We cross into the new year and try to start afresh, leave all the bad stuff behind. As 2024 begins, such renewal feels foolish and delusional.
Brutal Hamas still holds Israeli hostages; Israel’s retributive, savage punishment of Palestinian civilians intensifies. We are about to enter a more perilous, possibly catastrophic period. The Red Sea is becoming another site of violent combat between Israel’s Western allies and Iran, which is siding, it says, with the people of Gaza, a base claim. The ruling Iranian cabal is ruthlessly opportunistic. For years, it armed Yemeni Houthis – Shia, antisemitic insurgents – to fight a proxy war in Yemen with Saudi Arabia, which backed Sunni factions.
The Houthis won – around 377,000 Yemenis died and four million were displaced. Now the rebels are in the Red Sea, disrupting commercial traffic, targeting, in particular, vessels linked to Israel.
US helicopters have fired on Houthi boats and killed 10 men. India has sent a warship to the sea. Britain is itching to join this military adventure. Global trade is threatened. Meanwhile, Al Jazeera testifies that Hezbollah, the Shia militants in Lebanon, have launched explosive drones and missiles at Israeli positions.
Then there is Hamas’s agenda and aggravations. They are like the IRA, a group that doesn’t give a damn about the suffering its actions cause to their own people. They have turned the legitimate Palestinian cause into a hate-fuelled religious crusade. Unforgiveable. Their actions on 7 October, precipitated Israel’s equally unforgiveable collective punishment. They are sick enough to see that as a good result.
Remember, this is how the First World War began – through various conflicts coalescing into an all encompassing, horrific conflagration. Israel has an uninspected nuclear arsenal.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s extreme, right-wing Prime Minister, cannot be trusted to be cautious or considerate. He’s spent all his life striving to create a greater Israel, by any means necessary. He’s had four terms in office so far, in spite of many Israelis finding his domestic and foreign policies abhorrent.
This year multitudes protested against his proposed law to control the judiciary. On Monday, the Supreme Court threw out this undemocratic policy. But the rifts between citizens seem unmendable. The nation is split over Gaza, human rights, the future and Israel’s place in the world.
Breaches have been evident among British, American and European Jews too. Way back in 2008, many prominent Jewish people, including Harold Pinter, Miriam Margolyes and Stephen Fry, signed this declaration on the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the state of Israel: “[The remembrance] is understandable in the context of centuries of persecution culminating in the Holocaust.
“Nevertheless, we are Jews who will not be celebrating. [We must acknowledge] the price paid by another people for European antisemitism and Hitler’s genocidal policies.
“We cannot celebrate the birthday of a state that even now engages in ethnic cleansing, that violates international law, that is inflicting a monstrous collective punishment on the civilian population of Gaza and that continues to deny to Palestinians their human rights and national aspirations.”
The statement was published in The Guardian. All that just got worse and truth itself is being slandered as antisemitism. I despair. But must go on.
Did you know that Hamas was spawned in part by Israel? As Adam Raz writes in Haaretz, “the very fact that there has been close co-operation between the Israeli Prime Minister (with the support of many on the right) and the fundamentalist organisation seemingly evaporated from most of the current analyses… Netanyahu has lent a hand, in various ways, to the growing military and political power of Hamas.”
Other key figures in Israel are also implicated. Brigadier General Yitzhak Segev, Israel’s military governor in Gaza, disclosed in 1981 that they helped finance Hamas to divide and rule, and weaken secular Palestinian liberationists.
Avner Cohen, the former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza, said in 2009: “Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation.”
When Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer bang on about “evil Hamas”, why don’t journalists ask them about how Israel created and sustained Hamas? Because that would upend the propaganda.
The official narrative will proclaim shock and awe and victory for the Jewish state and its allies. As violence in Gaza, the West Bank and the Red Sea accelerates, Netanyahu’s secrets and lies will remain buried. Our fears and established facts will be silenced. And revenge will play out, bleed the world.
In Fiddler on the Roof, a play about a beleaguered Jewish family living in fin de siècle Russia, a fellow Jew tells Tevye, the father: “We should defend ourselves. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” Tevye replies sardonically: “That way, everyone will be blind and toothless.” Full of uncontrollable rage too. Who knows where that will take us?
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