The purpose of terrorism is fear. But the purpose of what is happening now in the Middle East is something else. A terrible machine has been activated, one that no one can control. It is the hate machine. And every day, events will take place that feed that machine. People who have picked one side or the other will mangle the truth, or convince themselves of it, so that it keeps on running at full capacity until it threatens to explode.
Yesterday, the al-Ahli al-Arabi Baptist Hospital in Gaza was hit. We don’t know who hit it, with what or why. We just know that it was hit.
Palestinian authorities say it was the result of an Israeli strike. News outlets such as the BBC were quick to report that Israel was responsible. I myself assumed the same.
The Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) say their radar system tracked rockets fired by militants close to the hospital. This morning they unveiled an evidence case. Two videos appear to show a failed rocket launch, followed by an explosion from the propellant load as it falls to the ground. An audio recording appears to show Hamas operatives confirming the rocket is from Islamic Jihad. Analysis of the damage around the hospital by the IDF in that briefing seems to show that there is no crater of the sort you get after an Israeli strike, and indeed that the damage is far too limited to account for the 500 deaths claimed last night by the Gaza Health Ministry.
Much of this cannot be independently verified. We just don’t know what happened there – not yet. Perhaps the IDF are right. Perhaps not.
These are precisely the sorts of events people warned about when they protested against Israel entering the Strip. They are the natural results of an approach that has put Gaza under siege, depriving it of food and water, imposed collective punishment, encouraged mass population flows and then inflicted indiscriminate damage.
They are the natural results of a military response that has been pursued according to no discernable strategy, with no obvious exit plan, under the inept and self-interested leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu.
Events moved quickly, even as the hospital fire raged. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas pulled out of a meeting with US President Joe Biden, as did Jordan’s King Abdullah. Protests took place last night outside the US embassy in Beirut, as well as in Iran, Jordan, Libya, Morocco and Turkey. We will see similar demonstrations in the streets of European and American cities, which will become increasingly bitter and anguished.
Online, it turned into a frenzy. Social media was never the best place for breaking news in a war zone, but now it has become infinitely worse. Elon Musk’s decision to allow people to purchase their prominence on Twitter through a blue tick means that the most partisan elements are even more prevalent than they were before. Each side rushed to claim unchallengeable empirical victory within moments of the attack and to spread their sense of outrage.
Anyone trying to maintain a hint of distance or universal humanity was attacked in the most brutal possible terms. “The scenes of hundreds killed at the al-Ahli al-Arabi Baptist Hospital in Gaza are absolutely devastating and cannot be justified,” Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said. “International law must be upheld. Hospitals and civilian lives must be protected.”
The replies flowed in – a wave of derision and biblical venom from people who blamed Starmer for enabling the attacks through his support for Israel. “You’ll never wash the blood from your hands.” “You are eternally marked as an apartheid/genocide supporter. May the sounds and the faces of the children whose deaths you enabled forever haunt you.” The hate machine bulges and whirs. Its pistons churn away.
This hatred is not necessarily cynical. It’s hard to deal with the emotions around what is happening. It is so senseless and obscene, such a remorseless unconscionable human waste. It’s like staring directly into the moral void: a tit-for-tat cycle of bloodshed and death, whose every act serves to encourage the next one.
Grief easily turns into anger. We know this from when we suffer personal bereavement. It’s incredibly easy to slip from loss to bitterness. And that emotion can be directed pretty arbitrarily – at a friend who clearly wants to stay away from the subject because it makes them uncomfortable, or people on a bus driving past, lost in their carefree world while you suffer inner torment.
The same applies during periods of public communal loss, even though we do not necessarily know the people involved. It is hard to watch what is happening, to experience the full scale of the horror. It feels nihilistic. It is much more satisfying to let it switch into hatred – to hold someone responsible, to decide a party has exclusive culpability, to close one’s heart to the suffering on one side so that it fits into a more comprehensible moral framework.
And that’s ultimately what many people in the region are counting on. It’s what Hamas presumably hoped would happen when it launched its attack. It’s what Netanyahu presumably desires when he imagines people will close their ears to the screams of children pulverised by his bombing campaign.
But there is another approach. It is to maintain your common humanity – not as lip service, or a half-hearted pretence so that you can appear more reasonable in your partisanship, but genuinely. It is to mourn each life as a life, irrespective of its religion, its nationality or the side of the border it lived on.
It is neither an easy thing to do nor a reassuring one. Those who do it will be called hypocrites and collaborators. But it is the only way to starve the hate machine of its fuel and allow us the possibility of one day bringing it to a halt.
That’s a small hope. But in times like these, small hopes are all we can aim for.
