Excellent piece. On all fronts. I realize strategy isn't the focus of the piece, but with that caveat, I'm concerned that if the IDF undertakes an attempt to go into Gaza and root out Hamas, that could leave the northern front vulnerable to Hezbollah in a manner that could bring Israel's continuing existence into question. If Iran was able to coordinate with a Sunni force without apparent detection, I fear what they may be planning in conjunction with their more natural allies.
Great piece Damon, the Iran deal is my big issue, because it felt like we were paying them to behave themselves and every parent knows that doesn’t work
Great essay. Intelligently reasoned and heartfelt, which has to have been difficult to pull off. The article that Damon linked explaining possible Hammas reasoning behind this attack is also good.
Would that we could all at least try to understand the other side, without feeling the need to excuse them. I have a question though: You write "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'd like to see a logical and thorough argument about why it is not worth the effort to engage with Iran to find a way to limit or eliminate its nukes. Even in Obama's day, the right was raging against it, but if there were nuanced arguments from their side, I never saw them (they all seemed to be along the lines of "Ok, we might be able to stop their nukes with the treaty, but if we can't make them behave in all other ways about meddling in the middle east, it's not worth it, and we should take our toys and go home". Are we REALLY in a better spot because of that all-or-nothing approach?) By all accounts, Iran WAS complying with the nuclear portion of the treaty before Trump threw it away. The "we cannot tell if they are complying" sounds suspiciously like the ones used against Iraq by those claiming they had WMD. Hans Blicks and Scott Ritter were 'cancelled' even though they were correct.
Damon, I was set to applaud you when I read the first half of this sentence:
"[T]he 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."
Why did you have to ruin it with the second half, which is utterly uninformed. Perhaps you believe, like most Americans, that Israel has made one sincere peace offer after another, which the Palestinians and other Arabs have stubbornly refused. This is perfect nonsense. Israel has always offered the least that they imagined the Palestinians could accept, and then, if the Palestinian showed too much interest, backed away or added a poison pill, leading the Palestinians to reject it, which Israel pointed to as evidence of Palestinian rejectionism. And meanwhile, of course, it kept annexing the West Bank and starving Gaza. For relevant history, see Noam Chomsky's "Fateful Triangle" and relevant books by Tara Reinhardt, Simha Flapan, Avi Shlaim, and Ilan Pappe, among others.
And quit condescending to the left while you apparently know so little about the subject, ethnicity or no.
An intelligent person cannot possibly have suggested I read anything by Noam Chomsky. The man is a moral autistic. As were many of those "democratic socialists" who embarrassed themselves this weekend. (I will stop condescending to the left when it stops demonstrating its own obtuseness.)
Look George, if you can watch what Hamas did this past weekend and not think the second half of that sentence applies to them. I can't help you.
As for the rest of the Palestinians, and the rest of your comment, it sounds like we have little to discuss. I don't respond well to the insinuation that my opinions are a function of ignorance. That's usually a sign that my critic has mistaken our disagreement for a matter of knowledge when it is usually a matter of varying judgment about what we each know. You've made clear what your judgment tells you about Israel, and my post made clear what my own judgment tells me about the same. I think we just disagree.
Damon, do you really believe that I that I reprobate Hamas's actions any less than you? Shouldn't we keep the discussion on a somewhat higher level? Our difference is that you believe last weekend's actions are the culmination of 75 years of Palestinian rejectionism -- refusal to accept the existence of Israel -- or so I understood you. If you do believe that, then you are indeed grossly misinformed, like most Americans I've encountered. *Do* you believe that, or do you acknowledge that 75 years of rejectionism by Israel and the United States, always by far the stronger party to the conflict, might have had something to do with the length and bitterness of the conflict?
If you don't believe that, then I must repeat that you lack a great deal of essential knowledge about the subject, which you should begin to remedy with some of the authors I recommended.
Noam Chomsky is by far the greatest American political intellectual of the last hundred years. Perhaps we can discuss our difference of opinion about him in calmer times.
Do you think the Hamas leadership will ever agree to a deal that does not have in place a Palestinian right of return to Israel within the green line? Because that's a deal-breaker for even the most dovish of Israelis.
I think Damon’s arguing that Palestinian rejectionism has contributed to the problem as have many Israeli actions which also spring from a form of rejectionism. He’s not intimating, from what I understand, that Hamas’ violent theological resistance is the equivalent of all other modes of Palestinian resistance.
