Why does Israel occupy such a strategic and almost obsessive place in the global political imagination?
The mere mention of the state now reliably produces fury. On one side are staunch defenders of Jewish nationalism. On the other are equally committed defenders of Palestinian sovereignty. Buried beneath these competing national projects is something deeply troubling: the near erasure of the ordinary human being, the child in the street who has not yet learned what a “nation” is, let alone chosen one.
I keep returning to a disquieting question: how did the ordinary Jew move from being the paradigmatic victim of the Holocaust to facing an almost similar hatred from the likes of Hamas, while also being accused of meting out violence against Palestinians? How did a historically persecuted people, marked for annihilation within living memory, become framed, often simplistically, as the singular aggressor in the Middle East? Surely, there must be more than meets the eye.
To even pose these questions is to invite denunciation.
Adopt a gentler tone and you are easily branded a Zionist sympathiser, as if Zionism is a poisonous ideology. Herzl would be turning in his grave.
Use harsher language and you are quickly accused of antisemitism, almost as if you need to agree with everything that is pro-Zionism.
This suffocating binary has produced a one-dimensional global conversation about Israel and Palestine, in which moral curiosity is treated as betrayal.
In much of the West, the dominant refrain remains that Israel has an unquestionable right to exist and defend itself, a position shaped not only by geopolitics but by the enduring shadow of Auschwitz, a historical rupture that still informs Jewish collective consciousness.
For many Jewish Israelis, the promise of “never again” is not rhetorical. It is existential. It is bound to the belief that Jewish vulnerability, once ignored by the world, must never again depend on the goodwill of others.
In more radical corners of what we loosely call the “East”, the counter-refrain is that Palestinian sovereignty trumps all other concerns, and that resolving the “settler question” of Jewish Israelis, frequently reduced to the “apartheid state of Israel”, would solve most of the region’s problems. Yet this framing often underestimates, or dismisses entirely, the depth of Jewish historical fear, and the sense that threats, when articulated explicitly, must be taken literally.
Here, the rhetoric and actions of Hamas matter profoundly.
When Hamas invokes the destruction of Israel or carries out attacks deliberately targeting civilians, many Jewish Israelis do not hear abstract resistance. They hear echoes, however imperfect, of a past in which calls for Jewish extermination were not theoretical but operational. The fear is not only of violence, but of repetition. The memory of Auschwitz is not a distant historical reference. It is a lens through which present threats are interpreted, often with visceral immediacy.
Both positions contain partial truths, but both are also temptingly simple. They are the abstractions of non-participants, often articulated from safe distances where no sirens sound and no drones circle overhead.
I recognise this distance in myself, sitting on a couch in Johannesburg while a Palestinian child roams the streets of Ramallah with nothing on the table at home. The same distance exists in the palatial suburbs of Cape Town, where residents debate the conflict over good wine while a Jewish family in a kibbutz near the Gaza Strip lives with air-raid sirens, bomb shelters, and the lingering trauma of 7 October 2023, a day that confirmed, for many, their deepest fears about vulnerability in a hostile region.
The well-fed South African can become a grand theorist of other people’s suffering, drawing confident conclusions about lives they will never have to live.
The attacks of 7 October and the subsequent war cannot be written out of the story. That day is now etched into contemporary history, not only as an episode of violence but as a psychological rupture for Israeli society. It reinforced a long-standing belief: that threats to Jewish life can escalate with terrifying speed, and that complacency carries existential risk.
Yet if we treat 7 October as the alpha and omega of understanding, we collapse a century of dispossession, memory and fear into a single day. We allow a complicated history to be narrated almost exclusively through the lens of immediate retaliation and security doctrine.
What troubles me most is how thoroughly nationalism has colonised the moral imagination. Many people have consumed so much nationalist discourse that they can no longer think beyond it. They do not think as humans. They think as labels assumed after birth: Jew, Arab, Israeli, Palestinian, Muslim, Christian, “the West”, “the East”. Social media amplifies this, rewarding loyalty to camps and punishing nuance. The incentive is not to understand, but to perform allegiance.
Yet no one is born with a bigoted identity. If you placed newborns together in a single ward, you could not tell who is the Jewish baby, who the Arab baby, who the white, black or “coloured” baby. They are, simply, babies.
Perhaps we need to become like babies again, before the flags and slogans, if we hope to talk honestly about this conflict. That is not a call to be naïve. It is a call to remember that the human comes before the identity card.
From Auschwitz to 7 October, from the gas chambers to the dense ruins of kibbutzim, history has done something cruel to our sense of proportion. History’s cruelty also visited the poor baby in Gaza whose nursery school was used as a shield by Hamas. The net result was the annihilation of her immediate environment in the ensuing search-and-destroy operation. She was displaced by a war of which she has no consciousness.
The memory of Jewish suffering in Europe has often been mobilised to justify near-total security claims by the Israeli state, but it is also undeniably a memory rooted in real catastrophe, one that continues to shape how threats are perceived and prioritised.
Conversely, the image of Palestinian suffering is sometimes mobilised in ways that risk erasing Jewish vulnerability, including the persistence of anti-Jewish hatred and the explicit threats posed by groups such as Hamas.
Each side reaches instinctively for the heaviest historical labels, “Nazi”, “apartheid”, “genocide”, to win the moral argument by analogy rather than by engagement. The result is a competition of traumas in which the point is not to prevent suffering but to establish whose suffering counts more.
Lost in this competition is the ordinary life: the shopkeeper in Tel Aviv who wants his children to grow up without sirens or the fear of rockets, the mother in Rafah who wants hers simply to survive the night, the Jewish student in Cape Town who now talks about walking to campus under police escort, the Palestinian exile in South Africa refreshing news feeds in fear.
Nationalism insists these people be treated as representatives of camps. Humanity insists they be seen as people first, with names, families and small, fragile dreams.
South Africans should recognise these dynamics.
We know how the language of “security” was used to rationalise structural violence, and how calls for liberation could sometimes slide into dehumanising rhetoric. We also know that a political settlement, however imperfect, required acknowledging that more than one history of pain was present in the room.
Our experience does not map neatly onto Israel-Palestine, but it should make us suspicious of narratives that demand total innocence for one side and total guilt for the other. The ghosts of our own past should caution us against easy analogies and easy certainties.
At times I feel that all that is left is to write lamentations, like the prophet Jeremiah, over Jerusalem, the city that has been battered so often that it seems profaned by our bloodshed. Yet for billions of Christians, Jews and Muslims, it remains a sign that God has not entirely abandoned history.
The more pressing question is whether we, in our fear and nationalism, have abandoned each other.
To trace the line from Auschwitz to Israel to Gaza is to follow some of the darkest threads of modern history. But that line does not have to end in permanent war. The child who cannot yet pronounce the word “nation” is still capable of friendship. The challenge for our sophisticated adult world, from Johannesburg to Jerusalem, is whether we can unlearn enough of our bigotry, our selective memories and our appetite for simple stories to think, again, as humans first.
Until then, the holy city will continue to weep, along with the children who never chose the flags that fly over them.
