Scattered Thoughts On Israel, Hamas, Gaza, And Related Matters

A possibly ill-advised post

(Photo by Mostafa Alkharouf/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

Under most other professional circumstance I’d sit this conversation out. It’s not my beat, and I have no special insights, just as I don’t have special insights about the overwhelming majority of the world’s horrors. If you want amateur takes on Middle East violence and geopolitics, the internet is absolutely saturated with them. 

Plus it tends to be thankless—upsetting some people, while satisfying few, and drawing the worst of humanity out of the woodwork, right into the comments section.

But here I am, asking people to subscribe to this new venture, and stick with me for the long haul, and I’ve received several emails from people who want to read what I have to write about Hamas’s attack on Israel, the Israeli response, and the implications for U.S. politics. So this one time I’ll choose not to duck the topic and lay my views out point by point.

• It was a pogrom on a vast scale, full stop. In the history of the world, there has never been a good or justified pogrom, and Hamas did not break that streak. Anyone claiming or intimating otherwise is engaging in abhorrent thinking. 

• The above sentiment is (or should be) banal. It should go without saying. But (thus) when people don’t say it, we shouldn’t automatically interpret their silence as evidence of mixed feelings or tacit support for wicked deeds. Sometimes it is, but in general it is not. The internet and the media don’t need to be infinite fora for public grieving and righteous indignation. Quiet reflection is still allowed.

• As a general matter, American mass media tends to portray Israeli violence as undertaken in self-defense, and Palestinian violence as motivated exclusively by antisemitism, bigotry, religious hatred—not to any degree by grievance—and the people who perpetuate that false dichotomy, or who believe it to be true, are lying to themselves. They’re also contributing to the rationalization of endless hostility and inevitable atrocities.

• In this case, though, Hamas’s motivation appears to have been the most vile possible combination of hatred and cynical geopolitics.

• The geopolitical goal is apparently to scuttle Israeli-Saudi diplomacy. The audacity and ghoulishness of the operation actually reflect cynicism more than the base hatreds that make humans capable of killing strangers. It was undertaken in order to provoke a violent response (to egg Israel into atrocities of its own) as a bankshot means of tipping public sentiment in the Gulf region. That isn’t deterrence, it’s a provocation. Specifically it’s a hope that Israel would kill a bunch of innocent people in response; it’s not anger over Palestinians who have already been killed, injured, or displaced.

• As to Israel’s predictably unconscionable response in Gaza: Doing the bidding of evil manipulators is a bad strategic idea, quite apart from any moral consideration. But, as always, opposing extremist factions exist in a kind of symbiosis and play into each other’s hands. (A similar dynamic of convenient alliances saw U.S., Iranian, and Israeli fundamentalists and charlatans join forces for different reasons to scuttle the JCPOA nuclear deal between global powers and Iran .)

• This insight—don’t let bad actors goad you into doing things they want you to do—extends to Israel’s military response and its diplomatic goals alike, but is one Benjamin Netanyahu appears too militant and corrupt to ever learn. I don’t know enough about Middle East diplomacy to say whether normalizing relations with Saudi Arabia in Israel’s clear interest, but if it is worth doing, then it isn’t worth scuttling at the prompting of Hamas.

• The world is still off its axis from the U.S. response to the 9/11 attacks. Most Americans today probably believe we erred by giving in to our most vengeful temptations; that we would have been better off husbanding global sympathy to support an unflinching-but-surgical operation to dismantle terrorist organizations, rather than launching two land wars and embracing indiscriminate violence. There is an insight here for Israelis, the Jewish diaspora, and (frankly) U.S. liberals and Democrats. Lashing out is not synonymous with strength, and will likely become the source of lasting regret. 

• The rote mantra “Israel has a right to defend itself” (everyone has a right to defend themselves) loses no force with the caveat that war crimes are a defense to nothing, even other war crimes.

