Public Domain, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Arendt#/media/File:Hannah_Arendt_1933.jpgStateless In Palestine
The belief that all humans have certain rights, endowed by the Creator as Jefferson put it, is common. The lesson of Chapter 9 of The Origins of Totalitarianism (“Origins”) by Hannah Arendt is that such rights mean little or nothing if there is no one to enforce them. Realist diplomats after WWI knew that the successor states would not enforce the human rights of minorities and refugees unless forced to do so. They created the Minority Treaties to provide that enforcement, backed by the League of Nations.
It didn’t work. It turns out that the important part of Jefferson’s observation is the next phrase: “that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed….“ Absent the protection of the state, the mystical state of having rights is useless. And even having formal rights, like citizenship, is no protection against denaturalization. Arendt provides an example:
Yet, one need only remember the extreme care of the Nazis, who insisted that all Jews of non-German nationality “should be deprived of their citizenship either prior to, or, at the latest, on the day of deportation” (for German Jews such a decree was not needed, because in the Third Reich there existed a law according to which all Jews who had left the territory—including, of course, those deported to a Polish camp—automatically lost their citizenship) citizenship) in order to realize the true implications of statelessness. P. 280, fn omitted.
The problem of statelessness, and thus rightlessness, which runs through Origins is still with us. One salient example today is the Palestinian people. Arendt wrote about the impact of establishment of The State Of Israel in 1947.
The notion that statelessness is primarily a Jewish problem was a pretext used by all governments who tried to settle the problem by ignoring it. None of the statesmen was aware that Hitler’s solution of the Jewish problem, first to reduce the German Jews to a nonrecognized minority in Germany, then to drive them as stateless people across the borders, and finally to gather them back from everywhere in order to ship them to extermination camps, was an eloquent demonstration to the rest of the world how really to “liquidate” all problems concerning minorities and stateless.
After the war it turned out that the Jewish question, which was considered the only insoluble one, was indeed solved—namely, by means of a colonized and then conquered territory—but this solved neither the problem of the minorities nor the stateless. On the contrary, like virtually all other events of our century, the solution of the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs, thereby increasing the number of the stateless and rightless by another 700,000 to 800,000 people.
And what happened in Palestine within the smallest territory and in terms of hundreds of thousands was then repeated in India on a large scale involving many millions of people. Since the Peace Treaties of 1919 and 1920 thé refugees and the stateless have attached themselves like a curse to all the newly established states on earth which were created in the image of the nation-state. P. 289 — 90, fn. omitted, my paragraphing.
The problem of the stateless and rightness Arabs described by Arendt has not been solved. The Palestinian Authority has no ability, or will, to protect the human rights of Palestinians and Gazans. Hamas is a terrorist organization, not a government. No Hamas member from top to bottom cares about the lives of the people of Gaza, let alone their rights, though apparently the “leaders” care about their own safety and luxuries, living the rich life in Qatar.
The State of Israel doesn’t care about the Palestinians either. There’s the ruthless bombing. There’s the settler attacks in the West Bank, which go unpunished. Israel has sold oil leases that were thought to be the property of the Palestinians. Even as the war continues, it announced its intention to build 3,000 new housing units for settlers in the West Bank.
The failure of assimilation
In earlier chapters of Origins, Arendt discusses the history of anti-Semitism in Europe, especially France. She tells the story of Alfred Dreyfus. But probably she wasn’t aware that the French Vichy government deported Dreyfus’ granddaughter, Madeleine Levy, to Auchwitz, where she was murdered in the Holocaust. Nor does she mention the deportation and murder of other assimilated French Jews such as the family of Nissim de Camondo; there are monuments to these dead all over France. I read this part of Origins as saying that assimilation of Jews into European society was a failure, at least up to then.
Arendt was herself a Jew and stateless, and worked for Zionist organizations in the early 1930s in Germany and then in Geneva. Given her premise about human rights, it’s easy to understand why she might favor the goal of Zionism to establish a home state for Jews. If the Jewish people are to have rights they need a state that is willing and able to protect those rights. This is the founding goal of Zionism.
Revisionist Zionism
Rick Perlstein wrote an essay for The American Prospect discussing a book by Eram Kaplan, The Jewish Radical Right: Revisionist Zionism and Its Ideological Legacy. According to Perlstein, Kaplan says that there were two factions in the Zionist movement, Labor Zionism and Revisionist Zionism. Labor Zionism is the faction that seemed to prevail. It’s the faction of the Kibbutzim, people working the land to make the desert bloom. It’s the faction for which Jewish kids collected dimes to plant trees. It’s the founding story of Israel I learned growing up in the 50s.
