Sunday morning I decided to wind myself up to impotent violence watching arch gammon and British TV pundit Piers Morgan goad Palestinian Ambassador to the UK, Husam Zumlot, with the question ‘Do you condemn the Hamas attack?’
In the next room, my partner was leading a women’s circle. They opened with a hymn to Mother Earth. It’s a simple song. It has great power. Listening to these women sing it suspended time. For a moment there was no genocide, no information war, no kaleidoscope of shattered lives. There was peace.
Earlier in the week, I reached out to an Israeli friend, and was glad to hear that she had decided to postpone emigrating to Israel to live with her girlfriend. Glad first and foremost as she is surely safer outside of Israel than in it.
Second — I did not said this to her — a decision to live in Israel risks siding with an occupying force whose excesses are plain to see. My friend is an EU citizen, living, like many Israeli expats, in Berlin.
A few days later, I sent her a link to an American Jew whose reel had appeared in my Facebook feed. Delivered with raw emotion, its appeal to common humanity felt much simpler than my previous essay. It calls out the invitation to Jews worldwide to live in Israel as immoral.
My friend replied with passionate words of her own, some of which I quote:
As all wars, this too is a war made by patriachy and men, their toxic, violent and greedy views. In the name of money and greed and religious fanaticism. And this is true for the fucking settlers and also true for stupid Hamas, whose heads are living in expensive hotels and leaving Palestinians to starve. So I am mourning all of these horrifying truths and avoiding going into these assumptions I know nothing about.
A-fucking-men.
Or is it?
Israeli ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotovely, told Sky News last week, “There is no humanitarian crisis [in Gaza].” When the interviewer reminds her that Sky has been showing images all morning of Israel’s siege on Gaza, the ambassador tries another tack. She asks the interview if she is a mother, before calling upon her to remember the Hamas attack and imagine her child was executed in front of her eyes, before dropping this little series of cluster bombs:
Would you expect your government to think about those Nazis committing those crimes and say, first of all we need to protect the enemy and then to protect my children…There is no humanitarian crisis. There is a war in Gaza, started by Hamas. Those people created a crime that is worse than ISIS. When the Americans started this fight of ISIS, together with the coalition forces, over 100,000 civilians got caught in the crossfire. Israel is trying to prevent that. Israel is better than any army in the world. We are alerting. We are giving them the opportunity to have a shelter.
Poking this poisonous offload with a long stick, we have that Hamas are Nazis. Everything was fine until they started a war via a crime “worse than ISIS.” And Israel is the most humanitarian state in the world—it notifies civilian targets before it strikes.
If Israel is the Jewish Homeland, then this from its ambassador, is a glimpse into the Jewish soul. It’s fucked up. It is a vampire squid bristling with poisonous barbs. It is watchful, monitoring discussion for terms it can misappropriate to justify its desperate actions.
Hotovely does not mention the church, where civilians were sheltering, destroyed by an Israeli strike. Nor the hospital, where doctors were operating by mobile phone light. The Israelis had cut off the electricity.
She demonstrates the dehumanisation of the Palestinians in her denial of a humanitarian crisis. She is unmoved, as a mother, by images of Palestinian infant casualties. She has crossed a line.
If we follow a deadly but valid logic, Hotovely is the official spokesperson of the Middle East’s only democracy. She represents the views of the people of Israel, who democratically elected her government into power. Those people too have crossed a line. A child is not a child. It is the enemy—the Nazis, the Palestinians.
I feel myself crossing that line. After decades of this calculated Israeli rhetoric, I find myself hardening to images of Israeli infant mortalities. This, from any humanitarian standpoint, is not okay.
From a war standpoint—a war that has no rules—it is inevitable. If the Israeli ambassador wants the world to side with her, she must expect a backlash. Dehumanisation runs both ways.
The asymmetry of the issue is undeniable. The massively greater casualties on the Palestinian side, the massively greater force of the Israeli side, and the fact that Israel is an illegal state (declared legal by that great arbiter of justice, the British Empire, in 1948). It has furthered its interests from that moment on by resort to terrorism and deceit.
This is a state whose expertise in terror and deceit is sought after by totalitarian states worldwide. Saudi, UAE, India, Hungary, USA, UK. Take a look at who gives it their undying support: Biden, Sunak, Starmer. Do you trust these men?
Take a look at Tzipi Hotovely, or Tzipi Livny before her, foreign minister in the government of Ariel Sharon, which oversaw the massacres of Sabra and Shatila.
I find it difficult to sympathise with the Israeli supporters who marched on London on Sunday to demand Hamas release the 130 Israeli hostages taken by Hamas.
I find it difficult to sympathise with the words of UK Chief Rabbi, Sir Ephraim Mirvis, who shared a platform with Tory MP Michael Gove:
It’s at a time such as this that we discover who our true friends are. It’s at a time such as this that words do matter and to all our friends from whom so far we haven’t heard a single word, your silence is deafening. Words do matter.
Sometimes we hear reference to both sides or the two sides but we ourselves know there are indeed two sides, one is good and the other is evil. Israel uses her forces in order to protect her citizens while Hamas uses its citizens to protect its forces.
Those who fail to condemn, condone. Those who refuse to call Hamas terrorists allow the legitimising of their brutal deeds.
