The Need For Wisdom and Restraint in Gaza
The worst thing Israel could do for itself is to behave just as Hamas did, or as America did after 9/11
I listened to Pod Save The World on Saturday, the podcast hosted by former Obama NSC aides Ben Rhodes and Tommy Vietor, and there was something that Rhodes said about halfway through that really struck me, especially given the histrionic responses from so many people in the media over the last ten days.
Speaking to the kind of trauma that’s reawakened in people, and maybe I’m getting out of my depth here a little bit, but there is a deep-rooted trauma inside Jewish people, and my mother’s Jewish, and I come from a European Jewish family that has pogroms in it and those who didn’t leave were in the Holocaust, and I do think this sense of trauma and vulnerability is awakening in the Jewish people, which is completely understandable given the scale of the atrocities we’ve seen.
At the same time, I remember 9/11, I saw 9/11, I was in New York, and that transformed my life, and I went into national security. Infamously, I was a creative writing grad student at the time. Witnessing that, I wanted to be a part of the response to it. I remember being in New York, and there were some lefties, I was at NYU, right, and there were some lefties back in the day saying we need to chill out and think twice before we start bombing Afghanistan, and I’ll be honest, as an angry 23-year-old, I was like, I don’t want to hear that, let’s go fucking get these guys. And that was the wrong mentality. Not that I was making decisions back then, but I wish a friend had came and said, you’d better think carefully about this, because when you start a war, you never know how it’s going to end. It always has consequences you don’t expect.
And I know this is hard for some people to hear right now, but thinking about it, counseling restraint, thinking this thing through, counseling being very careful to follow the rules of war, that is not a lack of regard for what Israel has gone through, on the contrary, it’s what I wish someone had done for the United States after 9/11, because the decisions we made immediately like the Patriot Act, going into Afghanistan, and then going into Iraq, we know how that all turned out.
I thought that was a remarkably brave thing to say as a former Deputy National Security Adviser to President Obama and as a Jew in a time where there is extreme social pressure on Jews in America to get in line behind Israel’s retaliation, no matter what course it takes. I also think he was spot on about feelings at the time of 9/11. I was 20, and I wrote an op-ed at U-M a couple of weeks after 9/11 condemning the Justice Department for its wholesale arrests and harassment of Arabs throughout the country. I said at that time that my grandfather, who had died two years prior from old World War II shrapnel shifting and slicing open an artery inside him, did not suffer those wounds fighting for America so it could create a Gestapo for Arabs and Muslims. To this day, I’m proud that I planted a flag early for civil rights, and I’m also ashamed that I let Colin Powell’s magic act at the UN Security Council sucker me into supporting an invasion of Iraq.
It’s with that experience in mind, the horrid path we went down, the way that we killed so many innocent Iraqis and Afghans, that I want to be a voice amongst many to urge restraint in the coming days and weeks. Gaza has already suffered incalculable damage, and if Israel wants peace at the end of this, it cannot be through anything resembling a genocide. There has to be something left, some sort of hope for those living there, some sort of pledge that the walls will come down and that a hand of friendship will be extended. It would be so much better for all involved to just absorb Gaza into Israel, to extend citizenship to those living there or pay for relocation to the West Bank, where a true, contiguous Palestinian state could be formed. It would require great political courage, something that the current government lacks, but also something that others inside Israel are capable, I think, of demonstrating. Israel took eastern Jerusalem by force in 1967, along with Gaza and the West Bank. They assumed responsibility for the Palestinians when they seized those territories, something that Defence Minister at the time, Moshe Dayan, acknowledged and said that Israel would ensure the welfare of the Palestinians. They haven’t lived up to that pledge, but it’s not too late to change that.
Below is a graphic, on the left showing the original UN peace plan from 1947 approved by the General Assembly, and on the right is what may be the only way to resolve this. When Oslo was signed thirty years ago, the tan parts on the right were all part of the Palestinian territory in the West Bank. The orange shading is what they currently have. That’s how much has been seized from them. You can see over time how the area Palestinians live in has been reduced and chipped away. There’s no access to the Jordan River, and no access to the sea, and all right-of-way through the West Bank is controlled by the IDF. It makes a mockery of Israel’s claims that Palestinians have control of certain areas when these Israeli settlements were foisted upon them since 1967, taking the best land, taking homes they didn’t own.
It’s been fifty-six years of Israel’s right wing not being satisfied with what they have and taking more away by force from Palestinians. If the cycle of violence is going to end, then just peace must be established. That means the West Bank being reconsolidated with Palestinian access to the Jordan River. That means, in my view, the Gaza residents being reunited with their brethren in the West Bank as part of an independent Palestinian nation. It’s a hard lift. The Palestinians don’t know independence. They’ve been ruled by the Ottoman Empire, the British Empire, and Israel for centuries. But if Israel doesn’t bother to try, and if the U.S. doesn’t start making its support conditional upon securing a peace after this war, then all that’s left is continued slow-motion genocide of the Palestinian people, and that will end in massive tragedy. We cannot allow that. We must do better. Israel can and should learn from our post-9/11 mistakes. You don’t have to become a monster to slay one.
So your stance is let terrorists murder thousands of people whenever and wherever they want and the country that just lost 2k citizens should just... turn the other cheek?