A newsletter of despair

It's so easy to give in to hate and tribalism, but it won't save a single life.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

It's the blood. Sometimes you look at what's happening and you feel that surely it has stained your clothes, that it's spreading over your shirt. 

You see a news report from Gaza and you feel indecently clean. Everything is neatly tucked away in your home. Your gas and electricity work. Your internet works. Your belly is full. Your family is safe. And that feels like an insult to the people on the screen. You sit there, guilty and powerless and conflicted, as you watch images of extreme human suffering, and your own sanctuary is like a final debasement to those whose child is buried under the rubble.

In that sanctuary, you start to pontificate about how complex this all is and how difficult it is to evaluate, and you feel empty inside. 

We're nearly one month in now. One month since the Hamas attacks. One month in which every day brings some new atrocity, some new horrific detail of what is happening. And the people who want you to pick a side scream ever louder, and pulsate with anger, and use the most extreme language available. Keir Starmer is a war criminal apparently, despite the fact that he hasn't made a single executive decision relevant to Israeli operations. The EU has "blood on its hands", despite plainly having close to zero influence in the matter.

Two instances this week. On Tuesday, the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) confirmed that they had struck the Jabalia refugee camp and hit a senior Hamas commander. Many civilians were also killed - probably around 200. The surgical director of a nearby hospital talked of 400 casualties, including 120 dead, the majority women and children.

The IDF had plenty of justifications for the action. They had hit a legitimate military target. They had warned people to evacuate weeks ago. "Either they made a decision or a decision was made for them by Hamas to keep them there," an IDF spokesperson told ABC news. "They're using the civilians as their human shields."

But that begs the question. Even if we accept everything the IDF says, we are still presented with a moral chasm. Faced with a scenario in which Hamas uses human shields, the IDF solution is to bomb anyway. It is to take the life of the human shield and treat it as an acceptable loss in exchange for assassinating a member of Hamas. 

There is an underlying moral calculation there. Innocent Palestinians can be killed to protect innocent Israelies from a future attack by Hamas. And that ultimately boils down to a simple and ugly sentence: Arab lives matter less than Jewish lives. 

The second instance. On Wednesday, Hamas official Ghazi Hamad told a news station: "We will do this again and again. The Al-Aqsa Flood [the name Hamas uses for the October 7th attacks] is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth."

It would be good to know what those calling for an immediate unconditional ceasefire have to say to this. I don't say that aggressively or as rhetoric. I want to know what the answer is. I want someone on one of those marches to engage with it. 

What is the offer to Israel, where 1,400 people were murdered? What is there to prevent it happening again? The massacres, the rapes, the savagery. The pogrom. The extermination attempt. Hamas is making itself perfectly clear: it will do it again. It wants to wipe Israel off the face of the map. What is the answer to that proposition? Not the long-term answer about a political process and a two-state solution. The operational short-term answer that would give you security if you were one of the people it might happen to - if it were your parents or your children in the firing line.

If someone calls for an immediate unconditional ceasefire but doesn't have one, it suggests they have made the same moral calculation as the IDF. Innocent Jews can be put at risk in a future attack from Hamas in order to protect innocent Palestinians now. Jewish lives matter less than Arab lives. 

I was in Barcelona at the weekend. As I walked around the Gothic quarter, a pro-Palestine demonstration took place. 

It was a million miles away from Suella Braverman's divisive gibberish about "hate marches": full of young people, of many different backgrounds, angry but compassionate, outraged by the images they'd seen, demanding that it stop.

There have certainly been instances of antisemitism on many of these marches, but they are not defined by being anti-Jewish and it's obscene to see defenders of Israel suggest they are. 

Hamas is the Other. It is a terror organisation. It cannot be pressured into a change of position by demonstrators marching in European cities. But Israel is part of the in-group. It is us - a liberal democracy, enmeshed in the international system, receiving support from Western governments. It potentially could be pressured into a change of position, however unlikely that currently seems.

Not so long ago, I would have been on that protest. I found the whole notion of Israel disturbing. Nothing good, I thought, would come from a state based on race or religion. Once you let go of that requirement, it was possible to imagine a one-state solution in which Arabs and Jews coexisted in one country, with full rights and freedoms. 

Israel itself was the problem. Its status as a Jewish state in a majority Arab area demanded ethnic delineation and catalysed the kind of tribal animosity we see today. And in that view was an assumption: Jews were safe. They could stop worrying now. It was time for Israel to become like any other secular liberal state.

It was the Corbyn years that changed things for me. The sudden outbreak of antisemitism. And the callow excuses that were made for it. 

