The rancorous divisions in Britain over the war between Israel and Hamas exemplify the decadence of our national politics. Peter Ramsay argues that the claims of both sides in the dispute are toxic to the sovereignty of the British people.
The sacking of Suella Braverman as Home Secretary is the culmination of an extraordinary round of reckless political grandstanding over the demonstration calling for a ceasefire in Gaza which took place on Remembrance Day. Opposition leader Keir Starmer was already severely embarrassed by his party’s hostility to Israel and the apparent indulgence by many Labour supporters of the Islamists who rule Gaza. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak hoped to make hay with Starmer’s discomfort, and rally his own side, by attacking the demonstration as disrespectful of those who died fighting for Britain in the two world wars. Braverman, in what appears to be a medium-term bid for leadership of the Tories, raised the stakes on Sunak with the explosive (if more plausible) accusation of political bias in the Metropolitan Police’s attitude to different demonstrations—more or less forcing Sunak to sack her. The huge march itself went off with minor clashes and some explicit expressions of anti-Semitism but no major incidents. And true to form, the Met spent the day fighting running battles with right-wing counter-protesters, arresting around 100 but bringing few charges.
All this drama has been triggered by a distant conflict in which Britain has little to offer to either side, and is unlikely to play any significant role. The controversy is, therefore, not at all like the foreign policy disasters that have divided the nation in the past, such as Suez or Iraq. Worse still, not only is Britain barely involved, but the war between Israel and Hamas is one in which the British people have no interest in the victory of either side. The obsession with Israel and Palestine, and the insistence that we must take sides in the conflict, is a marker of the sheer unseriousness of our politics. It is a moralistic evasion of our own pressing problems – an evasion that will do nothing to help anyone in the Middle East but will significantly worsen divisions at home.
No doubt, supporters of Israel or Palestine would want to take issue with the claim that the British people have no interest in the present conflict, particularly if it is made in the pages of The Northern Star. Why, if the national sovereignty of the British people is so important to us, are we apparently indifferent to the equivalent claims of Palestinians or Israelis?
After all, for the left-leaning supporters of Palestine, it is Palestinian freedom that is at issue; while on the right and the centre, what matters is Israel’s right of self-defence as a sovereign nation from murderous invasion. If either argument was true, then its supporters might have a claim that the interests of the British people in national sovereignty would be served by solidarity with their chosen national cause in the Middle East. But both sides are wrong. Both are peddling poisonous half-truths that serve the sovereignty of no nation. Let’s start with the left.
For the left, waving the Palestinian flag is an act of solidarity with a people who have been the victims of relentless violence by their Israeli oppressor. Palestinian violence, whether it is to be regretted or celebrated, is forced on them as part of their struggle. Israel is to blame and its continuing violence in Gaza has to stop.
The obvious problem that the left is overlooking is the fact that Hamas is a movement of religious fanatics. The Islamists are not fighting for the liberation of the Palestinian nation or Palestinians themselves, but the achievement of Muslim unity, and the expulsion or slaughter of the Jewish unbelievers.
Hamas may talk of Palestine’s freedom, but for them the Palestinian nation is defined in wholly religious terms as a Muslim entity in the service of God. By contrast at the heart of national sovereignty is the idea of the autonomy of secular political authority, free from any higher religious authority. In this sense, Hamas is a fundamentally anti-national organisation. Hamas’s militant anti-Semitism has led many to describe them as fascist or far right. But this misses the point. Hamas’s ideology ultimately seeks a return to a period before modern sovereignty with its political distinctions of left and right.
The very fact that the Islamists govern in Gaza is an indication of the disintegration of true Palestinian nationalism. Hamas was able to win elections in Gaza in 2006, and then inflict military defeat on the secular nationalists of Fatah during the Palestinian civil war of 2006-07 because Fatah, which had previously run the Palestinian Authority, was both utterly humiliated by Israel and mired in corruption. The Palestinian national project in Gaza has been extinguished, buried in Islamism.
The Palestinians are certainly victims of Israeli violence and oppression, but the violence that the left claims is done in the name of national ‘resistance’ in fact serves a different purpose to that of national liberation. The old left has neither accepted nor understood the reality of Palestinian national defeat. The result is that their talk of freedom for Palestine is really a political fig-leaf covering a deeply conventional liberal cause: protecting Muslim Palestinians as a victim-identity. Their support for Palestine in this context only encourages the promotion of a sense of grievance among British Muslims and the influence of anti-Semitism.
To grasp this point more fully it will help to understand what is false about the right’s apologetics for Israel.
In a mirror image of the left, the right and the centre have responded to the premodern backwardness of Hamas’s ideas and actions by demanding that we should stand with Israel. This too is presented as an act of solidarity both with the Jewish victims of a terrible massacre and with a liberal democratic state whose sovereignty has been attacked by fanatical anti-Semites.
The argument runs that if you stand for civilisation against barbarism, for modernity, with its freedom from religious bigotry and its democracy, then you must stand with Israel and its right to defend itself. The urgency of taking this stand is connected to the fear that Hamas’s anti-Semitism appears to have many sympathisers among Europe’s Muslims, sympathisers who are indulged by liberals and the left. But again, this is only half true.
