From fear to hatred: Israel’s grim war of survival

Living in Britain, I am subjected daily to media reports and opinions on the Middle East, many of which, while purporting to present a balanced analysis of the escalating conflict currently enmeshing Israel, are tilted against that country’s war effort and ethics. These views and the corresponding omission and downplaying of transgressions by Israel’s enemies, contribute to a general undermining of Israel’s position.

An exception to the torrent of biased reporting is a recent column in the Guardian by Jonathan Freedland. A Jew with a profound understanding of the historical roots of the conflict, he pinpoints the essential nature of the problem as one of fear – the fact that Israel is both fearful and feared. He goes on to say that this has produced an agonizing double vision: a people looking at themselves from within and seeing only a tiny, beleaguered state threatened with extinction, and a world looking at Israel from the outside, seeing nothing but a rampaging killing machine. If only these two viewpoints could be focused into one, he argues, it might be possible to move forward.

I would add another element to the equation: the ease with which fear can be transformed into hatred. “That which we fear, we soon come to hate,” says a character in Shakespeare’s ‘Antony and Cleopatra’. I remember my parents’ bitter, grieving hatred towards the murderers of their relatives in Europe and my own childish satisfaction at seeing photos of the bodies of executed Nazi war criminals in the wake of the Nuremberg trials. That hatred has remained embedded in me, despite the emollient effect of a liberal education.

It is all too easy for me to project that hatred onto Israel’s latter-day enemies, whose avowed determination is to destroy my people and possess their land. The hatred which blighted the lives of my parents’ generation has been re-kindled in Jews of my generation by the events of October 7th.

The emergence of the Palestinians as a people contesting ownership of Israel has been a bitter pill which many Jew have been unable to swallow. Jewish extremists have fallen in with a cycle of violence and counter-violence and such trust as there might have been between the two peoples has withered on the vine. Meanwhile, the war, fueled by hate, continues.

World opinion has now re-cast David as Goliath, but there can be no neat reversal of roles here. The protagonists cannot be simplistically understood as the strong against the weak, or the good against the evil. By the same token there can never be total victory for either side. Fear and hatred will continue to fester on either side of the divide. Extremists will continue to entertain the fantasy of destroying their enemies and fanatics will continue with their rants against all who do not share their values.

The distorted perception which these two peoples, the Israelis and the Palestinians, have of each other has grown out of the myth that there can only be one way of seeing the world. While militant Islam nurtures the dream of subjugating unbelievers, extremist Jews believe that all Palestinians are enemies who must be held at bay by force. Neither sees the other as a source of strength and support, and the dream of both nations living together in peace alongside other nations has become a nightmare of survival for each nation.

Hope for a resolution of the conflict now rests with the displacement of the merchants of hatred on both sides from positions of power. They will always exist but their numbers will only grow if the sole solution is sought in violence. However, if there is a loud enough voice of reason to drown out the frenzied rhetoric of hatred, it may just be possible to resurrect trust between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, and marginalize the extremists on both sides.

This is why I believe that Israelis should look more respectfully on their friends in the rest of the world and that reciprocally, those living outside Israel, who believe in a democratic solution to the conflict, should take a more empathic look at Israel, a small nation surrounded by a sea of hatred, whose people remain fearful of being overwhelmed by extremist forces from within and without and who are unable to see themselves as a much feared and hated giant in the region.