Highways to a War

I did have breakfast with Israel's biggest cricket fan in Jerusalem - g'day David - but that wasn't the purpose of a recent visit - GH

No story in the world is consuming so much oxygen as Israel's war in Gaza. No journalist could resist an opportunity to go. It was a sponsored trip, as I'll explain, but there was no pressure on me to write anything, and I didn't intend to until I got back and started looking through my notes about the events of 7 October 2023, the casus belli - it engaged my long interest in trauma and its consequences. I'm sure there'll be objections to my doing other than demonising Israelis out of hand, but I'll take that chance in the hope you're interested in what it feels like to be there, at this crossroads of the world, at this crossroads of history.

Be’eri Kibbutz is approached along Route 232 from the southern Israeli city of Sderot. The setting, at the north-west of the Negev desert, is idyllic. Through the secure yellow fence, one’s preliminary impression is still of verdant grounds, a kempt carpark and an imposing factory that prints Israel’s banknotes.

Yet on this morning, and on most mornings since 7 October, Simchat Torah in the Jewish calendar, one’s second impression is of its enveloping silence - the silence of abandonment. For Be’eri was one of the twenty kibbutzes targeted by Hamas on the bloodiest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust, and on the first day of what looms as one of the region’s longest wars.

Be’eri does not surrender the story of that day at once. One must first walk past the still pristine dining hall, and the neat notice boards with their photographs of seventy-eight years’ communal activity. I begin taking photographs also, unconsciously and almost reflexively. I find later that my eye was drawn not so much to the one-hundred-and-twenty blasted and incinerated buildings, but the vestiges of normality: the soccer balls, the basketball hoops, toys, bicycles, swings, a lonely trampoline, a solitary skateboard. I send my daughter a picture of a vagrant cat - a token effort at remaining moored in a reality I recognise. Now and again, too, one encounters an incongruously clean floor, because forensic technicians have collected the debris to sift for incinerated human remains.

I won’t recount events at Be’eri here: that was ably done by New Yorker and Reuters. What I wish to convey is the shock of seeing domestic scenes transformed into terrorscapes. Hamas and its agents did not discriminate. An irony of the assault on Be’eri is that this kibbutz has historically been a seat of Israel’s secular left. It had drawn labour from Gaza, just over 2km away; it had been part of a well-established programme to convey Palestinian children to Jerusalem hospitals; it was the home of the peace activist Vivian Silver, who had just returned from a rally of 1500 Israeli and Palestinian women in Jerusalem. Her remains went unidentified for five weeks.

The deeper one walks, the heavier the damage, the greater the disorientation. The dental clinic adopted as an evacuation centre is still identifiable as such: a dentist’s chair, a reception area, files, cabinets. Now it serves as a sort of shrine to the twenty-two-year-old paramedic, Amit Man, who rather than flee chose to stay and help the wounded, paying with her own life. The visit’s guide is Nili Bar-Sinai, a fifty-year resident of Be’eri, a prison psychiatrist and social worker. I stay close to her because she is so softly-spoken, so deadpan. Now and again she mutters something like: ‘This is humanity.’ Towards the end, she says to herself as much as anyone: ‘I don’t believe my ears when I hear myself saying these things.’ Only later do I learn that she lost her architect husband Yoram that day and barely escaped herself; also that, testament to Israeli’s long history as a terror target and to the multiplicity of its enemies, she lost her mother in the Lod Airport massacre perpetrated by the Marxist-Leninist Japanese Red Army in May 1972.

Despite this long heritage, despite the great reservoir of military experience and intelligence expertise it has given rise to, Hamas’s ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’ rendered Israel helpless, as it had not been for half a century. The attacks were one thing; the neutered leadership and lethargic countermeasures another. Twelve hundred people were killed, and the Israeli Defence Force seemed powerless to prevent it. Twelve hundred people were killed, and the reaction abroad was joltingly indifferent - even, in some places, celebratory. Six months on, the world is transfixed by the plight of the benighted Gazans, caught between Hamas and the IDF. In Israel, 7 October could be yesterday.

