The fate of two mil­lion blame­less, mis­er­able, often ter­ri­fied civil­ians in Gaza came down to  which vari­a­tion of words diplo­mats and politi­cians in safe places could agree on. The answer was: none. The next “nego­ti­at­ing ses­sion” should open with the words of the leader whose name is syn­ony­mous with wis­dom: “Words kill, words give life; they’re either poi­son or fruit – YOU choose.”

Since King Solomon won’t have a place at the nego­ti­at­ing table, maybe it would help if the next round of hag­gling and nit-pick­ing was done sit­ting in the open in the mid­dle of a refugee camp in Gaza. With the same ameni­ties and food avail­able as its res­i­dents are enjoying.
That sounds like a sim­plis­tic way to deal with what is any­thing but a sim­ple sit­u­a­tion. Unless you look at it from the point of view of the civil­ians of Gaza, whose needs have been reduced to sim­ple in the extreme: the bare basics of life in the form of water, food, san­i­ta­tion, med­ical sup­plies, a roof instead of a tent or plas­tic sheet­ing to live under and an assur­ance that they and their chil­dren won’t be air strike “col­lat­er­al dam­age” in the next five minutes.
Or through the eyes and tor­tured psy­ches of Israelis and oth­ers whose loved ones are held hostage by Hamas in who knows in what con­di­tions. Or if they’re still alive, come to that.
Instead, five days of pos­tur­ing, argu­ing, to-and-fro­ing and word games to keep the U.S. hap­py and fin­gers off the “VETO” but­ton pro­duced what, to be gen­er­ous, can be termed a “watered down” resolution.
The irony of the char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion was obvi­ous in a  Gaza hos­pi­tal vis­it­ed by a World Health Organ­i­sa­tion (WHO) emer­gency med­ical team, where patients “were cry­ing out in pain, but they were also cry­ing out for us to give them water” and med­ical staff were strug­gling to cope with “no food, no fuel, no water”.
As for Hamas, it’s a good bet that by now their poll num­bers – if they per­mit­ted such a lux­u­ry on their turf – would be worse than Pres­i­dent Joe Biden’s, cour­tesy of their posi­tion of  “a rejec­tion of nego­ti­a­tions while under fire”.
If the group’s lead­ers shout­ed that in the tun­nels they’re hun­ker­ing in, the echo they’d hear could eas­i­ly be mis­tak­en for the U.S. veto­ing a Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil res­o­lu­tion, or the Israeli gov­ern­ment trum­pet­ing its aim of com­plete vic­to­ry, like Joshua at the walls of Jeri­cho, but with less chance of attain­ing his lev­el of success.

                                   MEANWHILE 

Dur­ing the five days world pow­ers spent try­ing to hone a res­o­lu­tion to make it mod­est­ly eas­i­er for relief sup­plies to enter Gaza, the sit­u­a­tion in the belea­guered enclave reached the point where “the entire population…faces an immi­nent risk of famine”, and “only nine out of 36 health facil­i­ties are par­tial­ly functional…”.
Gaza is being twice reduced; phys­i­cal­ly to the rub­ble pro­duced by tens of thou­sands of tonnes of bombs, philo­soph­i­cal­ly to the reduc­to ad absur­dum of hag­gling over words which in terms of what is actu­al­ly need­ed, are lit­tle more than the sound of hand-wringing.
The mes­sage from the would-be Good Samar­i­tans is basi­cal­ly: so sor­ry for your trou­bles, inno­cent civil­ians, but you must under­stand we had to go through a lot of words to find a few that we might, or might not, veto or argue about some more.

                     SO WHO’S TO BLAME

Respon­si­bil­i­ty for let­ting those who can make a dif­fer­ence get away with what amounts to indif­fer­ence to suf­fer­ing lies in part with jour­nal­ists, and I say that as a mem­ber of the tribe. Too often words, from the apoc­a­lyp­tic to the mun­dane and ridicu­lous, are accept­ed under the excuse of fair­ness and objec­tiv­i­ty, rather than ques­tioned, or hav­ing their real mean­ing made clear.
Israeli politi­cians and mil­i­tary spokesper­sons decry Hamas as an “exis­ten­tial threat”, (cab­i­net min­is­ter Ben­ny Gantz: “The war here is for our exis­tence and for Zion­ism…”) which means there’s there is no room for com­pro­mise, or peace.
In fact, “exis­ten­tial” in a mil­i­tary con­text means “a threat to a people’s exis­tence or sur­vival”, which is a lot more applic­a­ble to Gazans than Israelis at the moment.
As for the lev­el of threat Hamas rep­re­sents, how can what con­sid­ers itself a resis­tance move­ment and is a ter­ror­ist organ­i­sa­tion by any def­i­n­i­tion, pos­si­bly over­come what is tout­ed as the most pow­er­ful army in the Mid­dle East and then take over a recog­nised, organ­ised, mod­ern state. Gaza isn’t a pow­er­ful armed nation. It’s not an even eco­nom­i­cal­ly viable one.
It ought to be a jour­nal­is­tic prin­ci­ple to nev­er report claims by politi­cians that are patent­ly and demon­stra­bly false or mis­lead­ing with­out labelling them as such.
Oth­er­wise, as the com­ic artist Walt Kelly’s char­ac­ter Pogo para­phrased a famous line from the War of 1812:  “We have met the ene­my and he is us.”
That includes you, UN word-hagglers.

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