Mick Clifford: Too simplistic to say Israel-Hamas war is a good versus evil conflict
People holding placards and flags during a solidarity rally organised by the Irish Israel Alliance and the Irish Christian Friends of Israel outside the Israel Embassy in Dublin.
Last Saturday an outrage against humanity was committed when Hamas fighters crossed from Gaza into Israel and went on a killing spree.Â
Civilians were shot dead randomly. Women were sexually assaulted. Children were not spared. Hostages, including reportedly an elderly wheelchair-bound Holocaust survivor, were kidnapped and taken back to Gaza. Footage uploaded on social media showed a woman’s half-naked body being dragged around. Another filmed a car pulling up back in Gaza, a young woman, her hands tied behind her back, was taken from the rear of the vehicle.Â
She had a wound to her face and her crotch area was blood-soaked. She was bundled into a back seat while all around her a crowd chanted “Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar” as if they were celebrating a medieval human sacrifice. Her terror can only be imagined. The death toll from a morning’s work was over 1,300, mostly civilian lives. Around 150 hostages were taken.
For a small but vocal minority in this country, the outrage committed was received with a big But. But they were Israelis. But look at what their government is doing to the Palestinians. But wait till you see the disproportionate and inhumane response that this is going to elicit. But they’re not really human beings, not like you and me who are capable of human empathy.
By Saturday evening Palestinian flags were appearing on Irish social media posts. Among them were a number of TDs and entertainment figures. At a time when an outrage had been committed, they felt it necessary to pin their colours to the mast, and that mast was not one of at least temporary solidarity to a people who were in that instant in terrible shock. It is difficult to believe that any other group, anywhere in the world, would be so contemptuously regarded in a time of great pain.
On Monday a demonstration took place outside the Israeli embassy in Dublin. By then the Israeli defence forces had begun bombing Gaza, probably indiscriminately. Prominent among the demonstrators were People Before Profit. The chilling indifference to the plight of civilians on the Israeli side had morphed into a compassionate and angry solidarity with civilians in Gaza.Â
Flowers that had been left at the entrance to the embassy were trampled on. Somebody climbed a gate and threw paint onto the building’s frontage. If you didn’t know better you would think that the outrage which had sparked this latest phase in the conflict originated with the Israelis. In the Dáil, Richard Boyd Barrett repeatedly refused to condemn the Hamas attack.
One social media post exemplified this attitude among a cohort that considers themselves “the left”. Comedian Tadhg Hickey had this to say on the reports of the rape of Israeli civilians by Hamas soldiers last Saturday.
“War has led human beings to do unconscionable acts since time began. Do I condone the barbarism of rape? Of course not, do you think I’m a psychopath? But to look at the act without the historical political context of oppression and apartheid is unhelpful.”
Can you imagine in this day and age the reaction to anybody who would attempt to contextualise rape against any woman, anywhere in the world bar Israel? The poster would be obliterated from social media and most likely every social sphere. The reaction in this case was relatively mild.
Days later Hickey removed the tweet, calling it “clumsy”. He claimed the “act” he originally referred to was the Hamas attack and not rape, adding he was “sorry for any upset caused”. The post is a matter for himself but the most telling aspect was the complete absence of the kind of universal outrage such a post would ordinarily attract.
None of that takes from how Israel has treated Palestinians for decades. General policy has been inhumane and the term apartheid is not misplaced in describing it. In recent years things have got noticeably worse, particularly with the relentless and sometimes savage expansion of settlements in the West Bank.Â
Over a recent 18-month period Israeli forces killed 140 Palestinian children in the West Bank, according to the UN. Few if any of those murders have attracted criminal proceedings. In an ideal world, the media would focus in on these everyday outrages in a relentless manner, but compassion fatigue among general populations ensures this does not happen.
The prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, could best be described as a nasty piece of work. During his current term he has attempted to dismantle democratic norms in areas like the judiciary, expediently pander to religious extremists, and show utter contempt for the Palestinians.Â
He has also encountered real resistance within his own country by those who oppose him and all he represents. The response to what happened on Saturday is going to be disproportionate and contemptuous of civilian life in Gaza. Already, sympathy for last Saturday’s massacre is beginning to ebb away as the bombs rain down and troops prepare to go in and wreak further carnage.
On the Palestinian side, leadership has been just as abysmal. It wasn’t too long ago when Hamas was throwing gay men to their deaths from tall buildings as punishment for their sexuality. They knew precisely the response last Saturday would elicit and they revel in presenting their own people as sacrifice to their ideological pursuit of driving the Israelis into the sea.
For those who see the conflict as Israel simply sticking its jackboot into the Palestinians, one element of the Israeli psyche is conveniently ignored. Their country was formed as a refuge from an attempt to wipe out Jews. When they arrived in their UN-mandated new home, all their neighbours were equally focused on wiping them out. This does not condone the appalling treatment of the Palestinians, but as professor Francesco Cavatorta told me on a podcast this week, it may assist in attempting to try to understand why things have got this bad.
Cavatorta, who co-authored , says the Hamas attack was inevitable because of the humanitarian situation in Gaza but points out that the overall conflict has its origins in Europe. While living in Jerusalem he used to bring visiting relatives to the Holocaust Museum just to experience what it might mean to those who “belong to a particular group to go to a place where you are told that you have faced in the past the scientific obliteration of the entire group.”
“It’s powerful and functions as a powerful message but not a message to cover up what has been done to the Palestinians,” he says.
“The real paradox is that the Palestinians are not responsible for what happened to European Jews and certainly not as guilty as the Europeans for the hundreds of years of pogroms and discrimination of Jews in the heart of Europe.”
Some Europeans prefer to ignore any such nuance. Instead, they view the conflict in simplistic terms of good versus evil. For anybody who values all human life, however, understanding and explaining is the only way to begin some attempt to arrive at a just accommodation. Right now that place looks to be very far off.
Francesco Cavatorta is this week’s guest on the Mick Clifford Podcast.
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