Ceasefire
Somehow, the news of a ceasefire was more depressing to hear than the news of yet another day of indiscriminate bombing. Of course it’s good news. Of course I want this stage of the conflict to end. But there’s something about this situation which emphasises the unflinching brutality of the US/Israeli war machine. Billions of dollars can be spent enriching weapons dealers, some of the worst people on earth, to fund the Israeli Defence Force, with its explicitly psychotic ideology, to kill tens of thousands of innocent people. 70% of all buildings destroyed. Every hospital. Every university. Attacking aid convoys to make sure as many survivors as possible died — a war crime. Denying water — another war crime. Denying access to journalists to cover up those war crimes.
And then, out of seemingly nowhere, the great war machine just … turns itself off. I know that politicians and diplomats have been working behind the scenes for 15 months to try to achieve this, and I don’t want to minimise the efforts of those who had genuinely peaceful intentions, but still. You cause so much suffering, and claim that it’s vital — we must eliminate the terrorist threat, we must free the hostages — but then, with no distinct objective actually achieved, you can just stop. The ceasefire is so arbitrary.
I spend a surprising amount of the time thinking about the Star Wars series Andor. It’s not even deep thinking; it’s always the same thought. This completely captures how arbitrary fascism is. Cassian Andor is thrown in prison not for any of his actual crimes but for an unknown offense committed by someone else who happened to be nearby. Then he’s thrown into a nightmarish prison from which no one is ever released, and when he finally escapes, those in the control centre are just a bunch of ordinary, skinny guys in their early 20s, wearing bland grey uniforms, going home to their single-bed flats at the end of the day. Evil at its most concentrated is thoughtless evil, committed by ordinary people who have a vague idea of the suffering they cause but can detach completely from it because it’s so thoroughly normalised.
I’m not claiming that the banality of fascism is a very original thought — I’m pretty sure this is what Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism is about, but somehow that never reached very high on my reading list. But I’m wondering if, the more time that goes by, the more that we embrace the politics of segregation and fascism, the more we will encounter this mentality.
What happens next? At best, Gaza returns to the apartheid non-state it has been for most of the last century. Hopefully it is allowed a chance to rebuild — at least, enough to get the pesky UN and International Criminal Court off Netanyahu’s back — and Palestinians can go back to not being able to leave the country, not being allowed citizenship, not being allowed basic human rights. Meanwhile, in the West Bank, the forcible and violent removal of Palestinians will continue. The liberal media have already begun to paint this as some weird fucking kind of triumph in which both sides win:
Assuming the last-minute issues can be resolved, we will have a week or two of fuzzy feel-good stories — Jewish hostage reunited with his children, Palestinian woman rebuilds her home — and then, my gut says that it will completely disappear from the news agenda. Left-leaning journalists and politicians will try to speak about what has happened, how difficult it is to start again, but the entrenched media figures won’t want to talk about it, and the right will probably focus on the simmering anger of the Palestinian population, the inevitable bursts of violence which will result from it.
Maybe, maybe, in at least five years’ time, the issue will be safe enough for the worthy thinkpiecers to go near it. An avoidable tragedy. A stain on the reputation of [insert the country/politician the article is really focusing on]. These articles might be right, but they will be too late, and their authors will likely ignore the complicity of themselves and the institutions they represent.
Unfortunately, I think it’s more likely that we won’t get to five years’ time before there’s a significant upsurge in violence. It doesn’t take much imagination to put yourself in the head of a fit and able Palestinian who has seen 2% of their entire community murdered, who has seen their house and 70% of other buildings in their country destroyed, who knows they have even less agency or life opportunities than they did before the genocide, and to see how they might turn to violence. That’s part of the convenient logic of fascism: repress, trigger reaction, use reaction as an excuse for further repression.
Whether through direct conflict or a gradual encroachment upon Palestinian life, I do feel fairly certain that Gaza and the West Bank will eventually disappear and be wholly absorbed into Israel. The place names will be denied legitimacy, just as the name “Palestine” is now. I don’t think the Israelis want the population intermingling with them — that’s essentially why they have sectioned off the Palestinians in Gaza in the first place — but from their perspective, the danger is too great to keep on their border. God knows what will happen then — it seems possible that most of the population will move to Jordan or Syria or elsewhere, but I’m far from an expert, and I don’t know.
But no matter what, the last 15 months, and whatever happens next, will always have happened. Smartphones may be destroying our lives, but they are bloody good at cataloguing atrocities — and if this genocide had happened 20 years ago, it would not have been catalogued in the way that it was. It will always be remembered, as will the vibrant and flawed country that faced being stamped out of existence. Atrocities bind a people together in a way which helps to preserve culture and community, so the Palestinians will not be erased even if their physical country is annexed out of existence. They might not have wealth, or status, or even statehood, but they have the idea of Palestine, and ideas are bulletproof.
