Reflections on the cruelty of the never-ending war

Posted on 10/04/2024

Nira Yuval Davis

Israel has now bombed an international aid convoy in Gaza and killed seven international aid workers. Apparently it bombed the convoy three times, supposedly in quest to kill a senior Hamas officer – who was not there. They did manage, however, to suspend the work of this and other international aid organisations supplying food to the starving Gazans.

This news came only a day after we were told that Israel had withdrawn from Al Shifa hospital, the largest hospital in Gaza, after virtually destroying it, supposedly in quest of senior Hamas officers there.

And so it goes on. 159 days of ongoing killing of children, women, the elderly, aid workers, academics, journalists and all other strata of Gazan society. Yes, they are killing senior Hamas officers and fighters, but, unsurprisingly, Hamas’s political influence among Palestinians has only increased since the beginning of the war. There is intended and unintended sadism in destroying all the infrastructure required for sustaining life, in directing the population to so-called safe zones only to bomb them later, and in then redirecting the same population into other so-called safe zones, thus preventing more than a million people from leading everyday lives, and stopping them from escaping to somewhere where they could lead such lives. Domicide is becoming an ongoing genocide even in the eyes of the international establishment, which has ignored the plight of the Palestinians for decades (and still continue to send Israel weapons and bombs). I heard the head of UNICEF interviewed a few days ago pointing out that only ten minutes separate the starving Gazans from the aid lorries waiting outside the borders of Northern Gaza where Israel is blocking their entrance. And so it goes on and on.

I grew up in the heart of Labour Zionist establishment. As a teenager I met Israeli Palestinians by chance, and found out what military government policy meant in their daily lives. I was recruited to the Israeli army as a eighteen-year-old and sent to work at the head office of the military government for a couple of months (which was considered prestigious), until I could join an officers’ training course for which I had been found a ‘suitable’ candidate. I was casually asked at the end of the first day by the commander of the office what I thought of the military government. In my innocence I answered that I didn’t think it was a just policy because it was a collective punishment of all Israeli Arabs (nobody then used the term Palestinians – this was in 1961), while punishment should have been focused only on those the state suspected were planning to do things against it. This led me into a whole month of security investigations, trying to find the source of my ‘dangerous’ [i.e. universal moral] attitudes’, during which time I really started to think about these issues, and started my process of politicisation. The month ended up with me getting a low security score, not being allowed ever to be more than a Private, and instead of being sent to the officers’ course being sent to be a typist in the main military garage. Here I also came across – in much more blatant ways than in the social bubble in which I grew up – issues of racism, sexism, class and above all petty authoritarianism, issues with which I’ve been preoccupied, and in my very inefficient way trying to fight against, ever since.

My process of political ‘radicalisation’ (a dangerous word to say these days in the UK, in which radicalisation equals criminalisation in the Prevent legal discourse) continued during my university studies. I was involved in opposition to the military government and the confiscation of Palestinian lands before and after the 1967 war, and to the following occupation of the rest of Palestine – before and after leaving Israel to live in the USA and then in the UK. I gradually gained much more detailed intersectional historical as well as global perspectives on the Settler society in which I had grown up (see, e.g., Unsettling Settler Society, the book I co-edited in 1992 with Daiva Stasiulis, including the chapter in it on Israel and Zionism, which I co-wrote with Nahla Abdo).

For many years I feared the possibility of what is happening in Gaza today, and I have been following the processes of neoliberalisation and religionisation that have been transforming Israeli society for a very long time (see my article on that subject in Feminist Dissent, No 5: https://feministdissent.org/full-issues/issue-5-2020-special-issue-on-secular-states-fundamentalist-politics/). But, emotionally, I never could really believe the extent of the cruelty unfolding in this war.

Yes, the cruelty has not been one-sided, and on this occasion it was triggered by the terrible cruelty of Hamas on 7 October 2023 (as a founder member of Women Against Fundamentalism I’ve been aware of the dangers of religious fundamentalist movements in all religions since the late 1980s). But, in its combination with Israel’s huge military power, the cruelty has reached a monstrous scale.

My father died after a stroke in 1982, the week when Israel first invaded Lebanon. After not having talked with him on political issues for more than ten years, so that we could continue our familial bond and love, he, the committed Labour Zionist, whispered in my ear that he had never dreamed that the utopia he and his friends came to build in the early 1930s would become such a nightmare. I can’t help but wonder what he would have said today.

I had planned to write a blog from a sociological situated gaze about the ICJ, the UN, international law etc. But this will wait for another day when I’m a bit less upset. Maybe.