To be human means to put an equality sign between oneself and others

 

To be human means to put an equality sign between yourself and others. That’s what my father-in-law, professor emeritus of mathematics Abe Shenitzer, said one day in our kitchen. We wrote it on a sheet of paper that he held up and we took a picture of him holding it in front of himself. As the IDF continues to destroy Palestinian lives and the Israeli cabinet plans to reoccupy and settle Gaza, all I can think of is this: what would it mean to put an equality sign between Israelis and Palestinians? What does it take to be human in this conflict? I don’t for a moment mistake my place here. I am a relative outsider to the conflict. I enjoy dual citizenship in Germany and the United States, where I reside and teach. My friendship in, connections with, and scholarship on the communities and history of the Holy Land don’t give me more than a tangential voice. It is my Israeli and Palestinian friends who are suffering and worrying about the future. And because I have Israeli and Palestinian friends, and because I consider myself Jewish, I feel more responsible and implicated in this conflict than in others. I worry about the people of South Sudan, but it does not concern me directly. To be sure, this is an unsatisfying position, lacking in moral clarity. Should not all lives matter? But this would be an abstraction. Not every conflict in the world concerns me so directly. At the same time, as I am reminded by people close to me, the laser focused attention on the Middle East alone may be driven by emotional, political, and historical reasons that have nothing to do with the nature of the conflict itself. Rather, what is at play is the singular importance of the Middle East to our collective imagination, our traditions, our religions, and our hopes for the future. It is also a sign of the moment in human history, a history infused with apocalyptic urgency, where every battle – but especially battles over rights, presence, and dominance in the Holy Land – seems to be conducted as a kind of last battle, a Gog and Magog, even though the finality has nothing to do with the expectation that, in the end, there will be a new heaven and a new earth. At the end of the Anthropocene, there will be only wasteland and destruction. All wars being conducted now and that will take place in the near future are battles for control over the scarce resources left after humans have degraded the planet beyond its capacity to sustain the wasteful ways of the west. We must decide whether under these circumstances we still believe that what it means to be human is to put an equality sign between oneself and others, or whether the death of others (literally, or in terms of access to the fundamentals of a human life in peace and dignity) is a calculated risk we are willing to take to save our kith and kin. In other words, what we see unfolding here and elsewhere is a return to tribal warfare that limits humanity to yourself and your own people. 

Putting an equality sign between oneself and others is work. We are not the same, nor does equality mean sameness. Men and women, black and white, trans and cis, Jew and Christian, Hindu and Muslim are not the same. What then does it mean to put an equality sign between oneself and others? The formula A=B states, in form of a general norm, that the universal (A) always stands in a necessary relation to the particular (B). If the particular (B) comes first (B=), equating it with A subsumes it under a universal (=A). We see that the order matters. When we say, Love thy neighbor, for he is like you, we start from a B (the neighbor), equating her with ourselves (A), and we do so under the norm of love (=). B=A means to see the other as equal to us. This neither denies that, in our own minds, we always come first, nor does it allow us to stand in isolation. Even though we are not the same, we are to love because we are equal. The formula expresses in abstract terms what is always already the case: our neighbor is like us. Hence, we must put an equality sign between ourselves and others. Everything else is wrong.  

Modern political theory (Spinoza, Hobbes) starts from the natural right of each existent to strive for self-preservation, to strive to persist in one's being as best one can. Since this supposedly leads to a state of perpetual warfare we agree to relinquish some of our rights to some form of government that, in exchange, uses the power accumulated by way of every citizen having relinquished some of their natural rights to protect the lives of citizens from being subject to one another’s whim and violence. This simple model of the social contract seems to have every single individual look toward the state as the sole actor in the mitigation of conflict between individuals and groups. In fact, it does not even consider the possibility of groups acting as aggregates of particular interests. For Spinoza, the weakness of this model is mitigated by the religion of the prophets and the apostles who preach love of God and love of neighbor, that is, by the need to put an equality sign between oneself and others. As Nancy Levene reminds us in her perceptive book on Spinoza, man is not just wolf but also god to man. This doesn’t sound like much, but if Abe was right – and his views were backed up by the kind of experience that most of us have been spared – it might make all the difference. To see the other as not the same but equal to myself is to set oneself a task, namely, the task of looking at the other as real, as worthy of more than mere life (though that’s already a start), as equally endowed with natural rights and as justified as I am to seek to enjoy a life of safety and happiness. Now, this sounds a lot like the preamble to the US Declaration of Independence, where it says, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” These words are a confession of faith. They put an equality sign between all men and they ground this equality in the belief in creation. Why “creation?” Does it mean that we are dealing with a religious creed? I can assure you that Abe was not a believer. This is not what he had in mind. He loved poetry and music but he was also a hard-nosed scientist who admired Bertrand Russell. What he was speaking of was not the traditional view that human rights are grounded in divine creation or in natural equality as its equivalent. He was aware of the fact that modern evolutionary science vitiates against the idea of equality. Nor did he ignore that people first and foremost act out of self-interest. It would be quite silly to assume that words can turn us into altruists. This Holocaust survivor from Sosnoviec in Poland cried tears of sublime relief when he arrived in Tel Aviv for the first time and saw a Jewish soldier with a gun. What he saw as well, however, was that Israel could not win an endless war aimed to suppress the desire of the Palestinian people to live in dignity. Putting an equality sign between himself and others did not mean to love your enemy. But, much like Yitzhak Rabin, he understood that it would be stupid and shortsighted not to respect your enemy. He worried about the future of the Jewish state. What matters most to me right now is that, for Abe and others, the future was something that could, should, and must be forged by us. That there was a future, and if we screwed it up, it was our own responsibility.

In view of the atrocities committed by the Israelis in Gaza, to be human means to imagine the future, a future where Israelis and Palestinians can both persist and live in peace and dignity. Israelis cannot and must not decide on behalf of the Palestinians but they ought to act in a way that envisages a future where both communities can live and thrive. To put an inequality sign between yourself and others is foolish and shortsighted. It might work. But it will destroy one’s own humanity. 

Stop the Genocide!

After eighteen month of war, with over 50,000 Palestinians dead, most of them women, children, and the elderly and countless wounded and maimed, infrastructure and housing stock widely destroyed, and the remaining population of the Gaza Strip traumatized and starving, we are facing a climate where even stating basic facts seems no longer possible without fear of persecution. 

Instead of an extension of the ceasefire and negotiations for release of the remaining hostages, we are seeing a renewal and escalation of violence pursued by an Israeli government that ignores its own people and shunts aside the urgent calls by thousands of reservists to end the war and bring back the hostages. 

Meanwhile, the US government aids and abets the Israeli right wing regime by labeling legitimate protests domestic terrorism and a threat to the security of this country. Abusing the International Holocaust Remembrance Association definition of anti-Semitism, the government is going after students, depriving them of due process and first amendment rights, revoking their visas, and unlawfully abducts and detains them. Criticism of Israel and vocal calls for an end to war on Palestinian civilians and the recognition of Palestinian rights are turned into un-American activities, with the clear aim to silence our students while gratuitously dismantling our institutions of higher education. 

At such a time, those of us secure in their rights as citizens and committed to the Torah's commandment to love the stranger must raise our voices on behalf of those silenced by fear and repression of speech. We must restore moral clarity and say it loudly and clearly: not in our name!

We cannot sit down and celebrate the Passover this week, remembering our own liberation from slavery, without looking toward a different, better future for all, Jews, Muslims, Christians, Druze and others, in the Holy Land. 

All people, individually and collectively, have rights, rights proclaimed and protected by international law. We all have the right to life, liberty, shelter, protection from violence, and everything else we all need to live in dignity and safety. 

Depriving the population of Gaza or the West Bank of these rights and threatening them with whole-sale expulsion or deportation has a name. It is called genocide.

