Alternative Editorial: Where Gaza Meets Climate
We’ve often claimed that the world has been in a revolution for over 30 years. Life changed irrevocably after the birth of the world wide web, radically democratising access to information and to each other (or to be precise: for the 67.1% of people worldwide with a mobile phone or computer).
While governments may not have changed the socio-economic-political systems much in that time, non-state actors are shifting the narrative on what matters, what’s true and what’s possible, on a daily basis. As underprivileged people of many kinds wake up to the history and conditions of their disempowerment, they’ve crafted a term—woke—that gives them significant agency in the shaping of history.
What might have once been dismissed as ‘protest groups’ - anti-racist, anti-capitalist, anti-fossil-fuels - are now global movements that put governments fully on the back foot.
For those of us who have worked over decades for system-level change, it’s helpful to see what young activists identify as entry points to the bigger issues that will define our futures. This means a focus on climate change – and the demand to stop flying, become vegan and buy less - as the doorway to the human flourishing we might describe as “ecocivilisation”.
It also means demands for transgender rights, decolonisation, post-patriarchal structures and culture. These are pathways to radical equality—as well as the full spectrum intelligence needed to allow social and planetary regeneration to occur. Here comes everyone!
But in this context, where is the current global uprising in defence of the Palestinians in Gaza leading to? Although there is only minimal reporting in UK mainstream news, the response from young people seems even more co-ordinated and determined than similar protests for the climate. See the latest reports of student encampments across the USA and Europe, with young people putting their own futures on the line to stop Israel bombing Gaza.
For those of us who have seen multiple wars break out in the Middle East around Israel’s right to defend itselfagainst incursion from its neighbours, the shift in narrative has been extreme and painful to observe. For over 80 years – since the Holocaust during WWII—the overwhelming mainstream empathy has been with Israel’s need and right to exist, as a home for the Jewish people. Today world-wide opinion has shifted against Israel for reasons not directly related to the original cause for Israel’s existence.
There’s no doubt we live in a world of competing perspectives – yet it’s increasingly common to have no winners. How many of us can agree with multiple, often conflicting points of view and find ourselves torn, lacking the capacity to integrate or act? Yes, Israel has a right to defend itself. No, Israel has no right to kill innocent people. Yes, Hamas are guilty of unimaginable atrocity. No, Hamas did not act in a vacuum. Yes, the global focus on Israel’s war rather than, say, war in the Congo confirms a history of singling Israel out for bad behaviour. No, opposing the war mongering of Netanyahu is not confirmation of anti-semitism. Yes, Israel/Gaza is a democracy and Netanyahu/Hamas is/are their leader/s. No, Jewish/Palestinian people are not murderous. All of these conflicting points are somehow true.
Add to that the wider truth that both Israel and Gaza are pawns in a much bigger ongoing battle for global domination, between the old colonial powers (Britain, USA) and those rising (Russia, China).
For decades, the mainstream argument has played out in a discourse around Israel – innocent or guilty – with far less attention being given to the Palestinians who were displaced by the formation of the Israeli state. Today much of that prevailing narrative has evaporated: the popular sentiment is with the Palestinian people who are being punished for the extreme actions of the military arm of their elected representatives.
The corresponding military arm of Israel is locked into an illusion that it can eradicate Hamas, whereas every expert in conflict knows that for every terrorist you kill, two more are newly recruited. While Palestinian citizens have become the collateral damage of this strategy, it looks and feels, in the eyes of respected international bodies, like genocide.
For those who have worked to keep a balanced view for decades, this wholesale loss of empathy for the victims of the Holocaust is a tragedy. Right alongside the untold historic tragedy of the Palestinian people. Both of them.
Yet the young people on the streets and in their encampments have a missionary zeal. It may be that what they are fighting for is more than the cease fire that they are demanding. In this recent Al Jazeera film, their slogans claim, “Yes there is an alternative to war” and “We are the Liberation Generation”.