*

I travelled to Israel recently under the aegis of the Australia Israel & Jewish Affairs Council. My reasoning was simple: I can’t believe that attending thinkalike writers’ festival panels and cherry-picking media to reinforce my prejudices substitutes for visiting and talking to people. Things feel different depending on where you’re standing, and Israel and Australia could hardly be geographically and temporally less alike. On our luxury south sea island, life is easy and politics trivial. Seventy-five years hemmed in by national and religious enmities has fostered an Israeli society both more urgent and more extreme. There’s a casual assumption that journalists exposed to AIJAC perforce return as jack-booted Zionists. The experience no more did that to me than reading Edward Said turned me into a suicide bomber.

The tour involved background briefings from a range of interested parties: politicians, diplomats, journalists, soldiers, families, even representatives of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation and the Palestinian Authority, approached through the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. They spoke with often disarming frankness, some more persuasively than others, but with far from one voice. About life in Israel there is both a strong sense of tradition and a striking lack of ceremony. Not one official wore a tie; most were casually dressed; it is as though Israeli life affords no time for formalities. When a former prime minister who hosted us at his home had a sniffle, he made a circular motion to his kids entertaining their friends next door; a roll of toilet paper was fetched for his leaky nose.

For a visitor from Australia, in fact, the sights of daily life in Israel take getting used to. Israel can appear simultaneously highly regimented, for it is a society in arms with compulsory national service, and hugely diverse, almost half its families originating in Asia and North Africa, almost a third in Europe, the Americas and South Africa. One day at Jerusalem’s Tomb of David, I stopped to talk to a group of teenage girl soldiers in their fatigues who disclosed family origins from Nigeria, Uzbekistan, Myanmar and Peru. They were cheerful, buoyant even, although one could hardly avert one’s eyes from their high-powered assault rifles. I later paid two visits to the Western Wall, that serene remnant of the Second Temple, access to which sparked 1929’s Buraq Uprising, costing the lives of 250 Jews and Arabs; this Jewish holy of holies neighbours the Al-Aqsa Mosque where, after we left, hundreds of thousands of Muslims celebrated Ramadan.

This diversity contributes to the on-going instability, and now the reactionary impulses, of Israeli politics. Initially established on the broad base of Labor Zionism, Israel has this century fragmented demographically and ideologically, with prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud best at exploiting division and forging alliances - thus a cabinet now featuring ultra-Zionist West Bank settler provocateurs such as finance minister Bezalel Smotrich and national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. An irony of 7 October is its quelling the protracted protests against Netanyahu’s attempted subversion of Israel’s Supreme Court: it’s only a year since a quarter of a million Israelis took to the streets in defiance of their government.

About Israel’s only truly trusted institution today is the air defence system, Iron Dome. The near daily drizzle of rockets and shells first became a feature of Israeli life when Saddam Hussein launched forty-two SCUD missiles, mainly at Tel Aviv and Haifa, in January and February 1991. Iron Dome now patrols the skies, faithful and steadfast. Its approval ratings would be as high as the Netanyahu administration’s are low.

Netanyahu’s culpability in first the shoring up of Hamas then the military and intelligence failures that enabled their incursion are undisputed, albeit not yet full explored by an anticipated inquiry. Almost nobody we encountered on our trip had a good word to say for their prime minister, or for Smotrich and Ben-Gvir. Nor was anyone insensible to the human toll in Gaza: it was unignorable even at Kibbutz Be’eri, from where Gaza is visible, surveillance drones and distant ordnance audible, and Hamas missiles lobbed later in the afternoon. But there is an air of being forced to choose between a range of awful alternatives, with the extirpation of Hamas maybe ever so slightly less awful than the rest. Such is what Ari Shavit once called ‘the intensity of life on the edge’.

*

I wouldn’t wish to sum up the conflict on the basis of an eight-day visit, however stimulating, and a score or so of briefings, however candid. I speak neither Hebrew nor Arabic; I possess expertise neither in the Holocaust nor the Nakba beyond some broad but unsystematic reading; I am certainly not about to insist that history began on 7 October. But when 4 Corners, for example, was prepared to reduce that day’s events to a few seconds of disembodied gunfire, it did feel like there was more to say.

