Eyeless in Gaza
Do I support a Palestinian state run by a fundamentalist
terror cult that targets civilians? No, I don’t.
BY
BERNARD-HENRI LÉVY
MAY 20, 2021
Faced with the onslaught of rockets that Hamas has rained down on Israeli cities since
May 10, it is impossible to avoid asking a few simple questions: What does Hamas hope
to gain? What is it seeking? What is its war strategy?
It can’t be the end of the “Israeli occupation,” because there has not been a single Israeli
soldier stationed in Gaza since the withdrawal engineered by Ariel Sharon in 2005.
Ergo no occupation, colonization, or territorial dispute of any kind.
Given the continuous fratricidal war that has simmered between Hamas and its
“brothers” on the West Bank since the former wielded terror to take control of Gaza two
years later, the goal obviously can neither be to show “solidarity” with the Palestinian
Authority of Mahmoud Abbas.
Nor can it be the “blockade” that is supposedly strangling the enclave, and this is so for
three reasons. First, Gaza has not one but two borders with the rest of the world, so the
“anti-blockaders,” if they were sincere, should also consider Egypt, which controls
Gaza’s southern border. Second, of the two borders, the one with Israel is the less
closed, since it allows daily passage, even in wartime—of water, gas, and electricity.
As well as the hundreds of trucks that supply the enclave’s everyday needs. Not to
mention the flow in the other direction of hundreds of Palestinian civilians who come
into Israel each day to receive medical treatment in Tel Aviv’s hospitals. And third,
since the blockade affects only items that can be used to produce military equipment
like what is now being used to attack Israel, all that Hamas would need to do to lift the
blockade would be to cease the attacks, which, only serve to tighten the blockade.
So, no.
Hamas has no clear objective that might be the subject of a dialogue and eventual
compromise.
More precisely—because “objective” can be translated in two ways in Carl von
Clausewitz’s language—it has no Ziel (a concrete, rational aim about which the
antagonists could negotiate during and after a ceasefire), but it does have a Zweck (that
is, one strategic objective, which is the reaffirmation of its utter merciless hate and
intended annihilation, spelled out in its charter, of the “Zionist entity.”
I ask myself another simple question, as should others, whenever thousands of
demonstrators take to the streets in Paris, London, or Berlin “to defend Palestine.”
Is it the death of Palestinian civilians that bothers them? If so, it is hard to understand
why they are silent when it is Palestinians who are pursuing, tormenting, gunning down,
assassinating, or using artillery to attack other Palestinians suspected of collaborating
with Israel or Fatah.
Are they concerned with human rights, everywhere and under all circumstances? Then
one wonders why, without going all the way back to the genocide of the Tutsis in
Rwanda or the massacres of Muslims in Bosnia and Darfur, we hear nothing from the
protesters in defense of the Uyghurs being “cleansed” by the Chinese dictatorship, the
Rohingyas being “displaced” by the Burmese junta, or the Nigerian Christians being
exterminated by Boko Haram and Islamist Fulanis.
We hear nothing about the violations of human rights being committed on a grand scale
in Afghanistan, Somalia, Burundi, and the Nuba Mountains, places I’ve visited and
know well and where it’s not hundreds, but thousands, and even tens or hundreds of
thousands of civilians who are dying from conflict, some at a simmer, some at a boil.
Are the demonstrators outraged by the indifference of a complicit West that allows a
Muslim city to be bombed? If so, why didn’t they spill into the streets to show their
solidarity with the Kurds of Kirkuk, assaulted in October 2017 by planes financed by
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards? Or with the Kurds of Rojava bombarded by Erdogan in
2018 and 2019? Where were they when Syrian cities were barraged by the planes of
dictator Bashar Assad, supported by those of Vladimir Putin, with a savagery seldom
seen.
No.
However you look at it, there are crowds of people in France, the United States, and
Great Britain who are not truly interested in human rights, forgotten wars, or even the
Palestinians. They simply seize the opportunity to demonstrate only when it enables
them to kill two birds with one stone and chant “down with Israel” or “death to the
Jews.”
Faced with such hypocrisy, I am proud to say that I have not changed my position for
50 years.
The number of civilian victims of the absurd, criminal war started by Hamas breaks my
heart. And even though the Palestinians’ claim to statehood is of relatively recent origin,
even though it is regrettable that their leaders have not used the billions in international
aid and subsidies they have received to take even the tiniest step toward forming a
government worthy of the name, I believe the Palestinians have the right to a state of
their own.
But not if it’s just one more tyrannical regime.
Not if it’s a gangster state that takes its own people hostage, that makes them live in an
open-air prison, and—every three or four years, when its political grip becomes
wobbly—sacrifices a new contingent of human shields so that it can use their
martyrdom to refurbish its lost legitimacy.
And finally, not if that state has no reason to exist except to serve as a launching pad for
rockets intended to destroy Israel.
Bernard-Henri Lévy is a philosopher, activist, filmmaker, and author of
more than 30 books including The Genius of Judaism, American Vertigo,
Barbarism with a Human Face, Who Killed Daniel Pearl?, and The Empire
and the Five Kings. His new book, The Will to See: Dispatches from a World
of Misery and Hope, will be published by Yale University Press in Fall
2021.
