The horror, chaos, and devastation that is being wreaked in Palestine was brought home to the audience at the 2023 Ubud Writers & Readers Festival (UWRF) in a session in which independent investigative journalist Antony Loewenstein and writer and private diplomat Michael Vatikiotis were in discussion with moderator Kirsti Melville, who is a documentary producer at Radio National in Australia.

Festival attendees thronged the venue for the session; it was standing room only.

When the session, entitled ‘Clashes and Hope: Unpacking the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict’, was planned several months earlier the situation in Gaza and Israel was not as catastrophic. There was continued occupation and oppression in Palestine at that time, but now outright genocide is taking place.

When the UWRF session took place, on October 22, the Hamas attack in Israel had occurred (on October 7) and Israel had already unleashed two weeks of reprisal bombardment that killed more than 4,000 Palestinians, nearly half of whom were children.

Loewenstein (pictured left), who has been reporting about Israel and Palestine for decades, spoke about the chaos that was being created.

Talking about the US and Australia, he said: “We actually don’t know how to end wars because we start wars we shouldn’t have started. And I fear that Israel is doing exactly the same thing.

“They could maybe decapitate Hamas; maybe; possibly. And then what? … The Israelis don’t know what they’re going to do if and when Hamas is overthrown, which leads to inevitably more chaos.

“And in the eliminationist, exterminationist mindset of much of the Israeli far right … chaos actually is a good thing. It’s what they want.”

Israel currently has the most fascist government in its history, Loewenstein says. He says the unrestrained military campaign that Israel has unleashed against the Palestinians is one that many members of that government have been dying to unleash for years.

It’s a bombardment born out of anger, revenge, and bloodlust, Loewenstein says, “a degree of undeniable fear after the despicable Hamas attack two weeks ago, which caused profound – for some Israelis and some Jews around the world – what I would call existential dread”.

There is far more genocidal intent within mainstream Israeli society than most people outside of Israel want to acknowledge, Loewenstein says.

“I’m not saying every Israeli Jew thinks like that,” he told the audience at UWRF. “Of course they don’t. But it’s unbelievably mainstream. And, to me, one of the key problems with so much of the shock that people feel in the global community now … is that there has been, in my view, a deliberate whitewashing in much of the Western press about what actually is going on inside Israel and not just the last two weeks; for decades.”

There has been a takeover of the Israeli state by what was once a fringe, far-right, fascist movement, Loewenstein says. This, he says, cannot now be reversed.

“The settler movement is now at the centre of Israeli power,” Loewenstein told the UWRF audience.

Talking about Israel’s strategy and messaging after the October 7 attack, Vatikiotis said: “We went from a declaration of war … to ‘It’s our 9/11 moment’.

“And that was, I think, quite deliberate on the part of the Israelis because they know that that unlocks not just sentiment, but also a whole new military configuration on the part of the United States and Europe plus money – a whole lot of money that can be now spent on supporting Israel in this effort, without having to go through appropriations and the usual channels.”

Vatikiotis (pictured left) lays blame firmly at the door of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

“Netanyahu is finished,” he told the UWRF audience. “He should be in jail; should have been in jail a long time ago.”

Would jailing Netanyahu address the problem of the far right in Israel? Vatikiotis asks, however. Would a more sensible Israeli government come along and re-establish a sense of balance?

Vatikiotis also attributes blame to the Palestinian Authority. He talked to the UWRF audience about the foundation of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and explained how, in his view, the Palestine Liberation Organisation became detached from Palestine.

“They took money from the sheiks, from the oil barons, from the corrupt states, and they got rich, and they decided to take that money instead of raising money from the ground for the struggle on the ground,” he told the UWRF audience.

Loewenstein would share Vatikiotis’ criticism of the Palestinian leadership. It is, he says “deeply corrupt, deeply complicit, and mostly funded by us [Western governments]”.

Many Western journalists miss the point that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a colonial issue, Loewenstein says.

“This is imperialism. It’s not just a conflict between two sides who can’t get along. It’s colonialism. That’s what it’s always been,” he told the UWRF audience.

“If we displace people for decades and decades and decades, you can’t be surprised if they rebel and resist and get damn angry, even if the whole world mostly chooses to ignore it until they can’t anymore.”

Vatikiotis wrote recently about the colonial roots of conflict in the Middle East. In an article entitled ‘A Cry for the Levant’, published on December 4, he writes: As a child of the Levant, I feel the pain and anguish generated by almost a century of conflict. My family was a victim of the great divide that opened up in the Middle East after Europeans dismantled the remnants of the Ottoman Empire, drew lines in a land previously defined by close-knit communities of different faiths, and then decreed how its people would be corralled into states defined by faith and ethnicity.

