MICHAEL MORRIS: Israel mirrors SA in justifying any means to achieve an ideal - Business Day

Michael Morris
How to confront violent extremism and simultaneously contain the influence of heartfelt fury on any strategic response was the theme of a Business Day column I wrote last year, soon after the events of October 7 visited terror, heartbreak and rage on the Middle East. 

Nil joy arises from sensing that, nearly a year later, the case against enraged revenge is not merely intact but strengthened.

This was an argument made with almost uncanny aplomb in 2001, only hours after 9/11, by British commentator Simon Jenkins. As I noted in my column of October 23 2023, Jenkins wrote: “The message of [9/11] is that for all its horror ... [and it] is a human disaster, an outrage, an atrocity, an unleashing of the madness of which the world will never be rid ... it is not an act of war ... The cause of democracy is not damaged, unless we choose to let it be damaged. Maturity lies in learning to live, and sometimes die, with the madmen.”   

Being certain of what we want to protect from being damaged is always hardest in times of intense conflict. SA is not alone in having experienced first hand the danger of mistaking some imagined ideal objective as the justification for any means of achieving it; in history there is no end, no moment of completion, only the ceaseless moving forward, either reasonably well or badly.

It was this reckoning with how things actually work that caught my eye in New York Times columnist Thomas L Friedman’s piece of early October last year, cautioning against letting rage direct strategy. Friedman had just read of a young tank commander saying of the looming Gaza invasion that Israelis “are relying on us to defeat Hamas and remove the threat from Gaza once and for all”.  This stuck, Friedman said, because “over the years, I’ve learnt that four of the most dangerous words in the Middle East are ‘once and for all’.”  

That “all of the Islamist/jihadist movements ... have deep cultural, social, religious and political roots in their societies ... [and] access to endless supplies of humiliated young men, many of whom have never been in a job, power or romantic relationship [is a] a lethal combination that makes them easy to mobilise for mayhem”.

If it was almost impossible to eliminate them once and for all, they could “be isolated, diminished, delegitimised and decapitated … [but only with] patience, precision, lots of allies and alternatives that have legitimacy within the societies from which these young men emerge”.   

‘Demeaning’

Not everyone admires Friedman’s thinking. One of his fiercest (and most eloquent) critics, writer and Al Jazeera columnist Belén Fernández, wrote of him in February that “[there] are few American journalists who so transparently embody the US’s pompous and demeaning approach to Arab and Muslim lands and peoples”.

Wherever you stand, though, it is striking that in the same month as Fernández’s broadside, Friedman observed that “the whole Israel-Gaza operation is starting to look to more and more people like a human meat grinder whose only goal is to reduce the population so that Israel can control it more easily”.

In this, he warned, “Israel is imperilling decades of diplomacy to get the world to recognise the right of the Jewish people to national self-determination and self-defence in their historic homeland”. And, one must add, imperilling the prospects for millions of citizens on both sides who are poorly served by nasty, enraged ideologues.

Morris is head of media at the SA Institute of Race Relations

https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/columnists/2024-09-30-michael-morris-israel-mirrors-sa-in-justifying-any-means-to-achieve-an-ideal/