Israel can take Gaza. But it cannot leave it
What will remain after Israel’s fury is spent? Collective punishment is not justice. Scorched earth is not security. Desolation is not peace
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In his history of a Roman invasion of northern Britain, Tacitus gives the Caledonian chieftain Calgacus a famous speech. Of the Romans, he says “They make a desert and call it ‘peace’.”
This is not meant to be an instruction manual. But Israel seems to be treating it as one. It will, after many thousands more civilians have died, eventually declare peace in a blood-soaked wasteland of rubble and dust.
There is, however, an obvious difference. The Romans, when they invaded the Highlands, were very far from home. They did not need to live beside a devastated Scotland. They could take it or leave it.
Israel can take Gaza. But it cannot leave it.
It has no exit strategy – not just in the immediate political and military sense, but in the plain, banal facts of geography. The terrible atrocities inflicted by Hamas on Israelis on October 7th dramatised a simple and inescapable truth: proximity. The Supernova festival, where young people were dancing through the night to trance music, was going on just five kilometres from the Gaza border fence.
It’s about a four-minute drive. WB Yeats’s grim phrase about Ireland during the Troubles – “Great hatred, little room” – recurs for a reason. There is no breathing space here. The toxic dust from a pulverised Gaza floats on Israel’s air too.
We know that dire intimacy all too well from our own very recent history. We know the terror of a tribalised topography, where a bend in the road is a sudden plunge into peril. We too, on our island, still have those tautologous structures: peace walls.
We know too well how familiarity can breed contempt, how physical closeness to the tribal enemy has to be negated by psychological distance. So near and yet so far: the more obvious the need to share a space, the more powerful the urge to erect supposedly impenetrable barriers. The daily evidence of common humanity feeds a desire to dehumanise.
In his Nobel Peace Prize lecture of 1994, the then Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin – soon to be murdered by a far-right Jewish extremist whose political heirs now serve in Binyamin Netanyahu’s government – evoked the haunted silence that follows a decision to launch an attack. Rabin knew what he was talking about: he commanded Israel’s armed forces in the Six Day War of 1967.
Rabin recalled “the hush when the hands of the clock seem to be spinning forward, when time is running out and in another hour, another minute, the inferno will erupt. In that moment of great tension just before the finger pulls the trigger, just before the fuse begins to burn; in the terrible quiet of that moment, there’s still time to wonder, alone: is it really imperative to act? Is there no other choice? No other way?”
The answer to those questions depends on what you mean by peace. Rabin, who was very good at the business of killing, knew what it did not mean. He understood that body counts are not victories and that there is no real security in mere superiority of arms.
“We invest,” Rabin said, “huge sums in planes, and tanks, in armored plating and concrete fortifications. Yet despite it all, we fail to protect the lives of our citizens and soldiers. Military cemeteries in every corner of the world are silent testimony to the failure of national leaders to sanctify human life. There is only one radical means of sanctifying human lives. Not armoured plating, or tanks, or planes, or concrete fortifications. The one radical solution is peace.”
This is not hippy-dippy peacenik piety. It is tough realism. Rabin’s prediction that bomber planes and tanks and fortifications would “fail to protect the lives of our citizens” was horrifically vindicated on October 7th. It is Rabin’s murderers, and their political progeny on Israel’s far right, who are the fantasists.
If you create a moral and literal wasteland on your doorstep, you can call it whatever you like – even peace. But it’s really just a vast, open-air radioactive dump that will continue to emit deadly particles of rage and hatred.
You cannot sanctify the lives of your own citizens by dehumanising those they are fated to live beside and among. You cannot overcome your own traumas by traumatising a whole population. You cannot immerse another generation of children in butchery and expect the future to be secure.
The hands of the clock have been spinning forward and there seems to be no one in power asking the questions about what comes after vengeance. How much revenge is enough? What remains after the fury is spent? Who is going to rule the wasteland?
Much as some of Netanyahu’s allies would like to do it, ethnic cleansing is not possible. Israel cannot drive the Palestinian populations into the Sinai or across the Jordan. Trying to do so would set the world ablaze and the world, however pitiful its current failings, cannot abide that conflagration.
If the Palestinians cannot be made to disappear, close proximity remains Israel’s destiny. It has to decide what kind of neighbours it wants. It has to decide what peace looks like.
At the moment, there seems to be no clue. There is, apparently, some make-believe world in which, after Gaza is levelled, somebody else sails in to take charge of the ruins, pay for reconstruction and make the shattered survivors behave themselves meekly and humbly. And meanwhile, five kilometres away, all-night dance festivals can resume in perfect safety.
It’s not going to happen. The abyss that Israel has to live beside will just get deeper and deeper. Israel’s own democracy, already on the edge, will, as the costs of war rise, become ever more tenuous. The “self” in “self-defence” will become more fractured and uncertain. The capacity to make a real peace will be further eroded.
Razing a city is not realism. Collective punishment is not justice. Scorched earth is not security. Desolation is not peace. Bloodshed is not irrigation. Human deserts, unlike physical ones, cannot be made to blossom.
Fintan O’Toole. 31 October 2023