I maintain as I always have, your ability to decipher what goes on in Israel-Palestine is a direct test of your worldview and its efficacy. If you take a side in the world's most complicated conflict, your judgement cannot be trusted, you care more about ideology than results, and you are effecting the destruction of precisely what you love. I have never made any apology for that statement I've made so many times, and I never will.
I am no centrist, but I am pro-Israel, I am pro-Palestine, and those who see people like me as one or the other neither understand my point of view nor their own. If I seem to lean more toward Israel, it is not because the Israeli claim is innately more right or more moral, it is because the Israeli way of looking at the conflict is more practical and effective. The Israeli way is so effective that it's lethally so, and causes exactly the hatred of the world they fear. The Palestine side remains as ever prisoners of their own resentments, Westerners as well as people native to the region, and prove over and over again that a plurality of them would rather sacrifice themselves to death than share the land. Meanwhile, a plurality of the Israeli side means not to justify their claim to the land, but to simply steal it. So many pro-Israel people claim it's in the name of security, but it isn't security, it's jingoism. They expand into settlements not because they need the land, but because they can have it and nobody can stop them. What they don't understand is that the settlements live on a volcano, and the smallest tactical mistake from Israel could cause an eruption of ghettoized Palestinians into their settlements where settlers could easily be massacred in the same numbers Palestinians are.
The ceasefire semi-holds right now, not really but Israel's doing a lot less than they were. And, of course Hamas uses it to consolidate power, re-arm and restore their rule with an iron hand. Who's providing the armaments? Probably Qatar. What are they doing to consolidate power? Probably killing any opposition either known or suspected. What does this mean? Sooner than we know, we'll be back at exactly the same wars as before. There is no stopping the Palestinian death tolls until the end of radical Islamism in the territories and the end of the Israeli right. Neither will happen in the foreseeable future, and the world may subject Israel to more and more pressure and sanctions until such time that Israel can no longer fend for itself and Israelis die in the exact proportions they currently inflict. There is no such thing as a winning streak that doesn't end, and just because it took twelve days to kneecap Hezbollah and the Iranian nuclear program this time does not mean it will be nearly so easy next time.
If 12,000 are dead in Iran, and some still say it's only 2,800, that means that Iran massacred a quotient of their own people that is one-sixth the amount of the official number of Palestinians killed in the Gaza war. So in one week they did nearly 20% of what Israelis have done in two years.
It's worth remembering:
1. In spite of the yearly $3.8 billion subsidy Israel gets from the US, Israel is a net lender nation to the United States. The US sends $14 billion in products, Israel sense $22 billion: this from a country with 1/30th the US's population, a number that counts the residents of occupied territories.
2. People claim that America's Israel subsidy makes gives us a unique involvement in this conflict and therefore justifies protesting this conflict over others. But if we give Israel $3.8 billion a year in loans, we give China one-fifth of our economy, and China uses it to run roughshod over the human rights of a billion and a half people.
3. And if we're talking about involvement in foreign countries, what then do you call the involvement of Trump and Putin?
4. People point out that there are anti-Zionist Jews and use that to convince others that their opinion that a Jewish state should not exist is morally justified. Of course there are anti-Zionist Jews, there are black and gay republicans too. There are pro-Russia Ukrainians. There are anti-immigration immigrants. There are pro-Israel Palestinians. In each case, the tokenism is used to justify a position that some part of them knows is morally indefensible. Every other state in the world is de facto comprised of a majority religion, why can't the world's oldest monotheistic religion have a place of their own the size of New Jersey?
So yes, the hypocrisy of the Palestine side is exactly as disgusting as we think it is.
BUT
The opposite is also true. The fact remains, even if the pro-Israel side can point to Hamas and the PLO as the ultimate reason for keeping Palestinians in squalor, the pro-Palestine side can, if they know anything at all about the Middle East, point to Iran's Shah as the ultimate reason for Iran's continuing problems. Even if the Mullahcracy may be worse, they're not THAT much worse, and there is no question that the rule of the Shah provoked the Iranian revolution.
Iran was another place I studied during my ignominious two minute grad school career. People forget just how draconian the Pahlavi family was. Shah Reza promised to turn Iran 'into a second America in a generation', but he banned all independent political parties, free press and trade unions. The Shahs used SAVAK, an intelligence apparatus to rival the Stazi and the KGB, to monitor Iranian citizens both at home and abroad. Torture was a fact of life. I won't repeat the methods here, but they would inspire as much horror and revulsion in you as anything in Nazi Germany, the USSR or imperial Japan. The Shahs weren't nearly as murderous as those regimes or the Islamic mullahcracy, but they were everything else.
All the apparatus of authoritarianism was already there. All the Ayatollahs had to do was come into power, keep the policies of the Shah going, and force former officers of SAVAK to switch their loyalties and all the policies the Shahs put in place continue to this day. The pro-Israel side could make the argument that Shah prevented Iran from going to communism, and that argument is likely correct, but the extremity of the Shah's methods provoked the Iranian revolution which resulted in a religious dictatorship no better and possibly worse than communists would have been to both Iranians and international security. Like so many dictatorships, including Israel's occupation of Gaza, the Shahs provoked their subjects into revolution, only for the revolution to bring to power rulers still worse. Bad as the Mullahcracy is now, it's not as bad as it was in its early years. So if there is a restoration of the Shahs, which is talked about plenty, why stand in solidarity with Iranians? What's the point? And even if a Shah doesn't come next, what takes over could easily be a military dictatorship under a brutal general from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. So there is a decent chance that the next regime would be even worse.