The thing that struck me was that none of it felt new. It felt terribly old. People were making insinuations and deploying opinions which had been made centuries, even millennia, before. It felt as if something monstrous had woken from a slumber, something under the earth, damp and fanged and covered in hooks, which it knew intuitively how to sink into a human heart. 

Suddenly those days of thinking about a happy-go-lucky multicultural one-state solution seemed laughably naive. If this was what lurked in tolerant moderate Britain, what would it be like elsewhere? And then I realised why Jews needed a homeland. They needed somewhere to be safe.

My naivety also had a long history. It was how many European Jews themselves had felt in the second half of the 19th Century, as they secured full civil equality in Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy and Scandinavia. Perhaps antisemitism was a relic of the past, they thought, an obscure remnant of a pre-Enlightenment age that would fade in the era of freedom and reason. And then came the spasm of Jew hatred in Germany in the 1870s following a financial crash. And then came the pogroms in Russia from 1881 onwards, leading to the Kishinev massacre of 1903. And then came the Dreyfus Affair in France. And then came the Holocaust.

The dream of a Jewish homeland succeeded because there was finally recognition that this was a precondition of Jewish safety. It succeeded because antisemitism hasn't faded away. It lies dormant, ready to be activated again. You could see it in the Corbyn years. And you could see it, in a far more murderous form, in the attack last month. The brutality. The viciousness. The existential quality. 

But there was a price for that homeland. It was the self-determination of the Palestinian Arabs. There's no point questioning that, or pretending it is not true, or waving it away. It is a fact. 

This is the moral contortion we face. Both sides are correct. Historically, it is a case of two competing goods: Jewish safety versus Arab self-determination. And politically, the current developments are the case of two competing tragedies: Hamas' massacres versus Israel's indiscriminate bombing. 

When things get tough, other people turn to the Bible, or Marxist analysis, or some angry conspiracy theory messiah on YouTube. I turn to the Jewish philosopher Isaiah Berlin. 

No-one ever really talks about him. They never will. His views are too difficult to emotionally accept. But he has the advantage of speaking truth.

Berlin believed that the world is composed of competing values: Hedonism, tradition, freedom, control, equality, hierarchy, whatever. They exist in cultures, which prize certain values above others. They exist in people, who do the same. And they exist within the beating heart of each individual. 

We all want things which cannot be put together. Maybe we value family but we've fallen in love with someone they disapprove of. Maybe we're a Ukrainian who wants to fight for their country but whose father is sick at home without anyone else to care for him. Berlin warns you to be wary of those who say that there is a right answer to these questions. He warns you to distrust those who say there is a future utopia where these difficulties have been conquered.

They cannot be conquered. Life is composed of inevitable tragedy: the tragedy of competing values. There will never be a happy ending. It will never be solved, because humanity cannot be solved. 

The role of politics is not to eradicate conflict. It is to smooth the edges, to soften the blades, to alleviate the suffering. To insert moderation and compromise wherever possible. It is a balm, not a cure.

Berlin is hard to accept because he takes away the lie of the happily-ever-after. He takes away the political promised land, where all problems have been fixed. But in exchange, he provides you with a shield. He allows you to insulate yourself against hatred and righteousness. He lets you accept moral complexity. 

With that shield in place, we can ask different questions, ones which do not pretend there is a right answer, but instead try to soften the edges of what is happening. Can humanitarian corridors be provided? How can civilians be protected while Israeli operations continue? Can air bombing ever destroy Hamas' operational capacity? If not, what is the military alternative? If a ceasefire can be secured, what kind of measures could safeguard Israel against a future attack so that the bombing does not start again? What kind of government could be established in Gaza which has legitimacy on the Palestinian side while providing reassurance on the Israeli side? Could an Arab-led international initiative secure that kind of arrangement? What steps can be taken to instigate this? 

These aren't great questions. They feel very distant. As far as I can tell, no-one in a position of influence is asking them, except for liberal Israelis and perhaps the Americans behind closed doors, if we're lucky. But at least they're realistic. At least they're practical. At least they recognise the mutual nature of the situation and of the consequences which follow from our attempts to address it. 

At least they protect us from falling into the binary opposition in which it becomes so much easier to rage and dehumanise, so much easier to make that grotesque moral calculation that some lives are worth less than others. 

Small pickings. And unlikely ones too. But a mast in the storm nonetheless. Something to cling to when everything seems impossible. And right now that's all we've got, as we sit at home: clean, conflicted and empty inside.