The Israel-Hamas War: Searching for Moral Clarity Amid Conflict
Ever since the Israel-Hamas conflict erupted, I’ve felt stuck in a moral maze, struggling to find moral clarity. On some days, I am caught up in the anguish and drama around the plight of the hostages and their families. On other days, I find myself horrified by the extent of destruction and loss of life in Gaza.
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I realise I’m feeling the same sense of cognitive dissonance now over Israel, that I once felt over Brexit – which ultimately led me to resign from the Foreign Office, because I could no longer reconcile what the Government was asking me to say about Brexit, with what my own eyes and ears were telling me.
Having throughout my life tended to trust that British ministers largely behaved with integrity, it took me a long time to accept that Boris Johnson’s Government was not just inadvertently misleading people about Brexit, but was deliberately lying about it.
Once the scales fell from my eyes about Brexit, I began to recognise that many aspects of our democracy in the UK were not as strong as I once thought them to be – and that the guardrails against abuse of power by the executive were far weaker than I had once trusted them to be.
As a diplomat, it was repeatedly dinned into me that our entire foreign policy was based around support for the international rules-based system, centered on the United Nations and its various charters and conventions. Now we have British ministers openly toying with the idea of derogating from some aspects of international human rights and refugee conventions to pursue the Rwanda scheme.
Robert Jenrick, who resigned last week as Immigration Minister, was even quoted as explicitly saying that the Government must put “the views of the British public above contested notions of international law” and that MPs are “not sent to Parliament to be concerned about our reputation on the gilded international circuit”. If he had his way, the UK would be no better than other states – only choosing to adhere to international law when it suited it.
So how can I be sure that the UK is applying the right principles in its stance on Israel/Gaza now?
The West’s strong support for Israel may have made sense in the early years of its existence, when it was a truly weak, vulnerable state, surrounded by more powerful, hostile states intent on destroying it. But does it still make sense today, when Israel is an established state and overwhelmingly the strongest military power in the region, the existence of which has largely been accepted by its neighbours?
Does it still make sense to give the current Israeli Government such strong backing, when it is headed by an individual under investigation on numerous corruption charges; when it has pursued policies designed to weaken judicial oversight of its actions; when it contains ministers openly opposed to making peace with Palestinians, and when it openly supports the construction of more settlements in defiance of international law?
