I also have been doing βwhat ifβ thought experiments in an attempt to fathom what is really happening in, and what is really driving, this conflict. I now routinely question what I thought I knew (about history) and what I thought I knew about various conflicting ideologies. Unfortunately, even after doing these thought experiments, I feel no closer to a better version of the truth or to a new way of understanding. It still seems to me that Hamas specifically (so not Islam generally) is driving this conflict. Hamas know the βMasada siegeβ mentality of most Israelis and indeed Jews worldwide. Israel will never submit, ever. This has been used to bait Israel in to action that is truly unimaginable β apart from in total existential war. I think that is what the world is now witnessing, again, the horrors of an existential war.
That does match the general sense I have of Sinwar and Hamas' military wing. This is an interesting case where there's no question about who "started" the current round of hostilities, but so many of the moral conundrums fall on the other side. Just an extension of Israel's disproportionate ability to inflict destruction when compared with Hamas'.
This is a really great piece Ross. Impressed that you had this clarity on October 13. That's right. It's the non-answerness of everything in the Middle East that is most confounding to the liberal sensibility.
What Gaza has shown is that if you are Jewish, you are no better or worse than anyone else. You are simply a human being. I don't blame Israelis for what is happening in Gaza, I blame Benjamin Netanyahu for leading his country in the wrong direction. More than that for falling into an obvious trap set for him by Hamas. Yayah Sinwar, Hamas' leader in Gaza predicted accurately how Netanyahu would respond to the October 7 outrage, and he also knew that Netanyahu was a deeply flawed person more interested in his own preservation than in the fate of his country. Sinwar had studied the Israeli personality and even taught himself Hebrew during two decades in an Israeli prison. None of us are omniscient or omnipotent. We have no control over the situation, so it is difficult for any of us to have genuine responsibility for what is happening. All we can do is to observe and learn. As for genocide, Netanyahu doesn't particularly want to kill all the Palestinians. He just wants them to go somewhere else, without considering where that somewhere else might be. If it is not his problem, it becomes ours. He is not burning people in ovens, or asphyxiating them with poison gas. He is indirectly starving them to death and blowing them to bits with bombs built in the USA. Death is death no matter how it is carried out. As Shakespeare put it, a rose by any other name smells as sweet. Murdering the innocent is abhorrent, regardless of whether it is labeled genocide or collateral damage. The moral in this tragedy is to pick our leaders carefully.
Agreed. Netanyahu is bad news. It seemed like he was finally on the way out of power when 10/7 happened. It is worth checking out the recent Wall Street Journal reporting on Sinwar's correspondence. He seems to have been living in fantasies of his own, didn't realize quite how overpowering Israel's response would be.
I wouldn't be surprised if Sinwar was living in a fantasy world. The first question to ask in any conflict is: what is your opponent thinking? What is his frame of reference? Why is he doing what he is doing? The problem with the Israeli repression of Palestinians is that it has limited the Palestinian frame of reference. Everyone in the region is living in one bubble or another, or you could say, one silo or another. The solution is to break down the walls that separate one group from another. It's hard to do that when both sides are engaged in atrocious behavior.
Last week you quoted the Times of Israel: "This is a zero-sum contest β either Hamas is toppled and Israel prevails, or Hamas retains its arms and retakes the Gaza Strip, a stunning defeat for the Jewish state. No speech of Bidenβs can square that circle.β
And then you agreed with that assessment: "Which does put in stark terms whatβs happening and is I suspect basically accurate."
You've thought so deeply about this.
I'd like to know if you believe that what's been lost is not worth winning the zero-sum contest. Or do you think this is now less than a zero sum contest?
I do not have the same level of grief as you have, but that could be because my views have been more or less locked in since October 7th whereas I sense you have been more open minded.
I think it's an impossible situation in which all analysis is wrong analysis. A peace deal is basically impossible for the reasons The Times of Israel mentioned. A deal would have to run through Hamas and since Hamas is completely intolerable to Israel, a deal is ipso facto impossible. Meanwhile, Israel's current path is impossible. Hamas is too entrenched as a political as well as militaristic force and these kinds of attacks from the air, however brutal, do very little ultimately to weaken Hamas' hold over Gaza.
So in the land of no-good-options, what's left? There is a certain logic in what Israel is doing, basically forgetting about humanitarian considerations and focusing entirely on the domination of Gaza - but I'm with Olmert in that it's not really good strategy: too many civilians die; Israel isolates itself politically, maybe for a generation; and I don't actually think Israel will institute the equivalent of regime change in Gaza.
