NORM-ALISE RELATIONS WITH ISRAEL. Why double standards of Western governments will fuel further global conflict

The massive escalation of violence between Hamas and Israel has led to strong emotions but also (more) deliberately one-sided narratives. What compass can guide us in this moral and political morass? Here some pointers.

A right to resistance is not a right to commit massacres

1.????? People have the right to resist oppression and occupation. Western governments have repeatedly insisted on this, for example with the different successful and failed ‘colour’ revolutions in former states of the Soviet Union, most recently in 2020-2021 in Belarus. In extremis, as peaceful protest and other non-violent conflict resolution attempts fail, because they are only met with more oppression, people will be forced into armed resistance. European countries hail the resistance to the Nazi and Japanese occupations during WWII, and have condemned the collaborators. Palestinians have a right to resist the deepening and increasingly violent occupation of Israel.

2.????? Hamas’ recent attack and indiscriminate mass killings of overwhelmingly unarmed civilians in southern Israel is not an acceptable form of resistance. It is an inexcusable crime. The claims of senior Hamas leaders that its fighters are very disciplined and only attack legitimate targets and not civilians are a blatant lie. Hamas’ has demonstrated it deserves to be labelled a ‘terrorist’ organisation.

Israel has a right to defend itself. That does not give it a right to violently occupy Palestinian lands, forcibly displace Palestinians, and create a racist state.

1.????? Israel will exist. Reversing the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, is politically not realistic. Given their long history of violent persecution and displacement, culminating in the Holocaust, wanting to ‘drive the Jews into the sea’, is also morally not defensible. This cannot and does not justify the 1948 Nakba, in which 700'000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced and hundreds of their villages destroyed. For more than 70 years, several hundred thousands Palestinians since live in refugee camps, mostly in the Occupied Territories, in Lebanon and Jordan. This injustice cannot continue and needs to be resolved. But destroying Israel and forcing all of its Jewish residents out, is not a defensible ‘solution’. The 1967 borders, as internationally recognized, must stand. Compromises will have to be made on both sides.

2.????? Not all people in Israel are Jewish – it cannot be a ‘Jewish’ state. The rights of non-Jews need to be the same or Israel is not a ‘democratic’ but a racist, discriminatory, state. Non-Jews need to be acknowledged: ?Not all killed in the recent Hamas massacres were Jews – several were non-Jews, and (Bedouin) Arabs. Are the Arab victims acknowledged? Arming Jews living in towns with also sizeable non-Jewish residents (Palestinians with an Israeli passport or with permanent right of residence) violates fundamental human rights and democratic principles.

3.????? Israel and all those living in it, have a right to security. Like all other countries in the world, Israel has a right to defend itself. Also militarily. That does not give it a right

• To occupy and to colonise, since 1967, ever more Palestinian land with undeniable sponsorship by the State of Israel; ?to grab the best land and most of the water, to destroy the livelihoods of Palestinians; and to create clearly segregated zones i.e. a de facto apartheid.
• To inflict daily humiliation on all Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and to use disproportionate and increasingly lethal force on unarmed protesters.
• To deny building permits to and evict Palestinians from east Jerusalem in a slow but obvious trend of ethnic cleansing.
• To hold large numbers of Palestinians for prolonged periods in ‘administrative detention’ without charge or trial, which is also a form of keeping people ‘hostage’. Current numbers are estimated at around 1200, but over the past 20 years they have at times exceeded 10’000.
• To violently attack Palestinian funeral processions, be it by Israeli police (such as the funeral of journalist Shireen Abu Akleh that repeated inquiries show to have been shot, without justification, by an Israeli soldier); or by armed settlers (other funerals in the West Bank). What do we normally say about a country where mourners in a funeral procession are violently attacked and even killed?
• To absolve or only give the lightest of sentences to Israeli soldiers or settlers who have murdered Palestinians.
• To practice collective punishment on Palestinians e.g. in the form of demolition of homes of relatives of militants, and the indefinite blockade of Gaza since 2007.
• To continue intensive shelling and bombardment of Gaza when it is blatantly clear that the majority of casualties are civilians. Giving a few minutes prior notice so that -in theory- residents can evacuate, is clearly not enough and does not serve as excuse. The assertion that the Israeli air force and artillery only target militant locations is a lie as blatant as that of Hamas. ?
• To force the displacement of already a million people from northern Gaza, probably more soon.

