Israel/Hamas war: Must I pick a side?

This article features in our October 2023 print issue, available to those who subscribe here.

LISTENING to a podcast the other day, someone claimed that the average person in 2023 receives as much information per day as someone would in their entire life a few hundred years ago. This sounds absurd but it surely makes sense. Today I have looked at hundreds of sites, from maps to videos to online translators. Were I a plough hand in the 1720s, no such things would be available to me.

This superfluity of information – too much for our small monkey brains – has multiple side effects, including the constant chasing for ‘likes’ and the elevation of the banal.

Additionally, it has resulted in every person having an opinion on everything. It is rare to hear in modern discourse that one simply knows too little about a given topic to make a judgement. Instead, amid a constant flow of news and opinion, everyone’s stance is crystallised within minutes of the latest hysteria erupting forth.

Times are, indeed, strange. Since Brexit, society has busily been manning panic stations on a near constant basis; followed, as our EU withdrawal was, by Orange Man, Wuhan Flu, Saint George Floyd, The Climate Apocalypse, obsession with Genderbending, Slava Ukraini and, most recently, the Israel-Palestine clusterflub.

I approach the latter with some trepidation, given that everyone – seemingly – must pick a camp. This is not to say that the Hamas monsters who perpetrated such evil deeds do not deserve their comeuppance. Yet the recent attack is, sadly, just another chapter in the grim history of a troubled region.

From a relatively tender age, I found myself unable to lump vociferously for Team Israel or Team Palestine, gazing on in bewilderment as everyone else passionately advocated for a cause so remote from their everyday life.

Naturally, given our nation’s long-standing interference with the Middle East (doing our damnedest to destabilise it wherever possible), many would posit that a side simply must be taken. I remain unmoved by such lines of argument, as I am similarly unconvinced by any assertion that I must atone for the historical sins of any ancestor.

Channelling my inner Chamberlain, I can’t help but feel that such matters concern a “far away country between people of whom we know nothing". Chamberlain’s sentiment has long been derided by people with the luxury of viewing events in hindsight, given what we know about the crimes committed by ze Germans not long afterwards.

Yet such a mode of thinking will lead to our involvement in each conflict or disquiet across the world. We are tempted to become the globe’s permanent watchmen, extinguishing each fire as it erupts, cooling it with jets of righteousness and wisdom.

Such delusions are, of course, impracticable. Look where they have got us so far.

Anyway, we have not the armed forces to carry out anything meaningful, shrunken as they have to a size where they might be able to hold a sector a few dozen miles wide in a peer-on-peer conflict.

Even more pertinently, we no longer have the nation nor the backbone. Having become a nation built on the sturdy, strong foundations of diversity, there is now scant chance that the United Kingdom would intervene in any meaningful sense in the Middle East. There would be riots in each ugly, degraded town across the land, upon which time the idiots in charge might belatedly wonder what had happened amid chants for jihad and intifada along our high streets.

There is some entertainment in seeing commentators in the mainstream media waking up to the fact that we have irrevocably altered our country for the worse, eliminating the cohesive strands that exist unnoticed between a people defined by a shared history and kinship. It is all too late now – people should have listened to the fruitcakes and loonies when they had the chance.

The only way out of the impending global poopfest is to declare ourselves neutral in the disasters of lands far away. Heaven knows we have enough problems here to deal with, anyway.

More fundamentally, it involves the acceptance of our current position and of the inevitable global shift away from Western dominance towards a multipolar world (another process hastened by our cravenly avaricious ruling class).

Nobody asks what Portugal or Denmark will do when it comes to an international crisis, so I no longer see why ‘Brics’ et al will ask what the UK plans to do. We have transitioned from a country of preeminent global significance to one of only moderate importance, but alarmingly few have cottoned on to this.

With the relative demise of the United States – amusingly referred to as our best buddy on the international scene – this will become more apparent by the day.

As I write this, Israel is poised to launch its invasion of Gaza. Many people on both sides will die and the suffering will deepen rifts and chasms. Perhaps it is just the prelude to World War Three. Let’s hope not, but it is undoubtedly another step down the road of the forming of a new world order.

We have done everything to weaken ourselves as this new, multipolar era emerges. If times get tougher, we will collectively see the consequences of decades of political folly unfold before our very eyes.