By Jagdish Rattanani
It is now exactly one year since the Hamas attack on Israel and the fierce and wild response from Israeli forces with a scale of revenge killing that has alarmed and horrified the global community, and shows no sign of stopping. Israel says the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023, killed some 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals, and took 250 hostages, about 96 of them still held captive by Hamas forces in Gaza. In return, the Israeli onslaught since then has killed (as of June 19, 2024) as many as 37,396 people in the Gaza Strip, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, as reported by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. The Lancet magazine notes that the Ministry’s figures have been contested by the Israeli authorities, although they have been accepted as accurate by Israeli intelligence services, the UN, and WHO.
The full horror of this massive scale of human killing is already the worst in recent human history. In a report published Sep. 30, Oxfam International notes that more than 6,000 women and 11,000 children were killed in Gaza by the Israeli military over the last 12 months. No other conflict in the last 18 years covered by the UN reports on Children and Armed Conflict killed a higher number of children in one year, Oxfam said. Yet, the Israeli Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the UN General Assembly just last week (Sep.27): “I decided to come here to … speak for the truth. And here’s the truth: Israel seeks peace. Israel yearns for peace. Israel has made peace and will make peace again.” It is said experience teaches, shapes and moulds future actions, often for the better. In that sense, experience is good to have. But the German scientist and poet Goethe famously noted that experience is only half the experience. The other half is how we read it, interpret it and suffuse it with our own meanings. A person with the unfortunate experience of growing up amid violence may reject violence, having seen the misery it brings, or, indeed, may end up believing that violence is the only way the world moves. So, experience can work either way — for the good or for the worse.
In the case of the State of Israel, it has clearly worked for the worse. A nation full of people who suffered horrific savagery during the Holocaust has become a nation that is the source of horrific savagery with its relentless battles that now threatens to grow into a much bigger war in the region. The consequences are impossible to imagine. We do not yet know where this will lead. But the one question that can be asked and answered clearly is this: Is Israel any safer than it was before this killing spree? Will Israel ever find peace after the blood it has spilled and the way its military has been responsible for killing more than 17,000 women and children? Oxfam lays out the horror in its Sep.30 by citing records that though not comprehensive show that Israeli explosive weapons hit on average homes every four hours, tents and temporary shelters every 17 hours, schools and hospitals every four days, and aid distribution points and warehouses every 15 days.
In fact, the offensive since the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7 last year has exposed Israel like never before as a State that knows no limits, is unmindful of boundaries let alone humanity. This will sooner than later force a rethink in key sections of the US-led Western axis that provides the money and the weapons that Israel has used to unleash terror and rain death among innocent citizens in Gaza. It is in this context that the remarks of the French President Emmanuel Macron are significant. Over the weekend, Macron called for a halt on arms deliveries to Israel for use in Gaza, saying that “the priority is that we return to a political solution, that we stop delivering weapons to fight in Gaza”. The remarks came to France’s Inter-Radio soon after a summit in Paris where the French president reiterated his concern over the conflict in Gaza continuing despite ceasefire calls, and criticised Israel’s decision to send ground troops into Lebanon, according to the BBC.
The futility of all this violence is plain for anyone to see. Israel gloats over pager bombs that open a new and deadly theatre of war that others can enter into, obliterating the boundaries between civilian and military targets. Turning everyday devices into terror bombs lowers the monetary cost of waging war and makes it tempting for all manner of non-State actors to play this deadly game. In that, this is a war that the State is waging against itself, plagued by the mistaken thought that violence will deliver peace. In the eyes of Israel, the killing of the Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah is a huge victory. But who, after all, is Nasrallah, if not the successor to those exterminated by Israel, notably Abbas-al-Musawi of Hezbollah who was assassinated in 1992. A decade earlier, in June 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon to put an end to the Palestine Liberation Organisation, the PLO. One outcome of that was the birth of Hezbollah, and the Intifada uprising that came later.
Today, Israel is farther away than ever from securing its borders. The Jews have always had regard for Mahatma Gandhi. In his ‘Harijan’ magazine of 26 November 1938, the Mahatma wrote these words about Hitler and the Holocaust: “Germany is showing to the world how efficiently violence can be worked when it is not hampered by any hypocrisy or weakness masquerading as humanitarianism. It is also showing how hideous, terrible and terrifying it looks in its nakedness.” Can these words not apply to the Israel of today? And that in itself tells us how much Israel has fallen.
(The writer is a journalist and faculty member at SPJIMR. Views are personal) (Through The Billion Press) (e-mail: [email protected])