The terror in Gaza is no ordinary humanitarian crisis, as the product of an ongoing, one-sided “war”.
Dr Lee Duffield posits that the recovery in Gaza during this year’s short-lived ceasefire showed the Israeli Government its options: try to raze Gaza and be reviled by the world, or wind up the campaign without its sought-after extermination of Hamas.
FROM A REPORTED conversation between two Jewish men: “Where was God at Auschwitz?”
The first answer was not that comforting: “Suffering is a mystery.”
The second answer might have been more helpful: “God was at Auschwitz, among the sufferers; God might never take sides even in the face of human cruelties — but definitely would not be there among the tormentors.”
Now it happens that the sufferers in Gaza might be asking that question, and we have the cheap and tragic irony that the perpetrators this time are Jewish.
Harsh realities
The harsh reality in the Gaza situation is that by accounts that are not seriously disputed, over 55,000 people, probably more than 80 per cent of them civilians, have met a violent death at the hands of the Israeli armed forces; thousands of others are carrying serious injuries; hospitals have closed or are at the end of their resources; there is widespread hunger with the population forced to depend on insufficient supplies provided by Israel and the Americans, who are demanding to monopolise the aid flow.
It is a harsh reality of our time that all this is being played out in the glare of several levels of global media and that the international community is forced to watch, stunned, unable to get it stopped.
Why a failed armistice?
The situation plunged to its present, most wicked depths after the attempted armistice from 18 January to 18 March this year. The criss-cross of narratives and proposals between the Israeli Government and the Hamas group that had been governing Gaza did not explain the breakdown of that truce: too many complicated projections, too weak a commitment to a proposed long-term plan in three stages, betrayals, no trust.
Israel recommenced its bombing attacks and eventually increased its occupation of land, while hostages remained captive.
This is a possible explanation for the breakdown:
The pause demonstrated to the Government of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, what would happen if it ceased its military campaign. The many forces that had been helping Gazans to assume a resemblance of normal life, before the Israeli incursion in late 2023, would take the opportunity to go back in.
Many agencies, from humanitarian groups like Doctors Without Borders (MSF) to sympathetic Islamic countries like Indonesia, which built hospitals or put in money, had enabled Palestinians to make something sustaining out a bad situation: they had infrastructure and services, and emphasis on education and universities, as a pathway to social and economic strength. Thousands were going over to Israel to work and bring home some good pay.
The 2025 armistice brought an industrious start to rebuilding, with prefabricated housing going in on the backs of trucks, restoration of food and medical supplies, and assured communication and other resources of a functioning city. There was the negotiated exchange of some of the hostages taken by Hamas and hundreds of prisoners who had been held in Israel. (Hamas made a possible great blunder, a provocation, in dramatising that, finding clean uniforms and firearms for a company of their soldiers, to put the hostages on parade amid a tirade of sloganeering.)
Discussion on important diplomatic forums, especially at the United Nations, turned to future plans with movement towards a wide international consensus in favour of a revived “two-state” solution — Israel and a sovereign Palestine.
A rebuilding, but not for Netanyahu
This would be repugnant and even frightening to a belligerent politician like Netanyahu, who was gambling on a total victory, with Palestinians clearly enough to be kicked out of their territory, to no-matter-where. It would be a new Nakba on the lines where they were driven out of Israel proper in the first place, to the Gaza Strip and West Bank in 1948.
He would see two outcomes:
- A Palestinian state and community in place, built on shared suffering and determination to survive. It would be helped generously by the outside world. Hamas, an Islamist terrorist movement and former despotic government, now effectively deposed by Israel, has roots in the community. Any political solution would have to take on the greatly difficult task of keeping it out of office. Would that be possible and how? Signs have emerged of a backlash against Hamas, its actions seen as leading to the suffering of civilians, as sacrifices or hostages. The civilian death toll has put pressure on Israel to withdraw, but it cannot be claimed as part of a “moral victory” for their enemy.
- Subjugation and degradation of the 2 million Palestinians in Gaza and the 2.7 million on the West Bank, hardship, the broad daylight theft of land and property by armed Jewish settlers, and likely military occupation by Israel.
