The week before Christmas we were in London.
The week before Christmas we were in London. The purpose was our annual family treat, a weekend of the capital at its prettiest and most entertaining; skating like crippled giraffes at Somerset House, riding the cheerful stampede at Hamleys, enduring a West End musical. But this year, since our elder son approaches exams including the history of two world wars, we visited the Imperial War Museum. Part of this admirable institution features a permanent exhibition dedicated to The Holocaust. Signs sensibly offer an age limit warning, so we split up, and I accompanied the 15-year-old round the exhibition while the younger went with his father to admire submarines.
In the gloom of the labyrinthine galleries we wept, and contemplated, and wept some more, emerging as shattered and chastened as the curators intended and the subject demands. Then followed the hours of explaining. The events leading to the atrocity are complex, but the morality of the slaughter is less so. This, I was able to say with unequivocal conviction, was an entirely innocent people, murdered by those who had rendered themselves inhuman. There we are then. A mere handful of days later the duty of parental explanation grew more challenging. Gaza.
Suddenly more spectacular inhumanity, this time brought to us from the state founded on the back of the very nightmare we'd just studied. Yes, here they are, behaving like utter bastards, making us weep again as we watch the daily, grotesque, bite-sized tableaux of horror that the Israelis have failed to prevent leaching out of their reporter-free killing fields.
Let's try and explain this one to a teenager. One could start, of course, with the press, backing in the beeping 18 wheeler lorryload of opinion pieces, taking up enough print space to wallpaper St Paul's Cathedral. Each one of these slices of opinion, from commentators to articulate bloggers, represents a breathtaking spectrum of emotion. There's indignation, rage, congratulation, horror, smugness, cool historical perspective, ugly schadenfraude, condemnation or bewildered expressions of impotence, and all are unfailingly accompanied by plausible excuses for the behaviour of one side or the other. They go something like this.
So the surviving Jews whose families were slaughtered, when not a single nation on earth came to their aid, birthed a state incorporating one of the planet's most ruthless military defences, motivated by the promise that a Jewish genocide will never happen again, and informed by the fact that if it did, no one would help. Except that America helped create Israel, on occupied land not theirs to give, and America defends it to the last. Subsequently, anyone who thinks that the timing of this latest atrocity is simply the Israelis losing patience with those pesky, rubbish, Heath Robinson Hamas rockets, hasn't been paying attention. Nothing to do with the looming Israeli elections then, or the last, mendacious days of Bush's poison making sure that "the war on terror" is kept at boiling point in order to stuff that uppity black dove about to take over. No indeed. Just a weird coincidence. No US involvement at all.
But then Hamas are all to blame. They are, unarguably, a bunch of sewer trouts with the straightforward remit, from a justifiably rage-filled people, to pick a fight and pick it good. And yes, they appear from their rantings to want not just an end to Israel, but to all Jews. And yes again, they're backed by fundamentalist psychopaths from Iran, whose terrifying, fascistic ideology would have women under burkas from Reykjavik to Auckland, and homosexuals tossed from the rooftops. They use women and children civilians as shields. They are cowards, monsters and liars, murdering even their own, killing fellow Muslim Fatah officials and supporters, and beating and torturing their dissenters.
But wait. They came to power democratically, because the half-starved, brutalised, undereducated, constrained and poverty-stricken population of Gaza has nothing left to lose and no recourse to justice in the face of consistent Israeli abuses.
Doubtless they didn't plan on being abused in tandem by Hamas when they voted, but now they are as desperate as ever, hopeless, pinned between vicious Islamic fundamentalism and immovable Zionist nationalism. What response would we expect? And then there's the more covert interests of Israel's neighbours/enemies/allies/business and corporate connections. Maybe a handful of shadowy men, western and Arab, are clinking tea glasses somewhere as we speak, smiling at our naive hand wringing, ordering up the next mayhem to suit their needs. How can we ever know? So what, among all these reasons, histories, excuses, theories and observations, does one tell a 15-year-old?
Perhaps this. A human shield of civilians is dishonourable and disgusting, but it does what it says. It's a shield. If you knowingly breach that shield by firing and killing then you are a murderer. And if a people and its government have calloused their hearts to the extent that the images of roaring grief, slaughtered children, screaming, maimed and soul-torn people, leave them with a shrug and a pat political response, then that surely is the very definition of a failed state.
Regardless of provocation, and ulterior motives of their wider enemies, this truth is inescapable. If a wealthy, healthy, highly educated secular democracy, connected to the outside world and weighty with military might, can only respond with inappropriate extremes of violence against an enemy, real enough but outpaced at every level and enfeebled by depravation, then it is not only moribund and uncivilised, but also guilty of the most profound stupidity.
The hardliners conjure the dead of The Holocaust to validate their hostility, claiming it's upon the memory of their suffering that the state of Israel has its obligation to defend itself at all costs, even by aggression and subjugation. Speaking as a Jew, by familial line though not by religion, I beg to differ, finding myself shamed, enraged and heart-broken. The unspeakable graves of The Holocaust dead are too numerous for the mind to contemplate, but there is space in them yet for the victims to turn.
