Fergus Finlay: Israel does not have right to take revenge on an entire people

Imagine it. An entire country, no longer than the journey from Cork to Bandon, or Limerick to Ennis, or Dublin to Naas if you prefer. No more than seven miles wide. And in that tiny space more than two million people, the vast majority of them poorer than we can imagine. One in every three of the people who live in Gaza is under 14. There are very, very few people as old as me (and I’m not that old).

Today that two million people is living in terror, bewildered and lost. By this time tomorrow a lot of them may well be dead—and a lot of the dead will be children.

I have often hesitated to write about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. I can claim no expertise, I have never visited the region, and I am emotionally torn. But there are situations that none of us can ignore, and this, surely, is one of them.

Perhaps I should address the emotionally torn bit first. The great loyalist David Ervine once told me that he totally respected my right to be Irish, but he couldn’t understand why I would expect him to be less British so I could be more Irish. That statement affected the way I look at the world. 

Everyone has the right to self-determination. That right doesn’t extend to dictating how other people should live their lives and how they should govern themselves.

Emotionally, I have always believed in the right of the Israeli state to exist. There are no people in the world who have suffered a greater injustice and cruelty in their history than the Jewish people. No one has a greater right to self-determination, or to a homeland, than the people of Israel.

But the Palestinian people have an equal right to self-determination, an equal right to raise their children in a place they can call home. That’s an inviolable human and political right.

For reasons of geography and history, the only way now that these two rights can co-exist is by co-existence, by people agreeing to live side by side. What is called the two-state solution. That approach has long been advocated by people who wish both Israel and the Palestinian people well. Right now it looks like a hopelessly naïve point of view. But it’s not.

The Gaza strip, the only home millions of Palestinians know, is ruled by Hamas. Hamas believes in terror. Although it has several times pretended to offer a show of support for two-state approaches, its fundamental aim is the destruction of Israel, and its preferred approach is atrocity.

When Hamas terrorists invaded Israel 10 days ago and carried out a series of merciless atrocities, they knew exactly what they were doing. They knew that couldn’t overwhelm Israel—they couldn’t kill everyone. And they knew exactly how Israel would react.

In fact, they knew there was a strong possibility that Israel would massively overreact. Israel can kill everyone. They have the power and resources to kill everyone they believe to be part of Hamas or a supporter of Hamas. 

And right now, it looks as if that’s exactly what they intend to do. And it seems they will have the support of the great majority of Israeli people as this vengeful operation starts.

The irony in all this is that a month or so ago, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was an increasingly despised figure among his own people. Now Hamas has succeeded in uniting Netanyahu’s country behind him.

As an outsider looking in, I find this impossible to figure out. And I’m not alone. There’s an Israeli writer called Ori Hanan Weisberg, one of several I follow on social media. He too seems confused—in fact the only emotion he can express right now is anger. Anger, as he says, at Hamas, and “the vicious slaughter and widespread trauma they inflicted, gleefully, on so many people”.

But he’s also angry at Hamas for “undercutting the struggle for Palestinian rights and lending credence to the caricatures of Palestinians as bloodthirsty savages who just want to kill Jews, which is far from the truth.” There is no doubt, surely, that Hamas has set back the cause of Palestine by a decade or more.

A lot of his anger is reserved for the failure of the massive Israeli defence and security architecture to predict and protect. But most of it is directed at Netanyahu. 

“I am angry”, he says, “at this absurd government led by a man who has time and again placed his own interests and power above duty to country, while posing as a superlative patriot … I’m angry at his party for clinging to him despite his amorality (or immorality) because doing so has served their own interests.”

Israel has suffered a vicious and merciless attack that has killed and maimed hundreds of innocent people. It has the absolute right to seek out those responsible and to try to bring them to justice. We would set out to do the same, within our resources, if it happened to us.

But Israel does not have the right to take revenge on an entire people. It does not have the right to deprive an entire people of water or to disable their hospitals. Given that a third of the people who live in the Gaza strip are under the age of 14, Israel knows now that the massive military operation it is about to launch will kill hundreds of children.

There can be no moral justification for waging war against children. Dozens have died already, and the World Health Organization has asserted that the forced evacuation of hospitals in Gaza is an effective sentence of death for hundreds more.

In the long post I read from Ori Hanan Weisberg, there was one simple sentence that struck home with great force. 

He said:

There is no security and dignity for Israeli Jews, if there is no security and dignity for Palestinian Arabs.

Israel and Hamas are blind to that now, but the rest of the world cannot allow itself to be.

No democratic leader can give carte blanche to revenge. At times of the greatest difficulty in the Irish peace process—after the Shankill Road massacre, for instance—democratic leaders asserted first principles over and over: the central value of consent, the repudiation of violence, the primacy of democracy.

Asserting first principles in this case means re-stating the two-state solution. The world’s democratic leaders need to come together around a total repudiation of violence and the strongest possible assertion of the right for justice, security, and self-determination for both Israel and Palestine equally. It might be dismissed as blowing into the wind but it’s not. 

Constancy about values has never mattered more. Moral leadership has never mattered more.