Antinuclear

Wars end in defeat for everyone: A reflection on Gaza

The selection of images is at the heart of the implacable demand from both sides for uncritical solidarity, for support for the right to self-defense and legitimation of the means used against the other. In this battle for public opinion, many stand with Israel and many others with the Palestinians.

The portrayal of the other side as demonic justifies the means used to fight it. The enemy is dehumanized, commonly likened to savage animals that have lost any shadow of humanity, morality or logic, killing machines that can only be stopped by brutal and merciless war.

Violence and victory

Fed by what seems like an unquenchable thirst for revenge, both sides to the conflict propose that violence will bring victory. The belief that victory is attainable by defeating the enemy in pitiless warfare is at the heart of the rhetoric of war. This is perhaps the most venomous myth in any conflict.

America, the Jesuit Review David Neuhaus, November 16, 2023

In the early morning of Saturday, Oct. 7, 2023, for Jews not only Sabbath but also Simchat Torah, a holy day celebrating the reading of the Torah, hundreds of armed Palestinian militants from Hamas broke through the barriers between the Gaza Strip and Israel or floated above them, pouring into Israel. They were accompanied by a barrage of missiles fired into Israel. They sowed terror and wreaked havoc, killing about 1,200, wounding thousands more and kidnapping over 240 Israeli soldiers and civilians.

The planning, implementation and ferocity of the attack took Israel by surprise—not only because Israeli intelligence had not uncovered the plot beforehand but also because the army took such a long time to neutralize the threat. Israelis were left shocked and horrified, while many Palestinians watched with a certain sense of vindication and some even rejoiced. Israel immediately responded with an intensive bombardment of Gaza, calling up its military reserves and massing its troops on the border with Gaza. The pounding intensity of the Israeli response was not only a reaction to the horrors that had been committed but also an attempt to restore some sense of security in military superiority after the shameful negligence that had allowed the attacks to take place.

The next day, Sunday, Oct. 8, Pope Francis addressed the world in his Angelus address:

I am following apprehensively and sorrowfully what is happening in Israel where violence has exploded yet more ferociously, causing hundreds of deaths and injured. I express my closeness to the families of the victims. I am praying for them and for all who are living hours of terror and anguish. May the attacks and weapons stop. Please! And may it be understood that terrorism and war do not lead to any resolutions, but only to the death and suffering of many innocent people. War is a defeat! Every war is a defeat. Let us pray that there be peace in Israel and in Palestine.

The Israeli Embassy to the Holy See reacted to this statement and those that followed with unease, claiming that the Holy Father and Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Holy See’s secretary of state, were using a discourse that manifested “linguistic ambiguities and terms that allude to a false symmetry.” In insisting that Israel had a legitimate right to self-defense but should not indiscriminately bomb Gaza, the Holy See, the Israeli Embassy argued, was “suggesting parallelisms where they do not exist.”

The issue raised is a serious one. What language should one use to talk about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? This is especially urgent at this time when the conflict takes on dimensions of violence that are unprecedented and emotions run high. How does one try to formulate a discourse that can encourage moderation, support dialogue and promote reconciliation even in the midst of battle? The issues involved are complex, but one must first recognize the morally problematic discourse that is being used by both sides in the conflict in order to dominate the narrative and garner uncritical support.

Whose side are you on?

The two sides to the decades-long conflict, Israelis and Palestinians, not only oppose each other with military arsenals but also attempt to mobilize public opinion at home and abroad in order to justify their actions. The military battle is parallel to the battle to control the images, sounds and words that are broadcast from the battlefield.

On the one hand, terrifying images of armed and masked Hamas militants pouring into Israel and wreaking destruction, killing, raping and maiming in a drunken orgy of vengeance began to appear in the media. These images capture the massacres of the Israeli men, women and children who were mowed down in the area bordering the Gaza Strip, among them hundreds of young people killed while at a music festival and dozens slaughtered, including babies in their cribs, in the taking of the small village of Kfar Aza. The scenes show bodies strewn in public places and in homes, with countless body bags displayed for all to see the enormity of the carnage. Photographs and short videos document the elderly women and young children taken hostage by Hamas, dragged back into the Gaza Strip together with dozens of others, provoking profound terror and searing rage.

