David Dodwell

Outside In | Israel-Hamas war reminds Asia of threats to peace

Israel thought it had dealt with the Palestinian problem. There are lessons here for the handling of Myanmar’s Rohingya, Indian Kashmir, and Taiwan and Xinjiang

The relentless repetition that the Hamas attack was unprovoked, in contradiction to decades of bad blood, is also a reminder to guard against cognitive bias

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David Dodwell

Published: 1:30pm, 13 Oct 2023Updated: 4:11pm, 13 Oct 2023

I have tried to justify why I should not examine the recent appalling events in Gaza. So much has been written, so many commentators have immeasurably more knowledge on the long and tortuous story of Palestine since the creation of Israel, the tragic events are far away, with few direct implications, and certain global problems are intractable and will remain so.

But I’m convinced that this distant Armageddon is not so distant after all, and there are lessons for us here in the Pacific.

It is easy to be caught up in the heart-wrenching awfulness. As Edward Luce wrote in the Financial Times: “It is hard to hear stories of slaughtered infants and not succumb to blind vengefulness.” But while we revile terrorists and terrorism, we also need to understand its roots if we are ever to effectively staunch them.

That means going back to May 14, 1948, and the establishment of the state of Israel. This was based on UN Resolution 181 – also known as the partition resolution – which proposed dividing Palestine into two separate territories – Israel and Palestine.

It is worth remembering that Palestinians to this day talk of the “Nakba” (“catastrophe” in Arabic): the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. As the United Nations records: “Before the Nakba, Palestine was a multi-ethnic and multicultural society.”

It is important to go back to 1948 because of the astonishing and relentless repetition by Western officials and media of a single word: unprovoked. The White House said: “The United States unequivocally condemns the unprovoked attacks by Hamas terrorists against Israeli civilians.”