So now we come to the bad faith of it all: so many people on the Israel side are up in arms about how everyone who protests the treatment of Palestinians has nothing to say about Iran. They're exactly right to do so. As it always is with such protestors, the hypocrisy is a disgrace. But so is the hypocrisy of the pro-Israel crowd who's long turned ignoring Israeli human rights abuses into an art, abuses that not only are counterproductive but easily fixable with precisely the violations of international norms that so excite Israel's supporters.
The fact remains, the Twelve Day War long since proved that Israel could have targeted Hamas leadership for assassination at any point during the last twenty years and orchestrated it perfectly in a matter of days. If they had a contingency operation to eliminate Hezbollah so easily, what are the chances they don't have similar means to eliminate Hamas, an enemy who operates in a territory Israel controlled for forty years? Such assassinations would of course horrify the international community and cause them to attempt precisely the sanctions we now worry about, but Israel is currently on-track to getting them anyway. Rather than slowly leaking a loss of American support, it would all be over in a few days, the US would have protected them from repercussion, some corrupt Fatah government would have replaced Hamas, and the imbroglio would all have been over in a month.
Netanyahu had thirteen years to do it before October 7th. He had four years to do it under Trump who would have given him a blank check. So why didn't he?
The reason should be obvious to any person who looks at the conflict without a state of denial: Netanyahu didn't assassinate Hamas because such a villain was useful to keep Israeli civilians afraid, and therefore keep himself in power. The ultimate justification for a dictatorship is enemy dictators, answerable to no one for their most violent acts.
Everybody involved with the Israel side has to face facts too:
1. Netanyahu is probably not going anywhere. He caused the worst breach of Israeli security, in the entire history of the country, including the Yom Kippur War in '73, and still he is in power. If he were capable of being replaced, it would have happened by now. Golda Meir repented for her catastrophic misjudgement and after a year bowed out when Yitzhak Rabin was ready to take over. Netanyahu shows no signs of bowing out, and even were he not in danger of jail, he could have easily ran a popular right-wing general for Israeli President (a half-ceremonial position as the true head of state) who would pardon him. He could have retired, moved to America for a corporate job, and he might have been a billionaire by now. He still hasn't, which to me, means he never had any intention of leaving even had he not faced criminal charges.
2. The permanent occupation of the territories caused a moral rot that let a leader with no scruples occupy the premiership in perpetuity. Those millions of us who hate Likud were so eager to believe it a necessity that we looked the other way at every tactic, every human rights violation, and never questioned whether every one of them weas necessary. It caused a slow motion, drip by drip ability for a demagogue to accumulate power who wants to rule Israel forever, and justify the necessity of everything he does over and over again under the necessity of security measures.
3. Why did Netanyahu ignore the warnings of October 7th? Would a politician this canny really not pay attention to the warnings of an imminent catastrophe? It flies in the face of every fact of Netanyahu's career. It only makes sense if you realize that Netanyahu's rule was threatened by protests against him of hundreds of thousands every weekend and constant bad coverage in the press, and he needed a disaster to happen to take Israeli minds off their hatred of their longtime prime minister. Netanyahu obviously didn't arrange October 7th, but at this point we have to concede, he likely let it happen, deliberately. Is it really so hard to believe?
Decades after the 1968 election, America found out that North Vietnamese premier Ho Chi Minh walked away from peace negotiations with the Johnson administration not because of any particular detail of the agreement, but because Richard Nixon promised him a better deal if he won the election, and the collapse of peace talks would help him. Even with a leader as unscrupulous as Richard Nixon, hardly anybody believed him capable of an act that evil. The war went on another seven years, even past Nixon's resignation.
So is a leader with a proven record of moral ignominy capable of acts such evil? The answer is absolutely. We would be irresponsible not to consider the possibility. The very leader we elect because of security's necessity is often the figure who compromises our security the most.
BUT
Regardless of Israel's conduct in the war, Hamas did not have to build its biggest tunnel entrances in hospitals, Hamas did not have to store weapons depots and missile silos in apartment buildings and schools. Hamas could have every single Gazan hide in 311 miles of tunnels. Since 1994, the Palestinians have received 40 billion dollars in foreign aid. $10 billion of that money ended up in the hands of Hamas's top three leaders: Ismail Haniya, Khaled Mashal and Moussa abu-Marzuk.
Hamas is not a political party, it is a totalitarian mission of death whose entire strategy is the same as dictators like Mao. Whether the opponent is Netanyahu or Chiang-Kai Sheck, the strategy is bait their opponents into killing enough people to earn international sympathy, get international help to win their war, then exploit the victory to install a regime still deadlier than the one it replaces. Until people get serious about Hamas, until people re-focus their hatred of Israel to a hatred of Netanyahu, this war will continue for years and years with exactly the same death counts as before.
Nobody with a partisan point of view on this war is viewing it seriously. They are causing endless suffering to Muslims and Jews alike in the name of alleviating it. The Middle East is the ultimate place where people devote their two minutes hate, and they do it in the name of love.
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