Perlstein’s essay focuses on Revisionist Zionism. He begins with a discussion of an interview by the excellent Isaac Chotiner of a leader in the settlement movement. Chotiner talked to Daniella Weiss, a leader in the settlement movement for over 50 years. Weiss believes that the State of Israel should include all the land from the Euphrates to the Nile. She says Arabs and other non-Jews who live there now have no political rights:
Q. When you say that you want more Jews in the West Bank, is your idea that the Palestinians there and the Jews will live side by side as friends, or that—
A. If they accept our sovereignty, they can live here.
Q. So they should accept the sovereign power, but that doesn’t necessarily mean having rights. It just means accepting the sovereign power.
A. Right. No, I’m saying specifically that they are not going to have the right to vote for the Knesset. No, no, no.
Weiss may seem like an extremist, but Perlstein tells us she’s stating the ideological position of Revisionist Zionism. Perlstein writes that Kaplan says that the Revisionist faction was a fascist ideology, based on Italian Fascism.
Perlstein describes the ideas of a founder of this faction, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, showing the connection to Benito Mussolini’s fascism, including its emphasis on violence and moral purity as a means of returning to a former glory. Perlstein says the language used by Weiss in the Chotiner interview is the doctrine of Revisionist Zionism.
And make no mistake: What this settler told [Chotiner] was doctrine. “For Jabotinsky,” Kaplan writes, “human rights, civil equality, and even political equality could not create harmony among individuals. Only the common ties of blood, history, and language could bring people together.”
Perlstein tells us that Benjamin Netanyahu’s father was an associate of Jabotinsky, and argues that Netanyahu carries the entire tradition of Revisionist Zionism forward.
Discussion
1. The blithe disrespect for the human rights of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank is shocking. You have to read it to believe it.
2. Perlstein’s essay is a bare introduction to Revisionist Zionism, and it’s the first I ever heard of it. It’s also shocking.
3. One of the many issues Perlstein discusses is the way his understanding of the history of the State of Israel has changed since he was a child. Perlstein is a historian, but he tells us he never heard of the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem until he was 30. Well, I never heard of the Tulsa Massacre until I was in my 60s.
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Thank you.
Excellent piece!
Official State Religion is the bane of the world and causes more wars and deaths than it prevents.
Extraordinary to me is the repeated canard that ‘from the river to the sea’ is an anti-semitic phrase. It literally forms the core of Article 1 of the Israeli ruling Likud Party Charter. Additionally, numerous streets and monuments honour Israeli terrorists who murdered and tortured British soldiers. Hell, there’s even a museum to Lehi in Tel Aviv! 4 stars on TripAdvisor… Israeli’s have never denounced terrorism. Their State was successfully founded upon it and several Prime Ministers were self-avowed & convicted terrorists. Imagine a museum to the IRA in Belfast!? Israelis ought not keep a straight face when denouncing the ‘glorification of terrorism’. Take a look too at Orde Wingate. He might well have been Wingnut because religiously he was one. An undoubtedly ’gifted’ military mind, he was a Plymouth Brethren who, whist writing the book on counter-insurgency in Palestine went native on the Jewish side. But it is his eschatological religious views concerning the necessity for the State of Israel to come into being as a catalyst for the Second Coming, which do much to explain the US religious right’s obsessive support for Zionism. Christian Zionism is pervertedly as anti-semitic as anything else worthy of the label, treating Zionism as merely a prop.
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Britons could argue the U.S. was founded by terrorists, and the Declaration of Independence was a terrorists’ manifesto; look where we keep that document which the signors knew to be their death warrant. Perspective matters.
If one is a Palestinian who lives between the “river to the sea” on the western side of the fence around Gaza, one might have a different perspective from those on the eastern side of the fence.
Another reason why slogans don’t really help. You mean it one way; your opponent says you mean something completely different; and then you learn the history, which throws a wrench into all of it.
My son met an honest-to-goodness Catholic monarchist who condemned the American Revolution as an affront to God because it was a rebellion against a divinely appointed king. My initial reaction was …”Wait, what about, you know, the whole thing between Henry VIII and the Pope?” To which my son responded, “Do you think I wanted to engage this guy in a politico-theological discussion?”
I can’t believe he ran into a Catholic monarchist defending British monarchy. That’s like meeting a living specimen from the Cretaceous period! I hope he snuck a photo for posterity!
