The spectre of genocide
In the two weeks since the 7th October Hamas raid in southern Israel, the government of Israel has launched a bombing campaign against Gaza (supposedly against Hamas, but targeting civilian buildings including hospitals and claiming they are Hamas rocket launching sites or in some other way linked to Hamas), killing more than 4,600 people as I write (allegedly 1,000 people were killed in the Hamas raid) in a territory where about half the population are children. While it is not the first time the term ‘genocide’ has been used about Israeli treatment of Palestinians, this time it has been accompanied by the use of actual genocidal language by Israeli politicians and commentators, one of whom (who boasts he is a human rights lawyer) posted a picture of a boot labelled ‘IDF’ (Israeli ‘Defence’ Forces) stepping on an insect with a green headband and blood dripping from its mouth, accompanied by the word ‘This!’. Politicians have been lining up to demonstrate their loyalty to Israel, even as the death toll in Gaza mounts and even as stories filter out of abuses towards Palestinians in the West Bank and repression against those in Israel; they mouth platitudes about the need for all parties to adhere to international law, but also emphasise that Israel’s attacks on plainly civilian targets are part of their “self-defence” and rebuff demands for a ceasefire.
In the week or so after the initial attack, I was seeing social media posts about “standing with Israel” all over the place and reports of buildings being lit up with or flying the Israeli flag, including 10 Downing Street, the health and social care department here (especially inappropriate given Israel’s attacks on hospitals and blockading of Gaza without exception for medical supplies) and similar buildings around the world. There were demands for Wembley stadium in London to do the same, a demand they resisted and rightly so. Do people not realise how inappropriate this was and how offensive to anyone who had been on the receiving end of Israeli violence, of which there are many in London? Had people gone insane? We were seeing people queue up to declare their solidarity with an oppressive regime as if the prior several decades of Israeli oppression had not occurred, like the events of 7th October just came out of nowhere. We can express empathy with people who have lost family or whose family have been taken hostage without lining ourselves up with their oppressive government, surely. It’s also that much easier to empathise with victims of a major crime or their families when we know that there are not going to be violent and probably lethal consequences for many innocent people, and this was my first thought when I heard reports that a large number of Israelis had been killed in the raid.
When this latest upsurge of violence started, I was sceptical as to whether Israel would actually carry out a genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. I have heard this term used before now, often by people who do not really know what genocide is but are looking for a stronger term than oppression, because the latter is used too often to refer to things that are merely unfair or annoying. Genocide is the elimination of a population, in whole or in part, by murder. When you have eliminated a population you cannot do it again, and if Israel did this, they would no longer have a security threat, which would be bad news for their arms industry, their security industry (the one which sells spyware to dictators around the world) and so on. However, the likelihood of it increases the further we get from the Holocaust and the fewer Jewish Israelis are still alive who remember the Holocaust, the survivors of which attempted to migrate en masse to Palestine in the immediate years following; the weakening of the judiciary by Netanyahu’s government also removes a check on his power. We should also remember Netanyahu’s claims back in 2015 that Hitler had not intended to eradicate the Jews by murder but to expel them, but was dissuaded by the mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Hussaini, who told him to burn them instead. (In fact, the Holocaust was already underway by the time Hitler met al-Hussaini.) This links in with other revisionist claims about Hitler’s intention to deport the Jews being frustrated by seaways dominated by other powers, ‘forcing’ him to resort to mass murder instead. Ken Livingstone, the former mayor of London now stricken by Alzheimer’s disease, was rightly pilloried for repeating this nonsense a few years ago; coming from Netanyahu, it now rather sounds like a statement of intent.
Israel’s supporters seem incapable of empathising with Palestinians at all. Not only Israelis, but their supporters overseas also. I read the most ludicrous article on Unherd, by a professor at Austin University called Jacob Howland, which consists of a long discourse on Evil with a capital E, replete with examples of cruelty from the Nazi death camps. Palestinian supporters cannot comprehend Evil with a capital E, he informs us. He repeats the claims about what Hamas terrorists did on 7th October, including the lurid tales of rape and baby decapitation which were never confirmed, but were believed by western politicians and commentators because they accorded with their prejudices; nobody, he said, had done these things to Jews since the Holocaust (although they had been done to others). These things were useless violence, which served no purpose other than inflicting pain. Evil with a capital E. Hamas’s supporters, he says, “cite ‘facts’ that are supposed to justify the terrorists’ vile deeds, including the seizure of Palestinian land in the 1948 War of Independence, when the Jews of the new nation of Israel fought the armies of five invading Arab nations”. But this wasn’t the reason; anyone living in the Palestinian territories will have been living with an oppressive occupation for some 50 years: aerial bombardment in the case of Gaza, settler violence, harassment by soldiers, water theft, unfair trials and arbitrary detention and so on. The Jews murdered in the Holocaust were innocent, the victims of Hitler’s irrational obsession and the cruelty of his underlings; they had never oppressed anyone. This cannot be said about almost any adult Jewish Israeli.