The other option is what Biden seems to have in mind, which is not really changing the dynamics of the situation but slowing everything down, working out some kind of cease-fire, however cosmetic, letting in more humanitarian aid, and hoping that time can alleviate the situation, at the very least by bringing in a more amenable partner in the Israeli government.
Btw I'm far from an expert on this region. I've spent very little time in Israel and none in Palestine. I really didn't know much of Israeli/Palestinian politics before 10/7 so am playing catch-up now, basically just by reading a lot. But it's striking to me how different people in my extended family have taken diametrically opposite positions on this. I don't think I can remember a political issue that's been quite so emotional to everyone I know.
I've often said that the aggravating thing about foreign policy is that there are no good options. Take care as you wrestle with this intractable knot.
Thank you very much for this overview and your honest vulnerable words. I think this is the hope, that we keep speaking our stories, our truths, stay open and curious about others and hope thereβs enough out there doing the same instead of closing down and turning backs.
It does feel like it. I just haven't spent enough time in Israel to know how much the country has changed under Netanyahu, but I don't like what I've seen. This Megan Stack piece - https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/16/opinion/israeli-palestine-psyche.html - has the ring of truth to it for me.
Dear Sam. I share your grief. Does that help somewhat? I donβt know. But I cried reading you. I have cried, and written, about Israel ever since October 7, also from a place of deep grief. You refer to Israel, the country I grew up in as β a state that, increasingly, is unrecognizable to me, that is carrying out actions that are ever-more impossible to condone or justify.β This is how I feel too and it is incredibly hard and painful to admit. This is why I havenβt been able to talk to my best friend in Israel for months. She doesnβt want to get βconfusedβ and I canβt pretend that the horrors are not happening. I struggle with my connection to Israel, though I am not Jewish (complicated, wild story). The only place I find momentary relief is at my local Shabbat service where we can cry together for ALL the innocent lives lost and celebrate what is beautiful about Judaism. Sending you a consoling hug from Montreal. Please know that you are not alone!!
Consoling hug accepted! Thank you Imola. I think Israelis do have a certain carapace built up because there have been so many conflicts, but this is a bad one. The scale of the strikes in Gaza is heightened and so is the international reaction. I don't have an amazing sense for how attitudes in Israel have changed since the start of the conflict, but what your friend said matches my basic perception: that people feel they're at war and anything at all critical of the government's conduct is felt to be disloyal. Just a terrible moment all around.
Thank you for writing this. It's the most comprehensive and humanist commentary on what is happening. You repeat "What is lost." To the Jewish mother, it is her child.
To the Palestinian mother, it is her child.
As Twain's illiterate boy narrator aptly observed: "Human beings can be awfully cruel to one another. "
Maybe it's the children who will end this, their innocence a powerful antidote to leaders' agendas.
Hamas is embedded in all so called civil institutions in Gaza. That means the βministry of healthβ, hospitals, clinics, schools, all NGOβs etc. Hamas is a totalitarian org. Everything is Gaza exists with its permission. What about this do you find hard to understand??
Well, that's not really what the piece is about. I do think there's room for a great deal of critical scrutiny of the Ministry of Health's numbers, but one way or another we do have to deal with the civilian toll of the war.
Why? When Sinwar himself states he wants non combatants to die? When hostages are kept in homes of so called βciviliansβ. When nothing coming from βgaza ministry of health (Hamas) has ever been true.
The immorality is from Sinwar and friends 100%. Hiding in an under hospitals and UNWRA schools is the war crime.
Grief seems like the right response -- the only one with any potential for change. Grief is what binds Israelis and Palestinians together. What's happening now in word and deed reminds me of the obsessive replay of trauma on television coverage of 9/11, compared to the more healing forms that coverage took on public radio (where grief counselors took calls from people who had lost loved ones, alongside people in military intelligence who felt they had failed). I was teaching MLK to my students then, and I asked them what it might look like if the U.S. used love as a weapon in the way that Gandhi and MLK proposed. What if instead of deploying billions of dollars in a counterattack, the U.S. directed that money to easing suffering somewhere else, saying, in effect, "Our suffering makes us mindful of ___'s suffering?" It sounds fanciful, but some of our most venerated historical figures believed such an approach could change the hearts of one's enemies. Something like that lay at the heart of the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia and in VΓ‘clav Havel's government. Maybe that a useless academic observation, irrelevant to grieving. But MLK, Gandhi, and Havel knew grief well enough.
