The first regulation of any enquiry into the background of war in Gaza is: no taboos. How noted Peter Hitchens, all large-scale solutions (two states, 1 large democratic state) present seem impossible, and the only glimpse of hope is the renewal of regular cooperation and contacts between Jews and Palestinians. However, as Hitchens added with reasonable sarcasm, specified contacts were much more frequent before the beginning of the large diplomatic procedures for peace, and these treatments caused an increase in tension and violence. The solution is so as impossible as the inevitable.
First of all, we should not be afraid to ask questions that most of those who emphasize that Hamas should be distinguished from the Palestinian majority, brutally utilized by Hamas—and what if the majority of Palestinians, without actively supporting Hamas, harbors admiration for him as the only organization that had the courage not only to complain about Israel but besides openly attack him?
Second, during events known as Black September, 1970 Jordanian King Hussein In 11 days, he murdered more Palestinians, than Israel did in 20 years, and was helped by no 1 another than Pakistani General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, then inactive in the rank of Brigadier (later became dictator), who together with King Hussein massacred more than 20 1000 Palestinians.
The communicative of Muslims killing another Muslims is not over: what about the Iraqi invasion of Iran, what about hundreds of thousands of Muslims killed by Assad in the Syrian civilian War, what is the most fresh example, with the fact that between March 2022 and June 2023 the Saudi Border defender killed hundreds of Muslim migrants from Ethiopiatrying to cross the border of this oil-rich kingdom from Yemen? Where is this universally declared solidarity between Muslims? Why weren't there mass demonstrations about these murders?
It is as if the Muslim planet has exchanged multiple mass murders by Muslims on Muslims for 1 tiny execution or persecution, carried out on Palestinians by the Israeli state.
Is there any Muslim country functioning on the basis of democracy? And wouldn't a real triumph over Israel be that in 1 Muslim country, rebellion would not turn into new fundamentalist authoritarianism? erstwhile public protests in Algeria and Egypt (mostly organised by educated, secular youth) convinced the military elite remaining in power to let free elections, the silent majority of Muslim fundamentalists prevailed in them, while liberal-world protesters regretted re-election Take over by the military.
Thirdly, the anti-Semitic context of many of Israel’s people present is not overlooked. In a letter to defend Israel, referring to my critical remarks, a Catholic author from Slovenia statesthat Israel's main problem “is neither Hamas nor the “king of the north”, as the Scriptures call the next large aggressor to Israel (Russia, Iran, and Turkey), and its own persistent sin, his own departure from God, as Israel is most likely the most atheistic state in the planet today.” Good luck to those who have specified defenders! It is no wonder that many far-right people, in rule anti-Semites – specified as Marine le Pen in France – presently completely supports IsraelOh, my God!
It is besides hard not to announcement how critics of the left-wing consequence to the war in Gaza systematically simplify the position of those they attack, rejecting the clear and unequivocal condemnation of the Hamas attack, reading them as a rhetorical measurement aimed at justifying the consequence to the Israeli business – a position I powerfully do not share. This critical attitude is not simply the consequence of superficial interpretation: it is essential for critics to justify their own argument.
Speaking in this tone, text on left-wing reactions to Hamas attack Eva Illouz falls into the same trap – even though she tries to make her approach more nuanced. He accuses me of disposing of the horror of Hamas's actions by utilizing “successful intellectual strategies” – but am I doing so? As in many another cases in the last fewer weeks, its main charge is that I relativize the Hamas attack by planting it in a broader context, which it opposes:
"I refuse to look at the context of Palestinian pain resulting from the failure of their lands. To take full account of this tragedy, I must suspend this context. Could not the left stand with us, shaken and mourning, even for a moment, as many Arabs throughout the planet and in Israel have done?"
Calling yourself out of context shock and mourning seems to me to go easy. At the beginning of the book fair in Frankfurt, October 17, or 10 days after the Hamas attack, erstwhile Israel had been bombing Gaza for respective days and the number of casualties among the Palestinians exceeded the number of judaic casualties, I gave a speech that sparked a real storm – There was a war, shock and mourning, which gave way to (often problematic) consequences of political and armed decisions and actions, which meant that alongside the shock and mourning there was besides a request for disciplined political analysis of the situation.
I agree with Illouz that average people are “usually delicate to circumstantial experiences: in fact, both Palestinians and Israelis will insist that their suffering is unique and incomparable, or cannot be compared to the suffering of others. [... Jews with large attention follow the circumstantial details of the 7th October pogrom, the odor of burned bodies, the killing blindly, not saving children or the elderly, blood on the streets, floors and walls. The content remembered by each group makes it impossible to usage an easy language of comparisons."
