A few nights ago, as I lulled myself to sleep with that drowsiest of Tennyson poems – “The Lotos-Eaters” – some lines surged, rocket-like, out at me from the page. In a barrage of images still haunting and familiar, the verses described the grotesque indifference of a people who from the hills above lie back “like Gods together careless of mankind” and, watching war and devastation down below,
… smile in secret, looking over wasted lands,
Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery sands,
Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking ships, and praying hands.
What do “fiery sands” call to mind today? No earth today is so scorched as Gaza’s, after swallowing, in the two years since 7 October, more ordnance than fell on Dresden, Hamburg and London in the Second World War. The bombardment has wrecked 90 per cent of the homes that housed a population of two million people now almost entirely displaced and being starved in a famine that was intended to make possible their “voluntary deportation”. By now Gaza resembles nothing on Earth; the satellite pictures might be of the Moon, all rubbly and ash-grey, riddled with craters.
The “flaming towns” seared in my memory are now the likes of Gaza City, where we all saw the silhouette of that little girl drift helplessly through the blaze of a bombed school refuge, and Deir al-Balah, where an airstrike on a hospital turned its grounds into an inferno. When Tennyson wrote of “clanging fights”, he couldn’t possibly yet have heard the metallic clamour he so aptly describes of heavy automatic shelling, unleashed by Hamas on 7 October and, interminably ever since, by the Israel Defence Forces. By the time I got to “praying hands”, I was in tears, imagining the clasped fingers of the Red Cross paramedic whose dying confession, before execution and burial in an unmarked mass grave of relief workers, was broadcast to the world: “Forgive me, mother… this is the path I chose to help people.”
To be unmoved by this seems bewildering; yet even Tennyson’s description of the heartless onlookers is eerily precise. In a now popular pastime – which I would scarcely consider credible were it not reported in the most reputable outlets – Israelis gather every day on the hilltops overlooking Gaza, to enjoy the smoke-plumed spectacle of annihilation. But I should not have been surprised. This is the world after 7 October. Two years ago, many Palestinians had the same relish, when Hamas stormed into Israel.
Since that baneful day, the value of life in the land where the very idea of its sanctity originated has undergone a cheapening that can only be described as hyper-deflation. Around 1,200 Israelis were massacred on 7 October, yet Israel has managed to trivialise this into what will be a mere rounding error in any accounting of the past two years’ fatalities: 60,000 Gazans dead and counting, a third of them children. The erosion of civilian innocence has, via acts of terror, also rippled back to the cities of the West – with synagogues under assault, just days ago in Manchester and last year in Montpelier. The Israelis on the promontories of Sderot are not the only ones who resemble the Lotos-Eaters insouciantly watching the destruction below. Equally “careless of mankind” is an entire world order overseeing the spread of war and the hatred it nourishes.
Why must we care what Israeli does to Palestinian? There are other worthy world causes. So Israel’s defenders reproach me. It is a serious question. The answer goes to the very heart of what Western values are, what Western civilisation is – and whether it is worthy or capable of being saved.
Palestinians are only one of the world’s benighted peoples. Tens of millions have been displaced globally since 7 October: suffering passed over in silence.
In 2023, another war broke out – one would hardly know it – across the Red Sea from Gaza. In Sudan, comparably vast numbers have been killed in fighting (albeit of lesser intensity; Sudan is 5,000 times the size of the Gaza Strip). No weekly marches on our streets have ensued. Nor have atrocities in Darfur been commemorated and mourned as 7 October, rightly, was.
Our history binds us to Israelis and Palestinians both. To Jerusalem the spiritual roots of our society wind back, via Rome and Athens and now Mecca, too. In Palestine was the British empire’s most enduring blunder and in Israel Europe’s expiation for its greatest sin. There, too, our age of terror was born. It’s as if the Holy Land remains, as in the medieval Mappa Mundi we studied at school, the centre of our moral universe. Everyone has to admit there are sound reasons for our peculiar attention to the fate of these peoples.
And it’s absurd to say that because peace activists don’t protest war in Sudan, they are anti-Semitic for campaigning for Palestine. Sudan’s RSF militiamen are not our allies. No Western government has defended their actions on the world stage. It’s true many nations today wage horrendous wars. But how many members of the OECD have prime ministers wanted for war crimes at The Hague?
Israel denounces the double standard by which it is judged. There is indeed something like that involved in our outrage. For years, during the long civil war in Syria, Israel complained pity was inordinately reserved for Palestinians over their war-ravaged neighbours to the north. This wasn’t actually true even for Muslims, for whom the Syrian conflict defined the political allegiances of an entire generation – but certainly, the pro-Palestine movement in the West has been more preoccupied with Israel’s offences than Syria’s.
But if Israel wishes to be judged on a par with the Assad regime, or those Sudanese militias, it would need to reassess its entire self-image. For Israel is rightly judged by the standard Israel wills upon itself when it claims the mantle of a civilised, law-abiding Western democracy. The scrutiny, in that case, is not disproportionate. If Emmanuel Macron sought tomorrow to depopulate Monaco, he would face similar consequences. In reality, the only hypocrisy in the West’s enforcement of international norms is in Israel’s favour.
No counterfactuals are needed. Three years ago, Russia occupied eastern Ukraine – Vladimir Putin, justifying it, said Ukrainians were not a real people. Israel has illegally occupied the Palestinian territories for almost six decades. Its justification for holding on to the territory is much the same as Russia’s explanation. As Golda Meir, Israel’s prime minister in the early years of the occupation, put it: “There was no such thing as Palestinians.”