A much better analogy would be US treatment of its indigenous population in which respect I can wholeheartedly agree. Perspective isn’t everything and is so often subject to distortion. Those on the Western side of the wall did not erect it nor do they in any way benefit from it. It is the perspective of the individual with the gun vs those on the other end of the barrel.
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No but thanks for the mansplaining to to a woman of indigenous heritage.
The core of fascism is that a country or a state is not just a border with a government running things. Rather a country is a Nation, composed of individuals joined together by ethnic, linguistic and religious backgrounds. Combined with the land of course thus the classic, blood and soil. The people joined together to satisfy some grand historical drama.
The establishment of a Jewish state was thus the substantiation of the core principal of fascism. Entwined in this is why American fundamentalist Christians love Israel. Stripped of all that Old Testament stuff they love that Jews have their own nation. As they think they should have America, because of blood, soil and here, Jesus.
Fascism arouse not from an ideology but out of seeking popularity for factions in the then new European democracies, as an alternative to Marxist Communism. They found that blood, soil, and God or fate, were a powerful platform which motivated people and so gave power to its leaders. Fascism’s rise was dependent upon the then new mass communications technologies of radio and movies. Fascism is fundamentally a phenomena created by media’s ability to influence and manipulate the masses. That might ring a bell. Fascism is an outgrowth of democracy.
“Outgrowth”? That’s an odd term to use for a movement that was a reactionary cult that hated democracy but used often used democracy to attain power prior to doing away with any pretense of supporting democracy.
Indeed.
It is of course the characteristic tolerance of democracies which can enable fascists within to prosper by dissimulation and manipulation, so only in that sense is the OP correct. Worth bearing in mind, though, it’s also possible for one form of fascism to be succeeded by another, as eg. in the eventual mutation of Stalinism to Putinism in Russia. A pre-conditioned public is always a help, anywhere.
But Stalinism was only, at best, marginally fascist in nature. Are you saying that Stalinism was a nationalist movement?
Co-option of democratized communications might be a better frame. As the media become less democratized — like the abolition of the Fairness Doctrine — it became easier for fascism to position itself as legitimate for lack of adequate rebuttal in the public sphere.
From the viewpoint of some within US evangelicalism, the establishment of the state of Israel is a prerequisite of the second coming of Jesus. It’s not that these folks love Israel per se, but that this is simply part of what has to happen before Jesus comes again.
If I recall correctly, the Jews do not fare well during the Second Coming.
Yes, and thank thanks for all the fish.
Bypasses do have to be built.
and, EOH, if i “recall” correctly, none of us knows what happens after death.
That the world’s equilibrium can be shattered so completely by things that are imaginary, competing MYTHS, is just nuts.
“Guns don’t kill people; religions kill people” was the slogan of a couple of gun-loving young friends, back in the day (and that includes state religions).
It may be true.
If I ever figure out what that means, I’ll come up with a blistering response.
Arnold Fruchtenbaum:
We’re so screwed.
more properly a “reaction to” rather than an “outgrowth of”…
“The establishment of a Jewish state was thus the substantiation of the core principal of fascism”
Not quite.There is a big difference between nationalism, and the ideas of nationality and self-determination which were one of the pillars of the Enlightenment and are part of the idea of a Jewish homeland, and Ultanationalism which is at the core of fascism. The former is represented by Labor (or mainstream) Zionism. The latter by revisionist Zionism.
It is shocking that an historian like Perlstein had not heard of the bombing of the King David Hotel. It was one of the seminal events of terrorism/freedom fighter violence during the British Mandate period. I learned about it in a modern English history class, covered, of course, from the perspective of how hard it was for the Brits to maintain peace as their empire disintegrated before their eyes.
Comparable to your comment about the Tulsa race riots in the US, the extreme violence associated with imperial resistance to the loss of empire remains something former imperial overlords remain reluctant to admit or address. Examples abound, Kenya and the Congo among them. Red state politicians in the US have even renewed their fight to keep their citizens in the dark about their own historical and contemporary violence. Presumably, they’ve read their Orwell: Who controls the present controls the past. Who controls the past, controls the future.
Every nation is pretty good at white-washing its past; some are better than others. We teach our kids the version that we think evidences our values, not necessarily our actions. But when we grow up we’re supposed to face the whole picture.
MAGA Republicans don’t want us to grow up.
I would imagine Stephen Miller has read and approved of Jabotinsky and taken notes. Useful to know where he would go if empowered by another Trump regime.