Palestinians and people around the world, not only Muslims, are bombarded with images of demolition and death in Gaza, and their rage thickens and approaches a violent explosion. How could anyone stay indifferent to the fact that in Gaza children compose their names on their own bodies, to identify their corpses? At this level there is no solution, it is only possible to combine different traumatic experiences.
And then, why is this effect (Hamas murders, Gaza bombing) so terribly traumatic? In the 20th century, worse things have happened – just mention frightening experiments on thousands of Chinese prisoners by Shirō Ishi in his infamous Unit 731 in Manchuria during planet War II. (Shirō lived to be retired in peace, as the United States was so curious in the results of his experiments that they guaranteed him full immunity in exchange for handing over the documentation of his “research”).
The historical context besides explains the traumatic effect of the Hamas attack: Hamas' slaughter of innocent judaic civilians brings to head Shoah's memory, while the bombing of Gaza Palestinians feel as a repeat of Nakba. The same mention to the context explains the reaction to the bombing of Hamburg by Allied forces: it was an attack carried out in the last week of June 1943, so-called. Operation Gomorrah, the top fire strength that RAF and U.S. troops utilized in planet War II, estimated killing 37,000 residents of Hamburg (and wounding 180 000 others), destroying 60 percent of the buildings in that city. Survivors with peculiar bitterness referred to the fact that the Allies concentrated fire on the suburbs inhabited by workers, bypassing the luxury villas they utilized after the war during the business of the city.
Although this event besides full deserves to be taken from the context of shock and mourning, it did not origin specified events due to the context: the Allies were fighting the Nazis, or the eventual evil. It is not amazing that Illouz is moving rapidly from calling to standing alongside Israel, in shock and in mourning, to cold legal arguments:
"Side losses – frighteningly impersonal wording – are morally and legally different from combatants cutting off children's heads, due to how intended this action is and their direct responsibility. Denying this difference would mean denying the foundations of our legal system. Similarly, the category of “disgusting crime” refers to those crimes which human communities consider to be different from others due to their highly shameful nature. Quantitative counts of fatalities in themselves are never adequate to find how morally repugnant execution was due to the fact that crimes are not equal in motive, work and wickedness."
In conclusion, even if the IDF has so far killed more than 10 1000 Palestinians in Gaza, it is morally and legally little evil than Hamas killing a 1000 200 Jews. However, Illouz should be more careful: he mentions cutting off children's heads, a fact that had already demented the IDF itself a fewer weeks ago, embarrassing Joe Biden, who claimed to have seen pictures of children with their heads cut off). I'm certain if Hamas had more sophisticated weapons and airplanes, he'd most likely besides be inclined towards more impersonal bombing.
The key issue is, however, that the "side losses" themselves are a highly suspicious category: this "terriblely impersonal wording" makes the terrible suffering of thousands of children seen as unintended effects. The fact that the wording is impersonal, does not reduce the scale of the problem, is even more terrible due to the fact that it deprives the victim of the position of a person. The problem in Illouz's message that the difference between Hamas' attack and Israeli bombing must be traced Gaza is that 1 is simply a clearly intended act of violence, and the another is accompanied by unintended collateral damage.
First of all, how large “side losses” are acceptable (even if you – like me – full condemn the Hamas strategy of utilizing average Palestinians as shields)? "Many Palestinians died. besides many have suffered in the past fewer weeks" – He said Antony Blinken. Secondly, even if the civilian victims of Israeli shellings are not intended (civil population is not their main target), they are full predictable: it is known what will happen if the areas densely populated by civilians are bombarded.
The basic charge of Illouz is that I present both sides as mirror reflections, co-responsible for these events – Illouz ironically summarizes my position as “because it takes 2 to tango”. My answer is yes, but not Israel and Palestine are intertwined in this dance, but two fierce enemies seeking common annihilation – the current government of Israel and Hamas. They are not the same, but together they dance this tango – how?
If we let go of our imagination for a moment, we can effort to imagine a telephone conversation between Hamas and Israel’s hard-headed ones: “Hey, remember how we secretly supported you in the fight against PLO? Now you owe us a favor: attack and slaughter any Jews around Gaza, they're arabian lovers, peacemakers, we don't request them. We have 2 problems: demonstrations of civilians against us and the slowness of cultural cleansing in the West Bank. The planet will be shaken by your brutality, and we will play the sacrifice again, the nation will unite, the purges in the West Bank will catch on!’ “All right, but do us both a favor: by avenging for our slaughter, promise to bomb the civilian population in Gaza, killing thousands, especially children – this will increase anti-Semitism worldwide, and that is what we truly want!”
