There are conflicts that are easier to understand and explain. Ukraine, for example: Russia attacks a sovereign country in a nationalist war of annexation. But there are few conflicts more inextricable and more frustrating to try to decipher than that between Israelis and Palestinians.
The person who most masterfully illustrated the complexity of the Israeli-Palestinian standoff is, in my opinion, Amos Oz, the Israeli novelist. In a short essay published in 20041Oz made it clear that in this conflict, there are no good guys or bad guys.
This conflict is a “tragedy”, he explains, “in the most precise and ancient sense of the term: a clash between two parties who are right”.
Two parties who are right ?
This land, Palestine and Israel, Israelis and Palestinians have excellent reasons to claim it, explains Oz, who died in 2018. For example, his father was told in Poland at the beginning of the 20th centurye century : Return to Palestine, the Jew…
“The Palestinians want a land they call Palestine,” Oz writes again. They have very good reasons to claim it. Israeli Jews want the same territory for the same reasons, which sets the stage for mutual incomprehension and terrible tragedy. »
The Press sent me there in 2009, when Israel was shelling Gaza because Hamas was raining rockets on the south of the country. It was Operation Cast Lead, another inflammation of the gaping wound that has always been this conflict and particularly since 1947.
I came back even more doubtful than when I left.
In some conflicts, there are good guys and there are bad guys. Not always, but often. Over there, in these lands called Israel and Palestine, it is less clear, much less clear.
When Hamas organizes a pogrom in southern Israel, it is clear: what the Islamists did is inhumane and it is indefensible.
When Israel inflicts collective punishment on Gaza as is happening now, it is inhumane and indefensible.
When Israel encroaches on the West Bank with illegal settlements, it is inhumane and indefensible.
When Hamas builds tunnels for nearly 20 years to “resist” rather than feed, care for and educate the Palestinians in Gaza, it is inhumane and indefensible.
The complexity of the conflict – its political, historical, religious roots (ancient and contemporary) – is downright dizzying. To convince you of this, I invite you to read this text from The Atlantic2 which pulverizes the Manichean vision of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as conveyed by a certain progressive left which analyzes absolutely everything through its favorite prism, decolonialism.
Complexity? This is the key word to accept to make progress towards resolving this conflict, said former President Obama on Friday.3.
There, I understood the Israelis to erect walls to protect themselves from suicide bombers. I understood the Palestinians for being incapable of living another minute under an immoral and humiliating occupation.
I also understood that the enthusiasts of the Netanyahu government needed the enthusiasts of Hamas. This was true in 2009, now imagine. Agnès Gruda explained it very well in The Press last Wednesday4in a column about the ignominy of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
I also understood the inhabitants of Sderot to be fed up with the rockets. How I understood the Palestinians in Gaza to be at the end of the Israeli blockade.
To write about this conflict is certainly to be accused of being “for” the other side. No matter how much you use kilos of nuances, the fanatics on both sides will accuse you of partiality, of being against one camp, theirs…
I quote the first words of a hyper-extensive report by David Remnick, from New Yorkeron the history of the conflict5 : “The only way to tell this story is to do it honestly while knowing that you will fail. »
I used the word “fanatic”. It’s no coincidence, the word is in the title of the wonderful essay by Amos Oz which I spoke to you about above and which has not aged a bit 20 years later: How to cure a fanatic.
Each side is a prisoner of its fanatics.
And in between, under the bullets and the rubble, civilians dehumanized by the fanatics.
Amos Oz, again, to finish: “One of the things that makes this conflict particularly hard is the fact that it is essentially a conflict between two victims. Two victims of the same oppressor: Europe, which colonized the Arab world, which exploited and humiliated it […], is the same Europe that discriminated against Jews, persecuted and harassed them, before finally slaughtering them en masse in this unprecedented crime, genocide. One might think that two victims would develop a feeling of solidarity between them, as in a poem by Bertolt Brecht. But in real life, the worst conflicts are often between two victims of the same oppressor. Two children who are victims of a cruel parent do not necessarily love each other: they very often see the face of the cruel parent in each other. »
1. Amos Oz, How to cure a fanatic2004, Gallimard