London Calling: How does India look from afar? Looming world power or dysfunctional democracy? And what’s happening in Britain, and the West, that India needs to know about and perhaps learn from? This fortnightly column helps forge the connections so essential in our globalising world.
An immense tragedy is playing out in Israel and Gaza. It has devoured thousands of Israeli and Palestinian lives, mostly civilians; and it is likely to claim many thousands more.
We are staring at an unfolding catastrophe – and yet collectively we seem to be able to do nothing to stop it. That is a stain on us all.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
The sophisticated military operation that Hamas launched earlier this month – firing thousands of rockets out of its Gaza stronghold north into Israel and sending thousands of its fighters over and under Israel’s heavily armoured border fence – had the advantage of surprise. For the Hamas fighters, this was largely a suicide mission. Their cruel goal was to take as many Israelis as they could down with them.
They aimed at soft civilian targets, massacring scores of youngsters at a music festival and slaughtering families in kibbutz settlements, agrarian communes, within easy reach. If reports from the scene are to be believed – and I believe they are – the attackers on occasion tortured and sexually assaulted their victims. More than a hundred Israelis were taken back to Gaza as hostages.
This is depraved and despicable and was called out not only by a furious (and perhaps humiliated) Israeli government but also in Washington, London, Paris and Kyiv, by administrations which are allies of Israel and strong advocates of a rules-based international order.
Hamas, which is both Islamist and nationalist, seems to want to goad Israel into a brutal response. It turned to terror to provoke another kind of terror, blanket air attacks on Gaza and an Israeli ground invasion accompanied by a profound humanitarian tragedy. The strategic aims is to infuriate Arab opinion at the sight of Palestinians in agony so that the deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia, which the US has been brokering, is derailed.
Hamas may also believe that this initial conflagration will spark a wider regional war to achieve the armed movement’s stated goal: the eradication of the state of Israel.
There are fewer than 20 million Jews worldwide, of which about seven million live in Israel. They have, for centuries, faced poisonous antisemitism. Among the Israeli families struck in recent days are many which, two or three generations ago, suffered in the greatest infamy of the modern world: the Holocaust. About 6 million European Jews were slaughtered in the industrial-scale genocide pursued by Hitler’s Germany.
A couple of generations earlier, many of their forebears fled from the Russian Empire in the face of ferocious pogroms, officially-sanctioned rioting and attacks on Jews. In all, more than 2 million near destitute Jews fled west in the thirty years before 1914, many making for America.
Also read: ‘In Standing With Palestine, We Are Also Standing Up For Ourselves’
The killing of Israelis accompanied by the targeting of civilians including children, arouses the most terrible nightmares among so many Jewish households around the world. The state of Israel was set up in 1948 because Jews were so evidently not safe in a state in which they were a minority. The answer was to have a homeland of their own.
But of course an attempt to address one injustice created another. Palestinians regard the manner in which Israel was created as the ‘Nakba’, the cataclysm, because it involved the displacement of most Palestinian Arabs. The Palestinians are now the people who have been dispersed and have no real state of their own.
Gaza, while nominally under Palestinian control, is the epitome of Palestinian dispossession. In an area one-tenth the size of Goa, more than 2 million people live without any real economic base. They are hemmed in on all sides. Only a tiny number are allowed through the Israeli border to work. To the south, the Egyptians are even more restrictive about who can use the Rafah crossing.
In the West Bank, the Israeli government continues to occupy Palestinian land captured during a war half-a-century ago. And in defiance of international law, it is encouraging Israelis to settle there in fortified communities. For Palestinians, it feels like they are being squeezed again and again – their land isn’t safe, their homes aren’t safe, their children aren’t safe.
And Palestinians have not been well or wisely led. The Palestinian Authority which has some control over parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank is a byword for corruption and nepotism. In the pressure cooker of Gaza, Hamas has channelled the anger of local Palestinians towards the pursuit of violence and terror rather than improving lives and building diplomatic alliances.
Hamas is guaranteed the support of Iran and Syria however loathsome its acts. Israel knows that Washington will stand by it come what may. The United Nations, the one practical friend to the Palestinians through the decades, is able to do nothing but issue platitudes.
For hardliners on both sides, the profound suffering in their own community is seen as sufficient reason to inflict terrible suffering on the other. The moderate, consensus-minded voices – Israeli and Palestinian – are once again being drowned out by the din of war.
Three-quarters of a century after Israel was created, we seem to be in a loop tape of hatred, distrust, destruction and barbarity. Those of us who look on in horror have no useful way to help achieve peace.
Andrew Whitehead is an honorary professor at the University of Nottingham in the UK and a former BBC India Correspondent.
