An Unending Nightmare.

Hate Will Find A Way: Historians divide into those who see Zionism as the only sane answer to the Jews’ historic vulnerability; and those who regard the Zionist “entity” as a purely colonial construct, founded in racism and shrouded in mythology. The moralists of both camps, meanwhile, demonstrate a capacity for joint-cracking contortions calculated to make a circus impresario’s mouth water.

ACROSS THE WORLD, Jews and Palestinians have been remembering the events of 7 October 2023 in very different ways. Israelis, still traumatised by the savagery of Hamas’s pogrom, struggle to visualise a purposeful future unmediated by the contradictory impulses of vengeance and security. The Palestinians of Gaza, shattered and broken by Israel’s relentless bombardment, sustain themselves with a potent mixture of indignation and hate – brewed in the caldron of their unending national nightmare.

The rest of the world has fallen in behind the flags of these bitter antagonists, each side decrying the dangerous “disinformation” of the other. Historians divide into those who see Zionism as the only sane answer to the Jews’ historic vulnerability; and those who regard the Zionist “entity” as a purely colonial construct, founded in racism and shrouded in mythology. The moralists of both camps, meanwhile, demonstrate a capacity for joint-cracking contortions calculated to make a circus impresario’s mouth water.

Perhaps the smallest group, after twelve months of blood, fire, and torment, are the optimists. These brave (or idiotic) souls still insist that a “two-state solution” is the only viable way out of the unceasing tragedy that is Israel/Palestine. As if 7 October 2023, and its aftermath, can somehow be set aside. As if the trauma-stricken judgement of Israelis and Palestinians can somehow be rendered sufficiently calm and dispassionate to envisage something other than the utter annihilation of the national enemy.

What, then, is the solution to this, the Devil’s own most treasured problem? Given its constitutive role in the Israel/Palestine impasse, history may not be the most obvious of guides. But, where else can we turn? There is no war in the present that was not conceived, and brought to term, in the past. What the world has been watching these past twelve months is nothing that the world hasn’t witnessed many, many times before.

In spite of appearances, no conflict is endless. Wars end. Peace is restored. How?

Let’s begin in the aftermath of the First World War. The Ottoman Empire lies in ruins. Far away, in the commune of Sèvres, on the outskirts of Paris, the victors have drawn up a treaty which shares what’s left of the Ottoman possessions (after the territories agreed upon by Monsieur Picot and Mr Sykes have been deducted) between France, Britain, Italy and Greece.

Encouraged by the British prime minister, David Lloyd-George, who dreamed, madly, of resurrecting Byzantium, the Greeks did their best to oblige him.

Mustapha Kemal, whom New Zealanders had learned to fear at Gallipoli, was having none of it. His Turkish troops drove the Greek invaders, quite literally, into the sea. But, not before the contending armies’ Muslim and Christian commanders had distinguished themselves by permitting/encouraging multiple atrocities against the inhabitants of the helpless faith communities their forces over-ran.

A new, and much revised, treaty having been signed and sealed, this time in the Swiss city of Lausanne, Kemal turned to the problem of what to do with all the Greeks who continued to live in his new Republic of Turkey (now Türkiye).

Too much blood had flowed under too many bridges for Turks and Greeks to co-exist peacefully, as they had done for centuries under the Ottomans.

Ever the ruthless problem-solver, Kemal determined to rid his new republic of Greeks – quietly encouraging the defeated Greeks to rid their own kingdom of Turks at the same time. The human-beings caught up in this first example of “ethnic cleansing” got no say in the matter. They were simply ordered to leave. Enterprising tourists can still visit the decaying ruins of settlements from which Christian Greeks and Muslim Turks were summarily uprooted and deported in the 1920s.

So successful was Kemal’s “solution”, that the victorious allies of World War II adopted it as the most efficient means of emptying the states of Eastern Europe of their numerous German-speaking communities. With the example of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland before them, the Allies were in no mood to burden the region’s future with the witches’ brew of ethno-nationalism. The victims of Nazi oppression watched with cold eyes as millions of “displaced” Germans trudged westward. Few tears were shed.

The Palestinians insist that, in 1948, they, too, became the victims of ethnic cleansing. If true, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Israelis made an uncharacteristically poor job of it.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 11 October 2024.

The Right Move Against Hamas Was Not To Make One.

“Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.” - Sun Tzu (544 ─ 496BC)

ISRAEL’S LEGAL RIGHT to strike back at Hamas is unchallengeable. No nation, having suffered the sort of horrific attack unleashed upon Israel by Hamas terrorists on 7 October 2023, is ever going to be convicted in an international court of law for defending itself. It is the nature of Israel’s retaliation that is challengeable. In war, doing precisely what your enemy expects you to do is never a good idea. By responding to the 7 October attack in precisely the way Hamas anticipated, Israel has allowed the terrorists’ long-planned (and far more important) propaganda offensive to build and strengthen the pro-Palestinian Cause.

That Benjamin Netanyahu was Israel’s Prime Minister on 7 October was of enormous importance to the success of Hamas’ plans. With the survival of the Likud Party-led Israeli Government in the hands of its much smaller coalition partners – all of them murderously Zionistic – there was no way Netanyahu could have responded to Hamas with anything other than overwhelming military force. The only strategy acceptable to Netanyahu and his allies was the one which called for the utter annihilation of Hamas. If Israel had opted to do something else, then Hamas would have been bitterly disappointed – and thoroughly alarmed.

The massive propaganda effort which sprang into action the moment the Gaza fence came down and Israeli citizens began to die, depended absolutely on the screens of the world fast filling up with gruesome images of Palestinians (their children especially) being killed and maimed by Israeli shells, bombs and missiles. These would be the cue for Palestinian apologists all across the West to start talking about “disproportionate responses”, or, more simply, “genocide”.

Many of these defenders of “Palestine” would be well aware that the charge of disproportionality, when used in such a context, does not mean that one side, having killed roughly as many people as the other, is legally obliged to cease and desist. What must be proportionate, under international law, is the nation state’s response to the initial attack. By this measure, Israel’s response to the horrors of 7 October was unquestionably proportionate.

Those who challenge the assertion, should ask themselves how the United Kingdom, Canada or Australia would respond if thousands of their citizens were raped, tortured, shot, stabbed, and burned alive by enemy forces located within the operational reach of their armed forces. Can there be any doubt that their armies, navies and air forces would have been unleashed upon these enemy forces?

And, if those same enemies attempted to avoid the just retribution that was heading their way by situating their military personnel and resources in or below civilian structures, and by using the bodies of their own citizens as human shields (a war crime, by the way) can there be any doubt that the British, Canadian and Australian forces would not have allowed themselves a moment's hesitation before sending their ordnance to blow every living thing within its range to Kingdom Come?

As it says in the Bible: “He who sows the wind, shall reap the whirlwind.”

But the “useful idiots” who fling a Keffiyeh around their shoulders and recite the annihilationist Palestinian mantra: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!”; are not influenced in the slightest by such counterfactuals. They are living proof of the saying that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing; and further, that a little historical knowledge can lead otherwise intelligent and progressive Members of Parliament into some very dark places.

Chloe Swarbrick is a walking testimonial to the extraordinary effectiveness of Palestinian propaganda. On the AM Show of Monday, 20 November 2023, she made reference to the “Nakba” – the catastrophic evacuation of Palestinian cities, towns, villages and farms that accompanied the war between the newborn Israeli state and the armies of the Arab League. (Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, “assisted” by sundry Palestinian militia.) To hear Chloe tell the story, 700,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes by evil Zionists hellbent on seizing their land and property. The Nakba was ethnic cleansing on a massive and brutal scale.

Except, it wasn’t.

What happened in 1948 was the culmination of nearly thirty years of unrelenting Palestinian resistance to Jewish settlement in Mandatory Palestine. Arabs had been bearing arms against the Jews, and the Jews had been defending themselves, since at least the 1920s. In 1947, organisations representative of the Palestinian Arabs had rejected the United Nations partition plan (which the Jews, albeit reluctantly, had accepted). By 1948, the Palestinian leadership were confident that their Arab brothers would rout the Jewish militias, and that “from the river to the sea” Palestine would be what the Nazis called Judenfrei – free of Jews.

A great many of the Palestinians who evacuated their homes and farms in 1948 did so at the urging of the Palestinian Arab leadership. Let the armies of the Arab League do their work, these leaders advised, claiming that their family’s return would only be a matter of days or weeks. Few of those who decamped on the basis of this advice had the slightest concern about the genocidal catastrophe which, for the second time in less than a decade, was about to overtake the Jewish people.

