I received a surprise phone call today from a freind I have not seen for many years, and not seen frequently for more than a decade since he retired with his wife to Boca Raton. There are not too many people that I’ve known in my life who are as essentially good to the bone as—well, I’ll call him “Micah.” He’s a talented artist in many mediums, intuitive, sensitive, kind and wise. We decided to meet for a beer.
We didn’t lack for things to talk about—there was my wife’s sudden death, of course, but we also know so many of the same people and have many similar interests. I don’t think in all the years we have known each other, political topics have ever come up. But we got on the topic of our kids and our friends’ kids, my son’s decision to eschew college, and from that onto the recent disaster at Harvard, as Micah mentioned in passing that my having a degree from there “didn’t hurt.” My brief but detailed exposition in response regarding Harvard’s ethics rot led to his off-hand comment, “The stuff around the war in Gaza is really upsetting.”
My old fiend was being careful: that could mean anything. He didn’t want to draw me into an expression of opinion that might lead to a rift, and in over 40 years, we’ve never had a rift of any kind. Then he said, still being careful, “I can certainly understand why Netenyahu feels he must do what he is doing.
Micah is Jewish, though that aspect of his life almost never comes up. He added, “I know a lot of innocent people are being killed.” Then he dropped a clue: “….although they might not be as innocent as people think.”
Ah! My cue! I replied immediately, “If you want your family, your children and yourself to avoid the consequences of being in a war, you shouldn’t elect terrorists to run your government. And if you want to make certain that the terrorists next door don’t kill your children, your only choice is to do whatever is necessary to get rid of them permanently.”
Micah turned to me with a look I could only describe as relief. “Thank-you,” he said.
There was only a brief coda to the exchange, after which we went back to pleasant subjects (well, other than the death of my wife). I said, “President Biden’s attempt to take both sides at once is indefensible.” Always trying to see the other person’s point of view as is his wont, Micah replied, “Unfortunately it’s an election year, and whatever position Biden takes will have negative consequences.”
I said immediately, “When that’s the case, it should be relatively easy to do the right thing.” He looked at me with relief again. “That’s how I feel about it too.”
Then we talked about theater, baseball, sealing wax, and whether pigs have wings….
[WordPress’s crack AI bot tells me to tag this “Bible study.”]
Ethics Alarms 
I’ve had more than one careful conversation with a family member here and there myself.
Isn’t it a shame that your Jewish friend felt he had to test the waters before expressing his opinion, though?
We’re losing something precious in this country.
“We’re losing something precious in this country.”
The talented Herr Saad would agree:
PWS
I, too, must be careful in engaging this, for fear that you or others may misunderstand analysis as taking sides.
I trust you appreciate – not “like”, or “concur”, but “appreciate” – that that second sentence is just precisely how the Arab world reads this situation, seeing in “peace” as proposed by Israeli politicians only the slow squeeze of an anaconda strategy that can have but one end (constricting snakes don’t actually squeeze with their own strength, they just take up slack whenever their prey breathes out and never give it back). Look at the context of those parts of the Old Testament that repeat the refrain “in those days there was peace in Israel”.
For what it’s worth, I no more believe in the right of Israel to exist than that of the U.S.A. or the U.S.S.R. or any other human figment of merely instrumental worth, it being idolatrous false consciousness to read anything more into them. But I respect that there are such sentimental connections, and I do agree that Jews have a right to exist – as do I, and you, and, yea, even Palestinians. And that may currently involve such instrumentalities as Israel – or Hamas. That irresolvable dilemma should tell us to back off and back up, we are going at this all wrong.
Cet animal est très méchant; quand on l’attaque, il se défend.
The second sentence is indeed how the Palestinians look at the situation and always will, though it is a dilemma of their own design and construction. Israel’s problem, in contrast, is not one of its own construction. It accepted the only deal available to it after the rest of the world, including the US., abandoned and betrayed the Jews at a crucial moment, and only by moral luck were they not wiped from the face of the earth.
The Palestinians indeed got a raw deal, but allowed the perfect to be the enemy of the good, and refused to abandon their doctrinal view that Israel must be eradicated. End of analogy. The Palestinian have a right to exist and have their own nation, but they have no right to dictate the conditions under which that comes about, or to make their existence a zero sum game with Israel. As long as they insist on a zero sum game, they deserve no sympathy if their opponents in that game play it to win.
You have not only misunderstood what I was telling you, and instead asserted as fact something that is demonstrably either untrue or irrelevant (depending on whether or not you were actually addressing what I told you rather than a product of your own imagination or of some other narrative), but you have also drifted into arguing for or against, into taking sides. By the way, what counts here is the larger Arab world’s view, not just that of the Palestinians, as that will still be there and working even if the Palestinians are no longer around some day. Remember, at this early stage I was not arguing that it wass true – that comes later – but rather something much more readily demonstrated: that this is the view that the Arab world takes, and which actuates that world’s actions in this field. You can easily check this from contemperaneous reports, e.g. Freya Stark reported that the Arab world took this view over eighty years ago. That would be a fact affecting events even if the view were entirely false (Edward Augustus Freeman, a historian, pointed this out about racism, as far back as the nineteenth century: false or not, it works in and through people all the same).
