I have been watching the events in the State of Israel with horror. Hundreds, perhaps a thousand Israelis have been killed in Hamas’s attack, hundreds more Gazans have died under Israeli missiles and “bunker-buster” bombs. And the State of Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has promised that there will be many, many more. “The price the Gaza Strip will pay will be a very heavy one that will change reality for generations,” he threatened today.
I mourn for the State of Israel, and I weep for Gaza, as apartment blocks, only recently repaired since the last time almost three years ago, are reduced again to rubble and the wounded die in overcrowded hospitals now deprived of electricity. I am shaking in shock and rage at the stupidity and brutality of it all and, in the smoke, fire, and blood, all I can do is ask “why?” It is not a welcomed question among my Israeli and Diaspora Zionist friends and family; asking it demands that they challenge a certainty produced in the moral binary of a religious tradition that few of them really believe in.
Why? There is no possibility that the Hamas attack, now supported by Hezbollah in South Lebanon, can succeed in any material or practical goal. It poses no threat to the existence of State of Israel and will neither change Israeli government policy with regard to the Occupied Territories and Gaza, and equally unlikely to encourage Israelis to advocate for a change in those polices. Minister Gallant made that much clear.
The only material or practical result of the Hamas attack will be the deaths of Israeli and Gazan civilians. It is likely that the attack will inadvertently assist the Netanyahu regime in its efforts to finally pass its “judicial reform” package, and it will almost certainly help to consolidate its settlement policy which, inevitably, will lead to the State of Israel’s official (and illegal) annexation of most of the Occupied West Bank. The inevitable “circling of the wagons” is already well-underway across the spectrum of Israeli politics, and among its compradors in the colonized Diaspora Jewish Community.
This, like all of Hamas’s offensives, is an act of startling and vicious stupidity. I have seen some people in the anti-Zionist left claim that it is some kind of brilliant, three-dimensional chess meant to advance imaginary post-modern military and diplomatic goals. That is utter nonsense. The attack is a paroxysm of violence enacted by a militant extremist movement that exists only for violence and itself. So, why did Hamas begin a conflict that it will surely lose and merely bring yet another wave of retributive destruction down on the people it claims to represent?
Few of my Israeli and Zionist friends are disposed to ask. They see the Hamas attack only as an act of aggression by an intractable enemy; consistent with Hamas’s extremism, but isolated from the broader historical context of the post-1948 Middle East. This is understandable; the violence is real and real Israelis are being killed and maimed (as are real Gazans). Hamas is a ruthless terrorist gang that is yet again destroying Israeli lives. The emergency is happening now, and I understand how Israelis are disinclined at this very moment to quibble over the historical details of how it happened.
The problem, however, is that neither Israelis nor their Zionist proxies are ever inclined to trouble themselves with the historical details of the ongoing crisis, of which the current violence is only the latest manifestation. I have never seen or heard one of my Israeli friends write or say in social media anything about the illegality of their country’s occupation of the West Bank or the blockade of Gaza. Not once. As far as I can tell, they simply accept it as a fact of life, and that the State of Israel’s brazen violation of international law is no more serious than underage drinking in a Tel Aviv nightspot.
The more insistent among them often remind me that the State of Israel, which was created as a positive act of international law, owes nothing to international law.
Far better for the Israeli conscience, it seems, to regard each crisis as a discrete, isolated event unrelated to the region’s long history of conflict and dispossession. That way, they can narrate the violence that periodically erupts from Gaza as nothing more than incoherent rage devoid of context and reason. In this telling, the Gazans and, by extension, all Palestinians trapped in the reservation lands of the Occupied Territories are irrational savages consumed by hate.
This narrative has traction in the Israeli imagination because it resonates so well with the image of “The Arab” of Zionist legend: the simpleminded and uncivilized tribesmen of Sword in the Desert, the Nazi sympathizer of Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer, the slavering rapists of Arthur Koestler’s Thieves in the Night and Leon Uris’s Exodus. One cannot reason with them, Binyamin Netanyahu said in 2016, so we have to cage them in. “In our neighborhood, we need to protect ourselves from wild beasts,” the Israeli leader declared.
For 75 years, the State of Israel’s animating myth has been that it is a tiny embattled nation surrounded by enemies and ever on the verge of destruction. That was certainly true in 1948 when, as the British boarded their ships home and the State of Israel declared its independence, the armies of Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, and Syria poured over the border to smother the infant republic in its bed. The Israelis had few friends at that time, and even the United States declined to intervene. Outnumbered and poorly armed, they heroically fought a bitter war for survival and won.
That was 1948. Six years later, the New York Times opined, “Reading the news from the Near East, it is hard not to get the impression of an embattled Israel, surrounded by enemies and fighting for its existence. The reality is not quite so dramatic, for the existence of Israel is in no sense at stake.” Indeed, the State of Israel’s next two wars were no struggles for survival.
In 1956, it joined Great Britain and France in an imperialist adventure to exert colonial control over the Suez Canal and Egypt. In 1967, the State of Israel fought a war of aggression against its neighbors on the pretext of a “preemptive strike.” If its Arab enemies had really been massing their forces and, as the official story goes, the State of Israel was about to be overrun, one has to wonder why Egypt, Syria, and Jordan folded so quickly and completely in just a few days.
The 1973 war, which my Israeli friends have been citing continuously this weekend, was a different matter. The State of Israel was caught on the back foot by aggressive enemies and had to defend itself. Yet, even there, “the existence of Israel [was] in no sense at stake.”
The myth that it is, and continues to be, feeds a victim narrative central to Israeli identity. In their imaginations, everyone is against them. American progressives like Elizabeth Warren are against them (and an antisemite, to boot!), Americans and Europeans exercising their free speech rights to advocate for a boycott of the State of Israel are against them, Diaspora Jews who do not immediately fall in line and bow in the direction of Jerusalem are against them, indeed anyone who questions Israeli policy is against them.
Israeli victimhood, and the belief that the State of Israel is always a hair’s-breadth from annihilation (despite being, by far, the largest recipient of American military aid over the last few decades), demands that it must be the only victim. Merely suggesting in social media that it is possible to grieve for the Israeli victims of Hamas’s while also worrying about the thousands of Gazan noncombatants who will inevitably be killed and maimed by Israeli bombs brings down a shower of abuse and condemnation. In the Israeli victim narrative, there is only room for one victim.
To acknowledge that the current crisis is just another horrifying episode in a long, depressing history stretching back to before the Naqba would be to suggest that Gazans and all Palestinian Arabs are and have been victims, too. It would demand that Israelis and their Zionist proxies look at the conditions in Gaza to the most densely-populated place on Earth, where more than 13,000 people occupy each square mile of territory and the annual per capita GDP is US$900 (a mere 1.75% of the State of Israel’s).
They would be ethically obligated to ask why this is so; why two million people are living lives of grinding poverty and desperation behind Gaza’s ghetto walls, who put them there, who keeps them there, whose army marches outside the wire, and whose navy patrols off the coast maintaining an illegal punitive blockade. If they did that, Israelis would have to allow they that are not the only victims, and that there are reasons for the Hamas attack. Few Israelis are willing to do that.
Until they are, the struggle will go on; Israelis will continue to die under Hamas’s rockets, and a great many more Gazans will die under Israeli bombs.
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