Nakba, as all the world now knows, means catastrophe in Palestinian Arabic, and that is surely one word for it. Gaza is an abyss of moral and political degradation from which recovery seems unlikely. Whereas, for most people, the war in Ukraine has been all confusion, the images of depravity from al-Shifra or Yhan Kounis need only a human heart to understand. If you are not appalled by what is happening, if you are not shaken to your core, there is something wrong with your humanity: so said the Reverend Dr. Munther Isaac in his sermon, on December 23, in the Lutheran church in Bethlehem. But people in the West, at least those “in power,” have not been shaken to their core and have long since lost all humanity. The U.S. veto of a Security Council resolution calling for a ceasefire will be historic and defining. Words like “liberal” and “internationalist” have lost all meaning. The notion of the West as sources for “rules” and “order” is now ludicrous. As the Reverend Dr. Munther said, The hypocrisy of the Western world is transparent and appalling…To our European friends, I never ever want to hear you lecture us on human rights or international law again. We are not white. It does not apply to us according to your own logic. As an addendum to the Reverend Dr.’s remarks, it is perhaps worth noting that 90% of the world is, like the Palestinians, some colour other than white.
The scope of this war is world-wide and civilizational, but its exact definition is more difficult.
Most simply, of course, Israel’s war against Gaza is a massacre, A general slaughter (of human beings; also occ., of wild animals), or, as a verb, To kill indiscriminately (a number of human beings, also occ., animals.) The number of human beings as I write is more than twenty thousand, of whom most are women and children; Gaza is now the largest children’s cemetery in the world. Details of this ghastly kind can be endlessly multiplied. The United Nations Secretary-General, in remarks to the Security Council on December 8, 2023, noted that 60% of Gaza’s housing had been destroyed or damaged and 85% of the population displaced. Attacks have struck over 300 schools, 26 hospitals, 56 clinics, as well as churches and mosques. Hundreds of people have been killed in UN refugee shelters and 130 UN aid workers have been killed. And these numbers will have only increased since his letter was written. All this, together with the numerous war crimes of the Israeli military—bulldozing hospitals with patients lying in their cots; desecrating Muslim cemeteries and mosques; humiliating Palestinian civilians: the evidence frequently being videos they’ve made of themselves—has caused people to describe what is going on as “genocide.” I sympathize; for such extreme acts one wants the most extreme word. And surely genocidal describes Israeli intent, that is, to kill as many Palestinians as they possibly can, and the language they use to describe Palestinians (animals, cockroaches, sons of dogs, vermin, cancer etc.) is typical of the language used by genocidal actors. But genocide comes into the English language in 1944 to describe Germany’s eradication of European Jewry, and though I accept that it can be used by extension, I would prefer to keep the word close to that particular historical reference. Besides, it would have to be qualified as an attempt at genocide, for there is a large Palestinian diaspora at least for now out of reach of Israeli bombers. As an alternative to genocide, I think “ethnic cleansing”—a disgusting expression for a loathsome reality—is more accurate. Various attempts have been made to define it, this one being supplied by Ilan Pappe, a remarkable and courageous Israeli historian:
“…ethnic cleansing is an effort to render an ethnically mixed country homogeneous by expelling a particular group of people and turning them into refugees while demolishing the homes they were driven out from. There may well be a master plan, but most of the troops engaged in ethnic cleansing do not need direct orders: they know beforehand what is expected of them. Massacres accompany the operations…they are a key tactic to accelerate the flight of the population earmarked for expulsion.”
For those who have been touched by the heroism of the early Zionists it is hard to accept that “ethnic cleansing” was an established part of Zionist strategy from the early ‘30s at least, but the facts are incontrovertible. This was a straightforward response to “facts on the ground,” literally. In 1947, as the British Mandate in Palestine came to an end, Zionists had less than 7% of Palestine’s land while partition gave 55% of the country to them; worse, only a fraction of the land held by Jews was cultivable, raising the question, in the Zionist review, Can we afford as a people to hold less than 60 percent of the soil? The answer was no. “As early as March 1946 Haganah had told the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry: ‘If you accept the Zionist solution but are unable or unwilling to enforce it, please do not interfere, and we ourselves will secure its implementation.’” This ‘implementation,’ worked out secretly by Ben-Gurion and senior military, intelligence and political associates, was called Plan Dalet (D):
“These operations can be carried out in the following manner: either by destroying villages (by setting fire to them, by blowing them up, and by planting mines in their rubble) and especially those population centres that are difficult to control permanently; or by mounting combing and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the villages, conducting a search inside them. In case of resistance, the armed forces must be wiped out and the population expelled outside the borders of the state.”
