So let's talk for a minute people. It's been a while since I talked to you about the Middle East. Why? Because who cares... But this article provoked something fundamental in me that... just about us all have to realize. This conflict isn't a disagreement about Israel/Palestine, it's a disagreement about the world itself.
The conflict of Israel, the conflict of America, the conflict of the world, really any conflict at all, is based on something more fundamental than mere differences of opinion. If you have differences of opinion but share the same basic facts, the same basic understanding, you can make progress, but if there is no consensus about what the conflict is, there is no hope for a resolution. And when I say no hope, I mean that literally.
The Cold War, for example, was based on something more fundamental than economic interests. The economic differences were the main symptom, not the cause. The main cause was the priority, and the two sides disagreed on the main cause: one side believed inequality the main problem of humanity, the other side belived it political freedom? So long as there was disagreement between governments on that score, there was very small hope of resolution.
Political liberty in America was both true and a farce. The wealthy and middle classes had freedom, and they were relatively large, but minorities? The poor? They were not free. Even the ones who thought they were free were not free. Southern whites were under the spell of propaganda, and thought blacks the cause of their poverty, a burden on their economy, and too unintelligent to be anything else. But African-Americans were not the cause of their poverty, and the reason whites thought they were was because propaganda told them so.
But lack of political liberty did not murder 20-60 million people over the course of thirty years. That's what happened in the Soviet Union. Why do we not hear about it more often? Because the descendants of the people who were killed were either killed themselves or never existed.
In the same way, good standard of living in the Soviet bloc was kind of a farce. My father lived in Romania in 1969 (don't ask), supposedly the height of the Soviet bloc's prosperity, and he told all kinds of stories about how stores had no food. According to him, people ostensibly had jobs, but nobody worked. Supposedly everybody has free healthcare, but in a repressive political system, who even knows if that's true? My relatives from Lithuania said very similar things as did so many Jews I know who left the Soviet Union: perhaps it was good for the upper class just like it was here, but at least according to them, housing and shopping were jokes. Education wasn't at all a joke, but minorities were quota'd (my Lithuanian cousin was denied a gold medal as a science student because she was Jewish, she even found the paperwork that said so). Health care may have been real, but according to many you were assigned doctors and if your GP was bad, you simply went without care.
But just because America was better than the Soviet Union in the 20th century (and it was) does not mean that America won't become something still worse than the Soviet Union in the 21st. Look, you all see the problems. America is declining just as old Europe was, and the decline is accelerating.
Two sides of American discourse have extremely different goals: and so long as both believe in the moral absolutism of their side, there will be conflict, and the conflict will be as in danger of going hot as America's conflict with the Soviet Union. People are entitled to their opinions, but so long as one side believes with absolute faith that there is no such thing as liberty until the government doesn't interfere with any aspect of their lives, and so long as the other side believes with absolute faith that there is no such thing as liberty until everyone is free and equal, if we avoid war from these conflicting claims, it may just be luck.
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So what does all of this have to do with Israel/Palestine? I hope it's obvious but I fear it isn't.
Israel/Palestine isn't just a real estate dispute. It's an ideological clash of the most extreme variety. This piece of land stands at the nexus of the world: spiritually and geographically. For 2000 years there is not a single era or region of world history that isn't influenced immeasurably by what goes on there. So everybody realizes that if you want to prove your beliefs right, the very first place you have to prove it is on what some call Israel, and some call Palestine. And yet for 2000 years, nobody has proven themselves right even as they all have tried.
So if you have a totalizing ideology where moral absolutes matter more than practical realities, you will run into conflict with people whose ideology is different than your own, and so long as you disagree on fundamental goals, there will be conflict, and until you agree, the conflict will grow larger. I'm sure a lot of people think Israel/Palestine can't grow any larger than it is right now: oh yes it can! The Middle East is basically in regional war. That war can spread and if it goes on long enough, it will...
The pro-Palestine side of this conflict believes absolutely in internationalism, solidarity, the equality of all peoples and the oppression of non-white peoples by whites. There is a dominant strain among them which believes that any militancy or murderousness of non-white peoples is ultimately provoked by Western behavior and white supremacy, and therefore is mostly excusable in resistance to any Western incursion on their sovereignty. It's not everybody on that side, but it's a majority. But because this is what they believe, they get into bed with some people whose capacity for murderousness is extraordinary, and if they haven't stretched their murderous capacity to their full extent, it's not because we overestimate their capacity for brutality--October 7th should have put that question to rest forever--but because places like Israel have been so successful in preventing them from perpetrating the crimes they want to commit. This is a winning streak that is very fragile, and when right-wingers say that if they're prevented from their security measures, they'll be killed in quantities at least as vast as Palestinians currently are, and I believe it's certainly possible. The end result is that the pro-Palestine side gets into bed with people who believe in the exact opposite of what they believe, and--there's no sugarcoating this, if people who believe as Hamas and Hezbollah do took over their countries, the anti-fascist beliefs of Palestine's greatest champions would make them the biggest threat to any dictatorship there, and quite possibly the first to be eliminated.
