I don’t want to make a habit of contradicting Nelson Mandela, but when I saw a quote of his over the weekend, claiming that “history will judge us by the difference we make in the everyday lives of children”, I had to admit that our late great statesman sometimes got it very wrong.
To be clear, I wish Mandela had spoken true. I wish that there was a giant ledger in which all deeds were listed, and that every so often some infallible cosmic judge named History gathered us all together and handed down verdicts, especially when it came to violence against children.
Even the biggest fans of history, however, know that for most of the last few thousand years, the story of our species has been just that — a story — and one usually told by the least reliable narrators, not to educate or illuminate, but to entrench their wealth and power and to defame their enemies.
Given how quickly the rules-based order has collapsed in the last few years, and the extent to which subjective, febrile feelings and faiths are now what dictate political realities, it’s not too great an exaggeration to suggest that all judgments about Gaza are still on the table; judgments which will, in turn, influence the curation of future history
Even today, when we claim to know better, many of their stories still have a startling grip on us: modern historians tell us that the people who lived around Gaza in the Bronze Age weren’t particularly unlike their neighbours in the kingdoms of Judah and Israel; but three millennia of slander are hard to shift and today we still use their name — Philistine — as a synonym for crude, ignorant brutishness.
The enormous crime being carried out in that same region today is another reminder that history’s judgment is entirely contingent on who is doing the judging.
For example, history will record, through figures like those supplied by the United Nations, that Israel has killed at least 17,000 Palestinian children in Gaza and wounded another 33,000, and that thousands are now showing signs of acute malnutrition as Israel’s blockade — a mass reprisal — begins to bite.
But it will also record, because it must, that Israel has allowed no foreign journalists into Gaza to verify the scale of the slaughter or the extent of the famine, and that, while British doctors in Gaza have expressed the belief that Israeli soldiers are deliberately shooting children in the head, there has been no independent confirmation of this claim, and that the fog of war is a real thing.
In other words, history can only supply the evidence, to be judged by whichever party has the loudest voice, the most money, the most dangerous weapons or the most compliant media.
Given how quickly the rules-based order has collapsed in the last few years, and the extent to which subjective, febrile feelings and faiths are now what dictate political realities, it’s not too great an exaggeration to suggest that all judgments about Gaza are still on the table; judgments which will, in turn, influence the curation of future history.
Fifty years from now, children might be taught that Israel’s massacre of the innocents was what sealed its ultimate doom, or they might be taught that the holy war against the forces of hell, fought by Israel and paid for by US and UK taxpayers, was what ultimately paved the way for the glorious new United Messianic States of Greater Israel, from the golden pyramids of Trump Egypt and the evangelical Christian communes of Vance-Jordan to the banks of Netanyahu River, now only called the Euphrates by the last remnants of the revolutionary Left and people who want 150% tariffs slapped on them.
It's become popular these last few years to declare that one wants to be on the “right side of history”.
But history shows us that the “right side” isn’t determined by who is right, just by who is writing.
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