This weekend I have an essay in the Financial Times Magazine riffing on the familiar protest chant, “No Justice, No Peace”, which is being heard again as people take to the streets to demonstrate against Israel’s destruction of Gaza
The link is here. The key point is this
The FT turned off comments for the essay which was probably wise but there were some thoughtful disagreements with my thesis in social media.
Sam Zarifi, executive director of Physicians for Human Rights, wrote
“Couldn’t disagree more. The experience of multiple failed ‘peace’ processes suggests that justice and truth telling are essential for sustainable peace. The model of ‘absolute justice’ here isn’t espoused by anyone involved in transitional justice processes.”
Faisel Sadiq, a London-based barrister, wrote:
“Perfect restitutionary justice and peace are seldom compatible. But we can still seek to achieve some modicum of restorative justice as part of any peace process. Apologies, Truth Commissions, financial compensation, can all go a long way to reinforcing peace by giving closure.”
Sadiq’s suggestions included, in addition to Israel publicly acknowledging the Nakba and UK admitting fault in its stewardship of Mandatory Palestine,
“The UK and Israel working together with Palestinians to create a development fund to build a viable Palestinian state - with cultural and educational exchanges could help slowly shift the Palestinian gaze from victimhood towards trying to achieve a prosperous future. All of these steps would not see the Palestinians get the true restitutionary justice so many want (but which is frankly unachievable), but this restorative justice could help build hope and the idea of a better future that could reinforce peace whilst not threatening Israel or its Jewish identity.”
At the end of the essay, I note that while the war in Gaza will stop, simply because all wars end eventually, the justice that both sides crave will not make for permanent peace because the justice that would satisfy the two sides is not tempered with mercy. It is more akin to vengeance.
I was alluding to Portia’s speech about mercy in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.
Shakespeare was an anti-semite. How could he not be? Englishmen in the Elizabethan era thought worse of Jews than whites in Mississippi thought of their Black neighbours in the Jim Crow era.
But unlike in Mississippi, it was not a hatred born of proximity. The Jews had been expelled from England 300 years before Shakespeare was born. When he invented the character of Shylock he was working from the worst caricatured prejudices about them.
To be clear about what the playwright was offering his audience, the play, as published in the first quarto of 1600, is partially subtitled: “with the extreme cruelty of Shylock the Jew towards the said merchant, in cutting a full pound of his flesh … “
When performed properly, the play is uncomfortable to watch for Jews and non-Jews alike. In 1788, in Enlightenment Berlin, a production of the Merchant, included a prologue, not written by Shakespeare, spoken by the actor playing Shylock who came onstage to apologize to the audience in advance for some of the scenes he would have to enact. He then invoked the name of Berlin’s best known Jewish resident, “wise Moses Mendelsohn,” as a more truthful representative of what Jews were really like.
Of course, Shakespeare was also a God-touched genius and when he created Shylock, underneath the caricature he gave him deep humanity and created a character whose blind hatred of Christians is very much the product of the hatred Christians have always shown him.
Scene by scene, intentionally or not, Shakespeare leads his audience towards an empathic understanding of Shylock and all Jews. They are men, not devils. They bleed and laugh and also feel the most primal passion,
“And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will remember you in that.”
The play builds to the judgment scene. Shylock demands justice. There is a contract, it is valid. Antonio has forfeited his loan. He demands judgment in his favor and the pound of flesh he is owed, as nominated in the contract.
Shylock is offered double the monetary value of his loan to Antonio if he drops his demand for a pound of the merchant’s flesh. The moneylender insists on the lawful fulfillment of the contract. The Duke of Venice asks him,
“How can you hope for mercy, rend’ring none?”
This introduces the idea of mercy as being something on a higher plane than the law, more divine than human.
Shylock responds with a blunt analogy. You have slaves, he reminds the assembly, human beings, yet you treat them no better than dogs and donkeys. Don’t presume to speak to me of mercy.
