The Future of Peace (2/4)

Gaza as a Crucible of Perception

This is the second of three posts on the future of peace. In between, I gave a few additional reflections on Gaza in an audio post for paid subscribers that begins with text anyone can read. I’m grateful and encouraged by those who thanked me for doing so. I am going to share a little more about Gaza here because I believe what is unfolding is prismatic of much that is relevant to the future of peace. So I’ve extended the planned two-part series to three parts accordingly. I start here with Gaza and then (in the next post) situate it alongside other major dimensions of our global predicament (Ukraine, climate collapse, democracy, and AI) becuase I think any quality thinking about peace has to move beyond areas and issues. All major geopolitical developments are now interconnected and our thinking challenge is typically abductive, it’s about ‘inference to the best explanation’ based on learning from one context and seeing how aspects of it may plausibly apply elsewhere.

Towards the end of the year, a couple of longstanding friendships became strained when I shared thoughts on my perception of what was happening in Gaza on my Twitter/X account and I was accused not merely of antisemitism but also of ‘historically illiterate garbage’. I risk the same thing happening here, and the wider reflection on peace risks getting lost in details about one part of the world, but speaking out on Gaza feels like a lesser evil in the context of what I am witnessing and experiencing. There is always too much to say, but three areas of inquiry feel pertinent to me as I reflect on the future of peace, and they feel like they are mine to share now: Perception, ‘Whiteness’, and Denial. They are broadly about our default ways of viewing the world, our moral sensibility, and how we interpret evolving situations like Gaza.

Image of Gaza from ABC7 Eyewitness in 2014 (chosen deliberately to give historical perspective) News:https://abc7.com/israel-gaza-conflict-un-school-strike-war-ceasefire/235897/

It matters a great deal where you begin your thinking, and how you orient yourself towards any problem space. I know this from my chess experience too - it’s the quality of the initial perception of the position rather than the thinking that follows, that is of primary importance. If you want to understand the Middle East you could of course go back to the Big Bang, the geology of land formation on planet Earth, the evolution of sapiens, early migration patterns, the contested ideas of ethnicity and race, the Axial age, the birth of monotheism, and the relationship between theology and territory, but sooner or later you come to history.

There is a history before The Balfour Declaration of 1917, where the UK government, then a major colonial power, decided the Jewish people needed a homeland and that Palestine was the place to do it. As Koestler put it with cutting wit:

“One nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third."

The history before 1917 matters because antisemitism all over the world then is still a big part of the context today, including historical memory of the pogroms. Yet how far back can one reasonably go to establish legitimacy? While the way the state of Israel was established was controversial, and it was followed almost immediately by the first Arab-Israeli war, the decision to create a geographic home for Jewish people, a particular kind of nation with political institutions, is understandable in light of living memories of pogroms, and the Holocaust. And of course, between the establishment of Israel on May 14th, 1948, and the Hamas attack on October 7th, 2023, a great deal has happened, very little of which, as previously admitted, I know or understand well. There do seem to be discernible patterns though, so if this is all “historically illiterate garbage”, please forgive my honest attempt.

One way to look at what has happened is that Palestine in general and Gaza in particular have been enduring significant structural violence for decades (as discussed in part one). Israel can always try to justify its actions as a form of self-defence; it is after all surrounded by enemies, and it has a collective memory of being scapegoated, demonized, and attacked. Israel can and does also argue that the genocide charge is entirely the wrong way around. For them, the real problem is Hamas trying to wipe out Jewish people in general and the Israeli state in particular - that, they say, really is genocidal.

Yet Israel can also be seen as an occupying colonial power supported by the West, especially the USA, and it controls critical aspects of Palestinian life including freedom of movement, which has been described as a kind of apartheid. The point is not to justify the unconscionable acts of Hamas or their barbaric strain of antisemitism, but just to hold the line that says “history did not begin on October 7th” is a legitimate statement. That event, however gruesome (and exactly how gruesome is unclear- see below) has a context. I don’t think there’s any hope of finding an appropriate peace praxis unless we see the current situation as being about an event (Hamas attack on Israel) that was part of a process (Israeli occupation, control, oppression, and colonization of Palestinian lands since 1948, often enforced violently).