This same operation is being conducted today, albeit with the addition of air power. The troops, indeed, know what they are doing. ‘Sparing the civilian population’ is an absurdity, for that is their target. Destroying homes (“by setting fire to them, blowing them up…”) is precisely the point today: driven out of them, Palestinians will not be allowed to return, and indeed Israeli construction companies are already vying for contracts to build new Jewish settlements where they stood. The savagery of the Israeli operation, as in 1948, is inherent to its purpose; and since it’s being live-streamed to the world, I won’t trouble to ‘prove’ it. Apparently it has no limit: three men, half-naked to show they are unarmed; carrying a white flag, to show they are not offering resistance; shouting in Hebrew to show they are not ‘the enemy’—and they are shot dead anyway; the IDF has its orders, kill on sight.
What to make of this? What has happened? Why?
Obligatorily, one begins with October 7. No one doubts the horror of the events of that day; and yet, however horrible, they neither excuse what Israel has done nor, finally, explain it. Even setting aside the whole question of “right” (the “right” of Israel to self-defence, the “right” of the Palestinians to resist) there is no doubt that Hamas was acting against a violent, oppressive military power. Gaza is a concentration camp; the IDF are the guards. Hamas attacked them. Of course. Were there atrocities? I assume so. But I have read enough military history to be very, very slow to pass judgment, and reports coming out of Israel do not incline me to quicken my pace. It is plain that the Israeli military killed many of their own people with the same indiscriminate violence they are now using in Gaza, and the leaked reports of testimony from released hostages indicate they feared death at the hands of the IDF as much as their captors. In any case, to consider what happened on 7 October requires one to consider the entire history of Israeli-Palestinian relations, tit-for-tat, slaughter-for-slaughter, going back to 1948 and indeed beyond: an almost infinite regression, morally and politically, in search of the prime mover. And at least the prime initiator can be found on October 5, when Israel settlers, protected by the police, rampaged through the al-Aqsa Mosque. “We have repeatedly warned the enemy not to touch al-Aqsa, which is our qibla, our identity, our belief, and the trigger of our revolutions.” So said Ismail Haniyeh, a senior Hamas leader—formerly head of the government in Gaza—in 2021. Well, it was the trigger again. Hamas didn’t call its operation the Al-Aqsa Flood for no reason. Since Ben-Gvir, leader of the settlers, is the minister of National Security in the Israeli cabinet, the man in charge of the police—he is often labelled a fascist—I think it’s permissible to wonder if this wasn’t a deliberate provocation, as in agent provocateur. The events of October 7 were horrible, but for some in Israel, in the government, the military, and civil society they have been seized upon as an opportunity. What was started in 1948 can now be finished. Political problems have again been defined as military; and again the solution is war.
War, “ethnic cleansing,” unrestrained violence—these are choices and events that raise the whole question of the nature of the Israeli regime.
Michael Levy is a former Israeli negotiator with the Palestinians, both under Ehud Barak and Yitzhak Rabin (Oslo-B). In an interview with a British journalist he makes a number of important points, including: People have been so preoccupied with not saying nasty words to describe the reality over there that they’ve failed to actually acknowledge, actually factor into policy making, the realities of what’s happening there. We have treated as normal a government which wears eradicationist ethno-supremacy and ethnic cleansing as a badge of pride. And it’s almost like, can we not talk about that? That makes for really bad policy…
In fact, the reality he’s talking about—the political formation, centred on Likud, which has ruled Israel for more than a quarter century—is violent, right-wing, ultra-nationalist, and racist. These are no doubt “nasty” words but then it must be remembered (I am being exculpatory) that Israel emerged from some rather “nasty” history.
