Israel and Palestine: A Ceasefire Must Be Just The Start

Politics is often more about illusion than reality. Promises are plentiful and benevolent, actions less so. It’s best to judge people by what they do rather than what they say.

Look at Gaza. For all that might be said, it seems a majority of Israelis have completely lost sight of Palestinians as fellow humans. They have bought into the idea that citizens of Gaza, and of the West Bank, are no better than animals. That their lives as worthless. And so they treat them as a kind of less-than-human vermin, to be eradicated.

How else can we explain seventy five years of second-class citizenship, repression, brutality, of expulsions and land grabs, arbitrary arrests, mistreatment – and now wholesale, bloody slaughter?

The Israeli government say Ireland’s recognition of Palestine is a reward for terrorism.

Well, that’s a bit rich. Israel itself was brought into being through the terrorism of the Irgun and the Stern Gang.

The Irgun, for example, bombed the King David Hotel in 1946 and in April 1948 killed well over a hundred Palestinian Arab villagers, including women and children, in the Deir Yassin massacre.

In their day, these founding figures of Israeli independence were regarded by others, including the US and the UK, as terrorist thugs.

Just as they now regard Hamas.

There are many examples through history, and not just in Ireland, of terrorists and political criminals morphing into establishment political figures.

For some, it sticks in the craw – especially if the horrors of the violence far outweigh the scale of the injustice, as many feel strongly was the case with the IRA’s murderous campaign across Ireland and the UK.

The argument for non-violent resistance is strong and in many ways righteous.

But it’s also true that sometimes people are left with no option but to fight. Nelson Mandela is rightly revered. He was part of an organisation widely regarded as terrorist. But they were fighting against a viciously repressive apartheid regime that point blank refused to recgnise the rights of black South Africans. That level of dehumanisation and injustice had to be overthrown.

A MAJOR ATTACK

Here is a thought that has felt inescapable recently: the photos and videos of bloodied, starving Palestinians, expelled from their homes under threat of being identified as combatants and summarily murdered, are starkly reminiscent of the Warsaw ghetto in 1942 and 1943.

More than a quarter of a million Jews were deported from Warsaw to Treblinka and butchered in 1942. Those who remained in the ghetto began building bunkers and smuggling in weapons and explosives. They had been left with no option.

The uprising began in mid-April when the ghetto refused to surrender to the police commander Jürgen Stroop. In response, he ordered the destruction of the ghetto, block by block.

Some 13,000 Jews were killed, half of them burned alive or suffocated.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Burning buildings photographed from the intersection of Zamenhofa and Wołyńska

They knew it was futile but, one of the leaders of the Jewish Combat Organisation later said, they fought so as “not to allow the Germans alone to pick the time and place of our deaths.”

It is deeply ironic, and in many ways shocking, that eighty years later, the very powerful occupying force laying waste to everything in its path in Gaza, and driving exhausted and starving people from their homes, can be seen as a direct descendant of the Jewish Combat Organisation.

Over 1,100 people died in Hamas’ sickening October attack on Israel. The grotesque excesses of what the attackers did, including rape, were outrageous and appalling. War crimes were certainly committed and should be punished in a proper court of law.

Hamas fully expected reprisals. Presumably, that’s what the attack was about.

However, the Israeli government and military complex pride themselves on their technical knowledge, their weaponry and the effectiveness of their intelligence. That Hamas were able to launch such a major attack represented a catastrophic failure for the Israeli army, the intelligence service – and the Government.

One might have expected that Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu would have focused on dealing with this failure, but Netanyahu has other fish to fry.

A CEASEFIRE IS ESSENTIAL

In truth, Netanyahu has a vested interest in prolonging the murderous carnage. The Israeli Prime Minister has been on trial since May 2020 on charges of breach of trust, accepting bribes, and fraud. He has had to relinquish all ministry portfolios other than that of prime minister.

He could face 10 years in jail if found guilty. What better way to put it all on the long finger than prosecuting an all-out war, with no end in sight? In effect, Hamas handed him a Golden Ticket.

And so, as the campaign began Israel’s Minister for Defence, Yoav Gallant, declared that “there will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.” Netanyahu said that Gaza would be reduced to “a desert island.”

They promised to level the place, and this is what they have done, in the hope, and expectation, that Palestinians would die en masse or be forced to crawl somehow across the border into Egypt. But that door is closed: there is nowhere for them to go.

Israel has the military power – supplied by the United States of America – to destroy Gaza. But the powerless matter too.

In recognising Palestine as an independent State recently, Ireland, Spain and Norway are joining over 140 UN Members. It’s not new ground, even in the EU, where eight other countries have also done so, including Sweden.

It is, as Tánaiste Micheál Martin has said, the right thing to do.

But it’s also necessary to do it right, by upping the ante further, to force President Joe Biden to stop supplying the arms that are butchering people and destroying the entre civilian infrastructure in Gaza.

A ceasefire is essential to prevent further war crimes being committed by Israel; but also to end the land theft that is the current extremist regime’s core objective.

But it shouldn’t end there.

In his new publication What Does Israel Fear from Palestine? the Palestinian author Raja Shehadeh offers what he calls ‘one hopeful idea’. “What if this war should end, he asks, “with a comprehensive resolution to the century-old conflict?”

It is a prospect worth chasing.

A POST COLONIAL MESS

The Irish Government has long held the view that this means two States, based on the 1948 borders, and that all efforts should be directed towards this goal.

Given the Israeli government’s dismissal of all views but its own, its naked contempt for Palestinian people, its obduracy in pursuing a policy of obliterating Palestine and either absolutely subduing or expelling all Palestinians from the lands where they have lived for three and more millennia, it will take a great effort by many parties. As yet, there is little sign of that happening.

Byzantine issues arise from the multi-generational hatred – and in places extremism – that have built up on the Palestinian side; the inter-factional rivalry between Hamas and Fatah; and the influence of implacable fundamentalist external funders and influencers – in particular the extremist theocratic regime in Iran.

So, it’ll be a long hard road. But a solution must be found. After all, no war has gone on forever. And the world can’t countenance the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, can it?

The building blocks should include a unifying Mandela-style presence on the Palestinian side.

Marwan Barghouti could be the one, but he’s been imprisoned in Israel for the last 24 years, and treated very badly too. Israel holds thousands of Palestinian prisoners, mostly without charge. They have been storing up a powder keg.

But saving Barghouti’s life, freeing him from prison and helping him assemble an effective political coalition, might be a very good start towards a new dispensation.

Marwan Barghouti mural

Palestinians need protection from the IDF and from the far-right, supremacist Israeli settlers – and they need it now. Israeli cities and farms will also need protection from potential terrorist intrusions. So, there will have to be enforceable boundaries and peace-keeping.

There will also have to be a Marshall Plan-style programme of funding and reconstruction. Uber-rich nearby petro-states should be expected to pony up, as well as Israel, the United States, the UK and the EU. This is a post-colonial mess and should be approached as such.

In due course, war crimes on both sides must be addressed. Land stolen by Israeli settlers must be returned. There will have to be a truth and reconciliation process between Israel and Palestinians and also among Palestinians themselves.

It’s worth quoting the words of former Irgun terrorist, and later Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, when accepting the Nobel Peace Prize “for jointly having negotiated peace between Egypt and Israel in 1978.”

“War is avoidable,” he said, “peace is inevitable.”

Time to take that road. And let us all judge and be judged on what is done now, rather than what is said.