Most of the victims were indeed Jewish, and Hamas are vicious reactionaries. However, just as Hamas’s rule in Gaza reveals the failure of the Palestinian nation, so too does it reveal the failure of Israel’s sovereignty. Israel is not defending itself or its territory from an invasion from the outside. On 7 October, it was attacked from within.
Israel exercised extensive control over Gaza even before the launch of the most recent ground invasion on 27 October. Water, power, food and communications – are all completely controlled by Israel. And Israel has played a hugely influential role in Hamas’s internal rule in Gaza too. To some extent, Israel directly facilitated Hamas’s advance. But, more importantly, Hamas’s rise to parastatal power within Gaza is Israel’s work in a fundamental political sense; it is the consequence of Israel’s deliberate strategy of weakening Palestinian nationalism.
The Palestinian nation was itself a response to the formation and expansion of Israel. Having driven out many thousands of Arabs from Palestine in 1948, and then conquered the whole territory of historic Palestine in the 1967 Six Day War, the Israelis generated a resistance movement among Palestinian Arabs that defined itself as a national cause represented by the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), a coalition of Palestinian political parties dominated by Fatah. In 1993 after a quarter of a century of fighting against Israel, the PLO surrendered and recognised Israel. The Jewish state now controlled the whole territory, and the representative of the people it had conquered recognised its right to exist.
However, Israel would neither integrate the conquered Palestinians into its state nor grant them their own state in any of the territory it ruled. They could not do the former without risking their claim to be a Jewish state, since the numbers of Arabs and Jews in the territory were too closely matched. And they refused to take seriously the two-state solution backed by outsiders and by Fatah.
Instead, Israel created quasi-statelets, devolving the policing of Palestinians to Fatah. But the Israelis refused to recognise an independent Palestinian state and expanded Jewish settlements on the West Bank. The constant encroachment on land previously owned by Palestinians necessitated a constant low-intensity war against them. The Israelis eventually pulled out of Gaza and instead subjected that territory to a blockade from the outside. The utter humiliation that Israel inflicted on Palestinian nationalism after 1993 is the reason why Gaza is ruled by Hamas today.
On the face of it, Israel appears to be a modern, prosperous and functioning democracy. But, as Alex Gourevitch has pointed out, its story is one of true state failure at the most fundamental level. The basic promise of a sovereign state is that it can provide security for its subjects within its territory. However, Israel only promises that for the Jewish half of the population in the territory over which it is sovereign. Worse, the condition of Israel’s provision of security to the Jewish half of its subjects is the insecurity of the Arab half. And, arguably, even its promise to the Jewish half failed on 7 October because Israel’s relentless policy of making war on its Palestinian subjects, rather than taking responsibility for them following their surrender, only strengthened Hamas.
This state failure is what is covered up when the right responds to Hamas’s anti-Semitism by waving the Israeli flag. The conflict has degenerated into a series of massacres carried out by the remnants of two failed national projects, Jewish and Palestinian. In the short run, Israel’s massacre of Palestinians will outdo Hamas’s massacre of Israelis by an order of magnitude. But the advocates of national sovereignty can take no inspiration from either side. Indeed, supporting either side is toxic to the cause of national sovereignty.
Once the failure of Israeli sovereignty is understood, the right’s argument about solidarity with Israel in its war on Gaza reduces to a claim on behalf of Jews as a victim-identity, just as the left’s argument—once its abstractions about the defunct Palestinian national liberation struggle are removed—amounts to a claim on behalf of a victimised Muslim identity. The two ‘transferred nationalisms’ currently dominating our public life are caricatures of true national causes. Perhaps that is why these simulacrums appeal to the exhausted political traditions of the West, unable as those traditions are to articulate a way forward for their own nation-states. Passionate engagement in the conflict of vulnerable cultural groups abroad only reinforces citizens’ loyalties to cosmopolitan identities, drawing them away from solidarity with their fellow British citizens in a shared project of national self-government, a project that neither left, right nor centre can any longer imagine.
Britain’s circumstances are nowhere near as tragic or violent as those of Israel and Palestine. The UK is nevertheless a nation in political decay, its sovereignty impoverished. All of our exhausted mainstream political traditions find it easier to wrap themselves in somebody else’s flag, whether that of the EU, Ukraine, Palestine or Israel – anywhere but Britain. It is not difficult to dial up the anger, take a side in the war of civilisations and dig the hole of identity politics that bit deeper. But neither our weakened national sovereignty nor our democracy will be strengthened by indulging the empty claims made by others in distant places. We have no national interest in supporting either the further militarisation of Israel’s state failure or the Islamist insurgency of Hamas.
Instead, the British people’s interest lies in meeting the challenge of integrating millions of Muslim and Jewish fellow citizens into a national project of our own, while being vigilant to the serious danger presented by Islamism and anti-Semitism. Our opposition to anti-Semitism, while resolute, should be premised on the grounds that British Jews, like British Muslims, are the equals of all other British citizens. We should not be upholding their rights on the grounds that Israel is Britain’s cause too. That is as fatal an error for the future of Britain’s national sovereignty as the left’s backing of Hamas.
Peter Ramsay
13th November 2023
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