On Sunday morning, 8th October, I heard the news on the radio like every other day as I drank my tea. And there it was the headlines – the most recent edition of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict which began yesterday, had escalated. Hamas had mounted a surprise attack, captured Israeli territory, taken Israelis as hostages and killed Israeli citizens in the raid. Israel, the most heavily armed and equipped state in the world, had retaliated strafing the Gaza strip with aerial bombing. By Day three of the conflict there were countless deaths on both sides. The two hundred odd Israeli hostages were still in Hamas custody. As Israel pondered a ground offensive and occupation of Gaza, there were calls for de-escalation by the international community. The US announced that it will send more firearms to Israel. Day 4 of the conflict and it gets worse with more deaths on both sides. A total siege of the Gaza has been announced by Israel. Hamas is preparing for a long war. Day 5 and the death and destruction toll worsens…. You can see the horrendous scenes hour by hour on the 24/7 news channels.
Writing at this time in the middle of such a dangerous situation, and on a sensitive topic like Israel-Palestine relations, is a minefield. Everybody has a different opinion and one has to navigate through the difficult terrain of feelings, emotions, and the tendency to take sides. It is difficult under these circumstances to find your own voice and just to grieve at the tragedy unfolding and our impotence to prevent anything, least of all to prevent the institutions that govern us from adding fuel to fire. But I just have to hear myself speak out, speak out for a just peace on all sides, old fashioned as this might be. I unequivocally condemn the Hamas attack just as I would condemn any attack that leads to the loss of lives of either of the Israelis or the Palestinians. I also condemn the Israeli airstrikes. The claim that Hamas targets were being bombed is a euphemism. Is it possible to ‘target’ Hamas in a strip of densely populated land and not wreak havoc on the population?
Every time there is a conflagration in this part of the world narratives of blame take over that normalise the conflagration as being time bound, obscuring the fact that a greater conflict remains unresolved and provides the fuel for these outbursts. Who started it, who is causing havoc, who is the victim and who the aggressor. The narrative seems to promise a resolution by use of force, military might and outright war. Till the next time. And it gives both parties – Hamas and the state of Israel – the opportunity to play out their murderous games. Neither wants a resolution to the on-going crisis: Hamas benefits because by attacking Israel and murdering civilians they establish themselves as the only political force capable of giving voice to Palestinian frustration, anger and resentment while the shaky right-wing government of Netanyahu is rescued by the wave of right-wing nationalism calling for retribution; or by the call for a unity government at this time of ‘crisis’ so that he can survive for the time being.
Then there is the diplomatic narrative which also follows a familiar pattern. The bad boys of the region, Iran, would like to prevent the imminent agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel from taking place. Hamas and Hezbollah are allied to Iran and possibly also funded and armed by them. This attack by Hamas, according to the diplomatic pundits, is a means to keep the Islamic world together and to scuttle the deal. In this simplistic narrative, with elements of truth in it as in all narratives, is always the same. The middle east is its own worst enemy because their geo-politics is so messed up. They are against the good guys in the west who only want the best for the region and to safeguard Israel. QED the safety of the planet lies in the hands of ….the west.
And through it all it is the people on both sides who are condemned to suffer. Both Israeli and Palestinian citizens are victims of an untenable, antediluvian security regime which imprisons them in cycles of violence and death, as we are witnessing, have witnessed earlier and will witness in future. I am firmly convinced that the governments of this world and of Europe and the US in particular will not do anything to resolve this situation. If they could it would have been resolved long ago. And in fact they can’t. In a world dominated by powers (I refer clearly here to the Europeans and their progeny in the US) as the descendants of centuries of European antisemitism, the culmination of which was the massacres of European Jews by the Third Reich in the Second World war, they are compelled by their history to secure a homeland for the survivors of the holocaust. Even if it meant, at that time in the 1940s, expelling the settled population. But that is ancient history and the world has moved on. Since then the strategic interests of these powers and unstinting support to Israel mostly at the cost of other people living in this region has made it unstable. The world may have moved on but not the Palestinians; they have nowhere to move to. Three generations of Palestinians have grown up stunted with consequences for the three generations of Israelis who are also stunted by their fear, dislike and hatred of the Palestinian other. What is this accident of birth that condemns some to live this impoverished life of insecurity and fear of your neighbour while some of us are the Brahmins of this world and live in relative security?
Where are the peace movements? Why are we not on the streets demanding peace? We are the People, we are the people of this world, we are interdependent and we should be standing in solidarity with the people of Israel and Palestine. Not for Hamas and certainly not for the Israeli government which has failed to secure a peaceful future for citizens on both sides of the border. It’s as simple as that. But given the decades long blame game and unwillingness to give the Palestinians their freedom, the entry of Hamas and successive right-wing governments in Israel, and the continuing apathy of world citizens, the political space for protest and action has shrunk and become toxic.
Lest we forget suffering has a face and name. I recall the taxi driver in Amman in October 2015, Hasan, who on overhearing the conversation between my colleague and me in which we shared where we would be in the world on our next assignment, quietly remarked that such mobility was for him a dream. As a Palestinian he had barely managed to cross six Israeli checkpoints between his village and the nearest town six years ago on his way to Jordan. He has not been able to return despite his mother’s pleas and tears because he didn’t know whether he would make it out again. And then there is Rasha in Palestine whom we met during our gender course in 2022, who withdrew her little boys from school because of the uncertainty, because of the fear of violence from the settlers whom the Israeli government has armed. Her fellow participants of our course message her everyday just to make sure she is okay as also to reassure themselves. The politics of the people cannot remain hostage to the realpolitik of states. They have betrayed us.
As opposed to the realpolitik which we are constantly being fed as the only practical solution, the politics of the people has to be grounded in the reality of an ethic and politics of non-violence. In her book The Force of Non-violence (2020), Judith Butler shows that that the ethic of non-violence is not a passive practice and nor is it an individualistic ethical relation to existing forms of power. Instead non-violence is an ethical position found in the midst of a political field. It accepts that hostility is part of the psychic constitution but values ambivalence as a way of checking the conversion of aggression into violence. The politics of non-violence is a critique of individualism pointing instead towards our existence in a social world, related to one another by interdependence. I can’t as an individual have rights if my neighbour does not have it too. This practice is part of wider struggle against social inequality, inequality that divides the world into two kinds of lives: the ones worthy of our grief and the ones who are not. Racial categories and fantasies inform justifications of state and administrative violence: the Palestinian/ Arabs as terrorists and fanatics; refugees to Europe as encroachers sponging of the system; low caste people in India as criminally inclined; young Black men in US cities as violent and presumed to be guilty – and the list goes on. If they are killed by the police, the military or pushed into the sea by maritime border security forces there is always a justification. The struggle against inequality central to the politics of non-violence is about the wider struggle of social transformation to make all lives grievable, to make the interdependency of life the basis for social and political equality.
And the time for acting is now. Our time is now.
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