I think it would be a good idea to revisit much of this at a time when emotions, or at least my emotions, are less raw. For now, I don't see how you could have read my post in its entirety and thought that I could be stating this weekend's events were somehow the inevitable culmination of anything -- except, perhaps, of Hamas' distinctively bloodthirsty ideology and theology. You've thankfully worded the other part of your comment in terms of "something to do with," which makes things easy for me. Of course the policies and positions of Israel and the US have something to do with the length and bitterness of the conflict. So maybe we don't disagree as much as either of us have been assuming.
Except, it seems, about Chomsky, whose political judgments I consider to be pretty close to worthless. Sorry about that. I hope we get the chance to discuss this and much else at another time, preferably in person.
Whatever they do for a response, don't follow the example of the United States after 9/11. Every damn thing we've done in the Middle East in the past 22 years has made the situation 1,000 times worse. If they're going to do anything, let it be "an eye for an eye," not "a head for an eye." They can smash Hamas into a million pieces. Which at some point in the future will reassemble into something far worse.
I think this is a very rich contribution to the responses to the attacks that I've read so far. I don't agree fully with all of it, but I do agree with most, and all of the post seems carefully thought.
I'm interested in Mr. Scialabba's response in the comments because it illustrates a process I've felt frustrated by now for well over fifty years: the response that suggests one side is fully at fault and then uses as evidence the arguments of people supporting that position, ignoring the arguments of people who say the other side is fully at fault while trotting out their own warhorses.
The history of the conflict dates back over a century and is enormously complex, both factually and morally, and extends to the detritus of Ottoman and Nazi wreckages. It is not at all difficult to drown out the "other side" with an endless recital of facts (often highly leveraged) to support your side.
It leads nowhere. Historical arguments assigning blame are only tools to prolong the conflict, which I've come to believe is going to outlive me, although if you'd told me in 1967 that it wouldn't be resolved by 2000 I'd have shaken my head.
What might lead somewhere, I think, is a realization that playing into the conflict by playing for one side against the other only creates continuing pain for both sides. The alternative of working for a settlement that may offend the sense of justice on both sides, each rooted in a different justice narrative, seems to me the only way out. I feel disorienting dismay about the Hamas attacks, but do hold onto a hope that they may somehow renew hard work towards a formula that focuses on future possibilities, rather than on the endless litigation of past history.
Robert, I appreciate your response, but it's not very useful simply to note that another person's arguments are all on one side. What's needed is either to show that some of those arguments are wrong or that they need to be balanced by this or that specific argument on the other side. Sometimes the truth *is* largely or entirely on one side rather than the other. The reflex of both-sides-ism is a dead end. The truth is not, after all, always in the middle ground.
The burden of my argument was that, however inexcusable Hamas's attack, it (like the 9-11 attacks) needs to be explained rather than merely excoriated. Otherwise, the Israeli response to these recent attacks will be as catastrophically inhumane and ineffective as was the American response to 9-11. Specifically, what needs to be acknowledged is that Israel is largely to blame for the conflict with the Palestinians. First, because it refused to allow the 700,000 Palestinian refugees to return home after the 1948, in violation of international law. Second, because it has continued since 1967 to annex and settle Palestinian territory in the West Bank and East Jerusalem -- again in violation of international law. Third, because it has ignored numerous peace offers from the PLO and various Arab states, probably because it would have required Israel to comply with international law. Fourth, because it has imposed horrendous collective punishment on the Palestinians of Gaza in retaliation for sporadic Hamas attacks, once again in violation of international law. And fifth, because Israel has for many years been a regional superpower -- and moreover a nuclear superpower -- by many estimates the fourth most powerful military in the world, and easily capable of defeating all other powers in the region, especially with the guaranteed help of the global superpower, the United States. Unlike the Palestinians, its national existence is not threatened. It has been willing to pay the price of sporadic Palestinian terrorism as the cost of its expansionary strategy.
From its beginnings, Israel chose expansion over security, with the approval and support of the United States. This sad story, of which most Americans, even educated ones, are almost entirely ignorant, can be found in the writings of the authors I cited in my earlier comment, especially Chomsky's "Fateful Triangle" and "Hegemony and Survival," along with chapters of his other books.
This really soft-pedals the Palestinian/Arab side of the equation. What of the rejection of the 1948 UN Partition Plan, or the launching of the second intifada -- to name just two glaringly obvious examples that have fueled the conflict. I assume you'll dismiss them as mere reactions to Israeli perfidy, but both sides can play the tit for tat game all the way back to creation.
