On Israel-Palestine
‘The nightmare in Gaza is more than a humanitarian crisis. It is a crisis of humanity.’
Antonio Guterres, Secretary General of the United Nations
For the historical background see the video above and here. We note it is an issue going back more than a century, and the want of the Palestine Liberation Organisation is – reasonably enough – either a two state outcome based on the 1967 borders as per UN resolutions (see here ), and international law (see here), or a one state outcome which could be a federal model where – as in normal countries – there are equal rights for people of all ethnoreligious groups.
Israel’s prime minister (from 2022, also from 2009-2021 and 1996-1999) is Benjamin Netanyahu. His party, Likud, and its far right partners in government, support the idea of a Land of Israel just for Jewish people that would swallow Gaza and the West Bank, if not also Jordan and Lebanon, most of Syria, large parts of Iraq and Saudi Arabia, and parts of Egypt and Turkey as a ‘Greater Israel’. Their thinking is that this land was God-given to the Jewish people around 4000 years ago and reclaiming this may initiate a ‘Messianic Age’. We see this want being played out in the Israeli government’s actions today and its rejection of a two state solution. We see also the link with Christian Zionism, note the powerful Israel lobby in the US, ponder on the oil and gas reserves in the occupied territories and the Ben Gurion Canal proposal, and recognize the particular problem here which is acute in this part of the world as it is powered by zealotry and greed, which is ethnonationalism.
Both within and without Israel-Palestine, good people of all faiths and none want peace, want justice, want the flourishing of all lives across the Holy Land, and recognize this can only come about through that one or two state solution which would herald a better age for humanity. In relation to the nightmare in Gaza, most countries in the world have voted repeatedly for an immediate and permanent ceasefire and ending of the siege; to affirm the right of the Palestinian people to their own home in the Holy Land; and to condemn Israeli land-grabs in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Consistently voting against such resolutions is Israel’s largest donor, the US. There’s a read here from 2021 on that relationship.
The proximal answer for why we have this century-long injustice and present crisis is for political-historical reasons which are the discussion and frustration of academics, journalists and politicians. The distal answer is for psychological-evolutionary reasons. We should start with these as they are universal not particular, then zoom in on Israel-Palestine.
The general crisis in the world today is explained by being in between one age of humanity qualified by a particular state of consciousness that is waning, and another age qualified by a more mature state of consciousness that is waxing. These ages are traced in Chapter 5 of the author’s book How to Run a Planet.
The waning consciousness is that of a self that is other to others. ‘Others’ including other people and nature. This manifests both individually and collectively in an ability to be selfish over property (e.g. land), and to identify exclusively with a particular national, regional, ethnic or religious group.
The waning consciousness also manifests culturally in a materialist worldview, and attitudinally and politically in a capitalist mindset and economic system. Arguably this defines modern Western civilization although it isn’t confined to it, nor the product of it, merely has been developed by it.
The materialist worldview is of a universe that is objectively real and made up of matter/energy, and a mind separate from the body (dualism) but also, conflictingly, with consciousness produced by the brain. The essential human self is thus both other than nature and yet not immaterial. This ‘messed up’ psyche means the world and other people can be conceived as just material and animal: non-sacred natural and human resources for appropriation and exploitation. Earthly self-service not service to the Divine is the civilizational stance, with the pursuit of wealth (economic growth) being seen as right and natural. This is the capitalist mindset and economic system – a system which always turns plutocratic and steers governments towards only serving the few.
As the same worldview includes not having a place in the universe other than physical, and an existential purpose other than survival, we rely on religious teachings, humanist ethics, non-right wing political views – and today knowledge of ecocide – to civilize behaviour. All of this struggles against right-wing political views though which have that materialist worldview more on their side.
The waxing consciousness, by contrast, is that of a self that is spatiotemporally nonlocalized. It is difficult then to other others, and what manifests culturally is a postmaterialist worldview and attitudinally a postcapitalist mindset. This explains the growing demand there is today for a postcapitalist economic system. What is newly seen as right and natural – as well as ecologically necessary – is the pursuit of societal and environmental wellbeing rather than economic growth.
The waning age consciousness gave us ‘my property-ism’ (and collectively ‘our land-ism’), and ‘my tribe-ism’ (and ‘our people-ism’), with individuals and nation-states seen as ontologically primary not some organic whole in which they are a part, and personal and collective freedom qualified as much by freedom from society (and from the international community) as it is freedom in society (and in the international community). It also gave us a view that government should be small, hands-off and area-confined when it comes to taxes, regulations and sovereignty (so socialism is largely eschewed, laissez faire-ism prevails particularly in the Anglosphere, and transnational states are opposed); and big only to protect this ‘way of life’ especially in the form of military power.
