[SCENE: The interior of The Conan Doyle. James and Tychy are sitting at a table a little way off from the bar, each with a bottle of Tyskie in front of them.]

James: We do need to organise something to say about the Israel-Gaza conflict. It’s clearly the latest epic battleground in these industrialised culture wars that we, as a society, seem to be always being herded through now. In equal measure, all of the exhilaration has flowed out of that previous dispute about trans women. Once you had only needed to utter the word “trans” and people would immediately start kung-fu fighting. Now their eyes scarcely even flicker. 

Tychy: We were right never to get involved in it. Many writers have taken an obsessional stance on the trans question and the passion that they put into it grows only ever more outlandish. But we have remained a rare island of dignity…

James: There are two irreconcilable views about what a woman is. That gender is a fixed biological fact or that it is non-biological and an article of faith. On this question, therefore, all that the people on either side can do is endlessly head-butt each other. As a society, we are in effect waiting for one side to die out demographically, for their numbers to dwindle beyond the point where they can remultiply again. This is the only way that anybody can ever “win” the trans debate. Gaza is different though. It feels less recreational than the trans wrangle and of more humanitarian urgency.

Tychy: Although the Israel-Gaza conflict has never been a part of the culture wars before…

James: No, it’s strange. Previously people either cared about it or they were indifferent. Now there are two sides or groupings with their chests thrust out and – in common with the trans question – each behaves as if it is wading into a zero sum game. Either Hamas has to come under devastating and histrionic rhetorical firepower or the State of Israel has to. Or rather, many commentators appear to propose this at an emotional level, even whilst acknowledging intellectually that it obviously isn’t a winner-takes-all conflict. Few commentators have stood back and absorbed the whole landscape. Slavoj Žižek is one of them – he has had a good war, so far. Bernie Sanders has as well, I think.

Tychy: Then why don’t we just reiterate what they are saying? You keep implying that we have to contrive some dazzlingly original standpoint all of our own…

James: Well, Žižek and Sanders might be calm and rational but their contributions get rather soggy in the end. Indeed, Sanders has said that the nature of the conflict should be decided by “military experts, of which I am not one.” The war is such an impossible moral squash that I am not sure there is really any room available in it for progressives to move about.

Tychy: If it is an impossible debate, then why don’t we just drop it? We’ve both learnt by now that it is best to avoid writing about day-to-day politics. For example, during 2020 we had produced over a dozen or so articles about the pandemic and the lockdown. Nobody ever reads these things now – everybody wants to simply forget about all the ins and outs of, say, that silly confected dispute over wearing face masks. If we had instead reviewed books during the lockdown, our website would currently have many more readers. People are always googling for information and ideas on Jane Austen or Alfred Lord Tennyson, even today, when Google is largely contentless, whereas nobody wants to collect any more new opinions on face masks.

James: Yes, but there is a stupendous humanitarian necessity to write about Gaza. Over eleven thousand people have been killed and over a million have been displaced [*]. If I can’t write clearly about something so basic then what is the point of writing at all?

Tychy: As if you can solve a foreign war with writing…

James: Two things have haunted me recently. The first is a tweet by the Edinburgh activist Bonnie Prince Bob. It read: “Artists / writers / commentators / If you think you always have something to say that we should be listening to, then why should we listen to anything you ever say ever again if you have got fuckall to say about a genocide?” Well, he’s right. I do have “fuckall” to say about it.

Tychy: And the other?

James: I was in the Meadows yesterday and just down from Söderberg I saw this hoarding, where somebody had stuck up typed lists of the names of all of the civilians killed in Gaza, along with their ages. It was so powerful because it was so crude, like a people’s war memorial, rather than a grand, marble state one. And there is something very chilling about a war memorial that is updatable on the hour, or a book of the dead where the pen is poised and most of the pages are still blank…

Tychy: Gaza is so nightmarish because its entire population is trapped in a society where every institution – the distribution of water, food, electricity and the internet – everything that in our own society is generally friendly – has turned against them. But the whole point of any nightmare is that you are powerless. Gaza is like a horror movie that is only ever self-contained and unfolding on screens. The people in Gaza can no more become conscious of your solidarity than the characters living inside a movie can read a review of it.

James: Well, I’ve invited somebody here to help us think Gaza through…

[Pippa appears in the doorway. She is looking around.]

Tychy: Seriously? It’s come to this?