If you're not sure what that term refers to, here, from the UN Convention on Genocide website, is its internationally recognized definition:

Definition

Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide

Article II

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

1. Killing members of the group;
2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Source: https://www.un.org/en/genocide-prevention/definition

Israel-Palestine: If You Want, the Future is Open

In 1914, the German Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen published an essay titled "Das Gottesreich." In English we might say, the Kinship of God. The essay appeared in a collection first released on November 9, 1913, at the meeting of the Federation of German Jews (Verband der Deutschen Juden). Other authors included Leo Baeck (1873-1956), a profound religious thinker and representative of German Jewry under the Nazis who survived internment in Theresienstadt, who wrote on "the creation of fellow man;" Simon Bernfeld (1860-1940), who perceptively wrote on modern Hebrew literature; the lawyer Bernhard Breslauer (1851-1928), a co-founder of the federation; the historian and folklorist Juda Bergmann (1874-1956); Max Eschelbacher (1880-1964), a jurist and rabbi; Moritz Güdemann (1835-1918), an older fellow-Breslau seminarian of Cohen's who served as chief rabbi of Vienna; Philipp Bloch (1841-1923), another Breslau seminary graduate, who wrote brilliant essays on medieval Jewish philosophy; and the extraordinary preacher Nehemias Nobel (1871-1922), famed for the brilliant intellectuals he attracted to his Frankfurt sermons, including Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig. The collection of essays was titled "Social Ethics in Judaism" and covered the topics of "the creation of fellow man" (Baeck), i.e., the biblical command to love your neighbor found in the Book of Leviticus and underscored by Jesus in the New Testament, a trope in Christian polemics against Judaism and hence a site of Jewish apologetics; "state and society" (Bernfeld) that anticipates Cohen's concluding reflections, arguing that ancient Judaism has no concept of the state except a state of radical freedom and equality of all of its members, a state where right confers might rather than the other way around; on "law and jurisprudence" (Breslauer) that places Jews and Judaism on the side of economic justice; "philanthropy" (Bergmann) as imitatio dei; traditional and modern views on the status of women in Judaism and in a changing society (Eschelbacher); education and Mendelssohnian educational reform in the spirit of an enlightened Judaism (Güdemann); popular and adult education (Bloch), an important subject at the time, along with the question of labor and social justice; the "Sabbath" (Nobel) as a symbol of human freedom and dignity; and finally Cohen's essay that attempts to bind the disparate themes together under the idea of divine rule. 

The book appeared ten years after the death of Theodor Herzl. Though Cohen is now often remembered as an anti-Zionist challenged by Martin Buber in their public exchange of 1915, the contributors were not then engaged in an open campaign against Zionism. The movement was no longer perceived as an immediate threat to the precarious status of European Jews, and the defense against anti-Semitism was once again directed at the genteel and liberal Protestant contempt for the Jews that gave rise to the Federation and similar institutions in the first place. Though Cohen could speak, earlier in the century, of a war of annihilation waged against the Jews, what he meant was spiritual degradation, the loss of identity, mass apostasy among the young trying to deal with a pervasive culture of contempt and  relentless pressure on Jews to convert in order to advance. The aim of the Federation was to instill renewed pride among the Jews and renew the spirit of Judaism through what they called the Wissenschaft des Judentums, a liberal project that acknowledged historical change while celebrating Jewish contributions to social progress and to the shaping of the very concepts we now take for granted: freedom from the relentless pressures of work, social justice, love of neighbor and the messianic orientation of history toward greater justice, greater equity, and the rule of law.

The liberal Jewish elite of that age represented a besieged community. But they could not know that, only two decades later, they would be marked for expropriation, stripped of civil rights, and eventually exposed to mob violence, deportation, and, finally, extinction. Blamed for everything, they were guilty of nothing. 

Or is there a relation between the attempt of German Jews to idealize the contributions of Judaism to modern concepts of equal rights and social justice and the destruction of European Jewry at the hand of regimes that not only marked the Jews for death but opposed the ideas they had so vigorously defended, that is, the ideas that had buoyed the American and French revolutions, the idea of liberty, equality, and the brotherhood of all men, regardless of race or creed? Can you blame the hatred of the defenseless on the defenseless, on their defense of the defenseless? Zionism arose as a different kind of defense, one that recognized the need for self-defense and appealed to the right of the Jews for self-determination. It became, in that sense like other nations, departing from the religious view of those who appealed to the better angels of humanity. There was also another kind of Zionism, rooted in what Buber called  "Hebrew humanism" and realized in a new kind of "concentrative" rather than expansive colonialism, one aiming at cooperation and coexistence rather than nationalism, exploitation, and exclusion. Are such views too good to be true? Could it have been otherwise? 

Modern politics has been riven between hope and fear, between belief in a just society, committed to universal human rights, and rank tribalism, driven by exclusive self-preservation, reducing politics to zero-sum, us-or-them, games. As we prepare to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, the mood here in Massachusetts is subdued and the foundations of the American experiment are shaking. Not that everything else in American history provides cause for celebration. The revolution had its birth defects, foremost among them its complete obliviousness to the evils of the slave trade. Abolition in the wake of an apparently unforgotten and unforgiven civil war was followed by the Jim-Crow-system with its euphemism of "separate but equal" enshrined into law by Plessy v. Ferguson, which casts its long shadow even today. American imperialism and the violent overthrow of foreign regimes during the Cold War remain among the causes of global instability, and the promise of the equal pursuit of happiness for all often seems mere propaganda assured to lull the disadvantaged into dreams of better days. Yet, now more than ever, we understand that words matter; ideals matter.

As the first phase of the cease fire in Gaza expires, the Netanyahu government has suspended all humanitarian aid, funded by many nations and agencies, from reaching the besieged population. Aside of the palpable cruelty of these measures during a period of religious fasting, withholding food as a means of exerting political pressure is a crime against humanity. If our German Jewish authors were right, it is also a blatant betrayal of the Jewish values incessantly invoked by the ruling right-wing coalition.  

At present, really since the late 1990's when an infamous memo circulated among Israeli and American neo-Conservatives that called for a "clean break" with the socialist past of the Jewish state and ushered in the end of the Oslo Process, the Jewish state is showing us the ugly face of Jewish tribalism, of us v. them, of exclusion, expulsion, stripping of rights, brutalization, internment, dehumanization, endless military occupation and random destruction. We have heard Israeli politicians openly calling for ethnic cleansing and a new Nakba. If not vigorously opposed by the international community, modern Israel is not immune to committing genocide. Like other regimes aiming to establish facts on the ground, Israel dresses up its brutalization of the Palestinians, piecemeal expropriation, harassment, deprivation of essential resources, including access to water, and other legal and extra-legal measures as security measures and acts of self-defense. New shipments of 2000-pound bombs and automatic rifles are on their way. We have seen how this kind of weaponry was used by the Netanyahu regime in the past. It is true that Hamas and their hateful rhetoric, their brutal repression of dissent, their bloodthirsty acts on and before October 7, 2023, have not helped. The voices of internal dissent are few and feeble. Yet, unless we unite in the interest of a different future and unless we recognize the Palestinians as political agents in their own right, more death, more brutalization, and more dehumanization is assured.

There are today, as there have been in the past, courageous people who are out on the streets, demonstrating for a different way, for an end to hostilities between Israel and the Palestinians, for a return of the captives (a Jewish duty), and a peaceful solution to the conflict. To be devoted to an ideal does not mean to be unrealistic. Idealism and realism are false opposites. Political agreements are possible. Compromise does not fall from heaven but is made. It can happen if we want. 

For Cohen, the kingship of God is grounded in the realization that all human states come and go. No state lasts, no state is the last. Statehood is not an end in itself. That's what God's kingship symbolizes: that it is always coming, always there for us to pursue. What does that mean? It means reaching for justice, equality, and the rule of law. No state that is based in self-preservation at the expense of others can prevail. The only rule that is eternal is the rule of the Messiah, the one who is coming, under whose rule humanity will be one. The more we are disturbed by the present, the more we ought to return to this ancient and ever-coming future. The future is open, if we want.

Kriegsziel: Frieden

Das Ziel des Krieges ist Frieden, so meinte Aristoteles. Vielleicht ist das zu einfach. Nicht jeder Krieg ist wie der andere. Es gibt Angriffs- und Verteidigungskriege, Präventivkriege und Vernichtungskriege. Krieg scheint oft eine Fortsetzung der Diplomatie mit anderen Mitteln. Dies setzt voraus, dass sich die Kriegsgegner auf Augenhöhe begegnen. Die internationale Regelung erlaubter und unerlaubter Kriegshandlungen zeigt hingegen, dass Kriege die im Frieden enden der Vergangenheit angehören. 

 

Es gibt internationale Abkommen, die zwar nicht den Krieg als solchen verdammen, aber den Angriff auf zivile Einrichtungen wie Krankenhäuser, Schulen und Gebetshäuser als Kriegsverbrechen bezeichnen. Außerdem wird der Einsatz von besonders hämischen Massenvernichtungswaffen, wie Giftgas, Phosphorbomben und andere Kampfstoffe international verurteilt. Jene Abkommen hinken den Tatsachen hinterher und haben wenig Einfluss auf die tatsächliche Kriegsführung im Zeitalter der Massenvernichtungswaffen. Es kommt immer wieder zum Einsatz solcher Kampfstoffe, oftmals sogar gegen die eigene Bevölkerung, und auch Krankenhäuser, Schulen und Gebetshäuser werden immer wieder angegriffen. Es scheint, als sei zwischen legitimer Kriegsführung und Terror nicht mehr zu unterscheiden. Überall zahlt die zivile Bevölkerung den Preis für politische Instabilität. Auf Krieg folgt hier oft kein Friede, sondern die Flucht ziviler Massen und die nachhaltige Destabilisierung ganzer Regionen. 

 

Friede, wie etwa der Westfälische Frieden, mit dem der Dreißigjährige Krieg beendet wurde, war nicht das Ende des Krieges in Europa. Aber er führte mit der berühmten Formel, cuius regio, eius religio, zum Ende der von der Reformation des 16ten Jahrhunderts ausgelösten Religionskriege und zur gegenseitigen Anerkennung der Souveränität und Autonomie zwischen protestantischen und katholischen Staaten und Fürstentümern des 17ten Jahrhunderts. Das Good Friday Agreement führte zur Beendung des Zwistes zwischen Protestanten und Katholiken in Nordirland, und die NATO Intervention im ethnischen Konflikt zwischen Serben und Kroaten im Balkan führte immerhin zu einer mittelfristigen Beruhigung der Zustände im ehemaligen Jugoslawien. Wie auch immer gespannt die Lage dort sein mag, die „ethnischen Säuberungen“ und Massaker der frühen 90er Jahre sind heute eine Sache der Vergangenheit.

 

Was sind die Kriegsziele, die Israel im Gazastreifen verfolgt, und mit welchen Mitteln wird dieser Krieg verfolgt? Der akute Kampf in und um Gaza wurde durch die Ereignisse vom 7. Oktober ausgelöst. Von Anfang an befürchteten viele Israelis, dass sich die Konfrontation zu einem Mehrfrontenkrieg entwickeln könnte. In der Westbank schwelten bereits seit Monaten die Unruhen, die von Siedlerübergriffen noch weiter geschürt werden. Geschosse fliegen an der Nordgrenze mit Syrien and dem Libanon und neuerdings mischen sich die von Iran gestützten Houthis vom Yemen aus im Süden Israels ein. Dennoch konzentriert sich die Aufmerksamkeit des israelischen Militärs auf den Gazastreifen, der somit auch den größten Anteil der Medienaufmerksamkeit für sich beansprucht. Nach einer kurzen humanitären Feuerpause, die von den Krieg führenden Parteien zum Zweck des Austausches einer Anzahl der von der Hamas und dem islamischen Dschihad am 7. Oktober entführten Menschen gegen die Freilassung palästinensischer Gefangener vereinbart worden war, ist der Krieg wieder in vollem Schwange. 

 

Das Kriegsziel? Es geht Israel, wie es scheint, nicht nur darum, den Hamas militärisch zu besiegen, zu entwaffnen und deren militärische Kapazität zu schwächen, sondern Israels erklärtes Ziel ist es, den Hamas als solchen zu beseitigen und als Faktor von jeder zukünftigen Regelung der Verhältnisse in Gaza auszuschalten. Die Rechtfertigung hierfür, im Gegensatz zu den kriegerischen Handlungen der Vergangenheit, als Israel sich damit zufrieden gab, der Bedrohung durch den Hamas die Spitze abzubrechen („den Rasen zu mähen“, wie man dazu in Israel sagte), ansonsten aber die Machtverhältnisse im Gazastreifen so beließ, wie sie sich seit dem Rückzug Israels aus dem Gazastreifen im Jahr 2005 entwickelt hatten, beruht auf der Tatsache, dass Hamas mittlerweile militärisch zu stark geworden ist, um weiterhin die Rolle zu spielen, die das Regime Netanyahu ihm zugedacht hatte. Statt wie bisher nur als Beweis zu dienen, dass die Palästinenser sich nicht als Friedenspartner eigneten, entwickelte sich der Hamas als ernst zu nehmender militärischer Gegner. Sehr zur allgemeinen Überraschung, so scheint es zumindest, und trotz aller Warnungen seitens der militärischen Überwachungseinheiten Vorort, die von den oberen Rängen des Militärs sowie von der zivilen Regierung ignoriert worden waren, gelang es dem Hamas, mit einer großen Anzahl von trainierten Kämpfern die viel gerühmte elektronisch überwachte Grenze zu Israel zu überrennen und mehr als tausend Israelis, darunter auch Gastarbeiter, Touristen und arabische Beduinen, zu massakrieren, die friedlich und nichts ahnend in den Kibbutzim an der Grenze lebten oder sich aus ganz Israel zu einem Musikfestival im Freien versammelt hatten. Ungefähr 200 Menschen, Alte wie Junge, Kranke und Gesunde, Männer, Frauen und Kinder, wurden als Geiseln in den Gazastreifen verschleppt und sind zum Teil bis heute dort, ohne dass man über ihren Zustand irgendetwas wüsste. Israels viel gerühmtes Militär und der weithin gefürchtete und geachtete militärische Geheimdienst hatten völlig versagt, genauso wie im Oktober 1973, als Israel am Großen Versöhnungstag an mehreren Fronten von den vereinten Kräften Ägyptens und Syriens überfallen wurde.^[1] 

 

Die Bilder des 7. Oktober haben in der israelischen Bevölkerung traumatisch gewirkt. Es war, als habe der Staat Israel die Menschen im Stich gelassen, der Staat, der den Zweck haben sollte, eine Wiederholung der Pogrome Osteuropas und der Shoah ein für alle Mal zu verhindern. Aus israelischer Sicht haben der Hamas und der Islamische Dschihad am 7. Oktober ihr wahres Gesicht gezeigt, nämlich das Gesicht von islamisch-faschistischen Nihilisten, die sich durch ihre Handlungen selbst aus der menschlichen Gemeinschaft ausgeschlossen haben. Die einzig sachgemäße Antwort hierauf schien der totale Krieg, mit dem Ziel den Hamas zu vernichten. Nur dann werde in Gaza der Friede wieder einkehren, wenn Hamas und Islamischer Dschihad beseitigt sind. So jedenfalls die israelische Rechtfertigung für den Krieg in Gaza. An die Befreiung der Geiseln wurde seitens der Regierung Netanyahu zunächst kein Gedanke verschwendet, und auch jetzt ist dieses Ziel, trotz aller Proteste, wieder in den Hintergrund getreten.

 

Die Kosten an Menschenleben und die Schäden an der zivilen Infrastruktur in Gaza sind überwältigend. Man wird sehen, ob es Israel gelingen wird, den gewünschten militärischen Sieg über Hamas zu erzielen und diese Gruppe als Bedrohung ein für alle Mal auszuschalten. Das Vorbild zu diesem Kampf bildet sicher die Kampagne der Vereinigten Staaten und ihrer Verbündeten gegen den Islamischen Staat in Syrien und Mesopotamien, oder andere von großer moralischer Klarheit gestützte Kriege, wie etwa der Krieg der Alliierten gegen Nazideutschland. Auch dort konnte, zumindest offiziell, nicht davon die Rede sein, die Nazis nach Beendigung des Krieges am Wiederaufbau Deutschlands zu beteiligen. 