Interesting factoid, given Marcy’s dissertation, is that Jabotinsky was once arrested in pre-revolutionary Russian territory for writing anti-establishment feuilletons.
Revisionist Zionism rejects the premise of the American project, the creation of a new state out of people from many linguistic, religious, and cultural backgrounds (originally dominated by Northern Europeans) based on their common allegiance to a constitutionally-founded, democratic government. It contends that the forging of such a state is impossible, and that a state can only be founded upon common racial, ethnic, and linguistic experience, and a common, if fictional, history involving some prior state of collective moral purity.
In retrospect, those beliefs were overt or unstated in the nation building attempted after WWI. Trump’s Fascist program seeks to resurrect them for the US, as witnessed by the language adopted by Magats and demanded by Red state educationalists.
Exactly. Perhaps we should think of it as a throwback to the violence of our primate ancestry, where survival of the group might depend on violence against outside groups, as discussed in The Evolution Of Agency.
As an Israeli expat, I got few comments for this otherwise excellent post.
First, historically, revisionist Zionism used to be a small faction within the Zionist movement. In the early years of Israel, Herut, the political party that represented the revisionists, got around 10 percent of the votes. This changed around 78, mainly due to the fact that any Sephardic jews were unhappy with the way they were treated by the Israeli government, controlled by the Israeli Labor party, which was predominantly Ashkenazy. They turned to the Herut/Likud as an alternative, which helped the Likud win the elections. There was further rightwing shift after following the second Intifada and the disillusionment of the peace process. Those two factors helped the right-wing Likud and Netanyahu to remain in power.
Another point is that you can’t really view Netanyahu through an ideological lens. Just like Trump, Netanyahu is a malignant narcissist who cares only about one thing: himself, and would do whatever he can to survive. In the early days, he presented himself as a center-right pragmatist. But once it suited him politically and helped his survival, he teamed with the extreme-right parties and moved further to the right.
And one last thing, related to Palestinian human rights, at least until October 7th Israelis used to have quite diverse opinions on this topic, and many Israelis were quite critical of Netanyahu’s right-wing government and the was they treat Palestinians. There are still many Israelis that support the idea of two-state solution, though many of them think it’s not feasible because there is no reasonable solution that both sides could accept.
October 7th changed this, both due to visceral reaction to the horrors of Oct 7th massacre, and existential fear from the Hamas. Many of the people around me who used to express concern for Palestinian human rights are now silent on this topic because of the anger and fear following Oct. 7th. Personally, I am very conflicted about the war in Gaza. On the one hand, i believe there was no other choice but military response against the Hamas, and on the other hand, I am concerned about the humanitarian crisis this war created there, and also about the day-after. And I don’t really trust Netanyahu’s Government and the way they manage this war.
Hamas and Netanyahu had a symbiotic relationship as Hamas’ peculation and neglect built up an angry and discordant populace. Given the technology, military prowess and the foreknowledge of the attack, the attack could have been easily repelled. I agree that even the most dovish government had to forcefully respond.
Hamas gave the Israeli right wing the war that they wanted. But, in order to achieve their goal Netanyahu was willing to sacrifice nearly 1500 Israelis and hundreds of thousands of Gazans to accelerate his ultimate goal to dispossess the Palestinians.
Nevertheless, I have heard other Israelis express your same concerns of the Israeli conundrum. Right now, it is a big mess and Israel is in danger of losing the righteousness of its vengeance.
I don’t think Netanyahu or anyone else in Israel knew this would happen, and certainly not the scale of it. It was hubris that made them ignore all the signals.
Netanyahu did have kind of symbiotic relationship with the Hamas, as part of his “Divide and conquer” approach, in his ill-advised attempt to weaken the PA. Maybe I’m naive, but I still don’t believe even Netanyahu knew or wished it would happen this way.
I was shocked when I heard about the attack because I knew about the Israeli infra-red and radar capabilities that can see through buildings and can distinguish the difference between a dog and goat from kilometers away. They had installations right on the border.
Additionally, a member of the IDF that I knew thought that Hamas was dangerous and they were being constantly monitored. He told me that in the event of an attack that they knew exactly what to do.
I do not think that you are naïve. But, I would use the word fatuous to describe Netanyahu in this episode. In the past Hamas and their proxies would use provocative pinpricks. Netanyahu would respond and a truce is called. Netanyahu becomes fortified as a protector of Israelis and Hamas becomes a protector of Palestinians. Frankly, this time Hamas went for a game changer.
