Pacem in terris?
JUST before sitting down yesterday to write this column, I was listening to a History Extra podcast about the ‘history behind the headlines’ of 2024. It was a conversation between Oxford and Harvard academics Hannah Skoda and Rana Mitter, who spoke for 45 minutes without even a passing reference to the genocide in Gaza or its antecedents.
What kind of oblivion do such intellects reside in, where they can reference the Nuremberg-adjacent Tokyo trials while ignoring this year’s Israel-focused proceedings at The Hague? And how can Christmas be celebrated today without any recognition of the daily atrocities taking place in the land where so many of the traditions on which the Abrahamic faiths are based originated?
And then there are the children, supposedly the chief beneficiaries of Yuletide, who are being robbed of their futures. Both the dead and the living. Earlier this month, a War Child Alliance-sponsored NGO concluded that 96 per cent of the surviving children in the besieged territory consider death to be imminent, and half of them would welcome that outcome. If only a fraction of the folk carving their stuffed turkey or ham roast would consider the starvation in Gaza that is part of the genocidal intent, it might give them cause for a pause. A token minute of silence, perhaps, followed by a determination to back the kind of boycott, divestment and sanctions that helped to demolish a previous apartheid regime.
Peace on Earth is imperilled or absent.
Israel’s raids on Gaza, resulting in dozens of deaths each day, continued even as it pursued a similar strategy in Lebanon, before going on to destroy the military capabilities of post-Assad Syria, a country that hadn’t posed any serious threat to Israel for half a century, notwithstanding its notorious role in Lebanon and serving as a conduit for weapons and other supplies to Hezbollah. Israel routinely attacked some of these Iranian-affiliated conduits, but Bashar al-Assad’s military facilities were rarely targeted while he was in power.
Although it has been suggested that the Qatar-sponsored ceasefire talks between Israel and Hamas are 90pc complete, there is cause for scepticism given similar previous pronouncements, mostly emanating from the US, which bears as much responsibility for the genocide as Israel. No one can say to what extent Kamala Harris’s presidential prospects would have been improved by at least pretending to have a spine. Still, those who understandably withheld their votes from the Democratic candidate on this basis and gave them to her Republican rival will find cause for self-flagellation once Donald Trump re-enters the White House.
There are, of course, plenty of supplementary causes around the world to reconsider the traditional Yuletide model of ‘joy unto the world’ — from the massacres in Sudan and the Congo to the continuing death and destruction in Ukraine and the terrorist attack in Magdeburg that has left German authorities struggling to figure out why an evidently Islamophobic and pro-Zionist psychiatrist who came to the country as a Saudi refugee would decide to plough through a Christmas market in his vehicle, killing five women and a child, and injuring more than 230 others. Taleb al-Abdulmohsen abandoned his faith and sought to support potential exiles who wished to escape the Gulf region’s version of religious injunctions. At the same time, though, he railed against Middle Eastern immigration to Europe, and absurdly considered the likes of Angela Merkel to be promoting the Islamisation of the continent.
Even the secular-minded Gulf emigres he contacted — especially women — were alarmed by his bullying tactics. Perhaps understandably, the German authorities paid little heed to warnings from Riyadh about his extremism. It is not inconceivable, though, that his horrific, deadly act was guided by the notion of helping his favourite party, the neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany (AfD), to reinforce its case against immigration. The AfD — unreservedly backed by Elon Musk, seen by some as effectively the next president of the US — has lost little time in capitalising on the obscenity of its kindred spirit’s murderous spree. It wouldn’t be surprising if that had been Abdulmohsen’s intention all along.
Meanwhile, as for a peace deal with a Saudi component, it’s worth recalling that the US Republicans thwarted a Vietnam settlement in 1968 to benefit Richard Nixon, and delayed the release of American hostages in Iran a decade later to boost Ronald Reagan. That pattern might be repeated ahead of the Trump presidency, eagerly awaited by idiots and fellow proto-fascists around the world.
Be that as it may, the relentless genocide in Gaza and its reflections in the region and beyond provide sufficient cause to wonder whether the worthy notion of pacem in terris will remain a realistic aspiration during Christmases to come.
Published in Dawn, December 25th, 2024