Coping with despair: Palestine, Lebanon and beyond

Oct 23, 2024
Global issues

Israel’s atrocities for which they are not held accountable, leaves a world feeling powerless to do more than watch and protest. Intervention to cope with a pandemic of despair, requires life enhancing responses to foster peace and revive respect for international humanitarian law.

In Gaza, on the West Bank, in Lebanon, Sudan, Ukraine and elsewhere, the world watches death, destruction and famine, those atrocities committed by governments which regard overwhelming violence as the only way to dominate, destroy and govern.

In response to end of time slaughters, people cry. They plead ‘where will this end?’ A nurse who has worked for decades in Palestinian refugee camps, writes, ‘I am feeling so sick. It is unlike me to be despairing. The arms manufacturers have made billions. People are starving in Gaza and Sudan. Palestinians are being burned alive in their tents. A cowardly Australian government refuses to condemn Israel.’

In common with the spread of a pandemic with no cure in sight, her despair is widespread but felt directly by citizens in Gaza, the West Bank, Israel and Lebanon who experience awful violence, death, loss and grief. In other countries too, even people who regard themselves as not usually interested in politics, express powerlessness at brutalities they find impossible to ignore.

There is no aspirin for despair, no prescriptions easily applied. Ideally, a UN peace force should be sent to end the Israeli sadism underway in northern Gaza, but until that proposal is implemented, other ways must be found to overcome the fatalism that nothing can be done.

The following is not a shopping list of steps to follow, but a chance to learn how others have survived punitive conditions but found space to inspire, in particular in totalitarian states where resistance prompts imprisonment and torture.

In Corrections Colony No. 4 in Gomel, Belarus, the brave dissident for democracy, classical flautist Maria Kalesnikova nears death in solitary confinement. The Belarusian dictatorship aims to erase memory of Maria and refuses to allow her father to visit. To support her father, to not lose sight of Maria, Amnesty International tries to connect. We must not give up. She cannot be lost.

Near death in an Egyptian jail, the courageous, writer blogger Alaa Abd El-Fatah, proclaims that words still pour out of him, ‘I still have a voice even if only a handful would listen.’ The inimitable Indian human rights advocate Arundhati Roy recalls that her jailed friend recommends ‘the political necessity of honestly looking despair in the eye.’

Daily life is peppered with lessons learned by coping with despair in response to loss and powerlessness. Grief occurs in response to the death of loved ones, Indigenous Australians cope with rejection inherent in defeat of the Voice referendum, frustration is experienced by asylum seekers because powerful people do not listen to grievances and seem unable or unwilling to craft solutions.

In response to a government which turns a blind eye to Israeli atrocities and aids and abets by sending arms to that country, frustration at failure to persuade Ministers to drastically change their policies has become a chronic condition, a persistent political pain. In nations’ capitals, politicians build castles of indifference and the rationality in advocacy of human rights and for UN resolutions falls on deaf ears.

It is tempting to think that lessons learned in coping with diverse experiences of despair have depended on psychological adaptation, but the context in which slaughter continues, raises questions about political structure not just individual psychology. Western leaders’ claims about a rule based order are the century’s rank hypocrisy.

In response to despair, listing steps towards empowerment can be helpful as long as there is no forgetting the context in which abusive power is fostered, where inhumanity grows.

Together the despairing can share social and political awareness, be curious, questioning, never taking for granted media repetition of official views. When news readers churn out their nightly repetition, ‘Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis identified as terrorist organisations by western governments’, ask about the decades old terrorism of the US and other human rights abusing states, Russia, Myanmar, Israel.

When filled with sadness, anger and distrust, there’s a principle in peace negotiations which says un clutter your mind, join with others in clearing desks before crafting the next appeal, letter or article. Global solidarity has spread as millions around the globe have marched to free Palestine, their non violent protests acting as safety valves for despair, though in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, military depravity continues.

Steps in empowerment benefit when questions about the sources of helplessness are reframed, so feelings of individual shortcomings can be replaced by refreshing thoughts and new alliances. But political leaders and a compliant media don’t dare to wipe the mould in their views. Although witnessing carnage overseas, leaders in the major Australian political parties have squabbled about stands taken by the Greens, have been distracted by noise over anti-Semitism and even trumpeted that protesters disturb peace.

Immediate reaction to despair, as in tears, anger, turning away, resolving never to read the news, can be paralysing hence the benefit of a strategy for the future. Given objectives of striving to achieve justice for Palestinians and thereby security for Israelis – who dares to say that – where do we want to be in a week, a month, a year or five years’ time? As with children learning to tread water before swimming for the shore, time scales remind what may be achieved in response to a challenge made specific by context and time.

We are in 21st century times about which Irish poet W.B.Yeats would have written again, ‘ …every where the ceremony of innocence is drowned, the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.’ Yet inspiration can be found from diverse sources, not least in friendship, hospitality, humour, great art, poetry and music. From dark places lies a need to find hope, solace, defiance and eventually triumph. Beethoven’s unforgettable 5th Symphony traces that journey.

In regard to the cancer of violence spreading from Gaza to Beirut, from the West Bank to northern Israel, and potentially from Tel Aviv to Tehran, a certain honesty about history clarifies routes to peace. To limit despair, to respect the Geneva conventions, to foster freedoms world wide, peace agendas must replace racism, discrimination and arms sales. In the case of South Africa, similar objectives were achieved.

For Israelis, Palestinians, Lebanese, and their supporters, if the world is to be safer, if despair is to be coped with, even eroded, Israeli apartheid has to be dismantled. What other conclusion might there be?

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