By Robert Surcouf
WHAT do I tell the kids when they sit next to me watching the news?
In the 1970s and 80s, I was used to watching the news with my parents and seeing hijackings, terrorist bombings in the UK and Europe and the perpetual threat of nuclear annihilation was ever-present.
As a family we often visited Spain and, on one occasion, the day after we left our family in Madrid, there was a major ETA bombing in the city centre, right next to where we always parked.
As a youngster, these tragic events were sometimes hard to process and, as a parent now myself, I had hoped that we had perhaps learnt from the lessons of the past and that my children would not have to fear such things.
The events in Ukraine have laid bare the growing divide between the West and several of the BRIC countries that we had been hoping would become successful trading partners and friends. But old hostilities are rearing their head, and we once again have regular reference to the possible use of nuclear weapons and the recommencement of nuclear tests was at the same time wanting to try and protect the environment.
For all our children this must be a very confusing time.
The tensions in the Middle East have never gone away, but there were some signs of a more peaceful co-existence between various states. Clearly for some, any move to normalise relations is unacceptable and, sadly, the events of the last ten days are likely to take the whole region back decades.
It is a region with very complicated history that goes back not 75 years but thousands of years, and for so many of us it feels like peace in the region is an impossibility.
Patrick Kielty, the new host of the Late Late Show in Ireland, in his closing remarks on Friday gave a great reminder that miracles do happen when we look at the success of the Good Friday Agreement and the level of peace it has built both sides of the border in Ireland. Is it perfect? Probably not, as Stormont is not sitting at present, but it has brought prosperity to all communities and a relatively peaceful co-existence that had not existed for decades.
Countries continuing to support terrorism and counterterrorism far exceeding what is permitted by international law will never help resolve the situation.
Terrorist groups often want an aggressive overresponse to garner greater support for their cause. This has been a common technique across history, yet governments still seek to escalate and create greater hostility. What does this teach our kids? When your child comes to you to say they are being bullied are your first words of advice to tell them to hit the bully twice as hard?
How do I make sense of this for my children and for myself? I cannot and it must be so much harder for the innocent families both in Israel and Gaza. They want to be allowed to live their lives in peace as we do.
In Gaza, they are subject to a blockade that has crippled the economy and limits the opportunity for development that you know your children are likely to grow up supporting terrorist action to try and change their future. On the other side of the border, you’re fearful of terrorist attacks and your government believes that the only way to respond is to further strengthen a blockade and add to the bloodshed.
The parents want peace and safety and to live a normal life and need their own version of the Good Friday Agreement, which would most likely be the two-state solution, but at present that seems further away than ever.
The difficulty is that such a miracle is impossible in a world where the level of hatred towards one nation and its people is so extreme that some protestors, and even some nations in the case of Iran, are calling for a country and its entire people to be annihilated.
When we see protests over Ukraine do we see people calling for the destruction of Russia and death to all their people? We do not, and that is where Israel faces a level of hostility like no other. Therefore, it will always have to have a very strong level of defence of its borders and homelands but that feeds the hostility. It is a Catch-22.
Sadly, the miracle that both sides of the Middle East conflict need – but not all of them want – is to first recognise the right of Israel to exist in peace and that is something that I support. How we get to that acceptance so we can then start building the peace is very difficult to see at the moment. But reflecting on the past bloodshed in Northern Ireland and the miracle that Patrick Kielty referenced, a man whose own father was murdered during The Troubles, it is not impossible, but it will not be easy. It will take very strong people to give peace a real chance.
As for explaining this to my children when I struggle to understand, I am not sure I can, so I will instead hug them and, like parents in Israel and Gaza, hope that they survive in the mad world we have created and perhaps they can make it a better one.
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Robert Surcouf comes from a Jersey farming family, though his mother was Spanish and moved to Jersey in the 1960s. He became an accountant and now specialises in risk and enterprise management. A father of two school-age children, he still helps organise and participates in local motorsport events and was one of the founding members of Better Way 2022 before the last election. The views expressed are his own.