The waxing consciousness, by contrast, is that individuals and nation-states are not ontologically primary – it is an organic whole in which they are a part. Freedom therefore excludes freedom from society, whether we are talking about the behaviour of a person, a business, a country or a group of countries. And government should be as big, involved and expansive as required – which would extend to world government – to serve the global common good, with global institutions and rules (not military power) being supreme.
The new consciousness demands, with respect to Gaza, that which all good people want – an immediate, permanent ceasefire and ending of the siege, the release of all those held hostage in Gaza and the thousands wrongly detained in Israel, peace talks held in good faith, and finally that one or two state solution. The new consciousness recognizes that an international peace conference would be a good idea and, in order to avoid a wider regional war, to secure the safety of Israelis and Palestinians alike, to reduce anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in the wider world, and to free up political time and funding that could be better spent elsewhere, it may be necessary for the international community to impose a solution on the Israeli and Palestinian governments/administrations. This is an idea the Chinese and EU’s foreign ministers have mooted. To borrow a phrase, the world needs to ‘take back control’.
The new consciousness demands:
1. A non-Westernism, which is perhaps the greatest challenge, where Westernism refers to a pan-nationalism and adolescent tribalism spanning the West as a group of countries.
2. The disallowance of a second Nakba (the mass expulsion of Palestinians out of their homes in the Holy Land).
3. The upholding of international criminal and humanitarian law based as they are on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This upholding would extend to the prosecution in due course of Hamas and Israeli leaders for war crimes as the human rights expert Kenneth Roth referenced last year:
The new consciousness recognizes that the unconditional support there is in many Western minds for Israel is wrong (as no country shall have freedom from the international community or in other words impunity), and that this support derives ultimately from the old consciousness in which ethnonationalism and settler colonialism are ‘fine’, together with guilt for the Holocaust. A guilt that is the more so because of a common Judaeo-Christian cultural – if not ethnic – identity: Israel being seen as part of the Western ‘tribe’ that is other to, and under threat from, other tribes including the Muslim-Arab-West Asian tribe. From this stems Islamophobia, anti-Arab racism and anti-Palestinianism.
Demagogues and authoritarians in the West use this ‘threat’ to advance their political careers, deliver harmful (but profitable to them and their sponsors) projects like Brexit, and implement regressive, quasi-fascist policies. Immigrants from outside the Western tribe are scapegoated for declining public services and rising wealth inequality which are caused not by immigration (and therefore not solved by closing borders), but by neoliberal policies (and therefore solved by economic progressivism). The West’s developed capitalist system and imperial legacy is also in the dock for the climate and refugee crises.
The new consciousness recognizes there are Western double-standards when it comes to Israel-Palestine: it not being OK for Russia to seize Ukrainian territory, but it seemingly being OK for Israel to seize Palestinian territory. And there being no hesitation in calling out Russian war crimes, but refusing to even acknowledge Israeli war crimes. The Western response to the nightmare in Gaza has been morally reprehensible and a geostrategic disaster – strengthening Iran-Russia relations, ceding moral high ground to China, and turning Muslim and Global South countries more towards the East. Moreover, it seriously undermines the rules-based international order: how can you say everyone has to abide by international law whilst providing a hall pass for your friend?
The repeat refusal to call for an immediate, permanent ceasefire and ending of the siege, merely humanitarian pauses, is particularly damaging. For that is to reject there is anything wrong with Israel continuing its course of withholding the essentials of life to a trapped population of 2.3m people and dropping hundreds of bombs killing hundreds of people every day. As of 14 February 2024, according to Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, 36,671 Palestinians have been killed including 14,031 children. One child is killed every ten minutes.
On top of that is the effect of the siege – see here. The entire population is living with crisis-level hunger, deaths have already begun from starvation, serious infectious diseases are spreading, and a projection of the death toll from excess mortality is here. We have seen the unforgivable blocking of aid trucks by Israeli protestors, the wilful destruction of food warehouses, bakeries, crops and fishing boats by Israeli forces, and the complete or partial destruction of around 90,000 homes and most civilian infrastructure including healthcare facilities and water treatment works.
