Thoughts on the Israeli Massacre

Some of them anguished, and some of them angry

Israeli artillery forces are deployed near the Israel-Gaza border. Fighting between Israeli soldiers and Islamist Hamas militants continues in the border area with Gaza. (Photo by Ilia Yefimovich/picture alliance via Getty Images)

There are few things I hate more than writing about terrorist attacks on Israel and the Jewish state’s justified but often brutal response.

Why?

Because I’m Jewish—and so an assault on the Jewish state feels more like an assault on me personally than would an assault launched against any place in the world except for the United States.

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Some people respond to that feeling, and the indignant rage it inspires, by sounding energized, empowered by righteousness to smite the enemy who deserves to suffer for his crimes. I feel some of that, but for me it tends to decay rather quickly into enervation and a pervasive feeling of hopelessness born of the awareness that the source of the rage and hatred that drove the other side to launch its murderous attack cannot be snuffed out by retaliation.

Because the source is rooted in another, older injustice that keeps alive a smoldering indignant rage of its own—against the founding and continued existence of the Jewish state. Whatever you do, don’t respond to this comment by fulminating against the Palestinians, or against me for buying into their self-justifications. I didn’t say Israel shouldn’t defend itself against those who have inflicted on it such grave wounds and humiliation. Israel should, and will, do exactly that. I will not be one of those calling for restraint or a ceasefire. Israel will not cease its fire until Hamas has been … removed from Gaza. No state could tolerate the vulnerability this weekend’s terrorist invasion revealed. That’s the way it has to be.

But that doesn’t mean anything more fundamental will be resolved by Israeli’s military response, no matter how severe—because the fundamental source of Israel’s situation is the dispossession of the Palestinians that followed from Israel’s founding, and the refusal of the Palestinians to accept it, even after 75 long, suffering years.

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Why do they refuse? There are undoubtedly many reasons. But I was struck by the points made in this essay in the Times of Israel, which so far is the best thing I’ve read about this past weekend’s events—and especially about the mindset of Hamas’ leadership. After listing several motives for the brazen attack, the author, Yaviv Rettig Gur, makes the point that “Palestinian ‘resistance,’ as conceived by Hamas, is about much more than settlements, occupation, or the Green Line. A larger theory of Islamic renewal is at work.”

As he announced the start of Saturday’s attack, Hamas military commander [Muhammad] Deif said it was meant to disrupt a planned Israeli demolition of the Al-Aqsa Mosque. And when Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh called on Saturday for “every Muslim everywhere and all the free people of the world to stand in this just battle in defense of Al-Aqsa and the Prophet’s mission,” he meant just that, that the fight was over holy things, over Islam’s redemptive promise.

This reclamation of Islamic dignity through the ultimate defeat of the Jews occupies a great deal of Hamas’s political thought, permeates its rhetoric and profoundly shapes its thinking about Israeli Jews and its strategy in facing Israel. Israel is more than a mere occupier or oppressor in this narrative, it is a rebellion against God and the divinely ordained trajectory of history. And by showing Israelis in their weakness, the thinking goes, Israelis are somehow actually made weak. Redemption requires only the faith of its believers to be fulfilled, and seeing is believing.

The footage from Saturday, the snuff videos shared gleefully by Hamas supporters, including in some Western far-left circles, weren’t an aberration. Hamas gunmen didn’t get “carried away,” as some explained. They were the essence of the whole enterprise. They were Hamas’s basic message to Israelis: That they weren’t being killed and kidnapped just for tactical advantage in the struggle for Palestinian independence, but rather were being humiliated and dehumanized as traitors against God.

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I suspect there is a lot of truth to this theological account of Hamas’ motives—though I also understand that this is in some ways exactly what Israelis and many American Jews most want to hear: That our enemies are deranged sociopathic zealots beyond reason and the possibility of pragmatic negotiation. Why would Israelis and many American Jews want to believe in the truth of this horrible reality, if it is a reality? Because it exonerates Israel: Its enemies and their God want the Jews to suffer and die simply because they are Jews attempting to live in the wrong part of the world. It’s not about occupation, or blockades, or settlements, or ritual humiliations and inconveniences that flow from dispossession, or the fascists who are major players in the current Israeli government. It’s about murderous Jew hatred. And the only possible response to murderous Jew hatred is merciless evisceration.