There was certainly more to see. No experience was so striking as the opportunity, afforded by Israel’s foreign ministry, to watch a forty-seven-minute video of the events of 7 October culled from social media, CCTV, dash cams and intercepted communications. Some clips from which have already circulated, such as the excerpt from one phone call home from Mefalsim: ‘I have killed ten Jews with my bare hands…mom, your son is a hero! Kill kill kill!’ And, as the video’s reception preceded it, half our party of journalists actually declined the invitation to sit in on the screening. Though I did watch, I cannot, I must confess, do it justice.

There are stories within stories. Phone footage from the Supernova Sukkot Gathering near Kibbutz Re’im, for example, begins with people enjoying themselves, smiling, laughing and dancing, and follows a plot of alert, alarm, panic, terror, bloodied captives being herded into Toyotas, bullets being fired into toilet cubicles in case of victims hiding, bodies piled among the Coca-Cola tubs, and corpses almost unrecognisable as human despite the remnants of their party gear, their cool T-shirts and sequinned crop tops. Three hundred and sixty four young people were murdered here: we hear a family trying, unsuccessfully, to identify their daughter from her tattoos.

There are many tiny personal dramas. CCTV footage from Netiv HaAsara, a community relocated after the Camp David Accords now known for its Path to Peace mural, shows a father being blown up with a grenade in trying to protect his young sons. As they run into the house, the audio captures their terrified voices (‘Daddy’s dead, Shay! It’s not a prank!’). A Hamas terrorist strolls in, surveying them coolly as he takes a drink from the fridge. A black labrador comes down a pathway wagging its tail, and is shot in the head.

There are more collective tales, like a group of female soldiers in their pyjamas gathered together trying to work out what to do and where to go, their faces illuminated by the light of a single iPhone screen; they remind me, inevitably, of the girl soldiers I had met the day before. Just then a menacing silhouette materialises in the doorway. The scene dissolves to its aftermath: a troop of satisfied Hamas militants in the same room enjoying a smoko, surrounded by the bodies of the girls we have just seen. The camera closes in on one killer who smiles faintly as he points a laconic forefinger to heaven.

Sometimes, while we’re watching, the streaming glitches, as videos are wont to do - the frame frozen always seems to hover over some particularly baroque act of savagery, whether the gleeful decapitation of a dead soldier, recorded in exhaustive detail, or an incompetent attempt to decapitate a dead civilian, verging on the macabre. ‘Let history be my witness,’ shouts the perpetrator. ‘This is the first man I will behead. Give me the knife!’ When no knife is forthcoming, he makes repeated efforts with a shovel shouting: ‘Allah is great! Allah is great!’ This man was not Hamas, I learn later, merely a Gazan wannabe who had wandered through the broken fences; Hamas, I was told, came amply equipped for the hacking of heads.

Yet it was also possible to feel a sense of pathos about the perpetrators, for only men desensitised and denatured in a systematic manner could have behaved so bestially. In addition to long indoctrinations in the dogma of their kindred Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas is reported to hop their soldiery up on large doses of amphetamines, suppressing their appetites, prolonging their endurances, disinhibiting them of any moral qualm or personal fear - necessary in this instance because, within a day or two, many of the men in these videos would themselves be, by their own lights, martyred. There was a sense in which they were also victims, the compliant tools of sadistic and medieval minds.

At a pinch, you could even see the atrocities as part of a cycle dating back at least to the Arab Revolts of 1936-39, when rape and dismemberment were also part of the arsenal. But the difference was also obvious. We have only still photographs of, say, the expulsion of Palestinians from Lydda and Ramle, or the massacre of kibbutzniks at Kfar Etzion. Hamas constructed a real-time carnival of carnage. Israel was only one target of Yahya Sinwar, mastermind of the Al-Aqsa Flood. The other target was an audience, at home and abroad, whom he wished to inspire, to inflame, to terrify, to horrify - in which we visiting journalists had now been joined.

