Remembering our humanity is the only way out of the trenches of fear

Elizabeth was speaking of the prospect of hospitalised people, both children and adults, being unable to respond to the Israeli government’s 24-hour warning to evacuate the area. This is before the anticipated bombardment, in retaliation for the attack (and atrocities) from Hamas’s military forces, on October 7.

READ MORE: Humza Yousaf says 'no justification' for Israel's evacuation demand

El-Nakla’s question turns out to be my only entry point to the world’s most intractable (and worsening) geopolitical problem. Where are people’s hearts in this situation?

Or to be more technical about it: what are the nature of the deep emotions that drive such brutalities, long-standing and immediate, as well as the brutalities in return?

Everywhere we look, we see massive, near-fathomless trauma. Big-picture historians will tell you that Europe and the US’s long-term defence of the establishment of the state of Israel isn’t just a response to the Holocaust, but an atonement for their own long-standing cultures and history of antisemitism.

Social scientists will say that Israel’s collective conviction to never again let Jewish people go undefended, or be under existential threat, is a current of fear which will always be exploitable by its leaders and movements.

In her new book The Emotional Life of Populism: How Fear, Disgust, Resentment, and Love Undermine Democracy, the Israeli-French sociologist Eva Illouz calls this “securitism”. Securitism means “survival is the key modus operandi of the country”, and fear is the dominant social emotion.

In these crazed times, some cool sociology is most welcome. Illouz notes that Israel is the only nation “to have been the object of direct attacks by at least seven countries in a span of seventy years, to be engaged in an ongoing low-intensity military conflict with a population intertwined with its own, and to identify 20 percent of its citizens as aligned with (potential or actual) enemies.”

“Israel is thus entirely unique,” continues Illouz, “in that it is defined by its enemies outside its borders, by enemies close to its borders, and by the presence (real and imagined) of similar enemies inside its borders …This distinction – between friend and foe –is at the heart of the self-understanding of the Israeli polity”.

This is an unimaginably anxious structure of feeling for a people to hold. But it is exploitable by many parties.

The disgusting community murders from Hamas sit alongside the imagery of hang-gliding into Israeli territory, as well as bulldozers tearing down Gaza’s perimeter fences. Hamas strategists must know how much these spectacles of (violently) broached defences will trigger the Israeli government into panicked, vengeful overreaction.

Who knows what grander geopolitical gears are whirring behind this expectation?

They will also know, from experience, what Israel’s baked-in trepidation has wreaked on the peoples of the Palestinian territories. The accusations that Israel has been treating Gaza and the West Bank as “apartheid” zones – where its subjects are under constant surveillance and checkpoints, threat of dispossession of homes, property and enterprises, and unexpected attacks and assassinations – are well enough evidenced.

What seems startling, if some of the more elevated pundits are to be believed, is that this grinding, pulverising existence was regarded as a form of containment by Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government.

Experts discern a “divide-and-rule” strategy, in which Hamas’s existence was even historically favoured by Israel, as a way to split any prospect of a united front with the Palestinian representatives of the West Bank.

In recent months, Israel has been in constitutional turmoil. Israeli citizens took to the streets to protest Netanyahu’s blurring of religion and state and disempowering of the judiciary. However, there was barely any mention of the Palestinian situation during these actions.

Out of sight, out of mind.

Well, no more. But to bomb and raid all Gazans out of existence in response to the war crimes of the Hamas militia, under such constrained circumstances as to threaten (with mythological irony) the crime of genocide, seems like a response driven by the most elemental fears.

How might these fears be calmed, on all sides? It was instructive to read the response to October 7 from Israel’s foremost global public intellectual, the historian (and technological futurist) Yuval Noah Harari. The great advocate of the power of storytelling tries to tell a particular story here – mainly a failure to respond, on the Arab side, to some brief relenting of Israel’s fear reflex.

READ MORE: Humza Yousaf says he is 'powerless' to help family trapped in Gaza

The Oslo peace process of the 1990s is rendered by Harari as the time when Israel “gave peace a chance ... Maybe Israel’s peace offer wasn’t generous enough. But was terrorism [the bus and cafe bombings of the early 2000s] the only possible response?”

Similarly, Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in the mid-2000s is weirdly presented by Harari as a chance for Gaza to become a “Singapore of the Middle East”.

Even under partial blockade? The eventual response was Hamas establishing the strip as a terrorist base. “Another experiment ended in failure”, says Harari.

The moment is dark, so you can’t much blame me for reaching towards some idealistic and theoretical light. I come back to the concluding chapter of Illouz’s book, which is titled The Emotions of a Decent Society.

I do like her distinction between “solidarity” and “fraternity”, as the context that might produce those emotions (beyond fear and disgust).

Solidarity is fellow-feeling and togetherness, based on specific moralities, values, even ethnicity. But fraternity, writes Illouz, is universalist. “It derives from legal and moral frameworks which extend rights to powerless others, from viewing the state as guaranteeing the rights of everyone and not only specific groups”.

She sharply notes that “Israel is high on solidarity and low on fraternity ... 42 percent of Jewish Israeli citizens support the claim that Jewish citizens should have more rights than non-Jewish citizens.”

Illouz urges the return of the “Jewish universalism” that marked the commitment of Jews to republics like France and the US; it also compelled them to lead the socialist movements of the 19th and 20th centuries.

But we would certainly also wish a universalist response from the Palestinian (and the Arab) world too. Illouz sees the Israeli need for “an alliance between liberalism and dynamic Jewish religion”, as a re-start for universalist fraternity. You could also put “Islamic” in that sentence.

What might elicit such thinking and feeling, on all sides? I come back to my beginning, with the tearful, trembling video clip from the First Minister’s mother-in-law, a retired nurse from Dundee.

Firstly, for those of us who have sought to see Scotland entangled in the challenges of the world, who could have predicted this terrible instance? I wish Humza Yousaf and his leadership all strength in the coming days and weeks.

And secondly: there are plenty of heart-wrenching social media clips from this horror show that one might dwell on. But a gentle, elderly Scottish-Palestinian wondering “where is humanity” – at a moment where vested identities and vast traumas take us to the brink of a terrible event – may be a tiny step towards a spirit of fraternity.

Perhaps the only pathway out of these trenches of pain and fear.

Eva Illouz’s The Emotional Life of Populism: How Fear, Disgust, Resentment, and Love Undermine Democracy, is out now on Polity.