Chloe Swarbrick should know this, but since her knowledge of the Arab-Israeli conflict appears to have been gleaned from the tendentious accounts of Palestinian nationalists, Islamic fanatics and that great throng of usefully idiotic allies who retail “Free Palestine!” propaganda in the West’s universities and news media, the chances are depressingly high that she does not.

And this is the strategic problem confronting Israel. That the effectiveness of the disinformation from which Palestinian nationalism and religious fanaticism continue to draw their strength depends, almost entirely, on Israel’s willingness to confirm its emotional truth by blowing Palestinians and their defenceless communities to Kingdom Come.

The only winning move for Israel, when subjected to the atrocities of 7 October, was, paradoxically, not to make one. To do nothing. This necessitates imagining an Israel led by a Prime Minister of enormous courage and wisdom – enough to face her people with solemn determination and tell them that, this time, unlike all the other times, the Israeli people will not take the bloody bait laid before them by the jackals of Hamas and their Iranian backers. This time, not a single bullet will fly, not a single bomb will drop. This time the Palestinians of Gaza will be left in peace to contemplate the true nature of the organisation that governs their little strip of hell.

One can only imagine the dismay of Hamas, and all the “Hamas adjacent” politicians, journalists and students who have spent the past six weeks waving Palestinian flags, tearing down the posters of Hamas’ hostages, and telling us what a genocidal, colonialist, monstrosity Israel is, and has always been. Why? Because who, and what, would the world be looking at if there were no babies’ bodies to evoke our horror and disgust? Who would be caught in the media spotlight and forced to answer for their atrocities? Their war crimes? Their unrelenting antisemitism?

Let me give you a hint: it wouldn’t be Israel.

This essay is exclusive to Bowalley Road.

Failing The “Leftist” Litmus Test.

Palestinian Lives Matter: What is it then that permits those who self-identify as leftists to survey the horrors of 7 October 2023 and see only a glorious act of Palestinian resistance? How is it possible for those who cheered on Jacinda Ardern’s “politics of kindness” to absorb all the details of the rape, the torture, the killing – and not respond with fury and disgust?

LIKE THE WAR in Ukraine, the war in Gaza is serving as a remarkable litmus test for the Left. It is testing its moral compass, its understanding of international law, its grasp of geopolitical realities and, not least, its awareness of what the PR mavens call “the optics”. A substantial portion, even, perhaps, a majority, of the Left is failing all of these tests – badly. That this should be the case points to what would appear to be a dangerous cognitive weakness in contemporary progressivism – and to a West under siege.

The moral and geopolitical confusion over the Russo-Ukrainian War is more readily understood than Israel’s war against Hamas. For the so-called “Tankies”, abandoning the cherished image of the Russian people, Nazism’s destroyers, as the world’s saviours, was an emotional wrench. Rejecting the argument that the Russian Federation’s illegal invasion of Ukraine was a justifiable response to US and Nato provocation proved equally difficult. None of these considerations excused the Tankies’ defence of Russian aggression, but one could at least see where it was coming from.

That is certainly not the case with respect to the devastating pogrom unleashed upon the Jewish inhabitants of Southern Israel by the Jihadist terrorist organisation, Hamas. To encounter its historical equal, it is necessary to travel back in time to the genocidal pogroms set in motion by the antisemitic citizens of the Baltic states in anticipation of the Nazi einsatzgruppen’s arrival in 1941. Here, too, one encounters the same indiscriminate and unsparing cruelty, the same savage delight in rape, torture and murder, that characterised the Hamas pogrom of 7 October 2023.

As was the case in 1941, it is quite impossible to look upon the atrocities of 7/10/23 as anything other than a deliberate turning away from all civilised conduct. Unless, that is, one has already been convinced that against the Jews/Israelis any and all crimes are permitted – and justified.

That this was the belief of the Nazis is well-documented. That a burning desire to rid the world of the “Zionist Entity” is equally evident in every act of Arab aggression towards the State of Israel since 1948. The important distinction being that, while Egypt, Syria and Jordan only wanted to drive the Jews into the sea, the Jihadists of Hamas are religiously committed to making sure that every last one of them drowns.

What is it then that permits those who self-identify as leftists to survey the horrors of 7 October 2023 and see only a glorious act of Palestinian resistance? How is it possible for those who cheered on Jacinda Ardern’s “politics of kindness” to absorb all the details of the rape, the torture, the killing – and not respond with fury and disgust?

