I am sometimes accused by my detractors on Twitter of having no sympathy for the suffering people of Gaza, and of Palestine more widely. It is no secret that I am utterly opposed to Hamas, and am confident in laying responsibility for the current hostilities at their door. But I want to take this opportunity to make absolutely and explicitly clear my sympathy for the suffering people of Gaza.
Israel’s military activities in Gaza – a legitimate war of defense launched in direct response to the murderous Hamas invasion of Israeli civilian areas on October 7th – undoubtedly result in immense suffering for Gazan civilians. Women, children, the elderly, and the peaceful men of Gaza are trapped in an invidious, evil situation. They are (mostly) the unwilling subjects of Hamas’s brutal regime, and they are the human shields the jihadists are willing to offer up to Israeli bombs and bullets. Hamas’s leaders are not, noticeably, suffering in Gaza alongside them.
What is happening to the innocents of Gaza is a horror. Israel should be held to the same standards as any other civilized state. The IDF must, of course, work to minimize casualties among Gaza civilians wherever possible. Nobody serious, even among Israel’s staunchest defenders, disputes this.
One reason we should be horrified at October 7th is that it made war in Gaza inevitable. There was no way Israel could reasonably have failed to hunt down the jihadists who invaded. Urban warfare in Gaza – barring Hamas’s surrender – became inevitable. And urban warfare is horribly destructive.
When Iraqi government forces, with the support of US and allied militaries, reconquered the northern Iraqi city of Mosul from Islamic State terrorists, civilian casualties were terribly high. Some estimates suggest as many as 40,000 innocent Iraqis may have died in 2016-17 as Mosul was liberated street by street. That it was a real and legitimate liberation does not diminish the terrible human suffering which was its price.
Who could look at Mosul then, or Gaza now, and fail to feel compassion for the suffering innocents? The seventeenth century English poet and priest John Donne wrote this:
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
Any humane person should feel sympathy for the people of Gaza, and I completely reject any suggestion that I don’t speak out on their behalf.
In the long run, we should hope and pray and campaign for a peaceful Gaza. When Islamists claim that they love death as much as the Israelis or Westerners love life, they are being awfully honest. But the Gazan people do not deserve death. They deserve life.
They deserve good lives, under a peaceful civilian government. They deserve a Gaza which lives amicably alongside the State of Israel. They deserve education, the protections of a humane legal system, and they deserve self-government. Gaza’s tiny Christian community deserves security, and a viable future. Gazans deserve productive jobs in Gaza (or, as was the case before October 7th, in Israel itself). They deserve to be treated with dignity, by both the Israelis and by their own rulers. One day, once Hamas is removed from power, Gaza could be a happy and free Palestinian city state on the Mediterranean shore.
This will happen when jihadism is crushed and discredited. It will happen when anti-Semitism is abandoned. It will happen when the West works to broker a genuine peace between a secure Israel and a free Palestine, rather than the violent fantasy of Israel’s destruction “From the River to the Sea.” It will happen when ordinary Arabs of good will have political leaders who can accept that Jewish Israelis will not be leaving their homeland, and when Israel clamps down on rogue Settlers in the West Bank and protects currently vulnerable Palestinian landowners.
My detractors accuse me of not caring about Palestinians, of not feeling their pain. This is completely untrue. I mourn the dead of Gaza, just as I mourn those killed on October 7th. I genuinely hope that one day this dreadful, bitter conflict will exist only in the history books.
There would be peace in Gaza tomorrow if Hamas laid down its weapons. There could be peace across the Holy Land next year, if Arab leaders could accept the State of Israel’s right to exist, and Israel acted to protect the Palestinian communities of the West Bank.
Dehumanization and despair are the tools of the jihadist and the totalitarian. I oppose jihadism precisely because I value human life. I want the people of Palestine to live, and to live well.
I hope and pray that Hamas are soon defeated, and that the people of Gaza are given the opportunity to choose life and peace.