On October 7, I was having dinner with my Jewish neighbours. As dessert was being served texts started arriving from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Tahlia, our host, told us that her parents had taken refuge in the family bunker. Her father was complaining.
“Your mother has eaten all the chocolate.”
My friend Michael pointed out to me that air raid sirens and taking refuge was a commonplace event. We all went home unaware of the horror that was unfolding. A few days later I asked Michael if his family was safe.
“All the women and children have been moved to the middle of the country, and the young men deployed to the borders in the North and South.”
I gulped.
When two jurisdictions go to war it usually means that things have been going wrong for a long time. I understand the phrase a just war, but I have neither seen one, nor recognised a fair outcome.
In my lifetime, in every instance that Australia has participated in wars – Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan – we followed American command, added to the mess, skunked away, and then complained when refugees from those countries wanted to follow our soldiers to safety.
“….he’s a terrorist and he will try to kill me”
In 1989 I met Edward Said, the great humanist scholar and author of the ground-breaking book Orientalism. We were having lunch in Canterbury, and he was giving me advice on my doctoral dissertation. He also recounted a story about a media interview he conducted in New York.
“I was invited to a televised discussion with the newly appointed Representative of Israel to the United Nations, Benjamin Netanyahu.
“I accepted but Netanyahu refused to be in the same studio as me. The interview commenced with the American journalist asking Netanyahu why he refused to be in the same building. Netanyahu replied:
“Because he’s a terrorist, and he will try to kill me.”
Said unpacked this paranoid response by pointing out that, for Netanyahu, any criticism of Israel was equated with anti-Semitism, and all promoters of Palestinian rights were reduced to terrorists.
A state that should abide by its ideals
During the summer of 1993 we had a guest staying in the house that I shared with Teodor Shanin. He was a Professor of Chemistry at Hebrew University and Head of the League for Human and Civil Rights.
Most of his work was defending the rights of Palestinians. He told me that the Melbourne based philanthropist Joseph Gutnick’s funding of settlements in the West Bank was one of the most dangerous forces in the country.
He was also a tireless critic of Zionism which he described as a racist ideology. He had no problem criticising the people he loved and demanding that his state live by the same rules it expected from others.
He was regularly spat on, but he also pointed out that, it was the German Nazis who invented the trick of accusing their internal critics as being self-hating citizens. He was a Holocaust survivor who came every year to spend two weeks going to the opera in Covent Garden and forgetting about the chaos in his own country. This man’s name was Israel Shahak.
Shahak and Said were from opposite sides but they both spoke from same language of reason and art.
Money for art not bombs
A few weeks ago, the IDF raided a theatre in the West Bank. The building was ransacked, computers destroyed, and the men detained. An American journalist asked one of the survivors what message he would like to pass on.
“Tell your people that they should stop funding this war. For one year they should give the money to art.”
Could art deliver a worse outcome than all these bombs? Such voices are these days dismissed as belonging to naïve utopians and are kept further and further away from power.
Yet, the discourse on this war is not lacking in idealism. On both sides we hear of a just war that will expel the enemy from this earth. The ideals of self-determination and self-defence have been perverted to barbaric ends. But will the slaughter of the innocent in the name of pure ideals deliver peace and security or fuel more hatred and suffering?
Absolute justice – leads to injustice
In this war we have heard both sides proclaim their rights to absolute justice but little hint of finding a solution based on practical fairness. Let me explain the difference between absolute justice and practical fairness.
Absolute justice is an impossible ideal that can only exist in the shadow of practical fairness. However, practical fairness needs a sense of absolute justice in order to guide itself towards a common standard. Practical fairness can be achieved through compromise and the acceptance that universal rights are extended to all.
Such a balance is hard to find, and the unevenness can cut. For the Palestinians this experience of living with less than a fair outcome has been entrenched and extended.
Their predicament of continuous displacement and imprisonment is turning justice into a burning chimera. It should come as no surprise that violence only begets more and more violence. The promise to live in a fair world rather than to die for a just war is getting more and more twisted.
For Netanyahu and his right-wing ministers as well as the Iranians that guide Hamas and Hezbollah a war without end is a way of hanging on to power. These extremists do not own the spectrum of Jewish and Palestinian ideals.
It is war that bonds these adversaries.
Bomb the world to pieces for peace
The singer Michael Franti warned that the path of war is full of graveyards not the road of sanity:
“We can bomb the world to pieces, but we can’t bomb it into peace.”
During the Vietnam war (1964-73) The USA dropped almost 3 million tons of bombs on neutral Cambodia. This violation was kept a dark secret. In 2009 the Cambodian photographer Vandy Rattana noticed a series of tranquil pools of water in the middle of rice fields and on the edges of urban developments. He asked the local what they were. “They are bomb ponds.”
The craters were filled with toxic residue and human remains.
The Nobel prize winning theoretical physicist Richard Feynman was recruited to work on the Manhattan Project. He was still a graduate student at Princeton but was convinced that beating the Germans in the race to the atom bomb was a just cause.
He produced pioneering work on calculating the yield of a fission bomb, and he was a genius at cracking safes. At the time his wife was living just outside of Los Alamos and was dying from cancer. He drove to be with her, but then continued to immerse himself in work. After the war he wrote her a beautiful love poem.
The perverted ideals of a just war and the loss of love haunted him for the rest of his life. In the Shaare Zedek hospital in Jerusalem, Israeli and Palestinian medical staff work together as treatment is offered to all people irrespective of race. Those who believe in civil society might not be in power, but these ideals have not been eliminated. I live in St Kilda East. If there is one thing, I have learned from Edward Said and Israel Shahak is that it is not incompatible to feel empathy with the Palestinians and love for my Jewish friends.
Prof. Nikos Papastergiadis is the Director of the Research Unit in Public Cultures, based at The University of Melbourne. He is a Professor in the School of Culture and Communication at The University of Melbourne.