The ambiguity of this situation is precisely why moral clarity and consistency is so valuable.
Do I think Hamas would launch a rocket to intentionally bomb a Palestinian hospital so they could blame the Israelis? I do.
Do I think if Hamas unintentionally blew up a hospital with a misfired rocket, they’d blame Israel? I do.
Do I think Israel would intentionally bomb a hospital? I do not.
Do I think Israel might blame Hamas if one of their airstrikes — which have been so aggressive and killed hundreds of civilians just this week, to say nothing of the last decade — had unintentionally hit a hospital? I do.
When you don’t know who to believe, who to trust, the world becomes a very scary place…and fast.
Either one upholds the equal worth of all human lives, opposes war crimes, and despises far-right ethno-nationalist political projects or one doesn’t. What’s more, cheering (or publicly announcing your refusal to condemn) the murder of children isn’t just morally grotesque but also politically self-defeating.
The West’s apologists for Palestinian war crimes have far less power than its apologists for Israel’s brutal domination of the Palestinian territories and discrimination against Arab citizens of Israel. But precisely because left-wing critics of Israeli apartheid lack power, we must not forfeit our moral authority.
The jingoism of some Americans isn’t helping. “Level the place,” advised Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. That “place” has more than two million inhabitants, including about one million children, and I shouldn’t have to remind a senator that when you care about some humans but not others, you’ve lost your humanity.
“If you fire missiles at densely populated areas, you will kill children, and that is what the Israeli military has been doing,” Sari Bashi of Human Rights Watch told me. War crimes shouldn’t be avenged by more war crimes.
Many Israelis aren’t in the mood to hear this. They have suffered a shattering blow, among the worst massacres of Jews since the Holocaust. The refrain from Israel is an anguished: But what do you expect us to do?
Fair enough. Everyone expects Israel to hit back. The practical question is how far to go: In the bluntest terms, for Israel, how many dead Gazan children are too many?
Nicholas Kristof.
He shouldn’t have to remind a senator that the murder of children, be they our own or not, is unforgivable. But Americans have all largely fallen prey to aggression toward the ‘other,’ no matter who that might be. Left hates Right. Right hates Left. When compassion for others isn’t practiced, like anything else, it becomes harder, less intuitive, more elusive.
Americans have long been a hateful bunch, tempered by strains of remarkable tolerance and an even more remarkable indifference. But if my own experience is anything, the invective that long festered on the Right has taken root in the Left. We are largely a rudderless people, guided only by the fire of the latest outrage enflamed by the gasoline of social media, not by strong moral convictions or, gods forbid, logic and reason.
Something wicked this way comes.
So delete social media. All of it — Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, the insipid platform-formerly-known-as-Twitter.
All of it.
No excuses.
You know better.
You deserve better.
Go outside. Say hello to your neighbors. Buy someone a drink. Go for a walk in the woods.
In 2006, Israel essentially responded to Hezbollah: “You think you can just do crazy stuff like kidnap our people and we will treat this as a little border dispute. We may look Western, but the modern Jewish state has survived as ‘a villa in the jungle’” — which is how the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak described it — “because if push comes to shove, we are willing to play by the local rules. Have no illusions about that. You will not outcrazy us out of this neighborhood.”
Yes, if you think Israel is now crazy, it is because Hamas punched it in the face, humiliated it and then poked out one eye. So now Israel believes it must restore its deterrence by proving that it can outcrazy Hamas’s latest craziness.
Israel has suffered a staggering blow and is now forced into a morally impossible war to outcrazy Hamas and deter Iran and Hezbollah at the same time. I weep for the terrible deaths that now await so many good Israelis and Palestinians. And I also worry deeply about the Israeli war plan. It is one thing to deter Hezbollah and deter Hamas. It is quite another to replace Hamas and leave behind something more stable and decent.