James: Biggy, she’s an important student leader and activist!

Tychy: [muttering]: So was Tintin…

James: Hey, you should go outside the pub, leave this snobbery at the door, with the umbrellas, and then come back in again. She’s young…

Tychy: She’s uneducated! I hate this narrative in which young people are meant to have these fresh ideas that we all have to listen to. They’re just a fifth as educated as we are! Increasingly even less!

James: It’s true that she’s part of a demographic that’s very lost currently. They have Twitter and TikTok and if that’s your media then it must be like having the same consciousness as a kitten. Just existing purely in the present moment and darting walleyed from one floating dandelion seed to the next. It’s important that we try to entice the younger generation towards the intellectual permanence of blogging. Good evening Pippa.

Pippa: Hiya! Yes, give me a hug! You owe me several! [She dives onto James and crushes him.]

Tychy: Not me! You keep away from me, you hear!

Pippa: So rude! We haven’t seen each other for weeks! You owe me a hundred!

Tychy [glaring]: I swear I will run straight out of this pub if you come anywhere near me. [Pippa sits in James’ lap, clinging to him but pointedly watching for the moment when Tychy’s guard is down. He continues to glower at her.] What I dislike is the hypocrisy. Imagine if I jumped on every girl I met and started hugging them. You’d phone for police with machine guns. I’d be “cancelled” into the next universe.

Pippa: The patriarchy used to be like this – worse, even. But the tide is going the other way for you now.

James [uncomfortable under Pippa’s weight]: Maybe the patriarchy can buy Pippa a drink…?

Tychy: Very well. Come with me to the bar. [He rises and, visibly annoyed at finding herself detaching from James, Pippa follows.]

Pippa: Maybe just a pint of lemonade.

Tychy [uncomprehendingly]: But this is a pub…

Pippa: It’s also not the olden days anymore. Nobody will be offended if I drink lemonade.

Tychy: Very well. [To the barman] A pint of lemonade please.

[The barman gives them the lemonade and Tychy begins to walk off.]

Barman [sharply]: Hey pal, you need to pay for that.

Tychy [confused]: But there’s no alcohol in it.

Barman: It isn’t complimentary.

Pippa: Don’t you work in a pub, Biggy? You don’t just give out the non-alcoholic drinks for free?

Tychy: Yes, of course I do. There’s no alcohol in them. Am I speaking in a foreign language?

Pippa: You might want to check with the guys who own the pub about that.

Tychy: Fine, I will agree to pay, although it does feel highly irregular…

Barman: That will be two pounds thirty, sir.

[Tychy’s face hardens and it looks as if his body is suddenly tingling with an electrical charge. Pippa dips forward and taps the card reader with her phone, before taking Tychy’s arm and leading him back to their seats. Tychy now appears to be very aged and frail.]

James: Ah, there you are. So Pippa, you’ll have been at the Pro-Palestine protest yesterday?

Pippa: Of course! [Suspiciously] Why weren’t you there?

Tychy: I think that James did once go to one of these protests, back in October.

James: It was at the Mound. It wasn’t very good – they totally got the mood wrong, in my opinion. I think that people had wanted to share their grief and sorrow at the death toll in Gaza, but the protest had this weirdly festive vibe to it. The protestors were merrily chanting “from the river to the sea…” The average passer-by would have found this to be bewildering or even unreadable. If you are going to ever achieve anything politically, then you need to be speaking to people who haven’t been elaborately inculcated into your exotic “from-the-river-to-the-sea” slogan.

Pippa [after taking a deep breath]: A GENOCIDE is occurring James. There isn’t time to have some wee fuss over what the most sensitive word is. It’s ACTIONS not words! [Another deep breath] You know I have been SO DEPRESSED since the genocide started. My MENTAL HEALTH has DETERIORATED.

Tychy: You mean your mood has deteriorated?

Pippa: That’s what I said. Why don’t you listen?

Tychy: It’s not as if you’re suffering from schizophren…

Pippa [Another deep breath]: My MENTAL HEALTH has DETERIORATED. I only ever feel relaxed now when I’m at the protests. And why weren’t you there? You need to BE THERE and to SHOW that you ACTUALLY CARE about ENDING the genocide. Everybody does!

Tychy: That sounds very corporate though. As if saying you are against the “genocide,” as you put it, is like a PRIDE lapel pin that everyone has to make sure they are wearing around the office…

Pippa: Everyone should support PRIDE!

