As the the dust and white phosphorus settle over Gaza, two questions present themselves immediately. What happens if the rockets fired on southern Israel stop? And what if they continue?
If they stop, Israel will feel fully justified in its strategy of a combined air and ground assault on Gaza, which left an estimated 1,300 dead, many of them women and children. If they continue, as appears to be Hamas’s suicidal intention, the Israeli army and air force have already shown what the consequences are likely to be.
International opinion is largely irrelevant here. The Arab world remains paralysed by its internal divisions, while western leaders have expressed their horror at the brutality of the war. Amnesty International has called for an investigation into alleged Israeli war crimes in Gaza and this may yet happen. But it will make no difference to the Israeli government’s position. When I travelled to Israel earlier this year, there was a clear consensus among the government advisers, soldiers and political analysts I met that Israel was doing the west’s dirty work for it by containing Hamas. It is certainly the case that its citizens have been in the front line in Sderot and other southern cities.
It is also true that the Hamas government in Gaza has been utterly reckless with the lives of its citizens. From the outside, the grotesque tally of the dead (over 1,000 versus 13 Israelis) looks hideously unjust. But from inside Israel and Palestine, there is another way of looking at it (and this is bleak, indeed): which side did best in protecting its own people?
Israel will now argue that the neutralisation of Hamas makes the prospects for a genuine peace based on a two-state solution more likely. Perhaps that’s true. It really is impossible to know at this stage.
But even if you accept, as I do, that Hamas represents a strain of totalitarian Islamist thought akin to fascism, what happened in Gaza cannot be justified. Even if you accept, as I do, that Hamas must be defeated as a military force, this was not the way to go about it. Even if you accept, as I do, that Hamas used women and children as human shields, this does not mean that the terrorist organisation should take the entire blame when Israeli weapons kill innocents.
When I wrote a piece for this magazine last May called “The great betrayal”, intended as a critique of the British left’s attitude to Israel, it turned out to be one of the most controversial articles I had written. It argued that some opposition to the Zionist state on the left was only explicable as anti-Semitism. I described the Israel-Palestine conflict as “a terrible faultline on the British left”. The piece was seen in some quarters as over-sympathetic to Israel, but it contained the following important paragraph: “On the face of it, the answer to my question [Why does the left hate Israel?] is simple. The British left hates Israel because it has abandoned its Enlightenment principles and set about the systematic oppression of a people whose land it occupies. The invasion of southern Lebanon in the summer of 2006 was a new low point that caused international outrage. For most people on the left in Britain, support for Israel is out of the question.” Now there is a new low point. However, before we assume that everyone agrees with the left consensus that Israel is to blame, it’s worth looking at the recent Sunday Times/YouGov poll, which showed that 39 per cent blamed both sides equally and 24 per cent blamed Hamas. Only 18 per cent blamed Israel.
No one denies that what happened in Gaza is horrible, not even the Israeli government. I was struck by an interview during the conflict, on Radio 4’s Today programme, with Mark Regev, the Israeli prime minister’s tough-talking foreign press spokesman. Asked whether he had any doubts when he saw the results of Israeli bombing, he answered: “Yes, of course I do.” Over the past few weeks, Britain’s most passionate supporters of Israel have been forced to search deep into their consciences.
On 6 January, when Israel hit a UN school in Gaza, the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (Bicom) issued the following statement: “Israeli voices are indicating that there was a hidden weapon store in the school, but clearly there can be no defence of civilian casualties.”
In Britain, the main consequence of the Gaza War has been to provide a rallying point for the motley alliance of totalitarian sympathisers of the hard left and Islamic radical right. It is not the responsibility of the Israeli government to consider the consequences of their actions on the rise of militant Islam in Britain and Europe. But the dangers are real. The Islamist tendency represented by self-appointed representatives such as the Muslim Council of Britain and the Muslim Association of Britain was on the retreat. The Gaza War has given them new life, as shown by their prominence in the recent demonstrations, and across the media.
Whether the Hamas rockets stop or not, either outcome will be used to justify the unjustifiable
It is telling that Ed Husain, author of The Islamist and one of the most effective opponents of Hamas sympathisers in Britain, issued a statement calling on the British government to intervene with Israel. “The UK government cannot seek to win hearts and minds across Muslim communities while failing to stop Israel from murdering Palestinians en masse,” he wrote. More worrying, in a way, is the renewal of an official narrative of compromise with Islamism, as demonstrated by David Miliband’s peculiar intervention during his trip to Mumbai where he warned: “The more we lump terrorist groups together and draw the battle lines as a simple binary struggle between moderates and extremists or good and evil, the more we play into the hands of those seeking to unify groups with little in common, and the more we magnify the sense of threat.” The uncomfortable fact is that many of these groups do have a unifying ideology, which is anti-Enlightenment, anti-women, anti-gay and anti-Semitic.
I have written widely about the Islamic radical right in Britain and I have always been depressed at the size of the psychological space occupied by the Palestinian struggle in the minds of young British Muslims. It has always seemed peculiar that bright and politically committed members of the Pakistani and Bangladeshi community are so particularly concerned with the alleged abuses of the Israeli government. If half the energy expended by the south Asian diaspora in defence of the Palestinians was spent campaigning for justice and political transparency in Pakistan and Bangladesh, then the prospects for reform in those countries would be vastly enhanced.
To return to my original questions: what happens if the Hamas rockets stop? And what happens if they don’t? The awful truth is that either outcome will be used to justify the unjustifiable, whether that is the killing of Israeli innocents by Hamas terrorists in the name of resistance, or the bombing of Palestinian innocents by the Israeli military in the name of national security.
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