The dead are collateral damage.
Their only goal in managing this war is that every day that this war continues, is one more day that Netanyahu and his band of criminals stay out of jail.
Thanks for this excellent elucidation of the situation. I don’t know my own history, let alone that of Israel, and like Perlstein, ask for and welcome the thoughts of people who know more.
I hope everyone reads Perlstein and Chotiner, and your comment.
Over the last couple of months, I’ve been thinking about writing a document that explains the complexity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but didn’t find the time to do it yet.
There are countless number of people who write about the conflict, but it is almost impossible to find texts that are both accessible yet detailed enough and accurate, and do not read like propaganda designed to convince the reader to support one side or the other.
Thank you. I appreciate Ed’s post as this is 1st I have heard the term revisionist and your contribution adds much to my understanding with the history of the parties/coalitions.
I don’t think there will ever be a “day-after” in my lifetime. The process seems to be following the final scenes in the movie The Kingdom.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qshnQ1UEDYA
One of Kahneman’s great observations: people are always too optimistic about how long it is going to take to accomplish something. He could have devoted another book to that observation as it relates to solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
I may be naive in my thinking, but I can’t wrap my head around what the Hamas militants thought, if they even gave it any, the best result would be. Israel has enough munitions to destroy Gaza and all Gazans, and more. Maybe they thought other nations would get involved, but it was less than 5,000 people that invaded Israel.
Same with the J6 insurrectionists. I’m sure if they would have tried that in Russia, their best case scenario would have been that the Moscow police would kettle them and starve them to death.
Yes, your thinking is naive. You’re assuming the entity which attacked on October 7 had intentions similar or parallel to the US J6 insurrectionists.
There are many moving parts to consider in the Israel-Palestine conflict; the only part which is really similar to the US is as SelaSela noted, “Netanyahu is a malignant narcissist who cares only about one thing: himself, and would do whatever he can to survive.” He’s been under indictment for quite some time for corruption, and like Trump he has no problem with disregarding the rule of law, even rejiggering the judicial system, in order to remain in office and avoid prosecution and punishment. Consider what Trump was willing to do to stay in office — would Netanyahu do less or more?
But there are other issues to consider which the October 7 event and Netanyahu’s response affect deeply; there are other parties with deep interest in damaging the US and Biden in particular which consider Gaza collateral damage. I’m trying to write a post about the complexity, but fellow contributor Peterr will have a post first at 11:00 am ET tomorrow about Israel-Palestine and the treatment of Gaza.
I recommend reading Hussein Ibish analysis on Hamas. It answers this exact question:
https://newrepublic.com/article/176512/palestinian-people-enraged-israel-hamas
“By attacking southern Israel and essentially killing or kidnapping everyone they encountered, including Arab Bedouins and Asian laborers, Hamas effectively perpetrated two huge massacres: the first of Israelis on the day itself, and the second of the Palestinians being played out on a much grander scale by Israel. Hamas’s cynicism is so profound that it’s no exaggeration to call it an intentional human sacrifice of thousands of Palestinians in a desperate bid to increase the organization’s decades-long quest for dominance of the national movement.
Hamas knew what it was provoking, and that was the whole point of October 7. Since it was founded in 1987 by the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza during the first intifada, the primary aim of Hamas has been to take over the Palestinian national movement and, eventually, inherit the Palestine Liberation Organization with its invaluable global diplomatic presence, including U.N. observer state status and over 100 embassies around the world. Hoping to split the Palestinian movement between Islamists and nationalists, Israel has consistently facilitated and bolstered Hamas.
…
There is no way that Hamas leaders were unaware that, as a matter of policy and doctrine, Israel would insist on inflicting wildly disproportionate losses on the Palestinians. Moreover, Hamas is trying to lure Israel into a prolonged reoccupation of the urban centers in Gaza in the hopes that it can launch an insurgency that begins to pick off Israeli troops in small numbers over time, even if initially the organization is smashed to pieces (along with much of Gaza and its population).
Hamas intends to use this insurgency to, at long last, succeed in taking over the national movement by pointing out that it and it alone is battling Israeli troops for control of Palestinian land. They would contrast this with the P.A.’s security cooperation with Israel in the West Bank while PLO leaders sit alone at the negotiating table listening to crickets and waiting for talks that Israel has long dismissed (largely by citing Hamas as an excuse).”
[Moderator’s note: link edited to remove tracking. Please avoid tracking when possible. /~Rayne]
Thanks for this comment, it helped me understand the background a little better.