The following exchange between one of my favourite journalists, Victoria Derbyshire, whom I admire a great deal, and the former PLO politician Dr. Hanan Ashrawi made an impression on me because it showed that even Victoria began her inquiry in what I feel is the wrong place. It’s a two-minute clip that’s worth your while.

Israel has a right to defend itself. And a meaningful right to self-defence means doing what is required to prevent threats to life, which includes eliminating the basis of the threat, in this case, an enemy dedicated to the destruction of Israel that resides nearby, is armed by a regional superpower (Iran) and embeds itself within a civilian population. However, that right to self-defence, like all rights, cannot be absolute, and if that makes it hard to have absolute security then so be it; none of us ultimately have that anyway. Like most rights, the right to self-defence exists alongside other human rights and the laws of war.

In my view, Israel’s actions in Gaza are a disproportionate response to the trauma they endured and the enduring threat they face. I know it is a controversial claim, and it can even be seen as twisted or cruel given the continuing existence of Hamas and that the very idea of Israel, forged in light of the holocaust, is in a sense anti-genocidal in character. Even so, I believe the response of this particular Israeli government is genocidal in the legal and moral sense, and at the time of writing, there have been about 24,000 Palestinian deaths with another 7,000 or so missing and presumed dead over just the last three months. That case was made by South Africa in a way that I found compelling, Israel’s defence had its moments, but I found it mostly unpersuasive given the nature and extent of the evidence against them. I may well be mistaken. The matter is now under consideration at the International Court of Justice.

All of this is not to say mine is the only conclusion you can reach, but that it matters where and how perception and thinking start. The challenge is to get beyond the ‘whataboutery’ that litters the internet. What about the hostages? What about the rockets? What about the increased settlement activity? What about Egypt? What about Hezbollah? Yemen? Iran? And so it goes on...

It’s also important to get beyond ‘bothsideism’. What makes bothesideism pernicious is not the recognition that both sides have a point, but the lazy notion that because there are two points in play they must be equally important, and have equal epistemic and moral validity. That is not the case.

The outlook we are looking for is not either/or (Israel is right, Palestine is wrong, or vice-versa), nor is it both/and (Israel and Palestine both have legitimate rights and grievances that are equally important). Instead, the perception we are looking for is Both both/and and either/or, which can play out in many ways depending on your information and your biases. In terms of my view, it goes something like this: The State of Israel is an enduring fact and it has a right to exist and to defend itself, and it has been an occupying power that has mistreated the Palestinian people for decades. In recent years, and particularly under the current Netanyahu government, Israel has increased settlement activity (colonialism), failed to make an adequate distinction between Hamas and Gaza, and militated against peace plans. Within that perception of context, I believe we can discern both that Israel is in a difficult predicament due to its geographical location, recent trauma, and charged history, and also that its recent response to the Hamas attack is at best disproportionate and at worst genocidal in intent.

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How can it be that approximately 30,000 Palestinian deaths and thousands of mutilated and orphaned children are considered by some to be acceptable collateral damage for Israel’s demand for absolute security? This is the view embedded in the question: “What choice does Israel have?” There is always a choice, and a big aspect of that choice is how you populate your moral universe - whose interests are included? Is an Israeli life of the same value as a Palestinian life? In principle, in 2024, that must be so. So why do so many commentators not see it?

In one word: racism. In two words: racism and colonialism. In three words: racism, colonialism, and denial.

We’ll come to denial in a moment, and I am including racism and colonialism under the term ‘whiteness’ because, for the first time in my life, that term means something to me. I would rather not go there, I’d rather not bring even the very idea of race into the room, but otherwise, I’m at a loss to explain what I see unfolding.

I am not a critical race theorist. I am a so-called regular white guy with a job, a family, and a mortgage. My wife Siva is Indian and that has given me some kind of subaltern perspective through osmosis, but in many ways, I am quite conventional, bourgeoise even, and more conservative in orientation than most of my progressive friends are comfortable with. And I am not a fan of identity politics. There is so much there that I find shrill, narcissistic, and vain in spirit. When people ask me to introduce myself with my pronouns I tend not to want to, just because it feels more like social coercion than human solidarity to expect it as a default. And yet, despite saying all that, I have become more aware in recent years of what it means to be white.

I am uncomfortable here, and this feels like opening a figurative can of worms, so let me ground this disclosure in two sources. The first is a conversation with Political Scientist (now working at Deep Mind) William Isaac where he argued that “you can’t have racial equality without historical memory”.

