What drives the Palestinians to confront such overwhelming might? Is it insanity, evil, or is there a reason we all can identify with as humans who seek fairness and justice for ourselves?
To quote Haaretz (Biden’s Israel Visit Reveals Inconvenient Truths about Shift in U.S.-Israel Relationship):
“Israel is a rich country with supposedly a strong military, highly advanced technologies, the most modern fighting platforms, self-proclaimed state-of-the-art intelligence, superior cyberwarfare capabilities, precise munitions, a huge defence budget and a $3.8 billion annual U.S. military grant.”
And in the recent war of October 2023 between Israel and Hamas, the article notes that:
“An American president, a Zionist by his own admission, is coming to Israel,” and that this follows sending of “the Carrier Strike Force USS Gerald R. Ford, the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower aircraft carrier, a 2,000-strong U.S. Marines rapid response force, and airlifting munitions.”
How is it even conceivable that the Palestinians should go up against such a force? Why? How? What could possibly drive a people, who possess only guns and meagre, makeshift rockets, to confront such massive and sophisticated power as that of Israel, and behind it an even more massive power in the form of the United States?
We must opt for one of several conclusions:
Palestinians:
- are insane
- evil
- are in a righteous struggle for survival against oppression. They have no option but either to fight or be pushed out of their land, to be replaced.
If we opt for either of the first two, or perhaps a happy combination of both (evil and insane), then we must explain why it is that the Palestinians are so? What makes them that way? What makes them fight for no reason that would bring them gain and only destruction? It would seem they are fighting without an objective other than to… fight… because… they are evil and insane. Even the most obstinately illogical among us would struggle to convince themselves that this is why Palestinians fight Israel.
Given that Israel is on record as violating human rights, and of illegally occupying territory recognised by the United Nations and every country in the world as Palestinian territory, it seems the Palestinians are fighting not because they are mad and bad, but for a reason.
As to the tactics employed in the Palestinian struggle against Israeli occupation and oppression, this is a different matter and of course open to debate. We may disagree and indeed condemn some of the actions, in particular the attack by Hamas on October 7. However, this neither compromises nor detracts from the central issue, this being legitimate resistance to the decades-long violation of human rights by Israel, as well as Israel’s own by now well documented barbarity and war crimes against Palestinians. As UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has now clearly stated of the October 7 attacks, they “did not happen in a vacuum”. After unequivocally condemning the attacks by Hamas, Guterres acknowledges that
“It is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum.
The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.
They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing.”
To claim that the attacks happened unprovoked would require us to believe that Palestinians indeed fight for no reason other than they are mad or bad. This idea is absurd, so absurd in fact, that if the Secretary General of the United Nations had not stated that the attacks must be seen in the wider context of Israeli aggression, he himself would look quite absurd and without credit.
Therefore, as the former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has said, we should not be interested in extracting condemnations of Hamas’s actions as being atrocities, but in an investigation into the reason for why they occurred, and into why all the killing – now, and for the past 120 years – has occurred, and how it can be stopped. If that inquiry leads to a judgement of right and wrong, and of who is right or wrong, then that is another matter.
At this stage we should not be interested in that. We should only be concerned with understanding how those young men ended up doing something as depraved as killing other young people at a rave, instead of joining them in their celebrations. What marks them out as being so nefariously, specially, evil?
Jews were once, and still are by anti-Semites, vilified as being particularly evil above and beyond the norm for humanity. Their evil lay beyond that which can be explained in normal human terms, it lay within them, as part of their unique nature as Jews. That is anti-Semitism, in a rather ugly nutshell.
And so if we reject any human, socio-geo-political based explanation of how come these young men became so depraved and barbaric, then we must accept they are somehow particularly evil above and beyond the norm for humanity. If in plain sight of the overwhelming evidence we claim that there is nothing in their lives that could possibly drive them to such barbarity, then we must accept Palestinians as somehow genetically hard wired for evil. That it lies within them as part of their irredeemable nature. That is the only conclusion if we refuse to believe what our eyes and the evidence shows. Is anyone prepared to declare them as such?
If not, then we need to acknowledge what Mr Guterres has said and begin to ask questions.