Is solidarity possible in Israel / Palestine?

By Hassan Damluji and Jonathan Glennie

Image: Palestinian and Israeli children playing together. Credit: Rivanna Miller/IPS.

“As far off as it might seem now, it is possible for Israeli and Palestinian identities to be shaped, not in opposition to each other, but by a common thread that binds them.”

At the start of this year, the Doomsday clock - which has set out since 1947 to measure how close humans are to self-destruction - reached an unprecedented “90 seconds to midnight”. In January 2024 we may see the hand move even closer.

It’s been a tough year for those who believe that all lives have equal value. COP28 has made some progress, but there is significant concern that the agreement and lack of money on the table will fail to protect the world from climate impacts and keep warming below the 1.5C threshold. And at September’s SDG Summit, which marked the mid-way point for the Sustainable Development Goals, world leaders warned that their achievement is looking very unlikely.

Perhaps most distressing is the surge in violent conflict, which has been growing for years and did not abate in 2023, making it the deadliest year for armed conflict since 1994. We entered the year with an ongoing war in Ukraine whose ripple-effects continued to impact development prospects around the world. We end it with a war in Israel/Palestine that is killing thousands, destabilizing the region, and severely undermining the moral authority of industrialised democracies.

As the bombardment of Gaza rages, we must ask what the role of solidarity is in such an apparently intractable situation.

The attack on Israeli soldiers and civilians by Hamas on 7th October, which killed around 1200 people, 14 of whom were children under 10, was an act of terrorism. The Israeli retaliation, which has led to the flattening of much of Gaza and a vast humanitarian crisis, cutting off water, food, electricity and healthcare for over 2 million Palestinians, has so far killed 21,731 people, 40% of whom were children. Both Hamas and Israel are now accused of war crimes. The scale of animosity on both sides is as extreme as it gets. Hamas has held a longstanding view that Israel should not exist, causing many to highlight Hamas’s genocidal intent. And when Israel’s programmatic destruction of Gaza is combined with the public statements of Israeli ministers and generals, Israel’s actions look like “a genocide in the making”.

It is hard to imagine the existence of solidarity in such a context; deeply entrenched divisions caused by conflict are perhaps solidarity’s biggest threat. Conversely though, solidarity is also our biggest protector against conflict. While the situation in Israel/Palestine shows what can happen when solidarity is absent, it also makes clear that solidarity is the only route to peace.

Where do we begin?

The starting point of solidarity is empathy. This is a conflict where both sides are people with deep historical trauma. But the stories we are told generally appeal to our empathy only in support of one side. Unless we seriously contend with the trauma that Israeli and Palestinian people have suffered, we are not in a position to even begin to solve this.

We cannot expect the combatants in this inter-generational conflict to quickly put aside their differences. Indeed, Time Magazine reported that support for peace negotiations with the Palestinian Authority among Israeli Jews fell from 47.6% in September to just 24.5% in a survey conducted in late October. We also know that after the war in Gaza in 2021, there was a huge increase (to 53% of those surveyed) in support for Hamas.

The international community has a key role here and must start to act in solidarity with both sides.

The world is divided. Most countries, sometimes reading the conflict as a straightforward case of white settler colonialism, are firmly on the side of the Palestinians. They look to their own experience of colonization and the excuses that were used over generations to deny their statehood, and they see the same situation playing out. That is why 139 countries recognise Palestine as a state, and the Israeli government has been criticised by more UN resolutions since 2015 than all other countries put together. On the other side are the US, most European governments and a handful of others, who firmly support Israel. These countries see Israel as an essential nation whose security is paramount, both because it is a strong ally, and also because they see it as providing a necessary national homeland for Jewish people who have suffered the most awful persecution, especially in Europe. Many are not even calling for a ceasefire, which is to say, they are calling for more killing. And their stance is not only rhetorical. The attacks being carried out by Israel use weapons gifted, free of charge, by the US and her allies.

As a result, the legitimacy of the international system is under severe strain. We are witnessing another situation similar to the Iraq war, where the Global South’s simmering anger at being “policed” by powers that seem only to believe in human rights when it suits naked political interest bubbles to the surface. The next time NATO tries to rally the world behind what it claims is a just cause, they are likely to get an even weaker response than they got in the case of Ukraine.

An international response based on solidarity would instead set out to ensure protection and human rights for all people in Israel and Palestine as a precursor to the conditions for lasting peace.

This is ambitious but eminently possible. Neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians can survive without the backing of their international supporters, so both would be forced to modify their behaviour if under enough pressure from them. Instead of Iran and private networks of individuals equipping Hamas to attack Israel, and the US and its allies equipping Israel to squash that threat, the world under the aegis of the UN could come together to protect Israelis and Palestinians alike. This arrangement would insist that all inhabitants of Israel and Palestine are treated with dignity, and with equal, rapid interventions in the case of any breaches on either side. Such a system would not be perfect, but it could stabilise the situation and remove the extraordinary injustices that occur every day. It might not cost much more than the tens of billions of dollars that the US is today spending on helping Israel to pursue a maximalist strategy of “winning” that has no chance of ever bringing Palestinians onside.

We live in a world of nation–states where citizens are supposed to be protected by their governments. However, Palestinians in the Occupied Territories have no citizenship, and no government. Israel has proven unwilling to change that. So until it does, the international community has a “responsibility to protect” . Our guess is that in these circumstances, a Palestinian state would be found to be possible after all. Once pressure from the international community puts an end, not just to extreme violence but also to the daily humiliation that Palestinians face as stateless occupied people, and to the threat of attack that Israelis face, the slow process of building solidarity between these harrowed peoples could begin.

As far off as it might seem now, it is possible for Israeli and Palestinian identities to be shaped, not in opposition to each other, but by a common thread that binds them. Consider that a total, genocidal war between Western Europeans is still in living memory, and yet citizens of the European Union now not only live peacefully side by side, but they have also built a common identity and a common political project through which to solve common goals.

The starting point to achieving the local solidarity Israelis and Palestinians so badly need is global solidarity, where the most powerful nations step in, not to back one side in the fight, but to insist that all lives have equal value.

At Global Nation, our strategy is to strengthen solidarity.

An ambitious vision of a better world can sometimes feel like a fantasy. However, to imagine a coming period of relative global peace during the height of World War II would have been an exercise in accurate prediction, not fantasy at all. Crucially, we can all agree that despair is not a strategy.

In September, Global Nation published its first annual Global Solidarity Report, and throughout 2023 we worked with partners to drive reforms in the global architecture from Global Public Investment to our new idea; circular cooperation.

We also supported the Gates Foundation to design and launch a $200m climate adaptation partnership at COP28, and helped WHO to prepare better for pandemics by developing a new Pandemic Intelligence strategy, creating a global genomics network, and refreshing WHO’s approach to crunching big data to identify health threats. (Our work with WHO is in partnership with our friends at SEEK).

As 2023 draws to a close, the need for a powerful and transformative movement to build global solidarity is clearer than ever. Please join us in the conversation.

We wish you a wonderful New Year and success in your work for peace and justice in 2024.