Sadly – and what a word with which to begin a blog – I still have nothing useful to say about Israel’s response to Hamas’s terrorist attacks on 7th October. I wrote this on 29th October and the response from my millions of readers was gratifyingly and yet sadly suggests we’re all in the same kind of place, all at once somewhere and nowhere.
The only things most of us agree on are that we support the right of Israel to defend itself, we support a twin-state solution, we wish the Netanyahu government would fold and go away, we hate the islamic maniacs of Hamas, we weep as innocent people get caught up in the crossfire, we know that a ceasefire would be welcomed most of all by Hamas who, for one thing, don’t support a ceasefire, would us it to regroup and rearm and want to destroy Israel and basically all Jews. How to come to a conclusion of what should be done with all that lot and more?
I’m now at the point where I can barely watch news items on TV. I cannot unsee the footage of Hamas murdering innocent young people at a music festival, the stories of rape, of terrorists displaying headless corpses to their fellow ghouls but I cannot unsee the death of the innocents of Gaza, including babies and young children.
If I say I support Israel’s right to wipe Hamas off the map, am I also supporting the collateral damage in human life? Inadvertently, I must be. If I nod in approval when a Hamas cell is removed from the face of the Earth, am I not also condoning the terrible death of those who get in the way? That’s how it feels sometimes.
For those of us who don’t do God and try not to favour one race from another, it’s even more difficult. In my world, there would be no religion and people would emerge from a giant melting pot where we all looked broadly the same. That’s me dreaming again, of course, but we can, and indeed should, dream from time to time, dream of a better world. But I just wonder how this dream could possibly come true in a world so divided and, it feels, irredeemably broken.
It looks like there will be another pro Palestine rally on Armistice Day on 11th November. Naturally, I face both ways on this, too. The Second World War, for example, was fought to enable us to remain free citizens, so if pro Palestine marchers want to march on that day, should they not be allowed to? Alternatively, it’s disrespectful and, shamefully, snake oil salesman Rishi Sunak is stoking up his culture wars by weaponising such a march, as is Obergruppenführer home secretary Suella Braverman calling it a “hate march”. There are likely to be some pretty hateful people on any march, but that is not the point of it. In other words, I’m keeping my head down, hoping that calmer, more sensible voices prevail. In Broken Britain, good luck with that one.
My overall feeling is one of hopelessness. Whatever I feel won’t change anything, anymore than any number of protest marches around the world. It is not just me that’s without a clue. Our so called leaders, who are really just a version of us with more power, don’t have a clue either. Those of us mired in contradiction, obfuscation and confusion, all wrapped up with a sense of hopelessness, just sit and watch, occasionally pontificating over matters we don’t really understand and trying to get on with our own mundane little lives.
Ultimately, we hope things will pause or come to a swift conclusion, or more likely a slow conclusion and the spiral of death can slow down and end. The alternative is more of the same, with massive conflicts like now with smaller, continuous conflicts carrying on all the time. It’s absolutely grim over there and the one thing sitting in the back of my mind is that Russia and Iran are watching things unfold and unravel, quite possibly with their assistance. How that ends doesn’t bear thinking about.