In large part—ideologically, and in terms of its principal actors—this is the history of the “revisionist” Zionism that opposed the “practical” Zionism of Chaim Weizmann.
“Revisionist” Zionism was always defined by violence. Jabotinski, its founder, was born in Odessa as Vladimir: the Hebrew name he took, Ze’ev, means wolf. Ukraine was (is) one of the most antisemitic places in the world. His solution was armed self-defence: “Every Jewish boy should learn to shoot!” He founded Betar, an armed paramilitary group, some of whose members trained with Mussolini’s black-shirts. Menachem Begin rose through its ranks and he founded Irgun, a Zionist “terrorist” group, most famous for blowing up the King David Hotel in 1946. He ultimately broke with Jabotinski because Jabotinski wasn’t violent enough.
The “revisionist” tradition was always right-wing. Jabotinski’s politics were defined in opposition to the Bund and the Labour Zionists (which included people like Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir). Jabotinski died in 1940. Begin, who displaced his followers as leader of this faction, would establish Herut (“Freedom”) as Israel’s conservative, right-wing party in opposition to Labour; and it was Herut that was the core of the coalition, Likud, when it was formed in 1973 by Begin and Ariel Sharon.
“Revisonist” Zionism, by definition, has always been ultra-nationalist. It’s definition of Israel, territorially, has always been maximalist. During the 1920s, Britain formed the Emirate of Jordan, predecessor to today’s Kingdom of Jordan. “Practical” Zionism accepted that Israel would have to be based on the territory of the remaining Palestinian Mandate. Here was a fundamental reason for the “revisionist” break. In Israel’s first election in 1949, Begin’s party, Herut, had a clear slogan: “Both sides of the Jordan River!” In their 1977 election manifesto, Likud proclaimed: “Between the sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty!” That slogan is in effect today. “Eretz Israel”—Greater Israel—the Land of Israel—has always been fundamental to this formation’s practices and goals.
I now come to racism, the “nastiest” word of all.
Levy supplies “eradicationist ethno-supremacy,” which is not a euphemism but a precision. Israel, an apartheid society—so called by the South Africans, and they ought to know—is by its nature racist: thus Jews, by definition, are ethno-supreme. Netanyahu’s father, in his abundant journalism, called the Arabs “savages”: naturally to be eradicated. His “mentor” was a 19th century racial theorist, Joseph Klausner: happy to call the Aryans a “civilizing” race, as long as the Semites were as well. Sources of Israeli racism, similar to these, can be multiplied endlessly, but the most important is the origins of these people. Though Likud is now marked by its strength in the Mizrahi communities (for example, Ben-Gvir’s parents were Iraqi and Kurdish Jews) its founders were East European, largely from Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltic states: Netanyahu’s family was Polish. These places were (are) intensely antisemitic. People in these societies were defined by their ethnicity and were subject to intense racial hatred. That men and women who grew up in this environment absorbed such tendencies is hardly surprizing.
