Category: Israel

‘Come you masters of war’

Remembering Bob Dylan’s song from 1962, Masters of War

So much has been spoken and written in recent days about the American and Israeli actions against Iran, and so much has been foolish. Too often we forget that violence as instrument of state always has vast unintended consequences, and even more so when there is little evidence of any planned outcome or endgame.

Palestine and Gaza are issues of long standing. Wisdom could have brought resolutions, recognising rights and interests on all sides. But any hope of that ended with the rise of Netanyahu. Iran is a vile, repressive, ideology-driven state. Israel not least as an American proxy gave it an external focus. Obama and the EU had an agreement (the JCPOA) to limit Iran’s nuclear ambitions: Trump scrapped it. We moved quickly from a world of attempted conciliation, which is always a long, hard road, to a world where threat is the modus operandi.

Trump in 2016 was a novice, and after 2020 he could have been written off as an aberration. There have been other populists aspiring to power in US history, but they’ve always been seen off. Not this time.

The notion of American exceptionalism is deep-rooted. Obama bought into it. But he saw it as bringing responsibility, not fist-waving, gun-toting belligerence. Seeing yourself as in some way ‘great’ is always a bad idea. Translated to a nation it’s dangerous. Allied to ‘again’ and we’re into wild misreadings of history. Was America greatest in the era of the robber barons, in the late nineteenth century? Or was it the 1920s, before the Wall Street Crash. Or the late 1940s and 1950s, when American beneficence brought restoration after the devastation of world war? Or the 1990s after the fall of the Berlin Wall?

‘Greatness’ as currently manifested (in its MAGA and Heritage Foundation guise) lies in the freedoms of markets and expression. But both are heavily compromised. The US market is anything but free. And power is ever more concentrated. We have the big seven (Apple, Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, Nvidia, Tesla) and a stock market racing ahead fuelled by their AI investments, not least in vast power-hungry datacentres. Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Jensen Huang, enjoy their closeness to power. And their extreme wealth. Power has devolved upwards, and ends with Trump, in whose hands it has an increasingly deranged quality.

Where lies the future? The rules-based order the USA once espoused and help police has had remarkable success. But at the same time it has built up a vast deficit. Chinese investment in Treasury Bonds and elsewhere has funded vast levels of debt. But you could blame the vast appetites of the American consumer for Chinese imports for that. Not an attribution of blame Donald Trump would accept. (So also the extraordinary levels of drug consumption. The Jalisco New Generation Cartel is only a symptom, not the cause. But that’s a subject for another time.)

The USA as it is now is epitomised by the rantings of Trump, but also by Peter Hegseth, who has come from nowhere and now heads the newly-anointed ‘Department of War’. There is for him, for Trump, for the Israeli government, no sense of the value of human life for any nation other than their own. Thousands of deaths are necessary collateral damage. The destruction of a city, of Gaza, and now vast swathes of Iran, is of secondary concern.

Along with nuclear disarmament, now it seems dismissed as a fool’s game, we should be arguing for the banning of all aerial bombardment, other than that of specific military targets. And the routine taking out of heads of state is an appalling idea: once established as a practice government becomes impossible.

That brings is back to the UK and Starmer, limiting the American use of the Diego Garcia bases to defensive operations. That had to be right. But, as the Iranian regime in its death-throe madness aims its missiles and drones at Gulf State targets, the definition of ‘defensive’ has had to expand, maybe to the point of being meaningless – where international law as we’ve understood it becomes irrelevant.

Trump is a pip-squeak in the long sweep of history, just another emperor who would cast off his imperial clothes but found they fit too snugly. The only history Trump connects to is of the shortest – one deal at a time – variety. Short history is also the Heritage Foundation, which is itself a rejection of the notion of progress in human affairs, also in the MAGA movement, but for them at least American responsibility ends at its borders. Trump disavowed external involvement, he was in his eyes a peace-maker, but as we see now it was and is peace guaranteed by war. Aggressors may want peace – but on their own terms.

Short history also exists in a fabled space: it has embedded in it the notion of recurrence. We can, we must, go back to a fabled era. ‘Judaeo-Christian civilisation’ is under threat: we hear this argued on both sides of the Atlantic. And we do indeed need to define that culture, and its freedoms and wide responsibilities, and in its finest forms its embedded compassion and rejection of violence, against other cultures, and not least Islam. But by defacing our own culture, by being violent or abusive in its supposed protection, we only do damage.

The world by arrogance and by sheer foolishness has found itself in the last few days in a terrible place, with outcomes uncertain, and hatred deeper embedded, thousands of lives lost, swathes of territory obliterated, with no possibility of any simple transfer of power to the good guys – not least because, these days, just who are the good guys?

