The Weekly Sift

The endless spiral of tragedy seems too depressing to contemplate. But beyond the repetitive segments of the 24-hour news cycle, a few articles are worth paying attention to.

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Nobody I know, including me, wants to talk about the war in Gaza and Israel. Sometimes we feel compelled to: It is the news, after all. It is consequential, and informed citizens in the world’s most powerful democracy should form opinions about it.

And yet …

I’ve been witnessing, experiencing, and occasionally complaining about this phenomenon for nearly a month now (since the October 7 Hamas attacks on southern Israel). But it really came home to me Friday evening. I was at a church potluck dinner. My church is full of opinionated people, many of whom have a fairly high assessment of their grasp of world affairs. Then someone brought up the war, and there was an awkward silence. Eventually we segued onto some other topic.

I did not break the silence, because anything it occurred to me to say sounded either pompous or stupid. I have no simple paradigm that lays everything out clearly, and no five-point plan for peace. The people who can fit everything into a simple frame — whether that frame is the Global Zionist Conspiracy or God’s promise to Abraham’s descendants in Genesis 15 — are more likely to be part of the problem than part of the solution. The situation seems to illustrate a famous Bertrand Russell quote:

One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.

And yet, a simple Google search for a source shows that this quote is out of context: Russell’s next line was “I do not believe this is necessary”, and from there he laid out a hopeful message of how he believed human happiness might be achieved.

I have no comparable vision. But if I have no grand explanation to present, Russell at least inspires me to start collecting articles and ideas that seem useful if we want to think seriously about the situation.

Colonialism plays a role, but maybe not the one you think. In the critique of Israel that is popular in some left-wing circles, Zionism is just one more example of White colonists stealing land from indigenous peoples. Previous examples include the United States, where Native Americans were steadily pushed onto smaller and smaller reservations, and the apartheid regime of 20th-century South Africa. In this narrative, the foundation of Israel is an unjust act of Jewish aggression from the beginning, and all the subsequent unhappiness — from the Nakba of 1948 to last month’s Hamas attacks and the Israeli reprisals — can be laid at the door of the early Zionists and their contemporary successors.

Simon Sebag Montefiore does a good debunking of this view in “The Decolonization Narrative Is Dangerous and False” in The Atlantic: Most of the Jews who moved to Israel in the last century or two were not “settlers” so much as refugees — from Czarist pogroms, Nazi death camps, Soviet oppression, Ethiopia, or long-vanished Jewish quarters of Muslim cities like Baghdad. Many of these refugees (especially the Ethiopians) do not fit any reasonable definition of White. Josh Marshall echoes this point:

You cannot look at the range of inhabitants of Israel and all the Palestinian territories together and think the conflict is fundamentally or consistently about skin color. Many Ashkenazi Jews [i.e. from European backgrounds], in American terms, look white. But more than half of Israel’s Jewish population is descended from Jews from the Arab and Islamic worlds. There are many Palestinians and Israeli Jews who could not be readily identified as one or the other by physical appearance or skin color alone.

There is a role for colonialism in this narrative, but it is more subtle. (I’m leaving Montefiore’s article at this point and going off on my own interpretation of history.) In the aftermath of the Holocaust (and the Western world’s relative indifference to it as it was happening), the Zionist vision of a sanctuary for Jews — a place that would always accept them and never throw them out — became compelling for many non-Jews. Once, Western liberals might have imagined that civilization and education would eventually overcome the ancient prejudices, but what society had been more civilized or better educated than Germany? And among those ancient prejudices, antisemitism seemed virtually unique. Jews, of course, are not the only group that has ever been persecuted, and the Holocaust was not history’s only genocide. But antisemitism’s ability to subside for decades and then spring up with renewed virulence made virtually any nation’s guarantees suspect.

In addition to that theoretical justification, there was a practical problem that needed a solution: Postwar Europe was full of displaced persons, including many survivors of the death camps. They couldn’t be sent back to their families, who were either dead or similarly displaced. Often their entire villages no longer existed, or were now occupied by the people who had collaborated with the Nazis to send them away. But they had to go somewhere.