And I agree with many of your criticisms of Israel's behavior.
George, I'm going to second Evets reply. It's not that I don't know and appreciate the litany you recite. It is that I have read the counter-litany, which begins in the late nineteenth century and focuses in part on pre-1948 events that make Israeli actions appear understandable as reactions to injustice. I believe both accounts are justice narratives grounded in real events, and that each is adequately documented to provide a robust ground for political loyalty.
For just that reason my point is that if we want to escape the enduring stalemate the key does not lie in adjudicating justice narratives of the past. I believe this is one case where truth-and-reconciliation is not a possible approach. Only a focus on the promise a future free of the stalemate can provide the type of motivation that result in an acceptable outcome, although it will seem like justice to neither side.
"events that make Israeli actions appear understandable as reactions to injustice"
Yes, Robert, but *whose* injustice is supposed to justify Israel's injustice? The 700,000 Palestinian refugess in 1948, nwhom Israel has unjustly refused to return home, committed no injustice against Israel. Neither did the inhabitants of the West Bank whom Israel has dispossessed for the last 50 years. Nor did most inhabitants of Gaza -- 41 percent of whom are children, tens of thousands of them undernourished because o0f the barbaric Israeli siege. Was it right to commit injustices against those who had not committed injustices against you?
George, I hope you can see the irony in the fact that I wrote a post that said that, among other things, "what really infuriates me is people ... 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" -- and your consistent response has been to ... stand in harsh, unempathetic judgment of one side. You've made your position clear: You think the Palestinians are innocent victims and always have been. Israel has fucked them over at every turn. And you can even recommend some books by one-sided scholars on the far left who will verify every word of the indictment. For what it's worth, I think you and your apologists for the Palestinians have intentionally blinded yourself to the other side of the story -- as much as the right-wingers who would be perfectly happy to ethnically cleanse the entire region to make room for a pure Greater Israel. Which is of course the mirror image of the genocidal ideology and theology that animates the butchers of Hamas. But then, this is a Substack with "middleground" in the title. (I did catch your reference in an earlier comment to there being no middleground on this issue. I obviously think you're very wrong about that.)
"You've made your position clear: You think the Palestinians are innocent victims and always have been." No, Damon, I very clearly condemned the Hamas attack here. How could you, normally the most careful and honest of writers, have made this blatantly false statement? Moreover, I have always condemned Palestinian terrorism, like 99.999 percent of Americans, contrary to the fulminations of those -- and they are legion -- who claim that many Americans, and especially all those on the left, always and only condemn Israel and hold the Palestinians blameless. Surely you don't want to add your voice to those of these unscrupulous "defenders of Israel."
But as regards responsibility for the conflict, yes, I think the balance is overwhelmingly on one side: Israel's. I've given my reasons twice in comments here, and you've ignored them. They were matters of fact, not judgment; and I not only cited the facts but gave you references if you cared to confirm them. Rather than refute, or even address, those facts, you prefer to deal in epithets ("apologists")
I think we woould both like to see a just solution to the conflict and would probably not be far apart on the details of what that might be. But getting there requires honest and accurate debate. I normally look for that here, but in this csase, I'm disappointed.
George, As you'll recall I wrote that I thought litigating the past has been and continues to be a dead end. Your response is to litigate the past, and you're continuing to do it in your response to Damon.
I'm not maintaining that your case is wrong, but whether it's wrong or right, repeating it gets us no closer to any resolution. I have my personal views on these issues, of course, and have since the early '60s, but I won't go there with you or anyone else because it would only be adding my small bit of fuel to this toxic dynamic. Likud and Hamas are examples of forces I see thriving precisely because of this dynamic.
I'm sorry, Robert, but I don't understand the notion of not "litigating the past." How can you understand the present if you've misunderstood the past, or are ignorant of it? If you're discussing race relations in contemporary America and your interlocutor denies or minimizes slavery and Jim Crow, how can you make any progress until you set him straight? In the present case, which of my claims do you find irrelevant to determining where justice lies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? The claim that the Israelis displaced 700,000 Palestinian non-combatants in 1948 and have refused, from that day to this, to let them return home, in violation of international law? The claim that the Israelis have illegally annexed large parts of the West Bank, d
I'm sorry you don't understand the concept of not litigating the past, George, because I think it's critical that those on both sides grasp it. The idea that before a negotiated outcome can be reached between two sides that view history very differently one side must agree to the other's view guarantees that no negotiated outcome will be reached. To respond by saying, "But how can you deny that my side is right?" does nothing to escape this stalemate.