Israel and Gaza – keeping the faith

So much is written about Gaza. I feel outrage, and disbelief. About Hamas and the brutality, and the futility, of its actions. And about Israel’s response, which has directed our focus back in Israel itself. What does it stand for?

Zionist ideas going back to Theodor Herzl are interwoven with a sense not just of a physical return to the Land of Israel (Eretz Israel) but of a spiritual and territorial revival of the old biblical, pre-diaspora Israel. This isn’t the modern Israel we in Europe supported. But it is the Israel of Netanyahu, Ben-Givr and Smotrich. It is also it seems the Israel of Trump’s born-again-Christian ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee. He recently visited a Christian church in the West Bank which had been attacked by Jewish settlers. He protested. But attacks on Palestinian Arabs are condoned. It is as if it’s they who are the occupiers of Jewish land, of the territories Huckabee and the Israeli government describe as, using their biblical names, Judea and Samaria.

I have always been pro-Jewish. I cannot emphasise that more strongly. My academic heroes and indeed teachers were Jewish. I never made distinctions between Jew and Gentile. The Old Testament, ‘Old’ as Christians see it, has been and is a primer for life, with God and without, as well being both magical story and superlative historical document. For my father freemasonry brought Christian and Jew together in Manchester in the 1930s and later decades. I remember reading, as maybe a ten-year-old child, a story about 1948 and Israel’s fight for and achievement of independence. Only later did I learn about the nakba (the mass displacement of Palestinians in 1948) and take on board the other side of the story. Later, in my twenties, Martin Buber became one of my heroes, for his books ‘I and Thou’, life lessons that have stayed with me, and the wonderful ‘Tales of the Hasidism’, and for his advocacy back in the 1930s of a bi-national, Israel and Palestine, solution.

Yesterday I watched footage, on Channel Four, from the West Bank, of settlers fencing off land owned by a Palestinian Arab farmer and, when he tried to stop them, a settler shooting him in the leg. The farmer’s son recorded the incident on his mobile phone.  Settlers are allowed to carry guns. The farmer had a leg amputated. He’s now back defending his land.

Two days ago I learnt of the death of an Al Jazeera journalist and his team in Gaza. The Israelis did not mind taking out five others if they got their man, Anas Al-Sharif. They claim to have documents linking him to Hamas and missile campaigns against Israel. But they won’t answers questions. They can’t produce the documents. Journalists are excluded from Gaza. We are left to conclude that Israel’s claims are specious. And they don’t care. They are, it seems, past caring, locked in their own doom-loop. Al-Sharif reported from  his tent, his home having been bombed, on the day-to-day reality of Israel’s bombardment. We need to hear what he had to say.

In this week of anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki we’re reminded of the terrible realities of destruction from the air. Israel’s destruction of Gaza has been measured, deliberate, and slow, and no less terrible for that. And yet we feel some residual moral obligation to support Israel. And that compromises our position when we oppose the brutalities of Vladimir Putin, also the SAF (government) and RSF (rebel) forces in Sudan, and the army junta in Myanmar. There is a deep cynicism in the way Netanyahu’s government turns that obligation to their advantage.

Israel in the years up to the Likud victory 1977 still had its pioneering spirit. That I could connect to. In the Six-Day and Yom Kippur Wars it was fighting for its survival. That was enough to overcome any ambivalence I felt. This was what I’d characterise as the old Israel. I could connect to its passion, and to its genius. Friends who worked on kibbutzim came back with good stories.

Yes, we could be accused of romanticising Israel. We weren’t to know how terrible the consequences of the continued occupation of Jordanian and Egyptian lands after 1967 might be. That opened floodgates for which there is no sign of any closure. But the old Israel I know is still there, it was in its own way an inspiration to us back then, and we lose too much if we lose it, vexed and violent though its origins were.

As for the ‘new Israel’ of Netanyahu, Ben Givr and Smotrich, of Judea and Samaria as they would rename Palestinian territory, they have nothing to offer the world. Only their hatreds.  And they have turned the current conflict into, as now it seems a majority of Israelis see it, a battle for their nation’s very survival.

The forces of hatred are not yet spent. We as outsiders might long for a pragmatic solution but by its nature pragmatism cannot be imposed. Like Keir Starmer I want to see Palestine independence recognised but wonder also what good it might do and how might Hamas be excluded. Would it be no more than a token gesture? With Trump dictating our response we are little more than straws waving in the wind.  

But we must keep the faith. In a very literal sense – Christian and Jewish. We need both.