As an outside observer, it seems to me that before Oct 7, the gov’t of Israel was able to tolerate having Hamas embedded in Gaza, but after Oct 7 that cannot be tolerated any longer. Hamas must be rooted out and destroyed. I think the majority of Israel’s populace wants that, and for their national security it is now necessary.
The war is having terrible humanitarian consequences in Gaza and in the long run, it may damage Israel’s standing in the world, but they have no choice.
The war has also brought into the open a shocking amount of anti-semitism in certain western countries, particularly in colleges and universities. Israel has certainly made some mistakes, but they’ve also tried—hard—to avoid civilian casualties where they could. And what the hell else are they supposed to do? Living next door to an organization which can commit the atrocities of Oct 7, and which proclaims that it will do so again, is no longer an option. There can be no lasting peace with a neighbor who prefers war.
Hamas is to blame for all of the civilian deaths in Gaza since Oct 7. They use the Gazans as human shields, and they forced Israel into this war. Gazans will continue to be caught in the crossfire until Hamas returns all hostages and surrenders, or is wiped out.
That’s a really shallow observation. Why did Hamas end up in a position to provide governance to Gaza in the first place? Who is Hamas except for Palestinian people?
And have you really looked at how the people of Gaza have lived? Could you live in an overpopulated double-fenced state of apartheid? What kind of governing body would you respect from inside that confine?
Obviously the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is very complicated and I am certainly not familiar with most of the details of its long history. There seems to be plenty of blame to go around.
Who is Hamas? A Sunni-Islamist offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood with the stated goal of obliterating Israel. Long before Oct 7 it had been designated by at least 9 western countries as a terrorist group due to its violent tactics. It seized power from the PLA in Gaza in 2007.
Why would you want to conflate Hamas with “the Palestinian people” when it was Hamas that committed those atrocities on Oct 7? Israel’s war is with Hamas, not with the other 2 million civilians living in Gaza, but Hamas builds bunkers under hospitals and herds civilians into the areas where they hide from the IDF, virtually guaranteeing that some number of them will be killed.
I don’t doubt that conditions in Gaza were awful even before Oct 7. You can’t blame that entirely on Israel though, as Hamas apparently spends a lot of the resources it gets its hands on building underground tunnels and fortifications, buying rockets and other weapons to use against Israel, etc. So of course Israel is reluctant to give them more stuff.
Over the last few months conditions have become indescribably worse, but this was deliberately provoked by Hamas. They know Israel has doctrine/policy of inflicting wildly disproportionate casualties in response to attacks, which Israel has done for a long time in the hope of maintaining some kind of deterrence against future attacks. Hamas carried out the Oct 7 attacks with the goal of provoking just such a disproportionate response (link to that analysis by Hussein Ibish that SelaSela posted above).
Hamas is to the Palestinian people as Netanyahu is to the Israeli people.
Strongly disagree. Israeli was and is responsible for the conditions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, because it refuses to share power, or tolerate either a joint state or two-state solution.
Israel is wholly responsible for its response to Hamas’s deadly assault. It has wildly exceeded any proportional response, which makes it illegal, and inflicted ten or more times the deaths and injuries Hamas inflicted. It’s conduct indicates that it does not intend to accept the continued existence of the Gaza Strip – or its population. The current govt’s own existence seems to depend on that.
The current govt and its propagandists label any criticism of such a far right, violent response as antisemitic. That’s a lie, and more propaganda of the sort common in wartime. It is not criticism of Jews, the Jewish state, or the Jewish religion. It is criticism of a govt’s excessively violent and unrestrained war making on a civilian population.
Proportionality in international law is complex, and I’m not a lawyer. But as far as Israel’s armed response to the terrorist attacks of Oct 7 goes, “ten or more times the deaths and injuries Hamas inflicted” certainly has nothing to do with it.
Its about balancing the expected military advantage of carrying out an action, against the expected harm to civilians from that action.
This NYT article from December gives an example of an attack by Israel that “collapsed a large number of residential buildings and killed 195 people, according to Gaza health officials”:
My point is just that the gov’t of Israel, after a deliberate and intolerable provocation that killed over 1,100 of its citizens, has committed itself to wiping out Hamas, and I can’t see what their alternative is supposed to be. They have legitimate military objectives to achieve, and they say they are trying to minimize unnecessary loss of life and suffering as they try to achieve them.