Tychy: It just leads to insincerity and next to paranoia. First you’ll want everybody to be in attendance at the protest and once you have gotten this you’ll be suspicious that their sincerity isn’t pure enough…

Pippa: Everyone should be at the protest. [Another deep breath] You should TRY TO THINK what a message it WOULD ACTUALLY SEND to politicians if all of their voters were IN THE STREETS, protesting against the genocide.

Tychy: This is the most humungous lie of them all. Everyone at these protests is fully reconciled to them disappearing like a stone into water.

[Pippa looks away, exasperated.]

Tychy: Imagine that one day we discovered – through monitoring intergalactic radio transmissions – that there was some faraway planet, many galaxies away, where tiny green creatures were holding marches, and giving speeches, and writing articles, and disputing bitterly with each other, over whatever is going on in general elections in the UK. Well, this is us and Gaza. Gaza has become a kind of vicarious, fantasy-world colony.  

Pippa [Another deep breath]: Actually, Israel WILL HAVE TO listen to us. We are going to BOYCOTT their goods and this will SEND A MESSAGE to their people that the war IS WRONG.

Tychy: And Hamas? They don’t even use the internet. Are you going to call them up on some geriatric landline telephone to tell them that…?

James: These protests will only work if they have a clear political objective.

Pippa: This isn’t difficult. We are calling for AN IMMEDIATE CEASEFIRE. Israel should STOP THE BOMBING and STOP THE KILLING. They should RESTORE WATER and…

Tychy: And Hamas?

Pippa: Hamas is just a comma in the whole paragraph. They have only forty thousand soldiers – or had – and Israel has half a million. Only ten percent of the people killed in this war have been Israeli and soon it will be one percent. [Another deep breath] On the Gaza side, NEARLY HALF OF THE DEAD ARE CHILDREN.

James: But if you want Israel to stop and you don’t care if Hamas continues, due to the former’s devastating and totally indiscriminate firepower, this is fine. It makes sense, morally speaking. But it isn’t a ceasefire.

Tychy: You want Israel to surrender?

Pippa: It’s not either the one way of fighting a war that Israel has chosen or surrender. [Another deep breath] FOR FUCK’S SAKE. They have HALF A MILLION soldiers.

Tychy: But if they send all of these people in…

Pippa [Another deep breath]: The WHOLE POINT of a war is that SOLDIERS are MEANT TO FIGHT in it. They are PAID to be put at risk and even TO BE KILLED. In Gaza, ALL OF THE RISK is put on the civilians. [Wearily] The soldiers only enter when everything has been burnt down and blown up. They have swapped everything with the civilians. The soldiers are hiding in tunnels or safely flying up in the air far above the city, showing all of the cowardice that you are meant to normally see in the civilians, traditionally I mean. [Flustered, her shoulders sagging] And the ordinary people… the children… are the ones who are… in the fire…

Tychy [Looking around]: Shall we give up? I was expecting a rational discussion.

James: Please don’t cry Pippa, or I shall cry too. Look, if Israel’s half-a-million soldiers are poured into Gaza, to fight their way across the city door-to-door, it could take years. And Gaza cannot afford to host the Israeli army for very long, given the disruption to civilian infrastructure. Airstrikes may be painful but at least they are… er… mercifully… fleeting?

Pippa [angry again]: What are you saying? HAVE YOU GONE MAD? [Another deep breath] Gaza is under Israel’s TOTAL CONTROL. They control the borders, the water, the electricity, the internet. Hamas is JUST CRIME. We had riots in Niddrie in Edinburgh recently. The police didn’t use airstrikes, or violence SO INDISCRIMINATE that it killed THOUSANDS OF ORDINARY PEOPLE in Niddrie, with some of the criminals somewhere in amongst them too.

James: But Hamas cannot ever be a blindspot. You cannot just shrink them until they can be smuggled away in a pocket of whatever narrative you are running with.  

Tychy: They have murdered over a thousand people and kidnapped over two hundred. And they are funded by Iran, a foreign power. Imagine that a terrorist group that was funded by, say, Russia had killed over a thousand people in the UK. Or in any country. No electorate could afford to become mystically highminded and remain aloof from retaliation and call for everybody to study some gigantic contemplative history lesson going back to the 1940s.

