October was the cruellest month, and November may get nastier. I receive an email from a relative that simply says, “Gaza is unbearable.”
Late into the night, we watch the news reports. After the appalling Hamas terrorist attacks, the Israeli retaliation is shocking the world with its savagery. The citizens of Gaza are locked in, with little food, water, medical supplies or fuel. Hospitals are becoming mass graves. Doctors are operating on wounds and performing emergency caesarean sections without anaesthetic.
The US vetoes a resolution calling for a humanitarian pauses, and US news broadcasts bluster about American leadership. “Oh yes,” a relative says sarcastically. “American leadership; I’m sure we’re completely safe.” We recall the US reaction after 9/11. Instead of treating those attacks as an enormous crime requiring a law enforcement response, the US went to war. The consequences for the world were disastrous.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres issues a statement condemning the Hamas attacks, but also calling for an end to the collective punishment of Palestinians. He says the Hamas attacks “did not happen in a vacuum”. The Palestinians, he notes, have had “56 years of suffocating occupation”. Israeli diplomats demand his resignation.
Hundreds of Gazan children are dying. Parents are writing children’s names on their arms so they can be identified if they’re dug out of rubble. Hospitals are running out of fuel to power incubators keeping babies alive.
A CNN producer tries to get his family out of Gaza but the border is closed. An Israeli soldier is filmed shouting, “We will not live next door to these people.” An Israeli Defence Forces spokesman refers to Palestinians as “human animals”. A commentator writes that some of the Israelis attacked on October 7, who lived behind barbed-wire fences in houses with safe rooms next to Gaza ‒ the place known as “the world’s biggest open-air prison” ‒ were “peace activists”.
Helen Clark joins world leaders calling for Israel to stop the bombing. She describes Israeli actions as clear violations of international humanitarian law. A whole population, she says, is being punished for the actions of the armed wing of Hamas.
I recall a book about the Jewish population locked into the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943. Jewish resistance fighters held out until the Nazis had bombed the ghetto into dunes of brick.
We take a break from the carnage, and watch a film, The Pigeon Tunnel. It’s a long interview with John le Carré. The writer’s mother abandoned him and he grew up with his abusive father, Ronnie Cromwell, a narcissistic fraud and conman. Cromwell recruited his son into crime; he grew up and was recruited by MI5.
Le Carré became a spy and then a novelist, and spent a lifetime exploring his preoccupation with betrayal. The film is fascinating, revealing. He is elusive, a divided self, a trickster. He can’t stop hinting that he’s something other than he appears. At one point, he says he has no centre, no self. He’s obsessed with the pigeon tunnel (a system used for shooting birds) which is a symbol of subjugation, cruelty and the trap of learned behaviour. He has a track record of personal deceptiveness, and although he’s fantastically successful, he’s described as “an exquisite poet of self-loathing”.
The writer is a product of his traumatic back story, and he re-enacts it, as people do. The film reveals how his history shapes him, drives his creativity and powers his destructive impulses.
The only way to stop the re-enactment is to cease, call a halt, reflect, start a dialogue. The only way to break the vicious cycle is to recognise that you’re doing exactly, often with uncanny symmetry, the evil that was done to you.