Palestinians not seen as human?
In this reading of the future, it has to be asked whether the Netanyahu Government and its supporters regard the Palestinian Arabs as human. It can be seen that they do not care about the abuse and suffering. So many are reduced to conditions of dearth and still kept under fire, all ages of people living precariously, without shelter, safety or aid, periodically facing starvation. Dogs get better treatment.
It is the wilful degradation, the emotional abuse and dehumanisation that brings up reflections on the Shoah, the 1940s holocaust inflicted on European Jews by the German Nazis. Close to the black heart of it is the maiming of innocent children in front of their parents, unable to protect them or get them any proper help.
Close to the black heart of it also is the pushing aside of very experienced aid providers, like Save the Children, by armed force, to give control of feeding to commercial contractors linked to Israel and America. Wisecracks about Cokes and hot dogs and iced donuts had to be scuttled very fast when the reality of that scheme struck home: the food depots have been placed in combat zones under insecure Israeli control.
Desperate people journeying through these zones looking for supplies have been coming under fire and getting killed in the confusion of war, in so many obvious cases by inadequately organised or disciplined, or plain malicious, Israeli soldiers.
Still not the Holocaust
Everybody knows that in other crucial ways, it is not the Holocaust. There is not the resolution to exterminate a race of people, much as they hate them and wish to see them gone (the cover of a “military” objective, of eradicating the remnant Hamas army, has committed Israeli forces to destroying also Hamas family members, though still not the same as erasing those people from the Earth by intent).
There is not, as yet, the same capturing and marshalling of the population as abused livestock. The attacks on Palestinians are direct, grievous and terrifying enough, but lacking the expressly personal insult and permanent harm of enslavement, denuding of property and even dignified clothing, physical and mental torture, random murder and violation, much for its own sake; with as a supplement naked enjoyment for perpetrators enabled to act with impunity. It was a descent into the depths, an extended variant of such insanity.
Everybody knows it is not a “reverse Holocaust” done by Jewish people in concert. The Government of Benjamin Netanyahu is a coalition with a small majority, of a radical right-wing stripe. It is mad after simplistic and violent solutions for problems, real or imagined; it is authoritarian and prone to racism in its disregard of the rights of Arabs; it is forever wilfully evoking spent biblical myths as some kind of justification for a modern drive to colonise their region.
Different to that government, the state of Israel itself is set up on democratic lines with an independent legal system. It is under pressure from the government of the day, but durable and finds respect across the world. For many years, it was held up as an important exception to bloody tyranny that characterised national governments across the Middle East.
Different to Israel and its current government, Jewish people in their community lives and as individual souls, must not be blamed for what is going on in Gaza. Because you are of the Jewish faith, it might give you a sympathetic understanding of Israel’s position, but it does not make you a supporter of the Netanyahu policy; it does not even identify you automatically as an Israeli or “pro-Israel” unless you are a citizen of that state.
What to do, say or think
What response can people with a civilised outlook make to the ignominious killing that is going on in this one-sided “war” over Gaza? A suggestion is for those identifying themselves with one side against the other to adopt the old negotiator’s practice of you stating the other guys’ position in terms they might accept.
For those who are not Jewish or Israeli, or backers of Netanyahu: never discuss or debate this crisis without reference to the spark that set off the fire, the depraved and cruel Hamas attack across the Israeli frontier, the hostage-taking and pogrom against Jews on 7 October 2023. Many, if not most, of the degenerates involved and their leaders have been put down by the Israelis by now; others remain, armed, dangerous to themselves, their enemies and to a future Palestine.
For those on the side of Israel, at least apologists for Netanyahu and the situation he has got into: never discuss or debate this crisis, never expect a hearing, without making yourself refer to the 55,000 dead, the Palestinian children and other defenceless persons whose lives are being disregarded by the current strikes from Israel, developed now into a wholesale attack on humanity.
Amongst Dr Lee Duffield’s vast journalistic experience, he has served as ABC's European correspondent. He is also an esteemed academic and member of the editorial advisory board of Pacific Journalism Review and elected member of the University of Queensland Senate.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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