It's Happening Again

Hamas's brutal incursion is bringing out the usual excusatory trolls. Before 2006, I would have been one

“of politics I am sick with a poet's / vanity,” wrote George Oppen, over fifty years ago, about this very issue, and at a time when the problem itself was already fifty years old. I'm sure most of us can relate. Every few years there’s another dust-up in the Conflict that Will Never End, and every few years the usual suspects come out of the woodwork to lecture us about how wicked we are for wanting a civilized planet where the surly losers of love and war don't blow themselves up on city buses or parade naked rape victims through the street for their compatriots to spit on.

What's different about this one is only that it finds us after years of feeling monitored and policed and demoralized by those same useful idiots, who managed in some mad social media scramble to seize the commanding heights of our culture, at least for a little while. So now instead of just rolling our eyes at historically illiterate MFA yahoos posting Palestinian flags on Facebook, we've got to sit here thinking about the eggshells we walked on all summer in 2020, when people were losing their livelihoods for having the temerity to suggest that maybe, just maybe, it's not 100% ethical to burn someone alive in a pawn shop because you're upset about the news¹. Meanwhile kids at Harvard—the flagship of the American educational system!—are issuing joint statements claiming that these volunteer door-to-door murder salesmen are a blameless unconscious reflex of the omnipotent Israeli Apartheid machine. Because "structural issues."

It's maddening, and it's embarrassing—for me personally in part because I know I used to be just like them, my knowledge limited to what I'd reversed engineered from sight-reading Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn—all the checkpoints and uncrossable highways and “illegal” settlements and bouts of retaliatory violence, the laundry list of indignities rattled off in a year zero immediate present, as if there were no such thing as historical context. Sometimes as a matter of principle. Like when Trevor Noah did this idiot savant impersonation during the pandemic: “People are always going to say you're leaving out some crucial context... instead, let's look at who is dead and who's alive, this week.” Because that's all that matters, who has the advantage right this second. “When you have this much power, what is your responsibility?”

I might have written something like that myself, once upon a time. I might even have taught it to my students in grad school. It’s incredible to me that I was allowed in front of young people at that age, unsupervised, with criminally epic levels of ignorance, just because of the name on my degree. (Vassar! God help me, I was an ignorant redneck, and they had a nice brochure.) I shudder to recall some of what I must have said. I cringe. But not as much as I cringe remembering the time I drunkenly called into a conservative radio show during the 2006 ground war against Hezbollah, mad as only an ignorant liberal can be over the escalating violence, feeling powerless to make everyone realize how it will only begat more, how it would all just spiral endlessly into something I personally can't control. Or understand. Or even really describe. God help me, I think I might even have compared Hamas to the Founding Fathers. (In my defense I was about to list the caveats when I got cut off.)

From the contemporary Times coverage

But I couldn’t help but notice, while listening to the mockery that went on for full minutes after they hung up, that they kept using terms that I could not precisely define. “Mandate era.” “Six Day War.” “Munich.” I'd absorbed some of them from the literature, could even reproduce some sentence-like references to “the issues,” but I had no idea of the underlying facts. I was like early GPT—a pure stochastic parrot, trained on piffle.

This began to gnaw at my brain. I didn't like the bad feeling it gave me, the haunting sense of unacknowledged inferiority. I didn’t like that I’d been holding forth with such confidence when I actually had no idea how Israel even happened. Given that I was freelancing back then (ie, extremely under-employed) I decided to spend some quality time at my local University library, reading everything I could find on the subject. I deliberately limited myself as much as possible to first-hand sources and objective historical surveys—no propaganda or opinion. I wanted to find the thing itself.

The experience was transformative. It wasn't just that I had been wrong. It's that I had been not even wrong. I had been thinking about things on a cartoon plane of pure propaganda, like a student pretending to follow the lecture despite having not done the reading, fooling no one but myself: Israel was a colonial power. Palestinians were victimized natives. This was Apartheid. Israel's official Jewish nature meant it was a racist state. The only way forward was to let go of arbitrary religious bullshit and embrace liberal rationalism. Etc. It was a puppet show, a cliche, exactly what anyone would think whose shitty public education had taught him exactly nothing, and whose malfeasant elite college had abhorred that vacuum with a bunch of second-hand post-colonialism.

Take a little thing, like this common belief, formerly mine as well, from Noah's grade-school idea of the “crucial context” he was setting aside: “There's the history of how Israel became a state after Nazi Germany tried to destroy the Jewish people, but there's also the history of Britain taking the land from the Palestinians.” As if anything could possibly work this way! As if “the west,” in the form of some giant sky-borne crotchety white Zeus, had just picked up Palestine and shaken the brown people off and handed it to “The Jewish people” and said, “Sorry for all the pogroms, bro.” I mean, the first part is accurate only as chronology—independence did happen after World War II, he got that right. The latter though is just made up out of nowhere, plucked whole from the vague awareness that some colonizing happened, and that it was very bad.

