When I woke up last Saturday and came downstairs to coverage of Hamas’s terrorist attack outside the border of Gaza on TV, it was in an Airbnb my friends and I were staying at for a friend’s wedding in Marin, California. The day was supposed to be joyous, and it was, but as with all spikes of joy, it transpired at the same time as tremendous suffering was unfolding halfway around the world. The main difference between most instances of concurrent joy and suffering and this one was just that we were acutely aware of both. We held them at the same time, even if the former took up most of the real estate in our heads and in our field of view. It wasn’t the only thing. There is never only one thing.
It’s worth mentioning, of course, that all of us in the house were Jewish, and although the wedding was a multi-cultural affair, the ceremony itself took on a very Jewish flavor. So there we were, openly celebrating while—likely to varying degrees of success—keeping knowledge of the atrocities at bay long enough until such a time where we could confront them fully. Personally, it took some time for me to get around to this mode. I would identify myself as left-leaning Jew, but the closest connection I have with Israel is the Birthright trip I took there in 2010, interactions with the fresh contingency of Israelis that would come to my camp each summer, and the dueling San Francisco rallies I found myself on the Israeli side of one day as a 16-year-old. I don’t have a deeply Zionist perspective, perhaps in part because my Soviet-born family immigrated to the U.S. instead of Israel. Who knows. All I can say is that despite feeling as if I’m not nearly educated enough on the historical context to comment with any authority on what should be done with this new chapter of a 75-year conflict, I’m not afraid to say I’m baffled by a lot of the discourse around it.
If nothing is easy or obvious about how to resolve the conflict, it’s ironically pretty straightforward and commonly understood that a primary reason for this is that its history, dating back to biblical times, is fairly complex. So why does it feel like few people are able or willing to apply this knowledge to the latest atrocities that have inevitably triggered more atrocities? Why have so many refused to condemn brutal mass murder before making whatever point they feel compelled to make—be it around Palestinian liberation or anything else? As others have written, not defending Hamas is a pretty low bar to clear. It shouldn’t be that hard to step right over it. It shouldn’t be so difficult to hold these truths at the same time: Israelis deserve to live and prosper. Palestinians deserve to live and prosper. Hamas is a terrible terrorist organization. The Israeli government has enacted terrible policies. Normal people suffer due to the actions of intolerant and often radical factions of both “sides.” I put quotes around “sides” for those that want to be reductive. Because looking at them as two opposing poles is exactly that.
I’ve been reading a lot the past week, doing what I can to find nuanced takes, because they’re the only sort that make me feel better about all the violence that’s already been wrought, and the fact that perhaps for the first time in my life I don’t feel entirely supported or safe as a Jew in America. I’m sure part of that has to do with living in New York—today is a “day of rage” that Hamas leadership has called for, so I’m staying home from work and fortunate that I can without penalty. But I think it has a lot more to do with seeing far more whataboutism and “reap what you sow” language than I ever expected in response to the senseless murder of innocent adults, children, and babies. It’s particularly surprising to see such classic conservative tactics used so flagrantly by liberals. A piece by Eric Levitz in Intelligencer sums this up—speaking of nuanced takes—very well.
“In this intellectual’s telling, the killings of entire families in their beds are not atrocities that contradict the left’s fundamental commitment to the inherent worth of every human life; they are “drastic actions in need of no apologia.” Such sentiments were not altogether aberrant among left-wing public intellectuals. A Marxist professor at Birkbeck University of London declared that the murder of 260 Israelis at a rave was a “consequence” for “partying on stolen land.” Other academics, and a wide variety of campus student organizations, issued statements pointedly refusing to criticize “Palestinian resistance.”
Meanwhile, social media was replete with claims that Hamas’s atrocities constituted heroic progress toward decolonization and that Jewish Israeli civilians were fair targets for violence as they are settlers occupying stolen lands.
All this is morally sick and intellectually bankrupt.”
What I appreciate about Levitz’s argument is that he doesn’t just stop at blasting these “morally sick and intellectually bankrupt” views. He goes on to explain exactly why these positions from a leftist perspective act directly against the end goal they claim to be in support of: Palestinian freedom.
