It has been 24 days since the barbaric Hamas attack on Israel. Two hundred-odd hostages are still captive. This has been followed by an unprecedented slaughter by Israel of innocent Palestinians in Gaza with the prospect of worse to come. But amidst this carnage and heightened political risk of a wider conflict, there is not one significant world leader who is acting in a way that is not morally myopic or politically ill-judged.
Go down the list. The Biden administration’s support for Israel is not surprising. But its embrace of Netanyahu, its utter lack of self-reflection on how we came to this pass, its lack of sincere interest in any political solution, its shocking “Othering” of the humanity of Palestinians — both by consistently casting doubt on Palestinian casualty figures and ruthlessly accepting collateral damage — is deeply alienating. In response to a question of whether wars in Ukraine and Israel were more than the US could take on at the same time, President Biden replied, “We are the United States, for God’s sake, the most powerful nation in the world, not in the world but the history of the world.”
Powerful rhetorical flourish. But it forgot the fact that all the power has meant in the last few decades is the ability to absorb the cost of repeated failure — from Iraq to Afghanistan. But this is not a power that has been deployed for a credible, just and lasting peace anywhere of late.
Iran always has maintained an infrastructure of violence that has served its political purposes but destroys the societies in which they are embedded, from Palestine to Lebanon. The Arab regimes have nurtured the Palestinian cause as a pretext, but have little concern for their welfare. The gap between Europe’s perception of its own importance and its power has never been greater; Macron’s civilising mission is now reduced to simply curbing free discussion on the Palestine issue and Germany’s idea of moral nuance is to de-platform Palestinian writers.
Russia has ruthlessly fomented violence in the region, including brutally in Syria. Turkey is more interested in using Palestine for its neo-Ottoman fantasies. As for the rest of the world, it was important that the UN General Assembly at least make a humanitarian gesture asking for a ceasefire. But it is a toothless advisory and not a single country has an action plan to stop the unfolding carnage in Gaza. It was also a misjudgement not to pass a resolution condemning Hamas. This is not because a ceasefire in Gaza should be linked to condemning Hamas, or for the sake of neutrality or two-sidedness. But condemning Hamas is the morally right and the politically prudent thing to do. China can at best watch from the sidelines; at worst smell an opportunity in the self-destruction of the West. As for India, one anecdote will suffice. I was at an international meeting recently, where someone, not unsympathetic to India, asked this question: “India claims to be the leader of the Global South. But let us ask the question, ‘who is following it?’”
In the West, this lack of statesmanship will have domestic consequences. Often support for, or involvement in, ill-thought wars leads to a loss of trust and polarisation. The Iraq war led to a huge loss of trust in the liberal establishment in the West. In a proximate sense, the West did not start this one. But it is deeply implicated in how this war goes. The loss of trust in these governments is increasingly palpable. President Biden’s ratings are falling, and he has deeply alienated sections of his own party. But more importantly, the fissures in civil society will begin to take on dimensions that will be difficult to control.
There is a heightened risk of a rise in both anti-Semitism and Islamophobia as extremist ideologies use the war to confirm their own agendas, or as groups get trapped in their own worst fears of persecution. Some of the pathologies of civil society discourse, excessive emphasis on Schadenfreude, exposing hypocrisy, virtue signalling, simplistic diagnoses and occasionally even ill-thought platforming of extremism, do not by themselves pose a danger. But they induce heightened nervousness at this moment because these are symptoms of societies where there is very little meaningful scope for political action on war. They can also be a danger, when these pathologies get empowered by a lack of statesmanship. It leads to a breakdown of empathy between citizens, traps them in vulgar binaries of group identity that make palpable human suffering of others invisible.
This portends an even deeper demise of liberalism. All of this is a shame since there is one silver lining at this moment. Partly as a result of cultural changes in the West, it has become impossible to make the Palestinian issue invisible — the mass protests across the world testify to that. Full credit where it is due: The kind of analytical criticism of the Netanyahu government (and its complicity with Hamas) you find in Israeli writers and journalists puts the rest of the world’s press to shame. In Gaza, according to polls, there was minuscule support for a military solution led by Hamas that would lead to the destruction of Israel. According to an Axios poll, there is a generational divide in most Western democracies on how the Israel-Palestine issue is viewed. This is not a symptom of the ignorance of the young, as much as it is a yearning for a fresh start.
But there is no statesman who can ride these currents to create new political openings. If we cut through over-sophisticated historical analyses, a vast majority of global public opinion will probably settle on three common-sense propositions: It is morally wrong to empower groups like Hamas. These are not freedom fighters, they are cults of violence. It is catastrophic and unacceptable to allow Israel to carpet bomb Gaza and potentially create the conditions for a second Nakba. And there can be no lasting peace without a workable two-state solution. What is striking is how many world leaders find an excuse to equivocate on the first or second of these propositions, and almost none want to use their diplomatic capital to create a global coalition on the third.
Governments across the world are out of sync with global public opinion. It is making most governments strange bedfellows of extremists. People don’t destroy their societies. States do. By their lack of politically imaginative responses, states across the world are pushing their own societies deeper into the abyss — even as carnage unfolds in Israel and Palestine.
The writer is contributing editor, The Indian Express
Israel-Hamas conflict shows governments today are making bedfellows of extremists
7
1
31.10.2023
It has been 24 days since the barbaric Hamas attack on Israel. Two hundred-odd hostages are still captive. This has been followed by an unprecedented slaughter by Israel of innocent Palestinians in Gaza with the prospect of worse to come. But amidst this carnage and heightened political risk of a wider conflict, there is not one significant world leader who is acting in a way that is not morally myopic or politically ill-judged.
Go down the list. The Biden administration’s support for Israel is not surprising. But its embrace of Netanyahu, its utter lack of self-reflection on how we came to this pass, its lack of sincere interest in any political solution, its shocking “Othering” of the humanity of Palestinians — both by consistently casting doubt on Palestinian casualty figures and ruthlessly accepting collateral damage — is deeply alienating. In response to a question of whether wars in Ukraine and Israel were more than the US could take on at the same time, President Biden replied, “We are the United States, for God’s sake, the most powerful nation in the world, not in the world but the history of the world.”
Powerful rhetorical flourish. But it forgot the fact that all the power has meant in the last few decades is the ability to absorb the cost of repeated failure — from Iraq to Afghanistan. But this is not a power that has been deployed for a credible, just and lasting peace anywhere of late.
Iran always has maintained an infrastructure of violence that has served its political purposes but destroys the societies in which they are embedded, from Palestine to Lebanon. The Arab regimes have nurtured the........
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