• If I were anyone’s political adviser, that’s essentially what I’d encourage them to say. I’d also encourage them not to be cowed by Republican agitprop and lies (already pouring forth!) into sacrificing their humane instincts. Twenty years from now do you want to be like Barbara Lee, or do you want to be a lemming like basically everyone else?

• Between Ronna Romney McDaniel calling the murders and kidnappings of over a thousand Israelis a “great opportunity” for her party, and Donald Trump asserting that “what happened…was incredible,” it could not be clearer that the GOP salivates for barbarism and human calamity when the president is a Democrat, for the sole purpose of using the blood of the dead as partisan war paint. Really, everything since Benghazi has pointed in that direction, and it is utterly ghoulish.

• If and as Republicans pretend to be Israel’s only defenders in U.S. politics, keep in mind that their allegiance isn’t so strong as to seek Democratic votes for a consensus speaker, in order to get the House functioning as necessary to race to Israel’s aid. To the contrary, they’d rather leave the House out of commission and Congress unable to function than work in concert with Democrats even briefly.

• Whether or not Israel has a regional interest in normal relations with Saudi Arabia, the Biden administration’s solicitousness of the Saudi regime in this and other initiatives is mystifying. Quite apart from the moral indefensibility of the U.S.-Saudi alliance, it’s undignified for Biden in particular to act as a handmaid for the Mohammed bin Salman regime. The Saudis have abrogated the alliance by undermining U.S. sovereignty, playing favorites in America’s domestic partisan politics. Netanyahu and his governments have done something similar for many years, bleeding diaspora support for Israel to the lasting detriment of its security. It isn’t in the interest of the United States to maintain alliances with saboteur regimes, but more crudely it isn’t becoming of Democrats, when they control the U.S. government, to carry on as if our country’s client states aren’t painting outside the lines—or, worse, behaving as if we’re the client state.

• It’s impossible to imagine the liberal leaders of western Europe conspiring and abusing their powers to elect Democrats, manipulating trade arrangements to harm the U.S. economy under Republican rule, or anything remotely similar. It’s even more unfathomable to imagine them enmeshing themselves in the private finances of America’s leading Democratic candidates. The political guide star of American liberalism should be that one set of rules must apply to both parties and that our institutions and their leaders will take fierce exception to any person or entity endeavoring to undermine this basic expectation of fair play. That might mean a candidate pulling dirty tricks, or a party deforming or violating election laws to favor itself, but it must include any foreign actors who decide that corrupting U.S. leadership is so in their interest that they’ll manipulate our elections to accomplish it.  

Where I’m coming from:

• I wrote recently about my unusual relationship with Jewish identity over the course of my life, but as much as that aspect of me has changed over time, I’ve never developed any sense of Israeli patriotism; to the contrary, the decisions the polity has made and the direction it has evolved in recent decades has reduced my affinity for it.

• The Israel I find appealing is the one where tens of thousands of people flood the streets to protest the authoritarian consolidation of power, the withering of Israel’s democracy, the flourishing of its bourgeoning status as an iron-fisted ethnostate. Sadly, they seem to be outnumbered. 

• If this post seems tilted toward criticism of Netanyahu, Israel, and Israel’s new bad friends, when Israelis were the ones who were ambushed, that is by design—and it’s consistent with the general purpose of Off Message. People who are annoyed by my output tend to be flummoxed by the fact that I devote so much time to scrutinizing Democrats when we agree that Republicans are the problem. But that’s because Republicans aren’t interested in good-faith criticism and won’t listen to it. Democrats, by contrast, aspire to higher values, and they just might. In fact sometimes they do. Similar logic applies here: A liberal, Jewish American writer has zero or perhaps negative influence over Hamas, but might be able to reach open-minded Israelis, and make them think about their commitments to liberalism, democracy, and human rights. The fact that Israel, in its basic laws  and putative ideals, is unlike Hamas is the entire point.

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