What Has Been Lost In Israel/Gaza

Or: How Complicit Am I In What's Happening?

Who knows if this comes through or not, but the idea with these Commentator posts is to be sort of elegant and above the fray — let my opinion in but abide by existing journalism norms. With Israel/Gaza, though, as everybody knows, that’s really not possible. What’s happening is so dark, so awful, that it forces everybody to grapple very deeply with everything they think they know.

This post is written from a place of grief — trying to itemize a few of the psychic losses we’ve had since October 7. It’s also my attempt to ask myself some difficult questions. I’m Jewish. I love being Jewish and am proud of being Jewish. I am supportive of the state of Israel. After October 7th, I believed that some Israeli military response was called for and, throughout the conflict, I have imagined that it is possible for Israel to strike some sort of balance. In a piece I wrote shortly after 10/7, I wrote that “nothing will be more critical” than for Israel to “retain a sense of proportion, to exercise restraint where needed.” In February, I called Rafah “a bridge too far.” But here we are, with three “mass casualty” events in less than a month — the missile strike on the Tel al-Sultan refugee camp in Rafah, the missile strike on the UNRWA school in Nuseirat, the bombing strikes on Nuseirat in the midst of the hostage rescue operation. The Rafah offensive is underway. And I have to ask myself about my own complicity with what’s happened.

I really do balk at the more extreme characterizations of the conflict. Genocide, simply, is not the right word — and I’m startled at how routinely it’s used by critics of Israel’s policy. But other, almost-as-uncomfortable-terms, come into view. Atrocity is there. A doctor at Al-Aqsa hospital, interviewed by The Nation, calls the attacks “an ongoing mass execution across all demographics of a population” and I do find it a bit difficult to argue with that description. It is important to question many of the numbers that have come out of the Gaza Health Ministry. This piece, for instance, chips away at the initially-reported numbers from the UNRWA school attack. The Associated Press has a valuable analysis showing that the proportion of deaths of women and children have deescalated dramatically since the fall, and civilian to combatant casualties now are roughly where one would expect them to be in counter-insurgency warfare. However, these are still enormous numbers of civilian deaths. And what I find particularly concerning is — as far as I can tell — the near-total indifference to it by Israelis. In the national rapture over the return of the four hostages, there was precious little attention to the afterthought that somewhere around 200 Palestinian civilians were killed as a diversion to protect the rescue mission.

What is lost for me then, first, is a narrative of Jewish innocence. The central narrative of Jewish identity has, for a long, long time been victimhood — the Inquisition, the pogroms, the Holocaust, were all, of course, unprovoked. “They tried to kill us, they failed, let’s eat,” runs a popular distillation of Jewish history. The idea with Israel always was that it would flip the script, but now, clearly, we’re reaching an extreme. There are those who would argue that I’m being very naive here — that Israel flipped into an aggressor state with Plan Dalet, with 1967, with Lebanon, with the First Intifada, but I think most Jews around the world would understand what I mean. There was a narrative in place that Israel had, in difficult circumstances, always acted more or less justly (Gurwinder lays out that narrative in cogent form here), but with the destruction of somewhere around half of Gaza’s buildings, with the general indifference to civilian casualties, with Israel’s tilting into an unjust war, the familiar narratives of innocence and victimization wear thin. In my other identity, as an American, I am used to being on the delivering end of unjust wars, and so can begin to wrap my mind around the guilt of it from that direction, but it is new and discomfiting for me from a Jewish perspective.

What is lost next is any hope for reconciliation. I grew up in a period of real optimism on Israel-Palestine. The good kids were all signing up for Seeds for Peace. People were already making plays and movies celebrating the Oslo Accords. Northern Ireland was the analogy, and the belief was that with enough tearful handshakes, and great rock music, people could eventually see through all their differences. But not so. My assumption is that what’s happening now — the intractable awfulness of it — will continue for another century or so. Palestinians will, with reason, never forget what is happening now. Israelis will never forget the sneak attack of 10/7. The reason that there has been no viable plan for a ‘day after’ is that there is no day after. I can’t imagine, Biden’s ceasefire proposal notwithstanding, any arrangement that slides Hamas out of power. And, since Hamas is the government in Gaza and is committed to continuing the struggle, and since Israel regards Hamas as a terrorist organization, there is nothing to talk about really, and the conflict continues, either faster or slower, more violently or less, but continues indefinitely.