One possible answer is that they have seen the images of Palestinians shot and killed for daring to oppose the Israeli occupation of Palestine. They have watched, aghast, as Israeli aircraft, Israeli artillery, have pounded the houses and apartment buildings of Gaza to rubble. Seen, also, the tiny victims of such bombardment, and heard the anguished cries of their mothers. “Lex Talionis!”, they cry. “An eye for an eye!”

But the moral vacuity of this position was as obvious to a Galilean rabbi back in 30AD, as it was to the Gujarat lawyer who declared in 1920AD that “An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind”. A leftist who turns her face in fury and disgust from the IDF’s brutality on the West Bank, cannot, either logically or ethically, refrain from doing the same in the face of Hamas’ murderous fanaticism.

That Pro-Palestinian leftists cannot see the deeply cynical purpose behind Hamas’ attack is similarly baffling. Notwithstanding the facts of international law concerning the responsibility of all those exercising state (or state-like) authority to protect their citizens from harm, Hamas committed its atrocities in the certain knowledge that Israel – fulfilling its own legal duty to protect its citizens – would feel compelled to destroy those responsible for organising and committing them. That this would entail air and artillery strikes on Gaza was obvious to the whole world. But, Hamas did not shrink from Israeli retaliation, it welcomed it.

Why? Because it knew that if the IDF was coming after them, then it would also be coming after the apartment buildings, the office blocks, the schools and the hospitals from which it launches its rockets, and under which it locates its storehouses, fuel dumps, arsenals, factories and command centres. Does Hamas know that this is a blatant breach of the Geneva Conventions – a war crime? Of course it does. Doesn’t it care that its own people will be “collateral damage” when the Israeli missiles strike their targets? Not at all. A steadily rising civilian death-toll isn’t a bug in Hamas’ strategy, it’s a feature.

There was a time when, to be regarded as a serious leftist, one was obligated to inform oneself as well as possible about world affairs – especially the geopolitics of great power rivalry and its consequences. No longer. One can be a fervent supporter of the Palestinian cause without ever pausing to wonder from whom groups like Hamas and Hezbollah get their military supplies, their military training.

Today’s leftists do not know, or do not care, that it is the hand of the Islamic Republic of Iran that is moving these terrorist pieces on the Middle-East chessboard. The same Islamic Republic that murders women and girls for refusing to wear the hijab. The same Islamic Republic that is committed to the utter destruction of Israel – and is rapidly acquiring the nuclear capacity to do exactly that. Today’s leftists simply do not realise that, if this was the Lord of the Rings, they’d be on the side of Sauron – they’d be cheering on the orcs.

Don’t they care about the optics of all this? When Jewish students in New York have to barricade themselves in their university library, against pro-Palestinian leftists, and all the antisemitic, misogynistic, homophobic and transphobic “allies” standing right there beside them, pounding on the door, trying to get in. Does it not occur to them that people looking at the video clip of that incident posted on X might be reminded of something? When a supposed “leftist” stands up in Auckland’s Aotea Square and urges the multitude waving their Palestinian flags to “Globalise the Intifada!” – i.e. Let’s have pogroms everywhere! – and is cheered to the echo. What does he suppose New Zealand’s Jewish community sees?

Not leftism, but fascism. And so does every other leftist who still understands the meaning of the word.

This essay was originally posted on the Democracy Project website on Tuesday, 31 October 2023.

Three Angels.

“I have been hard at work,” replied the Avenging Angel, “and where I have been there is no shortage of blood. I was there, above the field at Re’im when the fighters of Hamas arrived. All those revellers, so young, so beautiful, they were dancing and singing, oblivious in their joy to the horror that was advancing fast upon them.

“TELL ME WHERE YOU HAVE BEEN”, cried the Angel of Justice. “I have been seated here for hours, watching the ripple of explosions lighting up the length of Gaza, tracing the rockets’ fiery arcs across the skies of Israel, of Palestine. It is my fate to weigh the guilt of men, but in this land that is no easy task. And now you interrupt my thoughts, your raiment torn, your wings all blood be-spattered, a wild light in your eyes.”

“Indeed, I have been hard at work,” replied the Avenging Angel, “and where I have been there is no shortage of blood. I was there, above the field at Re’im when the fighters of Hamas arrived. All those revellers, so young, so beautiful, they were dancing and singing, oblivious in their joy to the horror that was advancing fast upon them.