 

Viele Menschen sehen den Konflikt in und um Gaza jedoch völlig anders. Überall auf der Welt gingen Menschen fast sofort nach Beginn der kriegerischen Handlungen in Gaza auf die Straße, um gegen Israels Versuch zu protestieren, den Konflikt mit militärischen Mitteln zu lösen. Man stellt die Kriegsziele Israels schon deshalb in Frage, weil nicht der Hamas, dafür aber die palästinensische Zivilbevölkerung den Preis zahlt. Hunderttausende von Menschen waren dazu verdammt, sich innerhalb des Gazastreifens in Sicherheit zu bringen. Die Grenze zu Ägypten wie zu Israel ist ihnen weitgehend versperrt. Alle Versuche Israels, ernst gemeint oder nicht, den Konflikt auf militärische Ziele einzuschränken, scheitern an der Tatsache, dass sich Waffenlager und Kommandozentren des Hamas hinter und unter zivilen Einrichtungen verbergen. So sieht der Kampf Israels mit und gegen den Hamas auf einmal aus wie ein Völkermord an den Palästinensern und die klägliche Abwehr dagegen wie jener Aufstand der Juden im Warschauer Ghetto, kurz vor dessen Liquidierung. So jedenfalls scheint es, wenn man die Bilder und Filme sieht, die auf den sozialen Medien weltweit verbreitet werden. Die Bevölkerung im Gazastreifen ist außergewöhnlich jung, und so sind zahllose Kinder unter den Toten und Verletzten. Wer gegen diesen Krieg protestiert, tut dies zumeist in der Überzeugung, dass hier Kriegsverbrechen begangen werden und dass der Hamas und wofür dieser steht durch militärische Gewalt nicht zur Strecke gebracht werden können. 

 

Aber wofür steht der Hamas? Was war deren Kriegsziel, als sie die zivilen Siedlungen auf der israelischen Seite der Grenze überfielen und unschuldige Männer, Frauen und Kinder massakrierten? Um was für eine Organisation handelt es sich hier? War der von langer Hand geplante Überfall eine spontane Initiative der militärischen Organisation oder war es die im Exil lebende zivile Führung, die diese Attacke anordnete? Erschien der Angriff deshalb opportun, weil man beobachtete, wie sehr die israelische Gesellschaft von der anhaltenden inneren politischen Krise abgelenkt und demoralisiert war und weil das israelische Militär mit den Unruhen in der Westbank zu tun hatte? War der Hamas überrascht vom Erfolg ihres präzedenzlosen Blitzkrieges? Rechneten sie damit, wie brutal das israelische Militär zurückschlagen würde, ohne Rücksicht auf Krankenhäuser, Schulen, Moscheen oder Einrichtungen der Vereinten Nationen? Oder war dieser Gegenschlag vielleicht genau, was sie erwartet hatten? Ein unvermeidliches Blutbad unter der Zivilbevölkerung, sodass es zu einer Sympathie für die Opfer des 7. Oktober erst gar nicht kommen konnte und die Weltöffentlichkeit sich sofort auf die Seite der Palästinenser schlug und den Hamas nicht mehr als Terrororganisation sah, sondern als Freiheitskämpfer bejubelte? War das die Absicht? Dann hat der Hamas gesiegt und wird auch nach Beendigung der Kampfhandlungen als Sieger aus einem Krieg hervorgehen, dem kein Friede folgen wird. 

 

Menschen, die bedingungslos für einen Waffenstillstand im Nahen Osten eintreten, die dazu aufrufen, an den Verhandlungstisch zurückzukehren, um endlich eine nachhaltige politische Regelung des Nahost Konflikts zu erzielen, setzen voraus, dass dieser Krieg für den Hamas und die Regierung Israels eine Fortsetzung der Diplomatie mit anderen Mitteln ist. Dass nur Diplomatie und nicht Krieg zur Beilegung des israelisch-palästinensischen Konflikts führen kann. Nur so könne es zu einem gerechten und dauernden Frieden zwischen den beiden Völkern kommen, die seit dem UN Teilungsbeschluss vom 29. November 1947 miteinander um dasselbe Land streiten. Das ist grundsätzlich wahr. Nur eine politische Lösung, mit der Israelis und Palästinenser leben können, nämlich zusammen leben können, kann diesen Konflikt beenden. Denn es handelt sich um einen Konflikt zwischen zwei Völkern, die die Herrschaft über ein und dasselbe Land für sich beanspruchen. 

 

Zur Zeit häufen sich jedoch täglich die Hindernisse auf dem Weg zu einer friedlichen und gerechten Lösung des Konflikts. Der Friede wird mit jedem potentiellen Friedensstifter erneut begraben, der unter dem Schutt erstickt, den das israelische Militär Tag um Tag und Stunde um Stunde vermehrt. Allerdings finde ich es erstaunlich, dass sich die Friedensappelle hauptsächlich, oder sogar ausschließlich, an die israelische Seite richten. Als hätten Hamas und Islamischer Dschihad nichts damit zu tun. Als ob sie es nicht waren, die diese besonders heftige Runde der Kampfhandlungen auslösten. Als ob sie nicht immer noch willkürlich Raketen auf die israelische Zivilbevölkerung abfeuerten. Als ob sie nicht an der Verbreitung von Bildern and Parolen beteiligt wären, die überall auf der Welt nicht nur Hass auf Israels Regierung lenken, was noch verständlich wäre, sondern Menschen dazu bringt, die Vernichtung des Staates Israel als eine gerechte und plausible Lösung des Konflikts zu propagieren. Als ob sie keine Geiseln gefangen hielten. Als ob sie für das Massaker vom 7. Oktober keine Rechenschaft abzulegen hätten. Als ob sie die legitimen Vertreter des palästinensischen Volkes wären und die Waffen im Namen der Beendigung der israelischen Besatzung der Westbank aufgenommen hätten. (Gaza ist seit dem unilateral disengagement Israels im Jahr 2005 nicht mehr besetztes Gebiet.) Wenn man in gut gemeinten Aufrufen zum Waffenstillstand stillschweigend über den Hamas und seine Geschwistergruppierungen hinweggeht, indem man verschweigt, wer diesen Krieg ausgelöst hat und von wem eine Bedrohung des Friedens zwischen Juden und Arabern in Israel und Palästina ausgeht, dann legitimiert und feiert man am Ende die Taten der Hamas oder man entschuldigt diese als Befreiungskampf gegen den bösen und allmächtigen Feind aller Menschen schwarzer und brauner Hautfarbe.

 

Dies ist der Grund weshalb ich nicht in den Ruf nach Waffenstillstand einstimmen kann. Hier wird zu schnell und ohne nachzudenken das Humanitäre mit dem Ideologischen vermischt. Handlungsfreiheit und Zurechnungsfähigkeit werden hier nur auf einer Seite gesehen. So macht man sich an den Taten dieser üblen Bande mit schuldig, einer Bande, die nichts baut, aber alles zerstört. Die niemanden befreit, sondern sogar die eigenen Leute mit Gewalt kontrolliert. Wenn der Hamas die Zukunft des palästinensischen Volkes darstellt, dann hat dieses Volk keine Zukunft. Das haben die Palästinenser nicht verdient. 

 

Damit soll nicht gesagt sein, dass Israel in Gaza einen Krieg zur Befreiung der Palästinenser führt. Selbst die Auffassung, dass Israel nach der etwaigen Beseitigung des Hamas für die Regelung der Verhältnisse in Gaza verantwortlich sei, halte ich für problematisch. Israel kann die Zukunft des palästinensischen Volkes nicht bestimmen. Das müssen die Palästinenser selbst tun. Israel kann sich auch nicht aussuchen, wer die Palästinenser repräsentiert.

 

