Brendan Hoban: Israel is alienating even its closest allies               

Western People 23.4.2024

If memory serves me right, the song ‘Fools rush in where angels fear to tread’ was issued as a single by Glenn Miller and his Orchestra in 1939, the second year of the World War I. In such terrible times its wisdom sparkled like a jewel in the darkest days of yet another war to end all wars.

Its sage advice represents wise counsel for those ever-anxious to flex their military muscles in search of expensive glory on the battle-field. Indeed it might be said to represent by extension a timely warning to columnists and scribblers of varying hues from commenting on contemporary conflicts.

The complex and fractious Middle East crisis is a case in point. It seems, like the present rain-sodden fields, a morass that the more it is traversed, the stickier it becomes. Unlike the once impossible political terrain of Northern Ireland, there seems to be no solid ground on which to base a reasonable or workable solution.

For one thing, the Jewish people have a mind of their own and – traumatised by an incredible and unendurable legacy of pain – now view the outside world through a narrow lens, ever wary and distrustful. It is as if to the outside observer, there is no healing, either sought or deemed possible, as the memory of Auschwitz, Birkenau and other concentration camps has denied them any relief from the mountain of suffering that is the burden almost every Jew seems to bear.

Part of the problem is that only the Jewish people know what the burden of that history means and only the Jewish people know that they only know. And that unassailable conviction – that no one else could possibly know – seems to prove them against anyone else’s wisdom but their own. Their instinctive response to admonition, even from their proven friends, is to infer that the rest of the world can never know what they know or ever feel what they feel.

I remember visiting Auschwitz and Birkenau some years ago. I remember my overwhelming sense of outrage, together with a heaviness and a helplessness at my inability to understand the palpable sensation of evil that seemed to rise to heaven like an all-pervading stench.

Never in my life’s experience was evil so incarnate and so tangible. It seemed utterly acceptable to me that the legacy of Auschwitz, Birkenau and other theatres of death, including the historic burden it has left in its wake, was beyond question absolutely unforgivable.

However, what remains difficult to comprehend was how the experience of so much suffering of the innocent led to a consequent acceptance of so much collateral suffering of others caught in the slipstream of Jewish defence of their hard won freedoms. A recent example is the effort to justify the grotesque bombardment of Gaza, the killing of innocent children, the apparent effort to starve the population of Palestine, and what looks suspiciously like revenge, ethnic cleansing or even genocide.

None of the above is a defence of Hamas releasing the dogs of war on October 7 last, its immoral killing of 1,200 people and its inhuman kidnapping of 250 innocent Israelis and the resultant suffering perpetrated by their forces on so many families. Rather it is that the suffering of the children of the Holocaust, immense and unacceptable and immoral and outrageous as it was, can seem to have left no residue of feeling for the dying children of Gaza. After 30,000-plus deaths, the question now hanging in the air is how many more Ramahs and how much more lamentation and weeping will there be and how many more Rachels will be heard ‘weeping for their children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more’ (Matthew 2:18).

There is no comparable outrage to set the Holocaust in historical context. Even the Great Irish Famine (1845-52) pales into insignificance in comparison. Even though an estimated million died of starvation in what was then the richest country in the world – the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland; even though the decisions, not to interfere with market forces but that were inevitably programmed to end in thousands and thousands of extra deaths, were taken knowingly by the great and the good of British society through their representative, Charles Trevelyan; even though the memory of Ireland’s greatest trauma was unreservedly ignored for most of two centuries and is still in comparatively recent times under-reported, the horrors of the Irish Famine, though of a different order to the Holocaust, have produced little more than a pale shadow of the indelible imprint and irrepressible focus of the Jewish people on the source of their great national grief.

But how could the people of Israel, by fighting an impossible war, have contrived to rob themselves of what has helped sustain their existence and their grief, the sympathy and support of the free world? How could they not have foreseen that the policies pursued by Binyamin Netanyahu’s government would both produce another generation of Hamas terrorists to continue the politics of exacting revenge on their sworn enemy and, at the same time, alienate their supporters?

The eminent columnist in the London Times, Matthew Parris, offered a telling insight: ‘It’s simply indisputable that the world, almost all of it , and whether or not it should, dislikes what Israel is doing, and dislikes it intensely. The state of Israel is rooted in an idea, a dream, a dream of rightfulness. Lose that and all else may be lost too’.

What seemed a glorious opportunity for Netanyahu and his ilk to justify the elimination of Hamas has become a fertile ground for credible Hamas arguments to sustain accusations to irreparably undermine Israel’s reputation and even possibly its future. It may be Netanyahu’s parting gift to his people.

Sometimes those who imagine they have all the answers can end up asking the wrong questions.

Association of Catholic Priests