Anti-Jewish ‘anti-semitism’ is unacceptable, needs to be condemned and legally repressed and redressed. There is no justification whatsoever for threatening, slandering or attacking Jewish people, or defacing their schools, synagogues, graveyards etc.,? in Israel or anywhere else in the world, because they are Jewish. And no, there is no global conspiracy of Jews to control the world. But anti-semitic rhetoric and aggressions, do not give Israel the right

• To incite racial hatred, from the highest levels, with government ministers calling Palestinians ‘human animals’. The violent persecution of Jews throughout history has always been accompanied by demeaning them and depriving them of their humanity. It is shocking to see Jews do the same to other identity groups. Palestinians too, have a fundamental right to security and dignity.
• To now distribute more arms to settlers and to Jews living in mixed communities, which is a clear expression of a racist and discriminatory government. What it should have done is provide greater visibility and support to movements such as 'Standing Together', where Jewish and Palestinian volunteers jointly seek to calm down the tensions and respond to incidents. (English | standing-together)
• To bomb or shell or otherwise destroy Palestinian schools, hospitals, water and electricity plants and other vital infrastructure and spaces of refuge, in clear contravention of the laws of war and international humanitarian law. These are war crimes.

Centuries of discrimination and violent persecution of Jewish people (by Christians including Orthodox Christians, much more than by Arabs), culminating in the mass murder of the Holocaust, demand empathy and redress. But that does not mean that Jews are now allowed, in turn, to collectively mistreat another identity group and to drive them from the land. Jews, and the State of Israel, are not above the international norms and international law.

Western governments are deeply complicit, by omission, ?in the bloody escalation taking place now.

• All the political statements now are about Israel's right to ‘security’ while the right of Palestinians to security is systematically not mentioned.
• For decades now, Israel’s deepening and ever more? repressive occupation has been met by Western political leaders with little more than a few mumbled disapprovals while brushing their teeth in the morning. But never are there any consequences. Israel has been granted unconditional impunity for violating international norms, laws and Security Council Resolutions: its leaders have known this and carried on.
• Everyone knows that a ‘two-state-solution’ is dead and has been killed off intentionally by successive Israeli governments. The deliberate division of Palestinian lands into separated enclaves, and the grabbing of land and water by Jewish settlers, has been an acknowledged strategy to ‘create facts on the ground’ under which no viable state can exist. Israel wants to annex the West Bank, and make life so unpleasant for Palestinians that they will leave voluntarily, or otherwise survive as second-rate workers in a Jewish state. Yet Western governments keep paying lip service to a ‘two state solution’, while they very well know this is no longer a realistic option.
• For years now, Western governments have been content to see this situation of unsustainable injustice ‘managed’ rather than ‘resolved’ or at least substantively improving. In reality, it was a boiling pressure kettle, the current explosion of which was predicted – yet ignored.[i]
• Framing the Hamas attack of 7 October as ‘unprovoked’, deliberately erases from the narrative the whole background of 60 years deepening and ever more repressive occupation, and the clear provocations of the last 2 years.
• ‘Terrorism’, in Western political discourse, is intentionally reserved for acts of non-state groups, as if there cannot be such a thing as ‘state terrorism’ (except, in Western rhetoric, in select enemies like North Korea perhaps).
• ‘Terrorism’ in Western political discourse, is mostly associated with Arabs or with Muslims, while violence to, committed by non-Arabs or non-Muslims, tends to be labelled as ‘hate crimes’. (We conveniently ignore that Jews are also capable of terrorist acts, as they committed during the British mandate period against Palestinians but also against the British – remember the bombing by the Jewish Irgun of the King David hotel in Jerusalem in July 1946?). Incidentally, and as a reminder to the Christians supporting the Zionist project, many Palestinians are Christian, not Muslim! [ii]
• Palestinians are constantly pressured to condemn Hamas’ (indeed condemnable) violence – but Israelis are never pressured to condemn the (equally condemnable) repressive, generalized and disproportionate violence of their compatriots and their State.

Western policies and (in)actions, more often than not, have been based on a deliberately one-sided and incomplete story. It undermines our credibility.

Worse, many Western governments are also actively complicit in prolonging for decades a situation that has now exploded into blind rage and revenge violence, and in furthering the already widespread disregard for international norms and laws. They did and do this, for example by

• Providing Israel for decades with lethal and non-lethal equipment used for the surveillance, intimidation and subjugation of millions of Palestinians.
• Criminalising the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign – a non-violent resistance movement to a clear injustice. A similar BDS campaign proved an effective pressure factor that contributed to the end of the apartheid regime in South Africa. If non-violent resistance is outlawed, some will conclude that violence is the only remaining option, a conclusion that has been made by many types of people throughout history – certainly not only by Arabs or Muslims.
• Now providing Israel with fresh military or dual-use aid for its latest war on the Palestinians, even if it is obvious that Israel’s ?current violence unleashed on Gaza is not about ‘defense’ but about ‘revenge’.
• Forbidding the flying of the Palestinian flag while encouraging the flying of the Israeli flag. Lauding terrorism and massacres should indeed not be allowed – but such norm only holds when it is consistently applied to all who use indiscriminate violence. (Note that hardline Jews applaud Yigal Amir, the ultranationalist Jew who in 1995 in Tel Aviv assassinated prime minister Yitzhak Rabin for having signed the Oslo peace agreement with the Palestinians, and that Israeli governments do not clamp down on this).
• By suspending all development aid to Palestinians, which is another form of inadmissible collective punishment.
• By automatically labelling criticism of the behaviour of the state of as ‘antisemitism’, as if Israel was above international laws and standards that we claim to uphold for any government in the world. This is all the more ridiculous given that many Jews, religious and secular, inside and outside Israel, also criticize the occupational Zionism of successive Israeli governments.[iii] Russian foreign minister Lavrov,? in his comments about the leadership in Ukraine, ?suggested there were and are ‘Jewish-Nazis’ (something that Israel strongly objected to); ?must we now wonder whether a Jew who criticize Israel’s state policies, is ‘antisemitic’?

