Over this weekend I’ve found some excellent commentaries on the Israel-Hamas War, which seems to be the name people are settling on. Okay, then,
Start with Paul Waldman, Israeli-Palestinian conflict needs moral consistency, not moral clarity. (And note that we’re not quite half way through October and I’m already almost out of Washington Post gift articles. So enjoy this one.)
While war rages in Gaza, many Americans have turned their attention to each other. As politicians, organizations and even ordinary people declare their positions on the conflict, everyone else leaps in to judge what was said. The result is a kind of sympathy meter to assess whether each statement properly places the needle between Israelis and Palestinians.
People are getting slammed for being insufficiently pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian. For example, “After Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) — the only Palestinian American member of Congress — released a statement saying ‘I grieve the Palestinian and Israeli lives lost yesterday, today, and every day,’ she was attacked for focusing too much on the fate of Palestinians. Fox News then sent a reporter to demand that she condemn Hamas.”
At the New York Times, please see this op ed by Nir Avishai Cohen. He is a major in the reserves of the Israel Defense Forces and is defending Israel now.
I am now going to defend my country against enemies who want to kill my people. Our enemies are the deadly terrorist organizations that are being controlled by Islamic extremists.
Palestinians aren’t the enemy. The millions of Palestinians who live right here next to us, between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan, are not our enemy. Just like the majority of Israelis want to live a calm, peaceful and dignified life, so do Palestinians. Israelis and Palestinians alike have been in the grip of a religious minority for decades. On both sides, the intractable positions of a small group have dragged us into violence. It doesn’t matter who is more cruel or more ruthless. The ideologies of both have fueled this conflict, leading to the deaths of too many innocent civilians.
Going back to Paul Waldman’s opinion piece, it’s noticable that an Israeli can say that but an American saying the same thing might be skewered for being insufficiently pro-Israel.
This war, like others before it, will end sooner or later. I am not sure I will come back from it alive, but I do know that a minute after the war is over, both Israelis and Palestinians will have to reckon with the leaders who led them to this moment. We must wake up and not let the extremists rule. Palestinians and Israelis must denounce the extremists who are driven by religious fanaticism. The Israelis will have to oust National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and their far-right circle from power, and the Palestinians will have to oust the leadership of Hamas.
Sounds like a plan to me. Let’s hope it happens.
David Faris, Yes, You Can Be Pro-Palestine and Anti-Hamas, at Slate. This really brings home that the real fight here is not between Muslims and Jews, or Palestinians and Israelis. It’s between hard-right religious conservatives who want to keep the fires of anger stoked and everybody else.
If there’s one thing that you would hope all factions on the progressive left could agree on, it’s that the hard-line religious fanatics who took suicide terrorism global in the 1990s, targeted civilians indiscriminately, bore enormous responsibility for the collapse of the Oslo peace process, and now operate a repressive, single-party authoritarian regime in Gaza are beyond the pale. More than any other single entity, Hamas (an Arabic-language acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement) helped destroy the Israeli left and, with it, any meaningful prospect of a two-state solution to the conflict.
The group had plenty of help, of course, from Jewish extremists in Israel and maximalist right-wing politicians like Netanyahu himself. Not long after the famous 1993 handshake between Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on the White House lawn that kicked off the doomed Oslo peace process, an Israeli extremist gunned down dozens of Palestinians in a mosque, Rabin was dead from a Jewish assassin’s bullet, the settlements in territories that would need to be handed back to the Palestinians continued to inexplicably expand, and then, in 1996, Netanyahu was elected.
But there is also no meaningful factual dispute about what Hamas has done and what role the group played in the obliteration of peace prospects. Beginning in 1993, the organization perpetrated dozens of suicide attacks in Israel, killing thousands of innocent people and plunging Israeli society into a maelstrom of fear and escalation that produced reactionary governments unwilling to take even rudimentary steps toward a negotiated peace. The Palestinian national movement did not then require—and does not now need—the slaughter of innocent civilians on buses and in dance halls and in family homes.
The relationship between the Israeli Right and Hamas is complicated. Alice Speri at the Intercept:
Hamas, in that sense, has been a convenient presence for Israel, whose leaders have favored the militant group over the Palestinian Authority, or PA, the pseudo-government established during the Oslo peace process to administer the Palestinian territories until the details of a sovereign Palestinian state could be negotiated. While Hamas has been enemy No. 1 in Israeli rhetoric for years, offering a cover for Israel to maintain its blockade and periodically kill hundreds of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, it has also offered Israel an alibi to avoid abiding by its supposed commitment to Palestinian statehood.
Israeli leaders seemed to believe this strategic calculation could hold indefinitely.
“They have determined that this situation of constant political instability and violence is preferable over making some kind of larger political agreement that would actually lead to a final status outcome to bring peace between Israelis and Palestinians,” Palestinian political analyst Yousef Munayyer told The Intercept’s Deconstructed podcast this week. “And they’ve chosen this path over that, and I think we are seeing the results of that on full display in recent days.”
