(Other People's) Thoughts on Israel, Palestine, and Gaza
An Anthology
“But Not Like This,” by Sam Kriss.
Here’s the question. What is the relation between these two things, the fence being torn down and the massacre that followed? Does the one always imply the other? Is an instant of freedom for Palestinians just another name for Israelis being slaughtered in their homes? A lot of Zionists would, I think, say yes. Maybe it’s not nice that the Gazans have to be locked in a cage, but look, this is what happens when they get out: they kill everyone they get their hands on. These murders are inseparable from the Palestinian cause; freedom for Palestine is a euphemism for another six million murdered Jews, and the only way to prevent that happening is to keep the Palestinians under occupation forever, or maybe just quietly get rid of them. For what it’s worth, I oppose this notion with every fibre of my being. But maybe I’m wrong, because a lot of people seem to agree with the Zionists on this one. Like, for some reason, basically all of my friends and comrades in the Palestine solidarity movement.
Because people, including a few people I ordinarily respect, who I know to be capable of being non-stupid, are being incredibly fucking stupid about this. You could observe that this nightmare is the culmination of decades of Israeli cruelty. You could point out that the IDF was caught off guard because so many of its soldiers were busy in the West Bank, guarding settlers as they rampaged through Palestinian villages. But that’s not enough; you psychos are actually endorsing this. You are directly identifying resistance and liberation with a slaughter of unarmed civilians. I know why you’re doing this, of course. You are trapped in a little game of meaningless discursive gestures, in which you have to constantly affirm the eternal righteousness of whatever side you’ve chosen, or else people online will make fun of you. And so you end up saying that atrocity is resistance, this is what it will always look like, and anyone who has any reservations about it does not belong to the cause. You end up aligning yourselves with the ugliest, most eliminationist strands of Israeli fascism, and you don’t even realise it!
But more to the point, this is an outrageously condescending approach, one that amounts to the wholesale denial of Palestinian ethical subjecthood. Do you really not see who you are helping when you position Palestinians as mindless savages who can’t be held responsible for their own actions? I have not, it’s true, lived under siege for eighteen years; maybe my perspective is limited. But I still think it’s possible to drive past some old people waiting at a bus stop and not kill them on sight. I think it’s possible to not execute parents in front of their children. In fact, I know it’s possible, because there were plenty of Hamas fighters who didn’t do it. Some filmed themselves with women or disabled or elderly people in their homes, promising not to harm them. They insisted that the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades do not murder children, which is completely untrue, but it’s hopeful. Afterwards, an Israeli woman told the TV news that the Hamas fighters in her home had told her ‘don’t be afraid, we are Muslims,’ and asked permission before eating one of her bananas. How do you explain these people? They lived in the same city under the same siege; they lived through the same Israeli bombings as the ones who happily took their revenge. Could it be that whatever our condition, and whatever evils are visited on us, we are all answerable for the deeds of our hands?
My interpretation remains that Hamas fully intended to provoke the most terrible possible response from Israel: their hope seems to be that Israel will commit such a massive atrocity in response that it will lose international legitimacy. All the sympathy that Jews as a people and the support Israel as a project receive as a result of the Holocaust will be erased or at least badly damaged. Every antisemite in the world will be able to say, “See, they are just as bad, stop listening to them complain, maybe they have it coming.” This would be the beginning of the end for Israel.
I share the profound fear and heartbreak my fellow Jews experience at witnessing a massacre of Jews and then the apparent indifference and even glee this can inspire in people. But I believe adopting the attitude at the core of extreme Zionism—that Gentiles hate Jews naturally and essentially, that they will always attempt to kill Jews or justify the killing of Jews, and that as a result Jews can only really count on each other—is to embrace despair and the premise of Nazism, if only in reverse: that Jews are not really part of the larger human community, that we are in some sense its implacable foes.
“War of the Statements,” by Sam Adler-Bell.
As the horrors mounted in Israel and Palestine, in America we did what we do best: We issued statements. Then we found fault with those statements and issued new statements…. Even ordinary people, I noticed, seemed to adopt the rhetorical tics of statementese, as if their social-media posts, too, were being written by committee, in consultation with crisis managers, calculated to assuage several constituencies: “My heart goes out to …” “While I strongly condemn …” “Two things can be true at once …”
We are accustomed to this ritual. It is familiar and, in this sense, something of a comfort. We distract ourselves, momentarily, from the real stakes of ongoing catastrophe by getting angry at college students, at Justin Bieber, at strangers on the internet. We fixate on words, invest them with talismanic power; perhaps, in the right combination, they can stop the bombs, make sense of so many deaths. In many debates, the crucial question seemed to be not “What is to be done?” but “What is to be said?”
These arguments exhaust me. Of course, words matter (here I am, using them now). But all this wrangling over diction, emphasis, and affect has begun to feel monstrously trivial. While I was writing this essay, a bomb exploded at a hospital in Gaza, killing hundreds… About 1,400 Israelis were killed in the October 7 attack; the death toll in Gaza has surpassed 4,000.
Why, I wonder, does this conflict so often play out, in the U.S., as a conflict over words?
“Jews in the Diaspora…” by Sam Adler-Bell.
What I have been unable to stop thinking about, through these awful days, are the arguments I would be having with my grandfather if he were still alive…. And I suspect that many Jewish leftists of my generation have experienced a relationship like this, in which our blooming awareness of Israel’s criminality, our opposition to the authorising myths of Zionism, was forged in a crucible of wounded attachment.
