Some thoughts on Israel/Palestine

Or why I've been quiet on here

I've been stymied in my writing since October 7. So, my intention with this post is to break the logjam in my head and share a bit about what I’ve been thinking, what’s been plaguing me since then, given my own connection to Israel.

In high school, I became active in a Zionist youth movement, about which I’ll say more in a bit. I lived, worked and studied in Israel for about a year and half total during my college years in the 1980s. I’ve visited on numerous other occasions. My partner grew up in Israel and much of her family lives there, as do lots of old friends of mine. I’ve thought about, read about, talked about the place for countless hours over the past four decades, and obsessively so.

People I care about continue to live in terrible pain and anguish in the aftermath of the atrocities Hamas carried out on October 7th, as well as its avowed intention to launch similar attacks in the future. And some of those same people are both tormented by and furious at the utter betrayal they feel toward the current Israeli government, a sense of fury and betrayal I’ve shared and carried around with me, even from the very safe distance I live from all the violence and suffering. The events of the last two months have also deepened, reinforced and laid bare my longstanding guilt over and feelings of complicity in Israel’s decades-long repression of the Palestinian people and the indignities and perpetual humiliation the Jewish State has subjected them to. Those feelings are only compounded now by the mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza by Israel, in pursuit of a stated goal, eliminating Hamas, that is by all reasonable accounts unattainable.

In the Zionist youth movement I participated in, including in the summer camp I attended and worked at for several years, we learned that the establishment of the Jewish state was necessary and justified, both because of the history of persecution we faced, culminating in the Holocaust, and because of our historical, cultural and religious ties to the land. At the same time, in that particular liberal Zionist milieu, we also talked a lot about what a “just, Jewish society,” as we often phrased it, should look like. I won’t try to deconstruct any of that here. But one thing we did not do was confront the full implications of what was done and to whom it was done in order to create the Jewish state. We never really asked ourselves why it was that the creation of that haven from a world committed to Jews’ destruction, should come at the expense of a people that bore no responsibility for the cataclysm, the Holocaust, that has been the single most powerful justification for the existence of Israel. We learned plenty about the founding Zionists, their ideas and their vision. But we never learned, for example, at least not in my memory, that virtually all of the founding generations of Zionist leadership understood perfectly clearly the dispossession they were causing and the unremitting hatred it did and would continue to foment.

To take two examples: David Ben Gurion, Israel’s founding father, wrote to his son in 1937, in the midst of the “Arab Revolt” then consuming Palestine: "Were I an Arab, an Arab politically, nationally minded ... I would rebel even more vigorously, bitterly, and desperately against the immigration that will one day turn Palestine and all its Arab residents over to Jewish rule." In 1956, eulogizing the murder of an Israeli Jew at the hands of Palestinians, Moshe Dayan, another of Israel’s most consequential and iconic founding leaders, said: “Let us not cast the blame on the murderers today. Why should we declare their burning hatred for us? For eight years they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we have been transforming the lands and the villages, where they and their fathers dwelt, into our estate.”¹

That generation of Zionist leaders was ruthless in pursuit of its goal to first establish a Jewish state and then to expand and secure it at the further expense of the Palestinians it was dispossessing. But its leading lights bore few illusions about whether those it was dispossessing ought to see Israel through the same lens as the country’s Zionist supporters. Indeed, for the sake of our own humanity, we should strive to see the world through their eyes, through the decades of discrimination, displacement, violence and deprivation that Palestinians have endured at Israel’s hands. That’s a responsibility I personally feel, more strongly than ever. 

I reject efforts to justify or minimize the atrocities Hamas committed on October 7. To do so is morally wrong, inhumane and an unnecessary and disastrous political choice for anyone who believes in Palestinians’ right to self-determination, as I do. But I also reject efforts to explain away or discredit Palestinians’ legitimate aspirations or to minimize their generations-long suffering by implicating their entire people in Hamas’ crimes. Among the justifications for such guilt by association one commonly hears is that, since Gazans voted for Hamas, they own Hamas’ actions. This is perverse. Those elections — the last ones Palestinians in Gaza were allowed to vote in — took place place seventeen years ago. In addition, such arguments typically come from the same people who would reject, in the strongest terms, the claim that ordinary Israelis are culpable for the actions of their government. This, in spite of the fact that we hear, ad nauseam, that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, i.e. the only country whose government can be said to legitimately represent the people's will. I have no doubt that plenty of Palestinians did cheer the bloodletting on October 7, or were, at least indifferent to it. But at least some Israelis have felt similarly about the killing of Palestinian civilians, as have at least some about the many people the United States has killed in distant lands over the years, including after 9/11. It would be insane, I think we can all agree, to claim that, as a result of such feelings, those Israelis and Americans somehow deserve to die. That's a minimum standard, therefore we ought to apply to Palestinians.

While we’re on the subject of common, tiresome tropes, the notion that the current Israeli government is hardline in protecting the well-being of Jews needs to be put to rest. Indeed, as Josh Marshall has written, Netanyahu has pleaded with his coalition partners to stick together now not for the sake of security for Israelis. Instead, it’s because he’s “the only one who will prevent a Palestinian state in Gaza and [the West Bank] after the war.” Apart from rank self-preservation, preventing even the possibility of a Palestinian state, by any means necessary — including the well-documented game of footsie he played with Hamas for years before the October 7 attacks — has been Bibi’s career long mission, his one true commitment. And he’s been more than willing to sow division and hatred within Israel itself, for decades now, in furtherance of those aims. Bibi is singularly compromised both morally and politically, and the government he formed last year is uniquely ill-equipped to do anything other than to kill and displace Palestinians on a mass scale. That, and to continue to undermine the well-being and safety of Jews themselves, even leaving aside this government’s catastrophic failures immediately prior to October 7. For the sake of clarity, therefore, we’d all do well to retire the notion that the current Israeli right is pro-security. Whatever else it is, it’s not that.

There’s so much else to say, but I guess I will stop here for now, except to say this - my values tell me that oppressing another people, denying them their basic rights to personal and communal dignity and to self-determination is an absolute wrong. If there is one thing we Jews should learn from our own history, it's that.  How that is achieved for the Palestinians, at this point I have no earthly idea. But I hold to the hope that we can, and the belief that we must, reject the idea that Jewish well-being and Palestinian well-being are mutually exclusive.

I welcome constructive engagement with any or all of this. 

1. I originally included the quote below in the text, but people have raised doubts about its veracity, including because it was a hearsay quote published after Ben Gurion had passed away. I am not entirely persuaded by those doubts, but the point above can be made well enough without it. In any event, here it is, for those who are interested: Eric Alterman’s recent book about the history of American Jewish support for Israel, communicating with another Zionist leader, shortly after Israel declared independence in 1948:

“Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader, I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: We have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it’s true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been antisemitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: We have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?”