In the descent into hell that Israel and the Gaza Strip are experiencing today, an infinite desire for revenge is at the heart of everyone’s reactions. This bubbling desire prevents any rational strategic consideration of a possible solution to the conflict.
Today, after the unprecedented, savage violence of October 7, the Israeli people as a whole thirst for revenge, punishment, and the crushing of the enemy. In its violent and hateful references, Hamas, for its part, experienced an “hour of glory” that day, outwitting and humiliating an army and secret services reputed to be among the most powerful in the world.
Satisfying one’s revenge in the face of humiliation – or to put it more elegantly, “taking justice into oneself” – can temporarily “do some good wherever it goes”… But that brings the protagonists neither closer to justice nor to peace, nor the solution to the problems.
These are not just pious moralizing generalities. It is a fact — proven in the past and which will be verified again — that the murder of innocents will not bring the Palestinians any closer to their liberation from Israeli rule, or the advent of a national state.
And it is also a fact that the crushing of Gaza, its inhabitants and the Hamas leadership, firstly, can never be achieved 100% and, secondly, even if it were achieved, would not will never result in peace and security for Israel and its people.
Attention ! What is underlined here, namely the existence of similar mental, moral and ideological mechanisms on both sides of this conflict, does not amount to symmetrically sending the protagonists back to back, in an equivalent manner, at 50-50. responsibility.
Disempowerment. These mechanisms present on both sides, despite the asymmetry of the forces present (the Israeli army, infinitely better equipped and endowed than Hamas) and the asymmetry of responsibilities (with for example the proposition: “We must place more blame, in the overall equation, on the Israeli occupation than on the Islamofascism of Hamas”), are remarkably similar. The other is a monster, never a human equal in rights, in strength, in morality.
With a self-justification amounting to saying: any violence on my part will always, automatically and necessarily, be the fault of the other, since it is only a matter of self-defense against constant oppression (Palestinian discourse)… Or even ‘a mechanical and obligatory reflex (we imagine here the monster of Dr Frankenstein reacting brutally to the touch of a control button), a reflex whose ultimate remote control is not within my control – since it is the other who started, who triggered the destructive cycle (Israeli speech).
Dehumanisation. Hamas considers that all Israeli Jews, armed or not, young or old (including schoolchildren and retirees) are, will be or have been, in essence and by definition, Jewish soldiers, fighters of the Zionist entity , which it is appropriate in all justice to fight to destroy them. No remorse, therefore, for having murdered or kidnapped unarmed teenagers dancing, elderly people picked up from their beds or three-year-old babies who had a bullet placed between their two eyes.
On the Israeli side, the dehumanization of the enemy, his systematic transformation into an evil archetype, is also radical. Over the last two decades, the ideal of Oslo, which postulated two peoples with equal rights aspiring to live in peace, in a small shared territory, has given way to an exclusively police, security, even hygienist approach to “Palestinian problem”.
The gradual relegation of the Palestinian question, between 2000 and 2020, to make it gradually forgotten, was a carefully considered strategy, systematically applied by right-wing governments in Jerusalem.
On a daily basis, we occupied the West Bank and surrounded Gaza, we humiliated and rendered insignificant the Palestinian Authority, while a Hamas circumscribed and “under control”, with a few periodic blows of the stick (we called it “cutting the grass”), reflected a convenient image of the Palestinians, of an inherently malignant Palestine.
Depoliticized, reduced to strategic insignificance, marginalized on the scale of a forgetful Middle East, the “sacred cause” of the Arabs has gradually become, from the Israeli point of view, nothing more than a security question, a police question, or even (in this logic taken to the extreme), a piece of dirt to clean up and a problem of “rat control”.
To be convinced of this, we can consider the anti-Arab attacks organized in East Jerusalem and the West Bank by Jewish supremacists who dream of ethnic cleansing. Violent operations (daily Haaretzyes, an Israeli newspaper spoke of “pogroms”) openly supported by key figures in the Netanyahu government: Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, who are as fascist as the Islamist ideologues of Hamas can be in their destructive madness – and self-destructive — from October 7, 2023.
Self-absolution, victim complex and moral clearance in the face of one’s own turpitudes are present on both sides. Just like the dehumanization of the enemy, which inevitably goes with it. We no longer know where to start to resolve this 75-year-old conflict. But these two psychological defects, also shared by zombified enemies, are certainly an absolute obstacle to any progress.
François Brousseau is an international columnist at Ici Radio-Canada. [email protected].