Gaza and Peace

A 4-year old Palestinian girl who lost her life due to malnutrition and lack of treatment due to the war on Gaza

They say you should never write an email when you are angry or upset. You should never send a message late at night. I guess the same applies to writing a blog. However, equally, anger sometimes propels us to respond to events which are so egregious that a rational response is wholly inadequate.

I was listening to The World at One today. The eye-witness accounts of two (incredibly brave) British medics – one of whom is currently serving in Gaza, the other who had just returned from there – was stomach churning. It is harrowing listening. But it should also be compulsory listening – if you can bear it, listen from 8 minutes in (https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002g4ps).

The medics describe children who should weigh 40kgs reduced to bare skin and bone, with maggots in their wounds, so worn down that they have no natural resistance left, their shoulders reduced to the width of their wrists. One medic spoke of the ‘gamification’ of the slaughter – clusters of patients who had been shot in the testicles or in the upper-left quadrant of their abdomens. She described the brutality of GHF opening ‘feeding sites’ at 0300, forcing starving people to walk across war zones at night, then corralling them into pens ‘and shot’. She described snipers shooting into hospitals, the bombing of the WHO’s ‘entire medical supply warehouse’. There is no world in which the wanton destruction of a medical supply centre can possibly be a legitimate part of an anti-terrorist operation.

I felt horror rising, alongside anger and disgust that this sort of behaviour could actually occur. It is revolting beyond words. Nothing can justify this utterly uncaring disregard for human life. And the impunity that lies behind it. And the inaction of Western Governments that makes them (and us) complicit in the deliberate slaughter.

Before anyone leaps down my throat, I am not defending Hamas. I loathe them with a particular passion. I cannot begin to imagine the terror of being held for nearly two years in underground passages, nor the utter inhumanity of the 7 October attacks, nor the anguish of families who lost loved ones that day, or have been waiting since then for their family member to be returned. Nor can I even start to comprehend how, despite all the pain and death that Gazans have suffered, Hamas are still not willing to accept a peace plan: I can only conclude that they are just plain evil.

But one evil is not extinguished by another. Biden warned Netanyahu not to allow his anger to lead Israel to make the same mistakes that the US made in Afghanistan after 9/11. Sound counsel, ignored.

And now Netanyahu finds himself in a bind. The more the slaughter continues, the more the risk grows that Israel will become a pariah state. Yet he cannot be seen to make a deal with Hamas – doing so would inevitably be presented by them as a victory and would lose him his ruling coalition, bringing him, finally, face-to-face with his Day of Destiny in the Court Room. The Knesset rises on Sunday for three months. If no peace deal is reached before then (and he has no interest in pushing for one), there will presumably be no peace deal for three months and the slaughter and suffering will go on.

I am reading Ian Black’s excellent book – Enemies and Neighbours. The hatred and killing goes back a long way. And it will go on out into the future. The one thing that Israel’s onslaught guarantees is that it will ingrain hatred into another generation of Palestinians. If there is no way out, that circle of hatred will be endlessly repeated in a cycle of violence and death which delivers only more broken families and lost loved-ones. That is not a future to contemplate. The cycle must be broken.

The nirvana of peace can be reached. But the West must be shaken out of its complicit torpor, the Middle East pressed into action. Only a peace guaranteed by neighbouring countries, with reconstruction funded by the Gulf, Europe and the IFIs and security provided by the UN and Arab countries will ensure the involvement of enough players with sufficient weight to make the deal stick. I do not believe that the US can or should play a role in such a future. It has for too long been a dishonest and unequal arbiter. US involvement would undermine the credibility of any deal. And yet, without US pressure, Netanyahu (assuming he escapes gaol) will never agree to one.

The first step is recognition of the State of Palestine - which is why I was humbled to be asked to sign the UN-A letter which was published yesterday and proud to do so - a step which must be taken whilst (as Wes Streeting said) there is still a Palestine to be recognised. The second step is a total ban on the sale of all weapons and components to Israel. The third is a ceasefire which returns all hostages – dead and alive – to their families. And the fourth is to offer people of both nations hope that there can be an alternative to this endless cycle of violence and murder.

But deal there must be. Only through a deal can the Palestinian people be offered a credible alternative to the violent hatred of Hamas and the Israelis an alternative to the equally violent hatred of the Israeli right-wing: a deal would make both sets of loathsome extremists as irrelevant as each other.

If we have anything left in the way of conscience, we must take a stand. In the words of Tom Fletcher, we must be able to look our children in the eyes and say ‘Yes. I really did all I could to stop this madness’. Otherwise, we condemn our children and their children to sit, like me, in their cars in the future, shaking in horror as they listen to the same stories of carnage, death and destruction told by the next generation of brave medics trying to sew shattered bodies back together again. That is a future we should move every sinew to avoid.