There's nothing new in feeling betrayed by leftist friends. By the time I was 20, I learned that all too well. If you want to expose yourself to different points of view yet hang around any ideological wing long enough, they eventually betray every cause you thought they believed in - right as well as left, until you realize that you just don't believe in anything anymore. Last night a lefty friend I value wanted to engage me in talking about why I feel betrayed, but I just don't have the wherewithal to do it. How do you find common ground with them without putting you both through the ringer of how dialogue requires both sides to jump through hoops of logic that neither side believes are true?
I have no ideals left: I don't believe leftists that there is any such thing as justice, any more than I believe rightists that there is any such thing as security. I refuse to demonstrate on behalf of Israel because I refuse to advocate for what I think is an opening for the permanent collapse of Israeli democracy, but I refuse to pardon friends who demonstrate on behalf of Palestine - current or former. It's all a bag of shit, sold to us by a vengeful god as a way of determining who's an idolworshipper. The world has so few universal truths: there are only the practical considerations of the moment: problems you can only tackle one day at a time, one foot in front of the other until you make a chip into the problems, sustained only by the faith that eventually, you'll see the progress from where you were last month, last year, last decade, last epoch and era.
My rage is all spent for this fight. So many people 'find themselves' in wartime, I know I have in the past. The pulse of their righteous outrage goes through the roof. All I can find during this period is cynicism and sadness. We are three weeks out from the worst day in Jewish history since the Shoah, and already people are protesting against the world's only Jewish state for the crime of doing what any embattled country would do to survive. For now, the feeling of betrayal is especially acute and bitter, whether justified or not. Eventually you can forgive friends who do, but you can never forget, and you can't help but keep a list of the betrayers. Over and over again, I hear stories of Jewish family members getting harassed and grandchildren of my parents' friends. It says something that all the people getting harassed are younger than me. The writing on the wall is so clear. People see the world in what they think are newly minted moral absolutes, but these moral absolutes are as old as humans ourselves, and these moral absolutes bring as much death as they do progress and the progress is always at the Jews' expense. When ideology propels the world over practicality, Jews get killed.
People on every ideological side want to find common ground with waffly centrists, but if a whole generation of peace talks proved anything, it's that there is no common ground to be had, and if you say what you really think, you only make people madder. If you want to understand logic of either side, it requires them stepping through dimensional doorways of self-reinforcing logic. And of course they won't.
Even to a person on the other side of good faith from Israel's, how do you explain that a friend who believes that Israel's actions can be termed genocide that it's the lowest sort of betrayal to a Jew who lost his entire ancestry to genocide? To them, even the death of 10,000 is a genocide, but if that's genocide, then what is the death of six million, mostly in a period of two years, with the goal of the complete annihilation of our peoplehood? A goal that nearly succeeded on an entire continent where we'd already lived in states worse than persecution for more than a thousand years.
How do you explain that when it comes to violence against Jews vs. violence against Muslims, persecution of Jews matters more? It inevitably sounds like the Jewish form of racial supremacy, but it matters that there are more than a billion Muslims in the world and only fifteen million Jews. If enough Jews die, a whole peoplehood and memory goes up into smoke forever. Nobody would be left to mourn us, nobody would be left to value us, the whole memory of what we ever were would perish in just the manner that the entire memory of European Jewry already has. To a Jew, saying that every life is precious is like saying to African-Americans the dreaded phrase 'all lives matter.' How do you explain to them that there is little such thing as 'mere persecution' in Jewish history, and what starts as persecution often becomes outright desire to annihilate us within a period of a few years? It inevitably sounds to them as though we're saying that our demands are more important than theirs. It sounds that way not because they misunderstand us, it sounds that way because it IS that way, that's absolutely what most of us believe with all our might and souls and we make no apologies for it.
How do you explain to them that the American funding of Israel is not what gives Israel license to misbehave but rather what keeps Israel from misbehaving? Israel would have long since laid waste to the Arab world if not for the harness of American support. If they ever believed us, it would inevitably make them think the Israeli government is even more evil than they already think it is. How do you explain to people who believe foreign policy can be moral that you can only create morality in foreign policy through immoral compromises? How do you explain to them that if they create a standard for every other minority that when you accuse them of something that sounds like a racist trope, you're being racist; then by accusing Israel of siphoning American money and having undue influence on American foreign policy, they're antisemites by their very own standards? How do you explain to them that the very fact that they ignore other conflicts in world affairs which cost so much more life than the Israeli conflict is the basest level of hypocrisy? Even if it's not antisemitism, you can cut their bad faith with a cold butter knife.
