How can we talk about this?

A small personal story about a big political problem

Sep 29, 2024

Last night I found myself shouting at the 7 o’clock TV news. Well, shouting at Benjamin Netanyahu actually. STOP! Just STOP!! I yelled. Netanyahu was telling the UN General Assembly that there was “no place in Iran the long arm of Israel cannot reach, and that’s true of the entire Middle East”. He also told the UNGA that Israel was “fighting for its life”. What, with such a long arm? If it weren’t so devastating it would perhaps be funny.

Flashback to 2005:

I don’t know how you keep going: I’d be constantly depressed.

— What makes you think I’m not?

This conversation happened at Ruchama Marton’s place in Tel Aviv. Ruchama, who was born in Jerusalem to Polish parents who had fled the pogroms long before Israel was Israel, has been a feminist and peace activist for many decades and was among other things founder of Physicians for Human Rights (PFHR). (Ruchama is among the roughly 70% of Jewish residents of Israel who were born there, many, even most of whom have no other citizenship and thus nowhere else to go—a fact that is often overlooked.) During my stay I was invited to accompany PFHR on a day trip to the clinic they operated in Sebastiya, in the West Bank, working in collaboration with a Palestinian health NGO.

(As an aside, Poland was for many centuries a place of refuge for Jewish people and home to the largest Ashkenazi community in the world. This began to change under the Russian Empire from the end of the 18^th century. By the 1920s Polish Jews were fleeing repeated pogroms—although some also happened during the “Poland-as-refuge” years, and we know what happened after 1939. How quickly and dramatically things can change, when peoples are made the pawns of militarised power interests. As we know.)

I met with many founder members of Women in Black (WIB, founded in January 1988, after the first Palestinian intifada) and other organisations during this visit, including organisations of Mizrahi women. I also returned to the West Bank, accompanying another activist from New Profile (a feminist organisation founded in 1998 with the aim of demilitarising Israeli society) to visit her friends and fellow activists in another village in the West Bank. I returned to Jerusalem the following year for the WIB conference, which took place in East Jerusalem in the fraught context of the upcoming evacuation of Gaza and hardline Zionist opposition to it. Israeli politics were coloured in orange (anti-evacuation) and blue (pro-evacuation) that year.

Jerusalem 2006. Should I envisage a new career as a postcard photographer?

I have kept in touch with some of the women, and was lucky to meet up again with Ruchama, and Palestinian activist Khulud Khamis, during a visit of international feminists to the Philippines in 2009. Unfortunately I have not been able to return to Israel and Palestine, much as I have wanted to, and much as I wanted in particular to rush there in October 2023 and hug all my grieving Jewish and Palestinian friends and co-activists. For all the good that would do. It would just have given them another worry: my safety. Not useful.

I struggle to find a way in to writing at this time about this polarised topic where whatever I say, I will probably end up arguing with someone and be cast in a role I do not seek to play. Plus, in this horribly fraught context where so many people dear to me have skin in the game (which of course is nothing like a “game”), I am worried about saying something really stupid. Because we really have quite enough of that in these conversations.

These are not recent concerns, and it is not only me. For decades I have been very keenly aware that it is impossible to have a nuanced conversation about what is euphemistically called “the situation in the Middle East”. One will always make an enemy of someone. I know of no other issue in international politics or conflicts that has so consistently been intensely polarising. I know of no other issue (well, except maybe one but let’s set the genduurrr stuff aside for once), in which disinformation has been so consistently mobilised, by both the Israeli state and by Islamist militants, along with the Zionist hard right and large sections (but not all) of the Free Palestine movement (broad left activist groupings for which this has for decades been the international issue—the word bandwagon comes to mind but I will go into that another day). I wrote “Zionist hard right” for a reason. For anyone who is having some difficulty understanding what Zionism means: at its most fundamental, and historical, it means the development and protection of a Jewish nation. Everyone who is attached to the continued existence of Israel or who considers that it would in any case be impractical and indeed inadvisable to demolish it, is not of the hard right, and many do not necessarily consider themselves Zionist at all.

A position statement of sorts

If you have read this far, dear readers, you may already have allocated me a role in this debate. So, before I go any further, let me state clearly and I hope unambiguously my position: the Israeli occupation of Palestine is a breach of fundamental human rights on so many levels, and the Israeli state is perpetrating a genocide in Gaza. What is happening to the Lebanese people, whether perpetrated by Hezbollah or the Israeli state, is a tragedy. What Hamas did to Israeli people on 7 October 2023 is a tragedy. These are all acts of war, without exception.

Australian foreign minister Penny Wong, during an interview on 25 September last from New York where the UNGA is sitting, reaffirmed the Australian government’s commitment to a two-state solution. Then why aren’t you formally recognising Palestine, I asked the TV screen, as 75% of UN member states have already done? (I seem to converse quite a bit with my TV set these days; I really should get out more.)

Let me also state clearly: when you are chased from everywhere, you need somewhere to go. Whether one agrees with the politics of Israel’s creation or not, it is one small Jewish state in a world that has some fifty Muslim-majority states and three times as many Christian-majority states.

