This week, Gideon Levy interviewed by Phillip Adams on the ABC’s Late Night Live and Gershon Baskin in the Times of Israel, reminded us why the Israel Palestine conflict is so intractable.
Baskin described the stubbornness of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, his authority within Hamas and his steadfastness to refuse negotiated compromises.
Levy told us that despite the overwhelming majority of Israelis despising the allegedly corrupt Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (avoiding charges and the courts as long as he is Prime Minister), the Hamas October 7 outrage has driven the population into the Government’s arms.
There are some demonstrations but no big ones calling for the end of the war.
In Gaza, we don’t hear any voices criticising Hamas for bringing the wrath of Israel crashing around them.
It is very much an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object. Neither side will give in. Neither will surrender. But far worse, neither will compromise.
Hamas and the supporters of Palestine – including so-called “left-wing” organisations – are honestly calling for an end to the State of Israel. They are virulently anti-Zionist and don’t see the spillover to anti-Semitism. They vilify all Zionists, ignoring the reality that many Zionists – including Israel’s assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and his Foreign Minister (later Prime Minister and President) Shimon Peres – wanted a two-state compromise in a land-for-peace agreement in 1993.
They also ignore the reality that 9 million Israelis simply are not going to go away. And of the 9 million, 7 million are Jews and most were born in in Israel and are second generation or more. To where do they go back? Poland? Russia? Ukraine? Latvia? Belgium? France? Morocco? Iraq? Iran? Syria? Egypt?
The end of Israel and Zionism is not a real goal. And to deny the Jewish people a homeland – a safe homeland from the next pogrom or Holocaust – is in itself, anti-Semitic. If every other nation is allowed to have their own land, why not Jews?
And the “safe homeland for the Jews from the next pogrom or Holocaust” is part of the Catch-22 in this conundrum.
We have not just been the victims of an actual genocide by the Nazis, we have been persecuted for not scores of years like the Palestinians, not hundreds of years like Australia’s Indigenous peoples (and the indigenous peoples of the Americas) but literally thousands of years.
The persecution complex is deeply ingrained in every single strand of DNA of every Jew.
In the current Gaza conflict, it manifests as: “Look what they did to us on October 7. They hate us and want to kill us. We have every right to retaliate and eradicate Hamas.”
And that is true.
But when the death toll in Gaza reached beyond the 1,200 raped and slaughtered by Hamas on that terrible day, someone should have given pause to think: “Hang on, how many ‘collateral damages’ are we allowed?”
The world would not have cared if Israel “accidentally” killed 1,200 Gazans while “taking-out” thousands of Hamas fighters. It probably would not have cared about 2,000 or even 3,000 dead civilians to 10,000 dead Hamas fighters. But 10,000 dead civilians were far too many and the current estimate of about 20,000 is far, far too many. So many, that friends like the USA and Australia are making noises.
But that’s where the persecution complex kicks in, again.
“We are fighting for our lives. And even our so-called ‘friends’ hate us. What do you expect?”
Not all Israelis support the illegal occupation of the West Bank and immoral siege of Gaza, but successive government policies have continued the policies. That the occupation is the root cause of Palestinian discontent, anger and rebellion is ignored by the right and has dumfounded the left. As far back as 1987 this writer warned then Defence Minister Yitzhak Rabin that the harsh Israeli measures against the Palestinians was causing even the middle-class to be agitated and rebellious. The response was meant to be placatory: “The measures are the harshest in five years and the number of incidents is the lowest in five years.”
Fifty-six days later the first Intifada erupted.
Another point that Gideon Levy made to Phillip Adams, was that most Israelis – and I believe it to be nearly all Israelis – don’t actually know any Palestinians, at all.
Just like most Australians don’t know any Aboriginal people, personally. You might have seen Adam Goodes, Cathy Freeman, Lidia Thorpe or Linda Burney on your television, but how many have shared a meal with Aboriginal people and how often? The same can be said for Native Americans and Japan’s Ainu.
Many Israelis claim to have a Palestinian friend, but more often than not that ‘friend’ is the gardener or a waiter at a restaurant.
So, another intractable component of the conflict is that neither side views the other as human beings any more, if they ever did.
They did in 1993, before Hamas and Likud literally blew-up the Oslo Accords – supported by 75 percent of both sides. But not today. Palestinians are “terrorists” and Israelis are “Zionists”. End of discussion.
But I have some news for my Israeli friends and family. The Palestinians are not going away, either. Also, you might not have noticed, but they are not just other human beings – they are our closest relatives. The DNA matching is evidence of Jews claim to come from the Middle East. In any case, just 70,000 years ago we were all Africans.
As Rolling Stone Keith Richards said so pithily in 1988: “What’s the point of fighting about little portions of the earth… little ants in fratricide and homicide and national boundaries when we’re probably polluting ourselves out of the whole game anyway. That’s a far greater danger… the weather’s changing.”
As for the answer to the Israel-Palestine conflict, not in my lifetime.
David Langsam
David Langsam reported on Israel-Palestine conflict 1985-’97 for Fairfax media, BBC World Service, ABC Radio, The Guardian, New Statesman and The Independent.
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