The Gaza conflict is destroying one of our dearest beliefs: the delusion that good must come from suffering. The hope that pain is not in vain is so widespread it must be wired into us.
Centre-left commentators like me have been guilty of promoting false hope after the October 7 massacres. We accepted that Israel had a right to defend itself and that Hamas was an Islamo-fascist movement that had to be destroyed. But surely, we kidded ourselves, the Israeli far right would go down with it.
I am just back from my first visit to Auschwitz and it is a sobering thought that the greatest massacre of Jewish people since the fall of Nazism was committed on the watch of Benjamin Netanyahu’s right and far-right government. Not some alliance of bleeding-heart liberals, if one could even begin to imagine such a government coming to power in Israel. But of men who beat their chests and boasted of their patriotism. Their policy of tolerating Hamas as a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority and its dreams of a Palestinian state had been a palpable disaster. Surely the Israeli public would turn on them?
This wasn’t just how centre-left commentators felt. The Labour Party now in power in the UK, the Biden-Harris administration in Washington and most European governments believed the same. Good would come from the horror as work began on a two-state solution.
JC readers can probably see the flaw in our reasoning. Israelis were appalled by the failure of the Netanyahu administration to protect them. Their anger did not make them more willing to accept a Palestinian state. On the contrary, the experience of terror was unlikely to make Israelis want to give power away. There never was a connection between despising Netanyahu and wanting a compromise.
In any case, as Netanyahu well knew, the longer the war dragged on the more likely it was that citizens would rally round the flag. And so it has proved. As a despairing report in the leftist Haaretz noted this week: “Netanyahu is enjoying an unbelievable, if not unbearable, recovery in the polls, despite Israel’s dire diplomatic and security situation.”
He may have presided over an unforgivable breakdown in national security and effectively abandoned dozens of hostages, but the threats from Iran and Hezbollah and the hatred of the global left have, predictably, allowed Netanyahu to recover.
Speaking of the global left, the failure to bring hope out of suffering is as evident in its inability to offer any strategy to Palestinians beyond a war to the death.
You may have noticed that in all the vast amount of commentary and journalism on Gaza, it is vanishingly rare to read that Hamas brought a catastrophe down on the Palestinians or hear any demand that it be removed from power.
Either Palestinians are infantilised and denied agency – everything that happens in Gaza is simply the fault of Israelis – or the Hamas/Hezbollah/Iranian strategy of war to the death is quietly endorsed.
Leaving all consideration of morality to one side, what hope does this strategy offer?
Palestinians have tried the violent overthrow of the Israeli state since 1948, and every attempt has ended up putting them in a worse place. In theory, one can imagine a combination of global sanctions and armed violence bringing Israel to its knees. But it is a hell of a risk, particularly when the Israeli state is only this week showing its ability to launch pre-emptive strikes across southern Lebanon to thwart rocket attacks by Hezbollah.
Despite all I said, I still feel the sentimental need to end this by offering you grounds for hope. It’s a huge effort to shake off that desire. To take the most extreme case, no one attacked the false consolations of what he called “the slave morality” of Judaism and Christianity more thoroughly than Friedrich Nietzsche.
Yet he is remembered for the chirpy aphorism that “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger”. Try telling that to a woman who was raped by Hamas at the Nova music festival, or a father who lost his home and legs in an Israeli air strike on Gaza. Indeed, it did not help poor Nietzsche, who went mad and spent the last ten years in an asylum as he suffered from the effects of tertiary syphilis. It didn’t kill him (or not at first), but didn’t make him stronger either.
The nearest I have come to covering a war was a massacre in the Scottish town of Dunblane. In 1996, a monstrous man called Thomas Hamilton walked into a school and killed 16 children and their teacher for no reason at all.
At the memorial service, the minister used these bleak lines from what he would have called the Old Testament to describe the senselessness of the murders: “A sound is heard in Ramah/the sound of bitter crying and weeping/Rachel weeps for her children/she weeps and will not be comforted/Because they are no more.”
No prospect of hope there, just as in Gaza and Israel today we only have the grim appreciation of death without meaning.