This is why I am so irritated by these protests you see in Edinburgh, with Edinburgh University’s humanities personnel all pompously sweeping by. A load of silly academics – who couldn’t pay a plumber’s bill without being cheated out of all their money – are now speaking as if they have this grand geopolitical authority and wisdom. Where has this suddenly come from? Edinburgh Uni is pure disaster capitalism. If Sir Peter Mathieson is running rings around these people then it’s a bit hypocritical for them to make out that they would ever cope in a negotiation with Hamas.

Pippa [acidly]: Shall we give up? I was expecting a rational discussion.

James: The problem is that Hamas can be never percolated out of the population of Gaza. And this means that Israel cannot attack Hamas without simultaneously blowing up its own moral authority. Hamas is a kind of expertly super-evolved parasite, one that nobody – precisely nobody, in fact – knows how to deal with. It has engineered the very landscape of the war so that it is impossible to fight its combatants without immediate civilian deaths. With this, Israel cannot dismantle Hamas without mirroring the King Herod imagery that is already ready and waiting within Hamas’s own blood libels.

Pippa [Another deep breath]: But Israel could simply AVOID THIS by NOT KILLING CHILDREN.

James: Is there any combination of options that does not end with civilians dying? There is a rational and utilitarian case for continuing the war here. Supposing that Hamas was allowed to melt back into Gaza and to rebuild and to edge towards the hundred thousand rockets that Hezbollah possesses today. Surely it is better to experience the pain now. A ceasefire, or whatever you want to call it, is only delaying an unavoidable showdown. And any analysis that doesn’t factor in this reality is just the aimless chattering of children.

Pippa: You can see why I am getting annoyed. [Another deep breath] HAMAS ISN’T PALESTINE.

James: But who does speak for Gaza then? Sure, Hamas doesn’t – it certainly isn’t elected to do this, at least in any meaningful sense. But without them, what exactly is left at the top of Gaza? Your protests imply that the U.N. and different NGOs and the international Left are all somehow entitled to represent the territory. None of these people are elected by Gazans either. None of them can actually speak for what is clearly a very socially conservative, Islamist society. A familiar neo-colonialism appears to be tiptoeing in here. With all of those right-wing memes laughing at “Queers For Palestine,” I worry that the right have not only taken over the traditional left-wing campaigns for democracy and freedom of speech as of late, but that they proving increasingly more reliable against colonialism. 

Tychy: Sometimes the twisting on this gets ridiculous. For example, Middle East Eye’s Hamid Dabashi has written that, “Palestine is not Hamas. Palestine is its heroic people, its generations of scholars, historians, artists, novelists, playwrights, poets, filmmakers, scientists, physicians, engineers, revolutionary thinkers and activists.” Palestine is just like our own academia, in other words.

Pippa [Another deep breath]: We need to STOP THE WAR. You can undermine the protestors all you want but if it was up to you, with ALL OF YOUR FUSSING and ALL OF YOUR REASONS FOR NOT DOING THINGS, then NOTHING WOULD EVER GET DONE. Maybe even in the Second World War, during the Holocaust, you would have just been SITTING ON THE SIDELINES, ON A HUGE MOAN.

James: It’s true. I still don’t have the first idea of what to write about this.

Tychy: Maybe we should resort to a dialogue instead of a conventional article. This way our ideas can be dropped into different handy characters, scattered here and there.

Pippa [in disgust]: Just listen to the state you are in! [Another deep breath] HOSPITALS ARE COLLAPSING and you are HAVING A TOTAL MELTDOWN over how to write… what? A blog?

James [meekly]: Yes, this is it. I’m trying to write a blogpost.

Pippa: Oh my, how exciting! Oh how will I be able to read it?

James: I’m sorry?

Pippa: Do I need to buy an old-fashioned typewriter? Will it appear on that?

James [quietly]: No, you can get it on your phone…

Tychy: She’s joking James. She’s laughing at us, I think.

Pippa [Another deep breath]: LOOK AT THE STATE OF YOU! PATHETIC! [Next she is giggling] Oh I’m sorry James, I know that this writing must be very, very important to you. And the ghost of my great-great-grandfather will be waiting to read it, when it is sent to him in his next telegram. [She cackles.]

Tychy: Let’s give up on Palestine.

Pippa: I don’t think so. YOU HAVE TO MARCH.

James: Let’s drink, at least, to better times. And to wiser writing.

Omnes: Cheers! 

[* A previous draft had “eleven hundred” instead of thousand. Apologies for the error.]