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“I and the public know/ What all schoolchildren learn/ Those to whom evil is done/ Do evil in return.” – WH Auden, from his poem “September 1, 1939”
“If one could combine Arabic faith and Jewish intelligence, with an Iraqi education, Christian conduct, Greek knowledge, Indian mysticism, and a Sufi way of life, this would be the perfection of humanity.” – Brethren of Purity, Basra, 10th century AD
“You are the nation who, rather than ruling by the Shariah of Allah in its Constitution and Laws, choose to invent your own laws as you will and desire. You separate religion from your policies, contradicting the pure nature which affirms Absolute Authority to the Lord and your Creator.” – Osama Bin Laden, “Letter to the American people”, Guardian, November 2002
In the Jewish legend, Samson is blinded by the Philistines. He becomes, in Milton’s phrase, “blinded in Gaza”. The Philistines tether him to a large stone. So Samson commits suicide by pulling down the pillars of the temple, and everyone is killed.
Well, the Israelis are not about to commit suicide, and the analogy of Samson is not exact, but they are certainly pulling down the temple of the Philistines. As Australian writer Julianne Schultz(1) remarks in a quietly horrified tone: it is little wonder that people are turning off the news in record numbers. The images are often unwatchable, the descriptions beyond imagining, the scale incomprehensible.
And the words of Auden, written to mark the opening days of the Second World War, could just as equally have been reflecting on the events of 7 October 2023. For that was the exact date – in the manner of Dingaan’s Zulus in 1838, descending on the area today called Weenen to murder unsuspecting Boer men, women and children – when Hamas, in the name of Palestinians, crossed the Israeli border to ambush Jews, who were as unprepared as the Boers for the slaughter that followed.
And, like the Boers, who then sallied forth to neutralise the Zulu threat at Blood River, so the Israelis have deployed an army into Gaza to defeat Hamas. It is some consolation that third-party talks may result in a brief ceasefire, and some, but not all, hostages may also be freed.
The grim reaper is everywhere to be seen as these tragic events unfold. Beyond the rights and wrongs, the claims and counter-claims, this war, like all wars, has already resulted in the deaths of thousands of non-combatants, including children. Heartbreaking photos appear daily in the world’s press. Hundreds of Hamas fighters seem to have disappeared, either hiding in tunnels not yet destroyed, or merging invisibly with an army of refugees.
As observers have noted, Britain’s counterinsurgency campaign in Malaya (now Malaysia) took more than a decade and involved separating the people from the guerrillas, swamping the country with security force personnel. Israel may struggle to find and destroy the whole of Hamas by the end of the year, but it will certainly not be for want of trying.
As the fog of battle slowly lifts and the Israeli Defense Forces look to be on track to claim control of Gaza within the next few months, questions are being asked about what happens afterwards. Washington has already made clear that Israel cannot occupy and run Gaza on its own. Germany is proposing the UN takes charge, but the Palestinians and their allies are already vetoing that suggestion. They want to run their own affairs, perhaps with a version of the Palestine Authority. Iran has announced that it cannot support Hamas any longer, perhaps adding sotto voce that they are secretly terrified that Israel will simply blow them off the face of the earth if they do. Likewise, Hezbollah in Lebanon needs to be careful for the same reasons. For all its bravado, Hezbollah is vulnerable if Israel, having cleaned up in Gaza, deploys the full weight of its army in the north.
Whatever happens, Israel and its Western allies will try and make certain that Gaza is organised on lines that guarantee a proper defence in depth, to counter against the re-emergence of Hamas in the future. The way the two-state-supporting EU is talking about the “end game” at present, is that they would like to replace the Israeli army briefly with a peacekeeping force, which can then hand over power to the old Palestine Authority.
But now comes the rub. How to ensure that Hamas vanishes as a potential threat? Judging from a recent article in the London Telegraph(2), this would mean a wholesale de-Hamasification programme, like the de-Nazification programme in Germany after the Second World War. The reason is that Palestinian children are apparently already indoctrinated with the “basest” Islamophobia. Their schoolbooks carry, for example, romanticised pictures of Dalal Mughrabi, who took part in the 1978 massacre of 38 Israeli civilians. She is portrayed as a Palestinian hero.
