On Israel-Palestine

Three Things #90: October 22, 2023

The search isn’t going terribly well at the moment, but all hope is not lost. Photo by the author.

I’ve been writing primarily about two things lately: Spacemesh, and miscellaneous “small” topics. This is easy, fun, and comfortable. I have a rhythm and I can write confidently about these topics. I know roughly how long it’ll take and, once I start writing and come up with the list of things for the week, I can visualize roughly what the final product will look like.

But I didn’t start this newsletter to write about small, comfortable things. I didn’t start writing publicly in the first place to do so. Writing is many things to me. It’s a chance to explain and communicate, yes, but it’s also a chance to learn and explore, to be vulnerable and to make mistakes. The only way to learn and grow is to write about bigger, less familiar, less comfortable things, and to make mistakes in the process.

I’ve written about big topics before. I haven’t done so recently because it’s exhausting and time consuming. But I’m doing it this week because I feel compelled to do so. I cannot ignore the Israel-Palestine conflict because my father was a Holocaust survivor who fled there and spent many years there. It left a deep impact on him and he told me stories of his time there throughout my life. Honoring his legacy requires that I not remain silent about the topic. Israel-Palestine is thus a place that’s played a critical part in my own family story, as it has in the stories of countless other families, and it’s a place that’s impressed me and moved me deeply on the occasions when I’ve visited.

Nearly all the coverage of the crisis that I’ve seen and nearly all the conversations I’ve had have been disappointingly one-sided. I’ve also heard a frightening degree of ignorance regarding the complex and nuanced history and present reality of the region and the conflict. One of my goals with this newsletter, and indeed one of my goals in life, is to explore nuance and contradiction and to grapple with the most difficult questions and topics. This is definitely one of them, and exploring and writing about this topic has been uncomfortable and exhausting. But the only chance we stand of ever resolving deep, long-lived conflict, including this one, is through nuance and discomfort.

This should go without saying but, for avoidance of doubt, any ideas expressed here are mine and mine alone.

Thing #1: Israel Must Defend Itself 🇮🇱

“There is nothing in this world—not even the cruel occupation—that can justify harming innocent people. Nothing. I have always categorically opposed harming civilians, and I will continue opposing it with every fiber of my being. It is a violation of our collective humanity.” - Ayman Odeh

One thing must be said upfront: the attacks on Israeli civilians a few days ago are atrocious and must be condemned in the strongest possible terms. Nothing can excuse assaulting and killing innocent civilians in their homes, at bus stops, and at a music festival, and taking civilian hostages. No moral code, no law, not in Israel nor Palestine, not in Judaism nor Islam nor any other place or creed, could condone such behavior, not by any stretch of the imagination. The attackers who carried out these attacks may have thought they were acting in defense of their cause or in the name of some twisted, misguided form of justice or retribution, but like just about every other terror campaign ever perpetrated they are delusional. They’ve already caused untold suffering not just for Israelis but for their own people and they’ve done irreparable damage to their own cause. Violence is never the answer; violence against a powerful adversary with the power and the will to carry out harsh retribution is also plain stupid.

I know many Israelis and what every single one of them wants is peace with Palestine. Some of them visit Palestine regularly and deliver aid or do humanitarian work. Some of them employ Palestinians. Many of them feel deep empathy for the suffering of the Palestinians and feel terrible about Israel’s role in it. Even the ones who don’t do these things and don’t feel empathy still wish for peace and feel frustrated that it’s not possible because of a constant stream of violence emanating from Palestine.

In my experience and opinion, when Israelis respond with force, they do so reluctantly and only because they feel they have no other option. I’ve never met an Israeli who bears any ill will towards the Palestinian people in general or is opposed to the existence of Palestine. I’m not saying those people don’t exist, I’m sure they do, but they are an extremist minority, and every place has its extremists.

Israel, like any nation and any people, has the right to exist, to defend itself, and to strive for peace. It has no more or less right to exist and occupy the land than Palestine and its people. Whatever your opinion or interpretation of history—and it is long and complex—the Israel of today is a thriving, legitimate nation state that, broken though its politics may be, has every right to exist and to defend itself.

Any terrorist organization like Hamas that holds as one of its raisons d’etre that Israel must not exist and that it strives to completely destroy Israel will never be a constructive negotiation partner. Whatever shred of legitimacy Hamas may have had prior to the brutal assault of a few days ago has been entirely forfeit. Nation states and organizations that do business with Hamas should declare it a terrorist organization and cease to do so.

As part of defending itself Israel has the right, protected under international law, to pursue Hamas and to capture or kill its leaders and fighters.

Thing #2: The Bigger Picture 🇵🇸

“Mr. Netanyahu has used every day in the prime minister’s office and every ounce of his power to try to convince the world that safety for Israelis must come at the expense of safety for Palestinians and to block all pathways to peace… We see the extent to which he is willing to burn our shared homeland to the ground rather than bring about long-term solutions that will deliver safety and a good life to all of us, Palestinians and Israelis alike.

