The Gaza / Israel chestnut? I’ve gone and cracked it!

Double Vision with Charlie Adley

That Gaza chestnut? I reckon I’ve cracked it. To be honest I don’t know what all the fuss was about.  I’d been feeling increasingly sad, angry and frustrated by both the war itself and the way some of my Irish friends had reacted, as they always do, during conflicts involving Israel.

Why do these normally wise and compassionate people suddenly become sucked into the very same dogma-driven propaganda-fuelled tunnel vision that has ignited the fires of every war mankind has known?

Removed from both my Irish friends and my Jewish family, I’m unable to see Goodies and Baddies here; just a terrifying and tragic crime of scale.

Somewhere between Facebook posts declaring RTÉ is biased towards Israel – which is akin to describing the desert as an ocean – and suggestions that not enough Israelis had died to win the Public Relations war, I just lost it, and spent an entire afternoon looking for an alternative to the IDF’s ground offensive in Gaza.

“Boom!” – bright as a Hamas rocket hitting Israel’s missile defence system Iron Dome – “Got it!”

Empathy brings success. The solution, henceforth known as ‘Operation Not Bovvered’, works symbiotically with the essence of the Israeli personality.

As things stand Israel wouldn’t bomb the Palestinians if Hamas didn’t fire rockets, but Hamas are firing rockets because the Israelis are blockading Gaza, but the blockade makes it impossible for Palestinians to go to their jobs in Israel, which is creating terrible poverty in Gaza, which wouldn’t be necessary if the Palestinians who worked in Israel didn’t bring with them suicide bombers who blew up Israelis, but the suicide bombers wouldn’t want to blow themselves up if the Israelis weren’t living on Palestinian land in the first place…

… deep breath…

So Israel withdrew their army and forcibly evicted their own settlers from Gaza in 2005, to then be hit by over 11,000 Hamas missiles fired from Gaza. Israel ignores international outrage about the siege of Gaza while Hamas smuggle in thousands of missiles through tunnels.

As the numbers of Palestinian dead pile up, Israel’s American funders apply pressure so Israel operates two ceasefires in a week; yet the rockets still come, because Hamas refuse to negotiate as they don’t recognise Israel, but are simultaneously sworn to Israel’s destruction.

So Israel says “Yes!” and Palestine says “No!” and ‘yes you did, no I didn’t, yes you did no I didn’t’, so I extricate myself from that kind of ulcerative Middle Eastern thinking, wondering at the blind hatred on both sides that allows you to be sworn to destroy something that you don’t even recognise.

Of course that’s only a tiny slice of the story. As we endure the present, I dread the future. If you are an Israeli of my age your grandparents were Holocaust survivors and you were raised by parents raised by Holocaust survivors.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.