Many of us at Tablet believed strongly, and still believe, in the possibility of creating a better world. But something bothered us from the very beginning about these ideas, and the people pushing them. Every time we pressed on one of the newly mass-embraced policy proposals or narratives—intersectionality, decolonization studies, the Iran nuclear deal, Russiagate, Black Lives Matter, the Women’s March, critical race theory, COVID lockdowns—a weird thing would happen: The idea itself fell apart at the seams within seconds of contact with reality, and yet its defenders got more sure of themselves, more performatively boastful, more passionate and gleeful about smearing anyone who dared to question them.
The more we listened to freshly minted universal experts, the more we were struck by the increasing lunacy of their pronouncements on every topic under the sun, always backed by “studies” and “science”—where COVID–19 came from, how many genders there are, which skin tones and personal experiences qualify a person for protection status and which do not, whether it was OK for a Syrian dictator to bomb and gas 500,000 of his people, whether the U.S. should ally itself with a Holocaust-denying medieval theocracy, whether the president of the United States was secretly a Russian agent, whether large American cities should let drug addicts and violent schizophrenics get high on the streets and steal stuff—and more. Indeed, over time, we were struck by how little the ideas themselves seemed to matter; what so many people seemed most attached to was power.
Tom Dannenbaum, an expert on siege law at Tufts University, affirmed this assessment, describing Israel’s policy as an abnormally clear-cut instance of starving civilians as a means of war, an unambiguous violation of human rights.
Israel’s aerial bombardment of Gaza also appears to flout international law’s prohibition of the disproportionate killing of civilians. The Israeli Air Force has dropped more than 6,000 bombs on a stretch of land roughly the size of Queens. Its targets have included hospitals and schools. By its own account, Israel has not been firing “warning strikes” to encourage civilians to exit a given building before incinerating it. As of this writing, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry, Israel’s airstrikes have killed more than 1,799 people, including 583 children. According to the ministry, 60 percent of all the injured are women or children.
A live stream seems a little macabre, a little distasteful, a little too ‘normal’ for the circumstances, but I’ve been holding my breath for a week. I have friends in Gaza.
Even though Israel gave up control of the Gaza Strip, it has kept a land, air and sea blockade on Gaza since 2007. The result has been damaging for Palestinians, with the United Nations saying in 2009 that the blockade from both Israel and Egypt had been “devastating livelihoods” and causing gradual “de-development” in Gaza. Israel has argued that the blockade has served to keep control of Gaza’s border, prevent Hamas from getting stronger and protect Israelis from Palestinian rocket attacks.
The blockade has faced criticism by human rights groups and the United Nations, which consider Gaza to still be under Israeli military occupation. The United Nations estimates that the blockade has cost the Palestinian territory’s economy nearly $17 billion over roughly a decade. The International Committee of the Red Cross has gone one step further in recent years to say the blockade violates the Geneva Conventions — a claim that Israeli officials have rejected.
The population in Gaza is extraordinarily young. UNICEF has estimated that there are roughly 1 million children living in the Gaza Strip, meaning that almost half the people in Gaza are children. Almost 40 percent of the population is under the age of 15, according to the CIA.
More than 1.4 million of the residents of the Gaza Strip are Palestinian refugees, according to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).
As ever, I feel I must preface any conversation about Gaza or Palestine, as I have learned to do over the many years I’ve been involved with and interested in the people and places of the region, with a statement: the attacks on Israelis last weekend were unconscionable. I do not condone violence of any kind inflicted on civilian populations. There is never justification for civilian casualties.
I fear that Gaza is going to turn into a mass civilian casualty event in the very near future, as though it hasn’t been one for a very long time. Death has always happened asymmetrically in this region: Israelis kill far more Palestinians than Palestinians kill Israelis. It’s horrifying — and having lived there, having witnessed it first-hand, I promise you the horror is not understated.
Implicitly or not, the Israeli justification has always been the legacy of the Holocaust. “Never again” is Israel’s unofficial mantra. Understandably so, right? The Holocaust was horrific on a scale that’s nearly unimaginable. The generational trauma of the population of Israel (and of Jewish people around the globe) is both understandable (if unrelatable) and deserved.
