What George Orwell could teach us about Israel and Palestine

Sitting in the comfort of my home, watching the bloodied bodies of innocents in Gaza and Israel, I feel sick and confused. But I am learning something about how to seek truth, and how not to.

A sure-fire way to misread the world is to treat a distant conflict as a figment of your own identity. Even many clever observers have chosen a foreign cause and anointed it as holy. They are watching this war through one eye only. For some, Israel is always right. For others, the Palestinians are. Instead, I’m sticking to my usual heuristic: what would George Orwell say?

People have always treated the world as a reflection of their own experiences and obsessions. Long after the Soviet Communist party disowned Stalin, western Stalinists were still justifying him with arguments such as “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.” In the 1970s, western Maoists in Mao-collared suits chanted: “A revolution is not a dinner party!” 

Often, those involved were just rebelling against their parents, or trying to give meaning to their lives. I once interviewed a man in Amsterdam who had spent years compiling an ingenious dictionary. I asked him why he’d done it. Well, he replied, he’d been a longtime member of an Amsterdam Maoist cell. Each week the group met, in secret, to plot the revolution. The murderous ideology filled his life. Then, one day, a fellow cell member said, “I don’t really believe it any more,” whereupon all the others admitted: “Me neither.” The cell dissolved and this man plugged the hole in his existence with the dictionary.

Apostates are often the clearest-eyed observers, precisely because they aren’t team members

Many people pick their cause based on the most primitive form of identity, which is to say ethnicity. I remember, in 1994, Irish-American Catholics in the US feting the visiting Gerry Adams as their Nelson Mandela. Some kept funding Irish Republican paramilitaries until 9/11, the day faraway terrorism stopped being cool in the US. Or recall the way some British newspapers covered Zimbabwe’s collapse as strictly a story about white farmers with British names. 

Those now treating the Israel-Palestinian conflict as an emanation of themselves aren’t seeking truth. They know the truth before it happens, because they picked their team long ago. Everyone on Team Israel is sure Israel didn’t bomb the Gaza hospital; Team Palestine is sure it did.

Meanwhile, I’m still unsure even why Israel is razing Gaza. Is it chiefly an attempt to eliminate Hamas, following the logic that the number of terrorists is finite, so that you simply need to kill them all, and that your killing won’t spawn more terrorists? How much is blind vengeance, weaponised by a discredited prime minister to stay in power through war? And how much is a plan to ethnically cleanse Israel, both Gaza and, more quietly, the West Bank? I don’t know.  

It’s easy for me here in Paris to treat the slaughter as an intellectual game. But on the other hand, being far away can sometimes enable understanding. The Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari says both Israelis and Palestinians feel such pain that they cannot even acknowledge each other’s. Both sides have also absorbed the lesson, over decades or centuries, that the world doesn’t care about their pain, and that only they can protect themselves.

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That’s why it’s up to outsiders to root for the boring, retro concept of human rights. As Andrew Stroehlein of Human Rights Watch says: “If you only care about war crimes when one side commits them, you don’t really care about war crimes.” And, yes, we can judge from afar. If we couldn’t, wrote Hannah Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem, then “neither the administration of justice nor the writing of history would ever be possible”.

My own guides, in this war as always, are Mandela and Orwell. Mandela modelled empathy across ethnic divides. This autumn 30 years ago, after Israelis and Palestinians signed the Oslo peace accords, the country headed for race war seemed to be South Africa, not Israel. Instead, Mandela created a non-racial democracy. The African National Congress has been disastrous at governing, but it has achieved a one-state solution: South Africans of all colours accept each other as South Africans.

My model for truth-seeking is Orwell, a leftist who insisted on seeing Stalin’s crimes. Apostates are often the clearest-eyed observers, precisely because they aren’t team members. For today’s paler, more timid version, see Mitt Romney calling out his Republican party. These people are on Team Humanity. The rest are just cheerleaders.

Follow Simon @KuperSimon and email him at simon.kuper@ft.com

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