And let me say one other thing: we know that Israel is the single biggest national recipient of US military aid. Whatever else were the reasons for Israel’s creation, and defensible motivations for either going there if not born there or for otherwise being attached to its existence (one British-born feminist academic living there characterised it as “one giant refugee camp”—guess how a number of her family died), the US in particular needs Israel as a spoiler in the Middle East. If you think Benjamin Netanyahu’s current manipulation of Jewishness and the Israeli people is cynical (and I do), check out the various manipulations, and indeed occupations, by world powers (most especially the Western ones) before and since World War II. Let us not forget, for example, the notorious Sykes-Picot agreement which led to swathes of the Middle East being divvied up between Britain and France after World War I.

And yet another thing (I rant, shaking my metaphorical finger at those who would contest the statement): Palestinians want peace, for sure, and the Israeli people want peace, for sure, but let us not kid ourselves that Hamas wants anything other than the annihilation of Israel and the departure of all Jews from its territory. As such, it will continue, with the financial and military support of a number of fundamentalist Middle Eastern regimes, and the “soft-power” political support of states such as Russia, to wage a war of attrition on Israel. Hamas wants the war as much as the Netanyahu-led Israeli state does.

Hamas was set up, we know, as the Palestinian incarnation of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the original version of its Covenant (1988) stated clearly that “Jews” are the enemy and cited a Hadith urging all Muslims to kill Jews. Elsewhere in the Covenant the Jews are “infidels”. Good Muslim women are to raise their sons to be fighters (presumably against the infidel Jews) and to train their daughters to become Hamas’s version of good Muslim mothers in turn. It watered down the Covenant in 2017, claiming its argument was not with “the Jews” but with Zionism, and removing references to good Muslim mothers, but the fundamental ideology has not changed.

Finally—and again, some may contest this but the evidence to support the claim is overwhelming—Jewish people have for centuries been the universal scapegoat in both the Christian and Muslim worlds (well, primarily the Christian one, until relatively recently at least): that is, those other two Abrahamic monotheistic cultures. More on that in my next post.

Then and now…

For months now I have had daily images of my now quite-long(ish)-ago experiences of Israel and the West Bank going through my head (I never visited Gaza): the separation fence and checkpoints with long queues and delays and searches, and the 45 minute trip it took a Palestinian olive farmer to get to a field that used to be a five minute walk away. And then an hours-long wait if the checkpoint was closed. The WIB conference happening under a marquee in East Jerusalem where just outside the wall, in the territory of the West Bank, Hamas and Israeli forces were periodically aiming missiles at each other. We could hear them, and often see them. So many other images of militarisation and abuse and petty oppressions. A Mizrahi man stopped and searched on a bus to the airport because he “looked Arab”. Me being searched and interrogated at an internal Israeli airport because I had immigration stamps from Muslim countries in my Australian passport. Machine-gun-armed guards everywhere.

This is daily life in Israel and Palestine and has been for a very long time. It is a violence reduced to banality. The level of tension at which Jerusalem lives, constantly, is ordinary, for Jerusalem. Yet it may surprise many readers when I say that it is one of the most multi-ethnic and multi-religious cities in the world. I do not infer a causal relationship between this diversity and the violence, quite the contrary. The violence undermines all that the diversity already is and could be in the future.

One of my earliest and most marked memories of these conversations about Palestine and Israel (and Lebanon, where I have sadly never been and am now unlikely to go in the foreseeable future) is the Sabra and Shatila massacre of 1982. I was living in Paris at the time: so much of my formative political history has been there. Then, I found myself arguing with Jewish friends whose direct and transmitted memories of the Shoah (the calamity caused by Nazism and the preferred term in France) and French collaboration remained open wounds. Not to mention ongoing antisemitism, with trials of Nazis and collaborators to continue for decades to come. Klaus Barbie, the “butcher of Lyon”, was finally extradited to France in 1983 after decades of being protected by the dictatorial Bolivian state, which he had helped put in place and to which the US had helped him escape to in thanks for his anticommunist efforts. With friends like these… Barbie was much in the French news at the time: his arrest and extradition process took three years after the fall of the Meza dictatorship in 1980.

Also much in the French news at the time was this: roughly a month before the Beirut massacre began, an Ashkenazi restaurant in the emblematic “Jewish” street of rue des Rosiers in the Marais district of central Paris had been bombed by a Palestinian terrorist organisation, killing six people and injuring another 22. (Sadly, rue des Rosiers has now lost many of its iconic Jewish businesses and has largely been taken over by upmarket clothing and accessory shops.) So when Sabra and Shatila happened, it was a hard conversation for everyone involved.

It had been a hard conversation since well before that, of course. But rue des Rosiers, and Sabra and Shatila, threw me explosively into it.

Anyway, dear readers, all this personal reminiscing and états d’âme (state of mind, mood, qualms) is by way of saying that, even if new to my blog, this is not a new conversation for me. It is not a since-October 2023 conversation either. But 7 October 2023 and all thepost-7 October warmongering, a bit like rue des Rosiers and Sabra/Shatila, have thrown it once again into sharp relief. And by sharp, I mean sharp. Its pointiness twists in my stomach whether I talk about it or not.

How can we talk about this? I still don’t know, I really don’t.