Gaza: a moral maze?
Tony Klug, Liberal Synagogues’ panel, 12 January 2009
These are difficult and emotional times and I speak from the perspective of someone who has been writing about, and otherwise engaged in, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for some 40 years. The situation is precarious and could sharply deteriorate and I hope you’ll forgive me if I speak bluntly, even at the risk of upsetting some people, which is not my intention.
When I was young, I learned about the quintessential Jewish values of justice, peace and truth from the distinguished rabbis that taught me at the orthodox Jewish school – the Hasmonean - that I attended from the ages of 5 to 18. Fast forward to today and, equipped with these same values, what are we to make of an advanced, modern state – forget for the moment its identity or declared motive - that is bombarding, from land, sea and air, an impoverished, entrapped, defenceless people, causing widespread death and destruction, not to mention generating new waves of hatred around the world and renewed calls for revenge, isolation and boycott?
What has happened to the Jewish psyche since I was a youth that some Jews today - although certainly not all – seem barely to bat an eyelid at this carnage, if they aren’t actively supporting it? Is there no limit to what they will tolerate being done in our name? - even if there is horrendous provocation in the form of the indiscriminate rocketing of hundreds of thousands of Israelis who live in daily fear of the missiles fired by Hamas and other armed groups which, like Israel’s actions, has been widely condemned by human rights groups as a war crime.
Many people from my generation, Jewish and non-Jewish, feel seriously let down – betrayed even - by what Israel has slowly but steadily developed into since its astounding military feat in 1967. I am, sadly, among them. As a student activist at the time, I believed in the justice of Israel’s cause and its right to self-determination and independence, free of threat. And for many years I fought the good fight, defending Israel’s corner – not necessarily to my personal or political benefit - at the local, national and international student levels. Our passionate arguments – that Israel was not expansionist, that it desperately yearned for peace, that it was eager to withdraw from the occupied territories, that it was a good friend of the Palestinians, that it did everything it possibly could to avoid civilian casualties, and so on – have all been exposed, one by one.
It’s not that these arguments were necessarily false from the very beginning. But little by little they were usurped by the triumphalist mood that infected the country following the 1967 war and the hubris the resounding victory gave rise to. Such characteristics are of course not unique to Israel. They are common to conquering powers and have frequently led to their eventual downfall.
The dreadful things that are happening today in Gaza are not an aberration. The Israeli military assault is merely the most recent in a rolling sequence of onslaughts that have previously pounded towns and villages in Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza itself. It all stems from Israel – as well as other parties - not having a peace strategy. The only real hope is that immediate advantage will be taken of this crisis by formulating a coherent peace strategy, to be swiftly advanced once the fighting comes to an end.
So what would an Israeli peace strategy look like?
The most important component would be a genuine commitment to withdraw in full from the occupied West Bank, subject to agreed land swaps, in exchange for a comprehensive regional peace based on two viable states as proposed by the Arab Peace Initiative. An unequivocal Israeli pledge of this nature, by opening up the space, could trigger a new momentum. Without such a territorial commitment, all other efforts are hollow.
While it is true that Israel is rhetorically committed to a two-state solution, a proposal I put forward myself in the early 1970s when there were some 5,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank - and I fully expected to see implemented before the decade was out! - the authenticity of the Israeli commitment to this end is contradicted by the evolving facts on the ground. Today, there are roughly 250,000 settlers there, or double that number if you include East Jerusalem and the surrounding areas that Israel has illegally annexed. To this day - urged on by the powerful but generally unpopular settler lobby - the land confiscations and the settlement expansion continue apace, gobbling up what’s left of the putative Palestinian state.
A peace strategy would start by freezing immediately all further settlement expansion and it would recognize, even if reluctantly, that both Fatah and Hamas – in or out of government - are integral parts of the Palestinian national movement and reflect significant political currents among the Palestinian people, however distasteful some of Hamas’s official policies may be. Destroying the ‘terrorist infrastructure’ is a euphemism for excluding one of these major currents from involvement in determining the end game, just as eradicating the ‘Zionist entity’ is code for dismantling the state of Israel as the embodiment of a Jewish national movement. Neither aim is achievable in the foreseeable future, but a strategy based on either of them promises nothing but further rounds of mutual atrocities.
The irony is that when Hamas was established in 1987, it was encouraged by the Israeli government as a more acceptable alternative to the PLO and Fatah, which Israel then regarded as terrorist movements. Today, this policy has been stood on its head. But sooner or later, Israel will have to do a deal with Hamas, as it eventually did with the PLO. In the meantime, Hamas - the victor in an internationally authenticated democratic election - needs some breathing space to develop politically and for its own internal tensions and divisions to crystallize and mature. If forced from power, it may abandon the political path altogether and revert to its more belligerent demands and violent deportment. Or it may give way to ‘jihadist’ forces, including al-Qaida whose advances it has so far rejected.
A peace strategy would have entailed Israel responding positively to Hamas’s perfectly reasonable demand to end the strangulating blockade of Gaza as part of a renewed ceasefire, which hitherto it had more or less observed. This would have been a far less gory and much more effective way of achieving Israel’s perfectly legitimate demand for an end to the missiles. None of the bloody mayhem was necessary, and if it weren’t for the looming elections in Israel and the quasi interregnum in the US, it’s unlikely it would have happened. In the end, the same deal will probably be cut although, by destroying so much of the civilian infrastructure in Gaza meanwhile, including the police force, and dramatically raising the temperature, Israel has made it a lot more difficult for any Palestinian party to enforce the terms of an eventual truce.
In the absence of a Palestinian government of national unity, a peace strategy would see Israel encourage a tacit agreement between Fatah and Hamas not to interfere in the territory currently ruled by the other, while Israel and Hamas observed a state of non-belligerency, pragmatically ensuring the basic needs of the Gaza population were properly met. These two rudiments would free Israel and the PA president Mahmoud Abbas to negotiate the modalities of Israel’s withdrawal from the West Bank and promptly implement them with the establishment of an independent Palestinian state there. The subsequent inclusion of the Gaza Strip would then be essentially an internal Palestinian matter, to be determined between the parties in due course.
So, inside this maze, is there a moral dilemma? I would suggest there’s a simple test. How would we, as Jews, nurtured with strong humanitarian instincts based on traditional Jewish values, have reacted to the dreadful toll of civilian deaths and the staggering devastation and fear if the perpetrator were any state other than Israel? It’s a rhetorical question.
But there is a different dilemma. Between the ethic and the ethnic. Between our sense of what is right and wrong, and tribal loyalty. And it is the latter, I believe, that explains the reflex support of many Jews around the world for Israel’s otherwise indefensible and counterproductive actions. Yet even tribal loyalty is not what it was. It was very simple years ago when there was virtually no dissent in Israel. Today there is growing dissent. And the protest movements will for sure continue to expand as the true horror of what has happened is revealed in the period ahead. It is no longer a question of whether to support Israel. But which Israel? Its very future, and the standing and welfare of the Jewish people globally, may depend on the answer. It isn’t a pretty picture, but can we turn it around? Well, in the new, forward-looking Obama era, let’s hope the answer is ‘yes we can’.
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