“The bad thing of war is, that it makes more evil people than it can take away,” Immanuel Kant

 ‘Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind…’  This immortal phrase from the Preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, referring to the horrors of the second world war, now applies equally to the heinous acts of the Israeli war on the Palestinians.

Whilst never justifying Hamas’s attack on 7^th October 2023, watching Israel’s savage, disproportionate and cruel war on Gaza, is to watch evil being perpetrated, not just by Israel, but also the UK, US, and other wealthy countries. A powerful group of people, mostly men, have ganged up against an already subjugated and beleaguered people. Inflicting famine and starvation, destroying homes, hospitals, schools; killing children, women and the elderly. Those who’re supplying the bombs, arms and munitions are committing evil as much as the genocidal state. Impenetrable power disenfranchising all those calling for a ceasefire, for negotiations and a two-state solution. The sight of massive bombs blasting hospital beds and plastic tents, burning people alive, shows us the pure evil of this war.

In the book Evil, the writers, Subniv Babuta and Jean-Claude Bragard define evil as a choice: ‘…where there is any possibility that the suffering was unnecessary, and caused by human beings acting freely and rationally, that is to say, in the knowledge that the suffering being inflicted could be avoided. Thus the napalmed child in Vietnam, the Jewish internee in the concentration camp, the woman raped and murdered, … in short, the destruction of human beings by human beings.’

Marina Purkiss. Political commentator writing on X: ‘Who TF bombs a hospital? Sick children on UV drips burned alive in their hospital beds. I just cannot believe what we’re seeing. I knew there was evil in the world. I just never knew how much. My heart is broken.’

‘Hell is empty and all the devils are here.’ (The Tempest) Shakespeare.

Let’s remember that Palestinians didn’t build the concentration camps, Palestinians didn’t perpetrate the holocaust. And yet they were the ones who were dispossessed, driven from their homes at gunpoint, raped and abused. And since 1967 it’s Palestinians who’ve lived under the ruthless Israeli military occupation of Gaza, and the West Bank including East Jerusalem. Israel’s ‘policies of land confiscation, illegal settlement and dispossession, coupled with rampant discrimination, have inflicted immense suffering on Palestinians, depriving them of their basic rights….Israel’s military rule disrupts every aspect of daily life in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. It continues to affect whether, when and how Palestinians can travel to work or school, go abroad, visit their relatives, earn a living, attend a protest, access their farmland, or even access electricity or a clean water supply. …It means daily humiliation, fear and oppression. People’s entire lives are effectively held hostage by Israel…. Israel has also adopted a complex web of military laws to crush dissent against its policies,’

The worst thing is the sense of being a stranger in your own land and feeling not a single part of it is yours.’ Raja Shehadeh, Palestinian lawyer and writer

The protagonist in the novel Minor Detail by Adania Shibli, venturing a risky investigation has to circumvent restrictive military divisions and battle paralysing fear: ‘the longest trip I can embark on with my green identity card, which shows I’m from Area A, is from my house to my new job. …  as soon as I sit down behind the steering wheel of the little white car I’ve just rented, and turn the key to start the engine, what appears to be a spider begins to spin its threads around me, tightening them into something like a barrier, impenetrable if only because they’re so fragile. It’s the barrier of fear, fashioned from the barrier. The checkpoint.’

Although we in the UK, experience the Israel-Gaza war, through our tv screens, phones, and newspapers, our emotions and dread are viscerally affected. A friend commented on a growing feeling of despair amongst people. Upon reflection, we’ve enjoyed peace since the end of the last world war, a kind of golden age. Notwithstanding the imperfections of electoral systems, economic disparities, race and class divisions, we’ve possessed functioning infrastructure, an educational system delivering a measure of social progress, scientific advancement and artistic flourishing.

Normally I publish a blog every month, but have not done so for the last two months. All my life, I’ve believed passionately in the importance of art, ever conscious of its ancient roots, as if it’s a sustenance we need with our bodies and souls. Stories, myth and music have existed since the earliest days of humanity, since the time when our ancestors sat around camp fires reciting tales and legends. Art possesses the transformative capacity to reflect, question, and interpret our world in imaginative, intellectual and profoundly emotional ways. To gift us revelatory insights, enrich our hearts and evolve our understanding of existence; engender empathy and fill us with wondrous awe at the beauty it creates. Art enfolds philosophy and political vision, the ordinary and the metaphysical, connecting us to the daily grind and to dazzling dreams. Above all, confirming we are more than mere brutes, more than a set of animalistic needs, hormones and electrical impulses. Affirming our comprehension of and necessity, for the moral and ethical, for decency and dignity, justice and fairness.

