Reflections on the cruelty of this never-ending war

JVL Introduction

On 12th October last year we published Nira Yuval-Davis’s story of her trip to Israel to see family and friends and to explore the issues of gender and ecology to which her current research is devoted, curtailed by the events of 7th October.

Here, in a raw Facebook post on 2nd April she reflects on the never-ending war on Gaza,  telling the story of her evolution into a fierce critic of the Zionist milieu she had grown up in.

Nothing that has taken place over the years has really surprised her, yet, subjected to reports of one atrocity after another, she finds herself shocked to the core by the extent of cruelty we are now witnessing.

RK

Nira Yuval-Davis

Facebook, 2nd April 2024

Israel bombed an international aid convoy in Gaza and killed seven international aid workers. Apparently, it bombed the convoy three times, supposedly in quest of killing a senior Hamas officer who was not there. They did manage, however, to suspend the work of this and other international aid organizations of supplying food to the starving Gazans. This news has come only a day after we were told Israel had withdrawn from Al Shifa hospital, the largest hospital in Gaza, after virtually destroying it, supposedly in quest of senior Hamas officers there. And so it goes on.

159 days of on-going killing children, women, the elderly, aid workers, academics, journalists as well as all other strata of Gazan society. Yes, they are killing senior Hamas officers and fighters, but unsurprisingly, Hamas’ political influence among Palestinians has only gone up since the beginning of the war. The intended and unintended sadism in destroying all the infrastructure required to sustain lives, in directing the population to so-called safe zones only to bomb them later and redirect the same population into other so-called safe zones, preventing more than a million people from leading everyday lives and preventing them from escaping to where they could lead such lives.

Domicide is becoming an on-going genocide, even in the eyes of the international establishment which has ignored the plight of the Palestinians for decades (and still continues to send Israel weapons and bombs). I heard the head of UNICEF interviewed a few days ago pointing out that only ten minutes separate the starving Gazans from the aid lorries waiting outside the borders of Northern Gaza where Israel is blocking their entrance. And so it goes on and on.

I grew up in the heart of Labour Zionist establishment. As a teenager I met by chance Israeli Palestinians and found out what the military government policy meant in their daily lives. When I was recruited to the Israeli army at 19 and sent to work in the (considered prestigious) head office of the military government for the couple of months, until joining the officers’ training course for which I had been judged a ‘suitable’ candidate, I was casually asked at the end of the first day by the commander of the office what I thought of the military government. In my innocence I answered that I didn’t think it was a just policy because it was a collective punishment of all Israeli Arabs (nobody used then the term Palestinians – it was 1961) while it should have been focused only on those the state suspected were planning to do things against it. This led to a whole month of security investigations trying to find the source of my ‘dangerous’ (ie universal moral) attitudes’ during which I really started to think about these issues and started my process of politicisation.

The month ended with me getting a low security score, not being allowed ever to be more than a Private, and instead of being sent to the officers course, being sent to be a typist in the main military garage in which I also came across, in a much more blatant way than in the social bubble in which I grew up, with issues of racism, sexism, class and above all petty authoritarianism – issues with which I’ve been preoccupied and, in my very inefficient way, trying to fight against ever since.

The process of my political ‘radicalisation’ (a dangerous word these days in the UK in which radicalisation equals criminalisation in the Prevent legal discourse) continued during my University studies, opposition to the military government and confiscation of Palestinian lands before and after the 1967 war, and the following occupation of the rest of Palestine, before and after leaving Israel to live in the USA and then in the UK and gaining a much more detailed intersectional historical as well as global perspectives of the settler society in which I grew up (see, e.g. Unsettling Settler Society, the 1992 book I co-edited with Daiva Stasiulis and the chapter in it on Israel and Zionism I co-wrote with Nahla Abdo).

So, while I feared for many years what might happen in Gaza, and have been following the processes of neo-liberalisation and religionisation that have transformed Israeli society (see in the first comment the link to my 2020 article on that subject in Feminist Dissent no 5), emotionally I never really did believe that the extent of the cruelty unfolding in this war was possible.

Yes, the cruelty has not been one sided and has been triggered by the terrible cruelty of Hamas on October 7th (as a founder member of Women Against Fundamentalism I’ve been aware of the horrible dangers of religious fundamentalist movements in all religions since the late 1980s) but combined with Israel’s military power, it has reached monstrous scale.

My father died after a stroke in 1982, the week when Israel first invaded Lebanon. After not talking to him about political issues for more than ten years so that we could continue our familial bond and love, he, the committed Labour Zionist, whispered in my ear that he never dreamed that the utopia he and his friends came to build in the early 1930s would become such a nightmare. I can’t help but wonder what he would have said today.

I planned to write a blog from a sociological situated gaze about the ICJ, the UN, international law etc. But this will wait for another day when I’m a bit less upset. Maybe.

Typos in the original have been corrected and more paragraphing introduced – JVL