Occupation of Palestinian territories has dehumanised both sides

The choice for Israelis is between security or a Greater Israel. They can't have both

The killing spree by Hamas on October 7 was indefensible. Nothing could possibly justify this sadistic slaughter of civilians. But it is not inexplicable. If future generations, however distant, of Israelis and Palestinians can hope to live in peace we have an obligation to examine things in the round - painful as that may be.  

Israel’s right to live in peace is unequivocal. But the inescapable fact is that the roots of this endless war lie in the occupation of Palestinian territories since 1967. Everything flows from that - even if there’s plenty of blame to go round both before and since.

Unqualified support for Israel’s existence does not preclude support for Palestinian statehood. This is screamingly obvious. But it has to be restated every time we try and navigate a middle path. Just as questioning whether killing Palestinian civilians in their thousands by obliterating entire communities in Gaza will make Israel more secure is branded as antisemitic.

No other conflict invites so much hyperbole.

Israeli governments, shielded against the unthinkable by nuclear weapons, will ultimately do what they deem to be in their best interest. They always do - even if their staunchest ally is telling them they’re heading up a blind alley. Lloyd Austin, the US Defence Secretary, for one has done just that.

On one level, this is understandable. The shock of seeing their border so easily overrun by sandalled gunmen on mopeds has made Israelis feel they’re in the fight of their lives. Their deepest fears passed down the millennia suddenly surface. October 7 was a day when the conviction that Israel is omnipotent was shattered once and for all.

The humiliation for Israel’s armed forces has been profound. So for now, and certainly while Hamas still holds hostages, Israelis are giving their deeply unpopular Prime Minister the leeway he seeks.

But tunnel vision is not unique to Israel. Explaining to Palestinians and their supporters why peace is impossible with Hamas and its abolitionist ideology runs up against decades of humiliation and anger. The sense of impotence inherited by succeeding generations of Palestinians leads ineluctably to radicalisation and a (futile) desire for revenge.

In truth, it’s easier all-round to view the choices the two sides face in this uniquely emotive conflict as binary: for Israel continued subjugation of Palestinians against another Holocaust; for Palestinians armed resistance (and in some cases terror) versus another Naqba, the violent displacement en masse of Palestinians in 1948.

But is there a different, more uncomfortable question to be asked, one that has nothing to do with politics or logic?

Have occupier and occupied become so brutalised, have they so dehumanised their opponents after half a century of vendetta, that killing comes easily and dialogue becomes all-but impossible?

As the war in Gaza tips into its third month Israel’s Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said: “We are fighting human animals (in Gaza) and we will act accordingly”. Whether Gallant believes this is irrelevant. As a blatant piece of dehumanisation it has the desired effect on Israel’s merciless pursuit of Hamas.

Trauma of war is nothing new: the Vietnamese, Kosovans, Bosnian muslims, Tutsis in Rwanda, the Irish, all carry the scars of humiliation and anger and that same desire for revenge. It’s the universal cocktail that makes sectarian conflict virtually intractable.

The late Emile Bruneau, a distinguished neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania studied what he called the biology of human conflict – how people at war feel about each other. His ground-breaking study into the 2014  Gaza war, “ The enemy as animal: Symmetric dehumanisation during asymmetric warfare”   came up with stark if unsurprising results.

“ Humans” he wrote” have in place strong moral prohibitions and psychological restraints against harming others. At the same time, history illustrates that humans have a remarkable propensity to commit extreme violence, particularly across group boundaries”.

The study was based on extensive contemporary interviews on both sides. It came up with two broad conclusions both of which bode ill for the future. The first was that communities in both Israel and Palestine expressed “extreme (and comparable) levels of blatant dehumanisation”.

The second was that individuals who dehumanised another group were much more likely to take extreme positions and be less open to the give-and-take of negotiations.  

The shooting by the IDF of three half-naked, Hebrew-speaking Israeli hostages waving makeshift white flags in Gaza last week is perhaps an example of this mindset. In the chaos of war when combatants have to make split-second, life or death decisions, dehumanising your enemy inevitably makes it easier to pull the trigger.

Israel’s children, we should not forget, like those of Sparta, are weaned virtually from birth, as warriors defending a home they believe to be under constant, mortal danger. In the book of Exodus, God is the divine warrior who successfully leads Moses and Israel into battle against the Egyptians.

Occupation is not for the faint-hearted. It’s not tough love. It involves a daily diet of suspicion, suppression, brutality and sometimes killing by the occupying power, in effect the coloniser. It sits on a vast bureaucracy of surveillance and repression backed by a well-armed military machine.

There are now 500,000 illegal Israeli settlers in the West Bank, around 200,000 in Palestinian East Jerusalem and 25,000 on the occupied Golan Heights. Vast, heavily defended housing projects as big as British new towns on Palestinian land are granted ‘city’ status by Israel’s far-right government in defiance of international law.

Entire villages are displaced. Communities are cut off from their olive groves by settler-only motorways gouged out of confiscated land. Settlers attack and kill Palestinians with impunity. They burn their olive trees.  The land is riddled with military checkpoints. Ordinary life for the past half century has become impossible.

This holds in Palestine today as it did in, say, French-occupied Algeria. Occupation without the consent of the occupied is  remorseless, exhausting and hugely expensive.

A complex matrix of control underpins what is a de facto annexation of large swaths of the West Bank. This, according to the UN, sub-divides the region into 166 islands, with boundaries drawn so as to incorporate all Israeli settlements. These are fully under civil and security control by Israel, although they contain the most valuable natural resources in the West Bank.

The cost of the occupation is huge both to the Israeli exchequer and to the West Bank in lost revenue. It makes stable economic development for the Palestinians virtually impossible. Nobody wins.

The occupied learn to live with the feeling that the cards are forever stacked against them. As a people without power anything can be done to them. While the occupier accrues over time a feeling that nothing is off limits to “pacify” the occupied and secure the safety of its citizens.

For this to work the occupied must be seen first and foremost as an enemy. Occupation inevitably de-civilises the occupier. Brutality becomes routine.

This is vividly captured in a remarkable, dispassionate Oscar-nominated documentary by a Palestinian farmer called  5 Broken Cameras.

Karim Kattan, is a French-Palestinian writer. Writing about his hometown of Bethlehem now dominated by Israel’s monumental wall he says. “ The wall” is an aspect of Israeli power — and not necessarily the most important one. Indeed, one of (the occupation’s) most brilliant achievements is that it is self-effacing, even unassertive in day-to-day life. It is a silent conquest stretching over moments and decades.”

October 7 was an event so traumatic and so inhuman that talk of reconciliation or peace or even a ceasefire is, to say the least, premature. But defeating Hamas, or at any rate, rendering it impotent ( assuming that can be achieved) is not the same as extinguishing Palestinian resistance to occupation. That is unachievable.

Israel’s leadership can plough on building a Greater Israel in the belief that it confers strategic depth or that it is the will of God. Alternatively, once the guns fall silent, it could begin to ask itself if its present course has made the country safer.

U-Thant, the UN’s third Secretary-General, once said: “War begins in the minds of men”.  Until a way can be found to help both sides in this conflict to start seeing each other as human beings history will keep repeating itself.