ANGUISH OVER A WAR FAR AWAY

A very personal reflection on the war between Israel and Hamas.

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I am perpetually distressed over the war unfolding between Israel and Hamas. I read about it continually. I confer with friends who are closer to the scene than I am. I speak about and write about it. Last month I traveled to Israel to gain a clearer sense of the reality of events on the ground. It's unclear to me whether my behavior is an effort that intensifies my disquiet or an attempt to purge, at least partially, my tangled emotions and conflicted thoughts.

On the American front, two forms of activism have emerged. There is barricades activism manifested in protests with people taking sides either in defense of Israel or the Palestinians. Characteristic of our times, it has greatly devolved into ideologically grounded and mutually exclusive factions that partake of simplistic reductionism. For many Jews in the Israeli camp, protest is fueled by tribal loyalty, and the millennial history of antisemitism is greatly embedded in Jewish identity. There are those Jews, liberal on other issues, for whom it is “Israel right or wrong” no matter its policies. For those Arab Americans identifying with the victimization of Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli destruction of Gaza, there is a corresponding loyalty. This is understandable. For other protesters, especially on college campuses, anger and righteousness are fueled in great measure by au courant ideologies that make a fetish of power inequities imbued with the purported truisms of post-colonialism. I am not sympathetic to these motives.

As a life-long progressive activist harkening back to the antiwar days of the Vietnam War, I have often been on the barricades. I have participated in more protests and marches than I can remember. I have also lent myself to arrest when I thought it was justified and necessary.

But not this time. For reasons implied, I am alienated from sectors of the Left that I believe have lost their way. It too readily embraces moral positions that are binary in nature. Such positions often glibly overlook facts, details, and complexities that intellectual integrity requires. Truth suffers. An inescapable reality is that the situation in the Middle East is very complex and long has been. To do justice to this conflict, one needs to embrace the facts and their complexity. I find polemics unhelpful.

The second form of activism is expressed by those who are working against the current to try to find solutions to this ostensibly intractable and tragic conflict between and Israel and Palestine. It is here that I have chosen to place my commitments and devote my time and energy.

As a Jew, I care about Israel, its character, its well-being, and its security. As a humanist and internationalist, I am also committed to the worth and preciousness of all human beings. Every life lost to violence is a tragedy. The war in Gaza brings these two fundamental commitments, and the values standing behind them, into direct conflict. As such, it is a source of my distress. But being conflicted about the war, I admit, it itself generates a secondary level of disquiet. I live in safety. I am here and not there; I am not at risk of being killed or involved in the killing. One could argue that my upset is consequentially an indulgence, a privilege that both Israelis and Palestinians cannot avail themselves of.

But not quite. I remain in significant ways tied to Israel and the war. Israel, as the Jewish state, in some sense speaks for me. I have a legitimate interest in its character, its politics, and its conduct, conduct which is brought into most painful relief by its current and ongoing devastation of Gaza. I cannot be indifferent to the tens of thousands of innocent civilians killed by the Israeli offensive in Gaza. Even as I care about Israel and am bound to it by ethnic loyalty, I have grown in my criticism of its policies, which increasingly define it. My circumstance is roughly analogous to a family member who has grown increasingly distant from a relative whose values and behavior stand at variance with his or her own. While disapproving, love and loyalty remain.

I have long been critical of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and its control over Gaza. It is cruel, humiliating, and a violation of international law and fundamental human rights to which I have long been committed. The driving heart of the occupation is the settler movement, which has insinuated itself into the upper echelons of the Israeli government, its administration, and even the middle ranks of the military that is vital for maintaining Israel's security. The settler movement, though a minority, is aggressive and well organized. It is a cancer that morally corrupts Israeli society. 

A spillover is that Israeli society has become increasingly conservative. Hatred of Arabs and Palestinians has become too commonplace. By contrast, the founding document of Israel, its Declaration of Independence, is an Enlightenment statement that explicitly proclaims that the new nation “.. will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture...” I can only lament that Israel has fallen far from that vision, and as it has, I have become increasingly alienated from the Jewish homeland, even as I continue to feel tied to it. The dialectics of occupation, and its consequent oppression of the Palestinian people, can only create a condition of latent and often explicit rebellion, and it is morally corrosive of Israeli society. A nation simply cannot oppress six million people forever without perpetual restiveness.

A while back I interviewed the journalist Eric Alterman on his book We Are Not One, a comprehensive work detailing the history of Israel-American relations. (A review of the book can be found in a previous Beyond Appearances newsletter sent January 10, 2023. https://joe834.substack.com/p/we-are-not-one-a-history-of-americas.) In the interview, Alterman noted that Israel is a “red state,” and American Jewry a “blue state.” Polls showed that during his presidency, over 60 percent of Israelis supported Donald Trump. Today their allegiance has shifted to Biden, which may indicate that Israelis favor whichever American president they conclude will better aid their security. But I find any support for Trump, regardless of the rationale, to be repugnant. Whether for reasons of security, or other reasons, such support is an index of how far Israel in general has moved to the right. 

The Hamas massacre of October 7th of last year, which killed 1,200 Israelis, was an orgy of bloodletting. It sent shock waves through Israeli society. It has traumatized the society at large, has turned Israelis inward, and has blinded them to the devastation of innocent lives that the war in Gaza has wrought. Hamas is not a liberation movement. It is a theocratic, autocratic, misogynistic, homophobic terrorist organization. Its objective is the single-minded commitment to destroy Israel and kill Jews, an objective that is explicitly genocidal. It cares little about the welfare of the Palestinian people. To my mind, this should encourage self-assured progressives to keep their distance.