How do you explain that what they term the military industrial complex is as inevitable as the private industries that grow around public health, education, and welfare? How do you explain that whatever may come from it in the future, military industry may be what's kept the peace for three generations? Many of them would explode at the very thought. How do you explain to them that if they think there should be constant government regulation in domestic affairs, then they're hypocrites if they think we can simultaneously be laissez-faire in foreign policy? How do you explain that if the US does not take a near-autocratic hand in running the world, then much more immoral governments will run the world and lay waste to whatever morality we squeeze into world affairs. Most on the Palestine side wouldn't just reject all that, they would reject the moral character of anyone who suggests any of it.
How do you explain without their laughing at our paranoia that Hamas and the like are exploiting their simple slogans like 'From the River to the Sea, Palestine Must Be Free' or 'Intifada until victory' to make their people believe that millions in the West are inciting them to the genocide of Jewish millions - directly related to the Palestinian Liberation Organization charter's mission statement to 'toss all Jews into the sea'? How do you explain to people who don't see the harm in constantly calling Israel an 'occupation' means to a few billion people that they too believe that the State of Israel should not exist in any form and must be ended?
How do you explain to them that even if pre-emptive war may kill everybody else, it may be what saves Jews? It probably would have saved us from Hitler in the 30s, a pre-emptive strike against Iraq in '81 saved Israel from Saddam hitting them with nuclear arms just as he hit them with scud missiles ten years later, and the fact that Israel never took a pre-emptive strike at Iran's nuclear facilities may have doomed Israel no matter how Israel otherwise behaves.
And for the moment, the most important of all, how do you explain to them that a ceasefire would only be used by Hamas to regroup and hog all the supplies for themselves? How do you explain to them that Hamas has deliberately not built shelters to house the dispossessed? How do you make them believe that Gaza has gotten twenty years of humanitarian aid and Hamas used nearly every bit of it to build 311 miles of tunnels underground? If you want to provide welfare for your citizens, you use the money to do exactly that, not for secret tunnels. How do you explain to them that you can't trust the UN votes against Israel's violations of human rights because Iran, the regime who means to wipe Israel off the map, heads the UN Human Rights Council? How do you make them believe the horror stories in a long series of intra-Muslim wars in the Middle East involving the deaths of multiple millions, often of the grizzliest variety? If this is what they do to each other, how much worse would they do to us? How do you make them believe that Israel has offered 1200 trucks of aid every day and negotiations broke down because Hamas refused 800 of them - probably because Hamas would no longer be able to control who gets the relief? How do you explain to them that their very support of Palestinian resistance gives cover to all the death threats received these days by Jewish college students all across America? How do you explain that Hamas would murder the very secular, progressive, and particularly queer people who voice support of Palestine most vociferously? How do you explain that a vast minority of Palestinians would cheer their execution? They would never believe any of it. How do you explain to them that Hamas means to get as many of their population murdered as they can and have declared so on al-Jezeera? How do you explain to them that a sizeable minority in the Arab world approve of Palestinian mass death because they believe more in the imperative of Islamic conquest than they do in peace and human rights? Most of them refuse to fathom the idea that people can be so evil.
I have no ideals left: I don't believe leftists that there is any such thing as justice, any more than I believe rightists that there is any such thing as security. I refuse to demonstrate on behalf of Israel because I refuse to advocate for what I think is an opening for the permanent collapse of Israeli democracy, but I refuse to pardon friends who demonstrate on behalf of Palestine - current or former. It's all a bag of shit, sold to us by a vengeful god as a way of determining who's an idolworshipper. The world has so few universal truths: there are only the practical considerations of the moment: problems you can only tackle one day at a time, one foot in front of the other until you make a chip into the problems, sustained only by the faith that eventually, you'll see the progress from where you were last month, last year, last decade, last epoch and era.