By the end, two of us are in tears; a third goes and buys his first packet of cigarettes in many years. I am consoled that however shocking, the experience would have been infinitely worse for first responders, whose stark, mainly silent videos, of violated and charred corpses amid car wreckage and thick swatches of blood, prove among the most graphic. The silence doesn’t lift when the video ends. None of us speak, save, finally, the young female soldier whose job to screen the footage this has been over the last few months. ‘Thank you for taking the time to expand your comprehension of what happened,’ she says quietly.

*

Our comprehension can only be expanded so far. Gaza and the West Bank are, unsurprisingly, off limits to our visit. Gaza, where the IDF broods on a final showdown with Hamas in Rafah, is a war zone. The West Bank, with its moribund Palestinian Authority, is not a war zone but restless nonetheless: a recent opinion poll found three-quarters of respondents approving of the tactics of Hamas. Mind you, these results hardly seem so surprising given the quotidian humiliations of Palestinian life in the occupied territories, not to mention the indolence of PA’s Mahmoud Abbas. Abbas turns ninety next year having served, as they say, twenty years of a four-year term.

The West Bank, it’s clear, is also being reshaped by 7 October, with the increased pace of opportunistic Israeli land seizures under Smotrich’s influence. Israel’s settlement watchdog, Peace Now, has declared 2024 a ‘peak in declarations of state land’. But such acquisitions are easier to justify to those anxious about a bulwark against their enemies; likewise the gathering up of security detainees. If Hamas imagined the Al-Aqsa Flood would inspire and embolden Palestinians in the West Bank, the short-term impacts have been opposite. And like Israeli hostages, Palestinian prisoners are collateral damage in this conflict.

The campaign for Israel’s remaining 134 hostages in Gaza is at least visible. On a Friday morning at Hostages Square, a plaza in front of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art now set aside for a public vigil, a hundred devotees have laid out mats for an intensive yoga session. Why? When Israel and Hamas suspiciously exchanged prisoners in January, those freed reported that Carmel Gat, a thirty-nine-year-old occupational therapist kidnapped from Kibbutz Be’eri, had been holding yoga classes to relieve the monotony of their subterranean incarceration. Gat’s brother, sister-in-law and niece were also kidnapped; Gat’s mother Kinneret was killed. Gat’s friends and admirers perpetuate her spirit with a weekly class in her honour, some brandishing tote bags featuring a beatified Gat in the lotus position.

Yet the position of the hostages is uneasy. Proponents of a ceasefire seem almost to have forgotten their existence, despite the possibility that release would conduce to their objective. Advocates of a determined, long-term IDF campaign, meanwhile, recall that a 2011 prisoner exchange made a free man of Sinwar, sentenced to four life sentences for six murders, two of whom he personally strangled. Though Hostage Square is located within sight of IDF headquarters, it is unclear whose sympathy the hostage families can engage, though they try. We meet three.

‘They’ve arrived, they have me,’ was the last voice message that the parents of thirty-year-old veterinary nurse Doron Steinbrecher, as she was abducted from Kibbutz Kafa Aza; next her mother Simona saw, in footage on Telegram, Doron was trussed up in a jeep with other girls. Simona can say little beyond reiterating her daughter’s innocence. ‘She [Doron] do nothing,’ she repeats, as if mystified.

Twenty-two-year-old Guy Dalal went with three friends to Supernova. Two of them were murdered; Guy and a friend were kidnapped; his older brother Gal escaped, simply because his car was more conveniently located. Had their parking places been reversed, Guy might now be wearing Gal’s face on a T-shirt; instead it is Gal wearing Guy’s.

In her most recent still image from Gaza, nineteen-year-old Karina Aliev’s eyes are blackened and her face bloodied. Like the other hostages she has been deprived access to Red Cross, and almost certainly submitted to physical and sexual abuse. Karina’s family is spread across two wars: her Ukrainian mother, who married her Uzbek father, has sisters in Donetsk. Her older sister Sacha looks like she has not slept in six months. ‘We used to have a joke that I would die before her because I was older,’ she says, almost inaudibly. ‘Now please let me die before my sister.’ If even half the remaining hostages are recovered, senior observers privately admitted, it will probably rank as a successful outcome. But in the meantime, the hostages serve to fan the 7 October flame - an admonition not to forget Hamas’s barbarism.