Für die Israelis kam dieser Krieg zu einem äußerst ungünstigen Augenblick. Die von Benjamin Netanyahu geführte Regierungskoalition ist im Auge weiter Teile der israelischen Öffentlichkeit in Misskredit geraten. Netanyahu selbst hat immer noch ein Korruptionsverfahren am Hals. Das Militär sieht sich in der misslichen Lage, die von Mitgliedern der Regierungskoalition geförderten radikalen Siedler in der Westbank zu schützen, obwohl diese mit fast täglichen Provokationen der arabischen Bevölkerung das Leben zur Hölle machen. Und das Vertrauen der Mehrheit in die Regierung litt nachhaltigen Schaden durch die monatelange Auseinandersetzung um die Reform des israelischen Rechtssytems. Netanyahu vertritt eine gesellschaftspolitisch relevante Minderheit, die keine Chance sieht für einen jüdischen und demokratischen Staat, in dem Araber und andere Nichtjuden die gleichen Recht und Pflichten genießen wie jüdische Bürger. Die aus religiösen und nicht-religiösen Parteien zusammengeschmiedete Koalition verfolgt die Annektion der Westbank und die permanente Entrechtung der Araber, wenn nicht sogar deren „Transfer“ über die Grenze nach Jordanien. Die aggressive Siedlungspolitik, der Ausbau der bestehenden Siedlungen und die nachträgliche Legalisierung der illegalen „hill top settlements“, die diskriminierende Infrastruktur mit Straßen ohne militärische Kontrolle, auf der man sich nur mit einem israelischen Kennzeichen bewegen darf, bei gleichzeitig recht engmaschiger Kontrolle jeder Bewegung der palästinensischen Bevölkerung, all das trägt dazu bei, dass von einem politischen Friedensprozess auch auf israelischer Seite nicht die Rede sein kann. Am Zusammenbruch des Oslo-Prozesses sind die radikalen Kräfte auf beiden Seiten schuldig. So muss man sich nicht wundern, wenn sogar die ältesten Freunde Israels, Juden wie Nichtjuden an der Politik Israels verzweifeln. Es gibt auch ermutigende Zeichen. Viele Israelis, Juden wie Araber und andere, haben sich von Anfang für die Rückkehr der Entführten eingesetzt, oft gegen die Kriegsziele der eigenen Regierung. Viele Menschen hat man zum Schweigen gebracht, indem man ihnen vorwarf, die Sache des Feindes zu betreiben. Aber es waren die zahllosen Initiativen der zivilen Gesellschaft, nicht die Politiker und nicht das Militär, die sich um die Überlebenden kümmerten, Menschen abholten und sie in Sicherheit brachten, die für Nahrung und ärztliche Versorgung sorgten und anderes mehr. Es sind dieselben Menschen, die sich von ihrer Regierung nicht einschüchtern lassen, die sich um einen dauerhaften Frieden zwischen Israelis und Palästinenser:Innen bemühen und sich täglich im Süden Hebrons zwischen die arabischen Hirten und die radikalen jüdischen Siedler stellen. Es gibt diese Menschen auch in Gaza.

 

Der Schaden, den das Massaker vom 7. Oktober in Israel verursacht hat, und der Schaden, den das israelische Militär im Gazastreifen anrichtet, sind ungeheuerlich. Als bloße Zuschauer sind wir dazu verurteilt, untätig und mit offenem Munde starrend dem zuzusehen, was sich dort mit erbarmungsloser Notwendigkeit abspielt.  Man will protestieren und nach einem Ende der militärischen Übermacht rufen, die unter der palästinensischen Bevölkerung Tod und maßloses Leiden herstellt. Der Wille zum Protest erstickt jedoch angesichts der Welle der anti-jüdischen Propaganda, der man sich kaum entziehen kann und die von Leuten ahnungslos weiter verbreitet wird, die bis vor kurzem vielleicht noch nicht wussten, wo Palästina auf der Landkarte zu finden war. Es ist auch irgendwie verdächtig, weshalb ausgerechnet dieser Krieg solche Schlagzeilen macht, wodurch andere Krisen und Konflikte in Vergessenheit geraten. Wer profitiert eigentlich gerade davon?

 

Und doch lässt sich ein Ende denken, mit dem man leben könnte. Die weltweiten Proteste könnten die internationale Gemeinschaft dazu bewegen, auf die Kriegsparteien Druck auszuüben, der zu einem dauerhaften Waffenstillstand führt. Die israelische Regierungskoalition wird zusammenbrechen, weil das Kriegsziel, den Hamas auszuschalten, nicht erreicht wurde. Bei Neuwahlen kommt eine Mitte-links Koalition, geführt von Benny Gantz, an die Regierung, und zwar mit dem Mandat, sofortige und konkrete Verhandlungen über eine langfristige, gerechte und friedliche Lösung des Konflikts einzugehen. (Die Rechtsreform kommt vom Tisch. Neue Gesetze zur Sicherung der Demokratie und der Gleichheit vor dem Gesetz werden verabschiedet.) Anfangs führt auf der palästinensischen Seite die alte Garde der PLO die Verhandlungen und widmet sich dem Wiederaufbau Gazas. Dann kommt es zu Wahlen, bei denen Leute wie Hanan Ashrawi und der bis dahin aus israelischer Haft entlassene Marwan Barghouti die Führung erringen, da sie für die Einheit der palästinensischen Bevölkerung eintreten und kompromisslos für die Anerkennung ihrer politischen Rechte kämpfen. Sowohl Hamas als auch die PLO verzichten auf ihren Führungsanspruch.

 

Jenen, die meinen, dieser Krieg sei der Anfang vom Ende des zionistischen Siedlerregimes, möchte ich sagen: auf keinen Fall, und dennoch vielleicht. Israel wird bleiben. Die Juden sind Teil des Nahen Ostens, wie sie es schon immer waren. Sie werden nirgendwo anders hingehen. In dieser Hinsicht also: auf keinen Fall. Aber vielleicht lassen sich der maximalistische Neuzionismus der israelischen Rechten und der messianisch religiös-nationale Chauvinismus der radikalen Siedler irgendwie doch noch einholen, einschränken oder einlenken, sodass vielleicht auch hier ein produktiver, respektvoller und auf Gegenseitigkeit bedachter Stil in der israelischen Politik noch einmal eine Chance hat. Die Zukunft Israels, Palästinas und, so muss man hinzufügen, Jordaniens, hängt davon ab, ob sie auf einer Grundlage von gleichen Rechten und freier Wahl des Wohnsitzes für alle aufbaut, wie auch immer sich die politische Form unter den Bedingungen von kultureller Autonomie und wirtschaftlicher Produktionsgemeinschaft dieser nur als Föderation denkbaren Völker- und Staatengemeinschaft auf dem Gebiet des ehemaligen britischen Mandatsgebiets organisieren lässt. Europa bastelt ja auch noch an so etwas herum, aber hat doch schon Einiges zustande gebracht. Weshalb nicht der Nahe Osten?

 

^[1] Ob der Angriff vom Oktober 2023 zu denselben oder vergleichbaren Folgen fü wie der Yom Kippur Krieg von 1973 bleibt abzuwarten. Zu hoffen wäre es! Denn der Krieg von 1973, verlustreich wie er auf israelischer Seite war, führte zur Wiederherstellung der Ehre Ägyptens nach der Schlappe von 1967, was wiederum dazu führte, dass sich Israel und Ägypten auf Augenhöhe begegnen konnten. So kam es 1979 zum berühmten Friedensschluss zwischen Israel und Ägypten, der in Camp David durch den damaligen US Präsidenten Jimmy Carter vermittelt worden war.  

The Goal of War is Peace

The goal of war – according to Aristotle – is peace. Perhaps this is too simple. One war is not like the other, and given the technology of modern warfare, there may be other goals. Peace, such as the peace of Westphalia that created a kind of mutual recognition of sovereignty and autonomy between Protestant and Catholic states and principalities in seventeenth-century Europe, was not the end of warfare, but it put an end to the wars of religion triggered by the Protestant Reformation of the 16^th century. The Good Friday Agreement, much called into question by the impact of Brexit on the status of Northern Ireland, also put an end to sectarian warfare, as did the NATO intervention in the Balkans in the 1990s. Where states emerged from the partition of territory along sectarian or ethnic lines, as in Ireland, India, and Palestine, important questions were left unanswered and a certain instability was left behind by the British Empire precisely because of what may have seemed, at the time, a fair and peaceable solution. Instead, partition was followed by bloodshed, i.e., decades of warfare and, with the possible exception of Ireland, no real peace in sight. 

What is the goal of the war Israel is waging in and on Gaza? One goal must have been to keep this conflict limited to Gaza, but that does not seem to have succeeded. The war is flaring up, though still in a more limited scope, across the West Bank, and military action has been occurring on the border with Lebanon and Syria. Iranian missiles and drones are being fired from Yemen. While those other, so far more low-grade, conflicts are being managed by mostly defensive and some preventive action, the war on and in Gaza is full on. Ostensibly it is a war to not just defeat, disarm, and degrade the military capacity of Hamas but to destroy the very organization and with it of the possibility of it playing any future role in the affairs of Gaza. 

