This morning’s Hamas attack on southern Israel is being portrayed, predictably, as an initiatory act of aggression by Hamas, and a total bolt from the blue. It’s no such thing. The situation in Gaza has been decades in the making. Israel conquered Gaza in an act of aggression in 1967, occupied it, settled it, de-developed it, then abandoned its settlements there, falsely to proclaim its occupation of Gaza to have ended. Since then Israel has besieged Gaza, bombed it, raided it, and murdered and maimed its inhabitants at will. No one should venture comment on the situation in Gaza without engaging with the authoritative work of writers like Amira Haas, Sara Roy, and Norman Finkelstein, of human rights organizations like B’Tselem, or before viewing films like “Tears of Gaza,” which depicts ordinary life there. And this is to set aside the treatment of Golan, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank.
It amazes me to encounter intelligent, educated “Westerners” who think that the brutality of the Russian invasion of Ukraine somehow overshadows what Israel has done in Gaza. That’s both a confession of ignorance and testimony to the power of “Western” propaganda: easier to believe that the monsters are our enemies in Moscow than to believe that they’re our allies in Jerusalem. Easier, but false. Confront the facts, and you’ll eventually have to realize that our allies really are monsters who have done monstrous things–not in “defense” of themselves, but in pursuit of pure, naked conquest made possible with our complicity, support, and benediction.
But the bottom line is: what happened this morning didn’t just causelessly pop into existence this morning, or yesterday, or last week, or even last year. I’ve predicted for a decade now that an altercation in Al Aqsa would trigger a full-scale war in Israel and Palestine, as it essentially did in 2000, just before the second intifada. The tension was palpable on my first trip to the region in 2013, and ratcheted up on each subsequent visit. I was surprised not to see a descent into war after the violence I encountered in Palestine in 2016 and 2017. By 2019, it became clear that it was just a matter of time.
On my last trip this past March, it was obvious that the place was a tinderbox ready to blow at the next provocation. The degree of Israeli militarization I saw on the West Bank was only too obviously a prelude to annexation and civil war. On previous trips, I’d seen curious “holes” in the occupation, intended to facilitate a degree of normality in ordinary life. This time, the holes had been patched. You couldn’t go anywhere without seeing and feeling the occupation, and its shock troops, the settlers. I myself was detained by Shin Bet (the internal security service) in Hebron this past March, and threatened with arrest for filming the wrong thing on the wrong street at the wrong time. Itamar Ben-Gvir’s claim that Jewish security is more important than non-Jews’ freedom of movement in the West Bank is not hyperbole or metaphor. Unauthorized movement–movement not authorized by this soldier with this gun right now–can mean anything from detention to a hole in your head. And does, every day, hundreds of times a day, whether it shows up in the “Western” media or not.
Don’t believe anyone who tells you that the Hamas attack was “unprovoked.” Conquest, siege, mass killing, occupation, settlement, and de-development are all ample “provocation.” Just don’t count on having read about any of it, or seen it on “the news.” The sad truth is that there are precious few “Western” reporters or diplomats in the West Bank or Gaza. Most of what you hear is filtered through official Israeli channels, or just is official Israeli propaganda. Mainstream Western journalism is structured around the assumption that Palestinian violence is uniquely aggressive, and Israeli violence uniquely defensive, regardless of the actual history or etiology of any given act of violence by either side. Press virtually any Western account of Israeli or Palestinian violence hard enough by asking the following question until you get a clear answer: who is morally responsible for having initiated the force that led us here? Before long, you’ll hit a total blank. Western journalists simply do not have the mental equipment to answer such questions, or even ask them.
Go back and look into the news archives of any “respectable” mainstream outlet, and you’ll see huge, yawning gaps in coverage that seem to imply that literally nothing happened in Gaza or the West Bank for months at a time. There are, instead, arbitrary “cycles of violence” that seem to come in and out of existence like the periodic re-appearance of the cicadas, only to disappear again as mysteriously as they came. If “cycles of violence” were medical symptoms, no one would treat their mysteriously cyclical nature as a reason for equanimity or indefinite agnosticism. We’d want to know where they came from. But “cycles of violence” in Western journalistic parlance operate by their own idiosyncratic rules. That’s why the most recent attack comes as a “surprise” to consumers of Western journalism. It’s only a surprise to people who rely on coverage that’s unreliable and selective to the point of outright deception. Otherwise, it’s an obvious response to decades of Israeli aggression.