The excuse given by Western leaders for not supporting a ‘full stop’ is that this would allow Hamas (members of which constitute around 1% of the Gazan population) to attack again (we recall 1139 Israelis were killed in that attack), and Israel’s security is all-important. But the security of Israelis is not more important than the security of Palestinians, the former is dependent on the latter (achieved through that one or two state solution), and unlike Gazans, Israelis are not starving, enjoy working hospitals, and are protected by air defences, 600,000 troops and the US.
Israel claims it is only at war with Hamas, but a war only on Hamas would have involved merely a targeted counterinsurgency operation such as the British Army did with the IRA in Ireland, not a comprehensive siege of Gaza, destruction of infrastructure and razing of neighbourhoods. The result would be civilian casualties only of a few score, not of tens of thousands. It is clear the ‘war’ is on all Gazans seen as the enemy (indeed Israeli politicians have said ‘there are no innocent civilians’) and, when we also observe the killing by Israel of hundreds of Palestinians in the West Bank where Hamas is not based, one can reasonably conclude we are looking at a genocide.
The human rights lawyer Craig Mokhiber spoke of this in November 2023 (see here); the Israeli professor of Holocaust studies Raz Segal also assessed that here. South Africa invoked the Genocide Convention the following month (their submission to the International Court of Justice is here). The ICJ found South Africa’s case to be plausible – Israel now stands on trial for genocide – and issued legally binding provisional measures which, to date, Israel has failed to comply with. The Western countries that subsequently suspended funding to UNRWA, the main agency providing aid to Gazans (based on evidenceless claims from Israel), are also in violation of their own obligations under the Genocide Convention.
South Africa had previously, alongside Bangladesh, Bolivia, Comoros and Djibouti, asked the International Criminal Court to investigate atrocity crimes in the occupied Palestinian territories. Other states and non-state parties have also referred Israel’s actions to the ICC, and current and former heads of government around the world have condemned Israel for committing the war crimes of collective punishment, perfidy, pillaging and forced displacement if not also genocide. The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention is under no doubt the US government is complicit in genocide (see here), and Nicaragua is taking Germany, Canada, UK and Netherlands also to the ICJ for complicity in genocide.
The long-held Western policy of unconditional support for Israel is wholly indefensible when that has involved turning a blind eye to the crimes of successive Israeli governments including apartheid (acknowledged by Netanyahu’s senior adviser Mark Regev here). And now the world’s public watches in horror as Israel murders tens of thousands of innocent civilians whilst Western leaders tell them their eyes are deceiving them or that there’s nothing they can do about it which is untrue. There is clearly more concern among Western politicians (if not among the public) for the lives of Israelis than Palestinians, with some degree of vilifying and dehumanising all of the latter: a view they are unworthy and disqualifying of inalienable human rights. The criminals and savages are the ones denying them these. We are witnessing something reminiscent of a native population massacre carried out by European colonisers in Africa and the Americas.
Israel could have chosen to pursue and punish the perpetrators of the 7 October attack (the Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas) with a targeted counterinsurgency operation as said. But it has chosen instead to use this attack as an excuse, a cover, for genocide and ethnocide (hence the destruction of Gazan mosques, churches, museums, libraries, universities, cemeteries and archaeological sites). All of this is linked to a Lebensraum-like ideology and victim mentality in Israel, fomented by schoolbooks which present Palestinians as lesser, backward and a threat. As a society, it might be said that Israel requires urgent mental health care.
Israel – or at least dominating forces in its current government – does not hide its wish to expel and replace Gazans with Jewish settlers. See the ministerial report here and the recent conference here. Israel supporters ask: Why don’t the neighbouring Arab states, particularly Egypt, take the Gazans in (as the US has reportedly pressured them to do)? The answer is because pained as they are by seeing their fellows suffer, and wanting that to end, they will not be party to a second Nakba, a crime against humanity, knowing that the problem is not Palestinians living in Israel but Palestinians not living freely in their own land. Palestinians can claim indigeneity to the Levant no less than ethnic Jews.
The Gaza crisis demands justice and racial equality in the Holy Land but also flags the need to bury Western colonialism once and for all, and to deliver global justice, peace and sustainability based on internationally agreed human rights and needs – a challenge to all states and governments, Western, Arab and other. This is a crisis of humanity as Guterres says: we are seeing a complete failure of UN member states to live up to their individual and collective responsibility to prevent and punish genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. Will this be a turning point toward a better world or a regression into lawless ‘might is right’? We hope it is the former.
