Old men start wars. Young men and women fight them. It’s a phenomenon that has broadly held true throughout history. Now, once again, in today’s violence-racked Middle East, the aggressive blundering of angry old men rains curses on the young, twisting minds, blighting lives, imperilling futures.
From Israel, Lebanon and Palestine to Egypt, Syria, Libya and back to Turkey, such men, in thrall to worn-out ideologies and prejudices, hold leadership positions by reason of longevity and guile, not wisdom or sense. They rule by fear and division, abuse the tenets of their faith and poison the minds of children. The young pay the price.
Take for instance Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s expensively suited 61-year-old chief. He ordered last weekend’s atrocious onslaught on southern Israel from the security of his Qatar office. Martyrdom, it seems, is not for him – unlike the psychopathically deluded, criminally misled young men he sent to murder, maim, rape and die in the Negev.
Now, a week later, Haniyeh looks on again in safety as the youth of Gaza and their families face Israel’s crushing fury.
“O children of our Palestinian people … Today you have a rendezvous with a great victory and a dazzling triumph,” Haniyeh declared as the attack unfolded, grooming his kill squads. Israel’s total annihilation was the aim, he cried.
His message to Israelis was chilling: “We have only one thing to say to you: get out of our land. Get out of our sight … This land is ours, al-Quds [Jerusalem] is ours, everything [here] is ours … There is no place or safety for you.”
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 84, is another genocidal gerontocrat. As president from 1981 to 1989, he sent hundreds of thousands of young Iranians to their deaths in a pointless war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. More recently, he has focused on killing, torturing, imprisoning and silencing young women who challenge his repressive, misogynistic travesty of Shia Islam.
Khamenei’s Iran is deeply implicated. It funds, trains and arms Hamas, likewise Hezbollah in Lebanon. Fearing wider war, the US and Israel have refrained so far from accusing Tehran of direct involvement. Meanwhile, Khamenei publicly celebrated the atrocities.
“We kiss the hands of those who planned the attack on the Zionist regime,” he said on television, sporting a Palestinian scarf. Was this a slip? Was the old fool congratulating his own military as well as Hamas?
Old folks befuddled by old ideas – the strategically superannuated – hog and abuse power in other key centres. Mahmoud Abbas, 87, president of the Palestinian Authority, is a sad case. He squats glumly in Ramallah, ineffective, irrelevant, past his time. By bedblocking younger, more energetic democratic rivals, Abbas hamstrings Palestine’s future. Vanity and inertia keep him in office. Votes do not. He has not allowed a presidential election for 18 years.
A standout figure in the angry-old-man genre is Benjamin Netanyahu, 73, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister – though not for much longer. His Mr Security image is blown. He’s ignoring calls to resign but, politically, he is a dead man walking.
For decades, Netanyahu marginalised, robbed and bullied Palestinians, dashing their hopes of statehood. Obsessed with power, lurching ever rightwards, scorning democratic principles and distracted by criminal charges, he did not see the Hamas attack coming – then he fumbled the immediate response.
Yet even now this discredited leader is mobilising Israel’s young people by the hundreds of thousands to fight a war his myopic misjudgments did so much to bring about. In Gaza, too, it’s the young who will suffer the most. Of 2,200 civilians killed so far, one-third are children.
Malevolent, incompetent leaders aside, a more fundamental failure of politics has also contributed to the present crisis – and in this, many around the world are complicit.
The most obvious failure, for which a heavy price now comes due, is the collapse of what used to be called the Middle East peace process and the clouding of the vision of a two-state solution. The US, EU and UN are at fault here, along with successive rightwing Netanyahu-led governments.
Donald Trump, 77, made matters worse, as he usually does, by wrecking the 2015 nuclear deal that might, eventually, have eased wider tensions with Iran. Trump’s Abraham accords attempted to bypass the Palestinian conflict while normalising Israeli-Arab ties. Hamas just showed why that injustice was unsustainable.
Underlying all this is another basic failure – the collective moral failure of the “international community” to enforce the laws of war, prevent collective punishments, respect the lives of civilians in conflict zones and abide by the UN charter and human rights treaties. It’s happening again in Gaza.
Russia’s senior war criminal, Vladimir Putin, 71, exemplifies this immoral obliviousness through his daily actions in Ukraine. Such behaviour is spreading, even becoming normalised. Look at Xinjiang, Tigray, Myanmar, Idlib, look anywhere in the Sahel.
That’s one reason why it’s so important that Israel desists from causing further harm to Gaza’s civilians. It will only make matters worse. US president Joe Biden forcefully made that point. Biden, 80, delivered a wise, brilliant speech last week of heartfelt sympathy and firm reassurance. He rallied and unified Israelis at a moment of supreme crisis and despondency. It was a speech the wretched Netanyahu could never have made.
Biden also gave a pithy answer to Hamas leader Haniyeh’s demand that Israel vacate the premises. Fifty years ago, he said, Golda Meir, the then prime minister, told him Israel would always survive thanks to its secret weapon. “We have no place else to go,” she said.
It just goes to show: being old does not necessarily mean being vicious and venal. It can be a blessing.
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk
