Never again. When the United Nations was originally founded from the ashes of the second world war, it was at least in part to give more solid meaning to those words. The first treaty it ever adopted, thanks to the efforts of a Polish Jew named Raphael Lemkin who had lost more than 40 members of his family in the Holocaust, was the convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide. From Rwanda to Srebrenica, the UN itself admits it hasn’t always lived up to Lemkin’s ideals. Its founding mission remains, however, to learn from history, not to repeat it. But whose history, exactly?
This week Gilad Erdan, Israel’s ambassador to the UN, furiously accused the organisation of becoming a “stain on humanity” after its secretary general, António Guterres, declared that while nothing could justify the 7 October massacre perpetrated by Hamas, the attacks “did not happen in a vacuum”. They had, Guterres said, followed “56 years of suffocating occupation” and vanishing hopes of a political solution to Palestinians’ plight. History, in other words, matters; perhaps especially so in the Middle East, where some trace the roots of conflict back to the Bible, and every modern war unfolds in the psychological shadow of the last.
But that’s not the kind of history Israel’s government wishes to discuss, perhaps especially in the context of UN calls for a ceasefire. Though Guterres had explicitly warned his remarks should not be taken as justifying Hamas’s crimes, Israel’s foreign minister promptly accused him of blaming the murdered, raped and mutilated victims for their own fates.
The idea that children gunned down in kindergartens, or white-haired peace campaigners taken hostage, could somehow have had it coming is, of course, repellent. And for Jews who have long sensed an unspoken “but …” hovering in the air when atrocities against them are condemned, talk of putting massacres in “context” may well feel like the beginnings of that argument being made: they note a tendency for sympathy towards dead Jews to fade rapidly once live ones start fighting back. They have their reasons.
But so do those who will have felt a strange relief at hearing someone in power articulate what is on one level a statement of the obvious – that like all terrorist organisations, Hamas feeds off an existing wellspring of pain, even as its own actions only worsen Gaza’s desperate poverty and vulnerability – and yet has felt unsayable. There is growing anger in some quarters at western leaders’ perceived reluctance to acknowledge the long tail of Palestinian suffering, even as dead children are once again pulled from the rubble.
Is nobody to talk of history even now, in a conflict where both sides are shaped by memories handed down through generations: of persecution and exile, suffering and mourning, the Nakba (or Palestinian tragedy of displacement) and the Holocaust? These stories are too entwined to make sense of one without mentioning the other, and it should be possible to say so without being accused of making excuses for Hamas – as if there was anything on earth that could excuse the slaughter of children in front of their parents, and parents in front of their children. For there’s a principle at stake here that goes far beyond one war.
Alarm bells should ring for liberals whenever we are told to stop trying to understand things, and perhaps particularly things that seem to defy all reasonable understanding, because that is essentially what liberalism is. To try to understand something that you cannot possibly condone or forgive is a way of holding on to our humanity, even in the face of its murderous opposite.
To say that neglectful, abusive parents are often repeating a pattern they experienced as children is not an excuse for cruelty. To say that even a madman has his reasons is not the same as suggesting that whatever he does is rational. To argue that gang or knife crime can’t be eradicated without tackling the reasons some teenagers want to carry knives in the first place is entirely about preventing murder, not justifying it.
You might get understandably short shrift for delivering that particular lecture to a mother whose son had just been stabbed, which is why no diplomat could have said what Guterres said in the immediate aftermath of 7 October. And some will always worry that understanding a little more, to paraphrase John Major’s famous 1990s homily on crime, leads to condemning a little less. But eventually societies have to be permitted to have difficult conversations about how and why people do unspeakable things, not to absolve the perpetrators but to prevent them happening again.
Some may feel it’s still too soon for such conversations in Israel’s case, but war imposes its own inexorable timetable.
Advocates of a ceasefire must accept that Israelis cannot simply be expected to live with the fear of Hamas coming back. But advocates of crushing Hamas in a ground war must equally acknowledge that Palestinians cannot simply carry on living afterwards in hopeless misery, or a new Hamas will eventually emerge to feed off that enduring pain and the cycle will begin again.
History does not have to be destiny, and nor can it be licence. Past suffering does not absolve any individual of moral responsibility for their own actions. But those who cannot look their own history in the eye are too often doomed to repeat it. If an organisation founded on learning from the past cannot be allowed to say so, who can?
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