Now, what I am saying here is not as controversial as might be thought. Ben-Gvir, for example is frequently called a ‘fascist’. But though I understand what people are getting at, the word is not precise. Racism, politicized, can take many forms. A crucial defining line is whether or not the racism has, as it were, an eschatological wrapping. For example, in the case of Verwoerd’s National Party in South Africa—the original apartheid party—this was never the case, except at the very fringes. Boer supremacy to blacks was certainly justified in terms of the Bible, but the Boers didn’t see themselves as charged with a divine mission. This was an important reason why, in the end, they were able to give way; their decision was made in terms of the here-and-now. But if the racism is part of some divine mission—if it’s not only only a question of one “race” oppressing another, but involves the oppressing race seeing itself in terms of an extra-historical reality—then defeat becomes much harder to accept; one has failed God, or ‘the gods.’ The Nazis are an obvious example. So, unfortunately, is Likud. Its mission is the fulfillment of divine promises about ‘Eretz Israel,’ that is, the realities of the present are defined in relation to a mythological past and the ‘divine vision’ of a ‘promised’ (by God) future. Of course there are differences between Likud and the Nazis, as there were between the Nazis and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, indeed all the others—ultra-nationalist groups of this kind are bound to differ simply because they are national. But that does not obscure the fundamental similarity; all these groups are of the same type. But the difficulty goes beyond Likud, because historical Zionism shares the same ‘mission,’ is driven in the same way. The difference is one of degree. Ben-Gurion, for example, often claimed that ‘the land’ had been promised to the Jews by God. For Ben-Gurion, the ‘Israel’ of Resolution 181 was only a beginning, and the ‘vision’ of Israel to be ultimately achieved was strictly the business of the Jewish people. Of course, national myths, founding myths, are part of the national ideology of many nations; there’s Arthur and Merlin, Roland, El Cid. But the identification between ‘Eretz Israel,’ Israel’s national purpose, and the lives of individual Israelis, goes beyond this, or at least it can. Personal identity and national identity are fused, becoming fundamental to social cohesion. It can be said the Likud’s greatest accomplishment has been to make this definition of Zionism hegemonic in Israel today. To make peace with the Palestinians—to divide the land with them; even to allow them to live on it—violates Israel’s duty to God.
But there is another dimension along which the regime must be defined, which flows, at least in its expression, from this ideology. For what do these beliefs, and their consequences, tell us about the people who hold them? The beliefs themselves are extreme: they are associated with the most extreme episodes and historical tendencies in modern history: but that does not deter the leaders and membership of Likud. They use language of a kind that allows them to be called genocidal; as Daniel Levy said, they wear this “as a badge of honour.” It is a language which expresses feeling but in a way that denies what is ordinarily considered reality. Racism is not in accord with scientific fact; in point of fact, other people are not animals or insects or the sons of dogs: to reject reality in this way leads to the idea of dropping nuclear weapons, that is, obliterating reality altogether. Moreover, the framing and justification for the action of these people is fantastical, hallucinatory. ‘Eretz Israel’ is no more history than astrology is astronomy. Netanyahu sees the conflict in terms of the Book of Samuel, “‘Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass’.” Which is indeed what the Israelis are doing in Gaza: these words are now being used to define reality. “There are moments in which a nation faces two possibilities: to do or die. We now face that test and I have no doubt how it will end: We will be the victors. We will do and we will be the victors.” This is part of a common theme, invoking the Holocaust, attempting to summon the most extreme, fearful feelings in his audience; but they are also sincere, truly felt. And of course they are utterly divorced from reality. Hamas can certainly kill people, but it poses no threat to Israel, at least not militarily; it is a moderately sized, lightly armed militia. But to these people, the threat is global, universal, civilizational, eternal. “We have to win. We have to win for the sake of the civilized world. That’s the battle we’re fighting and it’s being waged right now. If we don’t win, then Europe is next and you’re next.”
For most of the history of the English language—the first citations are in the seventeenth century—the phenomenon represented here is called mania: “Mental derangement characterized by excitement, hallucinations, and, in its acute stage, by great violence.” People affected by mania are maniacs. In ordinary discourse that would be a correct description of Netanyahu, the Israeli cabinet, and most members of the Israeli polity; they are maniacs. There is, of course, nothing novel in this statement: using more up-to-date language, Netanyahu has frequently been called a psychopath, as have various of his colleagues. But psychopath is, or was, a psychiatric term, and I would prefer psychotic, as used in psychoanalysis. Psychosis, and psychotic defences, occupied Freud for most of his working life, but at the core of his understanding was the perception that psychosis involves a break or breach between the ego and reality, that is, the denial or disavowal by the ego of ‘the reality principle.’ Through this breach, the famous ‘forces of the id’ rush up; these are primitive feelings, little differentiated and without modulation; not fear, but panic; not anger, but blind rage. Almost at once, but as a secondary operation, the ego begins constructing a new version of reality to accord with these feelings; these are the delusions, often organized into quite elaborate ‘delusional structures.’ The role of the superego can vary. In neurosis—people whose egos accept the reality principle—the superego contains norms, strictures, often fiercely applied; these are the demands upon the ego to give up ‘instinctual claims.’ In psychosis this can, as it were, work the other way; the demands of the superego require harnessing the forces of id in the interests of the superego’s ‘values’ and ‘vision,’ and failure means the super-ego’s wrath is turned on the self. I suggest, insist, that Netanyahu’s choice of the Book of Samuel (1:15) as his ‘text’ was not accidental. The story of Saul and the Amalekites enters the ‘history’ of the Jews as they were moving from priestly rule to kingship. Samuel, made the high priest after Eli, was badgered by the people for a king. At first the Lord resisted, but finally selected Saul. Saul was the first king of Israel, and it was Saul whom the Lord ordered to slay the Amalekites and all they owned. He defeated them, “But Saul and the army spared Agag and the best of the sheep and cattle, the fat calves and lambs—everything that was good. These they were unwilling to destroy completely, but everything that was despised and weak they totally destroyed.” The Lord was furious, his word had not been obeyed, and after Agag had been put to death, Saul lost his kingship. After a short interregnum, the crown passed to David. This is how Netanyahu sees himself. Israel is fighting its second ‘war of independence’—achieving statehood—and he must obey the will and the word of the Lord.
