Unquiet ghosts

Ben Wildsmith 

This week’s about turn on Israel by the UK government was so abrupt as to suggest panic.

David Lammy’s statement was so jarringly at odds with all that has gone before as to suggest that its purpose was to hastily put some distance between his record in office and an upcoming humanitarian catastrophe.

Only last week government lawyers were in court arguing that arms sales to Israel were acceptable on the basis that no genocide was being committed.

Amidst his newly rediscovered moral bluster, the Foreign Secretary was careful not to use that term, even as it was shouted at him from all corners of the House.

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Indefensible

We are left with a national position that is indefensible from any position. Whilst Israel’s prosecution of its war is now apparently unacceptable, the UK continues to supply arms, provide intelligence and fly reconnaissance flights for the IDF.

You might imagine that such support, alongside rhetoric that led Keir Starmer to accidentally endorse war crimes, would buy the UK a hearing in the court of Netanyahu. Not a bit of it. Responding to the UK’s decision to suspend trade talks, Israel’s Foreign Ministry said it was ‘…due to anti-Israel obsession and domestic political considerations.’ Today, after the murders of two Israeli embassy officials in Washington DC, Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar ascribed the attack to ‘toxic antisemitic incitement’ emanating from Europe.

So, the UK finds itself distrusted by those sympathetic to the Palestinians and also by the Israeli government. Such are the dangers of moral equivocation dressed up as even-handedness.

The shadow of WWII and its aftermath looms over much of geopolitics at the moment. The global trauma of that conflict seems to lie unaddressed by its various inheritors. Israel’s modern incarnation was wrought from the horrors of the holocaust, whilst Palestine is caught in the unresolved injustice of the Nakba.

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Empathy

You sometimes hear people wondering why these groups seem not to have learned empathy for each other as a result of the hardships both have collectively faced. That is to misunderstand the nature of trauma. Traumatised people are, by definition, hypervigilant. Their trust has been betrayed, their expectations of safety distorted by events. Trauma can ruin the lives of individuals and, if experienced collectively, turn societies into engines of fear.

Such people, and societies, are vulnerable to exploitation. Fear is the most immediate motivating factor in human experience and its manipulation is the stock in trade of malign political actors. Both Hamas and the Netanyahu government thrive upon a siege mentality.

So, interventions like Lammy’s this week, even if sincere, will be counterproductive. All the Foreign Secretary has achieved is to provide Smotrich, Ben-Gvir, and others with proof that everyone will betray Israel in the end; that nothing but aggression will keep it safe.

When opposition politician, and former general, Yair Golan warned this week that Israel risked becoming a pariah state, he was condemned as a traitor who should be ostracized from public life.

Foundational trauma

Appeals to reason have no currency in a nation where foundational trauma has been finessed into murderous paranoia by a Prime Minister who will be facing criminal charges the moment this war ends.

In Russia too, the shadow of WWII falls over the 21st century in a haze of half-remembered grief and convenient interpretations of history. State television has been airing lavish dramas about the Great Patriotic War since Putin was first elected and, as with our own fictional renderings, there has been little room for moral ambiguity.

WWII has assumed a place in global culture that is akin to the Great Flood. It is a historical event large enough to have touched most of the world, and distant enough to be distorted with impunity.

The UK’s absurdly inflated idea of itself as a 21st century power has been arrived at by the same quasi-religious process that Israel, Hamas, and Russia have used to justify their aggression.

The Banderist romanticising of Ukraine’s role in WWII has led it to some dark places as well.

We’re warned that a failure to understand history condemns us to repeat it. Worse still, though, the wilful distortion of it may lead us to supersede our historical nadir with new horrors.

The ghosts of our past will not be quieted by the brutalisation of their descendants.