Precisely because this is what some of us want to hear, we should be on guard against any temptation toward complacency that follows from contemplating it. It may be reasonable for Israel to conclude that Hamas cannot be tolerated on its border. (I think it is.) But that is not the same as thinking Israeli actions exercise no influence over the course of events in the region. The occupation, the settlements, the accompanying humiliations and inconveniences of dispossession, and the views of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition partners—all of it matters, and will continue to matter, no matter how events unfold on the ground over the coming days, weeks, and months.

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If you yourself are a Palestinian, or an Arab Muslim, or have family or friends who are either, I can understand siding with Israel’s enemies. I can understand it through the kind of empathy I’ve advocated from the time of my launch statement for the “Eyes on the Right” newsletter. I know my love for and sense of solidarity with Israel from the inside, so I can imagine myself in the shoes of someone with different but comparable attachments. I give Israel the benefit of a lot of doubts, and so I can imagine what it would be like to give Palestinian leadership the benefit of at least as many doubts—what it would be like to take special note of every Israeli injustice in Gaza and the West Bank going back decades, and to allow myself to explain away or forget injustices committed by my own side.

But what really infuriates me is people with no skin in the game, no personal connection to anyone on either side with anything to lose, who deign to stand in harsh, unempathetic judgment of one side or the other, as if they alone can see the easy, obvious moral truth of the matter. This is a perpetual temptation for those on the left, who very much like to believe the world is divided into self-evident heroes and villains, victims and oppressors, and who seek expiation for what they worry is their own complicity in evil simply by virtue of the past and present actions of people of the same skin color, ethnicity, or nationality. It’s a complex psychodrama. And it gives us the grotesque spectacle of American college students and “democratic socialists” seeking to demonstrate their moral fastidiousness by publicly proclaiming their solidarity with mass murderers.

The right has its own version of Manicheanism, of course, with its own moral simplicities that it uses to excuse the inexcusable and explain away the humanity and dignity of the enemy—those who commit acts we would never, ever think of employing ourselves. Except, of course, for all the times we’ve done exactly the same, or worse. The human world is unimaginable without a sense of justice. But the human world would be much better off if we tamed our love of justice just enough to permit us to see clearly how much that love can distort our judgment and justify the worst that we do. Most massacres in history have been committed by those who were quite certain its victims deserved it.

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Then there is the distinctive American blindness at times like this—much of which follows from a peculiar form of collective narcissism. What happened in Israel on Saturday was not about us. It was not an attack on America. It was not caused or “invited” by Joe Biden. (Or by Donald Trump, for that matter.) It certainly had nothing whatsoever to do with Kevin McCarthy’s defenestration in Congress last week. Hamas attacked Israel, full stop. Its leadership couldn’t care less about Republican brinksmanship. To suggest otherwise is to demonstrate a truly deranged level of self-absorption.

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Which isn’t to say the Biden administration’s Middle East policy, especially having to do with Iran, makes sense. All of that should be open to debate and criticism after this weekend’s horrifying events. I honestly don’t know why President Biden has expended so much diplomatic energy attempting to revive Barack Obama’s ambitions for a rapprochement with Tehran. I very mildly supported those ambitions during the Obama administration, on the rationale that a nuclear deal, however flawed, was better than no nuclear deal. But after Trump scuttled the deal, reimposed painful sanctions, and assassinated Qasem Soleimani? What made Biden think that turning back the clock was either possible or desirable?

I don’t know the answer to that question. But we do need an answer—and probably evidence that the president and his team are rethinking whatever led them to reach it. A government that would support and possibly foment such an attack is not a viable friend, ally, negotiation partner, or even a candidate for normalized relations with the United States of America.