Bernard Spiegal

What once were considered shared norms, for example, that armed forces do not as a matter of course kill and maim children, for Israel, this understanding is now redundant. It’s moved on from that, it is no longer a serviceable concept. Rather, callous, cool and calculated disregard are the governing principles.

The habit of praying-in-aid Hamas’s attack on the 7 October as some sort of justification for Israel’s current actions is grotesque. It’s an odd form of logic that justifies the replication of condemned actions, or worse, in order to defeat them.

As at 10 November, according to OCHA, [United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Palestine] 4,506 children and 3,027 women have been killed as a result of Israel’s actions in the Gaza strip. About 2,700 others, including some 1,500 children, have been reported missing and may be trapped or dead under the rubble.

Israel does not blink in the face of these figures, nor at the other atrocities which, moment by moment, it perpetrates against 2.5 million Gazan civilians.

No ceasefire

Israel has studiously avoided any possibility of declaring a ceasefire for a number of reasons, one of which is that a ceasefire contains, in principle, the possibility of negotiations about how to bring a permanent end to hostilities. In other words, a ceasefire implies the creation of linkages to a political process.

Israel does not want to engage in a political process for that would threaten its overriding objectives: one, to destroy Hamas, but also, more widely, to pursue ruthlessly the Judaisation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. This policy objective requires, for its fulfilment, the physical expulsion and/or the political neutering of Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The process of violent colonisation, always a feature of Israel’s rule over the OPT, is now, under the cover of the attacks on Gaza, being pursued with still more violent vigour than previously, armed settlers given carte blanche to attack, wound, kill and displace the indigenous Palestinian population.   

West Bank. According to OCHA reports, as at 12 November: Since 7 October, 172 Palestinians, including 46 children, have been killed by Israeli forces; and an additional eight, including one child, have been killed by Israeli settlers in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. Three Israelis have been killed in attacks by Palestinians…. About 59 per cent of the fatalities since 7 October occurred during confrontations that followed Israeli search-and-arrest operations, primarily in Jenin and Tulkarm governorates…Since 7 October, Israeli forces have injured 2,586 Palestinians, including at least 267 children, over half of them in the context of demonstrations. An additional, 74 Palestinians have been injured by settlers. Some 33 per cent of those injuries have been caused by live ammunition. 

In the past 24 hours, Israeli settlers, reportedly from Tappuah, threw stones, physically assaulted and injured three Palestinian farmers, including two women, in the village of Jamma’in (Nablus). 

What’s a pause but continuity confirmed?

The USA and the UK both call for a Humanitarian Pause in Israel’s unrelenting, murderous aggression on Gazans. But what is a pause? What does it actually mean? How long is a pause? And when the pause ends, what then begins?

To pause is nothing more than a temporary interruption of a process already ongoing. By its very nature, ‘pause’ implies continuity.  Israel has agreed to a limited humanitarian pause.  In other words, Israel has confirmed its onslaught will continue. 

Washington is beginning to get a bit nervous about Israel’s behaviour as it sees support for Israel ebbing away in public opinion, and among some Democrats. It also sees that Arab opinion, certainly on the street, is increasingly resistant to cosying-up to Israel. This reverberates among the rulers in the various autocratic, non-democratic Arab states. Support for the Abraham Accords is waning. 

At the same time, the US sees that Israel is a country increasingly out of control, a country that accepts no bounds to its behaviour except when self-interested pragmatism requires it. The US is getting nervous about what will happen in the future when, one way or another, Israel’s military aggression will cease. 

Because the US, and the West more generally, have so thoroughly woven Israel into its security, trade, intelligence, arms development and diplomatic infrastructure, the space that might otherwise have been available for policy change and innovation in the Middle East, along with the capacity to exert significant pressure on Israel, is simply not – currently – available.

Fig leaves

But something must be done. Or, at least, something must be seen to be done. In the absence of any commitment to address fundamentals, a fig leaf, or rather a bunch of fig leaves is required, here to cover an absence, rather than anything substantive. Thus, President Biden avers that ‘there’s no going back to the status quo as it stood on October 6’ and that when the ‘crisis’ is over, there has to be a vision of what comes next, and in our [USA] view it has to be a two-state solution.’  The real purpose of these statements is to provide cover for not doing anything in particular, but under the guise of a seeming commitment to purposeful activity.

Two-states is either an exercise in fantasy – or a prelude to a dystopian future. The fantasy aspect has been addressed by many, my stabs at it can be found here and here. So, no need to repeat.

The dystopian future is one where Palestinians are offered bits of Areas A and B – and therefore to be surrounded and dominated by Israel – that has not the faintest possibility of independent viability. Even to think that the latter could offer a meaningful response to Palestinians’ legitimate desire for self-determination, is to add insult to injury.

So, what happens next?

In an earlier blog article I’ve wondered whether Israel has the internal resources – ethical, psychological, imaginative, political – to reflect upon itself critically; to shed its self-imposed, self-defeating burden of maintaining and justifying a state founded on Jewish Supremacism.  All the indications are that it has not, if ever in recent history it had.

In the next article it’ll be worth exploring Israel’s capacity for self-deception and, from this perspective, how Israel has created for itself what might be characterised as a negative feedback loop, such that it cannot break out of seeing itself as a victim, a self-imposed victimhood that justifies its infringements of the ethical standards it purports to represent.