My rage is all spent for this fight. So many people 'find themselves' in wartime, I know I have in the past. The pulse of their righteous outrage goes through the roof. All I can find during this period is cynicism and sadness. We are three weeks out from the worst day in Jewish history since the Shoah, and already people are protesting against the world's only Jewish state for the crime of doing what any embattled country would do to survive. For now, the feeling of betrayal is especially acute and bitter, whether justified or not. Eventually you can forgive friends who do, but you can never forget, and you can't help but keep a list of the betrayers. Over and over again, I hear stories of Jewish family members getting harassed and grandchildren of my parents' friends. It says something that all the people getting harassed are younger than me. The writing on the wall is so clear. People see the world in what they think are newly minted moral absolutes, but these moral absolutes are as old as humans ourselves, and these moral absolutes bring as much death as they do progress and the progress is always at the Jews' expense. When ideology propels the world over practicality, Jews get killed.
People on every ideological side want to find common ground with waffly centrists, but if a whole generation of peace talks proved anything, it's that there is no common ground to be had, and if you say what you really think, you only make people madder. If you want to understand logic of either side, it requires them stepping through dimensional doorways of self-reinforcing logic. And of course they won't.
Even to a person on the other side of good faith from Israel's, how do you explain that a friend who believes that Israel's actions can be termed genocide that it's the lowest sort of betrayal to a Jew who lost his entire ancestry to genocide? To them, even the death of 10,000 is a genocide, but if that's genocide, then what is the death of six million, mostly in a period of two years, with the goal of the complete annihilation of our peoplehood? A goal that nearly succeeded on an entire continent where we'd already lived in states worse than persecution for more than a thousand years.
How do you explain that when it comes to violence against Jews vs. violence against Muslims, persecution of Jews matters more? It inevitably sounds like the Jewish form of racial supremacy, but it matters that there are more than a billion Muslims in the world and only fifteen million Jews. If enough Jews die, a whole peoplehood and memory goes up into smoke forever. Nobody would be left to mourn us, nobody would be left to value us, the whole memory of what we ever were would perish in just the manner that the entire memory of European Jewry already has. To a Jew, saying that every life is precious is like saying to African-Americans the dreaded phrase 'all lives matter.' How do you explain to them that there is little such thing as 'mere persecution' in Jewish history, and what starts as persecution often becomes outright desire to annihilate us within a period of a few years? It inevitably sounds to them as though we're saying that our demands are more important than theirs. It sounds that way not because they misunderstand us, it sounds that way because it IS that way, that's absolutely what most of us believe with all our might and souls and we make no apologies for it.
How do you explain to them that the American funding of Israel is not what gives Israel license to misbehave but rather what keeps Israel from misbehaving? Israel would have long since laid waste to the Arab world if not for the harness of American support. If they ever believed us, it would inevitably make them think the Israeli government is even more evil than they already think it is. How do you explain to people who believe foreign policy can be moral that you can only create morality in foreign policy through immoral compromises? How do you explain to them that if they create a standard for every other minority that when you accuse them of something that sounds like a racist trope, you're being racist; then by accusing Israel of siphoning American money and having undue influence on American foreign policy, they're antisemites by their very own standards? How do you explain to them that the very fact that they ignore other conflicts in world affairs which cost so much more life than the Israeli conflict is the basest level of hypocrisy? Even if it's not antisemitism, you can cut their bad faith with a cold butter knife.
How do you explain that what they term the military industrial complex is as inevitable as the private industries that grow around public health, education, and welfare? How do you explain that whatever may come from it in the future, military industry may be what's kept the peace for three generations? Many of them would explode at the very thought. How do you explain to them that if they think there should be constant government regulation in domestic affairs, then they're hypocrites if they think we can simultaneously be laissez-faire in foreign policy? How do you explain that if the US does not take a near-autocratic hand in running the world, then much more immoral governments will run the world and lay waste to whatever morality we squeeze into world affairs. Most on the Palestine side wouldn't just reject all that, they would reject the moral character of anyone who suggests any of it.
How do you explain without their laughing at our paranoia that Hamas and the like are exploiting their simple slogans like 'From the River to the Sea, Palestine Must Be Free' or 'Intifada until victory' to make their people believe that millions in the West are inciting them to the genocide of Jewish millions - directly related to the Palestinian Liberation Organization charter's mission statement to 'toss all Jews into the sea'? How do you explain to people who don't see the harm in constantly calling Israel an 'occupation' means to a few billion people that they too believe that the State of Israel should not exist in any form and must be ended?
