Accept neither side is going anywhere or suffer even more
THIS week we’re all entitled to wallow in despair, because there are times in the affairs of this miserable world when hoping is, quite simply, hopeless. The current state of the Israel-Hamas war is such a time. Things are going to get much, much worse, thousands more innocent people will die, the majority of whom will be Palestinians, and weeks and months will pass before the crisis shows any signs of easing. Guns are locked and loaded, the opposing sides are getting stuck in, and they won’t be separated until one or other of them can fight no longer.
That’s because the die has been cast ever since Israel resolved – following the murderous attack by Hamas cut-throats on mainly Israeli civilians on October 7 – that the status quo can no longer be tolerated. At that point Israel decided irrevocably that Hamas had not only to be confronted but destroyed – pursued, taken out and exterminated. Israel decided that Hamas must never again be in a position to repeat such a massacre.
That’s what changing the status quo actually means. And everything that is thoroughly awful flows from that decision. Changing the status quo means rooting out Hamas by an air, sea and, more horrifyingly, by a ground attack into Gaza. With at least 4,000 Palestinians already killed, the reconquest of Gaza has already begun.
It means urban warfare and close, hand-to-hand combat in the rubble of bombed-out buildings throughout the Gaza strip; it means improvised explosive devices and ambushes that’ll kill many Israeli soldiers; it means repeated and relentless bombardment of Hamas positions and civilian deaths on a scale never seen before because of the side-by-side, cheek-by-jowl, everyday living reality of ordinary Gazans and Hamas militants.
Everybody in Gaza is now in harm’s way, the guilty and the completely innocent – men, women, children and patients whose lives are hanging by a thread in starved-out, drugless, illequipped hospitals. Armageddon. Before this latest catastrophe Israel had a 170,000-strong standing army. After the Hamas outrage, which killed 1,400 people with another 203 taken back to Gaza as hostages, Israel called up 360,000 reservists, the largest mandatory mobilisation since the Yom Kippur war of exactly 50 years ago.
Many of these reservists answered the call from countries around the world, including a 23year-old medical student in Lithuania who told Reuters: ‘I cannot sit here and study medicine while I know that my friends are fighting and my family needs protection. This is my time.’ That’s the kind of high-emotion fighting talk that creates tragedies like the one now unfolding in Gaza and Israel.
Despite the hopelessness, however, there are still things the international community can do to lessen the damage for the people of Gaza. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar’s call for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire will fall on deaf ears, but it will heap pressure on President Joe Biden, in particular, to persuade the Israelis into allowing water, foodstuffs and other vital supplies into Gaza from Egypt.
Tragically, there is little more that can be done at this stage to prevent the inevitable. And the unwarranted, most likely unconstitutional, intervention by President Michael D Higgins, in his criticism of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen for her unqualified support for Israel, will have zero impact on what happens next.
Like Oliver Anthony, the author of that extraordinarily successful blue-collar anthem that has swept the boards in America, wishful and starry-eyed lefties here in Ireland and throughout the free world who, in effect, want Israel gone, wish they could just wake up and find it’s not true. “But it is, oh it is.”
And it’ll remain true for as long as the Jewish people of Israel and the Palestinians refuse to recognise each other, for as long as they refuse to accept that nobody is going anywhere. They will have to suffer a lot more, it appears, before that happens.
THE great fear now is another gigantic ethnic cleansing disaster, with much of the Palestinian population in Gaza being pushed into Jordan, Egypt and elsewhere as they try to save their lives and the lives of their children. Another Nakba, the catastrophe of 1948, repeated.
If that happens all bets are off, with even the pro-Western Jordanian government warning that such an expulsion would led directly to a war that sucks in the surrounding Arab states. It’s a daunting prospect, with the evil Iranian Islamic dictatorship poised like vultures.
Like the conflict in Northern Ireland, the decades-old war between Israel and Palestine is now a bitter legacy, handed down from one generation to the next, from parent to child. Hence the despair, and a reminder of Philip Larkin’s great poem, This Be The Verse: Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
NOW this is a vital debate worth having – whether there’s any benefit from age-based screening for breast cancer in women.
Cancer expert and Trinity Professor John Kennedy says screening women when they have reached a certain age doesn’t make much of a difference. Instead, he suggests screening should be based on risk, presumably family history and the like.
Thankfully, breast cancer death rates in Ireland and throughout the world have fallen, including in Switzerland where there is no screening programme.
But the disease remains a terrible threat in Ireland, with just under 4,000 new cases each year. And Breast Cancer Ireland says only 5%-10% of breast cancer is hereditary.
Which means, we need to talk.