peace | branchlines

The last days of summer stretch themselves out, give way to eventual autumn. Children pick their way into new terms, the conference season ends and all around there is a sense of settling in, of returning to some kind of application. The sun still graces every other day at least and it’s easy to feel that we can put away our fears, even when we know what we must deal with; that here is an antidote in the air even now, to believe in the things placed before us, the immanence of a degree of settled order, like the sun implies a promise that all we want is with us here and now.

It’s probably all just as well. Beyond the immediate grace of given days we know there is so much to be addressed. That what can lend a sense of some security also underlines what has to change – that, even though the weather has a mercy with the season we know it’s probably that much too warm, that the memory of the maelstrom of the heatwaves is not far away, that Russia is pounding Kyiv, that America has taken to public executions, that the oil prices are still high, that in fact for anyone paying attention, the Autumn is a kind of antidote asking somehow we rise above it all or simply face it, do what we can with the day like some kind of collective will can serve to keep us together.

Salutatory or symptomatic of our woes is the grim reminder of that other war, distressing for so long, positively screaming from our screens as the milestone of the last three years since October 7^th comes around and we contemplate again that the ceasefire has not stopped bombardment outright, that children are literally starving, often wishing they were with their families in Heaven where there is food and water, little children dying from their wounds without sedation.

In the face of all this, while we can take some thin if still welcome comfort with the change of face from our new government; the sanctions and apologies for former policy not least, we know too there is much more that can and must be done – the stopping of all arms to Israel, the lifting of the ridiculous, sinister ban on supporting Palestine Action, raising again a general outcry that has to continue loud and clear in the face of the ongoing attrition of an effective state of siege.

As with the climate crisis and acting upon it, perhaps it’s as indicative as anything else of a crisis of humanity or simply crystallises how we should respond. So many looked away after last year’s ceasefire, not least as the media machine itself moved on to other areas. So many were understandably relieved to feel that here was a job done, a point of stress and distress they could now turn away from, one less thing to think about in a world crying on its knees for better days.

It’s not enough to bear in mind that many cannot bear to follow – or simply tune out from – the news as a kind of lifestyle choice. Or that arguments against ethnic cleansing are not helped by black and white simplicities, failure to acknowledge the whole picture as the recent vote at the Green conference only so depressingly spells out. Even in the heat of mass death there are bedrocks that ought to be common ground – the honouring of the 1967 borders and the principle, subscribed to by many Palestinians themselves, of the Two-state solution. With that, there must be an acknowledgement that there are those, even if few and overplayed, who seek the destruction of Israel as a state. They must be pushed back against and called out in the knowledge that it ultimately serves the Palestinian people to do so.

The easy ambiguities, the creeping anti-Semitism coloured by ignorance and simplistic thinking as much as anything else are a thing we must all guard against, not least as, while abhorrent in themselves, they give all the more justification to Netanyahu and his cabal. We have to remember that, while Zionism goes back to at least the 1800’s and has carried within it all kinds of factions, colours and stripes, the state of Israel was ultimately founded after the horrors of the Holocaust.

That does not make the Nakba any less horrific, or wash our British hands clean of the Balfour Declaration, that unparalleled piece of ambiguity and conflicting promises, of which Arthur Koestler famously said “one nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third” (the declaration also originally stated “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”). But the Israeli state now homes some 10 million souls (over 7 million of them Jewish, with more than 2 million Arabs). We can all wish some elements of history may have been done differently. But things are as they are and we should not acquiesce to a blunt idealism potentially as bloody as the thing that it purports to stand against.

None of this in any way negates the harsh reality that we are living through the attempted extermination of a whole people, that what we have been witnessing is not some aberration or blip but a sustained, planned, cold and brutal ruthlessness that shames Israel, shames us, shames the international mechanisms that ought to facilitate restraint.

Living through such a time asks of us some very particular questions. Can we do more than only endure or even find some degree of peace in our cloistered and distant safe havens? Can we do more than simply cling to the things that can carry us through? However hard it may be, however distressing or depressing, we have to bear witness in the knowledge that this is the first step to any meaningful change, that it is the precondition that all other demands depend upon.

That does not mean we can necessarily expect Netanyahu to somehow change his spots or Trump to throw his hands up in remorse. But we have to accept we face a choice in our morality, in how we choose to respond in the knowledge it shapes who we are as a people, it shapes what it means to be human – not simply in how we will be remembered, if any of us will be remembered at all, but the very nature at its core of who and what we are.

Life will go on here. The kids will make their way to school. Workers collectively clock on. The panoply of politics will play out in our papers, on our screens. We will see to what extent the winter and the rising prices bite. We will try not to be consumed with the news of the day or any other distractions. But far away, men, women and children are facing a fight for simple survival. Is it too much to hope the world can find its voice, that there are still so many we can save?

