We've been here before: A personal view of the Israel-Hamas conflict

 

Flag of Kach/Kahane Chai

Over the last five months, the dialogue between Israel and the international community, including some of the strongest supporters of Israel in the international community, has begun more and more to resemble the conversation at an intervention. The participants all express support, sympathy, solidarity with Israel, emphasize their friendship, and slowly work around to the lengthening list of symptoms suggesting their friend has gone off the rails. The sense of dismay at the behaviour of the Israeli government grows steadily more apparent. Increasingly, we see calls for moderation, expressed willingness to broker and support a settlement leading to peace and freedom for Israelis and Palestinians alike, and behind those words of encouragement the seldom bluntly stated but increasingly solid consensus that the behaviour of  the current government of Israel will lead to catastrophe.

Perhaps a memory of my own can help explain why this is happening. 

During the Al-Aqsa intafada of the early part of this century, I remember being appalled by an attack carried out by Hamas: an attacker had shot of bombed a family at prayer, killing many  Israeli Jews. The attack solidified my disgust at Hamas. There are things you don't do, not in war, not ever, and slaughtering people at prayer comes high on that list. While I recognized, and still recognize, Hamas as an extremist faction, I have to admit that, reasonably or not, the stark brutality of the massacre by Hamas cooled my sympathy for the Palestinian cause.

Then, my work for Indigenous justice in Canada brought me into contact with people working for peace in Israel and Palestine, and I encountered the story of Baruch Goldstein. Of course, I knew about him. I had been appalled by his massacre of Muslim worshippers at Hebron in 1994; I had read Yitzhak Rabin's statement that Goldstein was "a shame on Zionism and an embarrassment to Judaism", and assumed Goldstein was a single individual acting out their own mental instability. It was only when I began to study the conflicts in the Israeli occupied West Bank that I learned Goldstien was lauded as a hero and a martyr by many in extremes of the the Jewish movement to settle the West Bank.

The current Israeli Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, kept a portrait of Baruch Goldstein in his living room until he took it down after he entered politics. This is not a matter of right versus left; it is a question of whether Israel's commitment to abide by the law of nations in conflict will hold. We have plenty of evidence Hamas does not recognize any restraints, practical or ethical, on its behaviour. International leaders have begun to confront the disturbing evidence that influential voices within the  Israeli government want their country to do the same. 

I made my journey to hope tempered by awareness of the worst impulses on both side a long time ago. The rhetoric coming out of many world capitals, and out of the world court, suggest many national leaders and international officials have made, or are making, the same journey I did.