I have made these points in relation to Netanyahu; but there is no doubt that they apply much more widely. They are plainly broadly shared, and expressed in Israeli society, especially political circles. No one can know the individual histories of these men and women, the personalities who make up the Israeli polity; but psychosis best describes the psychological position they occupy. It accounts for the violence of Israeli language, accords with the entirely unmodulated destructiveness of their acts. The fundamental operations of this are clear. The break with reality is created by an all-pervasive racism. The delusional structure lies ready to hand in ‘Eretz Israel’ and conscience thunders in the voices of prophets, the fierce imperative kill.
The larger political consequence of this aspect of the Israeli regime is obvious—this is the rationalization for its barbaric behavior—but I want to note several others that might be overlooked.
Psychotics cannot be reasoned with and they cannot be believed. Having broken with reality, they have no responsibility to it. No negotiation, no ‘advising,’ no ‘consultation,’ will have any effect on them; and they are all pathological liars. Here, you often find the ‘charm’ that is frequently ascribed to psychopaths. For the psychotic believes, in effect, that ‘normal’ people are crazy, and so humors them; which is what Netanyahu and Gallant have been doing to the Americans trooping through Tel Aviv, ‘advising’ them to ‘tone things down.’
Psychotics cannot stop. Psychotic individuals, in a psychotic episode, ultimately exhaust themselves—they collapse—but unless they are stopped by some outside intervention they will keep going until that point. The dynamic is always to go further, to keep fuelling the fire. Any pause, however brief, provides a moment when the reality principle, as it were, can rear its normal, ugly head. Thus the current dynamic is the expansion of the war, and the greatest fear the regime now has is a ceasefire. It is noteworthy that the only certainly sane people in Israel, the families of the hostages, demand the war stop NOW. But the current regime will go to any lengths to prevent this.
The intentions and goals of psychotics, like the rest of their behaviour, are not formed in relation to the reality principle but in terms of the delusional structure they have erected. Other than that, they are ad hoc, provisional, often contradictory. In the case of the Israeli regime, their goals—the logic of the delusions they are immersed in—lead to war, and nuclear war, with Iran. Iran is Amelek. They worship Gods foreign to Yahweh. It is Iran that Yahweh demands to be smitten. This is the ultimate goal of current Israeli policy.
The difficulty with making the kind of analysis I have just offered is that it disturbs people deeply. People are determined to sustain the illusion that they are ‘perfectly rational’—that psychological forces, however much they affect other people, certainly don’t touch them—and so they are desperate to extend the assumption of rationality to everyone. It’s people who question that assumption who are crazy. “Come on! They can’t mean that! You got to be crazy!” Well, no. This reaction can be fatal. It was nearly so once in the twentieth century. Netanyahu, and the others, don’t just say the words they utter, they mean them, just as Hitler meant every word in Mein Kampf. And the proof is the horror of Gaza, day after day.
***
Supporters of the Israeli regime would object to what I have written on a number of grounds. I think it is important to meet three of them.