If you were working on legislation concerning race in America and you found your negotiating partner believed slavery and Jim Crow were fictions and they were frustrated to find that you believed they were true, the legislation would be dead unless you found a way to focus to focus on how to resolve current problems through a compromise solution. In the Middle East, Oslo and Camp David made progress and did not focus on litigating history.
Will Israel's natural inclination for retribution be tempered in anyway because of the impeding Saudi/US/Israel peace deal? Or is that already a casualty? If in fact Iran approved of this attack last week, as reported by the Wall Street Journal, will Israel go to war with Iran? If Israel is calling up 300,000 reservists, as reported, does that mean a two front war with Hama and Hezbollah? That's just scratching the surface of the various consequences from this weekend. Most selfishly for political animals, how will this ultimately impact US politics. If Biden handles this situation like he did Ukraine (and so far he's handling it pretty well), then it will boost his 2024 reelect situation.
What saddens me the most about this situation is that the people who will be hurt the most by the massacre are the very people in whose name Hamas pretends to act, the civilians of Gaza, Muslim and Christian, most of whom are not aligned with terrorist organizations. Already Israel is beefing up the blockade, cutting electric services to two hours a day and stopping shipments of food and fuel. How will this action do anything to improve the situation or discourage further radicalism? What do these people have left to lose?
I'm also Jewish married to a former Soviet Jew who has relatives in Israel. Their daughter has already been called back into military service. So, I feel the sense of connection and fear. But, as Mr. Eno notes above, the history of the region is long and complicated, rooted in the fallout from the dissolution of colonialism. In America, and especially within the American Jewish community, we mostly get to see only one side of things.
The only thing I will politely dissent on is understanding anger and disgust. I remember 9/11, and while I was young I can still feel that pain seared across my heart. Like any tribal person (and make no mistake: I am an American patriot to the bone) I can imagine what this would be like. If, in some terrible alternate reality, there was a Mexican group trapped in Baja California determined to reclaim lands the US conquered in the 1850s and launched a terrorist attack against San Diego: I'd be in pain. Like Israel: I would want my government to stop at nothing to ensuring the men who perpetrated this terrorism be held responsible.
This is the part I get heated up about. I could not imagine being the father who's kids and wife are now hostages to a murderous Hamas. Or a parent who's child was killed while attending a concert for peace on the border. Or the husband of an unsuspecting border guard who was killed in shock. That pain must be unbearable: and Hamas is unequivocally and unquestionably at fault. This was not legitimate resistance: it was terrorism, and it must be resisted.
Am I supposed to believe that Israeli intelligence, who is credited with knowledge of the location of every Hamas cell location in Gaza, failed to see the amassing of thousands of rockets in Gaza? With thousands of Israelis in the streets protesting the proposed weakening of their Supreme Court, this attack played right into the hands of Bebe, who now has the ability to declare whatever a State of War allows him to call. (What about all those reservists who claimed they would not be called up if the Supreme Court issue came to fruition?) Sorry, but "Al Qaeda determined to strike in the U.S." lingers in this instance.
This is the result of human beings fighting over whose version of reality is correct, with each version featuring its own God and characters. This is the same as the Evangelical and MAGA devotion to an amoral Republican Party. I'm having a hard time making a distinction between MAGA Republicans and Hamas, to be brutally honest. There will be Timothy McVeigh-like or Hamas-like violence here in the U.S. unless the party can somehow check itself. It won't be at that scale, but there's a good reason the FBI are investigating these people now.
This question/option is very much counterfactual history, so I know it's completely stupid nowadays. But it seems to me, thousands of miles and many decades away, that things might have been better carving out a piece of Germany for the new Israel. The US/UK/France controlled Western Germany and it would have been an easy and a greatly symbolic move to let the Jews return to Germany as part of the conquering alliance. Of course we'd have to have ironclad security agreements, permanent troops there, and the same sort of arrangement would have had to been made to keep Jerusalem an open city. Putting a Jewish state on top of, and surrounded by, Muslims just seems like not a great idea. (and another plus, German land is a lot more fertile and centrally located than a strip of desert.)
Excellent piece. On all fronts. I realize strategy isn't the focus of the piece, but with that caveat, I'm concerned that if the IDF undertakes an attempt to go into Gaza and root out Hamas, that could leave the northern front vulnerable to Hezbollah in a manner that could bring Israel's continuing existence into question. If Iran was able to coordinate with a Sunni force without apparent detection, I fear what they may be planning in conjunction with their more natural allies.
