Butchery and raw terror in Israel have remade the face of the Middle East

One of the tragedies of the Israel/Palestine conflict is that up to this horrific weekend, it could have defined the term compassion fatigue. A friend who togs out regularly in a T-shirt with the year 1948 writ large above a depiction of an old-world doorkey often has to explain what it means.

News items showing rage, grief and howling sirens from Gaza or the West Bank are wearyingly familiar. But these few days have remade the face of the Middle East. The sudden vulnerability and raw terror of Israelis under mass attack on their own territory is new. It wasn’t just the rarity of the attack itself within Israel, it was the close-up, person-to-person nature of the butchery that set it apart. Men glided across the border from Gaza and looked several hundred human beings in the eye while shooting them dead and filming the obscenities, abuse and kidnappings.

Six members of one family are missing, including a four-year-old child and a nine-month-old baby. Asked if Israeli military should hold off its ground assault of Gaza for fear of killing his family, an unblinking male relative told Channel 4 the army should not wait – “they should act right now”, he said grimly, knowing that Israelis would certainly die.

Ask about the root of the problem and the answers rarely vary, the weight of history reflected in mirror images of each others’ brutal experiences. While 1948 for Israelis represents the miraculous establishment of a Jewish state in the wake of the Holocaust – following a UN vote to partition Palestine – for Palestinian Arabs, it represents the Nakba, “the catastrophe”. Dispossession, expulsion, expropriation of property, the destruction of their society. One state’s triumph begot another state’s catastrophe.

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The new Jewish state’s first act of parliament was the Law of Return, under which every Jew has a right to immigrate to Israel and become a citizen. To provide a safe refuge for Jews remains the state’s raison d’etre. The weekend’s atrocities broke that founding tenet.

The yearning for a permanent refuge from centuries of racism, pogroms and genocide isn’t hard to understand.

Nor is the anger of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs who fled brutal attacks and massacres from the incomers. They locked up their homes and kept the key close, from generation to generation, for the day they would return. That’s 75 years ago.

At the weekend, as all eyes fell on Gaza, a stunned world was again reminded that more than two million Palestinians are trapped in what David Cameron once described as a “giant, open prison”. On a sliver of land smaller than Co Louth, where the Nakba remains in living memory, families with lives punctuated by violence, aggression and daily humiliations deliver new generations of extremist militants.

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But far from ratcheting down the dangerously elevated tensions in the West Bank this year over illegal government-funded land grabs by Jewish settlers, prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu indulged his repellent cabinet of settler activists, ultra-right nationalists and religious parties who have openly advocated for the mass expulsion of Arabs from the country. As a former Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, put it to Channel 4 this week, Netanyahu “took into his cabinet as partners, chauvinistic, messianic, brutal terrorists” and put them in charge of national security.

Israel has its own reflective voices and warnings. The Occupied Territories Bill, for example, was supported by former Israeli ambassadors, former members of the Israeli parliament and decorated scientists in a letter to this paper in May 2020. Last spring, the general commanding the Israeli military in the West Bank described a Jewish settlers’ revenge attack on a village as a “pogrom” – a term more usually applied to attacks on Jews in the Russian Empire a century ago. A prominent right-wing Israeli commentator, appalled by the army’s reported inaction as a young man lay dying, called the events “Kristallnacht in Huwara”.

But the closer we get to the ground in the Palestinian refugee camps in Gaza and the West Bank – run by two separate authorities – the more hopeless it seems. There is no credible political leadership. Even if Netanyahu were to undergo a miraculous, selfless conversion to peace-making, who would he talk to?

Hamas, who last won elections in Gaza 17 years ago and declared Islamic rule, is the same bunch of killers who targeted a music festival. It rejects Israel’s right to exist as a state and vows to drive all Jews from the region. Its mission is the creation of a Palestinian state based on Islamic fundamentalism stretching from the Mediterranean east to the Jordan river. And it is funded and trained, terrifyingly, by the rogue state of Iran.

Those who refuse to condemn its heinous actions presumably believe the terrorist group is acting in the interests of the Palestinian people or at least acting as representatives of the people’s anger and frustration. But how can a fascist, murderous organisation represent anyone but itself and other fascists?

Some compare the latest attacks to America’s 9/11 atrocities and it feels just as awful as that.

The only certainty is that as long as the conflict remains mired in raw hatred and violence, new generations of the despairing and disaffected will grow up to replace the prisoners and the fallen martyrs. What else has the world to offer them?