It’s taken me a few days to get my thoughts together about the conflict that began this past Saturday with Hamas’s spectacular escape from a blockaded Gaza strip, murder of hundreds of Israeli civilians and military personnel, and the taking of an unprecedented number of hostages. In part that’s because I write best in response to what others have written or said, and in part that’s because my mother and first cousin were in Israel when this conflict broke out and my thoughts were torn between following (and opining) on the news and concern for their safety. They’ve since made it back to the states, and enough discourse has been produced that I can lay out coherent thoughts and reactions.
1. The images of Palestinian fighters breaking out of their imprisonment were nothing less than inspiring. I include two pictures here, one of the gap they blew in their enclosure, the other of Israeli civilians in Sderot watching and applauding their military’s aerial bombardment of Gaza in 2014, from a safe vantage point where they faced no personal danger (or so they thought). In our society, we routinely celebrate such heroic, violent resistance to violent repression, going all the way back to the Exodus. Doing so now is very far from being beyond the pale.
2. This isn’t news to Israeli leftists or to anti-Zionists in the states, but that image of Israelis applauding the indiscriminate bombing of Palestinians held in captivity bespeaks the transformation of Israeli society since the 1990s, in which forces of reaction and Jewish supremacy that were once fringe became mainstream, then dominant, and finally monopolized political power (though not public debate within Israel). In that respect Israel is but one of the countries to have embraced reaction in response to the failures of the post-Cold-War liberal order, so it has contemporary parallels. But it also reflects the long tradition of settler-colonialism: an aggressively acquisitive segment of society, geographically removed from the political core whence it emanates, takes resources by force from an indigenous population while operating with the implied backing of that core, but also resents it and develops a tradition of its own moral superiority and self-justification. Hence you have right-wing Israelis openly mocking their patron, the US Secretary of State, for example, while also parading themselves as an oppressed and besieged minority. Another signature of settler-colonialism is the resurgent fear that their victims will one day take vengeance, which in turn animates and justifies further repression. This is why so many commentators have given voice to the idea that what happened last weekend presaged a Palestinian uprising that would retake the entire land of Israel and restore Palestinian property to its rightful owners. That fear seems to me to be borne of the understanding that the original conquest and dispossession was deeply immoral, an original sin for which there will never be actual absolution, whose consequences can only be held at bay by force.
I for one find that posture and the sorts of people who adopt it to be despicable, and I want nothing to do with it. Hence I will resist anyone calling for me to performatively ratify its worldview.
3. The Hamas and allied fighters who escaped Gaza went on to murder civilians indiscriminately and take many hostages for future leverage. Those are acts of terrorism, not “pogroms” as I’ve seen some refer to them. Pogroms are organized private violence carried out by a popular mob against a despised minority, with state backing. They routinely occur in both Israel proper (against African migrant workers) and against Palestinians in the West Bank. Terrorism is spectacular violence undertaken by armed factions of a disempowered minority in order to demonstrate their capability to act, and the impotence to prevent it on the part of an oppressive force previously understood to be invincible. I presume the reason why people would falsely claim that what Hamas carried out was a pogrom is to deflect attention from the many parallels in Jewish history for the oppression Israel (and its external backers) inflict on Palestinians.
4. Hamas justified its action on the grounds that it was protesting the encroachment of Jewish groups on the grounds of Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, with the full support of the Israeli state. I interpret this justification as a pointed dig at the Saudi regime, which had been on the verge of reaching a deal to normalize relations with Israel. The Saudis, an indescribably wealthy kleptocracy with absolute power in Saudi Arabia and a great deal of regional influence outside it, present themselves to the rest of the Islamic world as the protectors of Muslim holy sites. And yet here you have a ragtag group of fighters who’ve been kept in captivity for decades under the thumb of a non-Muslim state power with unconditional military backing in the west doing more to protect a Muslim holy site than the Saudis could be bothered to offer, compromised as they are. I’m not Muslim, but I have to believe that’s effective propaganda. One effect will be to make ridiculous the claim on the part of world powers that the Middle East is “under control” following the putting down of the Arab spring.