Great piece Damon, the Iran deal is my big issue, because it felt like we were paying them to behave themselves and every parent knows that doesn’t work
Great essay. Intelligently reasoned and heartfelt, which has to have been difficult to pull off. The article that Damon linked explaining possible Hammas reasoning behind this attack is also good.
Thanks, Damon.
Damon, beautifully, intelligently, thoughtfully stated piece.
I read the essay in The Times of Israel too. I think there is substance in that opinion as well.
Would that we could all at least try to understand the other side, without feeling the need to excuse them. I have a question though: You write "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'd like to see a logical and thorough argument about why it is not worth the effort to engage with Iran to find a way to limit or eliminate its nukes. Even in Obama's day, the right was raging against it, but if there were nuanced arguments from their side, I never saw them (they all seemed to be along the lines of "Ok, we might be able to stop their nukes with the treaty, but if we can't make them behave in all other ways about meddling in the middle east, it's not worth it, and we should take our toys and go home". Are we REALLY in a better spot because of that all-or-nothing approach?) By all accounts, Iran WAS complying with the nuclear portion of the treaty before Trump threw it away. The "we cannot tell if they are complying" sounds suspiciously like the ones used against Iraq by those claiming they had WMD. Hans Blicks and Scott Ritter were 'cancelled' even though they were correct.
Damon, I was set to applaud you when I read the first half of this sentence:
"[T]he 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."
Why did you have to ruin it with the second half, which is utterly uninformed. Perhaps you believe, like most Americans, that Israel has made one sincere peace offer after another, which the Palestinians and other Arabs have stubbornly refused. This is perfect nonsense. Israel has always offered the least that they imagined the Palestinians could accept, and then, if the Palestinian showed too much interest, backed away or added a poison pill, leading the Palestinians to reject it, which Israel pointed to as evidence of Palestinian rejectionism. And meanwhile, of course, it kept annexing the West Bank and starving Gaza. For relevant history, see Noam Chomsky's "Fateful Triangle" and relevant books by Tara Reinhardt, Simha Flapan, Avi Shlaim, and Ilan Pappe, among others.
And quit condescending to the left while you apparently know so little about the subject, ethnicity or no.
An intelligent person cannot possibly have suggested I read anything by Noam Chomsky. The man is a moral autistic. As were many of those "democratic socialists" who embarrassed themselves this weekend. (I will stop condescending to the left when it stops demonstrating its own obtuseness.)
Look George, if you can watch what Hamas did this past weekend and not think the second half of that sentence applies to them. I can't help you.
As for the rest of the Palestinians, and the rest of your comment, it sounds like we have little to discuss. I don't respond well to the insinuation that my opinions are a function of ignorance. That's usually a sign that my critic has mistaken our disagreement for a matter of knowledge when it is usually a matter of varying judgment about what we each know. You've made clear what your judgment tells you about Israel, and my post made clear what my own judgment tells me about the same. I think we just disagree.
Damon, do you really believe that I that I reprobate Hamas's actions any less than you? Shouldn't we keep the discussion on a somewhat higher level? Our difference is that you believe last weekend's actions are the culmination of 75 years of Palestinian rejectionism -- refusal to accept the existence of Israel -- or so I understood you. If you do believe that, then you are indeed grossly misinformed, like most Americans I've encountered. *Do* you believe that, or do you acknowledge that 75 years of rejectionism by Israel and the United States, always by far the stronger party to the conflict, might have had something to do with the length and bitterness of the conflict?
If you don't believe that, then I must repeat that you lack a great deal of essential knowledge about the subject, which you should begin to remedy with some of the authors I recommended.
Noam Chomsky is by far the greatest American political intellectual of the last hundred years. Perhaps we can discuss our difference of opinion about him in calmer times.
Do you think the Hamas leadership will ever agree to a deal that does not have in place a Palestinian right of return to Israel within the green line? Because that's a deal-breaker for even the most dovish of Israelis.
I think Damon’s arguing that Palestinian rejectionism has contributed to the problem as have many Israeli actions which also spring from a form of rejectionism. He’s not intimating, from what I understand, that Hamas’ violent theological resistance is the equivalent of all other modes of Palestinian resistance.