What to you seems like the Israeli “govt’s excessively violent and unrestrained war making on a civilian population”, to me seems like the state of Israel defending itself against the agression of an intolerable neighbor (Hamas). Perhaps both perspectives have some truth in them. At least the IDF tries to avoid civilian casualties and considers whether strikes might be illegal or not. Hamas would scoff at such a thing.
There is a ton of misinformation online about the war, and people in western nations sit back and smugly blame Israel for everything awful thats happening in Gaza, while basically giving those Hamas motherfuckers a free pass. Israel gets blamed when they try to help, and blamed when they don’t. But it was the premeditated actions of Hamas that caused the current misery in Gaza.
Are there two independent sovereign states involved? No? Then why is Israel using its military against its own state, seeking to extrajudicially execute anyone associated in any way with Hamas?
That was one of the failures of US policy post-9/11: going to war instead of conducting a police action to hold criminals accountable. In Israel’s case it’s a civil war if it refuses to accept Palestine is a second state it is occupying.
You’re also completely ignoring the fact Netanyahu isn’t conducting this warfare in a vacuum — he is prepared to destabilize the entire Middle East for what? What’s the end game? The complete extermination of any human who came in contact with Hamas? Because blowing up a residential building and killing 195 people looks like that and not like targeted warfare let alone police action.
We have a problem with Russia doing the same thing to Ukraine — we call it war crimes.
You seem confused about who was prepared to destabilize the entire Middle East. That was clearly Hamas.
Sure, sure, it’s Hamas targeting Jordanian targets. Or Red Sea targets. Or…
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/1/29/what-is-tower-22-the-jordan-based-us-outpost-targeted-in-a-drone-strike
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/1/25/israel-gaza-war-spillover-risk-mapping-recent-strikes-in-middle-east
Maybe Netanyahu’s wildly excessive response indiscriminately eliminating civilians is a radicalizing effort to ensure Israel remains reflexively hostile for his own narcissistic ends.
Once again, conservatism rears its ugly head. I submit that conservatism is the bane of man kind’s existence. I cite every negative outcome man has ever experienced through the ages, can be traced back to conservatism in one form or another: philosophy, religion, or government.
This is not conservatism. This, as Ed’s superb post demonstrates, is fascism. Both in Israel and here in the USA. You might call it reactionary, but there is nothing conservative about a political movement that seeks to use government as a tool of its will–the exact infringement it has always accused progressives of doing.
There is nothing conservative about this. I wish we would stop letting them claim labels that lend a credibility they don’t deserve.
An excellent piece reminding me of things I had forgotten and telling me some I did not know.
But I wonder if on reflection you might have put the fourth and fifth paragraphs in the other order.
The approach of Israel produced the Palestinian chaos.
We will never know but if Israeli over many years, and not just since October 7th, had not done as much as it could get away with to destroy a functional Palestinian Authority (consistent as you demonstrate with Revisionist Zionism) there might never have been a Hamas in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank might have functioned better.
Might have even had a chance at being a government.
One symbol of America’s own problems treating stateless people with human rights: One signfiicant reason Abu Zubaydah remains in Gitmo years after it has been confirmed he was not who terrorist hunters torturing him believed in 2002 is that as a Palestinian there has never been a place to send him BACK to.
Very interesting piece. Indeed, there lies a great danger in “Only the common ties of blood, history, and language could bring people together.” Yet, most if not all countries are built on this, the most livable ones having diluted these elements to a tolerable level. You get Switzerland with its 3 official languages, Belgium with 2, Canada with 2, but all definitely accompanied by some political tensions. Some countries with a mixture of religions can function. But the “beast” can be provoked and even seemingly peaceful countries can turn to xenophobic paranoia if too many strange-looking refugees start to flow in. To me then the question is what binds these people together? What should a country be? To me, a country provides a collective geographical, cultural and economic space where I can live. The larger, most diverse and unencumbered is that space, the better. But I know that’s not what everyone wants.
Interesting comment in light of Trump’s recent rant-gents about people coming across the southern border speaking “languages no one knows!”
America reduced to Babel. A very particular xenophobic horror, just because people in Minnesota have been convinced they might have to learn “Mexican.”
Kudos for irony to the person who puts Trump’s word-salads together. Trump doesn’t even speak English anymore, so safe to say he doesn’t know how to speak a second or first language.
Trump himself speaks a language that I don’t know! It does resemble a cognitiviely-defective version of English…
In Quebec in Canada the language bubble burst in the mid-70s and many businesses and English-speakers left Quebec for other English-speaking provinces or elsewhere. The Quebec government has since made it more difficult for English-speakers to deal with the government in English.
