Israel-Hamas war reminds Asia of threats to peace

Israel thought it had dealt with the Palestinian problem. There are lessons here for the handling of Myanmar’s Rohingya, Indian Kashmir, and Taiwan and Xinjiang
The relentless repetition that the Hamas attack was unprovoked, in contradiction to decades of bad blood, is also a reminder to guard against cognitive bias

David Dodwell

Published: 1:30pm, 13 Oct 2023

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I have tried to justify why I should not examine the recent appalling events in Gaza. So much has been written, so many commentators have immeasurably more knowledge on the long and tortuous story of Palestine since the creation of Israel, the tragic events are far away, with few direct implications, and certain global problems are intractable and will remain so.

But I’m convinced that this distant Armageddon is not so distant after all, and there are lessons for us here in the Pacific.

It is easy to be caught up in the heart-wrenching awfulness. As Edward Luce wrote in the Financial Times: “It is hard to hear stories of slaughtered infants and not succumb to blind vengefulness.” But while we revile terrorists and terrorism, we also need to understand its roots if we are ever to effectively staunch them.

That means going back to May 14, 1948, and the establishment of the state of Israel. This was based on UN Resolution 181 – also known as the partition resolution – which proposed dividing Palestine into two separate territories – Israel and Palestine.

It is worth remembering that Palestinians to this day talk of the “Nakba” (“catastrophe” in Arabic): the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. As the United Nations records: “Before the Nakba, Palestine was a multi-ethnic and multicultural society.”

It is important to go back to 1948 because of the astonishing and relentless repetition by Western officials and media of a single word: unprovoked. The White House said: “The United States unequivocally condemns the unprovoked attacks by Hamas terrorists against Israeli civilians.”

In the US Congress, Republican Jim Jordan spoke of an “unprovoked terror attack”. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said “the violent, calculated and unprovoked attack by Hamas is heartbreaking”. Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jnr condemned the “ignominious, unprovoked and barbaric attack on Israel”.

Melbourne-based journalist Caitlin Johnstone cites many more “unprovoked” comments, and concludes: “Whenever you see the word ‘unprovoked’ being forcefully repeated in a uniform way across the entire political/media class, whatever they are talking about was definitely massively provoked”.

For a list of provocations, she cites Palestinian-American writer and comedian Amer Zahr on Twitter: “75 years of ethnic cleansing. 15 years of blockade. Confiscation of Palestinian lands. Pogroms on Palestinian towns. Desecration of Palestinian sacred sites. Daily raids into Palestinian homes. Constant humiliation of an entire people. Nothing about [Hamas’ atrocities] is ‘unprovoked’”.

At the heart of this prodigious insistence that Hamas’ murderous frenzy last weekend was “unprovoked” is a cognitive bias called the “illusory truth effect”: if you hear a claim repeated often enough, then regardless of whether the claim is true or false, you come to think it is true.

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Apart from a reminder that all of us – not just Israelis or their supporters – are bombarded by untruths that acquire a ring of truth through relentless repetition, we must remember that behind last weekend’s fanatical atrocities is a tortuous history of provocation that stretches back over seven terrible decades.

At odds with the UN’s Resolution 181, there are de facto not two separate states, Israel and Palestine, but one state - Israel. Land theoretically reserved for Palestinians – principally the West Bank – has been under Israeli occupation since 1967, with those regarding themselves as Palestinians left homeless, helpless, under siege from what they have come to regard as a colonising power, and betrayed.

The raggle-taggle band of militants that last weekend broke out of “the world’s largest prison” to wreak such terror were, in the words of former US diplomat Chas Freeman, “a revolt of the hopeless by the hopeless for the hopeless”.

They were also a dreadful reminder that Israelis have been deluded into thinking that overwhelming military force, ethnic cleansing and the confinement of Palestinians into a throttled ghetto can successfully expunge the “Palestinian problem” and create a secure Israeli homeland.

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That is a warning as relevant to the military government in Myanmar in its “handling” of the Rohingya “problem” as it is to New Delhi as it wrestles with its Kashmir “problem”. It provides important lessons to Beijing as it juggles how it might “reintegrate” Taiwan and ensure stability in Xinjiang.

In examples like Singapore and Indonesia, we have governments that have devised alternative strategies to successfully address multi-ethnic stresses and forge dynamic and stable multicultural communities. There need never have been anything “intractable” about Israel and Palestine securing peaceful cohabitation.

As the world waits, transfixed in horror, for a possible Israeli ground offensive to the Hamas atrocities, Professor Daniel Thomas at Leiden University in the Netherlands argues that Israel is engaging a war that is unwinnable.

He argues that the closest historic parallel to last weekend’s Hamas “breakout” is the 1968 Tet Offensive. The North Vietnamese timed the attack to coincide with a holiday that put the South Vietnamese forces (and the US troops supporting them) off their guard; it was a fight between two massively mismatched forces. As with Israel today, South Vietnam’s people were fiercely divided and the government accused of corruption.

Perhaps most importantly, the shock of the offensive critically weakened US public support for the Vietnam war. When reports of the attack came through to CBS in New York, anchorman Walter Cronkite reportedly fumed: “What the hell is going on? I thought we were winning the war!”

It took a further seven years for the Vietnam war to end, but the Tet attack set a clock ticking. Has Hamas just set Israel’s clock ticking?

David Dodwell is CEO of the trade policy and international relations consultancy Strategic Access, focused on developments and challenges facing the Asia-Pacific over the past four decades.