Published: 6 January 2025
Last updated: 6 January 2025
Because the issue of the Middle East has become so dominant, friends sometimes ask me, or sometimes avoid asking me but would probably like to know, my views.
This is an attempt to summarize my position. It is not comprehensive, nor a plan to solve the catastrophe, but just an attempt to assemble the key building blocks I believe must be accepted if a way forward is to be found.
I am not trying to provoke or persuade, nor, given how horrific and complex this issue is, am I confident that all my views are beyond challenge or can help find a resolution to it. I simply seek to explain how I see it.
- Netanyahu is a disaster. He is not interested in a peaceful resolution of the conflict or the lives of Palestinians. While he has a lot of support in Israel, and agrees with, or opportunistically yields to, the views of right-wing extremists in his coalition, there is also substantial opposition to him, and Israel remains a democracy, albeit a flawed one. (A recent poll found that 69% of Israelis want a ceasefire and hostage release.) One can only hope the democratic process will throw him out sooner rather than later.
- Hamas is a disaster. This dispute is about more than history, territory and the settlements; it is actually about the militant, fundamentalist Islamism of Hamas and some other nations in the region, most notably Iran, and their rejection of Israel’s right to exist. Unlike Israel, in Gaza there is little opposition to the ruling regime, Hamas, and such opposition as there is is brutally suppressed.
- There should have been a ceasefire long ago, but it takes two to agree, and neither Netanyahu, nor Hamas (which triggered the current round of conflict) or Hezbollah (which has no actual territorial dispute with Israel), are genuinely ready for one.
- Israel should have withdrawn from the West Bank long ago. That said, while the settlements, and in particular the brutality of some (but not all) of the settlers and the politicians who encourage them, are a significant cause of the hostility to Israel, they are also an excuse, and withdrawal would not end the rejection by Hamas of Israel's right to exist.
- The Palestinian leadership must stop poisoning the minds of children and teaching them that Israel is evil and that their duty is to eliminate all Jews from it by becoming martyrs who will be rewarded in heaven.
- Israel had to respond to Oct 7, and to Hezbollah’s constant bombing of Israel. Hamas is a real threat to Israel, and the accusations about tunnels and human shields are real, and make innocent casualties inevitable - as is always the case in war e.g. Hiroshima, Dresden, Afghanistan. However, it is not unreasonable to criticise Israel's response and the resulting toll as horrendous, probably excessive, and counter-productive (in that rather than eliminating Hamas, it may create a new generation), but it is not genocide if the meaning of that term is understood correctly (even if some extremists in Israel would countenance a genocide-like response).
- That said, Israel has gone much too far now, and should indicate a genuine and serious willingness for a ceasefire, perhaps even by offering a unilateral pause to see how Hamas responds. A real settlement will almost certainly require an international peace-keeping force.
- The refugee issue is largely spurious. Palestinian refugees are the only refugee category in the world in which descendants of the original refugees continue to be designated as refugees, and have a special UN agency (UNWRA). The 700,000 people who became refugees after the UN’s creation of Israel in 1948 are matched by the similar number of Jews who were at the same time forced to flee the surrounding countries (Egypt, Yemen, Morocco, etc) for Israel.
- The failure of the other Middle East countries (some of which are super-wealthy) to assist, or resettle, refugees since then, and to offer sanctuary and aid to the people of Gaza now, is contemptible, and reflects their manipulation of the refugee issue for political purposes, and their unwillingness to incorporate militant Palestinians into their own populations. Tragically and intentionally, Oct 7 set back the momentum towards better relations with some of those countries, in particular Saudi Arabia.
- The characterisation of Israel as ‘colonial’ is simplistic and unhistoric. It fails to recognise that the movement of people into Israel was not conducted by an imperialist invading foreign nation, exploiting people and resources, but that it augmented (incrementally, through land purchases, migration, and other, mainly but not always legal means, and finally in 1948 with a UN vote) an unbroken Jewish presence in the land.
- The charge that Israel is an apartheid state is, at best, only partially true. It may be that, regrettably, because of the hardening of attitudes and the perception of security threats, arrangements in the occupied territories look disconcertingly like apartheid. It is absolutely untrue, however, to describe Israel itself as an apartheid nation; non-Jewish citizens there (including Arabs) enjoy full civil rights and occupy senior judicial and other positions - almost certainly more than minorities do in neighboring nations.
- That is not to deny that Israel's creation resulted in significant conflict, injustice, dispossession and suffering for Palestinians and Arabs. Even so, dispossession and conflicts as a result of movements of people over time and territory have occurred everywhere in the world throughout history - for instance, in post WWII Europe, and on a massively larger scale, and at the same time as the establishment of Israel, in India and Pakistan, but also here in Australia. These movements have not always led to the turmoil that the ME has endured for so many decades.
- Whatever the horror and injustice of the current situation, even worse is happening elsewhere and the world does not care. In the past 24 years 432,000 people have died in Afghanistan; in the past 10 years, 306,000 people died as a result of the conflict in Syria, in the past year 62,000 have died in Sudan. This selective outrage is what leads some in the Jewish community to perceive the worldwide opposition to Israel as partly based on ingrained, historic - albeit often subconscious - antisemitism.
- Jews have vastly diverging views on the situation. While most, including me, fervently believe in the importance of Israel’s survival (and in that sense could be described as ‘Zionists’) many of us are very critical of its government. Many, like me, also recognize and are deeply distressed that the character of Israel as an enlightened, pluralist, secular, moderate, democratic and united nation, informed by the idealistic socialist and secular origins of its foundation, is seriously jeopardised by its recent history and conduct.
- It therefore follows that if those people (and movements such as Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) opposed to Israel’s conduct wish to avoid being seen as antisemitic, they should direct their opposition at Israel’s government and its representatives, not at Jews, universities and other institutions.
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