To characterize the regime as I have ignores much of the thought, feeling and the heroic, determined action that brought Israel into being; and that, most definitely, should not be ignored. The current regime may have taken control of Israeli history, but that history is larger than they are. It is certainly possible to argue that “Zionism is racism,” especially Zionism as the state ideology of today’s Israel, but Zionism was also an entirely honorable attempt by an extraordinary body of men and women to respond to terrible realities. These realities culminated in the Holocaust but began long before. The situation of European Jews, especially in Eastern Europe, was an existence defined by oppression and hatred, a social, economic, and cultural life restricted and confined by the most vulpine antisemitism. Even in Western Europe—the Europe of Freud—that hatred of Jews finally made life impossible. Freud left Vienna to stay alive. That Europe’s Jews, after their near-extinction, should have chosen to live somewhere else is scarcely to be wondered at. Palestine was an obvious choice.
A second objection, always predictable, is “it’s more complex than this!” Of course it is. It always is. One can always elaborate, adumbrate, qualify. But those elaborations do not deny the fundamental realities I have outlined, indeed would reinforce them. The most important of these is racism. Israeli society is, as the young people have it, systemically racist, not only in regard to the Palestinians, but within itself, in the distinctions between Sephardic, Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, etc., and all the shadings of Orthodoxy; not to mention those made on the basis of Israel’s babel of languages. The extraordinary political situation in Israel before Gaza—which the war may well have been designed to defuse—was an expression of Israel’s declining social cohesion. The terrible truth is this: killing Palestinians may be all that Israelis can agree upon.
The last objection has, perhaps, the most immediate political relevance. The current regime is, in many respects, a minority regime; and this may prove to be significant. Likud, Netanyahu’s party, the central party of his coalition, is only supported by about a quarter of Israeli voters, and the “fascist bloc” won the last election by only thirty thousand votes. Of course, “fascists” almost never win elections—neither the Nazis, or the OUN ever did. The government’s position before Gaza was tenuous; it is easy to argue that the war saved Netanyahu personally. The difficulty is that Likud’s ideology, as I have argued, is hegemonic. Outside of the left parties (Hadesh, Labor—even there with qualifications) no party in the Knesset supports a two-state solution. The plain fact is: the vast majority of Israelis do not want to see a Palestinian state in any form.
I now turn to the other side of the equation; the Israeli regime, defined as I have defined it, is only one party in this war. What about Hamas? We know something about it, but not very much. I have read a number of books about them but probably won’t read any more—they keep going over the same ground. But certain points are clear.
First, Hamas is not ideological; it is not socialist or Islamist, follows no “ism.” It is a Front de Liberation National, pure and simple. Its only goal is Palestinian liberation, in the form of a Palestinian state. The nature of that state is only to be considered later. It began as a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, but its break from the Brotherhood was not simply tactical. Of necessity, it wanted to appeal to as many Palestinians as possible.
Secondly, it is rooted in the Palestinian people, especially the refugees (and their descendants) in the camps. Earlier generations of Palestinian leadership were drawn from the diaspora, often the urban bourgeoisie. Arafat is a good example. He was born in Cairo, and his entire upbringing was in Egypt. His father was a textile merchant whose life was devoted to litigation in the Egyptian courts around an inheritance. By contrast, the leaders of Hamas were born in the camps, or to people born in the camps, and many have continued to live there. Their central positions in regard to any ultimate arrangement with Israel would be built around democracy (nothing can be done without the approval of the Palestinian people) and the “right of return”—the right of the refugees to return to their lost homes.
Thirdly, Hamas has no interest in government, in Gaza or anywhere else. Hamas was elected as the government of Gaza in January 2006—probably no election in history has been more closely supervised or “observed.” Its victory was a shock to the West. Bush, Blair and Condoleezza Rice immediately organized a civil war to overthrow the Hamas government. This failed. With Gaza blockaded and under siege, Hamas set about governing the place and did remarkably well; but their efforts, of necessity, were totally devoted (in effect) to administering a ghetto for the occupying oppressor. What we are seeing today is the revolt of the Sonderkommando. Hamas came to understand, I believe correctly, that they were living “the two-state” solution in the only form Israel would tolerate; a Bantustan ultimately controlled by the Israeli army. Hamas has been determined to return to the fundamental issue of Palestinian sovereignty.
