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Interview with social scientist Dr Gilad Ben-Nun

Why has the conflict in the Middle East escalated?

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We are continuing our series in which we give academics from various disciplines at Leipzig University the opportunity to speak on topics from research and teaching on the Middle East conflict. This time, we interviewed Dr Gilad Ben-Nun from the Global and European Studies Institute, who conducts research on the history of international law, migration studies and Jewish-Muslim relations. In the interview, Ben-Nun talks about the mistakes of Hamas and the Israeli government, the role of religion and why left-wing to far-left forces around the world deny Israel’s right to exist.

Zu sehen ist Dr. Gilad Ben-Nun
Dr Gilad Ben-Nun. Photo: Private

Dr Ben-Nun, you talk about three failures in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict since 7 October 2023. What are they? 

The three failures are: a failure of humanity on both sides, a failure of religion (or rather religious interpretation) and, above all, a colossal failure of leadership on both sides. Since time immemorial, Palestine / Israel has been the homeland of both peoples. Persecuted Jews, whether in Odessa in 1880, Germany in 1933, Iraq in 1950 or Ethiopia in 1984, could only flee to one place on earth that they could rightfully call home – the Holy Land. The fact is that persecuted Palestinians, whether from Syria in 2017, Kuwait in 1991, or today in 2024, have no other place to rightfully call home – except Palestine. 

The failure of humanity on both sides relates to the discourse of delegitimisation that is increasingly prevalent in both camps. The Hamas charter states that all Jews must leave Palestine or die. And the far-right Jewish-Israeli settlers have their unique and exclusive claim to the Holy Land of Israel. If Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s far-right finance minister, had his way, Palestinians should emigrate to neighbouring Arab countries.

In my eyes, it is a failure of humanity to delegitimise the existence of others in their home country. And young demonstrators chanting “From the river to the sea – Palestine will be free” on campuses in the US and even in Germany are committing the same evil of delegitimisation.

The failure of religion (in both Israel and Palestine) lies in the inability of religious leaders to practice religious tolerance – something that characterised the Middle East for centuries, especially when Christian dogma got out of hand in the early modern period.

The third, and in my view the worst, failure is that of the current leadership. Whether it is Netanyahu or Hamas’s Sinwar, both leaders only bring destruction to their people – and only for their own personal gain.

It has always been said that the Middle East is a powder keg. It only takes one person to strike a match and there is an explosion. Is the Netanyahu government’s action a (failed) attempt to put out fire with fire?

People are looking for a ‘good side’ and a ‘bad side’. There are no good and bad sides to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. There are simply ‘two bad sides’. The question of who is responsible for lighting the powder keg is based on the meta-logical assumption that one side has a greater interest in lighting it than the other. That is simply not the case here. Both are equally responsible.

Netanyahu did not trigger this round of the conflict. Hamas chose to rape and kill 1,300 Israeli men, women and children. All this, on what is without any doubt internationally recognised as Israel’s legitimate sovereign territory.

The real problem is one of time and pressure. When conflicts are allowed to fester over a period of 100 years, they develop into ever larger cycles of violence. The anger we observed in Gaza and the surrounding kibbutzim stems from the idea that Gazans have ‘nothing to lose’. The anger and humiliation of the Palestinians was reflected in the orchestrated campaign of mass rape and murder on 7 October 2023. And then came Israel’s harsh revenge.

The Palestinian-Israeli powder keg is, in fact, a cyclical structure. The leader of Hamas, Sinwar, cannot survive without Netanyahu – and vice versa.

enlarge the image: Zu sehen ist eine Landkarte des Gaza-Streifens vom Oktober 2023. Eingezeichnet sind Krankenhäuser, militärische Sperrzonen und die Stätten des Angriffs der Hamas-Terroristen in Israel.
Map first published in “Einsichten und Perspektiven”, Bayerische Zeitschrift für Politik und Geschichte. Credit: Peter Palm, Berlin

You also analyse how it came about that left-wing to far-left forces around the world deny Israel’s right to exist and side with Hamas. How did this happen??