The justification for pursuing this goal of a “pacification” of Gaza now, rather than, as in the past, just taking the edge of Hamas, but keeping the organization intact and in place, is that it has become too strong to be tolerated. Much to everyone’s surprise, or so it seems, and despite all advance warnings, which were dismissed by the upper echelon of Israel’s military and by the political establishment, Hamas and its sister organizations who have been holding sway in Gaza since the elections of 2006 and the subsequent defenestration of the PLO, which amounted to a coup against the Palestinian National Authority, mustered a large number of fighters, overran the much taunted digital border, and wantonly massacred over a thousand Israelis living in kibbutzim along the border, as well as at an open air music festival, raping, pillaging, murdering, mutilating, and parading their over two-hundred captives, many of whom, weeks after October 7, are still held in Gaza. Israel’s vaunted military and secret service had failed, just as they had failed in October of 1973, when Israel was jointly attacked by Egypt and Syria on a religious holiday. The images from the massacre of October 7 are now seared into the Israeli psyche. Memories of the Holocaust were invoked. Hamas and Islamic Jihad had, in the Israeli perception, shown themselves for who they truly were: Islamo-fascist nihilists who placed themselves outside the human family. The only reasonable and proper response was a full on war with the goal of eliminating Hamas altogether. Only with Hamas and Islamic Jihad gone from Gaza can there be peace. This, at least, is the Israeli rationale for the war in Gaza. The costs in human lives and in damage to the civilian infrastructure of Gaza are staggering. Whether or not Israel can achieve military victory over Hamas and essentially destroy the group as a military organization, as the combined forces of the US and various allies did to the Islamic State in Mesopotamia and Syria remains to be seen. Many people around the world feel that this war is waged at the expense of the civilian population of Gaza, a predominantly young and therefore vulnerable population, and that military action will not defeat Hamas, or the ideas it stands for.

But what does Hamas stand for? What was it they had in mind when they attacked the border communities and massacred civilians? What kind of a group are we dealing with? Was the action ordered and condoned by the civilian leadership, most of which lives in exile, or was the military wing acting by itself, seizing the opportunity of Israeli society being distracted by the inner turmoil of the mass protests against the legal reforms pushed through by the government, inattentive because of the high holiday, and otherwise engaged because of the deteriorating security situation across the West Bank? Was their attack a ploy, a baiting of the Israelis, provoking the very military reaction that took place? What did they expect to happen? What were they thinking? Did they expect that parts of Gaza would be flattened by Israeli counterattacks, that not even hospitals, schools, and mosques would be safe from Israeli shells? Were they surprised by how Israel reacted? 

People who are calling for an immediate ceasefire in the Middle East, the return to the negotiating table, and a stable political settlement believe, perhaps, that for Hamas as for the government of Israel, this war is the continuation of diplomacy by different means. That diplomacy, not war should end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and that a just and lasting peace can and must be achieved between the two parties to a conflict caused by the partition of Palestine, based on the UNGA resolution of November 29, 1947. The obstacles to such a peaceful and equitable settlement are mounting with every day. Peace is buried with every potential peacemaker buried under the heaps of rubble into which Israeli military is turning section after section of the strip. What I find astounding is that appeals for a ceasefire are mostly if not exclusively directed at the Israelis. As if Hamas and Islamic Jihad had nothing to do with it. As if their actions had not provoked this war. As if they were not still firing random missiles at Israeli civilian settlements. As if they were not waging a clever war of disinformation and delegitimization against Israel. As if they did not still hold hostages. As if they needn’t give an account for the massacre of October 7. As if they were the legitimate representatives of the fight against Israeli occupation. By being eclipsed as agents in this war, by being obscured as the cause of this war and as a threat to peace and coexistence between Jews and Arabs, they are being legitimized and their actions celebrated as yet another war of liberation against the almighty evil oppressor of all black and brown people.

This is the reason why so many calls for a ceasefire are unhelpful. They mix the humanitarian with the ideological. They assign blame only to one side and thereby implicitly take the side of an evil cult that aims not to build but to destroy. If Hamas represents the future of the Palestinian people, their future is bleak. The Palestinian people clearly deserve better. This is not to say that Israel is waging this war to liberate the Palestinians from Hamas. The Israelis would be mistaken if they thought they are in a position to determine the political future of the Palestinian people. They cannot pick and choose who represents the Palestinians. 

The war came at the worst moment possible for the Israelis. The current government coalition led by Benjamin Netanyahu has been discredited in multiple ways, involving personal misconduct, which is being litigated in Israeli courts, involving a weakening of the defense infrastructure by pushing the interests of radical settlers who are part of the government itself, and by eroding the trust of the majority of the Israeli people who have been out on the streets demonstrating against the pending legal reforms for months. Worst of all, Netanyahu and his ilk see no future for a Jewish and democratic state of Israel other than one that permanently condemns the Arab and other non-Jewish citizens of Israel to second class citizenship. Their vision of a Greater Israel is not just incrementally realized by means of settlements and infrastructure projects across the West Bank but also pushed by constant harassment and provocation of the Arab population by the radical settlers, often with the tacit support of the military. It is therefore not surprising that even long-standing friends of Israel, Jews and non-Jews alike, are becoming frustrated with the policies of the State of Israel. As friends of Israel, others and I are heartened by the tremendous engagement of Israelis, Jewish, Arab, and other, for the return of the abducted and care for the survivors of the massacre, even when it goes against the war aims of their government; by people who speak truth to power even when their dissent is being stifled; by the many groups who foster coexistence; by Jews who draw attention to settler abuse, standing between their fellow Jews and the Arab shepherds and farmers of the South Hebron Hills.

The damage caused by the massacre in Israel and by the Israeli government in Gaza is mind-numbing. As mere spectators we seem condemned to watch, open-mouthed, what unfolds with grim necessity. Our readiness to protest and call for a halt to the military overreach and the death and depravation it causes to Palestinian lives is canceled out by the wave of anti-Israel propaganda spilling all over social media and parroted by people who until recently had barely an idea where Palestine was. One marvels at the fact that this crisis is spinning out of control while so many other conflicts are being forgotten or ignored. Who benefits from this disaster?

Here is a possible outcome that one could live with. The combined pressure of protests across the globe will move governments, however reluctantly, to put pressure on the warring parties (and not just on Israel), to enter into a long-term truce. Because Israel will have failed to remove Hamas, the government of Israel will fall and there will be new elections in which someone like Gantz will emerge with a mandate to move the needle of Israeli politics toward Israeli-Palestinian rapprochement. Initially, the old guard of the PLO will take the lead on the Palestinian side, but they will soon be eclipsed by people like Hanan Ashrawi and Marwan Barghouti who will insist on political rights, not just the faux authority and moneyed impotence that has haunted the PNA from the day it was established. It was the flawed rule and corruption of Arafat and his circle that gave rise to the protest vote that brought Hamas to power in the Gaza strip. A repeat of this debacle cannot be the solution to the leadership vacuum among the Palestinians that Hamas stepped in to fill.

To those who believe that this war is the beginning of the end of the “Zionist colonialist settler regime,” I would say: no and perhaps. Israel will persist. The Jews are part of the Middle East, as they have always been. They will not go away. In that sense, no. But perhaps the neo-Zionism of the Israeli right and the religious-national chauvinism of the radical settlers can be reined in and be replaced with something more productive, something based on mutual respect and equality. The future of Israel, Palestine, and one may add the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, if there is to be one, must be based on equal rights of movement and citizens’ rights for all in whatever political and economic federation will emerge from this highly problematic and unstable political morass. Europe did it after many centuries of warfare. Why shouldn’t the Middle East? 

Must We Take Sides?

In times of war, someone said, people tend to take sides. In this war, perhaps more so than in others, it feels difficult to take sides. Or rather, it comes too easily. Taking sides takes no imagination at all. Big words are at hand, accusatory ones, that cast the enemy as the enemy not only of a people but of the entire human race. Accusations of crimes of war were flying almost before the first rockets landed on either side. The prize in this war is not victory but victimhood. Who has the greater claim to it? Whose cause is just? This, at least, is not a new question. 

As always, the price of war is paid by ordinary people. War never distinguishes between good and bad people; like an ancient god, it kills the good along with the bad. Our cry for an end to this war should ring out loudly and it should ring out on behalf of all those many men and women, old and young that have no part in it. Why should the innocent suffer with the guilty? Why should the innocent suffer, while the wicked masters of this war prosper in safety and abundance? The wicked are casting this as a war between nations, a war of national self-defense against a nation and a movement that guns for the erasure of the other. Who, in such a war, is innocent if it is a matter of them or us? In such a war, they say, there is no innocent civilian protected by the laws of war. The entire nation is guilty and responsible, by their very existence, for one's own suffering. What does it mean to defend oneself against a mortal threat that emanates from another people, not just from their army or their leadership, where such even exists? It means total war. This, too, is not a novel idea in the history of war mongering. Where this narrative prevails, taking sides inevitably means to own the rhetoric of annihilation as well. Taking sides means to tar an entire people with one brush. 