What is lost next is any sense of the ‘international community’ as a broker. Israel regards the UN as having a deeply anti-Semitic streak — this is the same organization, after all, that adopted the “Zionism is racism” resolution in 1975. Israel has been convinced that UNRWA members took part in the 10/7 attacks and that UNRWA buildings are routinely used as shelters for Hamas militants. Hamas’ tactics — the use of hospitals, schools, etc — flout international standards for conflict, and the ‘deconfliction’ work that is so critical for maintaining the presence of the international community in war zones is almost impossible to achieve in Gaza. Increasingly, the international community has condemned Israel and taken the side of Palestinian statehood, but it makes no difference — Israel has signaled that it regards the international community’s response as anti-Semitic and that it is perfectly willing to accept being a pariah state and to rely entirely on security.

What is lost next is the American hegemonic system. The premise of what’s somewhat euphemistically called the liberal international order is that America has sufficient military might to control its allies anywhere in the world and to keep conflicts within bounds. That has largely held in Ukraine, for instance. But, with Israel, it’s become clear that it’s the tail wagging the dog and that the United States lacks any real leverage to convince Israel to dial down its offensive, no matter how disastrous it is for American foreign policy in general or specifically for Biden in an election year. In seeking peace, persuasion turns out to be just as ineffective as pressure from the international community or the urge towards reconciliation.

What is left in place of any of those things is iron, military logic — the belief that all that matters is showing dominance and then unflaggingly maintaining it. In a piece discussing the 2006 Lebanon campaign, Ehud Olmert lays out something like Isaell’s guiding logic:

Ultimately, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah stated on Lebanese television that had he known what 1 percent of the scope of Israel's response to the abduction and murder of Ehud Goldwasser, Eldad Regev and other soldiers would be, and Israel's ferocious response to Hezbollah's rocket attack, he wouldn't have done it. As an Israeli military accomplishment, such a statement from a live Nasrallah was almost the same as killing him and displaying his body. The fact that Nasrallah understands the magnitude of his defeat is enough to put that war in the right perspective.

Olmert was writing to make the case that where Israel has gotten to in the Gaza campaign is enough, but, clearly, Netanyahu and his administration are unpersuaded. I have been haunted ever since I read them by some op-eds I saw in the immediate aftermath of 10/7, which called for Israel to do to Gaza what the Allies had done to the Nazi regime in World War II. It wasn’t about eliminating the Palestinians as a people, but the idea was to create a political blank slate, eradicate the existing military and political structure in Gaza and as it were to “de-Nazify” Gaza. “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything,” Yoav Gallant — to take one example — said in October. As far as I can tell, that is the thread that runs through Israel’s actions since 10/7. The fantasy of ‘total victory’ includes ideas of ‘total war’ and ‘unconditional surrender.’ The analogy to the Allied conduct during World War II is present in Israeli policymakers’ minds and the weapons used — civilian bombing, high-tech strikes, etc — are of a piece with that legacy.

The issue with that historical analogy is that it’s a fantasy. The Israelis are not going to break Gazans’ will to resist. Frankly, it would take far more firepower than that and the human toll is not-to-be-thought-of. What looms large is Israel’s drift to the right over the last two decades — the near-collapse of a left in public life, the embrace of hyper-nationalistic, messianic perspectives. As a recent Haaretz op-ed puts it, “Let’s be anti-Kahanists. The real danger is the growing power of Israel’s racist far-right and its consequences for Israelis, Palestinians, and Diaspora Jews.” So for a diaspora Jew like me, this gets to an excruciating place — supporting a state that, increasingly, is unrecognizable to me, that is carrying out actions that are ever-more impossible to condone or justify.

Which is where this post ends. The hope has been to get some kind of cogent moral stance, and I just don’t think that one exists. Of course Israel has the right to defend itself. But the brutality of Israel’s conduct moves beyond the framework of a just war. That in turn doesn’t illegitimize Israel as a state — just as the invasion of Ukraine doesn’t somehow illegitimate Russia — but it places Israel, as well as all those who have deep sympathy for Israel, somewhere in a moral no-man’s land. The hope in writing, always, is to get to some sort of clarity. Instead, this post just ends in grief.