On the other hand, Israel’s pummeling of the Gaza Strip with its sophisticated armory of precision weapons has provided a parallel and very different canon of images. Neighborhoods have been erased and high-rise buildings reduced to rubble in seconds, with thousands of Gazan men, women and children buried in the ruins. Hundreds of thousands of Gazans fleeing their homes provide more images of panic and desperation. On Oct. 13, the Israeli army ordered Gazans to evacuate the entire northern part of the Gaza Strip. Images of the flow of people carrying a few precious belongings added to the collection of heart-rending scenes.

The military battle is parallel to the battle to control the images, sounds and words that are broadcast from the battlefield.

This roll of images shows daily the extraction of an unending stream of bodies of men, women and children from their bombed homes, the writhing agony of the wounded carried off to overcrowded, underdeveloped and grossly overloaded hospitals, the non-stop shrieks of parents or children of the dead, their relatives and friends, gathered around the corpses of their loved ones.

The selection of images is at the heart of the implacable demand from both sides for uncritical solidarity, for support for the right to self-defense and legitimation of the means used against the other. In this battle for public opinion, many stand with Israel and many others with the Palestinians.

In the aftermath of the initial Hamas attack, President Biden declared that his country’s support for Israel was “rock solid and unwavering.” Leaders from major Western European countries followed suit. Israeli suffering was showcased to explain these unilateral manifestations of support. Israeli victims have names, faces, families and voices that cry out their pain in the media. Massive demonstrations have supported Israel, screaming out their condemnation of Hamas, some using expressions redolent of racism, anti-Arab sentiment and Islamophobia.

Palestinian suffering, although seemingly passed over by those who support Israel, is showcased in Arab, Muslim and many other countries, again galvanizing the sense that the world is unjust, that the powerful side with the powerful and the poor continue to be mercilessly exploited. Massive demonstrations of supporters of the Palestinians screamed out their condemnation of Israel, some using expressions redolent of antisemitism, and manifested a fury at what was termed the hypocrisy of mourning Jewish victims and ignoring Palestinian ones.

Who started it?

Israelis and Palestinians produce very different narratives concerning who is to blame for what is happening. In times of war, it is comforting to know who are the good and who are the bad; that way, the aggressor and the aggressed can be clearly separated from one another, one cheered on and the other excoriated.

On Oct. 7, Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel, proclaimed: “We will take mighty vengeance,” as Israel launched its military campaign, named “Operation Swords of Iron.” For those supporting Israel, it is clear that the narrative begins on that black Saturday morning. Israeli President Isaac Herzog stated the following in his meeting with the press on October 12 : “There was no reason at all for this flaring up which ended in the worst tragedy that was ever inflicted in the history of Israel, and the highest number of Jews killed since the Holocaust, including Holocaust survivors

………………………………………………………… . The proportions of what happened on Oct. 7, however, not only raised a very acute question about the invincibility of Israel’s military and intelligence network but also raised the terrifying question about whether the state of Israel is after all a safe haven for Jews fleeing violence in a world in which they were a marginal and often persecuted minority.

Muhammad Dayf, the supreme commander of Hamas’s military wing, named this stage of the ongoing conflict “Al-Aqsa Storm” and declared: “Enough is enough!” Hamas declared that this incursion into Israel was itself a response to an ongoing occupation and repression that have been going on for decades. More precisely, Palestinians pointed to increasing Israeli attacks and repressive policies directed against Palestinians throughout the territories Israel had occupied since the Netanyahu rightwing coalition came to power, as well as the intensifying activity of Jewish extremists in the area of Jerusalem’s Haram al-Sharif (what Jews often call the Temple Mount). For those supporting the Palestinians, the success of Hamas’s attack surprised them as much as it did Israel. Well planned, well executed and devastatingly successful in its initial aims, the attack is not seen as a beginning but as a response to a long series of Israeli acts of violence.

Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, said a few days before the present events that the Gaza Strip was “an open-air prison.”