“And we are also the ones who know, deep in our bones, which are made of the soil of this land, that the answer is peace. The only way we can fulfill our responsibility to the nation of our youngest ones—and to ourselves—is to recognize the nation of Palestine and the nation of Israel and to establish a State of Palestine alongside the State of Israel.” - Ayman Odeh

The other side of the story is far more complex. The Israeli-Palestine conflict is one of the world’s oldest conflicts, dating back somewhere between 60 and 2000 years depending when you start counting. It’s not possible to really understand what’s going on today without some understanding of and appreciation for that history, especially the last 100 years or so.

Israelis and Palestinians both have a legitimate claim to the land and neither group has intrinsically more right than the other. To say that the region has a long and complex history is a severe understatement, and I cannot even begin to do that history justice here so I won’t try, but I’ll share a little bit of helpful context.

The land that today comprises Israel has traded hands many times. The modern conflict began at the end of the 19th century when Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire and when the Zionism movement began. At the time Palestine was largely pastoral, consisting primarily of farming villages. There was no notion of Palestinian nationhood, and there was only a tiny number of Jewish settlers. But Jews began to migrate from Europe in gradually larger numbers, influenced by the message of Zionism and the belief that they’d never be welcome or safe in Europe, particularly Eastern Europe, and that the Jewish people could only be safe if they established their own nation state in the Holy Land. After the first World War British Mandate Palestine was established with a specific mandate to establish a home for the Jews, and during and after the second World War European Jews began to arrive in much larger numbers, fleeing persecution, pogroms, and antisemitism.

Unfortunately this was also when Israelis began to occupy land and even homes that had been occupied by evicted and dispossessed Palestinians. The situation got much worse for Palestinians after the Israeli War of Independence of 1948, known to Palestinians as the Nakba or “disaster” when 700,000 Palestinian Arabs were expelled from their homes. Since its swift and decisive victory in the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel has had the upper hand. It has asserted military dominance over its neighbors and it has increasingly circumscribed the lives of everyday Palestinians, who must now suffer through checkpoints in order to move around, especially in the West Bank, sometimes multiple times per day (while Israeli settlers travel with ease on different roads, bypassing checkpoints entirely). Life is even worse for Palestinians in Gaza, which is crowded and very poor and has been subject to a blockade on imports of many essential goods for decades.

In 2022 the unemployment rate was 47%, and 70% for the young; eight-hour blackouts are a daily occurrence. - The Economist, A Short History of Gaza

Hamas arose during the first Intifada, or uprising, of 1987 and subsequently won elections in 2006. Since then it has run Gaza as a de facto autocratic state and there have been no further elections. Despite numerous terrorist attacks and a stated aim of destroying Israel, over the years Netanyahu governments have propped up the organization as a partner with which it can do business, supposedly on the grounds that, with Hamas in power, a lasting peace and a true two state solution would continue to be unviable. Hamas indirectly receives hundreds of millions of dollars of support from foreign sources including Qatar, money that actually passes through Israeli hands on the way to Gaza. I was shocked to learn this and thought it sounded like conspiracy theory, but it’s well known and well documented.

This has led to a very unique, complex, delicate situation where Hamas is “at the same time a religious idea, a social movement, a political party, a government and a hybrid militia wedded to terrorism,” as The Economist describes it. And it’s embedded very, very deeply into the fabric of Gazan life. It intentionally uses civilians as human shields and situates weapons and other strategic assets in mosques, schools, and hospitals. It still has quite a lot of support in spite of its brutal, illegal tactics.

For this reason, however—because it’s so deeply entrenched—I don’t think Hamas can be removed easily, or even with great difficulty. Even if we assume that Israel is willing and capable of staying the course and removing its leadership and offensive capabilities, stifling political and religious ideas isn’t so straightforward, especially while the Gazan situation remains as dire as it is. Once Israel withdraws as it inevitably must, Hamas may rise again, and something even worse may take its place. This is indeed the lesson of history: in 1982 Israel invaded Lebanon to root out the threat from an earlier terrorist organization known as the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization), and after it withdrew, a much greater threat took its place in the form of Hezbollah which to this day threatens Israel from the north.

It seems pretty clear to me that as the situation in Gaza has become more dire its people, including Hamas militants and extremists, feel that they have less and less to lose. This is doubly so today as the Abraham Accords continue to play out and normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel looks ever more likely. If Saudi Arabia recognizes Israel without any accommodation for or demands regarding Palestine, Palestinian liberation may begin to feel like a truly lost cause. Derailing this process is almost certainly one of Hamas’s goals in the recent attacks.

As if all of that wasn’t complicated enough there’s also Iran, which is known to support not only Hezbollah but also Hamas and which seems to have had a hand in planning the sophisticated assault. Iran has seen its influence in the region wane in recent years, and it too is opposed to a Saudi-Israel alliance since this would mean two of its enemies effectively teaming up against it.

Israel has an impossible task ahead of it, and it doesn’t seem to have a clear plan for what comes next, the “day after” a victory. In this respect it feels a great deal like the United States in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and the risk is that it ends up in a similar situation to that of the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan, without a long-term plan.