Palestine was of course where the Zionists envisioned their homeland, but the great powers were not bound by their preferences. (Michael Chabon’s novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union takes place in an alternate history where part of Alaska became a sanctuary for Jews fleeing the Holocaust.) There was even a certain logic to making the nations that caused the problem pay the price: What if, say, Bavaria, where Hitler’s movement got its start, had been set aside as a Jewish homeland?

But even suggesting such a thing sounds laughable, because Bavaria already had citizens (some of whom share my last name, though I’ve never met them) and cities like Munich. But so did everyplace else, including Palestine. The world had no desirable empty spaces. The challenge was to find a place whose current inhabitants volunteered, or could be induced to cooperate.

Or whose desires could be ignored.

What separated Palestine from everyplace else wasn’t just the Zionist vision, it was that the Arab world had no power. World War I had brought down the Ottoman Empire, and the subsequent treaty of 1922 divided the region into a British mandate and a French mandate. These colonial powers then drew the outlines of the subsequent states: Syria and Lebanon by the French, and Iraq, Jordan, and the Hejaz (a forerunner of Saudi Arabia) by the British. The strife-torn histories of several of these states comes in part from their unnatural founding. (As we saw during the Iraq War, there is little reason for Iraqi Kurdistan — largely the Ottoman province of Mosul — to belong to the same country as the former Ottoman provinces of Baghdad and Basra.)

When Britain and the United Nations (with American support) split the Palestine mandate into a Jewish state and an Arab state, the great powers were doing what great powers often do: paying their moral debts with someone else’s assets.

Today, Americans often shake our heads at the two sides: Why can’t they get along? We are dismayed when every dispute seems to have no beginning: The Israelis have no choice but to do Z, because the Palestinians did Y. And the Palestinians had no choice but to do Y, because the Israelis had already done X … back and back and back to A and beyond. “Why not leave them to fight it out?” we sometimes think, because it has nothing to do with us.

But it has everything to do with us. We played a large role in the great-power coalition that redrew the world after World War II. That arrangement set the Israeli Jews and the Palestinians up to fight with each other. What has happened since was not fate; both sides have made mistakes and have blown opportunities to seek peace. But it’s not all their fault either.

Jews deserve a state. The Western powers should not have made Palestine provide one. That is history now and there’s no undoing it. Generations have been born and died in Israel; moving either the Israelis or the Palestinians somewhere else would be no more just than moving you or me from our homes. But we also can’t wash our hands of the current situation. If there is some way to resolve it that demands sacrifice, the US, Britain, the EU, and perhaps other countries should be ready to make some of those sacrifices.

The situations in Gaza and the West Bank may be linked, but we can’t lose sight of the differences. Here I would point you to Matt Yglesias’ “Israel’s Two Wars“. He believes that Israel has little choice but to root Hamas out of Gaza (with all the costs that entails), but opposes what has been happening slowly for decades on the West Bank.

while Israel is waging a just war in Gaza, they are in parallel waging an unjust war in the West Bank. This second war is much less spectacular, much more of a slow burn, and at the moment, is causing much less death and destruction to innocent civilians. That these two wars — one just but spectacularly deadly, one unjust but lower-key — are playing out in tandem is contributing to a confused and polarized debate over a set of issues that were already quite fraught.

Yglesias believes that the closest the two sides came to peace was at the 2008 summit in Annapolis. The framework of that near-agreement was that Israel got to keep its most populous West Bank settlements, in exchange for giving the new Palestinian state land elsewhere. Obviously that compromise gets harder for Palestinians to accept the more settlements there are. Yglesias believes that sabotaging such a two-state solution has been a deliberate Netanyahu policy.

Josh Marshall interprets Netanyahu slightly differently:

Benjamin Netanyahu’s return to power in 2009 was based on a very different premise [than an Annapolis-style agreement]: that the Palestinian issue could be managed indefinitely rather than resolved and with no major repercussions. …

For those of us who never believed this could be true, it did slowly become a matter of reason over experience. That couldn’t go on forever. And yet, year after year somehow it did. Israel’s economy grew stronger. It normalized relations with more Arab countries. It even managed a de facto normalization and something close to a de facto, though sub rosa, alliance with Saudi Arabia. It couldn’t work and yet it kept working. Until it didn’t.

