Where is the adult in the room?

Having lived and operated in Southern Lebanon for a year as a United Nations Military Observer, it is with heartbreak and aggravation that I now watch villages I used to patrol in the area being flattened in the tit-for-tat actions between Hezbollah and the Israeli Defence Force (IDF). Since the attack by Hamas into Israel on the 7^th of October last year, the military actions and rhetoric of the Netanyahu Government have gone on to only worsen the situation in the entire region. 

On 30 July this year, the political leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, was assassinated in Tehran and, while not having taken responsibility for it, it is widely assumed that Mossad, Israel’s notorious spy agency, carried this out – either directly, or through a recruited agent within Iran. While this action was ballsy, surely Israel can’t believe that it would serve to crush the ideology of Hamas, nor that it would bring about peace any sooner.

If there is to be some chance of peace in the region, the one with the power needs to start acting like a calm, mature adult! Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu needs to rein in the Israeli aggression in the region, and start being pragmatic about securing a lasting peace. Notwithstanding the intergenerational trauma being perpetuated, if Israel started showing some neighbourly compassion, Iran wouldn’t have the moral purpose to justify actions against it, either directly or through its proxies. Hamas, and its ideology, are able to exist and flourish as a result of the oppression of the Palestinians. But the Zionists, at least the hard-right Zionists, insist on chasing the ‘Promised Land’, from the ‘River to the Sea’, without Philistine presence, and so are facilitating Bibi’s use of war as a smokescreen for his own domestic political and legal issues, while collectively perpetrating a genocide of the Palestinian people. That’s right, let us not forget that Bibi was indicted for corruption charges, and was also in a particularly precarious domestic political footing during his attempts to limit the powers of the judiciary and his plans to prevent the draft of ultra-Orthodox Jews at the Israeli Supreme Court.

But all the domestic political influence aside, when Israel has gone and poked the tiger through targeting Iranian Generals in Damascus, then, assuming the suspicion is correct, assassinating Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, the United States and the United Kingdom invariably come running to support in the defence of Israel. But why? To protect a regional liberal democracy, whose actions only serve to undermine the moral legitimacy of Israel, her supporters, and the very idea of a ‘liberal democracy’; out of a sense of guilt for the atrocities that occurred in Europe over 80 years ago? At least, It wouldn’t have anything to do with the cold hard cash that the global Jewish diaspora pour into foreign governments through numerous lobbying groups, would it? With over USD $56M already gifted in 2024 to both sides of the aisle, Israel is able to garner support from the US, with similar circumstances in the UK and others. This then ensures military support to help Israel defend themselves against an enemy, one that they have created, antagonised, and provoked into retaliation, comes at a moment’s notice from the West; yet, a simple Google search would suggest that Israel’s military might needs no additional support (ranked 17^th-strongest in the world), given its extant numbers and the size of its military industrial complex (ranked 10^th-largest in the world in 2022).

The October 7 attack by Hamas was abhorrent, I would never think otherwise, but the crushed, starved, exhausted, thirsty people of a state without statehood and no means to improve the lot of its people, will invariably lead to devastating actions like that. Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch, in 2022 referred to the situation saying, “Israel, with Egypt’s help, has turned Gaza into an open-air prison”. So, since “Nakba Day”, aka the “Day of Catastrophe”, on 15 May 1948 where the State of Israel was formed and the Palestinians were exiled or forced to flee for their own safety into 58 official, and up to another 10 ‘unofficial’, regional refugee camps across the Palestinian Territories, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon, Israel has systematically sought to dehumanise the Palestinians, propped up Hamas – that’s right, successive Netanyahu Governments funded Hamas in order to curtail President Abbas and weaken the chances of a recognisable Palestinian State developing – and locked down Gaza with walls, security, restrictions on fishing, travel, commerce, access to their own natural resources, etc, etc.

There are two idioms that come to mind in this situation:

‘One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter’

‘Don’t poke the Bear’ 

However, instead of Israel recognising its culpability and seeking to amend the situation, they’ve conveniently used it as a means for genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza - albeit justified in their eyes – while increasing their pace in the land grabbing of the West Bank (144 official, and over 100 unofficial settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, disregarding numerous UN Resolutions condemning and forbidding such actions). But we can’t use the word ‘genocide’, nor the word ‘holocaust’, as these only pertain to the acts perpetrated upon the Jews in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s. In fact, Netanyahu and other far-right Zionists have invoked the memory of the Holocaust to justify the destruction of their “genocidal enemies” in a manner that, has been referred to as “weaponizing the Holocaust” to the benefit of Israel.   

The whole situation is ridiculous, makes it feel like the world is getting pulled into another major conflict, and demonstrates major flaws in the global order. If Israel cannot be prevented from denying Palestine the basics of human life, let alone precluding its Statehood, then what hope is there for a morally justifiable global order. The US uses its Veto power in United Nations to protect Israel from being held to account through successive UNSC Resolutions attempting to curtail Israel. This only serves to demonstrate just another in a plethora of failings by the UNSC to uphold its Charter to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.”  The power of the Permanent Five (US, UK, France, Russia, and China) continually serves to undermine the Charter of the UN as these members exercise their ability to block meaningful geopolitical action to obfuscate, protect, and facilitate the actions of themselves as the aggressor or their allied partners.

 So, with the UN incapable, and the major global powers facilitating belligerents, who is the adult in the room that will arbitrate this conflict, or any of the long-standing conflicts and humanitarian catastrophes our species is inflicting upon ourselves?