When people are subjected to brutality for prolonged periods, they sometimes do behave in ways that would seem outrageous to any rational person. I was in a boarding school as a teenager, and there was one boy who was abused by boys and staff for mostly petty reasons for most of his time there — he was fat, he smoked, he talked slow, he didn’t have the support of his family, he was perceived as ‘gross’ and ‘disgusting’. Towards the end of his time there, when he was 16 or 17, he took to drink and was a nightmare to live with, getting up in the night and attacking his dorm-mates. He formed an irrational grudge against a female teacher who joined in our final year for reasons I never fully found out, and one Sunday afternoon after she had left the school, he took the school bus to Felixstowe, got drunk, then took the empty bottles to that teacher’s house and attacked her with them. She wasn’t badly hurt. He was expelled, albeit only a few weeks before he would have left anyway. Now, the teacher was a nice lady and was never (unlike many of her colleagues) violent or abusive to him (or to anyone else that I know of) personally, but she was part of the school and whatever she had done was what pushed him over the edge. Likewise, the victims of the Hamas raid may well have been nice people, may not have hated Palestinians, may have been tourists or foreign workers, or migrated as retirees too late in life to serve in the army, but (assuming the Israeli army’s version is truthful) their attackers saw them as part of what had been oppressing them for so many years.
In scoffing at the demands for proportionality in the Israeli response to the Hamas attack, Howland cites Douglas Murray who suggests that this would mean killing as many young people as were killed at the music festival, killing as many babies and raping as many women. Once again we see unsubstantiated claims repeated as fact because they confirm prejudice, but a ‘proportionate’ response in this case never means the repetition of crimes, least of all against children who must by definition be innocent, and against women for rape, which they could not possibly have committed. We punish rapists (well, when we punish anyone for rape, but that’s another discussion), not their sisters and not random women from the same town. In any case, our appeal isn’t to Netanyahu but to politicians in our own countries, in the so-called civilised world, who have been egging on Israel to respond to the attack with vastly disproportionate violence, including the destruction of whole swathes of Gaza and its surrounding areas and the massacre of civilians from the air. They made it very clear from the outset that Israel had a free hand to respond as it wanted, even as Israeli politicians were using the language of genocide and openly threatening collective punishment. The cravenness and cowardice of Labour’s politicians in going along with this has been particularly upsetting and disappointing. In the UK, we faced a terrorist threat for 25 years as a result of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and we did not resort to bombing whole Catholic communities in Northern Ireland or massacring Irish Catholics by the thousand. There is no excuse for that in Gaza either.
In the rush to stand with Israel as they commit war crimes and potentially genocide in plain sight, people have forgotten to be sceptical about the Israeli story about the events of 7th October. Besides the lurid unsubstantiated stories that are being repeated as if that makes them true (and as if Joe Biden believing them makes them true), the type of attack involving a massacre of some 1,400 Israeli civilians is not typical of Hamas’s modus operandi; they have used rockets and suicide bombings, but not (at least recently) deliberate massacres of large numbers of known civilians. To kill a large number of people in an open space takes a lot of ammunition; unless you line people up and shoot them one by one, killing a hundred people by gunfire takes more than 100 rounds. Hamas is considerably less well-armed than Israel; Israel has arms factories and can obtain weaponry openly from major powers across open seas, while Hamas’s allies are many miles away across hostile territory, and getting their arms to Gaza relies on clandestine routes through Egypt, which is not their ally. Some survivors report that Israeli forces fired indiscriminately at both Hamas personnel and Israelis who were in danger of being taken hostage; it has in the past been Israeli policy to prevent their soldiers from being taken hostage by any means necessary, including the loss of the hostage’s life.
There is no doubt that Hamas mounted the raid; the likely reason was to take hostages to secure the release of Palestinian prisoners, perhaps including Hamas personnel but also perhaps including some of the many children being held in Israeli prisons. Israel’s supporters wail “bring our hostages home!” at rallies, like the one in London today, while Netanyahu’s air force bombs the territory where the 200 or so hostages are being held. Their supporters talk of the terrible conditions they are being held in, yet these conditions are the result of Israel’s own siege and everyone in Gaza is suffering them. Given the total disregard the state of Israel clearly has for its own citizens’ lives (while hypocritically accusing Hamas of the same attitude towards its own people), it is not unreasonable to suspect that Israeli forces exacerbated the death toll from the 7th October attacks and the government then exaggerated it, and by the time the truth is exposed, thousands more innocent Palestinians not only in Gaza, but also in the West Bank, Jerusalem and Israel itself (and Israeli hostages in Gaza) will have been killed so that Netanyahu can prove himself a war leader while burying the evidence of his corruption, while ‘upstanding’ people, liberals and conservatives with the utmost regard for the rule of law, mouth platitudes about keeping to international law while resolutely defending Israel’s right to “self-defence” against its own oppressed subjects.