“Where was the Angel of Pity upon that terrible field?”

“Absent. But the hot rush of my wings was there to fan the flames of retribution in the gunmen’s hearts. To blow the tinnitus of hatred into their ears. It drowned out the pleas for mercy of the young women, overwhelmed the shouts of protest from the young men. Such a ringing there was in their ears as their weapons dealt out death all around.”

“And Pity absent”, whispered the Angel of Justice.

“Oh, yes, there was no trace of Pity as they stripped, and tortured, and raped, and killed. But, I was there. How often had they called upon me, the Angel of Vengeance, to deliver their enemy into their hands? Out of the ruins of their homes, over the bodies of their brothers and sisters, as the limp forms of their infant nieces and nephews were passed down solemnly, hand-to-hand, from the mounds of rubble. Out of all that grief and rage, how could I not hear their prayers, their summons, their calls to me, the Avenging Angel?”

“And you granted them their wish,” said the Angel of Justice, casting a wrathful glance in the direction of his companion.

“I did, my friend, but only because their calls to you, for Justice, had for so long gone unanswered. And where Pity and Justice are absent, or unheeding, what is left but Vengeance?”

“Justice in Palestine? In the land of Israel? And exactly when, my friend, would you have me set that clock ticking? With Vespasian and his legions? With the destruction of the Temple? With a people dispersed to, as it says in the Hatikvah, “the ends of the East”. Shall I start the clock then – in Roman times? Or, perhaps you would have me begin with the first medieval pogrom? Or, with the greatest? With the Shoah, the Holocaust, and all that mechanised Nazi terror? If I remember rightly, Pity was also absent at Auschwitz. The Jews have reclaimed their ancient homeland because they have learned, from the bitterest experience, that they are never truly safe in anybody else’s.”

“But Palestine is somebody else’s homeland, also, my friend. The memory of the Arab is no less poignant than the memory of the Jew.”

“True enough, but when that same Arab has tried, on three occasions, to drive the Jew into the sea, it is difficult for the Jew to resist the temptation to call upon you, the Avenging Angel, to even the score. Because, as I recall, it was your swift sword that avenged the slaying of Israel’s Olympic athletes at Munich in 1972. Your wings that blew sand in the faces of the Egyptians and Syrians just one year later in the war that began on Yom Kippur.

“It is difficult, is it not, my friend, to rightly distinguish Vengeance from Justice? But – hush! What is that sound!”

The two angels’ wings lifted them high above the mountaintop, their eyes searching the cracked rocks and bare sands below for the sound’s source. While they looked, the heart-rending wailing, born of that worst of mixtures – grief and rage – throbbed louder and louder, as if to set the whole of Israel, the whole of Palestine, vibrating with its inconsolable misery.

At length, the Angels’ gaze fell upon the source of the sound. Sobbing, beneath a bare and bitter thorn tree, sat the one so many in Israel/Palestine speak of, but so very few speak to: the Angel of Peace.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 13 October 2023.

Watching Israel/Palestine Burn.

The Fire And The Fury: There must be something in the water and the soil of the Holy Land that causes those who claim it for their own to lose all sense of strategic perspective. Today, it is the Palestinians who refuse to accept that against the State of Israel there can be no victory. Two thousand years ago, it was the Jewish people themselves. Or, more accurately, it was the nationalist extremists who refused to acknowledge the impossibility of extricating Judea from the Roman Empire. 

IRRESPECTIVE OF WHICH SIDE of the conflict one stands, watching the latest tragedy unfold in Israel/Palestine is heart-breaking. Not the least distressing aspect of the renewed bloodshed is the antagonists’ reflexive defence of long held and deeply entrenched positions. On neither side is there the slightest evidence of new or original thinking. All we hear are the same slogans repeated over and over. But, if both sides insist on standing still, how can there be any movement?

This latest eruption of violence has, however, dramatically exposed the futility of the Palestinians’ uncompromising insistence on the so-called “Right of Return”. Ironically, it has been the actions of the Jews expelled from East Jerusalem in the Arab-Jewish war of 1948 that have revealed the sheer impracticality of this key Palestinian demand.

In demanding the return of the properties their parents and grandparents were forced to abandon in the face of the Jordanian Arab Legion’s successful defence of East Jerusalem in the year of the State of Israel’s birth, Jewish litigants are also demanding the eviction of Palestinian families who have lived in these properties for more than sixty years. Few on either side of this dispute would have been surprised to discover that the present occupants have not the slightest intention of abandoning them voluntarily. Indeed, it has been their resolute refusal to be dispossessed by the Israeli courts, and the mass Palestinian support their resistance has attracted, that set the scene for the latest confrontations.