Before the 1960s French-speakers felt they were being tread on.
A 2 language Czechoslovakia broke up because the Czechs and Slovaks hate each other.
I’m not sure that Czech and Slovak can be viewed as separate languages, as almost all dialects are mutually intelligible (falling somewhere on a continuum).
Also I think it is debatable how much the Czechs and the Slovaks hate each other. Certainly, there was resentment on the part of Slovaks to always being the “little brother” in the relationship, i.e., when they were a single country more prominent positions often went to Czechs. Meciar exploited this resentment for political reasons, leading to the Velvet Divorce (no fighting). I’m not sure most Czechs cared much at all whether the Slovaks stayed or departed.
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I realized that I incorrectly used the personal email address before the 5 minute edit period expired and attempted to delete the comment, then reposted the same comment with the work email address I was hoping that I would not be creating more work for the moderation team. My apologies.
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“Before the 1960s French-speakers felt they were being tread on.”? Felt? Really?
It was an objective fact. A french-speaking majority was forced to operate in english to satisfy the English minority. That’s how Quebec was before 1960.
Pourqoi? /s
What are you asking? Why what?
Yes.
Poor use of language on my part.
Excellent piece. I read emptywheel through Feedly, and the next item in my feed was Aaron Gell’s powerful essay Has Zionism Lost The Argument. Highly recommended: https://newrepublic.com/article/179430/zionism-lost-argument-american-jews-israel
Watch out Ed, writing unpopular things can and will get you scolded and deleted. But you will always have that bolded and colored nonsense admonition at the top of your post from Headmistress Rayne.
** GO BACK AND READ YOUR LAST COMMENT AT 3:10 P.M. OTHER THREAD /~RAYNE **
I step back to what’s next? What’s the exit plan? Is BDS an answer? Has the two state proposal a chance?
THEN – Most urgently, please everyone reread Freebird’s https://www.emptywheel.net/2024/03/02/stateless-in-palestine/#comment-1042513
It is not proven, but a belief I hold also. They knew it was cooking, not when necessarily but they had the outline, AND let it happen. A craven calculation to be able to keep mentioning Oct. 7 whatever they did thereafter. They being Netanyahu and his military intelligence community, possibly some in the cabinet. The extreme bombing campaign was to lessen the loss of IDF lives in the ground war. And to teach civilians a lesson of don’t fuck with us.
The larger themes of fascism and statelessness in the post and most of the commentary is the story of the post. The earlier link I emphasize is a part of things we should all hope is explored when the IDF declares its ground war over. Events from Oct. 7 onward have polarized things more than previously. But Ben Gvir’s walking about the Temple Mount – al Asqa Mosque previously – as a cabinet minister not solely as an individual – was a provocation without a justification. He wanted to do it. He did.
Was it intelligence failure, or intelligence decision making?
The most intractable political situations are those in which all sides believe in the necessity of more violence. That’s when you get leadership by people for whom the violence is an end to itself. The way to end those situations is simple, but never easy. It takes a sustained effort to build a grass roots movement for peace by those involved in the conflict and support from the external powers with leverage on the violent leadership.
At one time, it seemed as though the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was headed down that path. Today, it may seem impossible. It’s not. To make it happen, a lot of people need to start making different choices. I do wish Americans would realize that while we can’t impose a peace in Palestine, we could do a hell of a lot more to support peace for Israelis and Palestinians.
Years ago, an American-Jewish co-worker of mine recounted his trip to a cafe in an Arab neighborhood in Israel with an Israeli acquaintance. After taking a seat at an outdoor table the guy pulled out a large pistol and placed it on the table in full view. My friend, in shock, asked him what the hell he was doing. The guy said “Don’t worry, these are conquered people.”
Instead of looking at this as the creation of a nationalist or fascist state, perhaps beginnings the state of Israel was simply a handoff by one colonial proprietor to another.
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https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/israel-us-aircraft-carrier
Please don’t dump context-free links in comments like this. Make the effort to state your point and explain why this link is offered.
This isn’t the dead bird app for easy quick shit posting.
I am so sorry. I forgot. It will not happen again. The link is to an article written about the colonial relationship of Israel to the United States and by extension prior colonial states, specifically France and Britain in the Middle East. I think it makes some good points related to the prior comment on colonialism. I am acquainted with the author for over a decade.
That last bit of context is important and only you could provide. Thanks.
Thank you, Rayne. I will not do this again.