Taking sides without aiding and abetting the rhetoric of annihilation and total war requires surgical precision in one's perception and in one's words. Such precision comes dearly in the heat of passion. But surgical precision is for analysts. What matters more than context and the long view, more than sociological or political perspectives, more than any intellectual answer at all, is our very human ability to relate to one another as human beings. Our resistance to demonization. Our ability to defy the pressure to identify with only one side; to defy the pressure to take sides.

This is not an argument for neutrality. It is not an argument at all. It is more of a reminder of the many times before when people of good will on both sides of a conflict were silenced by the drums of war. Where individuality was erased, and groupthink took over. Where personality was suffocated by slogans. I understand the urgency. I just don't feel that taking sides is what we should be doing right now. We don't need more realism. What we need is a kind of miracle. An uprising with one another, not against one another. A cross-border revolution, not a cross-border incursion, violent rectification, or revenge. A removal of the cancerous forces that poison the minds on both sides. In other words: imagination and resistance to being cast as actors in an interminable conflict. Where there are no sides to take, there will be no more war. 

Hamas Already Won

The massacre of October 7 left over 1400 Israelis brutally murdered. More than 200 people  have been kidnapped, including women, children, infants, elderly and infirm. These are facts, though I have seen media reports, including interviews with representatives of Hamas, the organization responsible for the massacre, that refuse to confirm these facts and call them Israeli propaganda. The Israeli military response was belated. As of this writing, it has extracted a heavy price in human lives on the Palestinian side. The numbers have been climbing every day. As of yesterday, October 27, according to Al Jazeera relying on figures provided by the Palestinian Health Ministry, 7326 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli military operations, more than 18,000 have been wounded, and over a million Palestinian residents of Gaza have lost their homes and have become refugees in the sealed-off territory. Some international aid has reached the Gaza Strip, but water, fuel, and electricity are running out, including in the hospitals that care for the wounded. 

If one starts counting from 1948, when Israel declared independence as a Jewish state in Palestine, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is now in its 75th year. From the beginning, this conflict was never just local and territorial, but regional, even global, and symbolic. At the same time, the price for this conflict has always been paid by human beings, that is, by fathers, mothers, and children who are Jewish, Muslim, and Christian, Arab, Druze, Bedouin, and many who identify in multiple or neither of these ways. Some communities are highly traditional in their way of life, like the Jewish Haredim, or they have lived their multi-generational lives in rural areas harassed by the needs of a military administration, like the Bedouin of the Southern Hebron Hills in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank, or they have been limited in movement and mobility, such as the Palestinians living in UNRWA-supported refugee camps, including in parts of Gaza. Meanwhile, generations of Jews from around the globe saw Israel as a haven and supported the state and its aspirations economically and spiritually, celebrating its astounding achievements while often turning a blind eye to the human cost of the ever-expanding footprint of the Jewish state in Palestine, paid by a population seen as hostile, unreasonable and ever acting against their own best interests, as conceived from afar. 

When violence erupts, early on in form of the armed struggle of the fedayeen, in the airplane abductions and terror attacks of the 1970s, in the series of wars between Israel and its neighboring states, in the first and second Intifada and, since then, in rocket attacks from Gaza or more recently in the new militarization of Palestinian youths in Jenin, world attention returns to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. With the massacre of October 7, the unresolved political conflict--one that Israelis have been saying can only be managed, not resolved--has returned to the front burner. 

Many declared their solidarity with Israel. "We stand with Israel" was projected onto the Brandenburg Gate. But before the utter devastation wreaked by the Hamas brigades and others, including the Islamic Jihad, could fully sink in, world opinion turned. Almost instantaneously the brief moment of the world's sympathy with the Jewish victims was overshadowed by the Israeli military response, which highlighted the power inequilibrium between Israel and the Palestinians. Israeli attacks on Gaza, which many governments around the world have condoned as a legitimate response to the horrendous massacre, not only produced thousands of Palestinian dead and wounded, but it erased all sympathy for and interest in Israeli suffering. The seemingly effortless incursion of Hamas and its allies into Israeli territory and their ability to escape virtually unhindered, except for cases of heroic local resistance, has already shattered the myth of Israel's military prowess, the ability of the Israeli state to protect its citizens from harm, of Israel representing an island of tranquility in a sea of hostile populations. Now, with hundreds of thousands of Palestinians again on the move, desperately seeking safety from an overpowering, relentless, and unceasing attack, with houses upon houses and neighborhoods upon neighborhoods in rubble, with people taking what they could, carrying their children, elderly and infirm on their backs and trying to save their lives--all taking place in front of a global audience and broadcast live on our social media--it is 1948 all over again. 

Israel has pledged to destroy Hamas, a reasonable pledge given the threat to Israeli security that has emanated from the Islamist group not just now but repeatedly. "Mowing the lawn" -- as some have called the previous military actions in Gaza -- no longer suffices. But by attempting to destroy Hamas by overwhelming military force unloaded on the Palestinian people in Gaza, Israel has fallen into a trap, one that Hamas had set for it. A ground war on the soil of Gaza would be fought at a huge human cost on both sides, and whether Israel can achieve victory is unclear, among other reasons because there's no clear scenario as to what victory would look like. There are indications that Israel is preparing for war on multiple fronts. Iran is threatening to mobilize its regional allies. US warships have moved in place. All around, this is not a comforting scenario.

But Hamas already won. They won when they breached the border with thousands of militants and returned largely unscathed. And they won again, when Israel acted with overwhelming force, ignoring the fate of the kidnapped, and effectively collapsing the difference between Hamas and the Palestinians. Israel has conferred a legitimacy on Hamas that it never enjoyed before. This is evident from the -- admittedly simplistic -- campaigns of solidarity with the Palestinians all around the globe. There is no longer a clear difference between a legitimate target of Israeli military operations and the Palestinian people. People therefore choose sides, and they are increasingly choosing the side of the Palestinian people victimized by Israel. Hamas won this one, too. The over 1400 dead and however many wounded and kidnapped Israeli men, women, and children are forgotten. The kidnapped are even forgotten by the Israeli government, which refuses to enter into a humanitarian ceasefire for the sake of hostage negotiations, while Hamas earns points by releasing a few captives. 

The emotions of various publics are triggered and stirred in various directions. There is the righteous anger: at one's own government that's on the wrong side of history; at those who just don't understand; at the eternal enemy. There is utter confusion: what sources of information can be trusted? Who is right? There is despair and frustration: why can't we/they just get along? There are the protests and the counter-protests: spontaneous, manufactured, for or against, repressed and disrupted. Mostly, the public watches helplessly, speechlessly, overwhelmed by the many things that seem to be going wrong at the same time. People feel (and are in fact) canceled and placed on the defensive for speaking their truth; we can barely listen to one another without the sense that the abyss of violent conflict will also destroy our friendships and personal relationships. Campuses are erupting. Categories are slipping and differences are obscured. The first victim in a war, someone said, is the truth. Another one seems to be nuance, the ability to distinguish and to differentiate, to hold more than one truth in one's head at the same time.

As to the regional context playing out, one usually forgotten when one thinks of the Israel-Palestine conflict as a match between two (equal or unequal) sides, the ongoing warming of relations between Israel and its Sunni-Arab neighbors, an uneasy alliance, but one that seems to hold for now, has those neighbors watch and see how Israel responds. The governments of Egypt, the Emirates, and Saudi Arabia--governed by repressive regimes, to put it mildly--while always claiming to speak on behalf of the Palestinians, are really interested--self-interested--in how Israel responds; after all the Sunni-Arab/Israeli détente is really about Iran and its allies: can Israel continue to serve as a buffer and a military counterweight to Iran or will it cave? It is this silent government to government language of regional diplomacy, aimed at maintaining a mutual deterrence that will keep the current regimes relevant and in place, that -- aside from other reasons -- the Israeli government's military response to the Hamas massacre is speaking to. The international community's demand--as expressed by the recent non-binding UN General Assembly call for a humanitarian ceasefire--will fall on deaf ears as long as the regional powers are expecting a strong military action, or as long as the newly formed emergency cabinet believes that that is what is expected of it.

