The Israel-Hamas War, ctd.
The complicating, nuanced thing about speech is that — amongst many other things — speech is a community act. Hamas’s founding charter is as absurd as it is anti-Semitic. We can sit in community with that fact. We can sit in community with the grief of those Israel lost on October 7th, as David Remnick himself has done —
At first, there was silence, but now a great communal lamentation convulsed the assembled. I have never heard such weeping as I did that afternoon. There would be many more funerals to come, many more convulsions of grief. But the sounds of lamentation never carry as far as those of rockets, missiles, artillery, bombs.
— but we also have to sit in community with the fact that Israel’s far-right government filled with messianic-thinking figures might not necessarily be moving in the direction of ideal long-term security for Israel (to say nothing of Arabs and Jews across the world.)
If the military objective of this war is the defeat of Hamas, then why is the average Palestinian currently living on two pieces of bread per day? Why have 4,500 children been killed? If the goal is the defeat of Hamas, then why have 1.5 million Palestinians — 70% of the population of Gaza — been displaced? Why has one Palestinian journalist been killed every day? Why are 60% of hospitals no longer functioning? Why is the Israeli ambassador to the UN looking at all this and saying that there is no humanitarian crisis? Why is Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich calling to ban Palestinians from harvesting olives? Why are ambulances repeatedly being targeted? If the military objective is the defeat of Hamas, then why is the Agriculture Minister going on television and declaring the operation ‘The Nakba of Gaza?’ (If you’ve never heard the phrase ‘Nakba’ before, click here for a summary.)
This statement suggests that the answer to my string of semi-rhetorical questions is two-fold — the first is that the IDF wants to have as few people in Gaza as possible in order to confront Hamas, but it also suggests an overlap with something that came up in an interview between a settler and The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner —
In Israel, there’s a lot of support for settlements, and this is why there have been right-wing governments for so many years. The world, especially the United States, thinks there is an option for a Palestinian state, and, if we continue to build communities, then we block the option for a Palestinian state. We want to close the option for a Palestinian state, and the world wants to leave the option open. It’s a very simple thing to understand.
[…]
Where should the Palestinians in Gaza go?
To Sinai, to Egypt, to Turkey.
They’re not Egyptian or Turkish, though. Why would they go to Turkey?
O.K. The Ukrainians are not French, but when the war started they went to many countries.
Their country was being bombed, and so many of them fled west.
And Gazan people are dying to go to other places.
Given all this, it might be fair to perhaps characterize the Israeli government’s response to October 7th in three ways — (1) a war against Hamas, (2) collective punishment of the Palestinians who aren’t automatically seen as fully human, and (3) a chance to pursue a second Nakba. And though I could obviously be wrong — though this entire piece of writing could be wrong — I don’t feel like I see any attempts to untangle the three aspects here with any particular sense of urgency.
There’s also the lingering sense that this war sometimes seems slightly more interested in fulfilling preconceived notions than in actually responding to the situation as is. After not meeting with the families of kidnapped Israelis — after Biden seemingly met with Israeli families before Netanyahu — with nearly 60% of Israelis favoring a ceasefire in return for the hostages — there were reports that Netanyahu rejected a ceasefire-for-hostages deal. Though some hostages have been released, a majority haven’t been, and there are also reports that some hostages have died as a result of the bombing.
All this is happening while the United States seems to be pursuing a seemingly endless series of truly pointless speech acts, including The Atlantic offering up an absurd, tone-and-time-deaf piece on the moral obligations of Hamas as Palestinians are bombed —
Hamas should be making Gaza into a model of what a liberated Palestine would look like (perhaps, sadly, that’s what it has done). And then it should be organizing on the West Bank to achieve a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
— while the former speechwriter for George W. Bush is seemingly stuck in a loop of Bill O’Reilly-styled personal animus in seemingly going after every academic he can find.
At a distance, my sense is that Americans have a vague understanding of a history of antisemitism, a vague understanding of the darker parts of post-9/11 rhetoric, and know nothing about the nature of Netanyahu’s government. That leaves the choice in front of them a simple one. John Oliver’s piece on Last Week Tonight — which came out after 95% of this piece was written and covers similar ground to what you’ve read/are reading here — seems to confirm this.
You don’t need me to educate you on antisemitism throughout history, the horrific results of that antisemitism, nor the attendant anxiety that exists as a result of that history. Some have looked at that history and come to the conclusion that all arrows point towards violence. (See: “Austin warned Gallant about Israeli military actions in Lebanon.”) Some have come to a different conclusion.
But I don’t know who to turn to to plead for a greater sense of empathetic dexterity. Consider this small scene from Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger —
On our last afternoon [in Gaza], we sat on plastic chairs in the shaded backyard of a prominent Palestinian family who insisted on feeding us a sumptuous meal of food from their garden — immense-hearted people who refused to hate us because of our ethnic doubles. The father, a doctor, told us he was happy for his young children to meet Jewish people who wanted peace and justice, since the only Jews they get the chance to interact with are the soldiers at the checkpoints.
“I don’t want them to grow up hating Jews,” he told us. “But what can I do if the only Jews he sees are pointing guns?”
Who do I share that anecdote with? Who hears it?
We can’t let ourselves become a zero-sum game. We can’t have settlers telling The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner ‘children of the enemy don’t count’ while Palestinian children hold a press conference outside a hospital making the case to assembled journalists for their own lives.
We can’t let ourselves become a zero-sum game.
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Previously: Words, words, words / Thematically Grouped Words /