Gaza.
The word has now come to represent so much that is wrong in human behaviour.
It’s about revenge – by Hamas, for decades of often violent suppression of Arabs in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza; by Israel, for the invasion, massacre and hostage-taking of October 7/23.
The number of dead is staggering: 1,200 in Israel, and well over 42,000 in Gaza, with projected deaths approaching 200,000.
The conflict has nothing to do with Jews or Judaism per se. It’s about an increasingly fascist Israeli government – like fascist governments around the world and throughout human history.
Jews are embedded in practically every society. They often contribute disproportionately to the betterment of the societies they live in. Science, health care, business, the arts – with cultural traditions of lively discussion and debate, community values and hard work.
Jews produced “White Christmas” and “Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” polio vaccine and the Theory of Relativity.
But statements from Benjamin Netanyahu, and especially from his hard-line political collaborators Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bevalel Smotrich, are now undiluted hate-driven (or politically expedient) genocidal racism.
Israel was created after 2,000 years of incessant persecution of Jews, culminating in the Holocaust, and leading to a built-in expectation among many Jews of rejection and even violent persecution. The Israeli government, many Israelis and most older Jewish organizations conflate criticism of Israel’s government with anti-Semitism.
They’re actually totally different.
Criticism of the policies of the Israeli government towards the prior inhabitants of Palestine is not anti-Semitism, just as criticism of Donald Trump in the U.S., or Pierre Poilièvre or Justin Trudeau in Canada, is not anti-American or anti-Canadian.
There are three inescapable conclusions from Gaza. First, resolving disputes by violence is simply awful. Research by Harvard’s Erica Chenoweth has also shown that it really never works.
Second, the destruction in Gaza culminates a long process of progressively harsh discrimination against the Arab population in former Palestine.
Third, no political player even remotely connect to the Gaza situation has “clean hands”.
Americans have supplied vast amounts of weapons to Israel. Many rich countries (including Canada) have supported arms industries that cynically sell weapons to any buyer anywhere. Many nations and corporations (often barely distinguishable from one another) have meddled in the Middle East (and elsewhere) for their own selfish reasons (like Britain – first, to protect the Suez Canal, and later to satiate British craving for fossil fuels).
And all of us have at some time held illusions that led us to “other” people – with a different skin colour, different culture or religion or language or clothing, different lifestyle, different social status (either higher or lower), different level of personal wealth, or a different geographic home. We’ve believed they are meaningfully and negatively different from us.
These superficial divisions can create a thought pattern that leads to various kinds of irrational, fear-based discrimination at the very least, and violence at the very worst.
Gaza is telling us it’s well past time to abandon this harmful path.
We are all one – indissolubly and forever.
Warren Bell is a long-time family physician in Salmon Arm with a consuming interest and involvement in community and global affairs.
