Joe Hildebrand: Is the rippling multitude of personal grief and trauma seem like a pathway to peace?

Death doesn’t debate, doesn’t protest – and this means the only pathway to life is by burying the differences that divide us and finding a way forward, writes Joe Hildebrand.

Death has no slogan, no cause except what kills you.

Make yourself a martyr and your death will be celebrated by those who might claim to love you. In truth it is self-evident they couldn’t care less.

The cause is all they care about and you are just human fodder for it. The ones who really care about you will be wracked with sorrow and grief.

Please forgive my dark and pretentious ponderousness. I’m writing this having just returned from Melbourne and the funeral of a man who was like a father to me in my youth. Minutes after the funeral I spoke to my editor, who told me pro-Palestinian protests were planned for the same day as the first anniversary memorial for the Israelis who had died on October 7.

And the day after that funeral I drove two hours to speak to two Israelis – one Jewish and one Arab – while both were under threat of death by bombardment and terror in Tel Aviv.

A house left in ruins after an attack by Hamas militants on a kibbutz, in which dozens of civilians were killed, on October 7, 2023. Picture: Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images

So death has been a pretty familiar companion this week, like a front seat passenger who constantly tells you you’re going in the wrong direction.

My de facto stepdad had a good life and a long one, and his death was no tragedy but there was plenty of grief all the same. And that is because death is the most acute personal event either imagined or real, literally the end of you as a person, at least in this mortal sphere.

It is also the worst possible thing to happen to those who love you the most. For any genuinely human being, it cannot be quantified or thought of in political or ideological terms. It can only be felt in terms of complete loss.

This has to be the starting point for any just war or revolution but it never is. Take the most just war in human history — that against Hitler in 1939. Forget the complexities and equivocation both before and after the war began, forget the dual invasion of Poland by both Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia: Can we really believe that every or any mother who lost their son to a random piece of shrapnel thought “Oh well, it was worth it”?

I’m not sure that we can. Good causes are what other people’s children die for. When one of our own does it is nothing more, or less, than an immense and crushing personal loss. Hitler and Stalin knew this themselves, as proven by the apocryphal saying that to kill one man is a tragedy, to kill a million is a statistic. Horrific but not wrong.

This is how we have to think about the horrors unfolding in the Middle East, and also the horrors we are importing into our own sleepy suburbs.

Protesters rally against NSW Police Commissioner Karen Webb who had lodged proceedings with the Supreme Court to stop pro-Palestine rallies in Sydney on Monday, October 7. Picture: NewsWire/Simon Bullard

Mossad’s pager attacks were ingenious in the extreme. I have no moral qualms in declaring the only good terrorist is a dead terrorist.

Yet this brilliant piece of intelligence is the epicentre of a campaign in which one million or more people in Lebanon have been displaced, notwithstanding those killed.

Again, forget for a moment the political, historical or moral righteousness of Israel’s campaign – which is in response to intense aggression and provocation — and just imagine the rippling multitude of personal grief and trauma. Does this seem like a pathway to peace?

How many grieving families will be persuaded of this righteousness? How many mothers and fathers will be convinced that their sons and daughters had to die because they were on the wrong side?

An ambitious guess might be zero.

Palestinians carry the body of a victim killed in an Israeli strike, in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip, on October 7, 2023. (Photo by SAID KHATIB / AFP)

So let’s get back to the brutal facts: Death doesn’t debate. Death doesn’t protest. We are all on the side of the people we bury until we are buried ourselves. And this means the only pathway to life is by burying the differences that divide us and finding a way forward. And if they can’t do it over there, we must at least ensure we do it over here.

That seemed like a hopeless cause just days ago, as police desperately sought to stop the pro-Palestine protest from going ahead amid fears it would ignite a tinderbox.

There now appears to have been an agreement reached in which the planned demonstration on the October 7 anniversary will not go ahead. It is a small but important sign that maybe humanity is finally being put before politics in this all too inhuman political war.

Don’t miss a special edition of The Real Story with Joe Hildebrand featuring Jewish Israeli and Arab Palestinian community leaders outlining their path to a two-state solution. Download now wherever you get your podcasts.