But the Holocaust has become justification for the preservation of the State of Israel, and consequently for the wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian population. Civilians have been indiscriminately killed in Palestine for generations, all in the name of Israeli sovereignty.
Israel is in an impossible position. Many Palestinians want Israel wiped off the map because Israel forced them out of their ancestral homeland, land they had lived on for hundreds or thousands of years. Much of this Palestinian anger has become entangled with some truly wretched antisemitism, yes, but I cannot in good faith say that Palestinians hate Jews for the same reasons the Nazis did. Yes, some Palestinians do, and certainly the government of Iran does, but many Palestinians just want to go home, in the same way so many Native Americans want their ancestral homeland back, a cause toward which I am sympathetic. (Though remember, Native Americans can travel freely off the reservations and throughout the United States, whereas almost all Palestinians are forbidden from traveling into Israel — or from leaving Palestine at all. They are confined, unable to leave.)
But if Israel uses the attack of last weekend to slaughter Palestinians indiscriminately, it will (if it hasn’t already, in the eyes of many) lose the moral high ground. It will lose, if it hasn’t already, the goodwill and support of so many people around the world.
Goodwill cannot be measured. It’s intangible, ineffable. And it is more valuable than the billions of dollars America sends to Israel each year.
Israel must proceed with the utmost caution as it prepares to invade Gaza. If that goodwill is lost, I fear not just for the future of Israel, but for the future of Jewish people everywhere.
The day of the attack in Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned Palestinians in Gaza to “get out now” to avoid being hit in the retaliatory strikes against Hamas. But there is nowhere to go. Since Hamas took over the territory by force in 2007, Israel has almost completely banned Palestinians from leaving Gaza through Israel or the Mediterranean Sea. On Gaza’s southern border with Egypt, the Rafah gate — the lone entry point into the Sinai — has been shut down by Cairo, fearing a mass exodus into its territory. Negotiations were underway this week between Israel and Egypt to establish a safe corridor to bring in supplies and get foreign nationals out, but for now the Egyptian president said on Thursday that the residents in Gaza must “stay steadfast and remain on their land.” Israeli officials have also retracted Netanyahu’s earlier advice to “get out,” with an Israeli Defense Forces spokesman acknowledging on Tuesday that there is, in fact, no way out.
“Free Palestine”—the slogan, the fantasy, and the policy—has always consciously implied the mass murder of Jews in their towns, streets, shops, and living rooms. Few are willing to say so openly, but in many intellectual, professional, and popular circles in the Middle East and the West, the idea of Palestinian national liberation has long been framed in terms that condone or necessitate the indiscriminate killing of Jews.
We are walking in the footsteps of previous generations of modernizing, secular, intellectual Arabs. They too wanted nothing to do with their native lands, which they saw as having none of the power, prestige, or respect they craved. In their egotism and intellectual narcissism, they didn’t want to belong to “backward” societies. So they sought in foreign, mostly Western ideologies a refuge and a hiding place from backwardness. They joined the progressive secular movements and trendy revolutions because they offered an escape hatch from the drudgery of slow, marginal, local change. They became revolutionaries because they were afraid and insecure. Like Edward Said, they were anti-Zionist and anti-American “humanists” because they did not want to be, or could not be, “Arabs.” Their obvious cultural chauvinism was simply an urge to self-annihilate, to disappear into universalism. Their lives were a hopeless quest to shed their own skin.
While it’s too early to judge the long-term consequences of Saturday’s traumatic events—and there is no doubt they will reverberate for decades to come—what is becoming clear is that many Israelis are experiencing a new feeling, one we have never known before, and more importantly, that we were never supposed to know: that of victimhood. And unlike Jews outside Israel, that feeling is now compounded and worsened by the fear that we have become not merely victims, but victims in our own land.
On Saturday, as the raping and murdering and kidnapping were happening in Israel, Najma Sharif, a writer for Soho House magazine and Teen Vogue, posted on X: “What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers.”