It is unfortunate that among the Palestinian leadership there does not appear to be anyone with sufficient power to draw the obvious lesson. That the passion of the Palestinians threatened with eviction in East Jerusalem will be matched (if not exceeded) by the determination of the Israelis (and their descendants) who took control of the properties abandoned by Palestinians during the 1948 conflict, to stay exactly where they are.

To insist upon the Right of Return, is to insist upon the rolling back of history to 1948. Except, that simply amounts to demanding that the clock be wound back to a time when the State of Israel did not exist. In other words, the call for all those Palestinians uprooted by Israel’s birth (and their descendants) to be allowed to return to their houses, olive groves and farms, is a call for the dissolution of Israel itself.

If the rest of the world wants to know what a Palestinian attempt at dispossessing the Israeli people might look like, it has only to look at those anti-eviction protests in East Jerusalem, multiply them one-hundred-fold, and then imagine every Jewish protester armed to the teeth and wearing the uniform of the Israeli Defence Force, backed by artillery, tanks, helicopters, jets, and, ultimately, nuclear weapons.

There must be something in the water and the soil of the Holy Land that causes those who claim it for their own to lose all sense of strategic perspective. Today, it is the Palestinians who refuse to accept that against the State of Israel there can be no victory. Two thousand years ago, it was the Jewish people themselves. Or, more accurately, it was the nationalist extremists who refused to acknowledge the impossibility of extricating Judea from the Roman Empire. Again and again they rose in revolt. Again and again, the Romans crushed them in the most brutal and bloody fashion. Eventually, the day came when Rome decided that these stiff-necked Jews had rebelled once too often. They would have to go – but not before they witnessed the complete destruction of their temple and the re-naming of their country as “Syria Palaestina”.

Watching the desperate launchings of Palestinian rockets against Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and the instant and devastating retaliation of the Israeli Air Force, it is hard not to be reminded of the hard-line Jewish nationalists who took refuge in the great Herodian palace-cum-fortress of Masada. They, too, were magical thinkers, convinced that they could escape the wrath of Vespasian’s legions, who, far below, were patiently constructing the ramp that would carry their siege-engines up and over the walls of Masada – to victory.

Surely, there are some Palestinians who, looking at the entirely predictable consequences of their political and military leaders’ intransigence, recall with trepidation the awful historical precedents associated with refusals to accept that the occupiers of one’s homeland cannot be defeated?

More importantly, perhaps, are there none who recall that the Romans did not disperse all the Jewish inhabitants of Syria Palaestina? Some remained. Over the centuries what used to be called Judea was occupied by Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Mamelukes, Franks, Ottomans and the British: the Jews who remained saw them come – and go – until, at length, the Zionists made a great hole in history, and Israel stepped through it.

Holed, or not, History has lessons to teach both the victors and the vanquished about the virtues of patience, and the changes wrought by time.

An optimistic prophet might tell of a mighty Mediterranean entrepot called Gaza City: the glittering prize of an enduring peace settlement between the Palestinian people and the State of Israel. Funded by Arab oil, protected by the United States and Europe, it would fast become a wonder of the twenty-first century world.

A pessimistic prophet might see the Al-Aqsa Mosque in flames and the Dome of the Rock in ruins. He might tell of Israel’s pitiless ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and the Great Jihad it inspired: of Arab and Turkish armies clashing with the IDF at Megiddo; of Pakistani rockets bearing nuclear warheads nearly all being blown out of the sky above Israel’s Iron Dome; and of Israeli jets, hot for vengeance, streaking eastward with their deadly nuclear payloads. He might speak of “The Samson Option” and the end of the world.

There are some who would not care – so long as the Israeli/Palestinian enemy was destroyed. And these are the most dangerous men and women ever to have set foot upon the rocks and stones of the land where David sang, and Jesus spoke, and Mohammed flew up to God. These enemies of compromise, these strangers to wisdom, would make of Israel/Palestine a radioactive desert – and call it peace.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 13 May 2021.

Reaping The Whirlwind

Dresden, February 1945: Our parents and grandparents received the news of Dresden's destruction with equanimity. We were at war. By 1945 the civilian population of Germany had ceased to be "collateral damage", they were now regarded as legitimate targets. Israel's deliberate targeting of civilians in Gaza is not without precedent.