Indeed, some Israeli officials have at times been explicit about their preference for Hamas over the PA. Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, one of the most extremist members of the most extremist Israeli government coalition to date, offered an unusually frank assessment of the government’s approach to Hamas in a 2015 interview.
“The Palestinian Authority is a burden, and Hamas is an asset,” Smotrich said at the time. “It’s a terrorist organization, no one will recognize it, no one will give it status at the [International Criminal Court], no one will let it put forth a resolution at the U.N. Security Council.”
I’ve seen other commentaries this week that have said Netanyahu’s policies have actually reinforced Hamas. I take it this was a political calculation on his part. I confess I don’t pay enough close attention to Israel to fully appreciate the nuances there.
Michael Hirsch, Foreign Policy, Netanyahu’s Road to War:
No one can excuse the horrific atrocities committed by Hamas in the last several days, nor deny Israel’s right to a response, which very likely will entail a full or partial reoccupation of Gaza and the methodical destruction of Hamas. But it’s also clear that Netanyahu’s policies helped create the conditions that led to the bloodiest few days in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“The horrific event we’ve just experienced—and the prolonged, massive Israeli counteroffensive to follow—cannot be fully understood in isolation from what I consider … a two-layered Netanyahu strategic failure,” said Nimrod Novik, the former senior advisor to the late Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, who eagerly tried to pursue the Oslo process. First, Netanyahu and his current coalition —“the most extreme ever,” in Novik’s words—downplayed or ignored warnings from Arab signatories under the Abraham Accords about addressing Palestinian grievances, Novik said.
Second, for decades, Netanyahu pursued what Novik called the “illusion” that even under his draconian policies—which turned Gaza into what Human Rights Watch calls “the world’s largest open-air prison”—Hamas would abstain from the kind of attacks on Israel that might jeopardize its hold on power in Gaza, said Novik, who is currently a fellow with the Israel Policy Forum.
“His so-called ‘separation strategy’ rested on two legs: one, solidify Hamas control over Gaza, so that we have ‘an address’ and a governing entity with which to reach understandings over easing of closure in return for cease-fire. Second, weaken the Palestinian Authority, lest it emerges as a viable partner for negotiations, something Netanyahu has been determined to avoid,” Novik said. An Israeli official did not respond to a request for comment.
Netanyahu also pushed a controversial policy of weakening the judiciary inside Israel, in part to prevent the courts from protecting Palestinians from Israeli human rights abuses, which they did only occasionally. That push—described by Netanyahu’s critics as a judicial coup—set off waves of protests in Israel that have continued for months.
I keep seeing headlines saying that Israel is planning to attack Gaza or is preparing an invasion of Gaza. It is completely understandable that Israel now wants to smash Hamas. But this invasion will be ugly and messy and morally compromising. See David French, The Moral Questions at the Heart of the Gaza War.
As a former JAG (or Judge Advocate General’s Corps) officer embedded with a combat arms unit in Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom, I know that you can’t simply merge law and tactics and declare that everything that is legally and tactically sound is also moral, much less wise. We veterans know that the challenge for the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza isn’t simply to win the fight with Hamas within the laws of war. There is a third imperative, one that will define the soldiers who fight and the nation they defend for years to come: Do not destroy your soul.
This is much easier said than done. To shrink from evil because the fight will be hard and complex and fraught with risk to soldiers and civilians alike is to both reward barbarism (it sends the signal that sufficient savagery will be rewarded with impunity) and to forsake the sacred duty of protecting your citizens from harm. To lean into the fight, to stretch your violent reach every bit as far as the law allows, can create both an ocean of anguish and bitterness in civilian populations and leave a “bruise on the soul” of the combatants themselves, altering their lives forever.
Perilous times. And the U.S. House is still dysfunctional.
In other news: Speaking of which, CNN is reporting —
A number of House Republicans are in talks to block Rep. Jim Jordan’s path to the speakership as the Ohio Republican tries to force a floor vote on Tuesday, according to multiple GOP sources.
One senior Republican House member who is part of the opposition to Jordan told CNN that there he believes there are roughly 40 “no” votes, and that he has personally spoken to 20 members who are willing to go to the floor and block Jordan’s path if the Ohio Republican forces a roll-call vote on Tuesday.
In more other news, Lauren Boebert spent $317.48 of campaign money in late July at Hooch Craft Cocktail Bar in Aspen, Co., according to her most recent campaign finance filings. That the bar owned by her date at the infamous Beetlejuice theatrical event.
And “If special counsel Jack Smith succeeds in his quest for a gag order on Trump, prosecutors could lose one of their best sources of incriminating information — Trump’s mouth.” That’s from How candidate Trump’s claims boost legal risks for defendant Trump at WaPo.