Be that as it may, this non-existent people have since 1967 been subject to arbitrary rule and inhuman conditions, without citizenship or voting rights – which means Israel is not the democracy it purports to be. Its government has power of life and death over an entire nation of five million who have no say in electing it. (Arab-Israelis within Israel’s recognised borders, importantly, do.) In the West Bank, living under occupation means Palestinian homes are forfeit, routinely bulldozed or seized; children are abducted and held hostage; people’s movement is restricted, their land expropriated; they are even deprived of the water from their wells. More than 500,000 people have been housed in settlements on illegally seized land there; Israeli settlers live under one law, their Palestinian neighbours under another.
Under international law, Israel’s occupation and Russia’s have the same status and are, on paper, equally wrong in the eyes of the West. But for decades Israel has been rebuked only with strongly worded statements, while Russia bears the brunt of serious economic sanctions. Ukrainians get Abrams tanks and MIM-104 Patriot missiles; Palestinians get tent poles – to pitch where their houses once stood.
Last year, Israel’s president Isaac Herzog said the war – since recognised by the UN as a genocide – was “intended, really, truly, to save Western civilisation”. In one sense, it is. The way the arguments of the Palestinian and Israeli causes are grounded reveals the real conflict at play: the seam in the foundational ideology of our rules-based order – Western humanitarianism – between the notions of the “West” and the “human” that we have inherited from the Enlightenment, each hollowing out the other.
The Palestinian cause is based on that humanitarianism; the idea that no one can be denied fundamental rights, that the clarion call “never again” refers not just to the genocide of Jews, but to all humanity – as Raphael Lemkin, the jurist who evaded the Holocaust to devise the concept of genocide, intended it to mean. Palestinians desire equality; for their lives to be valued as highly as Israeli lives. Freedom, human rights, international law: the watchwords are in the humanitarian language of the Enlightenment – Western in origin, but for everyone.
The pro-Israel case is based on a distortion of the same moral legacy: a humanism that applies to the people of the West alone, Western chauvinism. The ideology that once informed the colonisation of lesser humans by the great powers now warrants, for Israel, the longest military occupation in modern history and its newest genocide. In their reading, Israel by definition cannot commit genocide. “Never again” means only never again for Jews. The political philosopher Hannah Arendt, a sometime Zionist who had fled Nazi Germany, had already noticed this travesty in the 1950s: “A people that for 2,000 years had made justice the cornerstone of its spiritual and communal existence has become emphatically hostile to all arguments of such a nature.”
Israeli politics drew deeply from the Enlightenment inheritance in its nascent years, but since 7 October it has crossed over into something epochally different. The governing ethos has been vengeful, fanatical, even mystical. Its defining statement – to be attested in tribunals of the future – is Benjamin Netanyahu quoting from the Bible to liken Palestine to Amalek, an enemy to be eviscerated. Israel’s leaders see the Palestinians shrouded in evil, speaking of “eliminating this evil from the world”, “an empire of evil”, “a city of evil” – like some bearded hermit in the old country, wittering on about demons and dybbuks.
Contrast that with the hardboiled wisdom of Moshe Dayan, Israel’s military mastermind – an atheist with no time for messianic make-believe – who, in 1956, at the patrol-man Ro’i Rothberg’s funeral, warned mourners that hating Palestinians served Israel no purpose:
Why should we blame them for their burning hatred for us? For eight years they have been dwelling in Gaza’s refugee camps, as before their eyes we have transformed the land and the villages in which they and their forefathers had dwelled into our own property. We should not seek Ro’i’s blood from the Arabs in Gaza but from ourselves.
No dove was Dayan. But he had the psychological realism to understand that Palestinians were people, not, as Israel’s former defence minister Yoav Gallant said at this war’s start, “animals”. The roots of this fatal flaw of Israel’s are deep – as Arendt noted of Zionism’s founding ideologues: “What they overlooked was that Arabs were human beings like themselves and that it might be dangerous not to expect them to act and react in much the same way as Jews.”
Israel’s leaders today – though not necessarily its security top brass – are impossible to tell apart from Hamas commanders, sharing the same Manichaean vitriol, which holds that Israel’s Jews and Gaza’s Palestinians deserve to be targeted simply by virtue of who they are. In its disregard for the idea of the civilian, the vengeance being visited upon Gaza only mirrors the terrorism that roared out of the Strip two years ago.
The State of Israel was created to ensure Jews would be spared such bloodshed. In this basic purpose, it has failed: keeping an entire nation hostage, subjecting it to what no people will humanly tolerate without being radicalised, Israel will face the spectre of violence its founders sought to banish. Israel was founded in 1948, the same year the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Lemkin’s Genocide Convention were adopted at the UN: no coincidence. Israel is a product of the very humanitarian traditions and laws that informed the postwar rules-based order – which it now buries beneath bombs. For any people – including Israelis – to be safe in the future, the shreds of that order need to be retrieved from Gaza’s rubble and reconstituted – by freeing Palestine first.
In Tennyson’s poem, drawing on a Greek myth, the Lotos-Eaters are a people who, by consuming the bark of the lotus tree, have drugged themselves into a callous and unfeeling stupor and isolated themselves from the world. That is a vision of Israel two years on from 7 October. When will it be roused from this world-imperilling ethical coma?
[Further reading: Under bombardment in Gaza City]
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This article appears in the 01 Oct 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Life and Fate