That said, there is no viable military route out of this conflict, whether Israeli or Palestinian. No Joshua or Saladin is going to swoop in and rescue either side from the other. The only solution that warfare offers either side is a Final Solution. Ultimately, that’s where things are headed, unless the underlying logic of the conflict changes in the direction of equal rights for all. Unfortunately, the United States, the presumptive (and pretended) defender of equal rights, has no leadership to offer here, and (Jimmy Carter aside) never has, whether under Republicans or Democrats. You can’t expect a polity that worships at the altar of perpetual warfare to do any better than ours has.
Personally, I guess I would say that their idolatry is not my problem: I don’t intend to support or vote for either party ever again. The only support I intend to offer belongs to my friends and comrades over there, Palestinian and Israeli alike, who have actually earned whatever support I can give them. To paraphrase E.M Forster, when faced with a choice between betraying or abandoning your country–or I would add, your “civilization”–and your friends, you betray your country or civilization, not your friends. He made it seem like a tough call, but it’s not. The tough call is how to support all of your friends without betraying any of them, when one group belongs to a nation that dominates and wants to destroy the other. I can’t say I precisely know how. But that, at least, is a challenge worth rising to. Choosing between friendship and the unfurling of a flag is not.
Policy of Truth 
You seem like a reasonable guy. I will be interested to hear your thoughts on this as events unfold. My biases and upbringing prime me for sympathy toward Israel (even prior to these attacks) but I will admit that my understanding of the long-term issues is not great. It is hard for me to understand why any discussion of provocation could be relevant to the mass slaughter of innocent civilians, women, and children in their homes (and I would say the same about the atrocious WWII allied air attacks on Germany on Japan). But I want to be able to see from the other perspective, which is difficult for me right now.
LikeLike
I suppose I should start by saying that I don’t regard the Hamas attack as justified, given the form that it took–targeting non-combatants–and that even if my post doesn’t come out and repudiate the attack in those very words, I do repudiate it. It should not have been done. But I find your puzzlement itself puzzling. You say:
Let’s take the more settled issue first. Is it so hard to understand the relevance of a discussion of “provocation” to the Allied use of strategic bombing against the Axis? The word “provocation” is an understatement here. The “provocation” in this case consisted of worldwide aggression, mass slaughter, and mass internment. Whether or not one regards the Allied response as justified, its relevance seems obvious: it’s a straightforward application of instrumental rationality to the case at hand. The Axis aggressed; the Allies were responding to aggression. In responding, the Allies wanted to neutralize the threat they faced so that they wouldn’t face it again. So they sought unconditional surrender. Since the Allies saw their enemy as fighting a total war, enlisting the civilian population for support and productive power, they had no qualms responding in kind.
The civilian population of the Axis countries might have been divided four ways: (a) culpable; (b) non-culpable; (c) causally instrumental to the war effort; (d) non-causally instrumental. In bombing whole populations, the Allies gambled on the proposition that those populations contained large numbers of people in groups (a) and (c). After a certain threshold of culpability and/or causal contribution, bombing groups (a) and (c) is indistinguishable from fighting combatants on “the battlefield.” So it seemed unproblematic. As for groups (b) and (d), those were written off as collateral damage to be blamed on the aggressor.
The Allied argument is open to objection at many places, but hardly mysterious. The same thing is true of Hamas’s attack in Gaza. Once again, the word “provocation” is a somewhat preposterous understatement, one I used only because people blithely describe the attack as “unprovoked.” The people of Gaza have been on the receiving end of 60+ years of Israeli aggression. Gaza was conquered in two separate wars of Israeli aggression–1956 and 1967. The occupation that followed was thoroughly malign. One part of it consisted of systematic expropriation with the aim of ethnically cleansing Gaza of its indigenous population. That failed only because Gazans resisted. In 2005, the Israelis decided to evacuate their settlements in Gaza, but by 2007, they decided to besiege it.
Since then, Gaza has not only been under siege, but on the receiving end of a series of Israeli military campaigns, mostly strategic bombing campaigns, each of which has demonstrably, systematically, consistently been demonstrated to rely on intentional infliction of mass death on the population with a frequency and casualty count that far, far exceeds what Hamas did this past Saturday. There is no significant difference (except scale) between the Israeli air campaigns over Gaza and, say, the Allied bombing campaigns over Germany or Japan (or the German ones over Britain). Like those campaigns, the Israeli campaigns have involved either the deliberate targeting of civilians or attacks of such recklessness as to be equivalent to intentional targeting. The difference is that the Allied bombing campaigns lasted perhaps three years. The Israeli bombing campaigns have gone on three times as long. To live in Gaza is to await one’s death with nowhere to go.
