167. THERE CAN BE NO JUSTICE THROUGH BLOODSHED - Israel, Gaza, Palestine, and the need for some different thinking.
On Tuesday last week, after staying silent about the situation in Gaza, I finally posted the following on my social media feeds:
What’s going on right now in Gaza begins and ends with the need to free Palestine from Israeli occupation. Hamas’ attack was undeniably horrific. An inexcusable war-crime. But Israel’s response, and the draconian prison-state apartheid it had imposed in the occupied territories before those attacks (not to mention the occupation itself) is also inexcusable and horrific. There is no side here with clean hands. There is no future to be found in seeking justice through further bloodshed. Yet Israel is now engaged in committing further atrocities and war-crimes in violent retaliation. Actions which are already proving to be a catalyst for humanitarian disaster on an epic scale for the people of Gaza. Actions which have no likelihood, or intention, of achieving peace. Actions which only keep alive the continuing cycle of violence and retaliation that needs to, urgently, be broken.
To move forward we need to move beyond unhelpful punishment narratives of justice. Retribution is, was, and always will be a false currency. Whether you call it defence, terrorism, warfare or retaliation, these are all just words used by both sides to attempt to justify the unjustifiable. Just as ‘security’ has been used for so long as a word to mask overt conquest, colonialism and displacement. Politics should not be a team sport. When it is, we’re doing it wrong. Usually because we’ve been manipulated by those who benefit from the division. It should never be Israel versus Palestine. My team versus yours. It should be ensuring our collectively assured mutual existence, always. Finding new ways to live together. Mutual aid. Walls and borders torn down. Sharing instead of seizing. Acknowledging wrongdoing and finding a way forward.
As this disaster unfolds, I therefore stand in solidarity with all of those in Palestine and Israel just trying to live their lives free from fear and daily oppression. My solidarity is with the humanity on both sides caught up in preventable violence that continues without cease. With those who should be alive today but aren’t. With those working towards the future, instead of dedicated to re-litigating the past.
To paraphrase Bruce Springsteen: ‘two states are better than one. Two states, girl, will get the job done.’ And to paraphrase a general principle of anarchism: ‘no states, only societies’. The path to peace lies somewhere between the two.
I posted because I began to feel that silence was complicity in allowing further atrocities unfold. That, futile as it is, it is important to call out the unjustifiable whenever it is being attempted in plain sight. To remind people that what is happening is being seen. But also to remind people that alternative ways of looking at the world are possible. That things do not have to be the way they are.
I believe Palestine should be free. I want an end to Israeli occupation. But I also recognise that all states are the result of historical conquest, coercion, carving up of disputed lands, and the displacement of indigenous peoples. That’s one of the reasons why, as an anarchist, I oppose the very notion of states in the first place. Yet, given the reality of existing states in a world not yet convinced by anarchism, the state of Israel (under its less controversial historically agreed borders) is arguably no worse than any other existing ‘monopoly of legitimate violence’ in the world except for the fact that it is one of the most recent examples of this violent phenomenon, and has been enabled by other states to continue its conquering, coercing, carving and displacing in plain sight of the modern world. We are merely bearing witness to what used to happen behind closed doors. A definite moral wrong-doing, but no more wrong than all the rest of the questionably drawn borders and divisions which exist in our world. Until we radically transform the way we organise societies in a post-state existence, therefore, as a state in a world of states, Israel is a reality which needs to be accepted as much as we accept any other state. It is the home to its citizens, who need an existence where they can be safe and live a free and happy life too. It is not going away.
So long as either side demand a zero sum victory - us or them - a win by means of the total elimination of the enemy, there can be no acceptable end to this historic conflict. Peace will require the agreement to acceptable compromises and disappointments on both sides. The only people in whose interests total victory work are the people in whose interest it is to maintain a never-ending war. In order to forge a just reconciliation or, at least, an agreeable and liveable detente, the eye-for-an-eye mentality must stop. Israel must recognise that it has taken more Palestinian land than is tolerable, return to its original borders, and end its draconian prison-state apartheid in the occupied territories, returning Palestine to the Palestinian people. Meanwhile, Palestinians must accept the reality that Israel is not going away and has a right to exist. That many of the people who will continue to live in some areas of a returned Palestine will be those who originally moved there as settlers and are not planning on being displaced now from their homes. No one will be 100% happy, but that’s compromise. That’s collective living. That’s peace. Conflicts never truly go away, but they can be contained to the point that they do not erupt into violence. See Ireland. See South Africa. See Nazism. We defeated the Nazis, we brought peace to Ireland and ended South African apartheid…but Nazis still exist and currently far-right movements are growing worryingly around the world; tensions continue to boil in Ireland and racism still exists in South Africa. But the hope - the best we can do - is that these muted conflicts continue to be kept to tolerable levels and peace, or at least its close approximation, can continue to reign. No more people ought to die because, in the search for some impossible perfection and fatally flawed attempt to undo the scars of history, we fail to recognise the satisfaction of an imperfect, but actually possible, imperfect good.
No one needed another post on social media about Israel and Palestine. And social media is a terrible forum for serious conversations and nuanced ideas. No one needed this post on this blog either. But… it does seem important to remind us all of that old philosophic concept of the false dichotomy: when someone gives you only two sides to a dilemma, we must always remember the possibility that this is a false limitation and other responses are possible. We do not have to be on Team Israel or Team Palestine, and no peace can really ever come from such rigid flag-waving. We do not need to ‘win’ and neither side will ever get their dead back by killing more of the other. The question of whose land is whose and who belongs where a question one would only ask in a world that has already failed all people. A world where sanctuary is not guaranteed. Where life and the resources to stay alive are not guaranteed. A world where we are scared we cannot call most places our home. An alternative to ensuring a homeland, or security, for individual groups of people is to ensure a homeland and security for all, everywhere.
Ultimately, with seemingly intractable historical conflicts with no end in sight, we are left with two choices: continue doing what we have been doing, and what has failed, for all these years, or do something different. Something radically different. Something which takes all the unhelpful arguments and assumptions of the intractable past and turns them on their head.
So I repeat: As this disaster unfolds, I stand in solidarity with all of those in Palestine and Israel just trying to live their lives free from fear and daily oppression. My solidarity is with the humanity on both sides caught up in preventable violence that continues without cease. With those who should be alive today but aren’t. With those working towards the future, instead of dedicated to re-litigating the past.
I stand with those with new ideas, and alternative conceptions of what is possible.
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
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