“Comparisons are odious. According to some great minds of yesteryear, it could therefore be risky to compare disasters while killings are taking place in Ukraine. That said, we can still afford to lament the plight of other people in other places, while the world is paralyzed by the gratuitous and horrifying war of Vladimir Putin. The physical collateral damage in Kyiv and Mariupol is visible to the naked eye, but there are many horrors that remain in the shadows when a big crisis takes over the media. However, the “small” disasters are present everywhere – they are there, even if, for the moment, Putin has swept them all away. In fact, the lack of attention to less publicized crises is a collateral damage of the Russian invasion.
Now the greatest (for some, presumed) catastrophe—climate change—has all but disappeared from the media debate. And then in February — just before the Russian invasion — I found myself faced with the eternal crisis of my journalistic career, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It came back to me in the form of a public letter — truly a cry from the heart — written by Salah Hamouri, the Franco-Palestinian lawyer who continues to fight against the Israeli state from his little corner of Jerusalem on behalf of his Arab comrades to “resident” status.
In 2005, Hamouri was accused of participating in an assassination plot against Ovadia Yosef, Israel’s former Sephardic chief rabbi and a founder of the religious political party Shas. After three years in detention, Hamouri was sentenced to 14 years in prison and eventually pleaded guilty — despite his declarations of innocence — in exchange for a reduced prison sentence to seven years. Finally freed in 2011 in the exchange of 1,027 Palestinian prisoners for an Israeli soldier held by Hamas, Hamouri engaged in a constant showdown with the military and civilian authorities, he who is forbidden to cross the border in West Bank occupied from East Jerusalem, and he who is separated from his French wife (as well as their two children), since she no longer has the right to enter Israel.
I don’t feel qualified to judge the Hamouri case, but the fact that his letter of February 11 reached me through my friend Rony Brauman, former president of Doctors Without Borders and originally from Jerusalem, matters a great deal. My political predilections have always positioned me on the side of the Palestinian cause. However, my thoughts on the subject are ambiguous because, in the end, while I only knew one Palestinian well, Edward Said, the great intellectual whom I edited and admired, I had in my far more ties with Israelis — and American supporters of Israel — with viewpoints spanning the political spectrum.
However, Hamouri’s call for help, written in good French, struck me to the heart. He recounted how his Jerusalem resident card (he is considered neither a Palestinian nor an Israeli) had been “removed” by the Minister of the Interior on October 18: “Why? Because a law that was passed in the Knesset in 2018 decreeing “Israel Nation-State of the Jewish people” resulted in a staggering consequence: the duty of allegiance for all citizens living in Israel. For them, Jerusalem is Israel… […] I cannot accept what they call “a duty of allegiance”. It does not mean anything. I am part of an occupied people, and the right is with me which consists in refusing any occupation and which consecrates the right to resistance. »
Admittedly, the Israeli legal logic here is weak, given that Hamouri is not a citizen of Israel. But “the right to resistance” is recognized neither by the Russians in Ukraine nor by Israel in East Jerusalem: faced with the logic of raw power, it poses an illogical argument. Hamouri declares that “to stay is already to resist”, so he refuses to leave his hometown and go to France. It is then “logical” that he was again arrested on March 7 and returned to administrative detention – on the basis of an emergency law dated 1945 – by a military court and without specific charge.
Instantly I’m immersed in Prophets without Honor, the new book by Shlomo Ben-Ami, Israeli Foreign Minister in 2000 and privileged witness to the historic failure of the Camp David “II” summit, which nails the coffin of “the two-state solution”. It is worth perusing this fascinating text — Ben-Ami calls it an “obituary” of peace attempts — in order to take stock of the tragedy of the Palestinian people and to understand how the best opportunity for a resolution was failed. Are there lessons to be learned for Ukraine?
The current Israeli Prime Minister, Naftali Bennett, is supposed to mediate between Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky. On March 21, Zelensky implored members of the Knesset to choose “between good and evil” and decide in favor of Ukraine, equating Hitler’s “final solution” to the Jews with the Putin’s military. Can we hope that Bennett, suspected of privileging his relations with Putin, will instead make the effort to settle the violent oppression in his own country?
John R. MacArthur is editor of Harper’s Magazine. His column returns at the beginning of each month