Who would sit down and wring their hands to write something about the war between Israel and Gaza? Not me. Last Sunday, when the first images of the carnage caused by Hamas in the south of Israel were received, I considered throwing out a previously written column. Not done for all kinds of reasons, and one of them is this: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has accompanied my life for as long as I can remember. It was, is and will be. During the Six-Day War, which started on June 5, 1967, I was six years old. I lived in the same country as now, but it was also a different country, because the Netherlands backed Israel en masse at the time. Point.
The composition of the population has changed in the meantime, and times have changed, but one thing has remained unchanged: the uselessness of any conversation about the existence of Israel and the fate of the Palestinians. I must have had dozens of discussions, heated, calm, pedantic, but I never experienced one of the conversation partners, including myself, saying afterwards: “Enlightening. I see it differently now.”
The Vietnam War was a shadow in my life; the war in Biafra is mainly a cynical encouragement to empty your plate; the wars in the Balkans, however terrible, were regional from the start; Afghanistan, Iraq: far away. But the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was and remained the accompanying shadow of my Western European, post-war existence.
This is not a complaint, at most an irritation that covers a certain despondency. Hardly interesting, because in both Israel and Gaza people have other things on their minds, as long as they still have a clear head. Anyone who has no relatives or friends in this part of the Middle East chooses ideologically: based on ideas that do not involve self-preservation.
Time and again I read that the world has once again ‘looked away’ from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That’s called a goof. Even before Israel existed, half the world was involved, and from 1948 onwards, with the official foundation of the State of Israel, the entire world. Sometimes I suspect that this general attention has strengthened the warring parties’ conviction that they are the only truly global struggle to deliver. The navel of the world is not New York or Beijing, let alone London or Paris: that navel is called Jerusalem, for both Israelis and Palestinians.
If the warring parties themselves are overcome by doubt, there are always outsiders to support them in their narcissism and symbiotic entanglement.
You see, they also demonstrate in Amsterdam, also in Pakistan.
That gives the warrior courage.
Stephen Sanders writes a column here every Monday.
A version of this article also appeared in the October 16, 2023 newspaper.