If the people of Jenin were Americans facing the British in 1776, we would be celebrating the revolutionary war they began. If they were Ukrainians facing the Russians, or Afghans facing the Soviets, we’d be sending them heavy arms to fight a proxy war against our common enemy. But because they’re Palestinians facing our ally, Israel, we arm the power that occupies them, anathematize their resistance, and watch with cold indifference or grim satisfaction as the refugees of yesteryear are made refugees once again, driven out of the refugee camp that until recently was their home.The Freedom Theatre of Jenin Refugee Camp in happier times, August 2019. 

It’s often said that the Israel-Palestinian conflict is very complicated, but in some ways, it’s very simple. Zionism is an ideology of conquest, and Zionists have, for more than a century, consistently acted on script. The 1956 and 1967 Arab-Israeli wars were unambiguously wars of aggression by Israel; the latter led to the conquest of Gaza, Golan, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank. Golan and East Jerusalem were annexed, Gaza remains under siege, and the West Bank remains the site of state-sponsored expropriation and expulsion under conditions of apartheid, with the ultimate (and increasingly imminent) aim of outright annexation.

There’s only one way to make annexation consistent with Israel’s character as a Jewish state: its resident Palestinian population must either accept apartheid-like subjugation as a permanent way of life, or accept forced expulsion, or die. That’s the predictable, inevitable destination of the Zionist dream–of an ethnocracy that demands that a favored ethnicity remain a majority in a place where it cannot by non-coercive means have that guarantee. You can either face that reality, or try your best to wish it away. The essence of anti-Zionism is the refusal to wish it away. The essence of liberal Zionism is the insistence on wishing it away. The essence of right-wing Zionism is the desire to live the dream in all of its full, bloody glory.

Americans have a lot of trouble dealing with any of this. In fact, there are times when it seems that they’d rather deal with just about anything else. To evade it, they have to believe a lot of strange things. They have to believe, above all, that the Israeli occupiers are maintaining a defensive posture, and the Palestinians an aggressive one.

To believe this, you have to believe that it’s possible to maintain a defensive posture after having conquered a place by aggressive force, after having expropriated the population by aggressive force, after having settled in the expropriated land to cement your occupation, and after having constructed an apartheid system to keep the disfavored, conquered ethnicity in place. You have to believe that armed settlers playing an explicitly military role in supporting the occupation are “civilians.” You have to believe, by contrast, that armed Palestinians defending their homes and neighborhoods against an occupying army and against paramilitary militias, are “militants.” You have to believe that attacks on Palestinian militants not currently engaged in hostilities are justifiable acts of law enforcement, even when carried out by military troops in a place lacking a system of criminal law or procedure. And you have to believe that Palestinian attacks on settlers not currently engaged in hostilities are all terrorism, even when the settlers targeted are off-duty soldiers or reservists.

It’s a tall order, but lots of people seem prepared to fill it. They’re prepared, in short, to concede the moral high ground to the aggressors. They’re prepared also to insist that people indigenous to the land, refugees or the children of refugees, crammed in camps, locked in their homes, and fighting for their lives, are “militants” to be targeted at will. Also that a full-scale military assault on a densely populated ghetto with a population of 33,000 persons per square kilometer (more precisely, 10-12,000 per 0.42 square km) is a perfectly justifiable endeavor that shows Israel’s deep respect for civilian life (with civilian casualties, including those on children, regarded as a regrettable necessity of “self-defense”). Basically, you have to believe that any attack on any Israeli not currently engaged in active combat–or maybe any attack on any Israeli, period, regardless of any other fact–is “terrorism.” You’re a Palestinian? An Israeli soldier is shooting at you? You’d better let yourself be shot. It would be anti-Semitic to do otherwise.The market in Jenin Refugee Camp, August 2019. “Always look on the bright side of life…”

What the defense of Israel demands of us, above all, is an Orwellian form of sacrificium intellectus. The teargas they’re using on the Palestinians may be too far away to affect us, so we’re obliged to gaslight ourselves. Aggression is to be equated with self-defense. Self-defense is to be equated with terrorism. Indiscriminate warfare is to be equated with peacekeeping. Ethnic cleansing is to be regarded as an expression of the highest aspirations of a “Western democracy.” And “anti-Semitism” consists in the refusal to accept these grotesque moral inversions. These are the mind-blowing double standards we live with in “the West,” and by which those outside of our charmed civilizational circle are insouciantly driven from their homes and put to death.

There’s really only one way to respond to what is happening in Jenin, one best expressed in the Hebrew phrase yesh g’vul. There’s a limit. What we’re seeing in Jenin–in the West Bank and Gaza generally–is a nation exceeding every moral limit, with our eager acquiescence, with our support, with our resources, and with our weaponry. How long will it take before we figure out that they’ve gone too far? They’ve attacked a theater, they’ve attacked a hospital, they’ve plowed up buildings and streets, and driven out the population to the tune of thousands. How much destruction do we need to see before we put an end to our own complicity? Or do we have no limits, either?