The fourth point I would make is the most difficult to understand, for it transcends Gaza and indeed Israel. Though Hamas is fighting in Gaza, and for Palestinian sovereignty, it is fighting for Islam itself. I do not mean that it is “Islamist”; this is not about the political nature of Palestine, or indeed any state in the Middle East, but about the very civilization. This derives from two considerations. The Middle East as we know it today is the creation of western imperialism. That imperialism stole and plundered, it crushed societies and destroyed cultures, it exploited populations without mercy. All the countries in the Middle East are seeking to free themselves from that experience. Palestine is the last of them. In its own history, therefore, it expresses the whole history of the Muslim world, becomes a kind of summing up. But even more important than this is the extraordinary position of Palestine, and Jerusalem, within Islam. Before Mecca, Muhammed, peace be unto him, and his followers turned to Jerusalem to pray. In his “Night Journey,” Muhammed, peace be unto him, arrived first at Al-Aqsa to join Abraham, Moses and Jesus in prayer, and then rose to Heaven where he spoke with God. Al-Aqsa is at the very centre of Islam, and is the centre of Palestinian identity. It is equally holy to Sunni and Shia alike. Hamas and the Palestinians guard it and keep it for the entire Islamic world. The Israelis seek to destroy the heart of Islam itself.
Where, then, does this take us? What lies ahead?
We are looking at a picture with a foreground, middle-ground, and a farther horizon.
In the foreground is the fighting in Gaza, the survival of the current regime, the survival of Hamas. Kissinger once said that all the insurgent has to do is survive, and so far Hamas is surviving; up to a point, at least, time is on their side. As that time extends, the pressure to expand the war increases, ultimately to Iran. The way there is plain—it lies through Lebanon; and at least a hundred thousand evacuees from the Galilee are refusing to return to their homes unless Hezbollah is pushed north of the Litani River. Gallant, the Israeli defence minister, has promised to act by the end of January. Will the Israelis go in? It is possible the Americans will finally say no, and it may be impossible for the Israelis to do it by themselves. Then again, the regime may get its wish.
The middle-ground is occupied by two large questions, the nature of Israel and the continuing evolution of Middle Eastern states.
The argument about Israel will be centred (in the outside world) by the “two-state solution,” but within the country there will be the continuing battle between established (Ashkenazi) Israel, and the Israel of the settlers and the Mizrahi and the Orthodox. What does it mean to be Israeli? This fundamental “existential’ question remains unsettled.
But it may be the evolution of the Middle Eastern states that will prove finally determining. The Middle Eastern autocracies must all be nervous. They can oppose the street only so far. El-Sisi (with the example of Nasser’s revolution before him) will be especially anxious; but even MSB must be taking thought. The longer the war goes on, the longer Hamas survives, the more difficult their position will become. These leaders and nations, if only because they accept the reality principle, do not want a war but they may be unable to avoid it.
Finally, on the horizon is Iran, growing in power and influence. It represents the Israeli nightmare. Their racism has always provided them one assumption, “The Muslims will never get their act together!” or, if they do, they’ll turn into ‘moderates,’ eager to watch the Super Bowl and have another margarita. Things haven’t quite worked out that way. Iran has survived round after round of sanctions, and its economy and military are now very powerful; it is, by virtue of its population and resources, potentially hegemonic. How can Iran be confronted? Possibly, during the Iraq War, Americans thought seriously of turning their army east. But for years now, such an expedition has been plainly impossible. The alternative was always a devastating strike against the regime, that would cause the Freedom-and-Coke-loving Iranian people to rise up and throw out the mullahs. Such a possibility is now absurd. The West appeals to no one, and is obviously declining. No Iranian regime, after the devastation of the Islamic Republic, could find its legitimacy in the West. That leaves only one possibility: nuclear war.
