Like yourselves, I am hoping for lasting “peace” everywhere. With the sting of COVID-19’s second wave in much of India, really the last thing any of us need on our conscience is more dead children.
Personally, I am not in a position to comment on the Israel-Palestine conflict: a previous version of me would be compelled to take a side. I am not in that place anymore, especially because I cannot change my hair colour, let alone the fate of nations.
Instead I want to highlight some of my thoughts this week.
The wheel of death
Over 20 years ago, one of my Pakistani classmates, a beautiful, stunning law student, would spend her weekends protesting outside the Israeli embassy as part of the pro-Palestine support faction. She would dress up in her Burberry and Louboutin heels, and what amused her the most was the look of confusion that the British police would have when they saw her.
Even in my lifetime, this conflict keeps going around like karma. And if you are being slaughtered, whether you are Palestinian or Israeli, karma is a bitch.
An alternative solution?
Secondly, in 2016, I heard Professor Yehuda Bauer, a Holocaust historian speak in great depth at an LSE event about the struggles of the Jewish people. He also viewed the Israel-Palestine conflict as something that is an internal country issue. His underlying assumption was that Palestinians over the next few generations would in fact become Israeli citizens, and that was the crux of his argument.
It is the most sensible outcome that I have ever heard: I have never heard a single Israeli politician advocate this. The Israeli ambassador to the UK in this interview talks about “peace” with no definition of what that would look like in this interview with Channel 4.
Also, what is notable is how she implicitly equates Hamas, an undisputed terrorist organisation with the entirety of the Palestinian people. It isn’t and certainly Hamas is not representative of the 64 Palestinian children (and counting) that are dead. The Israelis do have the right to defend themselves and do so with great efficacy via their Iron Dome defence system: I wonder why she is talking as if all the Israelis have is “air raid shelters” and fails to mention other defence mechanisms.
Rule of law exits
Finally, of my closest friends and I were chatting yesterday. He said that in the name of “defending” their homeland, how and why did it matter if the Israelis were using a sledgehammer to crack a nut? Of course, I went down the “rule of law 101” underpinning a “functioning democracy” diatribe that has been inculcated in me since law school and how this underpinned functioning Western democracies, such as Israel.
But I then heard myself say this: if you hate a bunch of people, you won’t think twice about the mechanism you used to slaughter them.