What exploded Netanyahu’s legitimacy and reputation on October 7th wasn’t just an abject national security failure. It exploded the whole idea that the occupation could be effectively managed and that Benjamin Netanyahu could manage it.

He sees a return to the Netanyahu status quo as a failure of imagination: a simultaneous inability to imagine peace and an inability to imagine the nightmares that will continue to happen until both sides are willing to take risks for peace.

What might happen in Gaza. One of the most dismal aspects of thinking about this war is that all roads seem to lead nowhere. Simply punishing Hamas, but leaving it in control of Gaza, just starts the clock ticking down to the next attack. But occupying Gaza would be an endless quagmire.

In Iraq, the US demonstrated the limits of military power: A superior military can go wherever it wants and destroy whatever it chooses. Any goal that can be achieved by going places and destroying things can be achieved by military might alone. However, neither winning over a population that hates you nor establishing a government they will cooperate with fits that description.

Israel wants to wind up living next to a Gaza that is stable rather than a launching pad for future attacks like the ones we just saw. But what kind of government could achieve such a goal?

Francis Foer takes on this challenge in “Tell Me How This Ends“.

Thus far, the Israelis have answered the question only in the negative. Although some of the ultranationalists in the Netanyahu government openly fantasize about reoccupying Gaza, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has said that his government won’t pursue that path, which would come at a financial, military, and moral cost that Israel apparently doesn’t want to bear. But the alternative to a postwar occupation of some sort is lawlessness, which would permit Hamas’s return, thus undermining the very purpose of the war.

Foer asked “a former prime minister, a former national security adviser, and a former head of Mossad, as well as longtime diplomats and analysts in Washington” to imagine “a plausible endgame for Gaza”.

What I found was both a surprising degree of consensus on a plan for life after Hamas, and a lack of faith in the current Israeli government’s ability to execute it.

That plan has a number of moving parts, and requires a number of countries, including the Gazans themselves, to make sensible decisions. The basic steps are

• Israel goes into Gaza and destroys Hamas as a viable government. But it does not stay as an occupying power.
• During a transition period that is framed from the beginning as temporary, a collection of Arab countries not aligned with Iran — the article suggests Egypt, Jordan, the Emirates, and Morocco — manage a reconstruction. Presumably, this reconstruction is funded by some combination of the oil-rich Arab states, the US, and the EU.
• What makes the transition temporary is turning Gaza over to the Palestinian Authority that currently oversees the West Bank.

Each participant buy-in might be difficult to achieve, but Foer tries to answer those objections: Egypt will want its companies to get reconstruction contracts. The PA will want to “substantially [bolster] its position in the West Bank.”

It would almost certainly demand stringent constraints on settlement expansion and promises of greater autonomy, measures that Netanhyahu and coalition partners abhor.

Now we’re back to the “sacrifices for peace” from the last section. So why would the Israeli government (whatever it looks like when the war ends) make such concessions?

In the midst of such gloom, I also thought I detected muffled hints of hope. Israelis almost universally invoked the unexpected aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the other cataclysmic lapse in the history of the nation’s defense, so searing that it scrambled the politics of both Israel and its neighbors. Some of the Jewish state’s old enemies finally accepted its existence. Fervent hawks in Israel became ambitious peacemakers. No Israeli was willing to stake their reputation on the rise of a new alignment, but they all wanted to believe in its imminence, beyond the carnage.

A million things can go wrong with the plan Foer describes, and with the resolution of Gaza as a stepping stone to a broader peace. Certainly, plans that seemed more promising have failed in the past. Peace is definitely a long shot. But we have to hope that at some point all involved will realize that there is no alternative. At that point, an admonition of the original Zionist, Theodore Herzl, can be repurposed: “If you will it, it is no dream.“