"TEL Aviv right now. Shoppers. Dogs. Children. Rabbis. Yoga. Everyone comes down to the bunker for 20 minutes with stoicism, resilience, and a sense of common purpose."
I am an empathetic person, and I truly wish to engage with the humanity of a people under bombardment. But like many people I find my capacity for empathy for residents of Israel has been utterly drained. Why should I care when I have seen nothing but encouragement for the unending, unrelenting, unmerciful bombardment of shoppers, dogs, children, church leaders and yoga in Gaza? How can I give the best of myself when I know that there was pitiless scorn, and justification at the babies torn apart and dismembered in Khan Yunis by Israeli bombs?
We know that part of humanity’s price for impunity is humanity itself. At the weekend I found my heart stone cold while wondering if the Israeli civilian population might now stop being cheerleaders in their generation’s genocide as a result of their own suffering. I watched as family units went to bunkers in Tel Aviv with their children, knowing that this was indeed a safe place. And I wondered if they thought of their neighbours, mothers with children who sought shelter in the few remaining spaces left to them, knowing that they would likely be targeted because the Israeli army has targeted the sanctuaries of schools, refugee camps and, most of all, hospitals. Gone are the days of innocence when some believed Israel when she scoffed in incredulity that hospitals might be targeted. They not only targeted them, they flattened them, murdered the medics, tried to bury the evidence and then simply didn’t bother to try. And that has made my heart hard to the fears of civilians in Israel.
Did you notice how Israel has “bunkers” while Gaza has “tunnels”? Did you notice how the attention on Gaza has turned to Iran and the slow, slow tide of concern at Israeli actions in Gaza has been suspended in favour of full-throated support for Israel’s pretence of concern at Iranian weapons of mass destruction? Of course you noticed. We all did, because we can predict the cynical book of impunity playing out genocidal chapter after debased chapter. And how I wish we were wrong. But we are not.
The past twenty years have seen the right-wing playbook destroy full Arab nations in unprecedented ways. Millions have died in military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and further millions in the CIA operation of an 'Arab Spring' that was about the destabilising of a region so that the West and its interests can win. Libya, Syria and now Iran all paying the price of geopolitical long games. And genocidal Israel just moves the chess pieces on that board with her audacious evilness. And my heart gets colder.
Being pro-human rights is about recognising our cold hearts when we are most tested. If we are at war and cannot hear the other side’s screams, we need law to keep us from wiping ourselves out; physically, yes, but also morally and spiritually. The law sees the dignity of the person whose humanity has been veiled to us by their nation’s tyranny.
The bare-faced hypocrisy of focusing on the suffering of proportionately fewer Israelis this weekend while utterly abandoning the humanity of Palestinians, might make us feel understandably sick, but our humanity must not be the cost of Israel’s inhumanity.
