We must look to the past in order to end the Israel-Hamas War

To stop further violence and destruction, we should look to two world leaders and one meeting, says Joe Hildebrand.

OPINION

In 1961 US president John F Kennedy attended his first summit with the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.

Kennedy’s advisers had one word of warning for the newly elected president: Whatever you do, they said, don’t talk about ideology.

Needless to say, that is exactly what Kennedy did. And so he ended up entangled in a pointless argument about communism and capitalism in which Khrushchev — who like all socialists was a master of pointless theoretical debate — comprehensively thrashed him.

“He just beat the hell out of me,” a shaken JFK later said.

A year later came the Cuban missile crisis, the only point in history at which the human race came close to genuine and complete annihilation.

Once more Kennedy and Khrushchev faced off against each other, except this time instead of pointscoring on political theory the survival of humankind was at stake.

Suddenly, in this moment of existential dread, ideology became irrelevant. All that mattered was the outcome.

Nikita Khrushchev and John F. Kennedy at a summit in 1961 Picture: Stanley Tretick/Look Magazine/Wikimedia Commons

This could not matter more than it does today. The war in Israel and Gaza, which threatens by each minute to escalate, is one crippled by ideology to the exclusion of all hope.

The death toll on the ground is openly hideous but there is also a deeper insidious creep of aggression into nations and communities who ought to be — and once were — at peace.

Jew-hating has a long and sad history. Ever since the Romans razed Jerusalem after one too many uprisings almost two millennia ago, innumerable regimes have purged and punished Jews. Most, to our shame, were Christian.

Ultimately came the Holocaust, although Jewish people will often make the point that Israel didn’t happen because of the Holocaust; the Holocaust happened because there wasn’t an Israel.

Either way, Israel happened. And it’s pretty clear a lot of Arabic people, be they Palestinian and otherwise, were pretty pissed off about that.

And so there was a war and Israel won. And then there was another war and Israel won. And then another and another and then this one.

The moral of this story is that Israel is very good at winning wars.

The problem is it can’t win the war it really wants to, which is the one for the hearts and minds of the global community.

Israeli forces during the First Arab-Israeli War in 1948. Picture: Keystone/Getty Images

The UN and its various dubious member countries see Israel as an intensely fierce country. That may well be true but what they seem to fail to see is that it is also an intensely fearful one.

And it is this anxiety that fuels its ferocity. Any threat to its existence — and almost everything in its orbit is a threat to its existence — is met with a full-frontal assault because it fears the alternative is annihilation.

This mindset is either not fully understood and appreciated by other nations or they simply don’t care. Depending on the country, I suspect it is both.

Israelis are aggressive because they fear external forces are trying to eliminate them — and both the present and the past has given them ample reason to believe it.

And this brings us back to the precipice. The conflict between Israel and Palestine is not — or at least does not need to be — an End of Days holy war between Muslims and Jews.

It should be, like all things, a practical matter.

The problem is these practical issues cannot be resolved because of the nasty ideology and rhetoric that always swamps them.

Palestinian complaints about excessive water and power costs fall on deaf ears because they are dressed in the language of apartheid. Palestinian complaints about travel restrictions are literally blown up every time there is an attack at a checkpoint.

And all Palestinian grievances have now been cast in the shadow of the October 7 attack by Hamas, which was unprecedented in its scale and depravity.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu needs to look past ideology to resolve the ongoing conflict, says Joe Hildebrand. Picture: Abir Sultan/Pool/AFP)

Likewise Israel cannot claim the moral high ground if it sanctions illegal settlers on Palestinian soil or excessively targets civilian areas — even if Hamas is just as much to blame for the latter.

Thus all the real troubles behind this conflict are both cloaked and thwarted by the ideological war being waged at the forefront. Practical solutions that could be offered by either side are made impossible because each side doesn’t accept the other’s right to exist.

The most obvious example is the clichéd and sinister catchcry of Palestine “from the river to the sea” — which would quite literally wipe Israel from the map — but Israeli settlers on Palestinian lands are also effectively denying their right to be.

The basis of both claims vacillates somewhere between history and divine right and both of those foundations are spurious and stupid.

In the end it wasn’t ideology that stopped the Cuban missile crisis. With both world leaders facing planetary annihilation it didn’t matter who had the better theoretical claim or history on their side.

All that mattered was that the apocalypse was avoided. All that mattered was finding a way out.

And so JFK and Khrushchev did a secret deal: The Soviets would withdraw their fleet to Cuba and in return the Americans would later quietly withdraw their nuclear missiles from Turkey.

The rightness or wrongness of communism and capitalism or east and west had nothing to do with it. In fact it couldn’t have anything to do with it because the crisis would never have been resolved if it did.

This remarkably clear-eyed moment literally restored world peace and there is no reason why it couldn’t bring peace in the Middle East today.

But that can never happen unless both sides truly want it.