‘revenge: to be satisfied with retaliation for offence’

‘vengeance: punishment inflicted, retribution exacted for wrong to oneself’. (OED)

The Israelis must be feeling satisfied. They have inflicted punishment and obtained retribution in a grandiose, biblical manner. Civil infrastructure in Gaza is destroyed. Schools, hospitals, universities, cultural centres, mosques, churches, police stations, council offices, electricity supply, sewage, water supply, roads, communication networks, commerce, media, housing – all gone. Thousands of men, women and children dead, whole families wiped out, thousands more wounded and disabled, the population traumatised. And now, starvation. As order disappears and dribbles of food arrive, gangs form. Brute survival takes over, a new vengeance.

‘Gaza, Gaza, don’t you cry, Palestine will never die!’ was a chant at initial demonstrations.. But a people and a culture have been destroyed. ‘Treat them like dogs’, ‘They are animals’ were the slogans. An army of brainwashed youths, armed with the most sophisticated weapons on earth, have run riot in a prolonged killing spree. The new technologies buzz overhead, the robots command, the algorithms rule. I look at Netanyahu and his cabinet of fellow thugs, at Biden and Sunak and the Hannah Arendt’s phrase, ‘the banality of evil’ comes to mind.

How does one react? What are the ethics of reaction, the ethics of living alongside this? To be in for the long, obsessive haul of persuading a majority of fellow citizens, many of whom are indifferent, to boycott this society and then to judge the individuals?  For the brave to choose martyrdom so that the murdering becomes internationalised and the above process is hastened? To dream of and work toward a better world? Like Sylvia Plath, to insist on the poetry of death?  To immerse oneself in the day to day before the next horror impacts viscerally? To vainly hope that there is some innate ethical necessity in human beings which leads to Israeli society itself imploding?

We live in strange and difficult times.