JONATHAN JANSEN | The human suffering in the Israel-Hamas conflict calls for strong, effective leadership

Unless you have the ability to cry twice there is something wrong with your humanity. Cry once when Hamas reigned terror on Jewish families in Israel, leaving hundreds dead and many more injured.

Cry once more when, with an international licence to kill, the Israeli government reigned terror on Palestinian families in Gaza, leaving hundreds dead and many more injured. The sheer disregard for human life on both sides of this never-ending conflict is the real tragedy of what is transpiring in the Middle East.

Many of us human beings cry once. Some don’t even cry, they celebrate the killings and the kidnappings of Israeli people. The story of a Holocaust survivor being dragged into custody in a wheelchair should break the most hardened heart, but it does not for those celebrating. Cry once.

Many human beings on the other side stand in silence as a nuclear power, no less, flattens whole communities in an act of blind revenge. Listen to the head of the Palestinian Mission to the UK on BBC Newsnight: “My cousin is not Hamas. These children are not Hamas.” He lost six family members among the near 700 killed in Israeli strikes on Gaza. Cry twice.

Don’t let the political junkies confuse you. This is not whataboutism. This is the human cost of war waged as if human beings do not matter.

Once we cry and mourn the death of Palestinians and Israelis alike, we need to ask hard questions of the politics that enable such seemingly senseless massacres to continue

All over the world, individuals, institutions and nations are being forced to take sides. Universities are not immune to the pressure to take a political position, one way or the other. Harvard right now is tossing in the wind as a former president of this university goads the current leadership to take a clear moral stand as they did when George Floyd was murdered by police. He is cunningly disingenuous, of course. An all too familiar racist murder of a black man on the open streets of America is not the same as a long and complex conflict with victims on both sides of an interminable conflict.

Once we cry and mourn the death of Palestinians and Israelis alike, we need to ask hard questions of the politics that enable such seemingly senseless massacres to continue. Here’s one question: can you really lock people up within close confines, uproot them from their homes, restrict their movements, desecrate their holy sites and pretend that peaceful coexistence is even possible? That situation invites the kind of murderous extremism that killed and maimed so many innocent civilians — including, by the way, an activist working against Israeli occupation.

What is to be done? It is hard to have a rational conversation about a difficult situation when there is so much emotion that comes with any attempt to make sense of things in that part of the world. Social media has, as usual, not only informed but inflamed for advantage of either side of the tragedy with fake images and false stories. Those in pain are very susceptible to some of the excesses of these platforms. For many Jewish compatriots, the shadow of the Shoah has long extensions into the present. For many Muslim compatriots the never-ending humiliation of Palestinians is a heavy burden to bear.

This is where leadership makes the difference. Political statements are not enough. What needs to happen in South Africa is for Muslim and Jewish to once again come into communion to talk about the tragedy of lives lost, to deliberate on how we can strengthen our resolve to work for peace and justice in the Middle East, and to find ways of influencing our government to play a much more constructive role in that part of the world.

But for any politics to be efficacious in this conflict, it has to start with that human question implied at the front end of this column: does a Palestinian/Arab life carry the same value as an Israeli/Jewish life? If we were absolutely honest, we know the answer to that question, not only for the combatants. Switch channels between the BBC and Al Jazeera as they report on this crisis, and you will find the answer very quickly. Make no mistake, political emotions are being produced for partisan effects.

As a teacher, I have thought a lot about the Palestinian and Israeli children whose lives have been taken as grown men have waged this relentless war for decades. Innocent lives lost in an instant, while some of these young people are hooked up to machines in ICU.

But remember also, between these dramatic conflagrations, the children who suffer on a daily basis in the struggle for survival in Gaza before the next missiles are launched and the retaliatory strikes that follow, and we suddenly pay attention to human suffering which is there all the time.