SUCH A BRIEF RESPITE. Barely time to find water – let alone food. And all around the shelter fires blazing unchecked. She did not tell her children what she had seen in the streets. Could not admit, even to herself, what lay there. Where was God, she wondered, amidst all this death? As if in answer, the sirens wailed again, their harsh note of alarm rising and falling like the cry of some gigantic beast in pain. In the shelter they could already hear the ominous drone of the bombers. And then, the thud, thud, thud of the bombs.

 

God may have been absent from Dresden on St Valentine’s Day 1945, but the Devil was there and he had brought the fires of Hell with him.

 

My wife and I have been arguing about Gaza. She demands to know what benefit Israel could possibly derive from deliberately bombing and shelling innocent women and children? I asked her what benefit our grandparent’s generation derived from ordering the bombing of Dresden – a city packed with refugees posing no threat to either the British, the Americans or the Russians? By February 1945 the Allies were driving Adolf Hitler’s battered armies before them and in less than three months the war in Europe would be over. Why unleash a firestorm on one of Germany’s most beautiful cities? Why kill 25,000 people, most of them women and children, needlessly?

 

Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris justified the Allies’ terror bombing of German cities in explicitly biblical terms:

 

“The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.”

 

Those words may sound harsh to New Zealanders living in the twenty-first century, but in the ears of our parents and grandparents they sounded both true and just. In the eyes of Hitler’s enemies, Nazism was an unmitigated evil which had to be destroyed – by any means necessary.

 

Once a nation thrusts itself into the unrelenting horrors of war, its over-riding priority is to end them, on the most favourable terms possible, as quickly as possible.

 

Almost exactly 100 years ago, at the outbreak of the First World War, Great Britain’s first lord of the admiralty, Winston Churchill, ordered the Royal Navy to institute a complete naval blockade of Germany. Of this ruthless strategic decision he would later write: “The British blockade treated the whole of Germany as if it were a beleaguered fortress, and avowedly sought to starve the whole population – men, women, and children, old and young, wounded and sound – into submission.”

 

These are not pleasant facts to dwell upon. The terror-bombing of civilians. The deliberate starvation of whole populations. And yet, these were, indisputably, the tactics employed by “our side” in both world wars. Unsurprisingly, when paying our respects to “the glorious dead” on ANZAC Day, we prefer to draw a veil across the inglorious death we inflicted in return.

 

I wonder, were it possible to travel back in time and confront our parents’ and grandparents’  younger selves about these measures; if we could demand to know their justifications for acquiescing, without protest, in these crimes against humanity: how would they respond?

 

I think they would look at us strangely. I think they would shake their heads in disbelief. I think they would reply, simply: “We are at war.”

 

That same incomprehension is similarly imprinted on the faces of Israelis when the world demands to know why their jets and artillery are pounding Gaza until the rubble bounces; why the whole of the Gaza Strip is being treated, in Churchill’s words, “as if it were a beleaguered fortress” and why “the whole population – men, women, and children, old and young, wounded and sound” are being ruthlessly bombed and shelled and starved into submission.

 

“Does the world not understand that we are at war?” Israel asks.

 

“They that sow the wind, shall reap the whirlwind.” So said the Prophet Hosea. If Bomber Harris could quote the Bible, can Israel not quote the Torah?

 

Gaza, July 2014.

 

Such a brief respite. Barely time to find water – let alone food. And all around the UN school fires blazing unchecked. She did not tell her children what she had seen in the streets. Could not admit, even to herself, what lay there. Where was Allah, she wondered, amidst all this death? As if in answer, the sirens wailed, their harsh note of alarm rising and falling like the cry of some gigantic beast in pain. In the shelter they could already hear the hideous screech of the jets. And then, the thud, thud, thud of the bombs …

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 5 August 2014.

War's Brazen Face

War's Brazen Face: Binyamin Netanyahu's threat to use "all power" to quell the rocket barrage unleashed against Israel by Palestinian fighters was made good when, on Friday, 18 July, infantry and armoured columns of the Israeli Defence Force rolled into Gaza. Photo by Gali Tibbon.