This obscene conversation is, of course, the product of imagination, although if it were true, you could actually realize everything that is happening in Gaza right now. Since, in principle, sacrifices can be struck, this war brings Israel an chance for ethnically cleansed large Israel.
Let us return to this contrasting of the gradual process of cultural cleansing in the West Bank of the abrupt brutal slaughter of Hamas: this is simply a large example of the difference between the first and 3rd worlds. In a developed “first” world, outside attacks mostly take the form of sudden, shocking violent events (11 September 2001 in fresh York City, planting explosives at a performance in Paris in November 2015 or Hamas attack). After the attack, normality recovers quickly, and people are haunted by traumatic memories.
In the “third” world, it is different: in general, terrible things are in the form of long, painful processes that take place over generations and become part of everyday life (as in Congo), causing despair in the people they touch, and receiving any possible of returning to average life. Is that not the case in the West Bank, where for months, if not for years, the Palestinian majority is exposed to various forms of violence, from bureaucratic harassment to simple killings?
It is so inappropriate to classify these 2 forms of suffering (the suffering of Jews killed in Gaza and the suffering of Palestinians in the West Bank) as a consequence of repugnant acts and acts not so bad. Long-term suffering extended to generations It can drive thousands of people into bottomless despair.
And yet the shock and mourning from the context plus the legal argument are not adequate – we request to tell a bigger communicative that will cover both. This communicative will not be a single communicative of colonization, nor a refusal by terrorists to admit the return of Jews to their lands. It will be an authentically tragic communicative about opposing claims, in which no 1 is just right.
The solution, therefore, lies not in the opposing moral assessments but in the sincere political action of creating a fresh social reality. Should Jews and Palestinians build a sense of solidarity based on the fact that they were (and are) victims of Western racism alternatively of trying to stamp out their historical traumas? Illouz is right erstwhile he notes that "it's easy to say: the 7 October massacres disgust me, and I want the Palestinians to have their own state" – yes, it's easy to say, but the hardest to do, since the task is inevitable and impossible. Standing behind 1 side is simply a full ethical and political disaster.
What about the rules of global law that both parties cite? Palestinian Ambassador to the UN Ibrahim Khraishi notedthat “there are plenty of rules of global law that can be relied upon. They are utilized full erstwhile it comes to Ukraine. erstwhile it comes to us [Palestines], they are put aside, broken, not applied, reduced.” In particular, he meant to say last year erstwhile European Commission president Ursula Von der Leyen said that Russian attacks on Ukrainian civilian infrastructure, including energy, were war crimes.
Khraishi is right: even erstwhile Western leaders criticize Israel, their criticism takes the form of “anxiety” or “moderate” appeals. In a tv interview given on 29 October 2023, National safety Advisor to the Biden government Jake Sullivan He saidThat the work for protecting the lives of innocent people in Gaza rests with Israel. Washington asked Israel hard questions, including humanitarian issues, distinguishing between terrorists and innocent civilians, besides asking how profoundly Israel had thought out his own military operation. Sullivan said: "We are convinced that all hour, all day of this military operation, the Israeli government and Israeli military forces should usage all possible means within their scope to separate between Hamas terrorists who are a legitimate military mark and civilians who do not constitute it."
Sullivan besides said that Netanjahu was liable for the “taking in the carbs” of extremist judaic settlers on the Israel-occupied West Bank: “The force by extremist settlers against innocent people in the West Bank is completely unacceptable.”
However, is this call to limit action sufficient? Of course, Israel has ignored them for decades and has no serious consequences. A further step is so needed: can he apply sanctions to Israel, which are regularly imposed on another nations accused of committing crimes? This would not be an action against Israel, a threat of sanctions would definitely be a manifestation of actual kindness, preventing Israel from following the way on which it would co-create a planet overtaken by planet anti-Semitism.
It's a real threat. On Sunday, October 29th, a raging mob in Russian Dagestan, mostly inhabited by Muslims, made Airport assault In Machachkale, in search of judaic passengers arriving from Israel. The locals were besides besieged by a hotel where judaic guests would halt and enter the airport, after reports of the arrival of the plane from Tel Aviv appeared. Passengers, fearing the attack, were forced to search refuge in aircraft and at the airport. Is this not a fresh wave of anti-Semitism that will flood the world, not just Europe and the mediate East? The threat involves the emergence of a fresh worldwide communicative in which the criticism of gay and trans rights will be linked to anti-Semitism, and both attitudes will begin to be seen as forms of combating Western neocolonialism.