Then Portia arrives, disguised as the young judge Balthazar, and speaks the most psalm-like speech in Shakespeare. The words—blessing, mercy, might, God, salvation, justice—and the imagery of water, all could have come from the psalmist himself.
“The quality of mercy is not strained,/It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven/Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest: …”
Each phrase is a calling to aspire to the highest levels of human behaviour and an entreaty to use power with wisdom. Mercy is “mightiest in the mightiest” it sits above temporal power. “It is an attribute to God himself.”
Finally,
“We pray for mercy/And that same prayer doth teach us all to render/the deeds of mercy …”
But Shylock is unmoved. He is too weighed down by hatred. This is a tragic flaw and it leads to hubris and personal destruction.
Let me make a midrash from Shylock’s story. A midrash is a biblical exegesis, the bedrock of the Talmud, but I am not religious and these are secular times so instead I will use Shakespeare instead of Scripture.
In the forever conflict with Hamas, the burden is on Israel—more mighty than the mightiest—to put aside its hatred, to overlook the wrongs that have been done, and show mercy.
How hard this is for Israelis, still dealing with the murderous atrocity committed by Hamas on October 7th. How hard it is for Palestinians and their supporters to extend the same merciful understanding to Israelis, to even acknowledge their rights to exist in the land both claim as theirs.
Israeli society is the product of several millennia of displacement, injustice and genocidal hatred. The personal effect of this history is incomprehensible to anyone who wasn’t born Jewish. But clearly this history has eroded Israeli society’s ability to show mercy and so it continues to mercilessly mete out what it considers a just response to October’s Hamas attacks.
The midrash I offer to Jews is that when world opinion changes—and it will, Jewish history teaches us that will happen—then the fate of Shylock might ultimately come to Israel: cast out, friendless, with no one to show mercy when Israel has the greatest need of it.
The midrash I offer to Palestinians and their supporters is to stop emulating Shylock and supplant your earthly wish for vengeance and return to a place that disappeared in 1948. Replace it with the wisdom of Anas ibn Malik, companion of the Prophet, in the hadith Qudsi, emulate God in heaven and extend mercy and forgiveness to Israelis.
O son of Adam, if you have sins piling up to the clouds and then ask for My forgiveness, I will forgive you without hesitation.
If both sides could find that forgiveness, then, to paraphrase:
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow them all the days of their lives and they will dwell in the house of the Lord forever and ever.
You have to dream. The resources exist. Can wills be brought to bear? Shakespeare has always had a keener sense of the human animal than any authors of the Bible. He was urban, educated, and modern, things lacking in the writers of the Bible. Our hunter/gatherer evolved sensibilities may serve us better in the coming ocean rise/climate disaster. Or not.
Israel will not tolerate a Palestinian state with any incarnation of autonomy. Palestinians will not tolerate being homeless and stateless. Reconcile. I didn’t think so. Can we heap mercy on Netanyahu or Hamas? Is there mercy for Trump or MBS? Putin anyone. Even Biden is afflicted by reflexive support for excessive violence. The lesson from 9/11 was that the proper approach was a police investigation and response. The military offered little help with the exception of diversion and enriching the MIC. Capturing and executing Bin Ladin extrajudicialy was something any group of SWAT team goons from Hometown, USA would have loved to participate in. Nice touch tossing the body in the ocean. I wonder if they cut him up with a bone saw?
Is there a justice possible for generational injustice?
Parallelish religions, which all believe great and final wisdom comes from the study of ancient texts. Sins from antiquity prevail into the future. The study of ignorance cannot help.
Our earth can handle less than a million humans before environmental degradation begins. Agriculture is by definition the destruction of natural systems and replacing it with a man made system. Religion is the natural reaction to the loss of nature and freedom. Since the fateful turn away from nature we have just fucked it all up. I fear the desert landscape that I will never see in person but is preserved beautifully in Lawerence of Arabia will become radioactive glass shards that will consume us all. What would those characters have thought of today visage? The British can be such asshats.