I also recall, during those days, the early 2000s, having difficult conversations with friends about the problems in Palestine, the perpetually sprawling settlements, the appalling living conditions in Palestine, the children growing up with almost literally nothing to lose. That was more than 20 years ago, and many of my Israeli friends, who had done their mandatory military service, scoffed at me as the "pro-Palestinian" guy. It made me wonder how U.S. foreign policy would look if every American had completed a tour of duty and been placed in harm's way.
Jimmy Carter's "Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid" is now 18 years old. I recall it was not terribly well received when it came out, in part because U.S. support of Israel had always been so unwavering. But you point out a new wrinkle in this conversation: "But, with Israel, itβs become clear that itβs 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."
I'm sorry for your grief, Sam -- it's difficult to accept another century of futility and all the other things you've listed that have been lost. I suppose I still wonder if grief might be unifying in some way -- one of those crucibles for clear-eyed idealism, like Havel's, rather than despair?
Thank you Josh. Always enjoy talking with you. I'm pretty pessimistic at the moment. I honestly can't imagine anything resembling a positive outcome coming out of this. I've been thinking about Carter's book and wondering if I should read it. I was pretty shocked, as I think most Americans were, by the title. I really didn't know enough about conditions in Palestine or, for that matter, about apartheid, to have anything like an opinion. But the "apartheid" critique of Israel does at least seem worth thinking seriously about. - Sam
π΄π΄π΄π΄ What a moronic article. Israel has a moral duty to eradicate Hamas, if Hamas chooses to hide behind civilians, it's not Israel's fault. As a Jew you are clearly morally torn. You should probably investigate what Judaism actually is, maybe pick up a book. Maybe travel to Israel a bit more. Think long and hard about what being Jewish means to you.
If you find clarity please God let me know. I am in exactly your position (I guess thatβs why I started reading your work) and I also now despair.
Haha thank you Geoff. I think I am very unlikely to find clarity tbh.
I also have been doing βwhat ifβ thought experiments in an attempt to fathom what is really happening in, and what is really driving, this conflict. I now routinely question what I thought I knew (about history) and what I thought I knew about various conflicting ideologies. Unfortunately, even after doing these thought experiments, I feel no closer to a better version of the truth or to a new way of understanding. It still seems to me that Hamas specifically (so not Islam generally) is driving this conflict. Hamas know the βMasada siegeβ mentality of most Israelis and indeed Jews worldwide. Israel will never submit, ever. This has been used to bait Israel in to action that is truly unimaginable β apart from in total existential war. I think that is what the world is now witnessing, again, the horrors of an existential war.
That does match the general sense I have of Sinwar and Hamas' military wing. This is an interesting case where there's no question about who "started" the current round of hostilities, but so many of the moral conundrums fall on the other side. Just an extension of Israel's disproportionate ability to inflict destruction when compared with Hamas'.
Sad and all very true. I wrote something similar https://rosselliotbarkan.com/p/there-is-no-answer?utm_source=publication-search
This is a really great piece Ross. Impressed that you had this clarity on October 13. That's right. It's the non-answerness of everything in the Middle East that is most confounding to the liberal sensibility.
What Gaza has shown is that if you are Jewish, you are no better or worse than anyone else. You are simply a human being. I don't blame Israelis for what is happening in Gaza, I blame Benjamin Netanyahu for leading his country in the wrong direction. More than that for falling into an obvious trap set for him by Hamas. Yayah Sinwar, Hamas' leader in Gaza predicted accurately how Netanyahu would respond to the October 7 outrage, and he also knew that Netanyahu was a deeply flawed person more interested in his own preservation than in the fate of his country. Sinwar had studied the Israeli personality and even taught himself Hebrew during two decades in an Israeli prison. None of us are omniscient or omnipotent. We have no control over the situation, so it is difficult for any of us to have genuine responsibility for what is happening. All we can do is to observe and learn. As for genocide, Netanyahu doesn't particularly want to kill all the Palestinians. He just wants them to go somewhere else, without considering where that somewhere else might be. If it is not his problem, it becomes ours. He is not burning people in ovens, or asphyxiating them with poison gas. He is indirectly starving them to death and blowing them to bits with bombs built in the USA. Death is death no matter how it is carried out. As Shakespeare put it, a rose by any other name smells as sweet. Murdering the innocent is abhorrent, regardless of whether it is labeled genocide or collateral damage. The moral in this tragedy is to pick our leaders carefully.