Suppose you try to leave? You will be summarily shot. That is what a siege is. If you try to leave, you are marked for death.
But forget trying to leave. In 2018, when Gazans decided to protest their treatment by approaching the fence that divides Israel from Gaza–there is no formal border–the Israeli military’s explicit, written order to its troops was to shoot anyone who approached the fence. And that’s exactly what they did–hundreds of deaths, thousands of injuries, including people whose eyes and knees were deliberately shot out specifically to maim them. The Israelis indiscriminately shot men, women, and children; those who appeared threatening, and those threatening no one; those who were armed, and those were obviously unarmed; those standing on two legs, and those sitting in wheelchairs. There cannot be a more obvious, explicit, sustained act of intentionally targeting combatants than that.
What was the response in “the West”? It ranged, on the whole, from indifference to approval. The 2018 protests were hardly the first non-violent protests to have taken place in Palestine. And they lasted years–with zero effect except mass casualties. What they taught the people of Gaza is that they could expect no justice or even mercy from anyone outside of Gaza. They had only one role to play in the world’s script: to suffer and to die, generation after generation, at the hands of a murderous regime valorized the world over as too morally pure to be capable of the kind of atrocities we easily ascribe to Israel’s adversaries.
Given this, and many other things I can’t summarize in a blog comment, Hamas seems to have reached a desperate conclusion: if all is hopeless, if there is no escape, if no peaceful action will suffice, and no targeted action is feasible, why not just go for broke by staging a desperate, bloody, psychopathically insane act of mass homicide, with hostages to boot, so as to hasten the inevitable and take the enemy with us?
In attacking so indiscriminately, Hamas, like the Allies, also did some gambling with human lives. Everyone in Israel is liable for military service. And every citizen has the right to vote. Beyond this, southern Israel is notoriously right wing. Sderot, in particular, is a notoriously right wing town. In attacking indiscriminately, there is some positive probability of attacking many people who fit the following description: they serve and have served in the Israeli military; they support and have supported a government bent on the destruction or subjugation of the Palestinian people; at the very least, they have made insufficient effort to overturn the occupation. So (the reasoning runs) treat them as guilty by default, and let God sort out the rest.
This is an evil way of thinking. But when you push people to the extremes of desperation, this is how they think, and this is what they do. The Israelis have done the equivalent on less provocation. And Americans, who face no provocation, have no problem pointing nuclear weapons at their enemies, including whole continents of civilians, on the premise that the deterrence that results is worth the destruction of the whole world. None of this justifies what was done, but it certainly raises the question: how is it that this one atrocity by Hamas seems so salient to people guilty of far worse, and perfectly willing to commit far worse? Yet it does.
Even as someone who regards the Oct 7 act as evil, if a Gazan were to press me for advice, I would have none to give except “Don’t do it.” But “don’t do it” is not particularly helpful advice. If a Gazan were to ask, “Yes, but what do we to escape our predicament?” I would have no answer. If they then said, “So you’re expecting us to sit here passively and await our subjugation or death? Or are you supposing we should just keep performing the same non-violent charades over and over to no effect?” Once again, I would have no response. And neither does the world. At this point, it becomes easy to blame them for their predicament. But that’s a cop out. It’s simply not true.
Let me send this, and end my comment in a new box.
LikeLike
In your comment, you say:
I guess it’s an interesting question to me how this combination of claims is possible. Why would someone have sympathy for Israel despite admittedly not being conversant with the history and politics?
Part of the answer, I think, is given in the Preface of one of the books I cited in the original post, Norman Finkelstein’s Gaza: An Inquest into its Martyrdom (2018). Finkelstein has spent a career shooting down Zionist mythologies. One thing that strikes me is how much more durable those mythologies seem to be than fact, and how easily they come to be accepted by people in the West, even when they admit to not having a detailed understanding of the concrete issues. Here is what Finkelstein says:
I have, after many decades of study and first-hand experience in Palestine, come to agree with Finkelstein. I didn’t start there. When I first started reading him, I was somehow “sure” he had to be exaggerating. It seemed hard to believe that the history of the West’s moral crown jewel–Israel–could be a history of lies.