How do you explain to them that even if pre-emptive war may kill everybody else, it may be what saves Jews? It probably would have saved us from Hitler in the 30s, a pre-emptive strike against Iraq in '81 saved Israel from Saddam hitting them with nuclear arms just as he hit them with scud missiles ten years later, and the fact that Israel never took a pre-emptive strike at Iran's nuclear facilities may have doomed Israel no matter how Israel otherwise behaves.
And for the moment, the most important of all, how do you explain to them that a ceasefire would only be used by Hamas to regroup and hog all the supplies for themselves? How do you explain to them that Hamas has deliberately not built shelters to house the dispossessed? How do you make them believe that Gaza has gotten twenty years of humanitarian aid and Hamas used nearly every bit of it to build 311 miles of tunnels underground? If you want to provide welfare for your citizens, you use the money to do exactly that, not for secret tunnels. How do you explain to them that you can't trust the UN votes against Israel's violations of human rights because Iran, the regime who means to wipe Israel off the map, heads the UN Human Rights Council? How do you make them believe the horror stories in a long series of intra-Muslim wars in the Middle East involving the deaths of multiple millions, often of the grizzliest variety? If this is what they do to each other, how much worse would they do to us? How do you make them believe that Israel has offered 1200 trucks of aid every day and negotiations broke down because Hamas refused 800 of them - probably because Hamas would no longer be able to control who gets the relief? How do you explain to them that their very support of Palestinian resistance gives cover to all the death threats received these days by Jewish college students all across America? How do you explain that Hamas would murder the very secular, progressive, and particularly queer people who voice support of Palestine most vociferously? How do you explain that a vast minority of Palestinians would cheer their execution? They would never believe any of it. How do you explain to them that Hamas means to get as many of their population murdered as they can and have declared so on al-Jezeera? How do you explain to them that a sizeable minority in the Arab world approve of Palestinian mass death because they believe more in the imperative of Islamic conquest than they do in peace and human rights? Most of them refuse to fathom the idea that people can be so evil.
How do you explain that the reason Israel seems like the bad guys is only because Israel's existence is the one time in Jewish history that Jews have successfully prevented the genocide that's beset them literally a dozen times in their history? Not just the collateral damage of less than 1% of a population but the real thing: 20-85% of the Jewish population over a large area of the earth. How do you explain to them that there are fates still much worse than a Naqba? How do you explain to them that Jews have encountered Naqbas of exile literally dozens times in their history, INCLUDING AN EQUIVALENT NAQBA IN 1948?
And yes, it's more complicated than that. It's all more complicated than all that. Every bit of it. That's history, not a narrative but a nuanced reconstruction of events in which every perspective is considered and critiqued. But if you want to understand the Middle East, you have to entertain every narrative BEFORE you dismiss them, exactly as how the worldwide right has to entertain all of the left's points before they dismiss their points in turn. In order to understand other people's reasoning, you HAVE to rid yourself of ideological, self-serving logic that inevitably proves your point of view. What is true for Palestine is also true for Israel. Israel turned rightward because the whole world rejected their point of view except for American-style liberals and American-style conservatives. Literally, the whole world else. When you reject the whole narrative of the other side, there is no peace to be had, there is only more provocation to the very war they claim they work to prevent.
And yes, it's more complicated than that. It's all more complicated than all that. Every bit of it. That's history, not a narrative but a nuanced reconstruction of events in which every perspective is considered and critiqued. But if you want to understand the Middle East, you have to entertain every narrative BEFORE you dismiss them, exactly as how the worldwide right has to entertain all of the left's points before they dismiss their points in turn. In order to understand other people's reasoning, you HAVE to rid yourself of ideological, self-serving logic that inevitably proves your point of view. What is true for Palestine is also true for Israel. Israel turned rightward because the whole world rejected their point of view except for American-style liberals and American-style conservatives. Literally, the whole world else. When you reject the whole narrative of the other side, there is no peace to be had, there is only more provocation to the very war they claim they work to prevent.
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