Forced Expulsions and Promised Lands, 2

Exploring the deeper strata of history and ideology behind the Gaza war

The Gaza war — the systemic destruction of Gaza by bombing — is horrifying. I agree with the anti-war movement that civilian casualties should be minimized or, better, avoided altogether (however, this seems impossible, considering the circumstances). I agree the obliteration of the city (apparently an incredible 45% of buildings have been damaged or obliterated by the last weeks of bombardment) should be stopped. I agree a humanitarian ceasefire is needed, although I doubt that will change the underlying dynamics or the trajectory.

Yet I don’t condemn Israel for continuing this war aggressively — even as I learn more about the deeper layers of this long, painful history. I recognize my view is colored by my Jewish heritage. I am not objective here, although I do try to be. On the other hand, I don’t think anyone else is, either.

I want to reflect on my thought process, based on ongoing research and reading which continues to inflect and alter my understanding. It is going to be long and I am going to move slowly, even doubling back at times. I am also willing to admit errors and will happily change my viewpoint when a better perspective, based on a more thorough analysis, is presented to me. I hope you, as a reader, feel the same. We can also continue the discussion, with more links and resources, in the comments.

As I noted before, I was never a supporter of Israel, which always seemed a perverse enterprise to me. I never considered myself, ideologically, a Zionist. But I try to look at our situation as it is now, seeking future path that prevents much greater death and destruction. I don’t think Israel is going to go away anytime soon, so we must try to reckon with the crisis we are facing, as it is.

I honestly wish I could just agree with the vast, incredibly strident global anti-war and anti-Zionist movement. It would make my life much easier and put my soul more at ease. Also, whenever I express something that doesn’t accord with the anti-Zionist, Leftist (and Alt Right) party line, I get subject to vicious attacks and insults. For instance, this one came a day or so ago by email:

“You're a slime ball and a charlatan.  Everything about you is fake as fuck.  What's happening in Palestine and your reaction to it with your fucking word salads and what amounts to a cowardly analysis makes it glaringly clear… You are the typical liberal, cowardly bitch hence why your so fucking fake.....and your main tool to hide your cowardly, pro apartheid stance is spirituality !! You can't spiritual-wash away your bullshit politics.”

I’m not made of stone and I feel such attacks, which I take as attempts to intimidate me and shut me up.   

I find that, for me, as I get older, the shrill tone of moral righteousness one finds across the Left seems increasingly disconnected from the very complex, ever-shifting, increasingly treacherous geo-political reality in which we are currently mired. I know it feels great to believe you hold the moral high ground. Many people really need to have the feeling of being right. They may even be addicted to it — fueled by it.

I am still, completely, Leftist/anarchist, and also, I am completely anti-war and pro-peace. Yet I also try to combine my idealism — my vision of how I want to see humanity and the world change — with honesty, pragmatism, and harsh realism. I think that is the only way we might actually turn our more idealistic or utopian visions into realities, eventually. Certainly, other approaches are doomed to failure.

I’m dissatisfied with many of the perspectives that are being shared virally across my communities — for example, that of Gabor Maté. Maté, a Hungarian Jew, is a bestselling trauma specialist whose grandparents died in Auschwitz. In fact, he was born in Hungary in 1944 and was lucky to escape the last murderous rampage of the Holocaust, where half a million Hungarian Jews were killed in a few months.

Maté notes that what is happening now is the result of generational trauma, that both sides are deeply traumatized and reactive. There is no doubt this is the case. We can, I am sure, all agree with that. But it leaves open the question: What can and what should be done now?

Maté often appears on The Gray Zone with journalist Aaron Maté, well known as a Kremlin apologist as well as Gabor’s son, to speak about Israel. I consider The Gray Zone part of this deeply anti-imperialist, almost Neo-Marxist Left that has so much anger against America and the West that they end up actively preferring totalitarian regimes and dictators like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, seeking to justify or vindicate the actions of these dictators as better than Anglo-European liberal democracy with its corrupt crony Capitalism. Matt Taibbi, Chris Hedges, and Amy Goodman also fall into this category for me. I used to trust them, but I don’t anymore.

I’ve actually spoken with two Leftists recently — one who works directly with The Gray Zone — who told me straight out that they consider the Chinese system superior to ours and would prefer it. This completely shocked me. The Chinese system is one of ruthless suppression of freedom of speech and even freedom of thought, where people are reduced to cogs in a totalitarian machine, continually watched by a total surveillance system. Nothing about it seems desirable to me.

Increasingly, considering our fragile circumstances, I find these strident anti-imperialist Leftists very problematic, even dangerous. For example, in my last essay, I noted that Chris Hedges uses the term “fascist” to describe the Israeli state. But Israel allows for dissenting media, free elections, strong protest movements, and opposition parties, unlike countries such as Russia, Iran, or Saudi Arabia. There is, of course, a danger that Israel becomes authoritarian or Fascist; this is similar to the danger we face in the US, with Trump and the Far Right. Similarly, Gabor Mate uses the term “genocide” to describe what’s happening in Gaza. As horrible as the situation is, it is not, yet, genocide. It seems to me that rote Leftist analysis is lagging far behind the changing realities we confront now.