Here is simply a fresh planet order, and the war in Gaza is like a knot, like a knot, in which the densities of antagonism, which is overgrown by our world, are concentrated; it is simply a place where everything will be revealed. Palestine is now a powerful symbol, a image of a peculiar universality, which contains opposing meanings: opposition to all colonial sins of Europeans (Jews colonized Palestine); and a place where anti-Semitism occurs. The tragedy is that the State of Israel, which arose as a consequence of a European sense of gigantic guilt for the Holocaust, as a desperate effort to supply a safe place for the Jews, appears as a symbol of European oppression and colonization. The first sin committed Western European states trying to make amends for the harm of the Holocaust by giving Jews a part of land for centuries inhabited by another people.
It is not surprising, therefore, that predictions about the result of the war in Gaza oscillate between 2 extremes. The majority see this war as the beginning of a global cataclysm: the hopes of peace are already in the past, and the only winner in the war going on will be war itself. However, there is besides a number that believes that the war in Gaza opens a fresh peaceful perspective: it will emphatically illustrate the failure of a completely armed solution, so both sides will be forced to prosecute uneasy peace in any form possible. In the current situation, Israel will gotta take the first step in this direction – by immediately stopping the regular terroristization of Palestinians in the West Bank, providing extended humanitarian assistance to civilians in Gaza and abandoning the pursuit of exclusivity in the West Bank.
These 2 visions of the future are more than 2 trends; these are the 2 “imposed” determinants of our future, which, as quoted by Jean-Pierre Dupuy, will seem inevitable if it happens. It is not that we have 2 options (catastrophe or reconstruction) – it would be besides easy. We have 2 imposed inevitable results. It is inevitable that the war in Gaza will end in a global disaster, due to the fact that our full past is going to do so, but it is besides inevitable that a solution will emerge. From the overlapping inevitable results one, and in each case our communicative will prove inevitable from a future point of view.
But 1 thing we can foretell right now. From a geopolitical perspective, Europe will be the biggest casualty of the war in Gaza – or rather, for the sake of precision, the European Union. Europe has missed the chance to talk separately, subjecting itself (with insignificant reservations) to the unconditional support given to Israel by the United States. If Trump wins the U.S. elections, Europe will well vanish from the global map of strong players – it will be reduced to the function of a insignificant partner on an isolated The West surrounded by more than just BRICS countries. The unconditional support for Israel without suffering in Gaza and the West Bank is disastrous: The West promotes human rights, etc., but how does it apply it itself? What are prejudices?
We live in a unusual time erstwhile reminding Israel of global law is considered a form of support for Hamas. Calling for global law will become even little effective as a consequence of the emergence of a fresh populist right in the United States – if Trump wins, The states will simply become 1 of the countries BRICS GroupsWhich, in the name of what they call a truly multi-centered world, will quietly tolerate each other's crimes.
Trump will end the war in Ukraine with concessions to Russia, and in the United States alone will go in the direction that Mike Johnson's choice as the fresh talker of the home of Representatives: spiritual fundamentalism in all its manifestations, which will be the end of democracy as we know it.
Although Trump claims to be a defender of the impoverished (white) working class, the perverseness of these declarations is that “the demolition of the working class was actually part of the full plan. The American mediate class accounted for over 60 percent of the population, present it is only 43 percent. So Republicans effort to drive people mad for their own ends and teardrop our society apart. They believe that from this chaos they will be able to rebuild a nation based on uber-maleness, racism, spiritual crucibility, misogyny, homophobia and Violence ThreatIt’s okay. ” In conclusion, the United States is fighting the same conflict as Israel, caught in the struggles between fresh populist fundamentalists and remnants of secular democracy.
Thus, erstwhile Illouz concludes his text with the message “For one more time in fresh past Jews feel very lonely”, I cannot aid adding 2 more. Yes, alone... and the large Western media and political forces are entirely on their side, all critical remarks being abandoned as anti-Semitism. And how do the Palestinians in the West Bank feel about themselves, which no country defends against the attacks and whose lands are constantly shrinking?
So, yes, after October 7 it is impossible to simply live, as if nothing – the same applies to Palestinians in the West Bank. How can they last grief erstwhile Israel forbids them even to usage the word NakbaWhat's the name of their trauma?
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From English she translated Catherine the Formers.