*

Then, of course, there are the dead, who in this conflict will take a long time to lay to rest - rather will the circumstances of their deaths factor into future deliberations. It is fearful to contemplate what Israel’s prosecution of war in Gaza will lead to - as Hamas surely intended, it will be an aquifier of grief and grievance to tap for generations to come. But 7 October may already be serving similar purpose in Israel, as I grasped on meeting two other families connected by Be’eri, if differently bereaved.

One night, having been a guest at a joyous shabbat dinner in Haniel, a village 65km northwest of Jerusalem, I was invited down the road to meet Zoha and Dorit Margalit, parents of twenty-four-year-old architecture student Adi, another dance enthusiast at Supernova. ‘We have three children,’ said Zoha, commencing a family sketch before correcting himself. ‘We had three children….’

On the morning of 7 October, the Margalits heard the everyday noise of sirens forewarning of a missile strike. Then Adi rang her parents from the bomb shelter near Be’eri where she was hiding after running from Supernova - she was never heard from again. ‘We didn’t believe something like this could happen,’ recalled Dorit. ‘Whenever we heard rockets it was like you go into the shelter for 10 minutes then come out…Now I wake up every morning and think it can’t be true.’ Unable to bear it when Ali’s twin brother Amit was called up for his military unit, she pleaded with him not to go. ‘You raised me this way,’ Amit countered. ‘Now you want to change?’

Israeli civic life has strong martial foundations. Because national service predates university education, one’s unit, rather than one’s alma mater, forms the basis of lifelong social bonds. Tens of thousands of young Israelis have already served in Gaza and the West Bank. One of our security guards had just returned from Gaza, scathing of Hamas; the other was about to head to the West Bank. The latter was with us when we visited the home of Iman Habaka, in the Galilean village of Yanuh, near Kfar Vadem.

Iman is Druze - ethnic Arabs whose faith draws on Islam, Judaism and Christianity. His son Salman, one of four, was named for one of the five Druze prophets. At fifteen he attended an army and navy school; at nineteen he joined the Tank Corps; at thirty-three, rather than await orders that never came, he responded to news reports of an attack to the south by setting off with three tanks, finally approaching Be’eri along Route 232.

There is a evolving consolatory mythology of 7 October, personified by figures like Elhanan Klemenson, a reservist captain who with his bible teacher brother Menachem put on their bullet proof vests, packed some M16s in their family SUV, and drove to Be'eri, where they rescued scores of survivors before Elhanan was shot attempting a final mission. Such stories are redemptive. The state may have failed, but individuals, using their own initiative, succeeded. Salman is another exemplar. Without him, and the thirty-six unbroken hours he spent in his tank, casualties at Be’eri would have been far higher.

Then, on 2 November, going to the aid of endangered colleagues in Gaza, Salman was killed. Iman stands like a soldier as he retells this story. He is patriotic about Israel. ’This is for our country,’ he says, drawing a deep breath. ‘We have to do what we can when we have a war. We know people can fall.’ He is proud of his son, contemptuous of Hamas: ‘He is not like the terrorists, under the ground.’ In the corner of the room, his wife is weeping. So, I notice, is our security guard. The house is festooned with photographs of Salman and with mementos of Maccabi Haifa FC whom he supported, and whose manager and players paid respects after his death.

This is important. Israelis do not have an army, like the US’s or Australia’s, where volunteer specialists are sent to fight wars on the far side of the world; they are raised to defend their borders, and their existence. After the Russian invasion, Ukraine found it necessary to pass a law preventing men under sixty-five from leaving the country. Since 7 October, 50,000 Israelis have enlisted. And when you have a large standing military associated with your nation’s foundation, you tend to use it. The IDF’s successes and failures ramify across families, communities and generations. From Iman’s window, in fact, you can see Lebanon, but he is staying put. ‘No,’ he says flatly. ‘We are not going.’