I’ve been having arguments with various friends about the Israel situation, some of which have ended badly. One old and dear friend, a visual artist from Northern Europe, has been marching proudly in the anti-war demonstrations. She feels enraged about the mistreatment of the Palestinians and strongly identifies with their cause. Certainly, with ten thousand civilians dead, including many children, and with so much footage of these casualties circulating on social media, one can easily feel that the Israeli military is a monstrous and evil force. And there is absolutely no doubt they have caused much unnecessary harm.

I asked my friend, before we started a discussion about Israel, if there was even a one percent chance she might change her views based on our conversation, because I would be willing to change mine. She said there was no chance — not even a one percent chance — she would change her views, no matter what we said or what arguments and evidence were presented. I noted, then, we couldn’t actually have a debate, because she was already convinced she was right. Even so, anticipating it was pointless, I tried to discuss the situation with her.

At one point in our heated discussion, after failing to see eye to eye on basic facts, she finally told me, with a strange half-smile, that she had seen online videos in which “the Jews” stated plainly that they wanted to take over the world and make the entire world Jewish. I didn’t know what she meant by “the Jews,” as if we were one unified group mind. Also, this seemed like blatant anti-semitic nonsense to me. But she clearly seemed impressed it.

I noted there were 1.9 Muslims and over 2 billion Christians in the world. I then asked her if she had any idea how many Jews were alive today. At first she tried to avoid answering the question. Finally, she said, “I don’t know — around a billion?”

I informed her there were only 16 million Jews in the world — and in fact, the Jewish population has still not reached where it was before the holocaust. In other words, she was simultaneously convinced of her opinions and utterly uninformed, off by a factor of almost a hundred, on basic facts. Yet recognizing that changed nothing. A few minutes later, she angrily stormed out of the door, not wanting to hear anymore.

This conversation was instructive, as it revealed that Anti-Semitism lurks just under the surface of the collective outrage about the ongoing nightmare in Gaza. (I’ve written previously about my uneasy sense that certain tendencies of wealthy, powerful Jews inadvertently feed latent anti-Semitism.). There has been no similar outrage or organized campaign over the 400,000 Yemenis who have died in an ongoing civil war, or about South Sudan, where over a million children face immediate starvation. There has been no similar, sustained outrage campaign, at this level, over the one million victims of the Syrian civil war, or those deprived of all human rights by brutal regimes in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and elsewhere. Etc. That whole region, alas, is subject to many horrifying circumstances. But it seems the woke Left only cares when there is an opportunity to denounce Jewish aggression.

Apparently, among Generation Z, anti-Semitism is rampant, as this essay from The Free Press explores. In “Gen Z has an Israel Problem,” Samuel Rubinstein writes for Unherd:

Supporting Israel, or simply having a more nuanced position than “From the River to the Sea”, is proof that you’re a brainwashed rube. TikTok is awash with videos promising to tell you what the conflict really means, and what’s being kept from your eyes by the powers that be. “‘Israel’ isn’t a country,” one of the more infamous infographics patronizingly explains. (Note the scare quotes.) “They are a settler colony.” …

The ubiquitous claim that Israel is a “settler colony”, often deployed to justify violence against Israeli civilians, fails to acknowledge that the majority of today’s Israeli Jews are of Middle Eastern and North African extraction, expelled from those lands against their will. If Israel is an “apartheid” state in any sense of the term, this is not along obvious racial lines: many Israeli Jews are indistinguishable from Palestinian Arabs. Calling Israel a “settler colony” also begs the question: a colony of whom? But none of this stops activists from countries where most Jews are categorized as “white” — and where Arabs are “non-white” — from imposing onto Israel those familiar racial and “decolonization” dynamics. The Palestinian cause, in other words, is already packaged for Gen Z in a familiar language.

I understand that the power and influence of the Jews, disproportionate to their population size, in intellectual fields, the media, and finance contribute to the fixed idea that Jews are puppet masters, somehow controlling the world. Another friend (or she was one before this), a model and “social media influencer” (meaning that thousands of people follow her because she is physically attractive) based in London recently posted this:

We are in a shit show, and it is unpleasant — as a Jew, a bit frightening — to see Anti-Semitism resurfacing, with all the traditional tropes (Protocols of Zion, etcetera).

Anyway, I digress from my original point, which is, while I agree with much of what Gabor Maté says about the history of Israel, he offers no tangible ideas on how to address the current situation. Also, what I find missing in Maté’s rhetoric is any discussion of Islamic fanaticism and the “death cult” mentality of its extremists, which, to me, is one of the crucial issues, if not the crucial issue. As Haaretz notes, Hamas’ charter “states that the prophet is its model, the Quran its constitution, jihad its path and death for God its members' greatest desire.” What Maté offers is a knee-jerk Leftist analysis, considering the issue from just one angle, with no criticism of Islamic fanaticism (and the support received from these extremist movements from Russia and Iran) as an ongoing existential risk to Israel and its people, which must be dealt with.

Maté presents Israeli history from an anti-Zionist, Palestinian liberation slant, without acknowledging the courageous, even at times heroic — as well as originally socialist/utopian — other side of the story. According to this alternative narrative, Israel is the triumph of a dispossessed, defeated people managing to carve out a tiny area of autonomy for themselves — a tiny desert state — in a world arrayed against them.