Israel / Palestine: Grief and Sorrow

My meager efforts at sense-making

In the wake of the recent atrocities inciting yet another horrific war in Israel, I feel grief for the people on both sides and for a situation that seems unresolvable. Currently, I’m trying to reach a better understanding, for myself, of the long historical tragedy that is Israel / Palestine, leading to this current moment. Even though I am Jewish by birth, I have always skirted this subject, which is, for many, highly emotionally charged.

To have a legitimate perspective on Israel/Palestine, I always felt I would need to do a massive amount of research. I would need to consider the Leftist, anti-colonialist perspective of thinkers like Noam Chomsky and Edward Said, as well as explore a vast range of more mainstream conservative and liberal viewpoints. Before I could do that, I would need a better understanding of English colonialism in the Middle East, the British war against the Ottoman Empire, the 1917 Balfour Declaration, the 1948 Palestine war which displaced 700,000 Palestinian Arabs and concluded with the founding of Israel, the Six-Day War of 1967, why the Palestinians rejected UN Resolution 242 (1967), why the Camp David Accords of 1978 failed, the First and Second Intifada, and so on, up to the present day.

The subject seems a labyrinth with no exit. I’m far from reaching any kind of overview. What follows mainly tracks through my current study and thinking — my meager efforts at sense-making — for those who care to follow along.

I’ve been exploring a range of perspectives over the last few days. The Washington Post provides a basic history of the Gaza Strip, which is tiny — 140 square miles in size — squashed on the border between Israel and Egypt. With a population of 2.2 million, Gaza is one of the most densely populated areas in the world. 40% or more of the Palestinians trapped there are under the age of 15. The inhabitants of Gaza have little mobility or possibility of escape. They live in hellish conditions, in a kind of open-air prison.

Israel officially gave up control of Gaza in 2005. Since 2006, Gaza has been ruled by Hamas, a.k.a the Islamic Resistance Movement, a radical faction founded in 1988, which won the last elections held there. In their founding covenant, Hamas called for the complete obliteration of the Jews and the Israeli state:

“The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight Jews and kill them. Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: 'O Moslem, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.’”

It doesn’t seem possible for any government to negotiate — in any meaningful sense — with an organization holding such an extremist view, demanding the annihilation of that government and its people. However, it requires a historical rewind to understand how we reached this lethal impasse. The tendency toward absolutism and fanaticism that runs through Islam certainly contributes to this “no exit” scenario.

According to Seraj Assi in The Jacobin, the Hamas attack was an inevitable response to Israeli oppression: “Israel’s unbridled brutality in Gaza has produced a generation of Palestinians who have lost faith in nonviolent resistance, thus rendering the latest explosion as tragic as it was inevitable. The young Palestinian men who stormed into Israel from Gaza this weekend acted out of desperation, seeing no way out of the yoke of oppression and the inhumanity of the blockade.”

While I understand this, I still find something has gone awry with the many Western Leftists who unreservedly support the Hamas attacks, ignoring its extremist ideology. This includes the 31 student groups in Harvard who issued a declaration which “hold[s] the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence,” including the massacre of 260 young people at a music festival (and, according to new reports, murders and beheadings of small children and infants at a kibbutz). This tone-deaf failure of empathy reveals the contemporary Left’s flaws.

On the other hand, outbursts of Palestinian violence have, in the past, been answered by extreme reprisals. As many as fifty Palestinians have been killed, on average, for every Israeli who dies in the conflict. In the present case, the eventual proportion is liable to be far worse. Both Jews and Arabs recognize the Old Testament as part of their faith, yet ignore the most basic Commandment.

I’m sympathetic to the view of Timothy Snyder, whose writing on Ukraine I appreciate, that this terrorist assault on the part of Hamas is part of a greater strategy — just as “9/11” was. By answering violence with escalatory violence, Israel falls into a trap set for them. Snyder writes:

Terror can be a weapon of the weak, designed to get the strong to use their strength against themselves.  Terrorists know what they are going to do, and have an idea what will follow. They mean to create an emotional situation where self-destructive action seems like the urgent and only choice… Usually part of the plan is to enrage.

Americans have fallen for this. 9/11 was a successful terrorist attack because we made it so.  Regardless of whether or not its planners and perpetrators lived to see this, it achieved its main goal: to weaken the United States.  Without 9/11, the United States presumably would not have invaded Iraq, a decision which led to the death of tens of thousands of people, helped fund the rise of China, weakened international law, and undid American credibility. 9/11 was a contributing cause to American decisions that caused far more death than 9/11 itself did. But the point here is that 9/11 facilitated American decisions that hurt America far more than 9/11 itself did.

Snyder notes that, taking this into account, an immediate over-reaction by the Israeli government and military may simply feed into the long-term plans of Hamas and its allies (such as Russia).

According to The Intercept, this seems to be what is happening already. Along with devastating air strikes, the Israeli defense minister has ordered “a complete siege of the Gaza Strip,” cutting off food, fuel and electricity. “We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly,” he said. It would have been far more extraordinary, and hopeful, if the Israeli authorities could acknowledge the agony and misery of the Palestinians trapped in Gaza as a factor contributing to these horrific acts of terrorism.

As often noted, the Israeli tendency to dehumanize the Palestinians calls to mind the dehumanization of the Jews by the Nazis. Edward Said already noted the irony, in The Question of Palestine (1979), that “the classic victims of years of anti-Semitic persecution and the Holocaust have in their new nation become the victimizers of another people, who have become, therefore, the victims of the victims.” He called out Israeli and Western intellectuals, both Jews and non-Jews, who refused to confront this: “Their silence, indifference, or pleas of ignorance and non-involvement perpetuate the sufferings of a people who have not deserved such a long agony.”

Another current factor is the authoritarian axis that seeks to intensify oppositions around the world, hoping to drive (admittedly imperfect) liberal Western-style democracies to the breaking point. Newsweek reports that Trump, America’s wannabe dictator, may have leaked sensitive Israeli intelligence to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov while in the Oval Office. It is possible that Israeli intelligence reports were then funneled from Russia to its allies, such as Iran, in the Middle East, who could have conveyed them to Hamas, helping them identify strategic vulnerabilities.

I think it is clear that authoritarian, despotic regimes collude to weaken the US and its allies, as many on the Left have long desired. As a Leftist myself, I have opposed the misuse of American military force — in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere — as well as the ways the US and its allies exerted control of “developing” nations through the lending practices of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and other institutions.

Now we are seeing the dangers of a “multipolar world.” As Noah Smith, former columnist for Bloomberg, writes: "Pax Americana is in an advanced state of decay, if not already fully dead. A fully multipolar world has emerged, and people are belatedly realizing that multipolarity involves quite a bit of chaos… The world is a more ungoverned, lawless place than it was 20 or even 10 years ago.” We are seeing blowback for the long-term misuse of American power, as many countries and regions forge new alliances.

Smith quotes Zheng Yongnian, a political scientist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong: “The old order is swiftly disintegrating, and strongman politics is again ascendant among the world’s great powers. Countries are brimming with ambition, like tigers eyeing their prey, keen to find every opportunity among the ruins of the old order.” Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s targeting of Taiwan provide examples.

This collapse of the global order (such as it was) runs parallel with climate breakdown and ecological emergency. I admit, as with many of our current crises and threats, I can no longer envision a way out via any familiar means. Resolution would almost require a miracle — a divine intervention of some sort. The collective consciousness of humanity could, of course, mutate, breaking through to universal love and compassion, via the 100th Monkey Principle or “morphic resonance”.

Perhaps we should put our efforts toward invoking such a breakthrough, as unlikely as it seems. But how to do so?