Agreed. Netanyahu is bad news. It seemed like he was finally on the way out of power when 10/7 happened. It is worth checking out the recent Wall Street Journal reporting on Sinwar's correspondence. He seems to have been living in fantasies of his own, didn't realize quite how overpowering Israel's response would be.
I wouldn't be surprised if Sinwar was living in a fantasy world. The first question to ask in any conflict is: what is your opponent thinking? What is his frame of reference? Why is he doing what he is doing? The problem with the Israeli repression of Palestinians is that it has limited the Palestinian frame of reference. Everyone in the region is living in one bubble or another, or you could say, one silo or another. The solution is to break down the walls that separate one group from another. It's hard to do that when both sides are engaged in atrocious behavior.
Sam,
Last week you quoted the Times of Israel: "This is a zero-sum contest β either Hamas is toppled and Israel prevails, or Hamas retains its arms and retakes the Gaza Strip, a stunning defeat for the Jewish state. No speech of Bidenβs can square that circle.β
And then you agreed with that assessment: "Which does put in stark terms whatβs happening and is I suspect basically accurate."
You've thought so deeply about this.
I'd like to know if you believe that what's been lost is not worth winning the zero-sum contest. Or do you think this is now less than a zero sum contest?
I do not have the same level of grief as you have, but that could be because my views have been more or less locked in since October 7th whereas I sense you have been more open minded.
Thank you David.
I think it's an impossible situation in which all analysis is wrong analysis. A peace deal is basically impossible for the reasons The Times of Israel mentioned. A deal would have to run through Hamas and since Hamas is completely intolerable to Israel, a deal is ipso facto impossible. Meanwhile, Israel's current path is impossible. Hamas is too entrenched as a political as well as militaristic force and these kinds of attacks from the air, however brutal, do very little ultimately to weaken Hamas' hold over Gaza.
So in the land of no-good-options, what's left? There is a certain logic in what Israel is doing, basically forgetting about humanitarian considerations and focusing entirely on the domination of Gaza - but I'm with Olmert in that it's not really good strategy: too many civilians die; Israel isolates itself politically, maybe for a generation; and I don't actually think Israel will institute the equivalent of regime change in Gaza.
The other option is what Biden seems to have in mind, which is not really changing the dynamics of the situation but slowing everything down, working out some kind of cease-fire, however cosmetic, letting in more humanitarian aid, and hoping that time can alleviate the situation, at the very least by bringing in a more amenable partner in the Israeli government.
Btw I'm far from an expert on this region. I've spent very little time in Israel and none in Palestine. I really didn't know much of Israeli/Palestinian politics before 10/7 so am playing catch-up now, basically just by reading a lot. But it's striking to me how different people in my extended family have taken diametrically opposite positions on this. I don't think I can remember a political issue that's been quite so emotional to everyone I know.
- Sam
I've often said that the aggravating thing about foreign policy is that there are no good options. Take care as you wrestle with this intractable knot.
Thank you very much for this overview and your honest vulnerable words. I think this is the hope, that we keep speaking our stories, our truths, stay open and curious about others and hope thereβs enough out there doing the same instead of closing down and turning backs.
Thank you Laura. Deeply appreciate it.
A well-balanced summary of an atrocious situation.
Thank you Mary Jane.
Feels as if the world is ending, as the humanity in Israel is dissipated by Netanyahu.
Yes⦠:(((
It does feel like it. I just haven't spent enough time in Israel to know how much the country has changed under Netanyahu, but I don't like what I've seen. This Megan Stack piece - https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/16/opinion/israeli-palestine-psyche.html - has the ring of truth to it for me.
Dear Sam. I share your grief. Does that help somewhat? I donβt know. But I cried reading you. I have cried, and written, about Israel ever since October 7, also from a place of deep grief. You refer to Israel, the country I grew up in as β a state that, increasingly, is unrecognizable to me, that is carrying out actions that are ever-more impossible to condone or justify.β This is how I feel too and it is incredibly hard and painful to admit. This is why I havenβt been able to talk to my best friend in Israel for months. She doesnβt want to get βconfusedβ and I canβt pretend that the horrors are not happening. I struggle with my connection to Israel, though I am not Jewish (complicated, wild story). The only place I find momentary relief is at my local Shabbat service where we can cry together for ALL the innocent lives lost and celebrate what is beautiful about Judaism. Sending you a consoling hug from Montreal. Please know that you are not alone!!