I’m not sure what he means about “deafening silence.” Can he not hear the flapping of Israeli flags flying from government buildings? Did he miss the instant declarations of support from Biden, Sunak and von der Leyen? Or is he referring to someone else? British Muslims perhaps?
His words are inflammatory and othering. They should not be spoken by a man of God. But he hath spoken, and must be held accountable by his own words for his failure to condemn and thus condone the terrorism of Israel.
It is easier for me to sympathise with pro Palestinian protesters the day before, who called for Israel to release the 2 million hostages held in Gaza, and the thousands of political prisoners held by Israel. According to Wikipedia:
In April 2022, there were 4,450 Palestinian security prisoners in Israeli prisons – including 160 children, 32 women, and over 1000 "administrative detainees" (indefinitely incarcerated without charge).
The West seems to find it easier to relate to Israelis than Palestinians. To take a random image, here’s a pleasant-looking cafe in Tel Aviv.
The image of Palestinians is generally something like this:
9/11 and Charlie Hebdo onwards, the West doesn’t like women in headscarves and veils. They have too many babies. Left unchecked, they will overrun the West by out-reproducing. The atrocities of Al Qaeda, ISIS and Taliban are often (and rightly) denounced.
When the Americans pulled out of Afghanistan last year, tens of thousands of Afghans queued at airports to flee the country before it fell to the draconian Taliban. Boris Johnson, then British prime minister, arranged an evacuation of dogs.
British shops, pubs and hotels fly the Ukrainian flag. Ukrainians are white people. White Brits, licensed by brown-hating Indian migrant Suella Braverman, blockade lifeboats attempting to rescue brown migrants drowning in the Channel, and throw stones at hostels housing the ones who made it ashore.
Antisemitism, redefined to include criticism of Israel, is illegal in the UK and other EU states. The BDS movement, which seeks peaceful means to end to Israel’s occupation of Palestine, is illegal in the UK. The Labour and Conservative Parties forbid members to attend pro Palestinian protests.
Israel lobbyists celebrate the cancellation of Jeremy Corbyn, who was once the leader of the Labour Party. His successor, Keir Starmer, whose wife is Jewish, told LBC Radio that Israel had a right to mount the siege on Gaza.
According to Wikipedia, there are nearly 4 million muslims, and nearly 300,000 Jews living in the UK.
According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics:
There are about 14.3 million Palestinians in the world in mid-2022, of whom about 5.35 million in the State of Palestine.
According to Wikipedia, there are about 7 million Jews living in Israel, and about 16 million in the world, including Israel. Followers of Islam number nearly 2 billion globally.
Can we derive any ethical justification from these numbers? Are Palestinians, part of a population of 2 billion, worth less than the rarer Jews? Like a Bengal tiger is worth more than a common mouse?
Does the Jewish Holocaust license the Jewish Homeland to defend itself at all costs, with the “undying support” of the US, UK and EU?
Does Israeli apartheid, occupation of Palestinian land and siege of Gaza justify the murder of Israeli children by Hamas?
Or is “justify” the wrong word?
The numbers provide a neutral context removed from history or any recourse to religious texts. They reveal Jewish exceptionalism. A Jewish life is worth more than a Muslim one.
Israel flouts international law, humanitarian convention and UN resolution, without reprimand, decade upon decade. Are they above the law?
Western defence of Israel has long been a thorn in the side of humanity. Swelling around it, an infection darkens the global corpus. There is no international law, Geneva convention or Oslo Accord. There is no peace process.
Thus we are faced with the toxicity of the world, a gangrene, a cancer, an ebola. Good can only come not by excising or disguising this poison but by swallowing it.
Here we may recall the Vedic myth of Shiva swallowing the kalakuta poison, a side product of the creation of the world. Leaping to his aid, his wife Parvathi, seizes his throat to prevent him fully ingesting it.
As the rotting fabric of the world falls away, perhaps this myth holds a clue to our redemption. There are many images of Shiva saving the world. I am unable to find one of Parvathi saving him.
Ancient Mother, I hear your call.
Absolutely brilliant; I hope this reaches a larger audience (I found you in the comments section over at Charles Eisenstein's substack). I think I agree with every sentiment and judgement you here express, and so beautifully....
The Jewish people have been collectively manipulated by very dark forces through their collective trauma and victim consciousness, coalescing into the race-supremacist techno-militaristic state of Israel. While I do not believe that most of them realize that they have contracted with evil and are being so used, I too have also found myself crossing that same line of which you here speak, hardening to images of Israeli suffering and death… And you are exactly right: from a humanitarian standpoint, this is not OK, which is why I am committed to alchemizing the shadow emotions that come up for me as I witness a “poor, forgotten and alone”* people be genocided while the world watches live in technicolor. But my god are those feelings hard to fully feel and hold and alchemize! It feels to me like it is through capture of our attention and energy we are all being recruited into a dark ritual of watching and acquiescing to the complete obliteration of Western morality.
But you are right: from a “war standpoint”, and what is probably also more broadly a political standpoint, it is absolutely inevitable, and it is also absolutely true that from this standpoint, no truth can be spoken without acknowledging the asymmetry, which so few have the moral courage to do right now.
*to borrow Chris Hedges’s words
Brilliant as ever xxx