The attack is justified by Hamas supporters as a reaction to the regime that has kept them enclosed in an overpopulated strip of land, mostly filled with sprawling refugee camps; Israel, they argue, has kept the Gaza Strip under a stranglehold siege. Refugees in Gaza constitute about 70 percent of the population, people driven out of the territories of the new state of Israel in 1948 and their descendants. The dire living conditions since then, worsened by periodic periods of confrontation with Israel since Hamas came to power in 2006, have left it battered and bruised, its population bleeding and its infrastructure regularly devastated. Furthermore, since 2006, the strip has been under a siege that deprives its residents of minimal conditions for life, prosperity and development. The newly-instituted Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, whose diocese includes Gaza, said a few days before the present events that the Gaza Strip was “an open-air prison.”

……………………………………………………………………………… The two sides are eager to show the other as demonic.

The Israeli point of view

In the media battle, supporters of Israel portray Hamas as Nazis, as ISIS, as servants of the evil empire of Islamic Iran. The use of images of some Palestinians rejoicing in the horrors visited upon Israelis solidifies the sense of horror and the contempt. Supporters of Israel point out that the people of Gaza elected Hamas and so argue that they are responsible for their own misfortune. Pointing to the long history of antisemitism and contempt for Jews in so many parts of the world, supporters of Israel present Israelis as the victims of unprovoked violence at the hands of bloodthirsty Palestinian terrorists, continuity in the suffering of the Jews throughout history.

……………………………………………………………………………………………. In the light of the fight against evil, the divisions that marked Israeli society in the past months have evaporated. Furthermore, the marked reservations that the Biden administration expressed with regard to Mr. Netanyahu and his right-wing coalition have also vanished, as Mr. Biden not only regularly calls in to express his support for Israel but also sends a steady stream of officials to manifest that support concretely, bringing assurances of diplomatic, military and economic assistance.

The Palestinian point of view

However, in the Arab and Muslim worlds and in many countries that have known colonialism, racism and exclusion, the Palestinians have succeeded in linking their struggle to a worldwide liberation struggle against colonialism, imperialism and white supremacy. Israelis are presented as colonial supremacists engaged in decades of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their homeland. Hamas justifies the cruelty of its militants by portraying Israelis as colonial settlers whose only interest is the oppression and eventual extinction of Palestinians. Hamas has explained that it does not target civilians, chillingly adding that the elderly, babies, children and youth are all part of the colonial Zionist project to deprive Palestinians of their rights and banish them from the stage of history.

The portrayal of the other side as demonic justifies the means used to fight it. The enemy is dehumanized, commonly likened to savage animals that have lost any shadow of humanity, morality or logic, killing machines that can only be stopped by brutal and merciless war.

Violence and victory

Fed by what seems like an unquenchable thirst for revenge, both sides to the conflict propose that violence will bring victory. The belief that victory is attainable by defeating the enemy in pitiless warfare is at the heart of the rhetoric of war. This is perhaps the most venomous myth in any conflict.

……………………………………………… . Might the intensity of the present conflict and the terrible losses on both sides take us beyond the horizon of endless war with a growing recognition that victory is illusive and continued violence is ultimately suicidal?

The word of the church

The international community seems to have given up on trying to play a moderating role in the conflict, and those peace plans that were proposed by various international parties have gone nowhere…………………………………………………………..

In this context, the presence of the Catholic Church is particularly needed. Free of the constraints of political interests and avoiding as much as possible the games of international diplomacy, the church can be prophetic in reminding all that every human being—yes, even a Hamas militant or a Zionist settler—is created in the image and likeness of God. 

………………………………………….. In a dramatic response to a question from a journalist, Cardinal Pizzaballa offered himself in exchange for the Israeli children held hostage by Hamas. In solidarity with the suffering, he would no doubt also offer himself in exchange for the Palestinian children buried under the bombs dropped in Gaza. In a letter he addressed to the faithful on Oct. 24, 2023, Cardinal Pizzaballa expressed his anguish:……………………………………………………………………………………………. more https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2023/11/16/gaza-israel-palestine-war-narratives-246530?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2928&pnespid=vag3FzocbKcfiuORqCylQp_J5RnxT4Jqd.rsx7th9gNmlvjlt_Lr8Z_7o_sm2symfUDQ03iQFg

November 18, 2023 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized