A year on

Look; just look

Start writing, it says here, so that is what I am doing. I am starting writing, but I really don’t know how I will finish. Whether I’ll ever stop writing, for one. And, for another, how I will end this piece.

One year into the Russo-Ukrainian war, I wrote a piece that sought to condense my feelings, though I truly never imagined that the war would still be ongoing at the present time. You can read it here:

A young Russian borstal boy looks defiantly into the camera lens.

The world’s press has commemorated this day, the Seventh of October, with titles that evoke how it feels to be Jewish in Britain, asking how much more we must yet see of the horrors, now not only in Gaza but elsewhere in the territories unlawfully occupied by Israel, and pointing to the complicity of high officials in the US, like Antony Blinken and Joseph Biden, in condoning the atrocities carried out in the name of the State of Israel. We are one year on from the Hamas attacks on southern Israel of Saturday, 7 October 2023. The death toll among Palestinians alone is well in excess of 40,000, in response to 1,200 Israeli deaths on that day, and 251 hostages.

Whilst one condemns the unilateral action by Hamas, it is shortsighted to label it as unprovoked. The policy pursued over many years by Israel of mowing the grass, has led to far more deaths among Gazan Palestinians than there were Israelis killed on 7 October. An estimated 1,166 to 1,417 Palestinians died in Operation Cast Lead in 2008-09 alone, an operation intended to reduce exposure to possible militant action on the part of Hamas against Israeli citizens, and sending a message of dissuasion from any aggressive action by Palestine against the Israeli State. One is inclined to the view that these mowing operations (there have been others) not only didn’t work, they may well have had an effect contrary to that which the Israeli leadership had intended.

Exiled Israeli philosopher Norman Finkelstein draws a parallel to when southern slaves mutinied against their owners and slaughtered 60 or so whites in the 19th century: if one keeps human beings in captivity, it is nothing less than understandable that they should take every opportunity that presents itself to them to strike out at their captors. Finkelstein understands that and I sympathise with his view, but it cuts no ice with the leadership of the Israeli State, and I wonder why that is.