“Britain taking the land.” They won a war against Palestine's former occupiers, the Ottoman Empire—a war the British did not start and which the Ottomans entered voluntarily—and were afterward granted a mandate by the League of Nations to administer it during its “transition to independence.” Kind of a bullshit colonialism lite, maybe, but not exactly “taking the land away.” But that’s just scratching the surface. What’s more important is that there was no moment or point in the process where Britain ever had the authority or power to “give” that land to anyone, for countless complex reasons: The population facts on the ground. The fact that Britain itself was more than one person, more than one faction, bound by conflicting obligations that always had it putting the brakes on its own intentions. When people say “they promised Palestine to both parties,” they’re talking about at least two different “theys”. During World War I, TE Lawrence offered Arabs postwar self-government in exchange for their aid against the Ottomans. Later, the British cabinet—totally different people—issued the Balfour Declaration indicating support for a Jewish homeland. But neither act was binding, they were both political gestures, meant to drum up support among potential allies by implicitly putting pressure on future actors to honor them. Someone still had to lobby, to follow through, to make anything lasting happen. And someone had to enforce the result.

Because what we call “history” is less about monolithic agents than intermingled agitating factions, endlessly intriguing for outcomes they themselves can only partly predict and which no one can fully guarantee. Why even promise Jews a homeland? Because there was a movement afoot to start one. Why was there a movement? Because someone wrote a book about it. But what does “there is a movement” even mean? That Jews, especially European Jews, who maybe used to dream of retiring in Israel, buying an olive grove from one of the Lebanese absentee landlords and settling down in the desert sun, were now dreaming about starting whole communities. They began to migrate, to build farms and factories and neighborhoods. They started talking about a real capital-s State, envisioning it, arguing about its nature. Other people, especially Palestinians, started reacting to the talk. It became the sort of thing you'd write a column about on the opinion page. Everyone had a take.

Some wanted a purely Jewish state, locals be damned. Some wanted a socialist paradise, or a bi-national state, or a refugee state for any people fleeing oppression, Jewish or otherwise. Some even thought it should be in Madagascar instead. Some, the so-called “Revisionist Zionists,” thought cohabitation would be nice and all, but human nature would never allow it, so they argued that war was inevitable. (Were they right?) On the Palestinian side, two old local families, the Al-Husseinis and the Nashashibis, represented the core Arab divide, with the latter taking a welcoming, liberal stance, envisioning a shared future (although likely with a tiny, rich and grateful Jewish minority, which they worked behind the scenes to keep as small as possible). The former took a hard-line, zero-tolerance policy (while corruptly doing secret land deals with the Zionist settlers for their own personal profit).

In an oral history of the Mandate era that I read years later (my week in the library became a lifelong hobby-horse), it was said that the Nashashibis once tried to broker a sit-down between the Zionists and the Al-Husseinis, even arranged for the former to host a massive dinner party at which the latter would be honored guests. Unfortunately, it came right after the Balfour Declaration, which made the Zionists feel they needn’t cater to bigots, so they seated them by the kitchen, offending them greatly. The Grand Mufti Al-Husseini would famously go on to try to make a secret pact with Hitler to deal with their mutual “Jewish problem.” Who knows, maybe he was still just miffed by the snub? Maybe it all would have worked out differently if the party had been scheduled a few months earlier.

Picture a history that knotted and gnarled and complicated and ancient, then picture John Kerry ambling over in 2014 to sort it all out for them. Poor sap thought he was brokering a peace, but they probably just saw him as another angle to work, a chance for each side to pull a propaganda victory out of his inevitable failure.

I am by no means an expert and am definitely not trying to explain the current conflict. If you want a professional history or a blow-by-blow of the latest, go here. Or listen to this. Or take a week off of pornhub to visit your local library. I'm just trying to administer a tiny homeopathic dose of the ignorance cure I accidentally ingested all those years ago into as many broken brains as possible. I'm trying to press on you that if you're caught up in #resist or #freepalestine you're probably missing some “crucial context” yourself (the kind that is actually crucial). Not “who is right” or “who is wrong,” which is meaningless, but that deep visceral sense that history is a process in which we’re all caught up, and which none of us can control, and which responsible people have to take as it actually is. The British couldn’t even control it, and that was their job. They helped first one side, then another, alternately aiding and restricting immigration and land sales, sometimes policing violence, other times sitting on their hands. There was a saying among the mandate officials: “You arrived on the side of Palestine, gradually became more sympathetic to the Jews, but always ended up loyal to Britain.”

Because inevitably the British had to leave, that became increasingly clear, and the fate of Palestine would depend on who lived where. Time always proved the revisionists right. Tensions escalated. Immigration sped up until Arabs agitated, successfully for restrictions. There were outbreaks of violence, riots at the growing Jewish presence, followed sometimes by Jewish retaliation and the eventual founding of a Self-Defense League, which would become the IDF. One generation was still dreaming of a multi-ethnic state, only to find their children thinking of nothing but war. 1920’s cosmopolitanism gave way to the ideological fervor of the 30’s and 40’s.