They are fighting for the right of all people to determine their own future. And against the ongoing atrocity of dropping bombs on ordinary citizens – meaning those who do not choose violence for themselves, their families and their communities.
While most of these youth may lack the experience of war, they can feel viscerally the double standards of taking one life to save another, let alone thousands of lives in the name of security. In a court of law, this would be an imprisonable offence. With the immediacy of the internet, they are witnessing devastation as if it were on their own doorstep. They are holding people responsible.
Yet to stop Netanyahu, for them, would not be enough. As the police physically remove them from their places of peaceful protest on the orders of senior politicians, trashing their belongings and denying them the education they’re paying for, they want to see the end of top-down, elite-driven coercion and force. This they have in common with climate protestors who see the loss of rights to protest as evidence of the abuse of power that’s core to system breakdown.
Seeing Greta Thunberg protesting at the Eurovision Song Contest brought these different foci together. Stop the killing of innocent people, stop the destruction of our planet, stand for justice! That those in power should use the full force of the police and army to prevent predominantly young people making their plea to save lives – all lives - is the front line of a battle between the past and the future. The kind - despite Greta’s reasonsble objection to ‘artwashing’ - only the arts and sports can regulalry create a space for.
The right to go on the way we we’ve always been, versus the right to radically change direction. How many people can see that we pay our taxes to military sectors that trap us in perpetual war, a burning house, where slaughter occurs constantly?
At the same time, in different parts of our social system, the opposition to force, abuse and violence takes numerous forms. From the decision to prosecute Spanish football coach Luis Rubiales for kissing Jenni Hermoso without consent. To the women coming out on strike against the ‘epidemic of violence against women’ in Australia. Or the environmentalists protecting nature and animals’ rights to life. It’s as if people the world over have crossed an elemental line, now calling out behaviour that once seemed normal, a part of everyday life.
Much of this behaviour is associated with masculinity and male-dominated professions – all forms of military, criminal gangs, hunters. We might even extend that to politicians, corporate CEO’s and others that glorify violence (including some film makers)—still overwhelmingly men.
Even so, young men may be less inclined to follow this path. Their exposure to information their parents didn’t have—including the impact of their behaviour on women—has made it more likely that they will stop and think before acting without consent, either in a personal, social or planetary level. Others, like Earthling Ed here, struggle with the ‘burden of waking up’ to our ritual cruel slaughter of animals. Ed frets about not being able to convey the horror of those crimes to the broad population who carry on regardless.
Mostly notably, 38% of young men today would not go to war if conscripted; this on the back of a long, slow deterioration in the army’s ability to recruit. It’s partly to do with the availability of much more information on the horrors of war, both on and off the field. But it also highlights a global culture shift. Given more choice, men are increasingly choosing to spend more time in the home, with friends or family, developing their own emotional capacities (often in therapy) and domestic skills. The call to arms falls increasingly on deaf ears.
So the drift away from war is more passive than active. While the 60s saw an active global movement for peace, arising somewhat from the liberated emotions of a drug-fuelled hippy era, there has been little comparable peace activism in the 21c. While we still have anti-nuclear encampments, they are dominated by older people with more time on their hands. The demand for a cease-fire in Gaza is the closest we’ve had to classic peace protest for a while. The extremity of these attacks on both sides has politicised another section of the young – beyond those that were already striking for the climate.
These protests are the reactions of people of all ages, but most passionately the young, as they wake up to our collective self-destruction. They have not yet forged an integrated commitment to what could come next: peace within ecocivilisation. That’s a different kind of work, already underway in some corners of the globe.
Even so, the conditions for getting to a world without war in the future seem to be appearing. The decline of social violence; the waking up of men; the gradual empowerment of the previously excluded; the growing awareness of the military-industrial complex controlling the economy and destroying the planet.
Add to that the feminisation of the public space, the proliferation of cosmolocal music, arts and community practices through the internet, the growth in the discourse around feeling. That’s the revolution we’ve been in for 30 years.
We might never abolish war: but there’s a small possibility that we’ll grow out of it.