The Boy in the Burning Bed

Israel’s Liberal Shop of Horrors

I’ve just seen the British-Palestinian filmmaker Farah Nabulsi’s marvellous film The Teacher. Despite a couple of plot outcomes that strain credulity, it’s a really powerful and moving piece of work. In fact, it’s probably the best Palestinian film I’ve seen.

Part of the reason for this is Saleh Bakri’s towering performance as the Palestinian teacher/resistant Basem. And there is also the film’s depiction of the suffocating reality of Palestinian life under a fifty-seven year military and quasi-military occupation.

Homicidal settlers burning olive groves and building gleaming suburban new towns on Palestinian land; the Israeli army’s use of collective punishment and British mandate-era house demolitions; a skewed criminal justice system that invariably finds against the Palestinians even in the rare cases that make it to court; the daily humiliation of roadblocks, checkpoints and identity checks; constant surveillance and atmosphere of pervasive violence; the complicity of the Palestinian Authority - it’s all here, and unsparingly and patiently rendered.

I urge you to see it, because so much of what it reveals is completely ignored by Western governments and in mainstream media commentary. Fifty-seven years of occupation, settler-colonization and land theft all taking place in plain sight - that is the reality of the ‘Israeli-Palestinian conflict’, which, some would have you believe, began on 7 October last year.

The Teacher also deals intelligently with the issue of Palestinian resistance to occupation. Its central character Basem is clearly a member of Hamas, or some other Islamist organization. He colludes in the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier. He has served time in Israel jails. He has lost a son in an Israeli prison. According to the terms that Israel and its supporters use - and which the British once used to describe the Irgun and the Stern Gang - Basem is a ‘terrorist’ who uses violence for political means, in this case to obtain the release of more than 1,000 Palestinian detainees.

The film shows very clearly why someone would do this - even a compassionate man who loves books and cares about education and children. And in humanising the demonic figure of the ‘terrorist’, the film also does something that Israel and its supporters almost never do: it humanises the ‘other side’ - through the character of the American/Jewish ambassador who seeks out the teacher to ask for the whereabouts of his kidnapped son.

In a powerful scene, these two men meet in a school corridor, and the teacher says ‘1,000 of our sons is worth one of yours.’

Over the last twelve months that ratio has increased to once-unimaginable levels in Gaza, and it now includes not just sons, but daughters, mothers, grandmothers and young children. In its determination to sate its vengeance and restore deterrence, Israel has made it clear that there is no upper limit on Palestinian deaths. And even though the likes of Starmer, Biden, Blinken or Kamala Harris may say from time to time that ‘too many innocent Palestinians have been killed’, their actions and inactions demonstrate that ‘too many’ is an elastic category.

Last week, the war in Gaza reached a new level of hideousness, when a video showed the teenager Shabaan al Dalou burned alive in a hospital bed after an Israeli strike on the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, where he and his family had taken shelter.

I won’t show those horror-film images here. They are as bad as anything you are ever likely to see anywhere, and they’ve already been seen enough. I would rather show this young man and his family, the would-be software engineer who grew up in Gaza with the same hopes and dreams that any teenager can bring to the world, and was so obscenely killed in its ruins, along with his mother, because we need to think of Palestinians when they were living their lives, not just when they die.

Not a word of condemnation from any Western government. Well no, there was a kind of condemnation. A spokesperson for the U.S. National Security Council described the images of ‘what appear to be displaced civilians burning alive following an Israel air strike’ as ‘deeply disturbing.’

You would think, right?

But then the same spokesperson also insisted that ‘Israel has a responsibility to do more to avoid civilian casualties’ even if - wait for it - ‘if Hamas was operating near the hospital in an attempt to use civilians as human shields.’ So not much of a condemnation, really. More an expression of concern. Accompanied by a headshaking, handwringing frown, because let’s face it, it is disturbing to watch a teenager being burned alive in a hospital bed.

Who wants to see that, when you’re the ones sending the weapons to the country responsible? And in an election month too, when the future of democracy is at stake?

Pallywood

The Israeli propagandist David Mercer found it less disturbing - no surprises here. Like Mark Regev before him, this is not a man with an uneasy conscience. In an interview, an indignant Mercer claimed that the whole thing was staged by Palestinian actors, in what he called ‘Pallywood’ - just to make Israel look bad.

This is the kind of thing that Israel will always say, and its supporters will always believe it, or refuse to acknowledge - let alone act upon - the truths that are staring them in the face. Last week, the novelist Harold Jacobson wrote a piece which suggested that even showing images of dead Palestinian children was ‘wilfully stirring race-memory of the child-killing Jew of the middle ages.’ Not that he wasn’t concerned. As he wrote:

Who has been able to watch the evening news on television three nights running without wanting to scream? Scream for those beautiful and broken children, the innocent victims of war, maimed, orphaned, wandering lost through their ruined cities. Scream if you’re a Palestinian, scream if you’re a Christian, scream if you’re a Jew.