Israel has a right to defend itself and ensure that Hamas is neutralized. Yet the assault on Gaza and the devastation it has wrought is agonizingly disproportionate. The longer the war endures, and the greater the loss of innocent life, with starvation and disease looming, the more unacceptable Israel's offensive becomes. There needs to be a ceasefire to engage the return of the hostages and as a prelude to a long-range solution leading to an independent (and demilitarized) Palestinian state. This will require an aggressive initiative by all the actors involved, especially the surrounding moderate Arab states. (I refer readers to my previous essay, dated March 10, 2024, inclusive of an interview with Professor Leonard Grob in which he sketches a possible scenario for “the day after.”) https://joe834.substack.com/p/the-israelhamas-war-the-day-after

But as the war endures, I find myself increasingly disquieted. My moral distress penetrates deeply. As implied, it taps into the nether recesses of my identity. This conflict was painfully brought to the fore by the recent film “The Zone of Interest,” which I have previously written about. It is a brilliant portrayal of the horrors of the Holocaust. The immediate subject of the film is not the victims but the perpetrators, who are emotionally walled off from the evil they are committing. The film centers on Rudolf Höss and his family. Höss was the commandant of Auschwitz. He, his wife, and his five children live in a very comfortable home accompanied by a spacious garden, replete with a well-manicured lawn, walkways, and beautifully arranged shrubs. At the rear of the garden is a large wall, immediately behind which is the wall of the Auschwitz death camp. All the viewer sees is a guard tower, tightly strung barbed wire, and two smokestacks in the distance, spewing gray smoke by day and flames by night. Imposed on the visuals are sporadic sounds that we understand are coming from behind the walls – gunshots, the bark of a dog, and human screams. But what is transpiring behind the walls is left to the imagination.

The interactions of the Höss family members are totally banal. Rudolf leaves for work each morning to dutifully oversee his work as the commandant of the death camp. His wife, Hedwig enjoys the delights of the garden. The evil perpetrated immediately next door is repressed and out of mind.

“The Zone of Interest” forces the viewer to consider that the perpetrator of great evil could be us. We rationalize and keep out of view evil done in our name by our government or others. 

It is this conclusion that is painfully brought home by the war in Gaza. I have read many articles on “The Zone of Interest,” but an opinion piece in The New York Times published on March 9th highlighted the anguish I feel. I found it especially disturbing. Entitled “'The Zone of Interest' Won't Let Us Look Away,” it is written by culture critic David Klion. While summarizing the film, Klion veers toward a conclusion that the Israeli offensive in Gaza renders almost inevitable, and which I find grippingly painful. Klion writes, “Watching 'The Zone of Interest' as U.S.-made bombs rained down on civilian neighborhoods in Gaza, I couldn't help but dwell on the banal acceptance of these mass civilian casualties that I have witnessed closer to home...”

“For Jews like myself, who publicly oppose Israel's actions in Gaza, one of the hardest realities to confront is the fact that plenty in our communities are aware that the Israeli offensive is killing tens of thousands of Palestinians, many of whom are children. But in the wake of the gruesome Oct. 7th Hamas attack on Israelis that touched off the war, many people we are close to are not just incurious about Israel's assault on Gaza but are willing to justify it without apology.”

I witnessed this lack of curiosity and caring in Israel on my recent visit, and I have witnessed it among American Jews. It is very disturbing. But this is not my sole nor primary source of emotional distress. More disconcerting is that fellow Jews, who have been the most abused people in history and the primary victims of the Holocaust, the paradigmatic genocide, have now become themselves flagrant victimizers. I reject the term “genocide” to describe Israel's assault on Gaza. Others have used it, and there can be no doubt that the loss of innocent lives is egregiously great. The persecuted have become the persecutors. It is a tragic historical irony of the most far-reaching proportions. It is a reality I find very painful to countenance.

My most abiding ethical values emerge in great measure from my Jewish identity. In my analysis, it is the Jews' relative powerlessness throughout their history that enabled the fostering of an ethical consciousness that has animated their admirable commitment to civil rights and liberties, and human rights, and has placed many Jews at the forefront of the struggle for justice. When one lacks power, it makes sense to appeal to equality and equal rights, and then actively deploy those values in the service of working for a society based on universal justice. It is a source of pride, admiration, and personal identity that Jews have done so.

It also comports with Jewish religious ethics. The Torah commands 36 times the love and acceptance of the stranger: “When you come into the land do not oppress the stranger, for remember that you yourselves were slaves in the land of Egypt.” It is a brilliant and edifying moral insight. A primary motivation for the establishment of Israel was to give Jews the power of self-defense and enable them to escape from the mercies of the host countries in which they were construed as an estranged and debased people. Yet, with the development of that power, however necessary, has come the relative forsaking of those ethics which have been at the center of Jewish identity, including my own. One needs to conclude that power has corrupted, even overwhelmed, a central foundation of values that defines what being a modern Jew means in its most valued sense. A further conclusion to be drawn is that there is an Israeli Jewish ethics and Diaspora Jewish ethics, and they are fundamentally separate and differ from each other. This, too, evokes the disquiet of alienation.

There are many causes for Israel's rightward turn. In my view, the occupation lies at its heart, with the war in Gaza, though indubitably caused by Hamas, the most destructive and tragic consequence. This is among the reasons, I believe, that the creation of a Palestinian state in which Palestinian people can live in freedom and dignity is so vitally important. I believe this for the sake of the Palestinians and for the sake of Israel's security and its moral character. 

If peace with justice comes to the Middle East, I may also find relative peace of mind. Perhaps.