*

Iman is unusual in standing fast. We have already come across some of his neighbours in Jerusalem. Seventy families in our hotel are among 70,000 people evacuated from Galilee since the outbreak of hostilities - a largely unreported exodus.

Because this is not a one-off war confined to a tiny corner of a tiny country. Alluding to the ‘six armies’ that menaced Israel at its foundation in 1948, the IDF refers to the conflict since 7 October involving ‘seven fronts’. Benighted Gaza and the restive West Bank are only the most obvious. Israel has experienced incursions from Sh’ite militias based in Syria and Iraq, and rocket fire from Yemen where the Houthis are escalating their civil war. Most nervously watched is Galilee, where Hezbollah, having accomplished the state capture of Lebanon, crouch just the far side of that northern border.

Hezbollah started firing rockets on 7 October. There is puzzlement that their chieftain Hassan Nasrallah has done no more since. It will hardly be to comply with 2006’s United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701 for the area’s demilitarisation: in addition to 150,000 precision-guided missiles, Hezbollah bristles with armoured vehicles, aerial vehicles, and barrel bombs. Some believe that the Al-Aqsa Flood accomplished more than Hezbollah expected; others report that Sinwar has been chagrined by the lack of Hezbollah support, though that may be temporary.

The key to that is the seventh front: Iran. The middle east’s most repressive regime and most energetic entrepreneur of violence is dedicated to extending its sphere of influence by proxy - that is, by alliance with Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthi and others. Their provocation: the Abraham Accords, a downpayment on Arab-Israeli normalisation signed between Israel, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates in August 2020. Their objective: Israeli pariahhood. So far, so good, they might think, if the growing coolness between Israel and the US is concerned. Israeli officialdom is now even wary of Iran’s cultivation of the African National Congress, sponsor of South Africa’s case against Israeli ‘genocide’ at the International Court of Justice.

Iran is estimated to have funded Hamas last year to the tune of $US350 million. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is known to have contributed intelligence and logistical knowhow to the Al-Aqsa Flood. Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, Iran’s foreign minister, remains a regular confidante of Ismail Haniyeh, head of the Hamas political bureau. But the Sunnis of Hamas, says Sarit Zehavi of the independent strategic think tank Alma Research & Education Centre, are to Iran perfectly disposable: ‘Iran is happy to fight Israel to the last drop of Palestinian blood.’ Shia Hezbollah, which deems Jews the ‘enemies of mankind’, and the Houthi, with their slogans ‘Death to Israel’ and ‘A Curse Upon the Jews’, pose the greater threat. 'It’s about loyalty to the Supreme Leader of Iran,’ says Zehavi.

Perspective on Levantine conflict can depend on your preferred geographic framing. A map of Israel in relation to Gaza, and Israel in relation to the Middle East, convey different messages; in the latter, the region’s Jews diminish to a minuscule minority; they are concentrated in Israel partly because more than a million co-religionists, having undergone systematic persecution in surrounding Arab states, arrived there as refugees after partition in 1948. Just because you’re paranoid, as they say, doesn’t mean that everyone isn’t against you. But whatever your perspective, cold war in the north of Israel has the potential to be as hot as the south. The antagonists may be awaiting summer: boggy conditions in winter confine heavy vehicles to roads where they are vulnerable to anti-tank weaponry.

In one Galilee control room, David, a former naval captain, how watches the border and studies the daily rocket fall on CCTV screens. Though he continues shouldering his assault rifle while talking, he is determinedly cheerful. ‘Just remember!’ he jokes, as if it is a catchphrase. ‘We are not at war with Lebanon!’

Does he feel safe? ’No, I don’t feel safe,' David says resignedly. ‘But you never feel a hundred per cent safe in Israel. There was a time in 2000 when you would not have driven behind a bus in Tel Aviv’. He pays a daily visit to the kindergarten in uniform to reassure the children they are protected; his village has formed into four squads and prepared to be self-sufficient at least seventy-hours in the event of finding themselves caught up in an offensive. The night before our visit, the skies overhead had been lit up by Iron Dome interceptions of Hezbollah rockets; a few hours earlier, ill-aimed rockets had descended harmlessly nearby.