As for the pro-Israel side, what's left of it..., there is a dominant strain that believes in Western superiority: which, we should specify, is not necessarily the same thing as white superiority, though the two terms are obviously related. Back when Israel support had a sizable liberal contingent, this was obviously not true. It's true now. But furthermore, they believe the priority is national self-defense, national security and nationalism generally. There are much worse things in the world than nationalism, but because they believe in all this, they get into bed with a vast conglomeration of fundamentalist Christians. Christianity is getting much more colorful, but in America, three-quarters of Christians are still white.
I believe these fundamentalists are not our friends. They may be temporarily friendly, but they view us as the ultimate crusaders, and if Jews do not put themselves directly into harm's way, they may deliberately force us into harm's way.
In the 1990s, peace talks were possible because people were fundamentally agreeing on goals. The right-wing was radicalized, but Republican politicians were radicalized before most of the party faithful were. Both sides of American discourse fundamentally agreed: peace is a good thing, security is a good thing, and because they did, they believed that people could co-exist in solidarity with one another.
So what changed? Part of what changed is that the peace talks failed. Everybody disagrees on why, I have my own opinions, but in this case, our opinions don't matter. When peace talks fail, the ability to get back to the table becomes more difficult, not less. That's true whether it's Israel/Palestine, or Republicans/Democrats, or Vietnam, or the German response to losing World War I, or the Chinese Civil War. Obama won by telling us that the solution is keep talking to your opponents. I'm sure you noticed, that didn't work.
But still more importantly, what changed was the internet, social media, echo chambers and separation that leads to polarizing radicalism. Whatever we believe, we see only things that confirm what we already believe, but the only way people get noticed is to make claims still more extreme than other people, and sooner than we know, we all believe the extreme version of what we believed ten years ago. This seems to happen in human history every time there's a new leap in mass media. We all understand that it has a terrible impact on our psyches, and then we fall for all the things it's meant to do to us anyway. When the printing press started, literacy became more widespread, and what did people read? Polemics, pamphlets, the 15th century equivalent to think pieces, and every one of them came to conclusions still more militant than the one before, and they convinced everybody because everybody decided that the problems couldn't wait and that certain principles were absolute goods, and other principles were absolute evil. The result was 130 years of war between Protestants and Catholics.
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So what's the solution? Insofar as there is one, the solution is not peace, the solution is what's called detente, ceasefire, truce, cold war. The solution is two countries to exploit a temporary ceasefire and look to hold it in perpetuity, and keep their guns focused right on each other for hundreds of years until facts on the ground so change that it makes more sense for countries to become allies rather than enemies because they have a different enemy to fight. Nobody fires because they know that the price of war is just too great. Until such time as Palestine and Israel share any goals again, that is the best we're ever going to do. You're never going to eliminate the beliefs of the other side without the wholesale extermination of the people who believe them, and if you believe that's a laudable goal, you have become the people you hate.
If you are constantly reading things that keep your rage boiling at people who disagree, eventually that rage will find an outlet. Eventually, your opinions and beliefs will turn into how you perceive facts, and you will begin to deny things that the vast majority of society views as obviously true. And the more you perceive facts falsely, the more you can be convinced that any false fact at all is true. Once you do that, you can convince yourself of any final solution at all, and there is no limit to the amount of violence you won't excuse.
I have my own rage to repent for. My rage boils enough that I hate Netanyahu at least as much as I hate Trump, maybe more, and maybe I'm selfish, but I hate him at least as much for what he's done to Jews as what he's done to the world. Jewish Baltimore is a terrible place to be these days for people who hold doubts. Certainty grips the majority of the Jewish community as it never has, and certainty leads people to colossal mistakes.
So for a time, a period of at least a few months, I managed to convince myself that Bibi Netanyahu let October 7th happen deliberately, a belief I warned at the outset of all this would circulate among antisemites like wildfire. This is a belief akin to the idea that Roosevelt deliberately allowed Pearl Harbor. This is an unacceptable, out of bounds belief, for me or anyone else. This is a belief that the minds of millions could justify anything at all to rid ourselves of him, including a mass murder of Jews. As truly horrific as Netanyahu is, his incompetence is so much more likely an explanation. An irony about propaganda is that even the purveyors of it come to believe their own claims. Propaganda only works when it requires a thin film of truth, and when you're fed that thin film enough times, it becomes a meal, and you've swallowed supposed truths that are 99% a drug meant to drive you mad.
I may not have done enough work to understand this issue I've been trying to understand my whole lifetime, but I'm trying. For anyone that this issue makes passionate, you need to do the work too. A lot of our future depends on us all making the effort.
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