I’ve hesitated writing this newsletter for so many reasons:
It’s politically loaded
It’s impossible to stay neutral
Everyone pretends it’s either incredibly simple or incredibly complex even though it’s probably somewhere in between
It’s rare that one side portrays the other side accurately
It’s emotionally triggering
It’s been written about so much with very little new insight, perspective, or nuance
It’s treated like a moral zero-sum game
Both sides have overzealous defenders who justify anything and everything their side does as the cost of survival, which isn’t hyperbole
Each sides frames itself as unfortunate victims that have been forced to resort to violence in order to avoid its own annihilation
Each side either ignores or openly justifies its own use of collective punishment
As I’ve watched this humanitarian crisis unfold in Palestinian territories, I’ve felt all the emotions that we’ve all felt for months (and before that, for years) and I’m sickened and discouraged and angry and hopeless and frustrated because none of this new. It’s been happening regularly since 1948. It’s going to happen again tomorrow and next year and the year after that if we don’t do something immediately. But there’s one moral position in this conflict that shouldn’t be controversial:
Civilians cannot and must never be collateral damage under any circumstances either from Hamas or from the Israeli government. If we can’t agree on that then all hope is lost. I think we need to start there.
This should be a bedrock position we can all agree on and yet I’ve watched in horror as Palestinian supporters have celebrated Hamas killing Israeli concertgoers and Jewish families just like Israel hardliners have celebrated Israel’s devastating bombings of Palestinian civilians who literally have nowhere to go and no resources to flee, even if they did. Since neighboring countries are not opening their borders to Palestinian refugees for longer than a few hours at most and since Gaza hasn’t had a functioning economy or a usable airport or access to its own taxes or access to its own ports or right of passage to Israel for work, there’s no way for Palestinians to make money to buy the things that would help them escape what has essentially become a war zone without exits.
There was once a time in this world when we respected and valued civilians, when we distinguished them from enemy combatants, but now neither terrorism nor state-sanctioned terrorism even tries. We must do better.
I think the time has come to revisit, reconsider, and re-promulgate the UN charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, & the Geneva Conventions because these human rights organs were created for a reason and we’ve lost sight of how important they’ve been to protect and safeguard our own humanity.
Regardless of our political, religious, & cultural perspectives, we are now pretending the line separating enemy combatant from civilian either doesn’t exist—which it surely does—or that it’s impossible to make this separation anymore. It’s not. This is why I’m much more critical of Israel, not just because of the sheer statistical carnage it has caused Palestinians now and historically (the numbers show nothing short of a killing machine), but also because Israel prides itself on being the only democracy in the Middle East and yet it doesn’t apply the basic tenets of liberal democracy (like following the four Geneva Conventions) to the Palestinian people. Israeli democracy is for Israelis and Palestinian apartheid is for Palestinians and never shall the two meet. This is the crux of the problem.
When I read the news and I see high-ranking Israeli politicians like its own President call Palestinians animals and blamed them collectively for the violence that Hamas caused (the antecedent before the Israeli military killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, most of them women and children in the past month alone), this dehumanization must not be taken lightly because dehumanization is always a stratagem in the moral self-justification of violence as much as it is a precursor to ethnic violence. Just as importantly, this rhetoric looks and feels very similar to that used by Hamas terrorists who don’t view Israeli civilians as human beings at all, but merely targets in larger a campaign to fight Zionism and its big bad bouncer, the Israeli military.
But collective punishment is not only morally repugnant, it’s also a violation of international law. And yet for some strange reason, the UN Security Council never forces Israel to take accountability for its chronic violations of international law, whether it’s the continuous use of white phosphorus, trapping Palestinians in Gaza and then bombing them while claiming to give advanced warning, protecting Israeli settlers who have been building homes illegally in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, or engaging in continuous collective punishment.
While some progressives framed Hamas’ attacks on Israeli civilians as “punching up” since the Gaza strip, according to Amnesty International, is the largest open-air prison in the world, I think it would be a mistake to frame Hamas as “freedom fighters.” This is exactly what the US government did when it gave arms and funding to so-called “freedom fighters” in Latin America, who were essentially counter-revolutionary groups opposed to communism but who also intentionally killed, tortured, pillaged, & raped civilians systematically. This is why the power of naming and the power of framing are so crucial in this war of political perception: when you claim that you’re facing an existential threat and that your behavior is simply a means to survive, that framing centers your own humanity while conveniently excluding the humanity of your enemy. To be clear, both sides in this conflict do this, but the Israeli military has done so much more damage because it has so much more money (Israel receives billions of dollars in foreign aid from all over the world) and because it has state-of-the-art weapons as well as mandatory conscription. The point is, we must insist on the humanity of all peoples in this conflict, not just the ones that pray like us or look like us or live like us or that fulfill some obscure biblical prophecy. It shouldn’t be controversial to demand we defend the humanity of both sides, but it is, because we’re only only allowed to pick one.
We must ignore the political pressure and support civilians on both sides anyway.
