Liam Kennedy: Netanyahu may well be odious, vengeful, and an incompetent strategist but there is no equivalence between the leaderships of Israel and Hamas

These are the worst of times.

More than 1,000 people died as a result of the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel. For demonstrators, the conflict is simply a black and white story of historic Israeli oppression that has taken a genocidal turn, writes Liam Kennedy

Russian troops are subjecting the Ukrainian people to constant drone, missile and artillery attacks; in Iran young women are being imprisoned and tortured for defying the theocratic regime of the Ayatollah Khamenei; in China, the Uyghur Muslim minority is suffering repression and cultural erasure; mass killings are the fate of Myanmar Muslims at the hands of a brutal military dictatorship. And then there is Gaza.

Curiously only Gaza and the plight of the Palestinians brings thousands of demonstrators onto the streets and campuses of Western countries. The Keffiyeh has become the new fashion accessory for radical students. Even more curious, the engagement is wholly one-sided in what is manifestly a complex conflict.

The pro-Palestinian demonstrators have not just Allah on their side but some very substantial arguments. Israel is headed by a duplicitous, ultra-right leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, who is waging a war in Gaza that has resulted in the deaths of more than 30,000 Palestinians, of whom perhaps a quarter to one-third are combatants. The Israeli squeeze on food supplies to this heavily-populated enclave punishes indiscriminately. Most of the population of Gaza has been displaced at one time or another. Malnutrition, hunger, ill-health, and the ever-present fear of death stalk the land. In the West Bank murderous attacks by Jewish zealots, with the connivance sometimes of the Israeli army, have resulted in the deaths of Palestinian civilians.

The Israelis are winning battles, while simultaneously alienating support for the state of Israel across most of the world. The Israeli army can kill current members of Hamas but not the motivating idea itself, that of resistance to Israel in Gaza and the occupied territories. “You succeeded in killing all these people but you will not kill the fire in our hearts,” the Irish Palestinian activist, Zak Hania, told a street demonstration in Dublin. As Netanyahu struggles to come up with any coherent strategy as to what happens in Gaza “the day after” the war ends, those chanting “Palestine will be free” have reason to believe they are winning the war, if not on the ground at least in the hearts and minds of people worldwide and among generations as yet unborn.

There are other sides to the crisis. The Irish playwright, Sean O’Casey, might have been talking prophetically about Hamas rather than the Irish revolutionaries of 1916 when he wrote: “I hear the gunmen blowing about dying for the people when it’s the people that are dying for the gunmen.” And so it is in Gaza where Hamas seems to relish the prospect of fighting to the death of the last Palestinian child-martyr. The head of the Hamas political bureau, Ismail Haniyeh, father of 13 children, responding to the deaths of three of his children in an Israeli air strike rejoiced that his sons had suffered the death of martyrs: “I am grateful to God for the honour he has given me in the deaths of three of my children.”

It is not easy to see how any state might deal with political fanaticism of this intensity. That is the nightmare faced by Israel, and by extension other countries facing Islamist insurgency. Ordinary Palestinians find themselves trapped between Hamas and the overwhelming military might of Israel. There is no easy solution.

But for demonstrators on the streets of London, Madrid, New York and San Francisco there is no cognitive dissonance, no hesitation, the conflict is simply a black and white story of historic Israeli oppression that has taken a genocidal turn. Some like to add an unlikely Marxist twist that this is all the outcome of settler colonial capitalism.

For those of us with conflicted views on the crisis in Gaza and the West Bank a more nuanced understanding of the conflict would be welcome. Having read various partisan accounts, I turned to the summer’s edition of Amnesty, the journal of Amnesty International, in the hope of some enlightenment. I’ve been a member for almost three decades. It was reassuring to see that eight pages were devoted to Gaza. Reassuring also to see there was a call for a ceasefire as well as a call for more food, fuel, water, and humanitarian aid for the beleaguered Gazans. There was a demand to suspend arms shipments from the UK and the USA to Israel. But to my surprise, there was no equivalent appeal to stop arms being supplied by the brutal regime of Iran to its proxy armies, Hezbollah and Hamas. Ali Khamenei OK then?

Other omissions were simply astonishing. Across eight pages there was but one perfunctory reference to “the Hamas attacks of the 7th October”. The sadism and misogyny of that onslaught – one Hamas hopes to replicate – merited neither a paragraph nor even a full sentence. As for the Israeli hostages, there was not a mention. Acts of genocide by Israel were assumed, so there may not be much point in the deliberations of the International Criminal Court on the subject. Case closed.

One might have expected more, but the Amnesty coverage reflects rather than transcends the simplified portrayal of the conflict on campuses and at demonstrations across the western world. The ICC prosecutor has just applied for arrest warrants for the Israeli prime-minister and a handful of Hamas leaders. Netanyahu may well be odious, vengeful, and an incompetent strategist but there is no equivalence between these two sets of leaderships. One is the product of democratic elections in the only functioning democracy in the Middle East, the other is a dictatorship of politico-religious zealots exulting in the suffering of its own people.

As for the blind eye of demonstrators to the barbarism of Hamas, might there be a shade of hidden, indeed reverse racism there? Could it be that Muslims, unlike others, are not expected to adhere to universal norms governing warfare?

Liam Kennedy is Emeritus Professor of History at QUB