As if this weren’t bad enough, Israel is going into this crisis during a low point in trust. Many Israelis have lost faith in Netanyahu, who has built a coalition government including some very extreme figures, who has been trying to make legal changes to the Supreme Court that have angered many liberals and secular folks, and who has been very focused on settlements in the West Bank at the expense of defense around Gaza. The current government is right wing, militarist, and anti-Palestine, and for years has been totally unwilling to entertain the idea of a two state solution (the only viable option on the table for establishing long term peace).

While the primary responsibility for terror attacks of course rests with the perpetrators, in light of this history, failures of governance, and of the desperate situation in Palestine, it’s not right to say that Israel bears no responsibility or accountability. Anyone who truly believes this is misinformed and/or has no moral compass. Israel has been playing with fire for a long time and has refused to come to terms with the reality on the ground in Palestine. The Palestinian situation, in particular Gaza, is and for a generation or more has been totally unstable and unsustainable. In retrospect, given the tragically long history of similar events and the unresolved conflict, this most recent event was to some degree foreseeable and also should’ve been preventable.

As if the buildup of Israeli troops near Gaza isn’t scary enough, the United States has sent a carrier group to the region and is providing logistical support to Israel, and President Biden visited this week to show support. Israel faces a serious and growing threat not only from Gaza but also from Hezbollah in the north and from distant Iran, which as mentioned has been conducting a proxy war against Israel and could potentially develop nuclear warheads quickly. The conflict matters so much because it destabilizes the entire region and because it risks growing into a much bigger conflagration.

While dysfunctional political processes on both sides are to blame for the present situation, ultimately the real cause is extremism on both sides. On one hand, Hamas and some other Palestinians believe that Israel doesn’t have the right to exist; and on the other, hardline Israelis, including members of the current government and those who support the Israeli settler movement, feel the same way about Palestine. As long as extremists rather than moderates are in the driver’s seat there will never be peace. A starting point then is for both sides to promote reasonable, cooler headed centrist narratives and sideline the extremists.

Thing #3: Light in the Darkness 🕊️

“The only real revenge for murder is achieving peace.” - Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish

I wrote previously in the context of the pandemic and of the Russia Ukraine conflict that the bright side of crisis is that it can help unstick things that have been stuck for a long time. Humans are stubborn and shortsighted and it often takes a true crisis to push us to change our minds and take action, to realize the error of our ways and course correct. Sadly, this is human nature.

It would be terrible if, when this crisis passes, the status quo continues. If Israel reoccupies Gaza, carries out operations against Hamas, and then withdraws without any meaningful improvement in the political, economic, and social situation in Palestine, it virtually ensures that the endless cycle of violence will continue.

The worst thing that Israel can do is play into Hamas’s hands and respond the way it wants and expects: with a massive invasion and enormous collateral damage, generating yet more tragic images of wounded and dead Palestinian children. Or with a long term occupation that alienates it from other Arab and Muslim states, and indeed from its supporters in the West. The images and reports of the unfolding humanitarian crisis in Gaza since the attacks and since Israel declared an embargo on food, water, and electricity are already having this effect, playing into Hamas’s hands and causing widespread outrage and condemnation. Things are not going well.

The options are limited. Palestine clearly cannot eliminate Israel. Israel cannot eliminate Gaza, or Palestine more generally. There’s nowhere else for the Palestinians to go: neighbors including Egypt and Jordan refuse to accept any refugees because they don’t want to be seen abetting Israel in expelling its Palestinian population. And the Israelis obviously aren’t going anywhere. Neither group would leave even if given the option to do so.

Which means they must find a way to live together, side by side, in peace. A one state solution is totally unpalatable to Israel (since it wouldn’t be Jewish majority for long) and probably to many Palestinians as well. True apartheid, where Jewish and Muslim citizens would have different rights, is also not a viable option. This leaves the two-state solution as the only viable path forward. And the only way that can happen is Palestinian self determination: the Palestinians must find a way to replace Hamas with better governors, with leadership that’s more reasonable, constructive, and palatable to Israel and the rest of the world, whether that’s the Palestinian Authority or something better. This is a golden opportunity to do just that: to heal political rifts and unite around a positive vision for the future. Any viable, long term solution will require hard work and sacrifices on both sides; if after even this horrendous crisis Gazans are unable to take this necessary step then the cycles of violence, terror, retribution, and agony cannot but continue.

There is one light in the darkness: the recent increase in stability and peace throughout the region. As The Economist reported recently the Middle East, for all of its flaws, is on the verge of a renaissance. Gulf states are in the process of successfully weaning themselves off oil as the main economic engine. The region is playing a bigger, more significant role globally. Old conflicts elsewhere in the region, such as civil wars in Syria and Yemen, are being de-escalated and political Islam is on the decline. Authoritarian regimes including Saudi Arabia are gradually liberalizing in limited but important ways. Through the Abraham Accords Arab states have begun to recognize and normalize relations with Israel.

In other words, Israel and Palestine should have the wind at their back. If, somehow, they’re able to come out of this crisis with a detente and take steps towards long term peace the region will embrace them and these trends will only accelerate. It’s a long shot and may sound like a pipe dream at this moment, but I pray that this is the final crisis, the one that gets things unstuck and finally makes peace possible.