Is It Possible To Stay Sane on Israel/Gaza?

And: A Note On Terms

I’m trying not to post on politics more than once a week, but it’s very difficult for me at the moment to think about anything other than Israel/Palestine.

The question I’m currently grappling with is whether it’s possible to stay sane with this going on — or to find anything like a balanced position. That seems to be an untenable point of view with the center collapsing and the social fabric fraying, really, all across the West, but it is necessary: the world keeps moving forward, Israel/Palestine isn’t the only crisis, and points of consensus do, somewhere or other, need to be found.

I do find it useful to split the conflict in two parts. There’s what’s happening on the ground in Gaza where bombs are falling and people dying; and then there’s how the conflict is playing out internationally, which is in a sense a much larger struggle. The two are not completely separate — the combatants are acutely aware of international opinion; and sentiment in the rest of the world directly influences the conduct of the war on the ground — but the terms of conflict are very different.

On the ground, there is what was — famously — the most intractable conflict in the world even before 10/7 and then Israel’s response blew past all possible balances and red lines. I regard Netanyahu’s conduct of the war to be unhinged — past the point of a proportionate response, neither succeeding in recovering the hostages nor in eliminating Hamas’ military leadership while losing the sympathy of the entire international community, the United States included — but it is worth emphasizing to the ceasefire-now crowd what Israel is up against. Israel did withdraw from Gaza in 2005. Israel had been working towards a modus vivendi with Hamas in the period leading up to 10/7, which was — in retrospect — all a setup on Hamas’ part. Israel really does have an obligation, like any other state, to regain control over its security. There never was a scenario in which Israel, after 10/7, would say the equivalent of “nice shot” and leave it there — deterrence needed to be restored and Hamas’ war-making potential neutralized. At this stage, it’s becoming fairly clear what a conflict-ending agreement would look like — a simmering-down of hostilities whether or not the word ‘ceasefire’ is used, an exchange of hostages-for-prisoners, and a flow of aid into Gaza — but there does need to be some international understanding that a ‘permanent cease-fire’ is a real challenge from Israel’s perspective: it involves giving a degree of legitimacy to Hamas even after 10/7 and ending the conflict well short of ‘victory.’ Unfortunately, though, cynicism has set in for both sides. As The New York Times noted, “The only party that’s really in a hurry is Biden.” Hamas seems content to sacrifice Gazans in order to gain its victories in the court of public opinion. And Netanyahu appears, largely for his own interests, to want to drag out the conflict. That turn towards the irrational gives the international protests much of their moral weight: Israel is killing civilians and suspending aid without necessarily having a correspondingly legitimate military objective.

But at the same time we do need to come to grips with what is happening internationally. The rhetoric from the protests, and from the left in general, isn’t about ‘proportionate warfare’ or ‘increasing aid’ or anything like that. So much of it is about the ‘Zionist colonial settler state’ and its ‘genocide of the Palestinians.’

And every one of these terms comes in for serious questioning. I have never been clear what the ‘colonial’ label is supposed to mean. Who is the colonist? The way Rashid Khalidi phrases it in The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine is that Palestinians had to contend with “a colonial power in the Metropole, in this case London, but also with a singular colonial-settler movement.” The premise is that the British, or the West, are the colonists with the Zionists acting as if on remote control. Which is a very odd way of thinking about things. As Benny Morris writes, “Colonialism is commonly defined as the policy and practice of an imperial power acquiring political control over another country, settling it with its sons, and exploiting it economically. By any objective standard, Zionism fails to fit this definition.”

The “colonial-settler movement” is a more complicated claim. That refers back to the work of Patrick Wolfe and the claim that a settler-colonial regime is inherently “eliminatory.” But the phrasing is disingenuous. It is meant to suggest a “structure rather than an event,” which means that Israel qua Israel can do no other than destroy an indigenous people. The phrasation is specifically designed to draw parallels with colonialism in South Africa or in the United States and to tap into a well of liberal guilt. It bears precious little resemblance to the complicated case of Israel, whose Jewish population were themselves predominantly refugees and which was itself under attack by neighboring powers throughout its history. Some overwhelming number of modern nation-states could be described as “settler-colonial” — all of the Americas, Australia, etc. Does that make them illegitimate?