It can seem hard at times to find some kind of fitting way ahead. Hard, specifically, to find ways to respond with a degree of humanity in any way adequate for the scale of what is being played out, once again, in Gaza as I write. It’s not enough to say we should have seen it coming, that the signs were there of the faltering process, that Netanyahu may have been in any case looking for excuses to return to the levels of bombardment we are witnessing again.

It speaks to particular pains. It can seem hard to fully empathise with the Israeli situation for example when the retribution is so disproportionate, when the tally of lives lost or destroyed renders them now the aggressor, the perpetrators of seemingly perpetual war. It’s hard in other words, when our newsfeeds are full of dead or starving Palestinian children, to consider Israel’s experience, how any other nominally Western nation might respond (and forgive the lack of equivalence; I mention it as a statement of what’s very much part of the problem) if hundreds of their population were butchered or kidnapped, not least when Hamas still do not recognise the Israeli state, are as far away from advocating or accepting a two-state solution as anyone in Netanyahu’s cabinet. It’s hard to imagine, even as – or especially as – we see the given state in Gaza, how it may be to live in fear of rocket raids, of the psychological strain of being surrounded by enemies real or perceived, of how it must be to feel your country is under a state of perpetual siege.

You can point fingers quite squarely at Hamas then, even if we can wonder how any of us would react in the face of seeing countless friends and family lost, how it’s not hard to see how Israel’s bombardments might act as a perfect recruitment device. But Hamas are historically simply survivors, the last players standing in a power struggle with Fatah that had gone on since at least the Palestinian elections of 2006, that they seemed to offer something credible in the face of the latter’s clear failures and corruption, that it was in no small part that many felt driven to Hama’s arms given Fatah’s acquiescence to demands from an unreasonable Israeli state.

And, if we can be mindful of the Israeli mentality, its stresses and long forbearance, how much easier is it to see the Palestinian side? How much less can we wonder at their response after so many decades in an effective open prison where few could leave and daily conditions were harsh if not downright humiliating and the international community largely looked away? Is it any wonder Hamas gained such standing and credulity in such a scenario, even as the ‘solutions’ they proposed played into the hands of the Israeli right? Hamas and Netanyahu need each other in a sense, locked as they appear to be in a mutually antagonistic spiral.

In the meantime, what can we do as world citizens when marching and letters, even vigils, do not seem enough? Where can we go with the knowledge that, far away, over vast distances of land and sea, scenes are being played out as bad as anything the last century threw at our feet, all the worse perhaps as we like to see ourselves as more enlightened these days, the spirit of the times supposedly lit up by greater grace and goodwill, where we foster conditions for healing, where we are meant to have moved on en masse as part of a greater humanity, a greater synthesis, as if Spring itself is meant to usher in a better age? The ongoing onslaught in Gaza pulls such aspirations into greater light; if these sentiments hold any currency at all, surely they should be brought to bear with every effort we can muster to help end the suffering in Gaza, to help bring the hostages home. The question remains; how can we respond at all to such horror with any degree of application fitting for its scale, with anything that holds any hope at all of cessation, let alone justice itself?

As charter after charter of international condemnation is invoked, as declarations of human rights abuses, constitutions of genocide, of war crimes come and go like bitter milestones on a bitter road, it’s easy to feel words are cheap. Would America be less intransigent if not more positively proactive without a Zionistic hinterland that seems to believe this all a precursor to some kind of greater messianic immanence? Could we stand a little taller in the UK if we cut off all arms sales to Israel, over and above some positive moves in this respect more recently? Can the banks disinvest? Can boycotts carry more teeth? Or should we be looking a little harder at the roots of this conflict, the grievances held by both sides, advocate space for renewed diplomacy, do not surrender to policy negotiated from the barrel of a gun?

If it’s clear that Israel is currently in the grip of a recalcitrant right wing and that many in the global Jewish diaspora, even many Israelis, regard their policies as the worst kind of intransigence; if we can hold some expectation that Trump could find it in himself to be more genuinely helpful, that in itself carries the hope that, in better circumstances, there might actually be more traction for some kind of better way ahead.

If it is in any way enough to seek to get our houses in better order, to bear bitter witness, to strive for Gaza with every part of us in the knowledge that every life counts, perhaps we can try a little harder too to fathom why so many Israelis support such a scale of aggression and the nature of the micro-climate of that country’s press. Perhaps we can seek to understand a little better how wrongdoing can be facilitated not just by the banality of any absence of response, but can be driven by historic and more current wounds being wilfully exploited. If nothing else, it may carry lessons for the future. It might just shine a better light on our collective here and now.