“Never has such meddling and machination wrought so much human suffering.”

He continues: “The conflict we see today, with all its brutal tribal dimensions, is an import – a legacy of foreign intrusion and interference, not something born of a land where all the Abrahamic faiths once thrived alongside one another, worshipping at their sacred sites, one on top of the other, a compressed pile of ancient masonry rubbed smooth and burned black by centuries of ritual devotion.”

Vatikiotis’ father was the prominent historian P. J. Vatikiotis, who grew up in Palestine. His mother, Patricia Mumford, came from a Sephardic Jewish Italian family from Livorno that had moved to Egypt in the 19th century.

He is concerned about the long-term ramifications of what he describes as “the steady decline of our own civilisational approach to the rules-based order, where we no longer are capable of understanding the difference between what is right and wrong”.

This started with 9/11, Vatikiotis said. It then bled into the Russia-Ukraine war and was now even more manifested in what was happening in Palestine “where people simply will not accept that international law applies in this situation”.

Loewenstein says the so-called rules-based international order (RBIO) doesn’t exist. “We’ve forgotten a multitude of other crimes: the American invasion of Iraq, the American invasion of Libya, which was illegitimate,” he told the UWRF audience.

There are numerous examples, he says, where there is no accountability for American or Israeli officials who have committed torture and/or are responsible for the deaths of civilians.

“Within about ten minutes of Putin invading Ukraine, he was charged by the ICC [International Criminal Court],” Loewenstein said. “By all means charge Putin, but it’s interesting how there’s no real desire or interest in prosecuting George W. Bush, or Barack Obama, or any US leader since World War Two, all of whom, by definition, are war criminals.”

In Loewenstein’s view, the Hamas leadership wouldn’t have expected such a dramatic outcome after October 7. “They expected that they would go in there and get some soldiers, take them back into Gaza, and they could negotiate for a number of Palestinians who are in Israeli prisons; often for years; totally illegal,” he said.

Hamas, Loewenstein says, has been concerned, as Iran is, about the growing number of so-called normalisation deals that are being struck across the Middle East between Israel and Arab countries.

These deals are arms deals, are all built on sand, and are delusional, Loewenstein says, and the vast majority of Arabs don’t support them.

Loewenstein points to the way the Palestinians have been abandoned by the Arab elites “in the deluded belief that somehow the conflict would just kind of go away”.

He doesn’t see there being a serious shift in Israel and Palestine until there is massive international economic pressure on Israel.

For Vatikiotis, a turning point appears to have been reached among younger people at the US State Department and in European foreign ministries, a breaking point that could bring a massive increase in international pressure on Israel.

There is also, however, the perpetual atonement for the Holocaust, which is very powerful and emotive and now politically mobilised and weaponised, Vatikiotis says.

“The money that’s being spent to influence the European establishment is extraordinary,” he told the audience at UWRF. “And so these two forces, I think, have collided.”

Loewenstein agrees that we may have reached a turning point, but points out that, in many parts of the world, the right and the far right are in the ascendancy.

He says, however, that, over the past ten years, there has been a profound shift going on in global Jewish communities, which he refers to as “an insurgency within the Jewish community”.

What this means, he says, is that many Jews, and particularly younger Jews, will no longer tolerate being told by their rabbi, father, mother, or grandparents that they must support Israel.

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Antony Loewenstein is a best-selling author and filmmaker. His latest book, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World won the 2023 Walkley prize for non-fiction journalism.

Michael Vatikiotis is the author of several books, including one on the Levantine roots of his family, Lives Between The Lines: A Journey in Search of the Lost Levant.

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According to Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, as of December 8, the number of Palestinian deaths in the Gaza Strip since October 7 had risen to to 23,012, including 9,077 children. The number of injured people had increased to 45,920, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said. The number of those killed includes people presumed dead under the rubble.

UPDATE: Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor says that 32,246 Palestinians were killed in Gaza between October 7, 2023, and January 19. The death toll includes 12,660 children, 6,860 women, 301 healthcare professionals, and 115 journalists.

Nearly 92% of those killed in the Israeli air and artillery attacks on the Gaza Strip were civilians, the organisation said.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor estimates that there are more than 1.95 million displaced people in the Gaza Strip who remain without a safe shelter amid inhumane conditions.

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