In fact, it is a history of lies. It’s a history told by victors-in-the-making zealously bent on covering the tracks of a crime-in-the-making. The victors have tailored their lies precisely to what they think their audience would be most apt to valorize. And they’ve succeeded, in spades.
One need not arrive at this conclusion in one fell swoop. But until one takes it seriously, there is no understanding the history of Zionism or of Israel. There’s just a series of rationalizations for Israel’s (and the West’s) moralized exercises in brute power and brutality.
LikeLike
Thanks for the detailed thoughts. I spoke too broadly. Yes you are right that the provocations are relevant historically and for a factual understanding of the situation, and I want to better understand this historical situation. Let me narrow my claim to say that the historical context is not morally relevant, or not relevant to how one should judge the incident. A state of conflict may cloud a combatant’s better judgement, but this does not excuse or mitigate the evil of atrocities that are committed and the evil of celebrating such atrocities. And maybe we aren’t so far apart on this more narrow claim. But I was a bit taken aback that your first response to the incident was to try to provide context and point the finger back toward Israel.
LikeLike
Not sure what happened. I meant this as a reply to your first comment.
LikeLike
Yes, you understand my position. It’s not that I have no understanding of the issues, it’s just that I mostly hear from conservatives and Jewish writers. Their narrative is self-consistent and makes sense, but I haven’t done the hard work of validating the details and studying the competing claims in detail. Given the narrative I am exposed to, the pro-Palestinian side comes off as incongruous, which makes me think there is something I am missing. I admit I need to do the hard work of looking into the details. I’ll start with Finkelstein since you referenced him here.
LikeLike
Whoa! Just came across this quote from Finkelstein’s Substack: “I, for one, will never begrudge—on the contrary, it warms every fiber of my soul—the scenes of Gaza’s smiling children as their arrogant Jewish supremacist oppressors have, finally, been humbled.” I put a hold on his book at my local library yesterday. I’ll read it, but these comments will certainly color my reading.
LikeLike
I wouldn’t let Finkelstein’s social media commentary color your reading of his scholarship. Finkelstein is one of the best scholars out there, bar none–when he actually writes as a scholar. His social media feed by contrast contains an enormous amount of nonsense and detritus, and what you’ve quoted is an example of it. The problem with Finkelstein is that he has been defamed, derided, dismissed, and mistreated now for thirty years by both the Left and the Right. He is hated by both, and himself hates both. So he justifiably feels disrespected and deprived of the accolades he (genuinely) deserves. He has spent a lifetime doing a great deal of thankless work, and gotten no thanks for it. When he sits in front of his blog, he permits this to get the better of him. He lets loose with pointless, aimless recriminations that undermine his credibility. I understand this sentiment, having been on the losing end of life myself. But it’s a culpable mistake. What he said about the 10/7 attack should never be said about any violent attack, even if the attack is justified (which 10/7 was not). But his scholarship speaks for itself.
Occasionally his scholarship, I admit, contains overstatements and exaggerations. But it has one offsetting compensation. Finkelstein is one of the few scholars willing to assert and defend a clear-cut, unequivocal truth in a fully comprehensive and rigorous way: Israel is at least as guilty, and probably more guilty, of every accusation that it has leveled at its enemies, including Hamas. There is an enormous reluctance in the West to admit this, but it really cannot be denied. Israel has intentionally targeted civilians for death and killed them en masse. It has engaged in torture. It has engaged in systematic state-sponsored expropriation. And it has engaged in sustained campaigns of defamation and misinformation to deny these things.
To make such claims about Israel in the West is to invite almost instant accusations of anti-Semitism, which is a personal and professional kiss of death. To make these claims about Hamas is a commonplace, indeed, in some places de rigeur. But everything said of Hamas is true of Israel. At a minimum, they are moral equals. I find it sad that Finkelstein aside, almost no one in our culture has the minimal courage to say this out loud. Even supposedly radical leftists dance around the subject. They will say that Israel wields “disproportionate force,” or that it “violates civil rights,” or it “denies a right of movement,” or “inflicts humiliations,” and what not. These are true, but by comparison with the truth, they’re also offensive euphemisms. The problem with Israel is that it deliberately murders people, then accuses others of deliberately murdering its people, expecting and getting unalloyed sympathy for its victimization. The value of Finkelstein’s work is to cut through the fog and expose this fraud for what it is. You can’t go around killing people, then demand sympathy when they do the same to you. This has been Israel’s game since its founding.