5. The Hamas incursion was an obvious, massive security failure for the Israeli state and military. Liberals in my family and in the media have said or implied that its cause was the redirection of state resources toward enabling settler violence in the West Bank (the aforementioned pogroms), at the expense of securing the Gazan perimeter. A higher-level way of saying that is that the mission of Israeli security forces has shifted from defense of the Jewish state from outside threats of qualitatively-similar capabilities to carrying out the violent repression that is that state’s policy with respect to people whose lives it controls, but to whom it denies citizenship—i.e., internal security, in defense of apartheid.
Such regimes aren’t particularly prone to competence or efficiency, because they have a ready-made defense when their inadequacy at carrying out the core tasks of government becomes apparent: they can blame the internal and external other. In combination with the aforementioned transformation of Israeli society, that move is a potent deflection (e.g. calling all Palestinians “terrorists,” which is completely routine in Israel). The weakness of Israel’s domestic opposition is decisive here; instead of opportunistically moving to dethrone the Netanyahu government at a point of extreme weakness, they ran to offer him their support.
It would be appropriate—indeed, necessary—for there to be internal political accountability for that security failure, and there would be, but for the unconditional backing of the United States and other hangers-on in Europe like Germany and Ukraine. This is where the parallels to 9/11 are unmistakable: what was by any account a disaster for the national security establishment will instead be re-purposed as an unparalleled political opportunity, an overwhelming justification for that security establishment to gain more power, and to be put to work repressing internal dissent even more oppressively than they have to date.
7. As of this writing, it looks like Israel will launch a retaliatory ground invasion of Gaza. It has already turned off Gaza’s electricity and barred all shipments of food, water, and medicine. It appears to be singling out ambulances and medical personnel for airstrikes, as though to demonstrate to Palestinians that Israel will face no repercussions from its western backers for committing the most flagrant war crimes. The Israeli defense minister (recall: the same man who postponed the enactment of Netanyahu’s ‘judicial reform’ earlier this year for fear it was impairing military readiness, thereby making himself a hero to liberal Zionists) called the two million people who live there, half of them children, “animals.” (I’ve also seen that remark translated as “beasts.”)
If that ground invasion happens, the slow-motion genocide of the Palestinian people that has been Israel’s policy since the breakdown of the Oslo process will accelerate. And if that happens, it seems impossible now to imagine that western powers will accept any refugees therefrom, given the state of the politics of immigration and mass displacement throughout the western world.
I write all of this now because if and when a mass genocide occurs, there should be no doubt that the same people who self-righteously congratulate themselves for moral superiority entitling them to high positions did nothing when they were in the same positions as historical figures we now deplore for acting similarly in similar circumstances—British colonial officials in Mandatory Palestine, for example, who barred entry to European Jews fleeing the Holocaust for fear their admission would inflame domestic conflict in the territory they administered. I offer this historical comparison that at the very least it might humble people alive now who succumb to moral judgments about the past or to the idea of historical progress.
8. That in turn means this conflict is part of the horrific tableau of human misery under conditions of climate change that we will see play out repeatedly for the rest of our lifetimes: large populations fleeing unlivable conditions, denied sanctuary and hence exterminated because their presence would be inconvenient, including on a moral level for indicating our own culpability in the conditions leading to their displacement. In that way, the present crisis turns us all into settler-colonialists, a thought I find sickening.
9. All of this explains why it’s deeply depressing to see the public discourse in the US shift so decisively in favor of left-punching, the go-to career move for journalistic mediocrities like Andrew Sullivan and Eric Levitz when circumstances call for holding the powerful to account. After the upsurge of left politics in the 2010s following the abysmal 2000s, that’s been the tendency since 2020 at least, and it’s why any rational part of me has no hope for the future beyond my personal circumstances. Any chance of reversing the horrific tableau currently being enacted worldwide would require a broad popular front, and we are very far away from that and getting farther every day.
10. It’s depressing (or worse) for me as an anti-Zionist American Jew to see liberal Zionists here proclaiming that “just because Israel hasn’t always lived up to its values doesn’t mean we have any less of a commitment to its security.” Netanyahu and his government well understand that that attitude on the part of the American Jewish establishment guarantees the success of their political movement, hence it amounts to a unified political consensus in favor of Netanyahu’s politics, which are in turn genocidal and eliminationist. As long as the American Jewish establishment thinks that Israel’s “true” values aren’t Netanyahu’s values, they play directly into his hands. At this late date, it’s impossible to believe they do so blindly, which in turn means that they’re part of a genocidal and eliminationist political coalition.
