We repeat our call for peace
Less than a week after agreeing to a ceasefire in Gaza, it appears that the Israelis have shifted their focus to The West Bank. As such, there is still a great weight of one-sided warfare in the historic land of Palestine. In classic double-speak, the Israelis have described this as nothing more than another part of a multi-front war. But it feels more of a facade than a front. It’s an act designed to keep stoking the fires of conflict until Palestinian society is extinguished in the flames that arise.
This latest onslaught is of no benefit to either Palestinians or Israelis in the long run. If there is to be peace, there has to be a meaningful ceasefire. We learned that in Ireland at both ends of the 20th century. Before the slow and painstaking birth of The Good Friday Agreement of 1998, both Republicans and Loyalists laid down their arms. The British Army agreed to withdraw out of the public eye back to their bases. Although still there, they were out of view. But the Israeli army are never far from sight in the Palestinian parts of the historic land that was once populated by Jews, Arabs and Christians living as one society.
Sometimes, if beings from Mars were to gaze down upon the scorched terrain of Gaza and the refugee camps scattered across the surrounding lands, they would imagine that human beings enjoy killing, purely for fun. At times, it’s like something between a cruel sport and a virtual reality game. Some might use the term inhuman. But it’s actually very human. Throughout human history and especially in the history of colonisation, one group of human beings has tried to exterminate another, or at the very least created conditions in which the presence of the ‘other’ would gradually fade to nothingness. This happened with so many indigenous people the world over, from North America all the way down to Australia.
Some call it progress and probably those in power in The United States right now would see it that way. Strangely though the same people who might say that Native Americans have no right to the naming of mountains and rivers in their own ancestral land are the very same people who say that the Israelis have a Biblical right to Palestine. It’s impossible to know if they are blind to the contradictions in their own argument. They probably are, quite unashamedly. But surely there’s no section of this Bible that gives authority to anyone to murder children, women and men indiscriminately from the sky, as if Gods. The violence in Gaza has been absolutely disproportionate and of such zealous wickedness it will be remembered for generations.
When the Western World wakens out of the fog of its own arrogance in years to come, it will look on this as many of us first looked upon Nazi Germany and the stories of the Holocaust when we first encountered them. There is still hope though because terrible as all this has been so far, people can still make peace. The ordinary Palestinians want peace. Though as dehumanised by some in the media as the people of Derry and West Belfast once were, they are people who love their land. Yes, sadly groups such as Hamas voice sentiments that are scary. But the reverse sentiments are expressed by the political right in Israel too and the best way to reduce the influence of Hamas would have been to strive for a just settlement decades ago.
It is not for us, as a group of Irish and British people, to make a suggestion as to what any future peace settlement should look like. Just as we believe that the Irish people alone should decide their constitutional future, the same should be true of those who live within the historic territory of Palestine. That will be a hard ask. But the first step to making it happen is to have a meaningful ceasefire. Without that, the endless hamster wheel of war is simply going to continue, with more men, women and children murdered as if nothing more than rodents to be exterminated. There has been enough bloodshed. For everyone’s sake, including the people of Israel, there has to be another road to take, other than the one that leads to fresh war in The West Bank.
