Decades of Conflict

Here are two contrasting views from The Independent on the latest conflict between Israel and Hamas, but after decades of conflict the most depressing thing is that the region is further than ever away from a lasting, peaceful solution. 

War is war: Why I stand with Israel
By Tom Doran - The Independent

There are serious concerns to be raised about Israel's policies, but when Hamas declares war, it must be able to defend itself

As a liberal Zionist, certain statements are expected from me at times like this, so let's get it out of the way:

1. The kidnap and murder of three Israeli teenagers was an abominable crime.

2. So was the kidnap and murder of a Palestinian teenager.

3. Palestinians have a right to a state of their own, secure in its own borders,

4. But so does Israel.

5. Hamas is a wholly malevolent organization who would be recognized as neo-Nazis if they happened to be white Christians.

6. The Israeli government, whatever my disagreements with it, is still a liberal democracy doing its best under highly adverse circumstances.

7. This doesn't mean that every innocent Palestinian killed isn't a tragedy, but...

8. War is war.

Are we done now? Can we not have this printed and bound in pamphlet form, to be distributed by the well-wrung hands of liberal writers each time events in the Holy Land take another apocalyptic turn? Because I'm a bit exhausted, to be honest. The kind of existential, moral exhaustion that might also be called despair.

This is how I feel, as a coddled third-hand observer a happy ocean or two away, so what Israelis and Palestinians feel must be beyond the power of words to describe. In 2017, Israel will have held the Palestinian territories for half a century, and the solution keeps on receding into the distance.

As my list above implies, I can't pretend to be entirely neutral: I stand with Israel, as the hashtag has it. Even if I didn't find the Zionist claim to a state in the historical Jewish homeland compelling, I'd still feel inclined towards Israel for reasons of solidarity.

What I mean by this was expressed beautifully by Howard Jacobson in 2009. So little has changed since then that, after I read it for the first time recently, I assumed it had been written this week. You should take the time to read the whole thing, but the nub is this: there is legitimate criticism of Israeli government policy, and then there is the international anti-Zionist movement, and the two bear scant relation to one another.

As Jacobson writes of the latter, it is "a discriminatory, over-and-above hatred, inexplicable in its hysteria and virulence whatever justification is adduced for it; an unreasoning, deranged and as far as I can see irreversible revulsion that is poisoning everything we are supposed to believe in here [...] But I am not allowed to ascribe any of this to anti-Semitism. It is, I am assured, 'criticism' of Israel, pure and simple."

A simple illustration: in the Hobbesian nightmare that is Bashar al-Assad's Syria, about 9,000 children have been killed since the civil war began in 2011. Nine thousand. That's the equivalent of a large British secondary school reduced to ashes every six months.

Forgive me if I'm merely being unobservant, but where is the international campaign against the Syrian regime? Is it hiding? Did campuses all over the world hold a “Syrian Genocide Week”, and I just wasn't paying attention?

I think not, somehow. This is not “criticism”, this is obsession.

A part of me is tempted to voice my very real concerns about where Israeli society is headed, but after a week or two of arguing with people who will do anything but recognize terrorist aggression has dissuaded me.

I still have those concerns, but somehow, I just can't bring myself to talk about them. Not while my Israeli comrades are rushing to their bomb shelters and being blamed for it at the same time.

I stand with Israel.

Why I'm on the brink of burning my Israeli passport

By Mira Bar Hillel - The Independent

I can no longer stand by while Israeli politicians like Ayelet Shaked condone the deaths of innocent Palestinian women and children

She is young. She is pretty. She is a university graduate and a computer engineer. She is also an Israeli Parliamentarian - and the reason why I am on the brink of burning my Israeli passport. Because behind that wide-eyed innocent face lurks the Angel of Death.

Ayelet Shaked represents the far-right Jewish Home party in the Knesset. This means she is well to the right of Benyamin Netanyahu, just in case you thought such a thing was not possible.

On Monday she quoted this on her Facebook page: “Behind every terrorist stand dozens of men and women, without whom he could not engage in terrorism. They are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads. Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.”

A week earlier, just before 17-year-old Mohammed Abu Khudair was snatched and burned alive, Shaked wrote: “This is not a war against terror, and not a war against extremists, and not even a war against the Palestinian Authority. The reality is that this is a war between two people. Who is the enemy? The Palestinian people. Why? Ask them, they started it.”

So even before the boy died horribly she declared him to be the enemy, and afterwards, without any apparent hint of guilt or remorse, she was calling for the deaths of innocent women and their unborn babies.

She made me think about my mother’s sister Klara and her three small children who were living in Krakow in 1939 when the Germans invaded. They decided that the Jews – all Jews – were the enemy and had to be eliminated, not least the women and the little snakes they were raising. “Why? Ask them – they started it”, as the Nazis would say if asked.

I never met Klara or her children who had perished by 1942. I did meet my uncle Romek, who survived by working in Oskar Schindler's factory, and his wife Yetti who survived because she spoke good German and was able to pretend she was a fine German woman who had kicked out her Polish Jewish husband, as she smiled prettily at every Nazi she came across.


My father’s brother Shmuel and his young family also perished before I was born, taken in Holland, to where they had escaped from Berlin, to the same camp Anne Frank died in.

I know what it is to have been helpless victims, living and dying under racist oppressors’ boots, and I know that today’s Israelis are no longer the victims but the perpetrators of the current crisis. Yes, Hamas are dreadful hate-filled killers and woe betide Israel had they had the wherewithal to carry out their intentions. But the fact remains that it is Israel which has the tanks, bombers, artillery, nuclear warheads and missile defences of Goliath, while ordinary Gazans had nothing a week ago and even less today, as even hospitals and schools were bombed.

Shaked got what she wanted: the death toll in Gaza is nearing 100, one in four being children. Hundreds more have serious injuries in a place where hospitals have also been bombed and medical essentials are running out.

In Israel, in spite of Hamas’s best efforts, not one death has been recorded, nor any serious injuries, although a wedding party was disrupted and got on the television news.

And, as the bombs rain on Gaza, Israeli teens have taken to tweeting scantily-clad selfies alongside their political sentiments. In two now deleted tweets, one wrote “Death to all of you Arabs you transfag”, while another proclaimed “Arabs may you be paralyzed & die with great suffering!” Another teen simply tweeted “Death to these f****** Arabs”, and attached a photo of themselves pouting alongside it.

Seeing these angelic faces of evil spouting such genocidal rhetoric, I pick up my Israeli passport and a box of matches. “Not in my name, people. Not in my name!”