The article describes how, in its 17 years in power, Muslim Brotherhood member Hamas’s brainwashing has churned out jihadis. Schoolchildren are taught to produce plays in which they dress up as terrorists and act out atrocities. At summer camps, they practise the rudiments of terrorism. Hamas’s ideology is strongly influenced by Nazism, says the article, so it should come as no surprise that this “resembles a wartime German school system that was pervaded by Third Reich ideology. Even mathematics textbooks featured questions about fully laden bombers flying to Warsaw. Once the Allied victory had been secured, the denazification of young Germans posed a more difficult problem than the deprogramming of older people,” explains the writer, who goes on to say that military victory is not enough if the ideology of the “death cult” persists – it starts, however, with a decisive military victory. By the close of the war, the destruction of the German war machine was total, making it indisputable that the promise of Nazism had turned to ashes. Gazans must get the same message, says the article. Then the process of de-Hamasification must begin: “The lesson of post-war Germany is that there can be no room for compromise.” The writer concludes that jihadism must be outlawed and zero tolerance shown towards it.
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has also come under fire for calling for Hamas to be added to the targets of an international coalition against the Islamic State group. That proposal was “useless and ineffective”, said Yves Aubin de La Messuzière, a former French envoy to Iraq and Tunisia. But Macron has, in fact, put his finger right on the problem – militant Islamism and how to defeat it. Especially since jihadi ideology is a global phenomenon.
The West and the rest
Some things never change, and the republication of a forgotten document, Osama Bin Laden’s letter to the American people (2002), reminds us that what we know as the “West” is less of a geographic expression than it is of an idea – the social contract. In the secular West, man makes the laws by which he is governed, while in the religious “East” it is God who lays down the law.
Countless scholars and students of Islam and the “West” have produced weighty tomes on the implications of this divide, but I have found the compact explanation of the matter in The West and the rest by British philosopher Professor Roger Scruton(3) to be the most digestible. I strongly commend it to readers of LitNet who are aspiring, as we all must do, to try and understand the roots of this firestorm in Palestine and Israel, which ultimately threatens stability in the whole of the Middle East in one way or another.
My layman’s précis of Scruton’s analysis, then, tells us that the different religious and philosophical roots of Western and Islamic societies have resulted in profoundly divergent beliefs about the nature of political order. Scruton says that the idea of the social contract – crucial to the self-conception of Western societies, and the basis of their legal system, where laws are made by man – is entirely absent in Islamic societies, where law derives its authority from the word of God as recorded in the Koran, or from the exemplary acts of the prophet as related in the sunna. As Scruton says of Islamic states: “Jurisprudence is limited to tracing a decision back to those authoritative sources, or to some Hadith of the Prophet that will fill the lacuna.”
This is not to say that during the great period of Islamic civilisation, the possibility of individual judgement, when it came to the law, was not admitted. The four orthodox schools of Islamic jurisprudence recognised this kind of “striving” (jahada, from which is derived jihad, the struggle on behalf of the faith), but such human intercession must be based on the main pillars of Islam – the Koran and the sunna.
Western law is inherited, by contrast, from Roman law, which was secular and unconcerned with an individual’s religious well-being. Roman law was designed to enable imperial government regardless of credal differences, and legal decisions were not validated by tracing them to some sacred source.
Roman law could be changed in response to changing circumstances, and legal authority derived from the fact that it was commanded by a sovereign power. Islamic law, on the other hand, comes from God. No sovereign territory or concept is involved – only the House of God. This distinction is crucial for Scruton, who says that without freedom of the individual, there cannot be government by consent, and it is the freedom of any citizen in a democratic country to participate in the process of government – a process called politics – which validates his citizenship, ie: “[T]he difference between the West and the rest is that Western societies are governed by politics; the rest are ruled by power.”
