The Middle Ground.

It was raining outside this morning. Proper rain. Mild (for this time of year, as the saying goes), but wet. The nights have stopped starting to draw in and are now just drawing away of their own accord, painting over the light with murky abandon. Summer and early Autumn are lost and now we shuffle towards darkness. It may not sound nice but it suits the mood well enough. In six months time we’ll have forgotten how we felt this morning, but that doesn’t mean we’ll necessarily be any happier. Only time will tell, but of one thing I can be certain: no matter how dour the air outside and the mood within it could all be a lot worse. Just imagine what life must be like in the Gaza Strip.

To say the Israel/Palestine problem is a hot potato is to massively understate the fact. If I were to pop down to the nearest branch of Spud-U-Like – which apparently is in Basildon, a settlement that sits not very far away from Gaza City in my list of places I’d rather not spend a whole lot of time – and order the Israel/Palestine special I could reasonably expect to be served a huge, steaming, volcanic potato, the cracked, blackened skin bleeding a curious mixture of bile, angry rhetoric, venom, arrogance, political misfortune, colonial mismanagement, daft hubris and a scattering of sour grapes. Only a fool with a terminal illness would want to make an uninformed judgement on what is happening on the far side of the Mediterranean right now, but here we are nevertheless, with all manner of cretins tossing their opinions in the air for all to see and hear. It is, of course, always absolutely fine to take a side, provided the side you take is the right one.

Israel is at a crossroads as I write this. Whether or not to be the second wrong to make certain that two wrongs don’t make a right. It’s lucky they have God on their side. They are, as always, in a bit of a pickle in that they have substantial friends far away but are surrounded by enemies. You can trace their current quandary back a century and still find the whole equation rather confusing. For those of a Palestinian persuasion the jigsaw seems equally hard to finish, but they are perpetually at a disadvantage as they have no proper state of their own and what land they occupy is divided, forever to drift in the breeze until the ends of time. Go back further and you have religious texts, dictated by voices in the sky to wise men, which clearly spell out thoroughly contradictory sentiments about who should be where and how they should go about getting there. The result is that the very last place you’d want to sit at a wedding is between an angry Palestinian and an angry Jew. You’d be buried by indignancy within seconds and would have to rely on a free bar to offer any sort of sanctuary.

The Gaza Strip is now the stage for what could be something truly abhorrent to behold. What Hamas did the other day when it bounced over the border into southern Israel to conduct their own massacre of the innocents was a gambler’s act, surely intended to provoke a fearsome response and what might at best be a Pyrrhic victory for their sworn enemy. In turn Israel were swift to cut off water, food and energy supplies to Gaza, though this isn’t the first time they’ve done that, being as they are essentially the governor of the world’s biggest open air prison, and then to flex their disproportionately veiny military might, safe in the assurance that some of the biggest flawed democracies the world over are happy to endorse their right to defend themselves. The whole thing is playing out like another round in an ongoing, and very bloody, very tragic, playground squabble and it will always be the innocent that will suffer. Innocent people always suffer the most when powerful people can’t agree on who’s the most right.

Gaza is the third most densely populated place in the world (it must be the enduring allure of the Mediterranean lifestyle) and Israel know very well that there is no way 1.1 million people (that’s half the population) can just up sticks and shift to the other end of the strip so their homes can be pounded to the ground in an effort to eliminate the Hamas threat once and for all; an effort that will not succeed as long as a single member of Hamas survives. When it happens (which could be very soon) this will be a war of acute attrition, a Stalingrad for the 21st Century, and the fluids spilt will serve as a bloodied, dust-mucked varnish for all the other shit this part of the world has had to endure for millennia. As we have come to expect, politicians and commentators have been clambering over themselves to say the right thing. Only this morning our culture secretary (who I shan’t name because I have never heard of her) joined the cue to voice her disappointment that the Wembley Stadium arch won’t be lit up with the Israeli colours during the England game tonight, but that’s chiefly because she’s very likely desperate not to be mistaken for an anti-Semite simply by not saying anything at all. It’s just an example of how everyone clamours to be heard saying the right thing though in truth when it comes to the Israel/Palestine problem there is no right thing to say anymore because the whole thing is completely wrong to start with. Attacks on Jewish people for what Israel is doing are exercises in extreme idiocy and ignorance. Jews, it should be emphasised, absolutely count but that doesn’t mean that Israel shouldn’t be accountable for what they do to their nearest and not so dearest, whether on the front foot or the back. It just goes round in circles and we mustn’t forget that neither of the big, hard, we-must-be-right-because-God-says-so men in this fight ever seems to want to be the bigger man in the better sense.

If I ever did visit that part of the world I’d go to the West Bank, which is the other bit of Palestine that is also an around-the-clock dangerous place to be, and visit Jericho. In Jericho there is a tower (called The Tower of Jericho, as you’d expect) that archaeologists reckon is around 8000 years old and also the world’s oldest stone structure. They also call Jericho the oldest city in the world and therefore the cradle of some kind of civilisation. But if you think that what is happening along the Gaza Strip at the moment, and what happened to hundreds of Israelis last weekend and what happened when the British government fucked over the Middle East decades ago, before it slunk away and tried to wash its hands of the whole sorry mess, is something you could ever describe as civilised then I think you might want to reach out for your dictionary.

I’m definitely no anti-Semite but I do find the continued stance of the state of Israel slightly troubling. In a similar but not entirely identical sort of fashion, I have a lot of sympathy for the Palestinian people, but will happily admit that Hamas are, very clearly, a gang of irredeemable bastards. The sum of it all leaves us as an audience for yet another faraway war; another tragedy and another battle of wills between twisted egos that won’t let go because they can’t let go because they just don’t have the will to imagine another way of doing things if they did let go. And that’s fine on one level. But if you’re there on either side or just stuck in the middle and about to get killed then it’s not fine on every other level. The Holy Land. What a silly name. Or just someone’s idea of a sick joke.

G B Burton. 13.10.2023