Jewish history in the 20th century testifies to this: that suffering is a meagre moral teacher; but we learn its lessons anyway. It is the bleakest of historical ironies that a people hounded from country to country, and eventually into camps, by the pestilence of nationalism should seize on nationalism as our saviour, our birth right, our vengeance. The question for the Jewish left today, as it was in 1945, is this: what can be done with anguish, with the feeling of being persecuted for an attachment to identity, to a history and even to a family, other than inflicting the same anguish on others.
“Against the Brave,” by Sam Kriss.
I began by saying that this is a war without opposing sides. Israel is not actually trying to defeat the resistance; it has no political objectives, just violence. But the same goes for the resistance: they are not, in fact, doing anything to meaningfully resist…. Whoever’s saying it, the fact remains that there is no military path to a free Palestine. This fact is inconvenient and unfair and doesn’t leave much room for the optimism of the will, but that doesn’t make it any less true, and if you think there’s an exemption from unfair truths that’s awarded to especially just causes then you are wrong. Israel has nuclear weapons: it will not be overthrown with small arms and explosives. I don’t think I have the right to condemn violent resistance altogether—but I can reject violent resistance that’s doomed to fail, that achieves nothing and produces nothing except violence for its own sake. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad claim to be fighting for an Islamic republic, in which Jews will be free to live peacefully as long as they don’t dispute the sovereignty of Islam. The PFLP claims to be fighting a revolutionary people’s war for a liberated workers’ state. Their critics say that both are actually fighting for an unlimited genocide, the death of every single Jew in Israel. But what difference does it make? This is all make-believe! None of it matters, because none of it is ever actually going to happen! They’re not fighting for anything at all. They’re just fighting.
And actually, I can think of one benefit all this bloodshed has brought. Violent resistance is an emotional salve for the indignity of living under occupation. A synthetic sense of dignity. You might be powerless, your future might not be in your own hands—but by killing, you can still show your enemies that you are a man. You can hurt the other side in some small way. Make one of their children suffer. Make one of their mothers weep. Force them to recognise your existence. And all of this is already justified ahead of time, because you are a victim and they are not. You will die in the process, of course. And afterwards, your family might die too, and your neighbours, and thousands of people who had nothing to do with you but happened to be part of the same people, including the young children who never got to make any kind of choice about any of this at all. Afterwards, when the smoke clears, nothing will have meaningfully changed. But maybe it’s worth it. For one shining moment, you get to experience the thrill and the freedom of being brave.
“Where They Burn Books,” by John Ganz.
There is no way to remain a “civilized people” and also commit barbaric acts: it will result in spiritual devastation.
My first reaction to seeing Israeli soldiers burning books was to say “these are not Jews.” But such a disavowal is too easy. This is what the founders of Israel wanted: for the Jews to “be a nation like any other.” To be normal. And therefore to be able to commit crimes like any other nation. The defenders of Israel cry, “Why pay so much attention to us? We are not the worst or biggest criminals? Do we not just do the same as the others?” But when the labels applied to others are also applied to them, they also reject them: “We could not possibly do colonialism, or apartheid, or genocide — how dare you apply those terms to us!” Every act of evil requires both a universal and particular moment — evil exists in that contradiction and false reconciliation. To do evil, one must say to oneself “everybody does it” at the same time as “I’m uniquely permitted to do it.”
As the Nazis worked for the physical destruction of the Jewish people, they work towards the spiritual destruction of the Jewish people: to go from the people of the book, to a people of blood. It is a form of virulent self-hatred. The non-Jews who encourage us down this path are spiritual antisemites, whether they realize it or not.
Oz pauses to ask his interlocutor: “Is it possible that Hitler did not only strike the Jews but also infected them with poison? Did that poison reach some of the hearts and is it still active?” I think that what Hitler did was stab the heart of the world and it is still writhing from that wound. I don’t know if it can be healed.
Genocide is called a crime against humanity because it attacks the very being of mankind as a plural entity. As Hannah Arendt wrote, the destruction of one people is “an attack upon human diversity as such, that is upon a characteristic of the ‘human status’ without which the very words ‘mankind’ or ‘humanity’ would be devoid of meaning.” This is why the burning of books is the supreme symbol of genocide: it is an attempt to annihilate the multifarious human soul.
“Plea for Palestine,” by Jordan Wood.
In Jesus Christ, the first-century Palestinian Jew, God has undermined our attempt to instrumentalize even human death and suffering, because absolutely no death, however undignified, is bereft of the God-human’s own death; all die in his death, that all might be raised in his own life. God has revealed his own infinite dignity precisely by granting it to us in our undignified state, not to dignify or justify that state but to dignify and justify any in that state. And so, as Pope Francis has recently taught, “every human person possesses an infinite dignity” (1), since, “By uniting himself with every human being through his Incarnation, Jesus Christ confirmed that each person possesses an immeasurable dignity simply by belonging to the human community…this dignity can never be lost” (19).
Let us refuse the demonic zero-sum game and instead seek where and how Christ suffers today. Then the infinite dignity that he himself is may be brought forth through liberation, salvation, justice, love. Rev. Isaac again:
“Yes, Jesus on the cross today amidst the ruins of Gaza. Suffering with the despised. Jesus on the cross with the abandoned around the world, victim of racism and authoritarian regimes. Jesus is crucified today unjustly and unjustly... Amongst the rubble.”
In Bethlehem all those years ago I first noticed the rubble, then the faces. The Lord sees only the faces, and so enters the rubble where they lie, decomposing. For God’s sake, this is my plea: at the very least, let us stop supplying the means of crucifying Christ in many thousands anew!