We should be able to support Palestinians, Israelis, a two-state solution, revisit the idea of 1967 borders, require bilateral concessions while also condemning collective punishment and moral slippery slopes and systems of apartheid and power asymmetry. We should and we must be able to draw lines in the sand when it comes to the deaths of civilians and the blatant abuse of power and the psychological devastation of terrorism, kidnapping, and starvation. We should be able to acknowledge that Netanyahu (and before him, Ariel Sharon with Arafat) long refused to work with moderate Palestinian authorities like Mahmoud Abbas and that it was this refusal which helped get Hamas politicians elected since nothing else was getting done politically. We should also be able to acknowledge that Palestinian leaders rejected a two-state solution when the UN passed a resolution in 1947 splitting Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. We should be able to acknowledge that Netanyahu intentionally sabotaged the Oslo Accords by increasing Jewish settlements in the occupied territories of the West Bank and East Jerusalem while Hamas sent suicide bombers to destroy the treaty. We should also be able to acknowledge that Arafat did not fulfill his promises to Yitzhak Rabin to renounce terrorism or take control of the PLO to ensure compliance and prevent/punish violations, all of which might have helped the Palestinian people avoid many of its future conflicts. We should also be able to acknowledge that a Jewish extremist, not Fatah or Hamas terrorists, killed Yitzhak Rabin to prevent a peace deal with the PLO. We should be able to acknowledge that the elimination of the state of Israel is literally in the Hamas charter, which offers no room for compromise. We should also be able to acknowledge that Israel is an apartheid state and also an occupying force of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. All of these things are true and all are deeply problematic.
So, here’s my solution, idealistic as it is: I think that the Palestinian authority, Israel, Britain, the EU, a commonwealth of Arab nations, & the US need to collectively broker first a peace treaty and then a two-state solution that follows and/or negotiates with the 1967 borders using a multilateral and multi-faith peacekeeping force to enforce a neutral zone or DMZ for at least five years between the Palestinian and Jewish states. If possible, the Palestinian state will be contiguous. I’m sure some of the wealthier Gulf nations would be happy to help create a New Palestine and accelerate Palestinian industrialization, so a new Palestinian nation state could be created quickly. For the first time, the Group of 8 would be allowed to pledge international aid directly to the Palestinian authorities and the Palestinian authorities would be required to fight corruption, Islamist indoctrination, & document each expenditure. Israel would be required to hand over hundreds of millions of dollars in back taxes that it has withheld from Palestinian authorities. Israel would also need to help rebuild the Palestinian infrastructure and local businesses and hospitals it has destroyed over and over again. The IMF would give grants to Palestinian local businesses and the World Bank would give interest free loans to the new Palestinian government with loan cancellation criteria based on specific benchmarks. UNESCO would help establish Palestinian culture centers, build new schools, & museums. Hamas would also need to help rebuild Israeli buildings and infrastructure it has attacked with rockets during the past fifty years and also rewrite its charter and step down from all political positions and become a charity organization dedicated to the welfare of Palestinian people instead. Israel will require (and enforce) that all Jewish settlements leave Palestinian land. Israel and Palestine would need to have a red phone line so that its prime ministers could talk directly to avert future crises. A Palestinian defense force would be created eventually after the Palestinian government had met a series of benchmarks. Lastly, any and all war crimes committed by either side since 1948 would be tried in the International Court of Justice without exception unless a multilateral Committee on Truth and Reconciliation (modeled on South Africa’s post-apartheid government) had created a restitution structure for wars criminals that included posthumous trials.
At the end of the day, if Israelis want to be safe, they need to support all of this. If Palestinians want their own land and cultural, religious, & political autonomy, they need to support all of this. Both sides will have to give major concessions. Both (future) nation states will have to renounce violence and (state-sanctioned) terrorism and acknowledge the right of both sides to (co-) exist while controlling religious extremism, corruption, terrorism, human rights violations, & political violence within their own borders. Both sides will need to go through a series of negotiations and meet a series of checkpoints verified by the UN, the EU, the US, &/or a Pan-Arab Alliance. It won’t be easy for either side. It won’t be popular on either side. But it can be done. It must be done. We can start by protecting both Palestinian and Israeli civilians without exception and without precondition.
It’s either both or it’s neither. But it cannot be one or the other. Seventy-five years of continuous bloodshed, violence, revenge, & dehumanization prove that we must fight to protect all civilians. If only one side is allowed to exist, then neither side can be safe based on the history and the unique geopolitical and religious conflict in this region.
Ultimately, that means we must enforce our own human rights organs in the ICJ, hold all sides to that bedrock principle, & help create a Palestinian nation state as much for Palestinians as for Israelis. Otherwise, each side will justify its continued violence as controlled, justified, & defensive while condemning the other side’s violence as barbaric, unjustified, and aggressive. A good place to approach this discourse is by first condemning violence in all its forms. But humans are deeply attached to violence, even though they don’t see themselves as inherently violent and even though they have a long list of exceptions where they believe that violence is justified. This is precisely why I believe that we must do everything in our power to broker an immediate cease-fire, address the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, create an international war tribunal, & quickly establish a series of timelines for a two-state solution precisely because nothing else has worked and nothing else will work except protecting the full humanity of every civilian in this conflict.
I’d like to end this newsletter with a short metta prayer: May all beings in this conflict be free from danger, fear, & trauma. May all beings in this conflict be blessed with health, joy, safety, & prosperity. May all beings in this conflict find the courage to love and to act bravely in the service of humanity and to defend all sentient beings. May all beings in this conflict have peace of mind now and in the future.
Really well said!!!