Framing this picture, all these questions, is the largest development of all: the decline of the West, and the United States. It was the United States that created, after the Second World War, the world that is in play today. It was the United States that insisted on German rearmament and this (not the Soviet Union) defined the Europe we have known. That Europe is falling apart. Former powers, France, Germany, Great Britain, have been reduced to political, economic and military nullities. Russia is re-working fundamental power relationships and maps will be redrawn. This is no less true in the Middle East. Israel was a creation of western imperialism, coming into existence just as its leadership was coming into American hands. Indeed, the final passing of the baton took place during the French and British attempt to overthrow Nasser in 1956, during which Israel, allied to the old imperialism, occupied Gaza for the first time. Since then, Israel’s position in the Middle East has been intertwined with American power. As that power recedes, what will happen? There is another factor. When the United States was pushed off the Asian continent after the Vietnam War, countries there developed rapidly, most especially China. That is, the decline of American power was accompanied in the rise of power outside of American control, with its own agenda. The shift in power, relatively speaking, was all the more dramatic. This might well happen in the Middle East.
But whatever happens, there is one consequence that cannot be avoided. The Reverend Dr. Munther Isaac puts it well: “We will be ok. Despite the immense blow we have endured, we will recover…But for those who are complicit, I feel sorry for you. Will you ever recover from this? We will not accept your apology after the genocide. What has been done, has been done. I want you to look in the mirror and ask, where was I?” What Israel is doing in Gaza has passed beyond the immoral, surpassed even ‘crimes against humanity,’ and entered a strange realm of cruel, abhorrent madness. One can say, finally: that is their business. But mine is found in the failure of the West to oppose this; instead, the West gives it active support, and attempts to silence any voice of peace. “They send us bombs, while celebrating Christmas in their land. They sing about the Prince of Peace in their land while playing the drum of war in our land.” And, for Rev. Isaac, perhaps the cruelest failure: “We are outraged by the complicity of the church. Let it be clear. Silence is complicity.” Indeed, the Pope has muttered and whined, refusing to act, but his failure is merely a small part of a more general one. For the failure of the West to act in this crisis represents an ultimate moral collapse from which there will be no recovery. What has been revealed in Ukraine—arming and applauding Nazis, deliberately destroying peace—has been raised to some infinite power here; and behind all this, a kind of palimpsest, is the Holocaust. This collapse is civilizational. It has many causes. But it is final. How to understand it?
Dr. Zhivago is one of those novels everyone has heard of, but few have actually read. Pasternak was a Russian Jew, nonetheless baptized, whose early definition of himself was developed within Orthodox Christianity. In his famous novel, a central character is Nikolai Nikolaevich Vedenyapin, a priest who has been defrocked at his own instigation. He takes Yuri Zhivago, his nephew, into his care after the death of Yuri’s mother. Early in the novel—Pasternak is establishing his themes—Nikolai is visiting a friend, and they’ve been having a discussion:
“As I was saying, we must be true to Christ. I’ll explain. What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know that God exists or why, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that in our present day understanding history began with Christ, and that its foundation is the the Gospel. Now what is history? Its beginning is that systematic work devoted to the solution of the enigma of death, so that death itself may eventually be overcome. That is why people write symphonies, and why they discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves. It’s impossible to go forward in that direction without a certain spiritual uplift, without spiritual equipment, and everything necessary has been given to us in the Gospels. Firstly the love of one’s neighbor, the supreme form of living energy. Once it fills the heart of man, it has to overflow and spend itself. And secondly, the two concepts that make up modern man—without them, he is inconceivable—the ideas of free personality and of life regarded as sacrifice. Mind you, this is all quite new. The ancients did not have history in this sense. There you have blood and beastliness and cruelty, pock-marked Caligulas…the boastful dead eternity of bronze monuments and marble columns.”
The West, by this account, has found the end of history, trumpeted as its triumph, in a return to barbarism—blood and beastliness. Christ has died in Gaza, so close to his birthplace, and in Rome the Gospels have long since been forgotten. The moral centre, the heart of our civilization, has not held. We can hope, in some distant future, for a renaissance. Meanwhile, things will likely get a good deal worse.
Ottawa, December 25 – December 31, 2023.
