Normalising unconscionable suffering in Gaza

Why extremists will never compromise

If you lead a government of extremists, you can never stop being extreme. What to most people looks like a sensible decision to bank your winnings, looks like weakness to the hard men around you.

By any standards the Israeli Defence Forces have achieved extraordinary victories. They decimated Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Bashar Assad’s dictatorship in Syria fell as a result. They killed the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and countless other Hamas fighters in Gaza. And now Israel’s air force has mastery of the skies over Iran.

Surely this is the moment to strike deals.

But extremists cannot strike deals because compromise is weakness. Benjamin Netanyahu and the far-right ministers who fill his government, insist that Israeli forces must still occupy Syrian territory, and spurn all offers from the new regime in Damascus. Netanyahu continues to order strikes on Lebanon and, talks as if victory in Iran will come only when there is regime change – surely an impossibly high barrier to leap.

Worst of all is the fate of two million people in Gaza. I hate the phrase “the news agenda” because it tells us that some subjects are no longer fit to discuss. Gaza has fallen off “the agenda” because of the war in Iran. It barely rates a mention.

But Israel is still killing Palestinians and Hamas is still holding Israeli hostages.

No compromise is possible in Gaza either, it appears. The logic of extremism leads to the continuation of the war, and ultimately to the great crime of ethnic cleansing.

I am grateful to the editor of the Jewish Chronicle for allowing me to ignore “the agenda” and write about Gaza and the Israeli far right. Not all of his readers will have appreciated my piece. They argue that the Hamas attacks of October 2023 make compromise impossible.

Here is my retort

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Before I go any further, I should say that you don’t need to lecture me about anti-Jewish prejudice. I have written whole books about the endorsement of radical Islam and Arab dictators by sections of the left. There is nothing a reader of the Jewish Chronicle can tell me about the double-standards antisemitism induces that I do not already know.