 

IT IS A FACE that brooks no contradiction. The black eyebrows angled sharply like the wings of an Eagle poised to seize its prey. The lopsided mouth, all curves and creases clutching at a single line, like a snake coiled ‘round a stick. And the expression in those dark, unblinking eyes? How often do we observe lightly, “if looks could kill”? Just study the Israeli photo-journalist, Gali Tibbon’s, most recent photograph of Binyamin Netanyahu and you will know – to a chilling certainty – that they can.

 

Tibbon’s photograph was taken as the Israeli Prime Minister, disregarding warnings from the United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights and cease-fire appeals from Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin, announced to the world: “No international pressure will prevent us from acting with all power.” This defiance of world opinion came after more than four days of Israeli military strikes against the Palestinian enclave of Gaza. “Operation Protective Edge” is supposedly targeting the individuals and groups responsible for launching a barrage of rockets against Israel.

 

“Hamas and other terrorist groups in Gaza are firing rockets at cities in the State of Israel,” Mr Netanyahu stated in a video released by his office at the end of last week. “No country on earth”, he said, “would remain passive in the face of hundreds of rockets fired on its cities – and Israel is no exception.”

 

The tragedy, of course, is that when Israel vows to act with “all power” its military capacity to do so is far beyond anything its Palestinian opponents can deploy. The rockets unleashed against Israel, for example, are crude, essentially unguided, weapons of, at best, haphazard (rather than mass) destruction. Indeed, at the time of writing, not a single Israeli citizen has been killed by the Palestinians’ desperate attacks.

 

The Israeli Defence Force (IDF), by contrast, is one of the best-trained and best-equipped fighting forces on the planet. It’s fighter jets, armed drones, computer-guided artillery, Merkava battle tanks and navy destroyers can strike Gaza anywhere, anytime and from any direction without the slightest risk of being harried by anything more effective than small arms fire and the occasional mortar round. Small wonder, then, that since the launch of Operation Protective Edge on 8 July 2014 hundreds of Palestinians, many of them women and children, have been killed or wounded in Gaza’s densely-populated streets.

 

The world has witnessed such tragic and unequal struggles between Israelis and Palestinians many, many times since Israel’s birth in 1948. What’s new and more than usually troubling about this latest eruption of violence, however, is the Israeli Government’s unabashed – almost cavalier – dismissal of the international community’s concern and condemnation.

 

Binyamin Netanyahu has clearly drawn some lessons from the neighbouring conflicts in Syria and Iraq. He has observed that in spite of the obscene weaponry (up to and including poison gas) deployed by the Syrian antagonists against defenceless civilians, the world has displayed a singular reluctance to intervene on their behalf. Likewise in Iraq, where a full-scale religious war between the Sunni and Shi’ite branches of Islam threatens to descend into unrestrained communal violence.

 

The Israeli Prime Minister must also have watched, intrigued, as the Russian Federation annexed the Crimean Peninsula – the highly strategic territory belonging to its neighbour, Ukraine – without suffering more than the most superficial of diplomatic wounds. Israel could hardly be blamed for concluding that lopping-off large chunks of one’s neighbour’s territory for strategic purposes, having been done once, and without effective reproof, might well be done again. The long lines of Merkava tanks snaking their way towards Gaza’s borders raise the very real possibility that the IDF may not simply be readying itself to re-occupy the Gaza Strip – but to re-absorb it.

 

And who will say them nay? Not Egypt – whose leader is still settling into the throne he stole from The Muslim Brotherhood. Not Syria – torn and bloodied by its vicious civil war. Not Jordan – clinging with rising alarm to the sword-arm of its Israeli neighbour. The United States? The European Union? If they were willing to watch President Putin re-absorb Crimea into Mother Russia, then is the re-absorption of Gaza into Greater Israel likely to mobilise anything more than their tongues?

 

Among the high purposes of the United Nations’ Charter was the determination to “ensure, by the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest”. This noble attempt to put a leash upon the dogs of war, always more honoured in the breach than in the observance, now seems poised to follow its predecessors into the same dark place that swallowed the League of Nations.

 

And before we conclude that abandoned principles and institutions are irrelevant to New Zealand, let us cast our eyes across the Tasman and study the face of Tony Abbott.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 15 July 2014.

 

AFTERWORD: In a grim example of how one hand of the God of War washes the other, the downing of a Malaysian airliner in the Eastern Ukraine on 18/7/14 has provided the global news media with a huge distraction - diverting international attention from Israel's decision to finally unleash the ground war against Hamas in Gaza.