I think it would be a good idea to revisit much of this at a time when emotions, or at least my emotions, are less raw. For now, I don't see how you could have read my post in its entirety and thought that I could be stating this weekend's events were somehow the inevitable culmination of anything -- except, perhaps, of Hamas' distinctively bloodthirsty ideology and theology. You've thankfully worded the other part of your comment in terms of "something to do with," which makes things easy for me. Of course the policies and positions of Israel and the US have something to do with the length and bitterness of the conflict. So maybe we don't disagree as much as either of us have been assuming.
Except, it seems, about Chomsky, whose political judgments I consider to be pretty close to worthless. Sorry about that. I hope we get the chance to discuss this and much else at another time, preferably in person.
Whatever they do for a response, don't follow the example of the United States after 9/11. Every damn thing we've done in the Middle East in the past 22 years has made the situation 1,000 times worse. If they're going to do anything, let it be "an eye for an eye," not "a head for an eye." They can smash Hamas into a million pieces. Which at some point in the future will reassemble into something far worse.
I think this is a very rich contribution to the responses to the attacks that I've read so far. I don't agree fully with all of it, but I do agree with most, and all of the post seems carefully thought.
I'm interested in Mr. Scialabba's response in the comments because it illustrates a process I've felt frustrated by now for well over fifty years: the response that suggests one side is fully at fault and then uses as evidence the arguments of people supporting that position, ignoring the arguments of people who say the other side is fully at fault while trotting out their own warhorses.
The history of the conflict dates back over a century and is enormously complex, both factually and morally, and extends to the detritus of Ottoman and Nazi wreckages. It is not at all difficult to drown out the "other side" with an endless recital of facts (often highly leveraged) to support your side.
It leads nowhere. Historical arguments assigning blame are only tools to prolong the conflict, which I've come to believe is going to outlive me, although if you'd told me in 1967 that it wouldn't be resolved by 2000 I'd have shaken my head.
What might lead somewhere, I think, is a realization that playing into the conflict by playing for one side against the other only creates continuing pain for both sides. The alternative of working for a settlement that may offend the sense of justice on both sides, each rooted in a different justice narrative, seems to me the only way out. I feel disorienting dismay about the Hamas attacks, but do hold onto a hope that they may somehow renew hard work towards a formula that focuses on future possibilities, rather than on the endless litigation of past history.
Robert, I appreciate your response, but it's not very useful simply to note that another person's arguments are all on one side. What's needed is either to show that some of those arguments are wrong or that they need to be balanced by this or that specific argument on the other side. Sometimes the truth *is* largely or entirely on one side rather than the other. The reflex of both-sides-ism is a dead end. The truth is not, after all, always in the middle ground.
The burden of my argument was that, however inexcusable Hamas's attack, it (like the 9-11 attacks) needs to be explained rather than merely excoriated. Otherwise, the Israeli response to these recent attacks will be as catastrophically inhumane and ineffective as was the American response to 9-11. Specifically, what needs to be acknowledged is that Israel is largely to blame for the conflict with the Palestinians. First, because it refused to allow the 700,000 Palestinian refugees to return home after the 1948, in violation of international law. Second, because it has continued since 1967 to annex and settle Palestinian territory in the West Bank and East Jerusalem -- again in violation of international law. Third, because it has ignored numerous peace offers from the PLO and various Arab states, probably because it would have required Israel to comply with international law. Fourth, because it has imposed horrendous collective punishment on the Palestinians of Gaza in retaliation for sporadic Hamas attacks, once again in violation of international law. And fifth, because Israel has for many years been a regional superpower -- and moreover a nuclear superpower -- by many estimates the fourth most powerful military in the world, and easily capable of defeating all other powers in the region, especially with the guaranteed help of the global superpower, the United States. Unlike the Palestinians, its national existence is not threatened. It has been willing to pay the price of sporadic Palestinian terrorism as the cost of its expansionary strategy.
From its beginnings, Israel chose expansion over security, with the approval and support of the United States. This sad story, of which most Americans, even educated ones, are almost entirely ignorant, can be found in the writings of the authors I cited in my earlier comment, especially Chomsky's "Fateful Triangle" and "Hegemony and Survival," along with chapters of his other books.
This really soft-pedals the Palestinian/Arab side of the equation. What of the rejection of the 1948 UN Partition Plan, or the launching of the second intifada -- to name just two glaringly obvious examples that have fueled the conflict. I assume you'll dismiss them as mere reactions to Israeli perfidy, but both sides can play the tit for tat game all the way back to creation.
And I agree with many of your criticisms of Israel's behavior.