The 7 October attack was a wake-up call to finally end not the problem of the Palestinians for annexation-wanting Israelis, but the century-long injustice against Palestinians and, via that, Hamas or at least its military wing. Many of the wisest voices on the conflict come from Ireland where it is understood that you only end the cycle of violence through a fair and lasting political settlement backed by the international community. Disarmament follows that. There is no military solution. General Charles Brown, Chair of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke of how eliminating Hamas was militarily unrealistic and how you cannot eliminate the cause Hamas fights for (Palestinian liberation – a cause to which millions more will rally to if you commit genocide) without that one or two state solution.
The new consciousness sees a Western media bias in the higher value placed upon Israeli lives, the non-acknowledgement of apartheid, a non-condemnation of Israeli leaders who speak of annihilating Palestine (see here), and an ‘our people’ identification with Israeli troops and hostages. There is a narrative that Hamas is responsible for the death of all Palestinians since 7th October or, if Israel, ‘she’ is to be absolved because of that singular attack. It is true Gazans elected Hamas in 2006, but there have been no elections since then, most Gazans weren’t old enough to vote or even alive then (such is the demography), civilians are protected under international law whatever their political views, and an underreported story is how Netanyahu propped up Hamas to divide Palestinians and to thwart a Palestinian state (see here). Plus an occupied people has a right to fight their oppressor, only war crimes are impermissable.
The new consciousness is greatly alarmed and angered by the current state of affairs which is a consensual Israeli view of ‘no’ to a Palestinian state and ‘no’ to ending apartheid, and to a position that: a) providing humanitarian relief (i.e. allowing food to starving civilians) would be dependent on further hostages being released (and the US supports only another pause during which it sees that and a further captive exchange would take place, but still refuses to vote for an immediate, permanent ceasefire); and b) ending the war is dependent upon release of all hostages but also ‘finishing the job’ – the job it claims is merely destroying Hamas and requires an assault on Rafah come what may, but which is actually ethnic cleansing and the latter a completion of that. Hamas’ view (here) is releasing further hostages is dependent on humanitarian relief (aka complying with the ICJ order), and releasing all of them is dependent on ending the war including retreat from Gaza and reconstruction works.
Israel objects to two states because it wants all the land which over decades through acts of aggression it has stolen more and more of, and – as it tells its protector the US – a sovereign Palestinian state (i.e. one that is in charge of its own borders, air, land and maritime space, and which is free to have its own armed forces if it likes and enter into agreements with other states as it chooses) would be a ‘security threat’ and ‘not in the West’s interests’. The block is therefore selfish and paranoic, tribalist and geostrategic, with US politicians paying lip-service to the idea of two states but having in mind a Bantustan not a sovereign Palestinian state. Netanyahu views even a return to the status quo ante as ‘giving in to terror’. Hence the need, somehow, for the international community to take charge.
The new consciousness recognizes all of this and more, but it is not anti-Israel nor anti-Zionism per se – only the ‘all of the Holy Land just for Jewish people and the Palestinians can leave or die’ type of Zionism that has become standard Zionism. A State of Israel – a homeland for Jews – is agreeable but of course can be a homeland for non-Jews equally. It is about an equality of rights. (The biblical Kingdom of Israel incidentally was not an ethnocracy.) What is clearly not agreeable is the illegal and immoral activities of Israeli governments. It is not just a pernicious ideology that has to go, but a deep ethnocentricity that, if once historically necessary in the community, is now inimical to itself and others. Time to move forward as part of one heterogenous but single human community.
The new consciousness is not pro-Hamas, it is not anti-Semitic (criticism of Israel is not anti-Semitic – see here), it recognizes Jews and Palestinians share a common ancestry in Bronze Age Canaanite and earlier Levantine people, and that all the Abrahamic religions teach the Golden Rule which is to treat others as you would have them treat you. As Hillel the Elder said: ‘What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow’, and ‘do not separate yourself from the community’. Israel’s actions today do not accord with Judaic teachings, nor Western support of them with Christian teachings.
The new consciousness is pro-Palestinian not in opposition to Israel but in wanting a homeland for them too (in the same democratic state as equal citizens, or in a separate sovereign state – as per the PLO want, UN resolutions and international law). The new consciousness is pro-humanity: that is the one people that is appreciated and identified with beyond the Western or any other. A ‘one humanity, one planet’ consciousness. So it marches in support of an immediate, permanent ceasefire and ending of the siege; it prays an assault on Rafah does not take place; it supports all genuine efforts to secure a just and lasting peace; it engages in all efforts to educate, enlighten and bring communities together; and it gets behind all actors in the political, religious and civil spheres – including the UN and its agencies, rightminded faith leaders, international aid organisations and international courts – that are leading on or have responsibility for this urgent and pre-eminent work.