By that, I think he means to feel like an equal part of society you have to be allowed to speak of shared and divergent perspectives on how we all got here, on our formative influences and experiences, and how that shapes our view of the world, even if they are uncomfortable for others, and perhaps especially because they are uncomfortable for others. Otherwise, we’re dealing with an inauthentic relationship.

In a second source, Bayo Akomolafe’s celebrated open letter, “Dear White People”, speaks to this same issue by highlighting the ethical imperative of our times “to re-join nature and, in so doing, become indigenous again.” Part of this is interrogating ‘whiteness’ as a default perception:

An ethico-politico-scientific apparatus produced whiteness, sustained it on the promises of scarce privilege, and cut you off from the abundance of the world around you. The soul of whiteness is the colours it excludes from mattering, the colours and voices that now haunt you from liminal places.

He also argues, chiming with Will’s point above, that saying sorry is not enough:

A deeper sort of accountability is needed – one that brings us to the edges of ourselves. One that helps us notice that we are a palimpsest of colours, and that who or what we are is always in the making. Forgiveness is settling debts; reconciliation is troubling boundaries.

“Reconciliation is troubling boundaries”. That line speaks to me in the context of Palestine. What I witness is (predominantly) white people mostly unconsciously drawing boundaries around who matters in their moral and political calculus.

So yes, the lives of the 132 Israeli hostages still believed to be held by Hamas matter, and there is a moral imperative to bring them home. But the boundary of moral concern cannot stop there, not when hundreds of innocent Palestinian children are being killed by the Israeli army every day. Reconciliation is hard to envisage at the moment, but the prior move from either/or to both/and, and then to both/and and either/or is an analytical way to trouble boundaries; it can’t just be us against them, nor can it be that both sides are as bad as each other. We need greater discernment.

And I don’t know how to explain the unwillingness to go there without invoking words like racism and colonialism, and by extension this nebulous and yet pervasive notion of whiteness. Just as I believe Ukraine’s fight against Russia is a frontline in the battle to preserve open societies, which is a critical part of having a desirable and peaceful future; so I believe the Palestinian struggle for life, dignity, and statehood is a frontline in whether humanity can get beyond its colonial and racist past and begin to cooperate in a way that is worthy of our shared planetary plight.

Finally, denial is a major obstacle to peace, but it is a much richer notion than most people are aware of. In my first major work on climate change, I coined the term stealth denial to capture, for instance, why many who understand the climate predicament and profess to care about it, live and act as if they do not. On Israel’s actions in Gaza, LSE academic Conor Gearty argues in the London Review of Books that denial is also a big part of the problem and it gets in the way of any longer-term hope for peace. The article is well worth reading. In essence, Gearty builds on a variety of conceptions of denial from his former colleague Stan Cohen (it didn’t happen; it’s not quite as you think; it’s not as bad as you think). He begins by questioning the details of the premise for the Israel attacks on Gaza (for instance, did Hamas behead babies, or was that notion used to build the political case for the extent of military action). He also argues that ‘The Global North’ or ‘The West’ needs to deny manifest truths of what is currently happening in Gaza so that we can continue to see our support for Israel as morally acceptable. Our capacity to deny things and thereby deceive ourselves and others should not be underestimated.

In the interests of fairness, rather than any moral equivalence, I should add that I am neither Jewish nor Israeli, and I might well see things differently if I were; perhaps the views I’ve developed here deny their existential predicament. When I was talking about the metacrisis recently, a Jewish friend seemed a little ambivalent, and with the holocaust in mind she said: “If you are Jewish, the apocalypse has already happened.” And as I said, I don’t know what it’s like. And Israel is surrounded by enemies. But none of that could justify what has happened over the last three months.

I don’t know how to end this post, but I think this is what I’m saying: Any hope for the future of the Middle East depends on improving the quality of our perception and thinking with a default ‘both either/or and both/and’ disposition, facing up to the history of racism and colonialism that still shapes our perceptions of what is morally acceptable, and reckoning with the complexity of denial, and perhaps also our unexamined need for it.

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Thank you for reading! Next week, I’ll continue the exploration of peace with reference to Ukraine, Climate change, AI, and democracy. This is a post for everyone, but if you enjoyed it and want to encourage me to keep writing, please become a paid subscriber if you can.