By Bert Hetebry

I was sent this quote by Bertrand Russell this morning:

“When you hate, you generate a reciprocal hate. When individuals hate each other, the harm is finite, but when great groups of nations hate each other, the harm may be infinite and absolute. Do not fall back upon the thought that those whom you hate deserve to be hated. I do not know whether anyone deserves to be hated, but I do know that hatred of those whom we believe to be evil is not what will redeem mankind.” (Bertrand Russell, Human Society in Ethics and Politics (1954) Part 1. Ethics Ch.VI: Scientific Technique and the Future, p. 271).

Does any one deserve to be hated?

Russell starts with hatred on a personal level. People hate others, people who used to love each other, marry, have children… and divorce for any number of reasons, some people can continue having a reasonable relationship with divorced partners, other cannot forgive, cannot get past the hurt and ensuing hatred of a marriage breakdown. The scars penetrate the fabric of the rest of the family. But life outside those relationships continues, friends, neighbours, work continues as though nothing has happened, the hurt caused by hatred is confined to those directly involved.

In work and social setting, dispute resolution ensures that the workplace and social environments remain friendly. If there can be no resolution, people are ‘moved on’ in one way or another.

We have choices to make at times of crisis, whether a small crisis between friends, differences over creeds or culture, the things we allow to divide us do not need to divide us.

Religion can be a great divider as history has repeatedly shown us: fractures within churches, such as the Reformation of the 16th century, or the Inquisition, to ensure that religious doctrines and creeds are not abused with severe punishments for those who flagrantly stepped outside the established orthodoxy, and even today we see people expelled from church groups for not living within the prescribed rules.

Interpretation of sacred texts where one understanding takes precedence over others, based often on the more powerful, such as a large denomination, such as the Catholic Church or the fractures within the various splinter groups or sects.

Or when one religion takes on the mantle of a state religion, as we have seen with Christianity in Europe through the Middle Ages and into last century, Islam in the Middle East with Iran as a Shia dominated nation, conflict between Shia and Sunni in Pakistan and Iraq, the dogmatism of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Sunni in Saudi Arabia, Hindu Nationalism in India. Each state is dominated or strives to dominate its chosen creed and discriminates against others, in India that is the exclusion of Islam and Sikh, and Sikh separatists seeking independence from India for the Punjab to separate from Hindu control.

Religious control ends in bloody battles and extreme forms of punishments, hatred because others do not believe what ‘I’ believe, in other words, a form of thought control which was also evident as political dogma in the USSR and China during the darkest times of Communism under Stalin and Mao.

Race divides when people of one race choose to hate those of another race, when the colour of skin or language difference become a symbol of hatred. When people are denigrated because of difference, most notably when people are enslaved to do tasks that are beneath the dignity of the slave master, such as the black birding of Pacific Islanders to harvest sugar crops in Queensland in the late 1800s and early 1900s, or those kidnapped from Africa and sent to the Caribbean and later the Virginias and the southern states of the US to grow tobacco and cotton; tasks not fit for the ‘white man’.

And race still divides. I was talking with friends and they claimed not to be racist, until challenged that because they are part of the white majority, they did not really understand how racism manifests itself in everyday life when you fall outside the majority. When you are Asian or African or even a First Nations person, racism is an every day experience. Systemic racism includes treatment in the local supermarket where First Nations people are carefully monitored, or where for some reason or other the police decide to pull the car over for a traffic stop because the driver is coloured. Or people appear to be invisible when it comes to being served in a service environment. An Asian lady serving me at the local library the other day agreed with my assertion but said that for me to experience racism I should try living in an Asian country. Or an African country.

Who deserves to be hated?

Currently there are over 117 million refugees in the world, that is about four times the population of Australia. Included are about 6 million Palestinians, many of whom are in refugee camps in Lebanon and Jordan and have been for generations (since 1948 in Lebanon and 1967 in Jordan).

Refugees have no rights, they are dependent on handouts from Red Cross, UNHCR and other welfare agencies. They are denied citizenship, they are effectively no-bodies. Recent elections in Europe have seen a hardening of heart, a refusal to accept refugees into a number of nation states, the Presidential election campaign in the US has illegal immigration high on the issues chart, here in Australia we send anyone trying to arrive illegally off to a prison island, never to be seen on Australian soil. Refugees from Gaza are not allowed in for fear of bringing their fight to our shores. We fear the hate they will bring, but do they bring hate or are they seeking a safe place to live?

At a time of geopolitical conflict we are in essence told to take sides, that one side has the right to kill but the other side does not. The division may be based on political ideology, as during the Cold War period where there were communists and the west. Or with the decline of the British Empire during the 1950s and 60s with ‘liberation’ movements in Malays and Kenya, the other side, the freedom fighters were terrorists, outlaws, criminals. And isn’t that still the same? We are told who the terrorists are, if and when we demonstrate we are told effectively which side we should be on. Do not wave Hamas or Hezbollah flags, they are terrorists and we cannot support terrorism.

Hamas and Hezbollah are terrorist organisations. I know this because it is a repeated refrain whenever the crisis in the Middle East is raised. There is never the question of why they are deemed to be terrorist organisations, nor what led to them becoming such organisations in the first place. That seems to be a bridge too far, just accept our word for it, Hamas and Hezbollah are terrorist organisations.

Both organisations have their origins in the defence if Palestinians as they are marginalised and dehumanised.

Do Palestinians deserve to be marginalised and dehumanised?

Israel has the right to defend itself. I do not dispute that at all.

What defines the State of Israel as proclaimed in United Nations Resolution 181, adopted on 29 November 1947?

The resolution aimed to:

“… divide Great Britain’s former Palestinian mandate into Jewish and Arab states in May 1948 when the British mandate was scheduled to end.”

The settlement of displaced Jews in Israel/Palestine was determined by the UN but was never really negotiated. Palestine was a British protectorate, a colonial outpost and whoever came there or lived there did so at the behest of the British. I guess a bit like when Captain Cook raised the British ensign on Possession Island, so many years ago, claiming half the land mass of Australia for the British crown. The people who lived on the big island had no say, nor did they when the British decided it was a good place to make an outdoor prison for the desperately poor British people who dared to steal a rabbit or a fish from the King’s forest.

As for the settlement of Jews in Israel/Palestine, negotiation has been with no preconditions from the Palestinians. They were merely there being protected until the British left. Can you really call that ‘negotiations’?

We as individuals can make choices: we can choose to hate or we can choose not to hate; we can choose instead to respect the rights of others.

We can choose to accept others, whether the others are of a different faith-based creed, a different ethnicity, a different language group or holding a different political view, or we can choose to reject others.

As we see the escalation of the conflict in the Middle East, and conveniently ignore the other conflicts around the globe as we see the anniversary of the beginning of this conflict, but deny that the seeds of the conflict sprouted behind the barriers that have served to imprison over 2.3 million Palestinians for no other reason than they are Palestinians, that the discrimination and marginalisation has been going on for 76 years, we may not fly the flags of Hamas or Hezbollah, they are terrorists… (or are they freedom fighters?)

I choose not to hate. I strive to respect the humanity of all peoples. and in this conflict that is the right to exist for Israelis, for Palestinians, for Iranians, for Lebanese, for those who are Christians, or Muslims, Judaism or whatever faith they choose to believe, even those who say there is no god. I respect their humanity and their right to live in peace.