In the present situation, we can view things one of two ways. We can either act as though all of relevant history began on the morning of Saturday, October 7, and proceed from there. If we do, we will produce the following narrative: Hamas willfully, sadistically attacked innocent civilians for no reason but that they were Jews and vulnerable. Israel was forced to respond. Yes, it killed many more civilians than Hamas, but it was left no choice.
This story will be repeated over and over, ad nauseum. Anyone who denies it will be defamed, accused of anti-Semitism, denied professional perquisites, maybe fired. But it is fundamentally false, and it stems from one absolutely ridiculous axiom: that we are not permitted to consider any event prior to the event in question in order to evaluate what happened on the event in question. The issue is not whether prior events necessarily justify later ones, or extenuate, or render the agents non-responsible. The issue is exactly the one you brought up. Are prior events relevant? The answer is: they obviously are. Apart from acts of pure agency, we cannot make sense of any human action without adducing prior actions. Exactly how the prior actions and events are relevant is a separate matter. But it is obvious that they are.
The alternative way of looking at October 7 is to ask why it happened. There is no a priori reason to assume that the why-explanation will mitigate or excuse the crime. But there is good reason to think that if you fail to ask why it happened, you’ll never understand what did.
If you go backwards in time, you’ll discover one absolutely undeniable fact: the past contains its fair share of Israeli injustice. These injustices are deliberate, intense, wide in scope, and long in duration. Many of them are initiatory acts of aggression.
I think it becomes clear to any fair minded person that if this much is clear, then if Palestinians are human beings with rights, they have a right of self-defense and a right to resist injustice. They could exercise this right well or exercise it unjustly. Suppose they do so unjustly, as they did this past Saturday. That deserves condemnation, but it doesn’t negate the fact that they would have been justified in exercising a violent form of self defense in some other way.
If Israel then “pulverizes” all of Gaza out of vengeance for what Hamas has done, there is no avoiding the conclusion that it shares some of guilt for the total outcome of the event. What is wrong with Hamas’s action is not that it is a violent act of self-defense, but that it is not a genuine act of self-defense at all. In responding to Hamas, Israel is not just responding to the injustice of Hamas’s act, but striving to destroy Gaza’s capacity to resist at all. This is especially clear if its response is as indiscriminate as its current response is. But the greater the degree of the injustices prior October 7–the more that Israel’s own guilt mirrors Hamas’s, or exceeds it–the clearer it becomes that Israel itself is to be blamed in part for October 7. An event may be perpetrated by evil perpetrators and brought about by the victims. Everybody recognizes this when it comes to ordinary gang warfare. My point is not that all of the innocent non-combatants deserved their fate. None of them did. My point is that not all Israelis are innocent non-combatants. Some of those who died at Hamas’s hands really deserved their fate, even if many did not, and even if Hamas was not the right agency to be delivering justice. No one can do what Israel has done for the last 60 years and justifiably escape the world with total impunity. This is not to agree with Finkelstein’s punch-drunk nonsense. It’s to say that people who engage in wanton mass murder should not get off scot free, as so many Westerners wish they would.
If sympathy for Zionism is an essential element of “Western culture,” I am willing to say, explicitly, in public, that I’m hostile to Western culture. I don’t happen to believe that the conditional is true. But if it were, I would accept the consequent. The history of Zionism has, from the standpoint of its victims, been a history of injustice. If membership in “the West” requires allegiance to that injustice, they can have both, with my blessing.
Aristotle famously said that philosophy begins in wonder. My own footnote to this is to say that moral philosophy begins with the species of wonder we call “horror.” In either case, inquiry requires an appetite for “why” questions. Why questions can only be answered by taking a look at the past. Take a cold look at contemporary discourse on Israel and Palestine, and ask yourself whether it satisfies this proviso. I think the answer is “no.” What the arbiters of our culture want is dogmatism, not inquiry or understanding. That wish should be denied, come what may. It’s time for their love of ignorance to stop being used as a weapon against the rest of us.
LikeLike
Incidentally, if I had to make one recommendation on contemporary journalistic coverage, it would be the British journalist Jonathan Cook.
https://www.jonathan-cook.net/
Also the coverage in Jacobin and JewishCurrents.
LikeLike
Pingback: The Final Solution Is Here | Policy of Truth
Pingback: His Deeds On His Head | Policy of Truth