So scream for them when you see them on the television. But better not to see them on television, because then you won’t have to scream for them. Though Jacobson insisted that ‘I do not minimise the tragedy that has befallen Palestinian children’, that is precisely the intention of his article - to describe such deaths as an inevitable tragedy - rather than deliberate tactical or strategic decisions - whilst suggesting that those who criticize and condemn such atrocities are guilty of anti-semitism or ‘blood libel’.

Jacobson’s interview with the New Yorker is even worse: a tortuous and convoluted attempt to unsay what he said, which only ends up reinforcing what he said; a Zen-like exercise in knowing-but-not-knowing which seems, like so many other commentators before him, to assume that the ‘Israeli-Palestinian conflict’ began last October.

Jacobson is of course, entitled to his opinions, even if they do amount to pious gibberish, but he could at least make the minimal attempt to understand the historical context in which this calamity is unfolding. But too many people don’t. Politically speaking, the instinctive support of the right and far-right for Israel’s merciless onslaught on Gaza is not surprising.

These are sectors that long ago swung in behind the Israeli Sparta - regardless of the fact that some of their predecessors would once have been sending Jews to the camps. You expect the likes of Tommy Robinson to cosplay with the IDF. It is Muslims who are being killed, after all.

But it is - or should be - another matter with Joe Biden, or the Labour Party, or Howard Jacobson and so many others. These are liberals who support human rights and international law. Some of them once supported wars on behalf of democracy, or in order to save Arabs and Muslims from dictators. But when it comes to the Palestinians, they only have crocodile tears, and much of the time, not even that, in their fervent willingness to allow one state, and one state only, to do whatever it sees fit in order to ‘defend itself’ against an array of ‘malign’ enemies.

Take Yahya Sinwar. When I went into the cinema he was alive. When I came out, he was dead. On Thursday evening I watched the video showing him in a keffiyeh, sitting in an armchair in a shattered apartment, hurling a stick at the drone that had come to kill him - one of many nightmarish images that have passed before our glazed eyes these last twelve months.

And if my government, and so many others, had little to say about teenagers being burned alive in hospital beds, they had a lot to say about this. This was the world’s Bin Laden moment - when the Israeli posse stumbled upon the Evil One and just like Chuck Norris or Steve Seagal, took him out.

It was, chorused Biden and Harris, a ‘measure of justice.’ Starmer delivered an insipid homily, on why we shouldn’t ‘mourn’ the death of Sinwar, while also warning Israel that the world would ‘not tolerate any more excuses on humanitarian assistance.’

After the last twelve months, no one would expect Netanyahu to be particularly worried about the West’s lack of tolerance. He knows who he’s dealing with, and he understands the games that our politicians have to play. And so, on Sunday, Israel struck Beit Lahiya, killing eighty-seven people.

Peace can only be just around the corner.

And as for Sinwar, we don’t have to mourn him in order to consider where this hard, brutal, uncompromising man came from. Like all Palestinians he lived most of his life under occupation. He spent years in Israeli jails. He experienced successive wars in which Israel killed who it liked, when it liked.

His men pitilessly murdered non-combatants on 7 October. In doing so, these actions exposed his largely defenceless people to what he knew would be the vengeful and equally pitiless wrath of the Israeli army.

So no, I don’t mourn him. But if ‘justice’ had ever been taken seriously by the governments that now see it in the death of yet another Hamas leader, there would have been no Sinwar and no Hamas.

His killing is only ‘justice’ if you believe that the ‘Israeli-Palestinian conflict’ began last October. It’s only ‘justice’ if you believe that this ‘conflict’ is a war between equals, or, as Israel and its supporters so dishonestly put it, a war between the descendants of the Nazis and Jews. It’s ‘justice’ if you pretend that there is no occupation, and ignore decades of Israeli attempts to annihilate the Palestinian people, and decades of Palestinian resistance that have taken many different forms

But now - marvellous! - with Sinwar dead, ‘peace’ is in the air. ‘Ceasefire’ is on the lips of politicians, along with their ‘concern’ and ‘impatience.’

Even Jonathan Freedland - the pseudo-moralist whose hands must hurt from the hours he has spent wringing them - saw cautious reasons for ‘optimism’ in the Middle East as a result of Sinwar’s execution.