None of this justifies the indiscriminate killing of men, women and children, overwhelmingly unarmed civilians (including Arabs) in the recent Hamas attack.

Moreover, Hamas committed an immense political blunder: Prior to its action, Netanyahu’s increasingly right-wing (occupation- and repression supporting) government had -finally- come under pressure from within Israeli society and in the West, for its overt racism and attempts to weaken the rule of law in Israel. In addition, over the years, the Palestinian side of the narrative was gradually being heard after decades in which only the one-sided Israeli narrative was listened to. Now, within days, Israeli society stands united under an ‘emergency united government’ while Western politicians stand ‘shoulder-to-shoulder’ with Netanyahu, as if he were some sort of Israeli Churchill, standing firm against the fascist evil. (In 2006, I heard an Israeli Jewish doctor who had refused to do his military service in the IDF and therefore was told he would not get his license to practice, refer to then Israel as a ‘proto-fascist state’. Maybe he was just one of those antisemitic Jews?).

None of this justifies the creeping but politically supported annexation of occupied lands, the collective punishments and indiscriminate killing of men, women and children, overwhelmingly unarmed civilians (stone throwing may not be acceptable but is not a capital offense for which one should be shot dead), by the Israeli army, police and settlers.

While the West vocally condemns China’s treatment of the Uyghurs and Russia’s indiscriminate violence in Syria and in Ukraine, not only does it not condemn Israel’s indiscriminate revenge violence and collective punishment now, it actively supports it politically and militarily. Why are the pulverized neighbourhoods of northern Gaza different from those of Ukrainian towns? Why are large numbers of Palestinian civilian casualties ‘collateral damage’ and Ukrainian civilian casualties a ‘war crime’? Why are we pouring (appropriately) millions of dollars into humanitarian aid for Ukraine but treat the right to humanitarian protection and assistance for people in Gaza (except those with dual nationality of course) as secondary to Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’?

Once again, we see a dramatic failure of Western governments to take a balanced, norm-based position. We believe this serves our geo-political interests. It does – in? the short term. It does not at all in the medium-term. Increasingly, around the world, other governments and people are more audibly pointing out what they see, rightly, as Western double standards and hypocrisy (terms also used recently in a television interview by a former British government minister). It dramatically erodes our often claimed ‘moral authority’ as promoters and defenders of human rights and international norms. For a while, that used to be part of the global ‘soft power’ of the West, the ability to attract and persuade others to our values and positions and be our allies. Destroying our own ‘soft power’, makes it easier to portray the West as ‘liars’ and ‘unreliable’. [iv] That reduces our ability to attract and maintain non-Western allies, and makes it easier to justify attacks against Western targets. Politically, we will then blame ‘the other’ and choose to be blind to how we contributed to this. That is not enlightened self-interest.

It is to be feared that Hamas’ massacres have set back the Palestinian cause twenty years, and will add fuel to the occupation and annexation of Palestinian lands. It is to be feared even more, that the unbalanced and shortsighted rhetoric and actions of Western governments, will globally erode our soft power and condemn international norms and standards to the room for the terminally-ill.

Without norms and without soft power, all that remains is hard power i.e. conflicts that are handled by the threat and use of violence. That will set the cause of a more peaceful world, in which we cooperate to minimize the climate and extinction emergencies, back for forty years. That is a far worse collective outcome.

Both for immediate reasons, and for medium-term ones, Western governments must ?stop treating Israel as if it is above the law and treat it as any other country - that means ‘norm-alise’ their relationship with it.

18 October 2023

[i] See e.g. P. Wintour in the Guardian of 17.10.2023: ?‘The danger of leaving things be.? How the world ‘failed miserably’ in the Middle East. The danger of leaving things be: how the world ‘failed miserably’ in the Middle East | Israel-Hamas war | The Guardian

[ii] Karen Armstrong’s ‘The Battle for God’ on fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, is one possible source for a needed broader perspective. (2000)

[iii] See e.g. Rabkin, Y. ‘A threat from within. A century of Jewish opposition to Zionism’. Zed Books 2006

[iv] Trumps withdrawal from the nuclear agreement with Iran, on top of a history of deep and violent interference in Iran by the British empire and subsequently the US, because of its oil and strategic position, could only confirm deep suspicions of the West.

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