…
What would this death cult do if it could do anything? We have glimpsed that over the past 72 hours. We know what they are capable of, and we know that they have many defenders here at home. Those who imagine themselves fomenting the long-awaited revolution. Those who know that the beloved academic language of decolonization means nothing if you’re unwilling to see it enacted in flesh, and especially blood.
This is a fascinating time to be watching the politics of academia.
You are about to withstand a barrage of lies about the war that broke out today in Israel.
Some of those lies will be explicit. Some of them will be lies of omission. Others will be lies of obfuscation. Or lies of minimization. Lies told by people who are simply too afraid to look at such an ugly, barbarous reality. And lies told by people whose true beliefs are too ugly to quite say aloud. Turn on cable news and you can hear some of them right now.
I like Bari Weiss. I admire her integrity, her commitment to journalistic ethics, and the compassion and curiosity she shows interviewees and guests. (Strangely, nothing enrages my more liberal friends than saying I admire Bari Weiss - a fellow liberal.)
I was listening to the recent episode of her podcast with Michael Oren and I found some of their language to be…unsettling. One part in particular, when they mention a “clash of civilizations,” and Michael says no, this is not a clash of civilizations, this is a clash between civilization and barbarism.
This. This is precisely why I can’t get onboard with much of the rhetoric surrounding the conflict. Do I condone the attacks on Israel? Absolutely not. But how on earth can anyone refer to their own culture (in this case, Israel) as “civilized” when they let such suffering happen just over the border in Palestine?
While I can’t begin to feel it myself, I understand the anger Israelis must feel. Many Palestinians, including Hamas, the “government” of Gaza, want to wipe Israel off the map. That’s a bit different than “kill all the Jews,” but it’s not an arbitrary distinction. I have Palestinian friends that feel as though their homes were stolen from them when the State of Israel was formed in 1948. I feel for them. I also have Israeli friends that have profound and lasting generational trauma from the Holocaust and so many other despicable, horrific attacks on Jewish people over the last, well, if we’re honest, many thousands of years. I feel for them, too.
But a civilization as I define it is a relentless, dogged pursuit of peace, of justice, of fairness, of civility. The arrogance of throwing a rave on the border of the Gaza Strip? To literally throw a party just over the fence from Gaza? Sorry, but the optics of that are terrible. Talk about arrogance…
Civilization is the pursuit of justice for all, not just those that think or believe as we do. Trust me, I get how endlessly frustrating-bordering-on-enraging it is to always try to be fair to those that don’t themselves practice fairness. (I, a gay man, must accept the strangeness of both caring for the Palestinian people…and recognizing that many among them would want me dead.) But there is no other option.
This commitment to principle in the face of an irreconcilable reality? This is the bedrock foundation of a civilization.
Barbarism is not just the slaughter of innocents, but allowing innocent people to suffer because of your own cultural indifference. And I say this as an American. The suffering that takes place around the world because of my own culture’s indifference is staggering.
But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t point out that indifference wherever and whenever we see it. Israel is a bastion of many good things in the world. But like America, should they allow their neighbors to suffer, no matter how much those neighbors might hate Israel? If so, is Israel — are we — civilized?
I arrive at this conclusion by looking at the current situation and applying three basic principles:
Large-scale ethnic cleansing will be minimized.
Israelis and Palestinians will not want to share a state.
Non-contiguous states aren’t viable.
A good place to start.
Thus, a two-state solution is really off the table, and always has been — not because of Israel’s actions or Palestinian irredentism, but simply because it’s not practically possible for Gaza and the West Bank to stay united.
This can’t be overstated.
I have many thoughts and many more feelings on the events of the last two days. I’ve long been interested in the Middle East and in Israel-Palestine in particular. I have friends on both sides of that border.
But it hardly seems worthwhile to wade into the morass at the moment. For now, here’s a photo I took a few years back — a view of the Gaza-Israel border.
