Why the world needs to get tough on Israel’s ‘never-never land’ mentality.

Unmasking Israeli myths is the first step on the long road to peace.

Respect Op-Ed

   Gaza is under attack again; the third sustained aerial bombardment since 2008. In the world’s largest prison camp (the words of well-known Hamas operative David Cameron), the number of dead has now risen to over 160, with women and children making up a depressingly high percentage. The Israeli armed forces rain down indiscriminate death and destruction, giving nothing more than an occasional perfunctory warning, onto the defenceless people below.

   This routine has become something of a political blood-sport in Israel. This recent wave of the crisis began with the abduction and murder of three Israeli teenagers near Hebron in the occupied West Bank. I was in Israel when the kidnapping happened and visited the site where the teenagers had been taken. As soon as the story broke the Israeli government were blaming Hamas, without any real clarification as to whether it had even been sanctioned by its central command as opposed to being committed by underground militants. The speed at which this narrative became accepted reality says much about the loyalties of mainstream media.

   The emotional outcry in Israel was remarkable, given that such events have become so commonplace in the Israeli conscience. Within days, everyone was on first-name terms with the teenagers. You couldn’t drive along any road without coming across a reference to the #BringBackOurBoys campaign. Once their bodies had been discovered, the atmosphere turned from grief, to anger, to vengeance. Within hours, #BringBackOurBoys had been replaced with #AvengeOurBoys. The inevitable result was the copy-cat kidnapping and murder of a 16-year old in East Jerusalem, one of at least six deaths in the days that followed. And that was before the bombing began…

   The grossly disproportionate response and collective punishment demonstrated by Israel in the wake of such periods of turmoil has become normalised. Not many people in Israel – or in the Western mainstream media, it appears – regard the life or blood of Palestinians as being as valuable as their own.

   This is the institutionalisation of an occupation at work. In the beachfront cafés and smart shopping centres of Tel Aviv to the sleek suburbs of West Jerusalem, nobody much cares for the occupation on the West Bank or for the disastrous humanitarian effect of the siege on Gaza. That is until their peace is shattered by the wail of the air-raid siren and they have to retreat temporarily into a reinforced bomb shelter (a luxury not afforded to many Palestinians, who just have to take their chances).

   This is why I don’t buy the “you don’t know what it’s like” argument that I hear from many Israelis. Rocket fire from the Gaza Strip has as yet mercifully failed to take a single Israeli life. Israeli bombing raids in Gaza, one of the most densely-populated areas on earth, are causing casualties which now run into the hundreds. The mismatch is glaring – not that you’d know it if you were watching the BBC. On Wednesday they led with the laughable headline ‘Israel under renewed Hamas attack’. The seething anger felt by Palestinians and Muslims generally is fed by this blatant double-standard which tells them that their lives are somehow not worth as much.

   This exceptionalism is now engendered in an Israeli society which is becoming forever more rabidly right-wing and forever less interested in a peace process, choosing instead to ‘manage’ the conflict. The settlement drive continues unabated, to the point where its continuation is on the verge of killing off the two-state solution forever. This is the ‘never-never’ land that supporters of Israel are living in: they think they can carry on with the reality of occupation because of their ‘exceptional’ circumstances; their opponents around the world just don’t ‘get’ the realities of their situation. But millions around the world are now calling their bluff.

    The onus is on Israel, and Israeli society, to change this. Israel holds the keys to occupation and they are to only ones who can unlock Palestinian statehood and freedom for its people. Failing this very unlikely prospect (the radical right is historically strong enough to resist it), it will be up to the international community to force a solution. There are signs that some countries are beginning to tire of Israel’s behaviour of exceptionalism.

   This conflict did not begin with the kidnapping of three Israelis, and will not end with any fragile ceasefire. It is tied up in the continuing Israeli occupation and supremacy, institutionalised through a complex societal framework over decades. A comprehensive process involving all parties from both sides is the only way to achieve a lasting settlement and help stability for the whole region. The only way that is going to happen is if Israel commits to it, or is given no other choice. That prospect looks as distant as ever.