This week I attended a seminar on International Humanitarian Law and the Gaza conflict. In questions someone implied that Hamas was a legitimate resistance organisation as Israel was a colonising power.
The expansion of settlements in the West Bank seems very colonial. But calling Israel a colonial power per se is wrong. The Jews who fled there in the 1940s were in desperate flight, unlike my colonial forebears here in New Zealand. And the first Zionists were in search of safe haven after millennia of oppression. The subsequent treatment of Palestinians has been deeply, morally wrong, but it’s a different wrong to the crimes which have occurred here (or in Australia, or the US, or Guatemala, or…).
What’s more, if you’re trying to win arguments in countries like the UK, the US, Australia and New Zealand, the term colonial is impotent. The majority of people in these countries shrug their shoulders when they hear the word — it has little traction. That’s wrong, but it’s the truth. On the other hand, ‘ethnic cleansing’, ‘humanitarian catastrophe’, ‘gross violations of human rights’, are urgent, forceful words, which many more people will react to. If you want to win arguments, use words that have power.
And, for obvious reasons, most white people in colonised countries — me included — will have very, very unfavourable reactions to the implicit suggestion that it’s ok to indiscriminately butcher “colonisers”. Just like many of the Israelis Hamas murdered, I didn’t chose to move to the country I currently live in. I was born here. I have no other passport. I have an obligation to help make amends for past crimes, and to stop future ones, but I’m not a legitimate target for murder. The argument is vile. Good luck trying to convince any New Zealand government to take a stronger stand on Israel’s aggression with that sort of logic.
My frustration with the left runs deeper than this though (even though I’m a lefty). Why is it so hard to simultaneously hold the following beliefs?
- What Israel has been doing in the West Bank and Gaza strip has — for years — been morally wrong.
- Nevertheless, Hamas’s butchering of civilians on October 7 was a heinous crime. It was also a crime against the people of Gaza. Hamas must have known what was going to happen in its wake.
- That doesn’t justify Israel’s response though, which has been abhorrent in so many ways. There have been countless violations of human rights. What is happening looks a lot like ethnic cleansing.
- The tepid response of the governments of countries such as my own is to our shame.
I guess the search for certainty and binaries isn’t unique to the left. But if you want to make the world a better place for the majority of its people, at some point you need to embrace some nuance.
Waylaid Dialectic 