Flowing from this distinction is Scruton’s insight that territorial jurisdictions “sit uneasily upon credal communities”, which tend to recognise the validity of no law other than the divine commands that shape their identity. A sovereign state in the Muslim world is different to one in the secular West. In the West, the sovereign state is at the root of law. In the Muslim world, no ruler can impose a law that has not been derived from the Sharia, the revealed word of God.
The Ottoman Empire recognised the difficulties of Sharia law in its vast territory, which included Christians, Jews, Druze, Alawites and Muslims – all competing for resources in lands where territorial boundaries were virtually non-existent. The Ottomans introduced a system of managing these various creeds – the millet system. Any rivalry between the millets, ie, creeds, was settled by adjudication from the Sublime Porte – whose own authority, in turn, depended on the dominant millet of Sunni Muslims.
Eventually, the Turks managed to codify Islamic law, always making sure, however, that it complied with the Sharia original, and this codified law was preserved under the British protectorate of Palestine following the break-up of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War. Later, after independence, it was incorporated by the new State of Israel after the Second World War, to apply to resident Muslims.
And so to the present day
The British protectorate of Palestine was opened to large-scale Jewish immigration in 1917. The horrors of the WW2 German Holocaust – so graphically revealed to the world by Lord Russel of Liverpool in his shocking book The scourge of the swastika (1946) – hastened the claims of Jews to have a state of their own, and Israel was duly born as a nation state and recognised by the USA, all other Western countries and the UN in 1948.
The result is that Israel today exists in the Middle East as a sovereign state on the Western model, with a genuinely democratic government. Yet, there is no Palestinian state – or even, as Scruton points out, a Palestinian nation – beyond a collection of historical creed communities. There is no authority in Gaza which can control organisations like Hamas, which takes its inspiration from the Muslim Brotherhood. Hamas does not work through diplomacy or negotiation, but through violence. Hamas wishes to punish Israel, which has man-made laws, as an outreach of the West in the dar al-Islam – the house of Islam – says Scruton. They wish to destroy Israel, for Israel is a “nation-state established where no nation-state should be – a place where the only law should be the sharia, and the only loyalty that of Islam”.
We Westerners are basically responsible for this state of affairs at the end of the day, says Scruton. Ever since the establishment of free-trade bodies like the IMF, World Bank and WTO in the post-war era, globalisation has been the name of the game. Inevitably, the corrupting effect of Western advertising, films and secular media of all kinds – celebrating an impious way of life – has overwhelmed the fragile economies of the historically Muslim territories. As Scruton says: “Globalisation has plunged the Islamic world into crisis by offering the spectacle of a secular society maintained in being by man-made laws, and achieving equilibrium without the aid of God. It has also obliterated many of the customs and ways of life of the Muslim people, replacing pastoral traditions with a phony and humiliating economy of pure consumption.”
He concludes that globalisation, at bottom, has re-awakened the age-old nostalgia for a reign of goodness in which those who corrupted the Prophet’s community will be finally destroyed and the true order of the Sharia established on earth.
When one stands back and absorbs the philosophical reality of the stand-off between the West and the Muslim world, it seems clear that ambitions of de-Hamasification and the like are destined to fall foul of the fundamental gulf that Scruton has identified. Already, one can see this in the one-sided nature of the current hostage “negotiations”, where Hamas has refused to sign the brief ceasefire agreement. In other words, they continue to fight, regardless. By releasing batches of hostages, a few at a time, they buy themselves the opportunity to re-equip and re-arm. Israel, on the other hand, has clearly now prioritised the hostages ahead of an immediate military victory, but has also signalled that its troops are ready to advance to secure their goal.
There are no easy answers to this major tragedy.
(1) Guardian, 18 November 2023
(2) Telegraph, 14 November 2023, by Jake Wallis Simons
(3) The West and the rest by Roger Scruton, ISI Books, London, 2002
Also read:
Die Johann Rossouw-gespreksreeks: Notas oor die tragedie van Israel en die Palestyne