George, I'm going to second Evets reply. It's not that I don't know and appreciate the litany you recite. It is that I have read the counter-litany, which begins in the late nineteenth century and focuses in part on pre-1948 events that make Israeli actions appear understandable as reactions to injustice. I believe both accounts are justice narratives grounded in real events, and that each is adequately documented to provide a robust ground for political loyalty.
For just that reason my point is that if we want to escape the enduring stalemate the key does not lie in adjudicating justice narratives of the past. I believe this is one case where truth-and-reconciliation is not a possible approach. Only a focus on the promise a future free of the stalemate can provide the type of motivation that result in an acceptable outcome, although it will seem like justice to neither side.
"events that make Israeli actions appear understandable as reactions to injustice"
Yes, Robert, but *whose* injustice is supposed to justify Israel's injustice? The 700,000 Palestinian refugess in 1948, nwhom Israel has unjustly refused to return home, committed no injustice against Israel. Neither did the inhabitants of the West Bank whom Israel has dispossessed for the last 50 years. Nor did most inhabitants of Gaza -- 41 percent of whom are children, tens of thousands of them undernourished because o0f the barbaric Israeli siege. Was it right to commit injustices against those who had not committed injustices against you?
George, I hope you can see the irony in the fact that I wrote a post that said that, among other things, "what really infuriates me is people ... 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" -- and your consistent response has been to ... stand in harsh, unempathetic judgment of one side. You've made your position clear: You think the Palestinians are innocent victims and always have been. Israel has fucked them over at every turn. And you can even recommend some books by one-sided scholars on the far left who will verify every word of the indictment. For what it's worth, I think you and your apologists for the Palestinians have intentionally blinded yourself to the other side of the story -- as much as the right-wingers who would be perfectly happy to ethnically cleanse the entire region to make room for a pure Greater Israel. Which is of course the mirror image of the genocidal ideology and theology that animates the butchers of Hamas. But then, this is a Substack with "middleground" in the title. (I did catch your reference in an earlier comment to there being no middleground on this issue. I obviously think you're very wrong about that.)
"You've made your position clear: You think the Palestinians are innocent victims and always have been." No, Damon, I very clearly condemned the Hamas attack here. How could you, normally the most careful and honest of writers, have made this blatantly false statement? Moreover, I have always condemned Palestinian terrorism, like 99.999 percent of Americans, contrary to the fulminations of those -- and they are legion -- who claim that many Americans, and especially all those on the left, always and only condemn Israel and hold the Palestinians blameless. Surely you don't want to add your voice to those of these unscrupulous "defenders of Israel."
But as regards responsibility for the conflict, yes, I think the balance is overwhelmingly on one side: Israel's. I've given my reasons twice in comments here, and you've ignored them. They were matters of fact, not judgment; and I not only cited the facts but gave you references if you cared to confirm them. Rather than refute, or even address, those facts, you prefer to deal in epithets ("apologists")
I think we woould both like to see a just solution to the conflict and would probably not be far apart on the details of what that might be. But getting there requires honest and accurate debate. I normally look for that here, but in this csase, I'm disappointed.
George, As you'll recall I wrote that I thought litigating the past has been and continues to be a dead end. Your response is to litigate the past, and you're continuing to do it in your response to Damon.
I'm not maintaining that your case is wrong, but whether it's wrong or right, repeating it gets us no closer to any resolution. I have my personal views on these issues, of course, and have since the early '60s, but I won't go there with you or anyone else because it would only be adding my small bit of fuel to this toxic dynamic. Likud and Hamas are examples of forces I see thriving precisely because of this dynamic.
I'm sorry, Robert, but I don't understand the notion of not "litigating the past." How can you understand the present if you've misunderstood the past, or are ignorant of it? If you're discussing race relations in contemporary America and your interlocutor denies or minimizes slavery and Jim Crow, how can you make any progress until you set him straight? In the present case, which of my claims do you find irrelevant to determining where justice lies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? The claim that the Israelis displaced 700,000 Palestinian non-combatants in 1948 and have refused, from that day to this, to let them return home, in violation of international law? The claim that the Israelis have illegally annexed large parts of the West Bank, d
Sorry, I accidentally posted before I was finished. But you get the idea.
I'm sorry you don't understand the concept of not litigating the past, George, because I think it's critical that those on both sides grasp it. The idea that before a negotiated outcome can be reached between two sides that view history very differently one side must agree to the other's view guarantees that no negotiated outcome will be reached. To respond by saying, "But how can you deny that my side is right?" does nothing to escape this stalemate.