‘Stories are the secret reservoir of values: change the stories individuals or nations live by and tell themselves, and you change the individuals and nations.’.
—Ben Okri, Nobel Prize for Literature

‘We have art in order not to die of the truth’. Friedrich Nietzsche

Nonetheless, for the last couple of months, my belief in the power of writing and the arts did indeed falter. Witnessing the unrelenting anguish and hardship, the deliberate and sustained violence unleashed on helpless people by those with terrible and mighty weapons, the daily and mounting death toll, seemed to annihilate the purpose of the arts, render it some fanciful extravagance enjoyed by those living safe, peaceful lives. The arising doubts and questions threatened to make redundant art’s contribution to social and moral discourse. What meaningful activity could it be to write some words or compose a piece of music when doctors were dying under torture, and when bullets were being fired into the heads of babies and children?  Who can forget the harrowing story of five year old Hind Rajab.

Civilisation is when civil power should prevail, rather than military power. The arrival of evil on an industrial-scale threatens and undermines civilisation; starting with the violations of International Law, the deliberate policy of starvation and famine, and the embargo on journalists and truthful reporting. Civilisation is a fragile construct, dependent on a network of laws, practices and beliefs, based on the recognition that human life is our most sacred possession. Together with dignity, worth, and the four freedoms: ‘the freedom of speech, the freedom of worship, the freedom from want and the freedom from fear’. Civilisation enshrines the ethos of mercy and compassion, the delivery of humanitarian aid, and the amelioration of human suffering. Above all, civilisation allows for the cessation of violence, enables negotiations, compromises, and the formulation of treaties.

The arts are integral to civilisation: free speech being its fuel, speaking truth to power its strength, the vision of a better world its engine; humour, wit and entertainment its sparkling components. My belief in the power of writing and the arts was shaken but didn’t die, and has now reasserted itself. Not due to any epiphany or enlightening moment of revelation but two important insights: the first being the need to use writing and the arts to continue objecting, to continue saying ‘No’ through words, song, poetry and all the other arts. For ‘No’ is the strongest word in any language, a human right possessed by every individual and all societies: a woman can say ‘No’ to any violence against her or a child can say ‘No’ to any unwelcome touch. Little wonder then, why women’s and children’s right to say ‘No’ has been negated, undermined, and so often silenced by traditions and cultures. In the public realm saying ‘No’ to apartheid, slavery, colonialism, has brought down empires and won freedom for oppressed people. At this immediate point in global history, saying ‘No’ to carnage, to endless killing, to the extermination of a people, is our duty, whether that ‘No,’ is heard or ignored. The power of reason, decency and humanity can only be exercised in that ‘No’, in that rejection, in that writing. Silence may be golden, but it’s never toppled any tyrants. The second insight was into myself. Having shut down the writing part of me, after several weeks I began to feel barren, as if a desert was growing within. I can’t be the first writer or artist to have such an experience, nevertheless it was instructive. A reminder that abandoning cherished beliefs and work bring no rewards, only nihilistic sterility. Whatever I write, or whatever another artist produces, we’re still adding to the moral and political discourse, whether directly or obliquely.

Art bequeaths human experiences between those who may be separated by thousands of miles, connecting people from different places across the globe, creating a bridge of affinity. Whilst writing this blog, I was in the midst of reading the novel Minor Detail by Adania Shibli, winner of an English PEN Award. Set in Palestine, written with exquisite restraint, I found myself transfixed by a passage describing a bombing incident. The protagonist, pretending to be Israeli is staying overnight in a settlement; the description of the bombing starkly illustrates the safe world of the settlement compared to the continually assaulted world of Gaza. ‘I am awoken in the hours before dawn, by the sound of a heavy explosion, followed a few minutes later by another, then another, and another. … I listen intently to the sounds of the shelling, and the heaviness of the sound translated my distance from the place being bombed. It’s far, past the Wall. In Gaza or maybe Rafah. Bombing sounds very different depending on how close one is to the place being bombed, or how far. The rumblings from this shelling aren’t strong at all, and the noise isn’t unsettling; rather it’s a deep heavy sound like a languorous pounding on a massive drum. And the bombs causing it don’t shake the building I’m in, even though the walls are thin and made of light wood; they don’t shatter the glass … And when I get out of bed and open the windows, the room isn’t filled with a thick cloud of shuddersome dust …I keep listening, my ears trained to the sound of repeated bombings, and I feel a strange closeness with Gaza, as well as a desire to hear the shelling from nearby, and to touch motes of dust from the buildings being bombed. The absence of dust brings an awareness of how profoundly far I am from anything familiar …’

As we watch our tv screens or read the papers, the unrelenting attacks continue; death, grief, destruction and despair continue. More children have been killed than in any other war this century. Crimes against humanity are mounting up. Arundhati Roy, awarded the PEN Pinter Prize 2024, delivered a blistering acceptance speech titled ‘No Propaganda on Earth can hide the wound that is Palestine.’ And named the British-Egyptian writer and activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah a Writer of Courage, who continues to be imprisoned in Egypt, whose letter from prison contained the following sentences: “[M]y words lost any power and yet they continued to pour out of me. I still had a voice, even if only a handful would listen.” Arundhati Roy replies: “We are listening, Alaa. Closely.”