“Much of Israel’s Jewish population descends from people who were expelled from other Middle Eastern countries; which is to say, people who suffered the same sort of dispossession endured by the Palestinians. These people did not have anywhere else to seek refuge. And their grandchildren do not have any metropole to return to. The idea that they deserve to be shot to death while dancing because they were born in Israel, or for the crimes of a government many actively opposed, is hateful.
More broadly, the notion that an ethnic group can boast the exclusive right to occupy any stretch of land is not a left-wing one. Virtually all land is “stolen land” if one rolls the tape back far enough.”
Probably the only issue I have with this article is that it’s deeply intellectual and extremely inaccessible. I don’t think one should need a graduate-school-level education to engage with the nuance of a critical moment in time. It’s why I’m grateful for Tangle, a newsletter written by Isaac Saul (disclosure: we worked together at a digital media startup from 2015-2016). The entire basis for his political writing is taking an issue and presenting the range of perspectives on it from one “side,” the range of perspectives from the other “side,” and then his own take. In his article on last Saturday’s attacks, he cleanly presents his bias upfront—he’s a Jew who has lived in Israel—then goes on to acknowledge the impossibility of recapping “the entire 5,000 year history of people fighting over this strip of land in one newsletter” before setting the more recent context of the 20th century and diving right in.
“You can’t speak about this issue in a vacuum. You can't pretend that it wasn't just 60 years ago when Israel was surrounded on all sides by Arab states who wanted to wipe them off the face of the planet. Despite the balance of power shifting this century, that threat is still a reality. And you can't talk about that without remembering the only reason the Jews were in Israel in the first place was that they'd spent the previous centuries fleeing a bunch of Europeans who also wanted to wipe them off the face of the planet. And then Hitler showed up.
American partisans have a narrow view of this history, and an Americentric lens that is infuriating to witness. As Lee Fang perfectly put it, "Hamas would absolutely execute the ACAB lefties cheering on horrific violence against Israelis if they lived in Gaza & U.S. right-wingers blindly cheering on Israeli subjugation of Palestinians would rebel twice as violently if Americans were subjected to similar occupation."”
But if you think he’s just here to slam the anti-Israel takes, think again. He deftly transitions into speaking about the position of power that Israel has, and has always had over Palestinians. He explains that it’s never been a fair fight because the former’s government is rich and backed by most of the West, whereas the latter doesn’t have any unified leadership and hasn’t been given “more than an inch of freedom” to live in the West Bank and Gaza.
“These are largely the refugees and descendants of the refugees of the 1948 and 1967 wars that Israel won. And you can't keep two million people in the condition that those in the Gaza strip live in and not expect events like this.”
No, you can’t. But that doesn’t mean the violence is justified! And neither is the oppression that led to it! Back and forth, back and forth. It’s complex. And it’s refreshing to see that never-ending cycle rendered plainly, without any illusions, without any nonsense, and with as much acknowledgement of potential blind spots as possible. Because recently I’ve felt like I’m swimming in a sea of performative radicalism which reeks of ignorance at best and outright hatred at worst. And while personally I don’t have productive solutions to a seemingly impossible conflict, I do think we’ll move further away from finding them collectively if we’re unable to embrace the complexity inherent to all of this. As someone who often looks away when things are bad—I still haven’t brought myself to look at images and videos of the horrific violence from last Saturday—I think it’s imperative that we turn ourselves squarely toward the difficult work of holding more than one truth at the same time.
As for where things go from here tactically, well, I don’t know. It seems pretty obvious that Israel’s response in Gaza will only continue to intensify, despite it likely being exactly what Hamas hoped to provoke. Thomas L. Friedman wrote in The New York Times this week that if he were President Biden counseling the Israeli government, he’d tell them to ask themselves: “What do my worst enemies want me to do—and how can I do just the opposite?” Unfortunately, and in some ways understandably, it looks like the urge for vengeance will overpower that sensible view. So as Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents alludes to right in the title of her article yesterday, we’ll have to wait longer still to see eye-to-eye and move forward. “We Cannot Cross Until We Carry Each Other,” she writes, citing a poem by Aurora Levins Morales. Doesn’t matter if you think it’s overly sentimental. It’s true.