Charles Wooley: We must not stumble blindly into another war
An internationally brokered peace settlement may be the best way to handle the explosive Middle East situation, writes Charles Wooley
Opinion
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I can’t ever hear the name Gaza, no matter what ghastly events occur there, without thinking of the line from the great English poet John Milton, “eyeless in Gaza”.
Milton, who was blind himself, based his poem Samson Agonistes on the old biblical story from the Book of Judges.
As the tale goes, the mighty Samson, betrayed by Delilah, is taken prisoner by the Philistines, who gouge out his eyes and set him to work as a slave, grinding grain. After a spell of self-pity about being “eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves”, he regains his faith in Jehovah and his old strength is returned.
He then uses his restored powers to demolish the pillars holding up the stone temple of the rival Philistine god Dagon. Samson brings the whole thing down, blindly killing himself and his enemies.
Familiar today? In the (un)Holy Lands what’s happening in Gaza now has been going on for thousands of years.
In current times the Bible and the Koran are possibly not the best advisers for settling modern territorial disputes.
You will have to work out for yourselves whether Samson is a template for Israel and the hostages, or for Hamas, whose cruel behaviour has just made the lives of long-suffering Palestinians so much worse.
We might know sooner than we wish.
The question now is whether this terrible conflict has the potential to inflame the whole Middle East and possibly lead to greater international conflict. Already there is some sabre-rattling from the Australian government. We are scarcely capable of defending our own patch, but apparently we love a stoush.
We charged in without much thinking in Iraq and Afghanistan. That worked out well, didn’t it?
The architect of those engagements, John Howard, stepped forward this week to condemn the Australian government’s “pussy-footing and lukewarm” approach to the pro-Palestinian demonstrations at the Sydney Opera House.
Yes, they did involve unacceptable antisemitism and, as Howard said quite reasonably, “You can have strong views ... but for people to invoke the memory of the most appalling crime in humanity, the extermination of six million Jews in gas chambers, is terrible.”
But should the NSW government have thrown fuel on the fire by lighting up the Opera House in the colours of the Israeli flag? There are about 100,000 Jews in Australia, but there are also 60,000 Arabs.
At the height of the so-called “troubles’’ in Northern Ireland we didn’t as a nation pick a side and provoke strife between our Protestant and Catholic communities. We argued for an internationally brokered peace settlement – which is sensibly what Foreign Minister Penny Wong has been calling for in Gaza.
The dispossession of Palestine has been a running sore in international politics since 1948. It has infected the whole of the Middle East. It may be insolvable, but the world should try.
Our Tasmanian Minister for Roads, Michael Ferguson, is hardly a Colossus of Rhodes, nor I think an international political expert. Should he have caused the Tasman Bridge to be lit up in Israeli blue and white? It was, he said, “in support of the ongoing situation in Israel after many lives were lost in the terrible atrocities over the weekend”.
Ours is a parliament of pygmies. It can’t even run the bus service in Lilliput, so what Fergo says doesn’t really matter a jot outside of Tasmania.
But according to the 2021 Census, there are about 5000 people in Tasmania’s Muslim community and 376 in the Jewish community. Were they consulted? Australia is a successful multicultural society, and in my experience as a reporter I find the immigrant populations often want to leave the dissensions and strife of the old countries back in the old countries. They don’t travel 20,000km for more of the same, stirred up by local politicians who can be relied on to be woefully ignorant of foreign politics.
What will happen now in Gaza is anyone’s guess. I have more than a passing interest in a negotiated peace because I am booked to go to Egypt at the end of the month.
I am to shoot a documentary on the greatest of the pharaohs, Ramses II. He could be a template for all the world’s dictators who followed him. He ruled 3300 years ago and was a brilliant administrator, an engineer and a general who bashed up the Nubians, the Hittites and the Libyans to create what was then the world’s most powerful empire.
But we know him best for the great vainglorious monuments he built to himself, including a huge statue with a plinth declaring:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings.
“Look on my works, ye Mighty and despair!”
In the poem Ozymandias, the English poet Percy Shelley supplies these concluding lines:
“Nothing beside remains.
“Round the decay of that colossal wreck,
“Boundless and bare
“The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
That’s a piece of eternal wisdom the great commanders, rulers and dictators of the Earth would do well to recite every day.
They build their empires on cruelty, on the blood and suffering of others, but in the end everything ends up in ruins.
Just like Gaza today.
Charles Wooley is a Tasmanian-based journalist
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