Peace, no matter how fragile, is gold dust

People of goodwill everywhere – and not just in Gaza and Israel – are holding their breath that the ceasefire, improbably cobbled together out of Trump’s brash ambition and the shared exhaustion of the Israelis and the Palestinians, will somehow hold. 

A common focus of all the participants is that peace, no matter how fragile, is gold dust compared to the agonies that have been visited on them. After surviving at least in part an extended theatre of often mindless violence and conflicting ideologies, they have all been forced to accept something less than everything they wanted.

Through the lens of the Jewish people, and for most people around the world watching the conflict from a safe distance, in the words of a recent Tablet editorial, "the genocidal attack on innocent Israeli young people attending a music festival was almost unique in its premeditated savagery". The message loud and clear from Hamas and the Islamist ideology it represented indicated clearly what would await the Jewish people if Hamas got its way. Thus, the response of those who saw ‘the Promised Land’ as a gift from God, was that Hamas represented a clear and obvious threat to the only place in the world where Jews felt safe.

Thus too, when the Palestinians of Gaza were subjected by Israel to the fate Israel had itself feared from Hamas through an estimated 60,000 Palestinian deaths, in Israeli eyes the line between Palestinians and Hamas had become so obscure as to make it meaningless. It is telling that when Israel ravaged Gaza, the main (and often possibly the only) reason for Israeli concern was the safety of its soldiers and the fate of its hostages.

The varied lenses through which the conflict was viewed brought with it a partial view of what was happening and what its consequences might be. For example, the narrow focus on the justification for their own perspective of all the participants led to an inability to appreciate other opposing assessments.

Thus, the Israelis couldn’t empathise with the suffering of the Palestinians and the Palestinians with the suffering of the Israelis, in a shared myopia that extended to both teams of supporters around the world. So justifying the unjustifiable – Hamas treating the hostages so badly and the Israeli refusal to accept that their military campaign was genocidal and their use of hunger as a weapon of war unconscionable – became a shared perspective of both sides. It was as if – like cheering on Mayo in an All-Ireland final in Croke Park – anything your own side did was acceptable when clearly, on both sides, this was not the case. In truth, there were no angels in Gaza or in Israel or in Hamas.

There was something unnerving about meeting supporters on every side - men and women of clear moral rectitude in their daily lives - who casually supported, almost as a matter of principle, anything Hamas or Israel did, on both sides positions that simply cannot be morally sustained. But if you voiced them you were dismissed as failing to understand the complexity of the situation. As if denying starving people food and water was an acceptable policy because Israel did it without apology or any sense that it was contrary to moral principles. Or excusing Hamas who ruthlessly took hostages and submitting them to a form of incarceration that caused such agony not just to them but to their relatives and friends.

So, almost as a matter of course, pro-Palestinian demonstrations seemed at times to have an antisemitic character to them and pro-Israeli demonstrations almost an acceptance that the activities of Hamas justified almost any response. There was no acceptance on either side that part of the solution to sorting out such long-standing divisions and grievances demanded an ability or at least an effort to try to understand what they regarded as the obsessions of the opposite side. Or even an acceptance that peace involved moving at least gradually towards an understanding of the other side’s ‘obsessions’ - as is evidenced by what began to move, as in the Irish experience, the two opposing sides together. If both sides are committed to believing that their opponents are always wrong, there is no wriggle room to allow a bit of give-and take - still less the prospect of a meeting of hearts and minds.

The British media are at present fascinated by the appointment of a new Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood. A barrister and a graduate of Oxford University, Ms Mahmood recently confided that her Islamic faith is the most important thing in her life. She has also been outspoken against antisemitism and among her unlikely influences is Catholic Social Teaching and its focus on The Common Good.

Holding a position that straddles some of Britain’s most intransigent and complex difficulties as a multi-cultured society, Ms Mahood is well placed to project an image of Islam that may help to reconcile those who see Islam and its adherents as more complex than the polarising antagonism it is wrongly given credit for.

No ideology is ever completely right or completely wrong, either acceptable or unacceptable and stark denunciations of one or the other can and are moderated by personal experience and open minds. It is an accepted fact of life and of history that no one is ever completely right all the time. Even accepting that truth is a starting point towards if not solving at least questioning the unexamined tropes that have prevented what present as long-standing divisions being critically and freshly analysed.

Breaking down barriers often begins with people realising that their rivals are not always wrong in everything or have no right on their side. As happened in Ireland.