(In)security

I first drafted this essay in the period immediately after the murderous Hamas attacks in Israel on 7 October 2023 and in the early stages of the ensuing devastating assault on Gaza by the Israeli military. A year later, there is still no resolution; things have moved on, but have only made the situation worse. In the wake of the ongoing and multiplying conflicts there have been thousands of deaths, even more thousands of injured, even more thousands of mourners. Bitter recriminations of all kinds have followed and are still resounding around Israel and Palestine and throughout the world; antisemitism, anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian racism have escalated; and no-one – not Israel with its fortified borders, Palestinians in Gaza and the Occupied Territories, citizens of Lebanon or any of us anywhere else – is more secure. Indeed, the ongoing disaster simply spreads and people everywhere are affected. The words of the Hebrew-language poet Yehuda Amichai (1979) come to mind, from his poem “The Diameter of the Bomb”: “The diameter of the bomb was 30 centimeters”, the poem begins, but its effects radiate out to include the area where people are killed, the hospitals that deal with the wounded, the woman buried far away “in the city she came from” and the person who mourns her even farther away, which “includes the whole world in the circle”. The pursuit of violence makes everyone’s insecurity spread, creating waves of yet more insecurity and suffering, pursuing destruction, circulating it – the diameter of the bomb.

“Security” is the watchword of the Israeli state. Made insecure by the revelation that its vaunted intelligence and military machine could fail, as the Hamas terrorists flooded in and killed so many of its citizens and other people, its underlying insecurity produced an explosion of rage, a huge torrent of fury, the only aim of which seemed to be to destroy everything in its path. Is this where the obsession with security leads? One’s own security always at t