There have been numerous marches and demonstrations since 7 October. Some are pro-Israel; some are pro-Palestine; some are pro-peace. It would be surprising if there weren’t supporters of all three of those constituencies. They are not, of course, mutually exclusive. One can simultaneously be a supporter of the populations on both sides of the border. And those who want peace can be supporters of all sides or none.

What has caused shock and alarm in the Jewish community (not just in the UK) is the outbreak of pockets of antisemitism. Some fear that it is, or might become, more than just pockets. I am alert to that possibility, but for now I am determined to remain optimistic that these are isolated incidents, not the start of an epidemic. I recall only too well the outbreak of anti-Americanism in the UK following 9/11. It was, for example, well-represented in a selected studio audience on the BBC’s flagship programme, Question Time just two days after 9/11 – look here and here – resulting in this apology from the BBC to the former US Ambassador who had been a guest on the programme. [My apologies for the watermark on the YouTube video of the programme. I have been unable to find a clean copy.]

Whilst I do not doubt that there are those who are always anti-America and those who are always antisemitic, I believe there is a natural tendency in humans to look for a reason why a catastrophe elsewhere will not be repeated at home. So we – some of us, but by no means all of us – look for a reason to distinguish ourselves from the victims. If I am right about this, it would go at least part of the way to explaining the perverse occurrence that prejudice directed at the victim group often increases after a tragedy. As worrying as it is, it is not necessarily the start of something worse.

It is important not to equate Israel with all Jews, just as one must not equate Hamas with all Palestinians (or even all Gazans). But one must not forget that, although Hamas is a terrorist organisation, it did (as mentioned above) win a majority in the Palestine election of 2006. There have been no elections since with which to test current opinion. We must hope that ordinary Gazans do not support the current actions of Hamas and are frightened to speak up. We must hope that, if Israel succeeds in removing Hamas from Gaza, the rest of the population will actively seek to prevent Hamas’ return.

Whatever anger Gazans might feel against Israel right now, we must hope that they reserve more anger for Hamas’ use of civilians as human shields. Impartial news media seem to be widely accepting of the IDF’s claim that Hamas does use Gazan citizens in this way. This, it seems, is done not just by locating Hamas’s military operations amongst the civilian infrastructure, but also by placing obstacles in people’s way when the IDF gives Gazans advance warning of an attack. News media report that this has been going on since long before the current crisis.

What next?

This war, like all wars, will end one day with a declaration of peace. We must hope that, this time, the peace is permanent and not merely a pause before the next war.

The stated aim of Hamas is to eliminate the nation of Israel. The stated aim of Israel is to eliminate the organisation, Hamas. Right now, Israel is much closer to its aim than Hamas is. And Israel can achieve its aim with the loss of far fewer lives than it would take for Hamas to achieve its own aim. The cold logic of that statement suggests a heartbreaking continuation of the current position.  

I do not doubt that those who have been calling for an immediate ceasefire want it to be permanent. Sadly, we have yet to see any explanation from them as to what would give it permanence.