Consoling hug accepted! Thank you Imola. I think Israelis do have a certain carapace built up because there have been so many conflicts, but this is a bad one. The scale of the strikes in Gaza is heightened and so is the international reaction. I don't have an amazing sense for how attitudes in Israel have changed since the start of the conflict, but what your friend said matches my basic perception: that people feel they're at war and anything at all critical of the government's conduct is felt to be disloyal. Just a terrible moment all around.
So profoundly stupid that I have unsubscribed.
Thank you for writing this. It's the most comprehensive and humanist commentary on what is happening. You repeat "What is lost." To the Jewish mother, it is her child.
To the Palestinian mother, it is her child.
As Twain's illiterate boy narrator aptly observed: "Human beings can be awfully cruel to one another. "
Maybe it's the children who will end this, their innocence a powerful antidote to leaders' agendas.
Thank you Cathy. Beautifully put.
A tragic tally, beautifully expressed.
Hamas is embedded in all so called civil institutions in Gaza. That means the βministry of healthβ, hospitals, clinics, schools, all NGOβs etc. Hamas is a totalitarian org. Everything is Gaza exists with its permission. What about this do you find hard to understand??
Well, that's not really what the piece is about. I do think there's room for a great deal of critical scrutiny of the Ministry of Health's numbers, but one way or another we do have to deal with the civilian toll of the war.
Why? When Sinwar himself states he wants non combatants to die? When hostages are kept in homes of so called βciviliansβ. When nothing coming from βgaza ministry of health (Hamas) has ever been true.
The immorality is from Sinwar and friends 100%. Hiding in an under hospitals and UNWRA schools is the war crime.
That's not true. Everything in Gaza exists with Bibi's permission. Including Hamas.
Grief seems like the right response -- the only one with any potential for change. Grief is what binds Israelis and Palestinians together. What's happening now in word and deed reminds me of the obsessive replay of trauma on television coverage of 9/11, compared to the more healing forms that coverage took on public radio (where grief counselors took calls from people who had lost loved ones, alongside people in military intelligence who felt they had failed). I was teaching MLK to my students then, and I asked them what it might look like if the U.S. used love as a weapon in the way that Gandhi and MLK proposed. What if instead of deploying billions of dollars in a counterattack, the U.S. directed that money to easing suffering somewhere else, saying, in effect, "Our suffering makes us mindful of ___'s suffering?" It sounds fanciful, but some of our most venerated historical figures believed such an approach could change the hearts of one's enemies. Something like that lay at the heart of the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia and in VΓ‘clav Havel's government. Maybe that a useless academic observation, irrelevant to grieving. But MLK, Gandhi, and Havel knew grief well enough.
I also recall, during those days, the early 2000s, having difficult conversations with friends about the problems in Palestine, the perpetually sprawling settlements, the appalling living conditions in Palestine, the children growing up with almost literally nothing to lose. That was more than 20 years ago, and many of my Israeli friends, who had done their mandatory military service, scoffed at me as the "pro-Palestinian" guy. It made me wonder how U.S. foreign policy would look if every American had completed a tour of duty and been placed in harm's way.
Jimmy Carter's "Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid" is now 18 years old. I recall it was not terribly well received when it came out, in part because U.S. support of Israel had always been so unwavering. But you point out a new wrinkle in this conversation: "But, with Israel, itβs become clear that itβs 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."
I'm sorry for your grief, Sam -- it's difficult to accept another century of futility and all the other things you've listed that have been lost. I suppose I still wonder if grief might be unifying in some way -- one of those crucibles for clear-eyed idealism, like Havel's, rather than despair?
Thank you Josh. Always enjoy talking with you. I'm pretty pessimistic at the moment. I honestly can't imagine anything resembling a positive outcome coming out of this. I've been thinking about Carter's book and wondering if I should read it. I was pretty shocked, as I think most Americans were, by the title. I really didn't know enough about conditions in Palestine or, for that matter, about apartheid, to have anything like an opinion. But the "apartheid" critique of Israel does at least seem worth thinking seriously about. - Sam
Keep writing, Mr. Kahn, as long as the same quality and equanimity of thought continues to undergird it.
π΄π΄π΄π΄ What a moronic article. Israel has a moral duty to eradicate Hamas, if Hamas chooses to hide behind civilians, it's not Israel's fault. As a Jew you are clearly morally torn. You should probably investigate what Judaism actually is, maybe pick up a book. Maybe travel to Israel a bit more. Think long and hard about what being Jewish means to you.