Joe Hildebrand: Israel, Hamas war, conflict in Ukraine and votes like the Voice give a lesson in history

Whether it’s Russia’s claim of historical right to occupy Ukraine or Israel and Palestine’s claims to the most hotly contested piece of land over the past three millennia, history is tearing humanity apart, writes Joe Hildebrand

I am obsessed with history: the stories, the lessons, the losses. History is what it

says it is: the story of humanity.

And the reason I love it so much is that nothing else makes me feel so connected to my fellow human beings.

But it doesn’t look like history is connecting us much right now.

Whether it’s Russia’s claim of its historical right to occupy Ukraine or Israel and Palestine’s claims to the most hotly contested piece of land over the past three millennia, history is tearing humanity apart.

We have wars being waged on the basis of historical rights and wrongs and we

even just had a referendum in Australia that put history into the future tense, with calls for citizens not to be “on the wrong side of history”.

And it is within that most tediously overused activist cliché that the truth of the matter

unwittingly lies.

An Israel solidarity vigil taking place at Sydney's Entertainment Quarter on Sunday. NCA NewsWire/ Dylan Robinson

Because while history may be many things, one thing it is definitely not is the past.

This is a fact that had not remotely formed in my mind until I heard a historian say it. In fact, he said, history and the past were two completely different things, often unrelated or at direct odds to one another.

The past is everything that has happened, whether we know it or not. History is the story we tell about the past, whether true or not.

Sometimes it’s propaganda or puff-piece hagiography and sometimes it’s incredibly strong and scholarly and sensible work. Sometimes it’s an arrowhead from which we try to deduce the life story of the skeleton lying next to it — although history and archaeology are also two different things.

Thousands turn out as a pro-Palestine rally takes place in Sydney's Hyde park. NCA NewsWire/ Dylan Robinson

And so when people talk about being “on the wrong side of history”, they’re not talking

about being on the wrong side of what actually happened — anti-Voice voters were clearly

on the right side of that — but that future generations will disapprove of them.

Point being, history is not something that happened long ago. History is something that is

done in the present — be it the present in which the Ancient Greek “father of history”

Herodotus is telling us about the even more ancient Egyptians in the 5th century BC or the

stories we are telling ourselves now.

And so why does this matter? Isn’t it all just semantics?

Probably not to the thousands dead in Israel, Gaza and Ukraine who have all been sent to

meet their respective makers in history’s name.

Because it is in history’s name that such wars are started and fought and in whose name

that innocent people die for what is often no reason in the present.

But just take the word “history” or “historical” in any of these conflicts and simply replace it with “past”. Suddenly the folly becomes clear.

If you claim a historical right to a piece of land or hold on power the clear implication is that the right is yours in perpetuity, because the history that is being told clearly confers upon you that right.

Russia's President Vladimir Putin claims a historical right to occupy Ukraine.

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky sees history differently. Picture: AFP

By contrast if you were to claim a past right it makes it equally clear that this is merely a

longing for something you once had but lost. Incidentally the Romans had a magnificently

specific word for this: desiderium.

More pertinently, it was the Romans who expelled the Israelites from Jerusalem in the 1st

century AD after yet another uprising, razing the Temple, rebuilding the city and renaming

the province Palestine.

Previously the Jews had also been expelled and enslaved by the Babylonians and the

Egyptians before finding their way back to the Promised Land.

A few centuries after the Roman rout the lands were taken by the armies of Mohammad

and his successors, who swept through the Eastern Mediterranean and North African

worlds, flipping them from Christian to Muslim, and later the Ottomans finished the job by conquering the Orthodox Byzantine Empire once and for all.

And in between those two seismic shifts the Western Christian crusaders came and caused

outrageous bloody carnage in the Middle East, both conquering and later losing Jerusalem

and also shamefully attacking their fellow Christians of Constantinople.

Augustus the first emperor of Rome and father of the nation. The Roman Empire expelled the Jews from Israel in the 1st Century AD

More latterly one could point to the declining Ottoman Empire’s decision to side with the

deranged German Kaiser Wilhelm II in the First World War, thus leading to the British

Mandate which ultimately enabled the modern state of Israel to exist after the greatest

planned genocide in human history.

And so the question of who has the right to rule and inhabit these holiest and most historic

of places is a patently absurd one.

People search through buildings, destroyed during Israeli air strikes in the southern Gaza Strip on November 13. Picture: Getty Images

The historical right depends only on who is writing the

history while the past simply depends on who had the biggest guns.

The inescapable truth is that the past is the past. It is done and cannot be undone. All that

matters is where we are now.

The problem is we have two sides in Israel and Palestine who not only cannot agree on the

past but cannot agree on the present.

Hamas, along with other extreme Islamist groups, does not acknowledge Israel’s right to

exist.

Smoke rises over northern Gaza and destroyed buildings on November 13, 2023 viewed from Sderot, Israel. Picture: Getty Images

That makes it impossible for Israel to negotiate a two-state solution.

Their utterly inhuman actions on October 7 only prove beyond doubt that no peace can be negotiated while they are in charge.

However Palestinian leaders also find it all but impossible to deal with Israel in good faith

while it allows or encourages its citizens to settle and encroach on Palestinian lands.

This terribly undermines the moral authority of a nation that holds itself as a bastion of

democracy and reason in the Middle East.

And so while both sides point to history for both legitimacy and grievance it is the here and

now that is holding them back.

They would do better to leave their differences in the past and chart a new course starting in the present.