Look, I've said this many many times already, I'll probably say it many times again, but I feel stretched on a cross, and I think most liberal Jews feel the same way. It takes no great insight to see the direction Israeli policy is trending, and our blind insistence on a rubber stamp for Israel aid has lead to the blind arrogance of a now permanently ensconced Israeli government. Even if Ganz leaves Netanyahu's government, there is still a conservative majority until 2026, and I think not even Smotrich and Ben-Gvir are stupid enough to give that up, and no liberal government will ever give the orthodox what the conservatives will.
We live in the real world, and there is no world in which the beginning of this war wasn't justified but fantasy, but going after Rafah is the red line past which this becomes a war of choice, and all the casualties are no longer on Hamas. But whether it's Netanyahu, Netanyahu-lite, or Netanyahu-extreme, we are stuck with some version of his policies for a while yet, and if impartial arbiters eventually confirmed that a few more ten-thousand Gazan civilians died, how would it not be justified to call it an ethnic cleansing? How would it not be justified to call it ethnic cleansing in the most brutal scale and manner?
Hamas is estimated to have 30,000 troops, but ask yourselves, what would happen after they're all gone? Knowing that ending the war ends his chances for keeping his job and possibly avoiding jailtime, would Netanyahu ever end the war willingly? So long as Netanyahu is Prime Minister, he will find new threats. If not Hamas then Hezbollah, if not Hezbollah then Fatah, if not Fatah then god knows what else.
It's one thing for Zionists to turn our backs on anti-Zionist Jews, it's another to turn our backs on the few Jews brave enough to say more than once that these policies can kill us. If Israel is endangered again, there's no decent insurance policy for when things get hairy abroad, and it's difficult to conceive of a future when things aren't about to get hairier.
A large part of being Jewish is dealing with ambiguities that would drive the rest of the world insane, and at the same time as we're endangered in the longer term, we're temporarily more secure than ever. We're heading towards a potential future where Trump is the President again, and it's naive to expect that Netanyahu or whatever sheol replaces him won't have blank checks. Not even Netanyahu or anyone short of a Ben-Gvir is dumb enough to wage a genocide, and were a genocide to happen, it wouldn't be a war like what's waged now, but the real thing where Palestinians are killed with the impunity with which China may have annihilated the Muslim Uighurs. But eventually, Netanyahu will almost certainly try everything he can to deport Palestinians from territories he very much views as Israel's, I'm sure he's tried already, but he will almost certainly fail. And yet, if an Israeli PM of the future offers some nearby country in crisis a price astronomical enough, some country can buy them.
So some form of ethnic cleansing is a very likely future. The worst of it wouldn't be in 2024, but by 2050 after global warming and AI can hit with the force of dozens of atom bombs. No country will get through it without the stink of their shit clinging to them for the next hundred years, but no people is punished for their sins as frequently as Jews are. After war, ethnic cleansing that goes well beyond 1948, that is a very real potential future, but god knows what would follow it for Jews.
Ethnic cleansing is not just Israel's likely future, it's the likely future of the entire world. In the years after World War II, Palestine was just another ethnic cleansing among dozens: German speakers from every Eastern European country, 12-14 million of them, along with 3 million displaced Poles in the Polish Civil War that followed WWII (including my grandparents). India and Pakistan, 11 to 14 million displaced in the partition, as many as 2 million killed. Stalin ordered 3 and a half million ethnic minorities resettled all around the USSR to break them of their national identities - the expulsion of 300,000 Italian speakers from Yugoslavia, the expulsion of 150,000 Turks from Bulgaria, 100,000 Greeks from Turkey, 300,000 Indians from Burma. By the 70s, another 300,000 Rohingya from Burma, 425,000 Chinese from Cambodia, 140,000 Kurds from Syria. By the 90s, another 360,000 Turks from Bulgaria, 60,000 Turks from Uzbekistan, 100,000 Bhutanese from Nepal, another 150,000 Rohingya from Burma, 125,000 in a population transfer between Ossetia and the rest of Georgia, roughly 4 million former Yugoslavians displaced in the wars that followed the country's collapse, roughly 800,000 from the Kashmir province on the India-Pakistan border, untold smaller expulsions, and, don't forget, 270,000 to 400,000 Palestinians from Kuwait! And, nobody cares off course, but 1 million Sephardic Jews expelled from all around the Middle East to Israel by 1970. And yet it's all Palestine, Palestine, Palestine as though the world itself didn't commit the same sin. After war comes, ethnic cleansing is the sin of every peace that follows, and in the whirlwind that follows the worst of it, it won't just be Palestinians that are expelled.
We liberal Jews are neither leftists nor conservatives, and we're reminded every day of how far we are from both camps. We know that there is no Jewish future worth having without Israel. We also know that there is no Jewish future without Israel taking so much more care. We are at an impasse, and there may be no fix for it. Israel must survive, but it must survive as a country worth fighting for.
Yes, it's true, Jewish loyalties are dual to the US and Israel. Get over it. This accusation of 'dual loyalty' usually comes from people who find the US a force for evil and feel no loyalty to the country at all. And yes, it's true, we conspire to make the US pursue Israeli interests. Not in the way people think, but yeah, I guess it has to be seen as some kind of conspiracy, even if compared to most political conspiring, it's relatively benign. We've partaken in a conspiracy to make the US pursue interests which, until recently, were in the interests of both the US, and of human rights. Oh how evil we are. Damn us all to the cross again.
Please try to understand, for Jews - not Israelis, Jews - it is still October 7th. The writing is on the wall again. It's not just about October 7th, it's about the 2000 years of October 7ths which might follow. We had a lifetime off from history's melee, but we are right back to where we were. Some Jews have to be forgiven for not seeing that peace is the only way out. Jews are subject to the same historical forces everybody else is, and if you put the backs of Jews up against the sea, they will radicalize and fight just like any Islamist would. But read Jewish history, not just the highlight reel but the unflattering stuff they didn't teach us in day school. We usually lose, and there were times we probably deserved to lose. We're like any country or peoplehood, we get complacent and arrogant, and we demonize the people who point that out. But there's a reason we remember Jeremiah and Isaiah: they denounced the ways of the Israelites, but it turned out they were right, and we paid the price sevenfold for not minding our sins.
So f*ck human rights. We need to pursue peace to save ourselves. No god would let us win forever.
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