That is just a taste of what the future may hold, says David: ‘When Nasrallah says he can hit everywhere in Israel, he is right. But we cannot evacuate our country.’ He observes that Tel Aviv has it lucky, with minutes to prepare for a missile strike: ‘We have fifteen seconds.’ About the delicacy of the peace, he makes an astute observation: ‘Iron Dome is a great system. But it is a political weapon. It allows politicians not to do anything….If not for Iron Dome we’d have gone to war five months go.’ Then he bids us a cheery farewell: ‘Just remember! We are not at war with Lebanon!’

*

Yet stasis is an illusion. The human catastrophe of Gaza deepens daily. Its extent is difficult to quantify in the absence of sources other than the Hamas-controlled health ministry death toll, which grows with curiously unaltering steadiness, and Hamas-authorised media, hardly positioned to exercise any skepticism. But the unchallenged evidence is shocking enough. The Israeli offensive has wrought horrendous civilian losses, borne disproportionately by women and children, and worse impends. The UN’s hunger monitoring group, Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), warned months ago of the threat of starvation in Gaza, and so it has come to pass, in part because of alleged Hamas taint of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency and minister Smotrich’s punitive instincts. IPC now anticipates a famine afflicting half Gaza’s population in the next two months. That’s more than a million people - as staggering as it was avoidable.

The IDF’s advance has been confounded at stages, and Gaza’s immiseration infinitely worsened, by the extent of Hamas’s defensive resourcefulness, in particular its excavation, in the area’s loose soil, of tunnels estimated at twice the length of the London Underground. Gaza is often characterised as an ‘open-air prison’; it might also be called the world’s largest defensive fortification, with civilians performing for Hamas a function similar to that which Iron Dome performs for Israel. One cameo, from a dinner I attended with some business people. ‘My boy is in Gaza,’ explained another guest. ‘Today he went to a kindergarten.’ On his phone was a photo of a weapons cache whose size simply beggared belief.

But with each passing day, Israel’s herding of displaced persons, degradation of infrastructure and general insouciance about Gazans grows harder to defend internationally. It’s arguable that such discretionary horrors could abate tomorrow were Hamas’s dwindling forces to surrender their arms and release their hostages. But that might not suit Netanyahu’s stated objective of ‘total victory’ either - nothing short of the annihilation of Hamas, as Hamas notoriously demanded the annihilation of Israel in their original charter. Hamas has committed to repeating the Al-Aqsa Flood, with the claim that ‘everything we do is justified’; Israel is increasingly inclined to echo them. An old story: antagonists egging one another on, inured to one another’s suffering.

This may be the lasting legacy of 7 October in Israel, with its sense, as we often heard repeated, of the violation of the nation’s covenant with the Jewish people, to protect them from their surrounding ill-wishers, to prevent a repetition of the Shoah. Israel today contains nearly half the world’s Jews, most of their hopes, many of their fears. The Al-Aqsa Flood deepened their identification with that famous couplet of Numbers 23:9: ‘This is a people who dwell alone/Not reckoning themselves one of the nations.’ Their economic heartiness, their vaunted technological prowess, their bristling military and even their mighty Iron Dome availed them nought, pricking the vulnerability that lies beneath Israeli bellicosity.

This is a problem for Palestinians also. Whatever your perspective, a nation of nine million cannot be willed away. Fair or not, a just resolution in Palestine will depend on Israeli acquiescence. How to achieve it when the previous version of Palestinian self-governance has cost more Jewish lives in any single day since 1945, not to mention turned a Palestinian civilian population into a human shield for a military stronghold? How to achieve it when the chief sponsor of opposition to Israel is a vicious theocracy also at odds with many of the surrounding Arab states? How to achieve it when the allegedly ‘moderate’ Palestinian Authority has done nothing to flesh out its credentials as a potential broker in the conflict? How to achieve it when so many benefit by the prolongation of the conflict, on all sides, Sinwar and Bibi, jihadist recruiters and West Bank settlers alike?