“Genocide” is of course the most serious, punishing word that we have. It brings everything else to a stop. The problem with the word, though, is that it means such different things to different people as to be almost meaningless. The actual 1948 definition of genocide is the “intentional destruction of a people in whole or in part.” But it is the “in part” that is a bit baffling and far from the way the word is used in common speech — since, in theory, “in part” could refer to a single member of a group. Read further into the criteria of genocide and the word collapses almost into incoherence: genocide can also be “causing serious…mental harm to the members of a group.”

That disjunction between the technical, international definition of the term genocide and its use in popular understanding (everybody who hears the term instantly pictures Armenia, Auschwitz, the Killing Fields, etc) makes it readily deployable as a rhetorical weapon even when the situation is far removed from it. In the much-cited instance in the winter where the International Court of Justice found it “plausible” that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, the ICJ was — if you read more closely — actually saying something very different. The full quote from the ICJ’s ruling is: “At least some of the rights claimed by South Africa and for which it claims protection are plausible.” The judge who wrote the ruling, Joan Donoghue, later clarified that what she meant was: “The court decided that the Palestinians had a plausible right to be protected from genocide….But it did not decide — and this is something where I’m correcting what’s often said in the media — it didn’t decide that the claim of genocide was plausible.”

Those sorts of technicalities are of course absent from the protests and from the hyper-charged rhetoric from the left. The deaths of civilians — even stripped of the context of the military operations involving Hamas — are brought entirely under the overarching umbrella of “genocide.” And for much of the left the term “genocide” is imported from another discourse — from Patrick Wolfe’s notion that “the question of genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism” and that the “settler-colonial state” has, structurally, an inherent genocidal component — which, if you buy into this, renders Israel a “genocidal regime” almost regardless of which specific acts are committed by the Israeli government.

And, finally, we get to the most vexed word of all which is “Zionist.” I recently had it said to me that “Zionism is the biggest threat in the world,” which is on the face of it a baffling claim. Zionism refers to the settlement (or, depending on how you look at it, repatriation) of less than 8 million Jews to Israel. But, of course, the current round of “anti-Zionism” — the Salt Lake City bar owner announcing a “No Zionists allowed” policy’; the Columbia student telling a disciplinary committee to be grateful that they are not “out murdering Zionists” — has little relation to that dictionary definition.

The protest movements anchor on a dichotomy of oppressor and oppressed — or, as Zadie Smith phrased it in The New Yorker, on the idea that “there is an ethical duty to express solidarity with the weak in any situation that involves oppressive power.” And the language of the protests has been carefully calibrated to see “Zionism,” or the state of Israel, as the embodiment of oppressive power. Israel is the “colonial” state and the tool of “American imperialism.” If “white supremacy” is a little hard to apply to  a state in which the majority of citizens are not of European origin, the term “Jewish supremacy” may be substituted instead. “Settler” is suitably reminiscent of what European colonists and the United States did to the Native Americans. And so “Zionist” comes to be the short hand for the prevailing power structure and for all that is wrong in the world.

The simple equation of anti-Semitism with “anti-Zionism” isn’t exactly right, if only because anti-Semitism is only ever in part about Jews: it functions by treating Jews as symptomatic of some larger ill. In its 19th and early 20th century formulation, to be anti-Semitic often meant to be opposed to “cosmopolitanism” — and the structure of anti-Semitism that we got used to featured Jews as the embodiment of an urban, deracinated, modern society receiving the enmity of those dedicated to a version of blood and soil. Behind Zionism was a desire to desire to undo that binary — for Jews to have a state just like anybody else has a state. And then, in the course of time, the Jewish state finds itself a pariah precisely because it is committed to a nationalist, blood-and-soil paradigm. The irony of that is hard to miss.

In some sense, none of these terms matter that much compared to the suffering-and-dying in Gaza — this was the point that Zadie Smith seemed to be getting at in her recent, much-maligned essay. But there is a wider dispute as well, which is well on track to creating a deep fissure across Western society, and, in that, these terms matters enormously.

Anyway. The real point is that it’s very difficult to stay sane when thinking about Israel/Palestine. I usually enjoy writing. Not this time. The Middle East is being ripped apart. And then, separately but overlappingly, Western society is facing a deep-seated ideological faultline. There are no easy answers anywhere in here, but there is something like an obligation to breathe deeply, examine both sides of these questions, stay sane as much as possible.