Earlier this month, Freedland wrote an article that was intellectually dishonest even by his dismal standards - a masterpiece of the ‘shooting and crying’ genre - in which he evoked the ‘two Israels…the Israel that is seen by much of the world, and the Israel that sees itself.’ In making this comparison, Freedland described ‘the war that has caused so much pain for all of the last year:’

What the world sees in Gaza is a benighted strip of land that Israel has crushed, heedless of the consequences for civilian life. What Israelis see is a cruel Hamas enemy that revealed its true face on 7 October and which has embedded itself inside and beneath the streets and homes of Gaza, using the entire population as a human shield, so that when innocents die there, it is Hamas who should bear the blame.

No prizes for guessing which Gaza Freedland sees. Ignoring the occupation, he evokes the world of the shtetl, when ‘Jews were an defenceless minority,’ and invites readers to Hamas’s vicious pogrom-assault on an Israel that is, ‘small - the size of New Jersey -besieged and vulnerable.’

Israel may be small, but what’s left of Palestine is smaller - partly because of the land that it lost - and Israel is the dominant military power in the region. No one else comes close, and it’s partly because that aura of invincibility was so brutally dented last October that Israel has gone to such shocking lengths to restore it.

And there is an Israel which Freedland does not acknowledge: an occupying power with direct control over the lives of more than three million Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and indirect (before the war) control over 2.3 million Gazans.

This a country in the grips of extremism, whose politicians gleefully talk of annihilating cities and whole countries. A country whose soldiers post videos of themselves wearing Palestinian women’s clothing in the houses they have destroyed; who laugh as they demolish houses just for the hell of it; who beat and torture Palestinian prisoners, shoot civilians, blast whole families to pieces on the basis of AI data - and do all this from a position of impregnable military strength.

Yes, there is another Israel: the demonstrators who have bravely protested the actions of the Netanyahu government for the last twelve months; the Israel of Gideon Levy and +972 magazine; the 130 soldiers who have said they will refuse to serve in Gaza without a ceasefire.

But that Israel is small and shrinking, in part, because of the unconditional support that the West has given to Israel’s descent into depravity. And this support doesn’t just come from ghouls like David Mercer and Douglas Murray who don’t care how many Palestinians die or who they are. It also comes from liberals like Freedland, Jacobson and Simon Schama, who anguish about the deaths of ‘innocents’ but won’t condemn the state that kills them.

And so, with Sinwar dead, Freedland cautiously sees prospects for a ceasefire and the return of the hostages, and even ‘a diplomatic process that offers a different future for Israel and its neighbours’, based on the imaginary message to Israel’s leaders: ‘with Sinwar’s death, you have your total victory - now win the peace.’

There is nothing whatsoever in Netanyahu’s prosecution of this war, or the war that Israel is now fighting in Lebanon, to suggest that Israel has any interest in ‘the peace’ - or in a different future with its neighbours - beyond their submission.

If Netanyahu had ever cared about the hostages, he could have negotiated their release. He had no interest, and members of his own negotiating team have accused him of sabotaging attempts to secure a ceasefire.

To argue now, after so much carnage, and so much death and trauma, that the death of a single Hamas leader makes ‘peace’ possible is to ignore the historical forces that made Hamas possible - and that will, inevitably, produce a successor to Sinwar. It also means ignoring the nature of the war that Israel has fought in Gaza, which has effectively destroyed Gazan society, and made it impossible for Palestinians to live there.

Call this war a genocide, a war of extermination and annihilation, a second Nakba, or an act of collective punishment that goes further than anything that Israel has ever carried out before. But let’s not pretend that this has anything to do with peace or justice. And whatever it is, Western states, and too many commentators like Freedland, are too cowardly, too complicit, or too dishonest, to recognize Israel’s descent into the vortex and the awfulness of what has been done these last twelve months.

If Gaza is a genocide, it is a liberal genocide. Carried out by a democratic state, and supported by democratic governments, and by commentators who think themselves liberal on almost every other issue, many of whom once urged the US and Britain to wage war all over the Middle East and beyond in the name of democracy.

Yet faced with evidence of the mass killing of civilians and the destruction of an entire society in plain sight, these same governments and a broad swathe of the liberal commentariat have found a way to rationalise the carnage, to the point where some of them can now have the temerity to imagine ‘peace’ emerging from the wreckage.

In the future, many of these politicians and commentators will talk about China and Russia, about international law and the international community. But the stain of the last twelve months will never be eradicated. If Israel is found culpable for war crimes or genocide in the International Criminal Court, some of these governments may also be found complicit.

And the next time the United States and its allies set out to assert global ‘leadership’ and bring down the next dictator or human rights abuser or international lawbreaker, millions of people will remember the epic moral failure that reduced a little strip of land that was once known as the Gaza Strip to a smoking ruin.

They will be able to see the video of the boy in the burning bed - an image that shakes our species - and they will ask what kind of country did this, and what kind of countries allowed such things to happen?