*

In a 1986 interview collected in Power, Politics and Culture, Edward Said told a story: ‘My fourteen-year-old son and I were watching the television news two weeks ago and he said, “Apartheid has become very trendy, hasn’t it? When are we going to become trendy?” Then he paused and said, “I guess never.” ’ Said’s son was too pessimistic. And it was eerie to return to Australia after visiting Israel, where the atmosphere was claustrophobic, the anxieties real and the stakes existential, to encounter a debate so replete with slogans, so grandiose in gestures, and so irrelevant in outcomes, with its tit-for-tat cancellations and my enemy’s enemy thinking.

In the aftermath of 7 October, Guy Rundle on Crikey, hardly a flag waver for Israel, issued an admonition: ‘The pro-Palestine left should have separated itself from this application of a new type of violence quickly and immediately, once it was clear that enough reports of large-scale killing were true. To not do so has been to attach the solidarity movement to an event that went beyond that to which solidarity can be offered.’ This wasn’t so much a moral position as a matter of practical politics, for Rundle was concerned about weakened relations ‘between Western progressivism and Palestinian solidarity’ if the atrocities against women were verified: ‘Their [progressives] attachment to the remnant anti-imperialism of Palestinian solidarity was vestigial anyway; one suspects a whole section will swing around to a de facto pro-Israel position, as a repository of women’s and LGBTQIA+ rights. No amount of brazening it out or accurate conveyance of Israeli violence is going to work.’

Rundle need not have been so pessimistic either. On 3 March, the United Nations published the results of a detailed investigation of 7 October confirming evidence of ‘sexual violence including genital mutilation, sexualised torture, or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment’ against women: ‘In most of these incidents, victims first subjected to rape were then killed, and at least two incidents relate to the rape of women’s corpses.' They reported ‘a pattern of victims, mostly women, found fully or partially naked, bound, and shot across multiple locations’; they reported ‘clear and convincing information’ that the sexual violence was ‘ongoing.’ The response was an uneasy silence where it wasn’t denial.

While understanding the wish to distinguish it from fair-minded criticism of Zionist expansionism and exclusivity, the recrudescence of anti-semitism in any context should be nothing other than severely disturbing. Anti-Zionism can draw on some distinguished antecedents. It encompasses two of my most admired public intellectuals, Tony Judt and Christopher Hitchens. But while not every anti-Zionist is an anti-semite, every anti-semite is an anti-Zionist. Given this overlap, it’s hardly surprising that most Jews sense a distinction without a difference, with darker impulses at play. It’s not mere whataboutism to wonder what it is about this regional conflict that so stirs intelligentsias the world over.

Hundreds of thousands have died in Ukraine; hundreds of thousands of Muslim Uighurs exist under conditions of state tyranny in China; more than a million refugees languish in camps in Chad after a twelve-month rampage by a Sudanese warlord’s militiamen; 26 million severely hungry people dwell in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. By unspoken consent, these conflicts and calamities are too distant and complex to opine on, let alone to inspire marches in solidarity; yet when the subject is Israel, ‘Queers for Palestine’ makes common cause with ‘Rape is Resistance’ and ‘Babies are Occupiers Too.’ A favourite recent discovery is that the Wikipedia page for Hezbollah has been altered to describe them as ‘a left-wing political entity focused on social injustice’, which could be either a uni student’s wishful thinking or the work of a Russian trollfarm. There is even a determination hereabouts to parallel Palestinian deprivation with indigenous dispossession, disserving both. Amos Oz once observed that Israel and Palestine were involved in fanning a ‘real estate dispute’ into a holy war. It’s unclear what the modish idéefixe with ‘settler-colonialism’ helpfully determines outside the university seminar room.

These, perhaps, are subjects for a different time. In the meantime, 7 October sits in that murky middle space between history and current affairs. It is too late for regret, too soon for memorials, a daily nightmare for hostage families, a historical territory up for annexure. For a reckoning, Israel is too busy expiating its failures, Israel’s detractors are loath to acknowledge the company they are keeping, and innocents continue to perish.