Gaza & Israel: another war to end all wars?

Note: I have rewritten this piece, given that it originally contained references to the Holocaust and the Shoah which were both inaccurate and insensitive 

Gaza: pity the children

All my life as a thinking adult – immature at first, leading now to some semblance of maturity – I have hoped for peace in the Middle East. Ah, blind fool and ingénue that I have been! I might as well have been eyeless in Gaza, limbless in Aleppo, headless in Mosul . . . “The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small.” Well, the stones of Syria grind exceeding fast. As for Gaza, is it has just suffered a second pulverization. When Israel is angry it destroys the infrastructure of its enemies – in Lebanon as in Gaza; and the heart of Netanyahu is set in stone. This intransigent man was always a danger, and it was a black day for Israel and its neighbours when he came to power.  

I do not condone any acts of terrorism by any group. It is true that Hamas deliberately provokes, yet ninety–nine per cent of its pathetic rockets are dealt with by the Iron Dome; and fighters emerging from the Hamas tunnels are killed with almost unerring accuracy. And then one Israeli soldier is presumed captured, and Israel goes practically insane with a retaliation that further traumatises countless Gazan civilians (hammering hatred into the young: cutting off the heads of the fabled but deadly Hydra). It is all too much – truth to tell it already was in the last two wars in the Lebanon and Gaza (and Lebanon was crushed over the heads of the legitimate enemy, Hezbollah). The world has lost patience; I have lost patience. The illegal settlements are spread – as I cannot help but see it – as a deliberate strategy: to make any Palestinian state worth little more than an olive tree whose crop is too poor for the market. Yes, the suicide bus bombings – which reached their peak in 2002 – made me sick to the stomach (as did the IRA bombings of the 1970s). All of these acts were evil (those historically of Irgun included). Well, here is something: all of these actions were vitiated by the belief that it is acceptable to kill innocent people for some greater purpose. But then, as we know, people do not care much for one another – some people, that is. “And what about the bombing of Hamburg?” I hear you ask. Well, there was a holocaust: and we have a statue of “Bomber Harris” – how truly wonderful that is. Melt it down, I would be inclined to say (but please do not turn it into ploughshares, because they would forever have about them a charred corpse–like quality: that deep bitterness instilled daily into the souls of so many by the utter futility of war; and of visits to the charnel house so frequent that hope runs dry in the sands of despair). Still, the manufacture of weapons is good for business, is it not? And, as the honourable Baroness Varsi says, having supplied the killing machines – ‘defence weapons’, that is – we then send out doctors and medical supplies to attempt to treat those who have been injured by the very weapons that we – and the usa – have supplied.  Vested interests rule the day, and

. . . the grim wolf with privy paw 
Daily devours apace, and nothing said; 

Anti–Semitism still runs deep under the surface in Europe – as elsewhere – and at the moment this gross tumour of the mind is finding plenty of fuel to keep it bright and burning. The world, it seems, is abandoned to the actions of human beings – and the omens are not good. 

As for a moral compass, every time we forget Kant’s Groundwork to a Metaphysics of Morals we will go astray. Almost everything we need to know is in that book (even though we should not go as far as telling the truth to the famous ‘axe–murderer’).