At its heart, as Amos Oz put it, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is fundamentally a matter of real estate: there is only one Palestine and there are two peoples who want it. The reason that both sides want the land so badly is that they have nowhere else to go. Jews have been forcibly expelled from so many countries over so many centuries that they see Israel as the only place where they can be safe. In the time that has passed since the creation of the state of Israel, the situation of the Palestinians has been shown to be little better: they might not be persecuted for their religion, but neighbouring Arab countries have shown no appetite for a mass influx of Palestinian refugees.

We can argue until the cows come home as to who has the stronger ancestral claim on the land and whose human rights have been violated by whom. But it boils down to this: in the long term, there are only three possible outcomes: ethnic cleansing whereby one side or the other is “driven into the sea” (a phrase often heard on both sides), a peace deal whereby both sides share the land and feel equitably treated (whether the “two state solution” or one of the various alternatives to it) or a stasis whereby violence continues indefinitely, perhaps ebbing and flowing in severity.

The 1993 and 1995 Oslo accords stated the objective of a peace deal. It’s reasonable to suppose that at the time, both a majority of Jews and a majority of Palestinians hoped that a listing peace could be created that would be accepted by both sides. But even then, there were contingents on both sides who had no interest in this and preferred to push for ethnic cleansing of the other side. For these contingents, it was better  to accept a violent stasis, however long it might last, if it meant avoiding capitulation. On the Palestinian side, Hamas exemplifies those who believe that the Jews should be expelled from Palestine. On the Jewish side, there are substantial numbers of people promote unlimited settler expansion and severe constraints on the liberties of Palestinians: they may not be terrorists in the way that Hamas are, but they are equivalent in their desire to subvert the peace process. In November 1995, with the ink scarcely dry on the Oslo accords, one of these Jewish equivalents murdered Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli Prime Minister who signed them.

Both of these camps are in profound agreement: they don’t want a peace deal on terms that could conceivably be palatable to the other side: you could call it an anti-peace alliance. And while both sides get very angry if you accuse them of intending genocide, they both use genocidal language and they both have the same goal: ethnic cleansing or complete subjugation of the other side. Right now, the alliance is the ascendancy, in control of the governments of both Israel and Gaza. In the early days after the Oslo accords, you might have considered these two camps as extremists. By now, in the aftermath of the October 7th attack,  they are mainstream – perhaps even in the majority in their respective peoples.

Both halves of the alliance must think that everything is going swimmingly well right now. Hamas is achieving the dream of every terrorist organisation, to provoke its opponents into acts of revenge and repression so horrible that anybody neutral considers them to be monstrous (for a clear analysis of this kind of mindset, read Louise Richardson’s What Terrorists Want, written in 2007 but still spot on today). The Israeli far right are in equally good shape, able to demonstrate to their followers that Hamas are monsters who must be eradicated at all costs – even if those costs include taking a large chunk of the civilian Palestinian population with them.

So how do I – born in the UK of Israeli parents, Jewish by race and atheist by religion – feel about supporting Israel in all this? For a start, I accept the fundamental Jewish argument of “we need a safe haven, and Israel is it.” I don’t believe for a moment that antisemitism has been consigned to history: even in supposedly liberal countries like the UK, it’s easy to detect classic antisemite language and behaviour both in the far right and the far left, while in most Muslim countries, antisemitism is a majority viewpoint. (By the way, Islamophobia is even more present in the West, a fact which doesn’t affect the argument here but shouldn’t be ignored).

But the way Israel is waging its war against Hamas is a godsend to the antisemite cause: it’s daily proof for everyone who considers Jews to be bloodthirsty monsters, giving credence to centuries of slanders from Christ-killing to the blood libel. If we want to persuade the world to hate us because we’re Jews, there’s no better way to do it than to massacre thousands of Palestinian civilians. It doesn’t matter whether individual killings are deliberate, collateral damage from operations against armed enemy fighters, or starvation by destruction of infrastructure. A civilian death is a civilian death. If flushing out a terrorist organisation requires the killing of tens of thousands of civilians and the destruction of their entire country, that isn’t self-defence, it’s revenge.

Sadly, it was a predictable response. Writing in Le Monde just a week after the Hamas attacks, historian Vincent Lemire described what he called “the double trap” set by Hamas: the military trap of enticing Israel into warfare in difficult territory and the moral trap of provoking Israel into an excessive response. The Israelis may have been smart enough to avoid the worst of the military trap, but they have fallen headlong into the moral one.

Unless both sides commit to peace, the cycles of violence in Palestine are doomed to repeat themselves. This may be the worst of the cycles in recent times, but it will not be the last – however much the Israeli military might wish to believe it so. The “war to end wars” idea didn’t work in Europe and it won’t work in Palestine either.

What Hamas did on October 7th was monstrous, and their continued holding of Israeli hostages remains so. But before I can support Israel in their war against Hamas, Israel needs to do three things: stop the mass killing of civilians in Gaza, reverse the settling of Palestinian lands in the West Bank and display some genuine intent to make peace on fair terms. The present Israeli government might conceivably do the first of those things. It looks unlikely in the extreme that they will do all three. I can only hope that some political cataclysm happens in Israel that will bring in leadership of a very different kind.

The Israelis are my people. I hope that one day, I can once again be proud of this. But I fear that’s a day I won’t live to see.

More reading:

Louise Richardson, What Terrorists Want, Random House, 2007 https://www.randomhousebooks.com/books/153951/

Le Monde article by Vincent Lemire https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2023/10/14/vincent-lemire-historien-depuis-l-attaque-du-hamas-contre-israel-nous-sommes-entres-dans-une-periode-obscure-qu-il-est-encore-impossible-de-nommer_6194355_3232.html (in French, paywalled)