(By the way, nobody betrayed the Jews who did not owe the Jews; it would have been a contradiction in terms. I never owe what other people lie that I promised. And I see that you are unaware of your circular argument, as though Israel could exist to call for existence, and that you do not know of the many places that Jews could go when Israel actually was created.)
For the sake of argument, let us suppose that you are entirely correct as to the facts, history and processes, even though you are merely asserting as established the very thing that is at issue (I will attend to the facts, history and processes in another reply, when time and space permit). Let us address that below:-
Wrong, that is only the end of a deflection.
Read what I told you before. The Palestinians, from the get go, were placed in a situation – the anaconda strategy – that they cannot survive unless they break it. That get go was no later than the 1880s, and it was not the Palestinians who created that situation. What you have repeated, just there, is a belief in the merits of just precisely a peace that I told you was ‘”peace” as proposed by Israeli politicians [is] only the slow squeeze of an anaconda strategy that can have but one end’. The pretence, that you have bought into, is that there is any good for the Palestinians there at all. Calling that peace is like saying that using an elastrator on cattle isn’t really castration as it doesn’t use cutting. The Palestinians cannot survive that sort of peace, and they have known it and told it from the start. After all, warnings were being sounded as early as the 1830s (that is not a typo).
Although the Palestinians have a right to exist, neither they nor anyone else has a right to concoct “their own nation” on the basis of a right that conflicts with and is inconsistent with stronger and different rights of others. This shows up – if I may appeal to your own prejudices – in the lack of a right to a Turkish state in Cyprus. It also shows up in the internal inconsistency of the Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia among others. And, it is why there was never any right of the Zionists to create an Israel in those lands that way. (Hint: what Palestinians, any more than what Lebanese? there are larger confessional identities at work here too, Muslim variants, Christian variants, Druze and others.)
Now look at that claim that the Palestinians made this a zero sum game. No! the aim of the Zionist agenda always was a remaking that squeezed the Palestinians out – and being squeezed out with no means and nowhere to go, in those parts you die (the stories of the exodus and of the Banu Hillal are no rebuttals).
Now for the big rebuttal: even if it was always the Palestinians who set all this up to work this way, that would not turn it into “deserve no sympathy if their opponents in that game play it to win”. Not only was Zionism doing that from the get go anyway, but also sympathy would be deserved by our humane responses regardless. Furthermore, sympathy has nothing to do with who set it in motion and how it all works – and I am trying to do analysis here, the better to further understanding.
I am now going to prepare your history lesson to post later, if you are willing to be confused with the facts. For now, by way of a hint, I am going to make another appeal to your prejudices: how could the Turks ever have the right to convey land titles to outside settlers, even after first creating the titles ex nihilo and conferring them on comprador middlemen? Be warned, the whole murky story of late nineteenth century chicanery is not only lengthy, it needs an insight into the earlier history of other places to understand it properly.
(If your objective is clarifying something, you have to write more clearly than that. A lot more clearly. A lot.)
All that matters is the history of the region since Israel was created. What Arabs choose to believe doesn’t change reality, only the nature of the problem. I don’t know what you think the definition of betrayal is, but whatever it is, it’s wrong. Betrayal occurs when one party induces another to trust that party, and that party proves untrustworthy.
There are no anacondas in the Middle East, so accusing Israel of having an “anaconda strategy” is a slur.
Write less hysterically and more civilly next time, or I’ll take the comment down.
Right there, I was trying to avoid letting my emotional reactions get in the way by showing them clearly, as that would make more heat than light. I admit that I allow myself to get long-winded when I am faced with that need.
Also, my limited and intermittent internet access enforces these pauses in replying, with further delays from some ill health right now. That has an up side: none of this is ever an immediate, hysterical reaction, but only ever “emotions recollected in tranquillity” (as Wordsworth put it). I fear that any reading of incivility comes from the confronting nature of the material I have to show; but there is only so much I can do to make it less bitter.
In that spirit, I will try to clear some things up so I can start again in later replies:-
Now, if we can agree that we cleared up some clutter, we may get back to the substance again.
Agreed!
The confusion seems to arise from you and others thinking in terms of whether Palestinians are doing things that would help them get a state, and whether they are choosing war or peace as means to that, considering that as the issue.
But that is not the substance of what they face, it is just an area where insult is being added to injury. It would no more help with the actual harm they have faced for generations than a proposal by a bank ombudsman investigator to award me compensation for a peripheral matter connected to the bank not letting me access my own funds for close to two years now, without addressing that deeper issue of giving me that access: compensation would be vacuous, since I still wouldn’t be able to access that either! (Amusingly, the investigator has an Arab name.)
The actual Palestinian predicament, the substance of it, is not a matter of war and peace but of life and death. The Palestinians are deprived of their own homes and livelihoods and even necessary subsistence resources like potable water, sometimes through silent processes but sometimes explicitly and violently. Their dilemma lies in facing the same outcome regardless of whether they choose quietism or violence, something which reached a crescendo at the creation of Israel but neither started nor finished then. And they weren’t the ones who made that dilemma, nor would choosing peace and statehood help their predicament, though they were willing to explore it at Oslo, any more than that vacuous offer of compensating me for bank failure would help me.
So, now I hope I have directed readers’ attention properly, I would like to get back to preparing material that would show the whole history and process of what has been done to the Palestinians from no later than the 1880s down to this day. If readers are willing, I will present that in due course.