Analysis such as offered here is cold comfort to people who just want the violence to stop. It is cold comfort to me. I want the violence to stop. I want the kidnapped to be returned. I want the Palestinian and Israeli communities to recover from this terrible moment and return to the negotiating table with the utmost seriousness and urgency. I want there to be a lasting peace and cooperation between Israelis and Palestinians, whatever the political form of such a collaboration. I know that it can be done, if only there is the political will to do it. Right now, the war mongers have the upper hand. Once again, the forces of evil have prevailed over the forces of good. The Israeli civil society that has been on the streets to prevent Israel from turning into just another authoritarian regime has been stabbed in the back by an alliance of the worst on both sides. Settler rampaging continues in the West Bank. Palestinian lives and livelihoods are being suffocated, starved, dishonored, insulted and destroyed on a daily basis. This must stop, and it could stop immediately. And yet, perhaps we must also remember, at the same time, that Israel, though militarily the stronger party, is not the only party. We must not allow Hamas to win the war of public opinion either. Netanyahu and his government do not represent Israel or the Jewish people. Neither does Hamas represent the Palestinian people, though right now it seems--for better or worse--that they do. 

Tisha b'Av 5783

The Ninth of Av is a solemn date on the Hebrew calendar. It marks the date when the first and second Jewish temple in Jerusalem were destroyed, events that took place more than half a millennium apart, the last one almost 2000 years ago. That the two events are commemorated on the same date is based on the tradition that they were destroyed on the same day, suggesting that it was not simply an act of the empires–first the Chaldean, then the Roman–that caused the destruction, but that those empires merely acted at the behest of the God of Israel, Ha-kadosh Baruch Hu.

The first temple, as the prophets attest, was destroyed either because Israel rejected the prophets and their dire warnings, or because of the sins of King Manasseh (who, at least in the Greek version of Scripture, gets to repent), or because "the fathers had eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth were set on edge." In any case, it was impossible to account for the destruction without blaming the people or the kings of Judah for the stiff-necked disobedience ("since I brought you out of the Land of Egypt, the house of slaves"), their refusal to worship YHWH alone, their worship of other gods, or other transgressions. Whatever the blame, responsibility for the destruction lay with God alone who merely made good on the threat he had issued long before, that the land was to "vomit them out," just as it had vomitted out the Amorites and the other Canaanite people, once the measure of their sins was full.

Eventually (as prophecied by Jeremiah), Jews returned from Babylon and, under Persian tutelage, restored the temple, though not the kingship of David. Henceforth, it was the temple and its priesthood that anchored Jewish existence and provided the ritual condition for Jewish communal life and collective thriving, at home and abroad. The shift in institutions from kingship to priesthood is reflected in the rewritten version of Chronicles, which eliminates the history of the northern kingdom, expurgates the story of David, retroactively establishes the Levites at the heart of the sacred ritual life, and elevates the deity venerated in Jerusalem to the status of God Almighty. This new reading of the ancient legacy of Judahites and Israelites (now contested between Jews and Samaritans), shaped – as it may have been – by the Jews of Babylonia under Persian rule, was firmly in place when Greek traveling ethnographers – before and in the wake of Alexander – extolled the Jews as the "Brahmins of Syria" and a "race of philosophers."

After the second temple was destroyed (in "AD 70"), the rabbis in charge of reorganizing Jewish life under direct Roman rule needed to answer the question, why. They also needed to answer the question of how long, a favorite question of apocalyptists who believed that the history of the holy people unfolded with the predictability of astronomic events. The rabbis of the Mishnah, the so-called Tannaim of the second and early third century responsible for aggregating the Oral Torah in encyclopedic and accessible terms, were no friends of apocalyptic fervor, even though some of the most venerated teachers of the previous generation had supported the abortive Bar Kochba Revolt of 132-135 CE and paid with their lives for their anti-Roman zeal. Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi, the prince in charge of the Jews of the Land of Israel (then: Syria-Palaestina) knew better. The Mishnah projects a deeply apolitical, non-nationalistic, irenic way of life for the "People of Israel." (I am sure not even then everyone was pleased.) 

This does not mean that the Tannaitic rabbis accepted the destruction of the temple as a fait accompli. One retained the memory of temple-related practices, one diligently preserved and studied the commandments pertaining to the temple services and priesthood, one compensated for the absence of sacrifices through prayer and other mitzvot, one prayed for the restoration of the temple, the ingathering of the exiles and the return of King David to be accomplished "speedily in our days," and hence one made every conceivable preparation for the sacrifices to be resumed the moment the opportunity was to arise and a return to Jerusalem and a rebuilding of the temple seemed possible. Meanwhile, the rabbis also taught, if you are in the middle of planting an apple tree and someone says, Messiah is at the gate, finish planting your apple tree and then go and greet Messiah.

When asked, why the temple was destroyed the second time around, their answer was equally sanguine and pragmatic. It was, they said, because of civil war, because disunity among the Jews. Today we might say, because of polarization.

As this year's Ninth of Av approaches –– where I am writing, the sun has yet to set –– civil-war-like confrontations are playing out in the Land of Israel. The Jews, so some say, have returned to the Land of Israel, and there are those among them whose messianic expectations are nourished by their interpretation of the historic events of our times. They hope and expect that the rebuilding of the Temple is imminent. They want to enshrine a love for the Third Temple in the hearts of all school-aged Jewish children. They believe that the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 was a divine miracle, a sign of divine providence acting on behalf of the Jews. That the conquest of the Temple Mount in June 1967, along with that of the ancient regions of Judea and Samaria, was "the beginning of the sprouting of our redemption." That settling the complete Land of Israel is a divine commandment and that negotiating away an inch of holy land conquered by the T'svah Haganah Le-yisrael, the IDF, in her wars with an implacable enemy out to destroy us, is a grievous sin that endangers the path toward redemption. 

Many left wing and liberal Jews in Israel and elsewhere once dismissed as marginal the Jewish Underground that planned to blow up the Dome of the Rock to hasten redemption, the Jewish Defense League that inspired the 1994 massacre at the Tomb of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs, and the young hooligans of La Familia and their ilk who have routinized attacks on Arab property and people and rendered anti-Arab hate-speech endemic. They thought all this was an exception, a passing phenomenon, a temporary aberration in the history of the Jewish people rendered harmless by the "most ethical army in the world" and neutralized by the "only democracy in the Middle East."  

This is now a matter of the past. People have woken up to the fact that the erstwhile underground is now in the government, that what could once be dismissed as a "cancer on Israeli society" – dangerous but operable – has metastasized and threatens to be lethal to Israeli democracy itself. As hundreds of thousands of Israelis have taken to the streets for more than six months, while the governing coalition is plowing ahead with legal reforms that, whatever one's political opinion, are rending asunder the social contract among the citizens of Israel, a Ninth of Av is upon us unlike any one we have seen in our lifetime.

In Israel, for those who fast on the Ninth of Av and for those who don't, the choice seems to be this: can we hold more than one truth in our heads and hearts at the same time? Can we pray for forgiveness and lament the destruction of the ancient Jewish temples, while also remembering Isaiah's prediction that Jerusalem was to become a house of prayer for all nations? Can we fervently hope for the coming of Messiah and believe, at the same time, that no real Messiah–or at least not one we should welcome at the gate–will want the Jews to rule at the cost and at the expense of Arab lives? Can we celebrate the ingathering of the exiles as the unprecedented miracle and sign of divine favor that it has been, without giving up the hope that swords will be beat into plough shares?

A man-made, man-willed beyt ha-miqdash can only lead to another hurban. We need Messiah, but we don't need the kind of messianism that led to the destruction of the holy temple in the first place. 

We pray for our friends in Israel who have been on the streets week after week, holding vigil out of hope and faith in a Jewish and democratic state of Israel. It may be time to think new, larger, more capacious thoughts; to repent and start from scratch. Not to fear those who use force! They are losing power even as they believe to have gained the upper hand. Believe in the prophets! לא בחייל ולא בכוח כי עם ברוחי אמר ה׳! The future is now! Revolutions happen. May the People of Israel seize the moment! May the citizens of Israel – all of them, regardless of race, religion, or sexual orientation – take back their country! May the Israeli experiment be renewed in the spirit of the Hebrew prophets! May democracy prevail!