In a recent interview with the well-known British television journalist Pier Morgan, singer Roger Waters (former lead singer of Pink Floyd) claimed that Israel had fabricated lies about Hamas’ rape campaign. When confronted with the UN reports proving the rape campaign and the International Criminal Court's requests for arrest warrants against Hamas leaders for this very reason, Waters insisted it was a fabrication. The philosopher Judith Butler, who has made a career out of defending women’s right not to be sexually essentialised, has made the same claim as Roger Waters.

In 1968, it was the French communist intellectual Maxime Rodinson who refused to accept that the Jewish people had any connection to the land of Israel. The fact that these people spoke Hebrew, or that Palestine is full of Jewish archaeological sites, or that there was a clear Jewish majority in Jerusalem in the Ottoman census of the early 19th century – all these facts were declared meaningless by Rodinson because they did not fit into his communist theory.

In many cases, people on both the left and the right do not want to be confronted with the facts, preferring to stick to their opinions. The problem with the left is that, unlike the right, it often makes global and universalist claims. Right-wing fascists don't really care about such claims, as long as they have their own turf. Left-wing extremists, on the other hand, all too often cloak their anti-Jewish and sometimes even anti-Semitic claims in a pseudo-universal, seemingly ‘objectivist’ veneer.  

Hamas denies Israel’s right to exist, sections of Israeli Jewry deny Palestine’s right to exist. Why?

Both believe that by demanding ethnic exclusivity they are strengthening their claim to their own homeland.

My main article has just been published in the highly acclaimed “The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Contemporary Migration”. In it, I emphasise that migrants are the most protected category in the Torah under Jewish law. And even if far-right religious Jews believe that the land belongs exclusively to them, they had a Jewish religious duty to annex the West Bank and grant full Israeli citizenship rights to the Palestinians there. This is exactly what Israel did to the Palestinians who remained in Israel after 1948 and were under military rule until 1966, when they were granted Israeli citizenship. If you really believe in religion that much, then it's not an à la carte menu. But if you misuse religion for your own secular, nationalistic emotions, then you are twisting your own religion to fit your exclusive nationalism.

Interestingly, an Islamist movement like Hamas quotes the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” in its charter (Art. 32). What does an Islamist movement have to do with a vile anti-Semitic text written in 1905 in Tsarist Russia? But if you want to manipulate Islam for your own nationalist agenda, anything goes.

If you misuse religion for your own secular, nationalistic emotions, then you are twisting your own religion to fit your exclusive nationalism

Dr Gilad Ben-Nun

With the exception of Iran, the other Arab states are conspicuously reluctant to support Hamas. What is the position of Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, for example?

These neighbouring countries are about the only ‘responsible adults’ in the region. Morocco could also be added to this list of countries working for the better. All of these states, with the exception of Egypt, the seat of the Arab League, are ‘sherif’ kingdoms, that is, kingdoms that trace their royal lineage directly back to the Prophet Muhammad. I think these states feel a real sense of responsibility and duty to improve the West Asian region.

And since there is so little hope in this region at the moment, they are the only ones who provide any form of optimism for me. 

What will it take for a solution to the war-like situation between Hamas and Israel?

The only possibility is that the international community manages to persuade both sides to reach a compromise. The situation reminds me strongly of the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s: without the immense pressure during the Dayton Agreement and later during the NATO mission in Kosovo (1998–1999), there would have been no end to the violence.

It will take a lot more intervention from above and hard pressure to get both sides to compromise, because neither side is acting with any serious degree of reason anymore.

Dr Gilad Ben-Nun researches and teaches at the Global and European Studies Institute at Leipzig University and at the Research Centre Global Dynamics (ReCentGlobe) on the history of international law, migration studies and Jewish-Muslim relations. He completed his habilitation and doctorate at Leipzig University and his studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
 

He has written a guest article on current developments in the Middle East conflict for “Einsichten und Perspektiven”, the Bavarian journal for politics and history.