If you were working on legislation concerning race in America and you found your negotiating partner believed slavery and Jim Crow were fictions and they were frustrated to find that you believed they were true, the legislation would be dead unless you found a way to focus to focus on how to resolve current problems through a compromise solution. In the Middle East, Oslo and Camp David made progress and did not focus on litigating history.
Will Israel's natural inclination for retribution be tempered in anyway because of the impeding Saudi/US/Israel peace deal? Or is that already a casualty? If in fact Iran approved of this attack last week, as reported by the Wall Street Journal, will Israel go to war with Iran? If Israel is calling up 300,000 reservists, as reported, does that mean a two front war with Hama and Hezbollah? That's just scratching the surface of the various consequences from this weekend. Most selfishly for political animals, how will this ultimately impact US politics. If Biden handles this situation like he did Ukraine (and so far he's handling it pretty well), then it will boost his 2024 reelect situation.
What saddens me the most about this situation is that the people who will be hurt the most by the massacre are the very people in whose name Hamas pretends to act, the civilians of Gaza, Muslim and Christian, most of whom are not aligned with terrorist organizations. Already Israel is beefing up the blockade, cutting electric services to two hours a day and stopping shipments of food and fuel. How will this action do anything to improve the situation or discourage further radicalism? What do these people have left to lose?
I'm also Jewish married to a former Soviet Jew who has relatives in Israel. Their daughter has already been called back into military service. So, I feel the sense of connection and fear. But, as Mr. Eno notes above, the history of the region is long and complicated, rooted in the fallout from the dissolution of colonialism. In America, and especially within the American Jewish community, we mostly get to see only one side of things.
The only thing I will politely dissent on is understanding anger and disgust. I remember 9/11, and while I was young I can still feel that pain seared across my heart. Like any tribal person (and make no mistake: I am an American patriot to the bone) I can imagine what this would be like. If, in some terrible alternate reality, there was a Mexican group trapped in Baja California determined to reclaim lands the US conquered in the 1850s and launched a terrorist attack against San Diego: I'd be in pain. Like Israel: I would want my government to stop at nothing to ensuring the men who perpetrated this terrorism be held responsible.
This is the part I get heated up about. I could not imagine being the father who's kids and wife are now hostages to a murderous Hamas. Or a parent who's child was killed while attending a concert for peace on the border. Or the husband of an unsuspecting border guard who was killed in shock. That pain must be unbearable: and Hamas is unequivocally and unquestionably at fault. This was not legitimate resistance: it was terrorism, and it must be resisted.
Am I supposed to believe that Israeli intelligence, who is credited with knowledge of the location of every Hamas cell location in Gaza, failed to see the amassing of thousands of rockets in Gaza? With thousands of Israelis in the streets protesting the proposed weakening of their Supreme Court, this attack played right into the hands of Bebe, who now has the ability to declare whatever a State of War allows him to call. (What about all those reservists who claimed they would not be called up if the Supreme Court issue came to fruition?) Sorry, but "Al Qaeda determined to strike in the U.S." lingers in this instance.
Those were my immediate thoughts, too. I just held off stating most of it until more info comes out.
The Moussad could not have completely missed the buildup for this.
This is the result of human beings fighting over whose version of reality is correct, with each version featuring its own God and characters. This is the same as the Evangelical and MAGA devotion to an amoral Republican Party. I'm having a hard time making a distinction between MAGA Republicans and Hamas, to be brutally honest. There will be Timothy McVeigh-like or Hamas-like violence here in the U.S. unless the party can somehow check itself. It won't be at that scale, but there's a good reason the FBI are investigating these people now.
This question/option is very much counterfactual history, so I know it's completely stupid nowadays. But it seems to me, thousands of miles and many decades away, that things might have been better carving out a piece of Germany for the new Israel. The US/UK/France controlled Western Germany and it would have been an easy and a greatly symbolic move to let the Jews return to Germany as part of the conquering alliance. Of course we'd have to have ironclad security agreements, permanent troops there, and the same sort of arrangement would have had to been made to keep Jerusalem an open city. Putting a Jewish state on top of, and surrounded by, Muslims just seems like not a great idea. (and another plus, German land is a lot more fertile and centrally located than a strip of desert.)
I've had similar thoughts, way back when. What a spot to pick as a Jewish Holy Homeland.
I, as you put it, have no skin in the game, so I'll limit my comment to saying that I found this post helpful. Painful, painful time.
Excellent piece. I lived in Israel for a few years and find that my reactions mirror yours.