I can’t expect to add much to the billions of words being spoken about Israel and Gaza at the moment. My main thought is that if human rights and non-violence ever sounded like good ideas, they really do now.
But since my day job is in education, and education about peace and conflict, I can’t help thinking about the role of learning in all this. A lot of people think that turmoil in the Holy Land is a topic about which it is very hard to learn.
A few unsurprising anecdotes.
The other week I was asked by a well-educated person for a good way to find out about the conflict. This person was unsure about information they’d come across.
Then, a few days ago, I heard a pro-Palestine activist from Belfast on the radio. The presenter described the activist’s position as ‘political’. In other words, it was a perspective, one among other legitimate perspectives, equal to the pro-Israeli speaker’s. It seemed that listeners were being told that if they wanted facts, they wouldn’t find them here – perhaps anywhere. The discussion, incidentally, was about possible BBC bias in the coverage of the Gaza war.[1]
And I’m remembering an argument I got into during a previous Gaza war in 2014 when the person tried to educate me by sending me a link to a pro-Israeli website. I said, ‘OK, but you do realise this is a biased website?’ and he said my view that his source was biased was biased. [2]
There’s an idea out there that facts on this conflict are very hard to get, and that we can’t trust many – maybe all – sources of information.
There are many different reasons for this idea.
- The media feels the need to present both sides equally, and so doesn’t give us a steer.
- The media focuses on immediate events and avoids the historical context.
- Some commentators really are biased.
- Some sources of information look biased i.e. are full of loaded words like ‘terrorist’, ‘anti-Semitic’, ‘fascist’, ‘Zionist’, or ‘colonial’.
- There is more than the usual amount of, let’s say, informal sources of information (Christian Zionist emails, protest speeches, social media, blogs like this one).
- There undoubtedly is deliberate misinformation.
- There undoubtedly are genuine disputes between the parties as to what has occurred in a particular instance.
- There is a broad spectrum of opinion among both Palestinians and Israelis, stretching from apolitical people who just want to go about their lives, to depraved militarists, and lots in between. It’s hard to get to grips with this.
- While the state of Israel is still relatively young, a lot has happened in the last century that has shaped how things are today. There is a lot of history.
- Any long-running conflict takes a bit of effort to grasp.
One response to all this could be to switch back to Netflix.
But, a) rightly or wrongly, the media is covering the story around the clock[3], including ‘local angles’, so it almost becomes local news i.e. our business, and, b) depending on where you live, your country’s stance may be implicated in what is happening, so people should be informed.
So, how to get past all this confusion, and learn?
What I did was read some (good quality history) books.
In the final year of my history degree, I chose a module on the Arab-Israeli conflict. This was not long after 9/11 and it sounded like something I should know about. The module was taught by a gentlemanly, Anglican Scotsman who was close to retirement.
There was no ideologizing, no anti-imperial or anti-terror jargon, no theory even. He did not split the class into ‘Israelis’ and ‘Palestinians’ and get them to role play. The lectures were all storytelling, all ‘what happened’. They were often boring. The professor drew maps with chalk, complete with little warplanes. I wrote two essays and a dissertation, spending a lot of time at the Middle East shelves in the history section of the Coleraine main campus library.
I’m not actually sure what my lecturer’s personal views on the conflict were. But what I learned from this module was that Palestinians have been the serial losers in the century-long, and internationally-supported, project to build and expand the state of Israel, and that this explains the dire conditions in which Palestinians today must try to live.
This is not a ‘contested narrative’ or a ‘political’ viewpoint. It’s a fact; in fact, it’s so factual, it’s silly to even say it’s a fact. There are other facts, sure, but they don’t deny the factualness of this fact! (As we should know in Northern Ireland, ‘whataboutery’ is not a valid way to argue.) It’s not even that complicated. But it’s a fact which was, and is, brushed aside by the kind of unionist pro-statism and Christian Zionism I grew up around.
I’m not saying everyone needs to do a history degree, though I recommend it. But it’s why I have a simplistic belief that it is possible to get to the heart of the situation in the Holy Land and do so through a fairly sober and undramatic route – if, that is, you are open to learning. I learned through other routes later, like reading NGO reports and doing a study-trip which engaged mostly with Palestinian Christians. But all this built upon what I learned in that dull module which explained how the region got to where it is today.
Of course, you don’t need to know any history to be opposed to the slaughter of human beings. You just need a minimally functioning moral compass. But some history will let you see that whenever this phase of bloodshed is over, the basic situation will still be the same, as it was the day before Oct 7.
It’s perfectly obvious who in Palestine-Israel has their human rights and who does not. Despite appearances, the problem is not a lack of facts, nor is it an impenetrable complexity. The problem is the ideas, beliefs, and attitudes that allow people to live with certain facts, like the denial of others’ human rights and mass murder.
[1] Interestingly, most of what the activist said was not political opinion by any measure but was facts – the numbers of Palestinians killed compared to Israelis, and the many ways in which Israel breaks international law. I don’t even think Israel would dispute these facts. As far as I can see, the main approach of spokespersons for the state of Israel is not providing alternative facts, but excusing the fact of what is happening. They argue that all those dead Palestinians, and all those law-breakages, are a price worth paying for Israel’s ‘security’ and/or are justified by the Hamas attack (i.e. are justified revenge). It is straightforward for us, as observers, to work out whether this sounds reasonable.
[2] In return I sent him a link to a report by Christian Aid, what I thought to be a very mainstream charity, about the conditions in which Palestinians have to live due to the Israeli occupation.
[3] In 2022, more people died in war in Ethiopia than in Ukraine.
David Mitchell 