The difficult thing in trying to write about what is going on in Palestine/Israel at the moment is that one must choose between opening by recording the full and frank horror of it in its many dimensions – including, as I write, today’s hospital bomb strike, leaving hundreds dead and maimed – and thus saying nothing new or informative, or analysing and interpreting it, and thus normalising the events. The third option is thus sort of waffly meta-opening, which merely serves as the least worst option.
In past years and recent decades there have been worse events than both the Hamas raid and the current Israeli pre-invasion bombardment and siege on Gaza. Ethnic massacres approximate to the number and horror of the Hamas raid have gone on in Africa and Asia; urban destruction on a Gaza scale has occurred in Chechnya, Syria and Ukraine.
The horror of these urban destructions was muted by either their limited visibility, or our limited complicity, or above all by the capacity, however also limited, of the population to get out from under, the very basic human capacity to make a run for it. The remorseless presentation of impossible courses of action by the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) — move hundreds of thousands of families and without petrol to nowhere in a day — has the measured sadism of the master, a vise squeezing in from three multiple directions.
That’s the horror there. The horror here, and in any number of Western (and a few other) societies is that that horror is being not merely normalised, but celebrated, if by nothing else than by an absence of any questioning of its morality. I suspect a lot of people of my type are feeling what I’m feeling now: for all one’s knowledge of imperialism, its mystifications of state terror turned into order, of the logic of colonialism, of scapegoating, and all of that — the indifferent callousness and consent to what is happening now stuns afresh and afresh every day and every hour.
How do people here think like this, about deaths in the dozens dealt out every hour to people sitting in apartments much like theirs, in a city that looks kinda like theirs, mothers and children, whole families. You know how they think like that, one part of my head screams inside my skull. They really know nothing of Palestine’s history, and many would not ascribe justice to the Palestinian cause, even if they knew about it.
You know that burning children to death with bombs, in its distanced and measured process, can be “dehorrored”, or is never-horrored — its abstract mechanical distance sparing those contemplating it any consideration of the intimacy of violence, such as arises in a terrorist raid on kibbutzim. You know that ordered, uniformed violence communicates security to dominant populations elsewhere, while wild, outbreak violence, marshalling cruelty, reminds of the chaos lurking beneath the surface, or at the city’s edge everywhere.
You know all this, yet it still feels suddenly alien again, to be walking among people who simply accept this, who grab at the visible horror of Hamas’ actions to forestall any further moral-political thought that might make everyday equanimity possible.
You know that Labor went finally and fully from the left in about 2020, that its right was always attached to Israel, its mainstream left half-hearted from the ’80s on, and only a sliver of dissent to it from a leftish left with its own MPs and unions. Now that is gone, and there is the spectre of a Labor defence minister — really a co-prime minister, the right’s consigliere — claiming that whatever Israel does is, by definition, within the rules of war.
You always knew this, about the so-called rules-based order, but once again this is the attitude of Mussolini’s braying tone during the 1935 invasion of Ethiopia, assailed (somewhat hypocritically) by the European powers as a return to earlier brutalities, and which was affirmed by Il Duce as being right by being done, the moral of the will and force.
You watch as the prime minister, a shrunken man, who once prated about “fighting Tories”, and who has failed several moral-political challenges set since achieving office, shrinks from another one. He and Tanya Plibersek and Penny Wong and others might have said words in support of the Palestinians once — and have a few timebombs ticking away in student newspapers somewhere, if anyone wants to dig — and may well have even believed them to a degree, and will now watch grimly on and lend their voices to legitimating the slaughter, because they had to do something to gain power, and not have their lives be a joke, and will now, to keep it, do anything.
You watch as Labor soldiers and grandees, with their unaltered mid-century blind spot about Zionism, join the remnant solidarity of their social democracy to Israel’s, and reveal the gleaming edge of social fascism at their base of their own. You watch as Zionism’s history of terror is rendered invisible beyond invisible, as progressives swing away from Palestine, pleading ignorance and distaste for their leaders’ values on gender and the rest.
You watch it all and wonder what sort of wilderness of mirrors cross and double-cross this is, a raid on the 50th anniversary of the Arabs last near-victory, in which an ultra-tech garrison state was invaded by young men on motorbikes. Working for an organisation Israel has propped up for decades. Attacking a beleaguered prime minister who is now the leader of a national government. Which promises a destruction of Hamas. A mission which licenses unlimited violence against the innocent in the eyes of the world — even though there is absolutely no real belief or intent by Israel that such a mission will be completed.
You wonder whether any of that last paragraph is even worth saying any more, or just puts one in the company of the endless armchair warriors, as seven decades fall away, the present sutures itself to the 1930s, and the significant majority of Zionists who are supporting Israel’s extermination of Gaza take on the cold, remorseless, style which has an echo of their former oppressors, who now project their flag on to the Wagnerian centrepiece of Berlin.
As you find a meta-conclusion to waffle your way out of an inconclusive piece, waiting not for the next bombs to fall, but for the next thousand.
