The Forever War - Thoughts on Israel and Gaza

If insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly while expecting different results, then the Holy Land is the world’s largest psychiatric ward. Yet here we are in 2025, and I am told the situation requires comment, as if mine, or anyone’s, could make the slightest difference to people who have been killing each other over the same strip of land for generations, and who will likely continue doing so long after I am gone. Still, one must try to speak clearly about unclear things, especially when they involve the killing of children, something both sides manage with appalling regularity, even as they cling to claims of moral superiority.

Let me begin with what should be obvious but apparently isn’t: both peoples have legitimate claims to the land, and both have behaved abominably in pressing those claims. Palestinians were indeed displaced from their homes in 1948, a catastrophe for them no matter the circumstances. Jews faced centuries of persecution culminating in genocide, and their desire for a homeland where they could defend themselves is entirely understandable. Anyone who denies either of these facts is not serious about resolving anything.

The tragedy is that these two legitimate narratives of suffering have become weapons to justify further suffering. The Holocaust is invoked to excuse the occupation, as if the gas chambers of Europe gave Israel permanent immunity from moral criticism. The Nakba is invoked to justify terrorism, as if displacement gave Palestinians the right to blow up buses full of civilians. Both sides are so invested in their own victimhood that they’ve lost the ability to recognise the humanity of the other.

And so, in 2025, we have another round of violence. Hamas’s successor groups fire rockets that are increasingly sophisticated but still largely ineffective. Israel responds with airstrikes, devastatingly effective but politically counterproductive. Civilians die on both sides, though in vastly disproportionate numbers. The international community condemns everyone and no one, and eventually, a ceasefire is declared, only to collapse in the next round of fighting.

The American position remains unchanged: official support for a two-state solution that everyone knows will not happen, combined with unlimited military aid to Israel and occasional finger-wagging over settlements that expand regardless. Europeans issue statements about international law that no one takes seriously. Arab states speak of Palestinian rights while quietly cooperating with Israel on security. It is diplomatic kabuki theatre; everyone knows their lines, and no one expects the play to end.

Religion, predictably, poisons everything it touches. Jewish fundamentalists insist God gave them the land. Muslim fundamentalists insist God gave it to them. Christian fundamentalists support Israel because they believe it will hasten the apocalypse, after which Jews will be converted or destroyed. One might think adults in the 21st century could find better reasons for territorial disputes than the alleged real-estate preferences of their invisible friends. But apparently not.

The settlers, zealous believers that God is a real estate agent, continue their project of making a Palestinian state impossible. They build hilltop outposts, daring the world to stop them, knowing the Israeli government will eventually legalise and protect them. They want all the land and make no pretence otherwise. Meanwhile, Palestinian leadership remains corrupt, incompetent, and more interested in clinging to power than improving lives. The Palestinian Authority governs like a mafia with NGO funding. Hamas governs like a death cult with Iranian backing. Ordinary Palestinians are trapped between their occupiers, their failed leaders, and Arab “allies” who use their cause rhetorically while treating actual refugees as unwanted guests.

The peace process (an exhausted phrase) remains invoked by those who know perfectly well that there is no process and no peace. The two-state solution is dead, killed by settlements, demographics, and political realities. The one-state solution is impossible: it would mean either the end of Israel as a Jewish state or the permanent disenfranchisement of Palestinians, neither acceptable nor sustainable. What remains is a de facto one-state arrangement where Palestinians live under Israeli control without Israeli rights, a situation that looks increasingly like apartheid.

None of this absolves Palestinian organisations of their crimes. Terrorism remains terrorism, even when committed by the oppressed. Targeting civilians remains a war crime, even for the weaker party. The fact that Israel has more power does not transform Hamas or Islamic Jihad into freedom fighters. They are theocratic fascists who would create a Taliban-style state if given the chance. The BDS movement, meanwhile, imagines boycotts of Israeli academics will bring peace, but only convinces Israelis that the world is against them, hardly a recipe for concessions.

And through it all, the body count rises. Palestinian children are killed by Israeli missiles aimed at militants. Israeli children are traumatised by rockets and sirens. Young soldiers enforce an occupation that corrupts them even as it oppresses Palestinians. Young Palestinians see no future but resistance, which usually ends in death. This conflict is a machine for producing misery, and everyone knows it.

The truth no one admits is that this conflict will not end until both sides surrender parts of their identity. Israel must give up the dream of Greater Israel and accept that security comes from peace, not control. Palestinians must give up the dream of return; the refugees are not going back to homes that no longer exist. Both must abandon the fantasy of victory in favour of survival. But this will not happen because their leaders benefit from perpetual conflict. Israeli politicians win votes by promising strength. Palestinian leaders maintain power by promising resistance. The conflict has become an industry, employing soldiers, bureaucrats, aid workers, journalists, activists, and propagandists. Peace would put too many out of work.

So the grotesque dance continues. The Israeli right grows more fascistic, Palestinian resistance more nihilistic, the international community more useless, and the prospects for peace more distant. Anyone who states the obvious, that this is insanity, that it solves nothing, that it perpetuates suffering, is dismissed as naïve, treacherous, antisemitic, or Islamophobic.

And yet, amid the despair, there are flickers of humanity. A Palestinian doctor and an Israeli teacher, both of whom had lost children, became friends, united in grief and determined that others should not suffer as they had. Their communities saw them as traitors. They knew their efforts were probably futile. But they persisted. “What else can we do?” the doctor asked. “Hate forever?”

The answer, tragically, appears to be yes. Hate forever, kill forever, suffer forever in the name of causes that have become more important than the people they supposedly serve. The land has become more sacred than the lives lost fighting over it. The past outweighs the future; the dead outweigh the living.

And so it continues, this war that is not quite a war, this peace that is not quite peace. This endless, grinding conflict deforms everyone it touches. In 2025, as in 1925, 2005, and likely 2055, the Holy Land remains the place where hope goes to die. Until both sides decide they would rather live in peace than die for justice, the killing will go on. And the rest of us will remain a Greek chorus in a tragedy that never ends.