Israel and Palestine: 10 October 2023

I look on, once more, in horror.

I look away in disgust. Another round of violence, another stain on our collective humanity.

A few things bear repeating – though I grow weary of doing so.

And why should I, in Belgium, or anyone anywhere, repeat the self-evident, let alone attempt to do more than scratch the surface of stale cliché?

To that question, I venture: in today's world, there is no 'there'. There is no 'them', far away; none of our business.

History entangles all. Long ago trespasses are never long enough ago to shrug off someone else's business.

The world has shrunk not just in place, but also in time. 1933, 1945, 1956, 1967, 1973 are all on 2023's doorstep.

Germans will hate to hear this, but we ARE responsible for our parents' parents' transgressions if we don't endeavour to righten their consequences today.

The things that bear repeating then:

No crime, however horrific, justifies another.

Theft doesn't justify counter-theft.

A massacre doesn't legitimise a single murder.

Genocide does not excuse counter-slaughter, no matter the scale of either.

To my Israeli and Palestinian friends, I regret to inform you:

You are not special. Sorry.

The holocaust, though by far the most egregious instance of genocide humans have concocted to date, was not the first, nor the last, attempt at wiping a particular group of people off the face of our beautiful, cruel planet.

The occupation of Palestinian land and people, their dispossession and corralling, daily humiliation, murder, the locking away of thousands without due justice, is not the only ongoing colonisation; the elbowing out of a native people by more recent arrivals. Ukraine anyone?

Inhabitants of many Balkan countries will tell you as much: massacre upon massacre, 'theirs' always worse than 'ours', one side always wrong, outsiders - by attempting mediation or mere comment - always betraying core 'truths' only the involved parties can truly understand. Or worse: stupidly shrugging, ascribing the situation to "peoples who are just wired this or that way, condemned by history to one bloody Groundhog Day after the next.

These two facts, the holocaust and the occupation, are not mathematical equivalents. Humans are not numbers.

But they are undeniably linked, which makes it our shared responsibility: meaning mainly Europe and the US.

What will we, or those who represent us, do?

So far, the answer has been rather disappointing. We fly Israeli flags, as if the conflict started yesterday, out of the blue and white. As if it will expunge the sin of genocide that will stick to the old continent's spiritual fabric until the end of time. Ursula (minor) interprets being 'a friend of Israel' as condoning carpet-bombing a post stamp inhabited by 2 million humans – none of whom have voted for their current 'administration'. Friends don't let friends drive drunk, or go to war grief-stricken, fuelled by revenge, aiming to 'change the Middle East', whatever Netanyahu meant by that. Those proponents of Palestinian self-determination who overlook the indiscriminate killing spree of women and children and revellers at a music festival do the cause ill justice, or worse, have ulterior motives – just as many European extremist politicians espouse pro-Israel views to quench their constituents' anti-muslim obsession.

What should be clear to anyone with an iota of sense is that the status quo is untenable. The Israeli blockade of Gaza, the grinding down of its population to Afghanistan-level deprivation, the subjugation of West-Bank Palestinians to martial law, 56 years and counting, will lead to ever-grander conflagrations. No wall is ever high enough to contain resourceful desperation. I'll go you one further. The separation wall is a sham. Thousands of Palestinian workers cross this 'impenetrable barrier' every day. The Israeli economy depends on their cheap labour. It is, in other words, as leakproof as a coffee filter, and always will be.

Whither hence?

The Balkan wars ended because an outside power intervened. The Irish civil war ended on a word from Washington, not Belfast or Dublin.

So too, actual friends of Israel; not fundamentalist Christians who seek rapture, actual friends of Palestinians; not geo-strategic schemers in Tehran, should step in.

The occupation must end. That means the Israeli army ceases to determine the lives of Palestinian civilians. Fear of the next rocket barrage, tunnelling or paragliding murderers, should no longer paralyse Israeli citizens. The Israeli army is clearly unable to keep Israeli civilians safe. Nor should it rule over the daily lives of Palestinian civilians. (The Palestinian authority, like the separation fence, has all the sovereignty of your average municipality. It is in other words, like the separation fence, a sham.)

There are limited ways of achieving this. The first is to establish two states between the Mediterranean coast and the River Jordan. A Solomon's judgment if you will. This was the premise of the 1993 Oslo accords: Palestinians rule themselves in Gaza, East-Jerusalem, and the West Bank. Israel keeps the rest. While the evacuation of 270.000 Jewish settlers could be thought of as necessary, painful, but achievable in 1993, doing the same to the 700.000 Israelis living there today seems all but impossible. Lip service to this two-state solution, as the international community continues to do, has become an Orwellian fig leaf, an excuse to do nothing at all.

The alternative, quietly espoused by many Israelis, is to simply remove Palestinians from the equation. This 'population transfer' across the river Jordan and into the Sinai has never strayed far from mainstream thought; a means to 'finish the job' started in 1948. It could be achieved, some hope, under the cover of a horrific enough provocation. Similarly, liberating all of Palestine, 'from the river to the sea' just happens to be the dream of many Palestinians. Funny, that, no?

No, of course it isn't. Removing civilians, by truck or bullet, is a war crime. Remember, friends don't let friends commit atrocities.

If separation isn't possible, can we in stead envisage separating both groups from each other's clutches? But not remove people from their homes?

What seems unthinkable today has long been achieved in many other countries: equal rights for all the inhabitants of the areas the Israeli army controls today. One person, one vote. Every crime deliberated by the same kind of judges: no one living under military rule. It sounds deceptively simple, though the practical implication shouldn't be much more complex than, I dunno, Belgium? Or Switzerland? The thing is, it doesn't have to be simple. An iPhone isn't simple, but it works brilliantly. If the warring parties, occupier and occupied, cannot extricate themselves from the cycle of violence, others should step in. If Europe and the US fail to live up to the minimal definition of the word 'friend', perhaps rising powers further afield will fill the vacuum. We flatter ourselves thinking an edict, issued with a yawn from Beijing, will carry (even) less moral weight than so many vacuous mumblings heard in Washington or Brussels.