My millions of followers (is this right? – ed) have rightly been asking, “Why haven’t you written a word about the crisis in the Middle East, as Israel retaliates against Hamas’s murderous attacks on 7th October? You obviously feel strongly. Are you just a bottler?” To which I reply, no, I’m not a bottler. I do have strong feelings but I have struggled to put them into words because this seems to me an insoluble issue.
I don’t know if this blog will see itself to a conclusion because I’ve tried at least a dozen times before and ending up deleting every one. But here’s the thing. With the notable exception of the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland, I’m not the only one to struggle. My position goes something like this:
- I support the existence of Israel
- I support the right of Israel to defend herself against the clerical fascists of Hamas, whose only aim is to obliterate the state of Israel
Also:
- I can not condone the terrible collateral damage being inflicted on ordinary Palestinians, measured in thousands of deaths and the destruction of cities and towns
- We need to ensure that adequate aid gets through to Palestinians, the majority of whom do not support Hamas
- Netanyahu, the Israel prime minister, is a wrong ‘un and the hard right government he leads is awful, too.
So far, so good. Large swaths of the worldwide population call for a ceasefire. Shouldn’t I support that, too? Yes, except that we all know that Hamas will use any ceasefire to regroup and rearm. I find it impossible to square the circle and I end up supporting everything and nothing and everyone and no one.
Rishi Sunak says “I want (Israel) to win,” but what does that mean? To defeat Hamas, I guess, yet Israel’s massive reaction, some say overreaction, to Hamas’s terror attacks plays into their hands. It is their strategy to isolate Israel by provoking it into going too far and uniting certainly the muslim world behind it, not to mention the rest of the world where there have been huge demonstrations against Israel but strangely few against the maniacal attacks by Hamas that started the current bloodbath.
The radical left calls for said ceasefire and peace, as if it’s that easy. Many of us support a twin state solution, one state for Israel and another for Palestine. Hamas doesn’t want that. It wants Israel, and particularly all Jews, to be wiped off the face of the Earth. Both parties, Israel under Netanyahu and Hamas don’t want peace: they want victory. In the current climate, there are no reasons to be cheerful.
My opinion is a mess. I want Israel to exist and be freed from the tyranny of Hamas and I want the Palestinian people, the vast majority of whom do not support Hamas, to be free and independent. However, I don’t have the first clue as to how this can be achieved.
One big step will be when Israel goes to the polls again they remove the right wing government which simply makes a bad situation worse. After that, it’s probably all wishful thinking.
Surely, no one wants this conflict to rumble on forever, do they, unless of course they conclude there can be no compromise, just total victory, with one side, currently the Palestinians, being obliterated. But Hamas is the Hydra and I fear that total victory will be difficult, if not impossible, to achieve.
So, that’s where I am. All over the place, without a solution or even the first clue of how to achieve one. Which puts me firmly in the camp of pretty well everyone else in the world, bar those who seek to glory in slaughter, of whom there are still too many.