From the oral history: A mother brought home produce from a cross-aligned market only to have her children throw it in the trash. A rancher from one group, a kid, leading his cattle between cities, found his herd interpenetrated by one controlled by the other, led by three older boys, one armed, who quietly picked off as many head as they could as they passed through. I honestly can't remember who were the Jews and who were the Palestinians in either anecdote, probably because I got stuck thinking about what it would have been like to be that mother sitting there flummoxed wondering how her kids got so goddamned strident. (And also what the hell she was going to make for dinner now.) Or to be that kid with the herd, thinking, how many missing cattle am I going to have to explain to my family when I get home, how many can we tolerate losing before I have to fight back, and what will those other guys end up doing to me if I do? That's the lived experience of an ethnic conflict, the sheer vastness of history implied by those few individuals, none of whom can steer the ship, who can only either embrace what comes or get pulled along by it anyway.

By the end of the mandate there were nearly two million people in Palestine, living two million lives. They almost ran out of grain during World War II, you can look up the charts.

“Israel became a state after Nazi Germany tried to destroy the Jewish people.” The sheer smooth-brained simplicity of this! Almost as many Jews were killed in the Holocaust as live in Israel now, but that’s not the justification, it’s just the prelude. Jews fleeing persecution went where they could go. That was mostly America or Israel, against local pressure and in most cases with little choice or control. America wanted the Mandate to take in 100,000 survivors. The British were against it. Jews took up arms to try to force it, Arabs protested. Agitation over the future continued up until the moment of partition, which the British refused to enforce. There were competing terrorist factions, a hotel bombing, fighting against each other and against the British, as occupiers. No one was in control.

The legitimacy of the UN plan, as well as exactly how the war started, is a subject of endless contention. The country was divided, possibly unfairly. The Arabs objected, thought they probably would have to anything. Israel declared independence, fighting broke out, the UN plan went out the window, and Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq sent in their armies.

I spent the summer of 2020 neither burning down police stations nor seceding from the union, but instead reading a history of the ground war. I was struck by two things: one was how the outcome seemed almost predetermined by a persistent asymmetry in stakes. The Palestinians were one small Muslim polity in a sea of nearly a billion compatriots, they were never alone, never desperate, never sure of what they wanted from “self-determination,” never united in the idea of themselves as Palestinians—especially their leaders, who were acting on a much larger stage, and so always had the incentive to sell out a local interest for personal advantage (this is part of what doomed Kerry's efforts). Whereas the Zionists had nothing but Zion. This seemed to guarantee a degree of relative disorganization in the Palestinian efforts that as individuals they were powerless to overcome, however bravely they fought.

The other thing of note was how the escalations and counter-escalations crossed a specific and inevitable threshold that locked the conflict to its current state. Initially, the Israeli forces promised amnesty to any Palestinian who remained neutral. They left Muslims alone in their homes as long as they didn't take up arms. Then rumors began to spread of ethnic cleansing, on both sides, which led to actual cleansing on both sides, with each captured town being cleared and people scrambling to get on the right side of an ever-shifting border, until things devolved into a mad dash to secure not just as much territory as possible before a ceasefire, but as much population hegemony. That was the real origin of your Nakba, your great “catastrophe.” It wasn’t some secretly orchestrated European plot to exterminate the browns. The Palestinians were just on the losing side of a war in which it was to the advantage of both sides to drive as many people out of their homes as possible—in which it would have been irresponsible for any sane actor not to do so.

Arguably, that aspect of the war never really ended. People call it “Apartheid,” but the better analogy is North and South Korea. It’s a frozen conflict, with one half an isolated ideological basket case. Just as North Korea could at any moment decide to stop believing in crazy hoo-hah and demilitarize, Hamas is just one acknowledgment of Israeli victory away from changing the dynamic. They could stop being a contained perpetual belligerent and start being a people unfairly deprived of freedom of movement and fewer import restrictions, because they are no longer a military threat. (Lack of credible security guarantees was the other sticking point for Kerry's efforts.)

Consider this mostly deranged rant from one of New York City’s useful idiots:

He’s right at least that Gaza is denied a lot of needful “dual-purpose” goods, and would be justified in stealing some. If they’d crossed the border for that purpose alone, without the raping or killing—or the charter denying Israel’s right to exist, or the strategic alliance with a regime committed to nuking them to dust—then this guy would be giving us a genuine moral upbraiding, and we’d all be assholes for rolling our eyes.

Israel has achieved normal relations with all the original aggressors except Syria and Lebanon, as well as Bahrain, Sudan, Morocco, and the UAE—and soon Saudi Arabia, if the current conflict doesn't scuttle it. Eventually Palestine, too, will have to accept that it’s over. Just as our moral betters on America’s campuses and campus-occupied territories will have to accept, sooner or later, that armed resistance when alternatives exist is actually nihilism—and that acting on metaphors that don’t fit the facts is actually narcissism. Maybe they could start by cracking a couple of actual history books, the kind with facts and charts instead of postmodern free-associative outrage poetry about how isolated data points feel sloshing around in one’s disorganized skull. Maybe read a table of bushel counts and think about the sheer number of human mouths implied, the amount of administrative complexity it takes just to get us all fed every day, and how utterly fucked they’d be if that broke down for even a week. Personally, I can vouch for the fact that it’s sobering.

1. If you object to this characterization, I’d invite you to do some digging into the gap between what activists were claiming about police violence and what the data actually show.