MICHAEL MORRIS: The insanity of threatening for peace - Business Day

Michael Morris

I have been vacillating for days between writing and not writing, for the third year in a row, about the continuing torment in the Middle East — essentially for not having anything different to say.

It’s not a question of taking sides. At the centre of all the awful things that have guaranteed this conflict its prickling status in the public consciousness are people like you and me — on both sides.

In my 2023 column on the topic, I drew on the insights of Thomas Friedman (not loved by the left or by the right, which seems a solid recommendation), who had cautioned in the New York Times only days earlier against allowing rage to shape strategy (“Pragmatism trumps idealist’s rage in times of bloodshed”, October 23, 2023).

His thinking was set off, he explained, by 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”.  Friedman said this caught his attention because “over the years I’ve learnt that four of the most dangerous words in the Middle East are ‘once and for all’.”  

I concluded by arguing that “the wisdom of setting the idealist’s rage aside is the prize that stands to reward the pragmatist”.  

Rage’s cost to ordinary lives

About a year later, recalling my column of 12 months earlier, I noted: “Nil joy arises from sensing that, nearly a year later, the case against enraged revenge is not merely intact but strengthened” (“Israel mirrors SA in justifying any means to achieve an ideal”, September 30 2024). 

The enduring commitment to waging war was “imperilling the prospects for millions of citizens on both sides who are poorly served by nasty, enraged ideologues”.

Typically, detractors will be content to dismiss all this as dovish whimpering and idealistic naiveté that realism apparently exposes not only as weak, but as submissive.

The seduction of simple plans

That the reverse is likely truer goes some way to explaining the almost magnetic appeal of the Trump plan for Gaza — which, I hate to say, brings to mind the illustrated guide airline passengers are invited to consult before take-off on how to disembark “safely” should the plane land in the sea, the tiny stylised wavelets economically representing what would surely always be a restlessly heaving ocean.

Every sane, humane person hopes for an end to the violence, the release of the hostages, a mutual acknowledgment of legitimacy, and a commitment to finding longer-term amity. But doing for people what you think is good for them is only ever good for them if they choose it.

The folly of forced peace

In a different context (though no aspect of human freedom is ever wholly unrelated), fellow Daily Friend writer Martin van Staden cautioned last week that “perfection is often the enemy of liberty”, adding: “Free societies are chaotic... This messiness fosters moral agency and the diffusion of existential risk.” 

The mistaken idea that you can threaten people into doing what you think is best for them is perfectly captured in a couple of lines that could have been lifted from a movie script rejected as a sure-fire dud.

“If this LAST CHANCE agreement is not reached, all HELL, like no-one has ever seen before, will break out against Hamas. THERE WILL BE PEACE IN THE MIDDLE EAST ONE WAY OR THE OTHER.” 

(I’m often torn between being surprised, and not being surprised, that Donald Trump is a property mogul.)

After all the death, destruction and pain, how perverse it is that the organisation that two years ago was going to be destroyed once and for all remains central to “peace in the Middle East, one way or the other”?

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

https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/columnists/2025-10-06-michael-morris-the-insanity-of-threatening-for-peace/