How To Respond To The Deepening Crisis In Gaza?
Start by getting off social media and educating yourself about the complex issues and histories at stake
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Last Sunday, when news began to filter out that Hamas terrorists had flooded across the Gaza border into Israel and were systematically murdering people, I was shocked and horrified. I am usually shocked and horrified when a group engages in a mass slaughter of civilians, goes house to house shooting people, pulls people out of their cars and then murder them, grabs people’s grandmothers and takes them hostage, and publishes videos of executions on Telegram.
Call me old-fashioned. And in case you are wondering if there is a word to describe such a mass casualty event, when it happens to Jews, it is called a “pogrom.” It may not surprise you that there some on the American left who seem to neither grasp this concept, nor care to think about what countenancing the death of several thousand Jews implies about their own moral imagination.
Recently, Israel gave Gaza’s over 2 million civilians 24 hours to get out. It isn’t enough time, and the clock has been ticking for hours. It is absolutely the case that Palestinians will die in droves for what Hamas has done. It is absolutely the case that the dispossession and brutality of the Israeli state and its right-wing political parties have created an atmosphere within which terror and terrorist organizations can thrive.
Latest reports suggest that Israel is already using some of the most destructive weapons at its command, nearly all of which are aimed at heavily populated areas, and has cut off food, water and fuel until the hostages are returned. Hamas has threatened to publicly execute hostages unless Israel signals each and every building it plans to destroy in advance, so that inhabitants can be evacuated.
It’s awful, truly awful. If it happens as we have been told, the planned strike on Gaza will count among the worst human rights calamities against a civilian population in modern history. But only fools could imagine that the complete destruction of Gaza would not follow a full-scale attack on Israel. Only in a blinkered, ideologically-bound world could anyone imagine that a state would respond to an attack on its citizens of this magnitude without a massive, defining counterattack.
The leadership of Hamas is many things, but it is not packed with fools. So, we have to assume that the terrorist attacks were planned to draw Israel into a massive response of the kind that turned world opinion against Russia’s Vladimir Putin and the Assad regime in Syria.
Without further ado, as we descend into the unthinkable over the course of the next few days, here are a few thoughts about how to proceed.
Do not get your news from Facebook and X. It won’t surprise you to learn that these platforms are currently rivers of misinformation, anger, hate, and trolling. But we know the disinformation problem is worse than usual right now (all combatants have social media teams that are pumping out propaganda) because the European Union (EU) has laws about this, and monitors content for violations. On Monday, EU commissioner Thierry Breton warned X’s Elon Musk that “the company’s handling of the unfolding conflict so far has raised doubts about its compliance” with content moderation laws.
According to CNN Business, “The warning letter highlights X’s potentially vast legal exposure as it battles a wave of bogus claims linked to the war that have been attributed to everything from fake White House press releases to false news reports and out-of-context videos from unrelated conflicts or even video games.”
More importantly for users here in the United States, the extremist postures that are highlighted on social media will not help you think clearly about this crisis. Instead, consider picking a few good sources beyond your daily news diet that feature thoughtful reporting, such as Al Jazeera, The Guardian, The Christian Science Monitor, and Just Security (which already has a couple of good features up about social media in wartime.) Friends tell me that Haaretz is the best source inside Israel.
Avoid framing your thinking around identifying who are the “innocent” victims in this conflict. Logically, deciding who is innocent makes other people available for punishment. But what exactly does it mean to be an “innocent” dead person as opposed to someone whose death can be justified? Who decides? At what age, for example, does a person cease to be automatically innocent? What actions, or thoughts, make someone “guilty” of supporting evil actions or policies determined by others? Isn’t all murder wrong in the end? Aren’t all assertions of “just war” a circumlocution of sorts? And are babies and children of any nationality or ethnicity inherently more innocent than their parents and grandparents, or soldiers who volunteered to be in harm’s way?
Assertions of innocence, particularly at this stage of a war, are invariably manipulative and serve only to prop up a political program. They are also riddled with propaganda: for example, there is no proof, as yet, that an early report of Hamas fighters beheading Israeli babies is true. Yet by narrating extremes of innocence (Israeli babies) and guilt (monstrous Hamas fighters) a false, or partially true, story of the first day of the slaughter evokes moral clarity about the larger story of this attack.
To elements of the American left, there are no innocent Israelis; conversely, all Palestinians, no matter what they have or have not done, are innocent. For example, the New York City chapter of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) sponsored a rally on October 8 in which they characterized the most significant mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust as “resistance.” Affiliate organizations of National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP) have also rationalized Hamas’s gruesome, well-organized attacks, blaming Israel’s policies for the death of their own citizens.
Assertions of collective guilt play a similar role to assertions of innocence. Thirty-five student organizations at Harvard University signed a letter that “hold[s] the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” The letter continues:
Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum. For the last two decades, millions of Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to live in an open-air prison. Israeli officials promise to “open the gates of hell,” and the massacres in Gaza have already commenced.
Palestinians in Gaza have no shelters for refuge and nowhere to escape. In the coming days, Palestinians will be forced to bear the full brunt of Israel’s violence.
The idea that college students can so casually dismiss the slaughter of civilians truly horrifies me, as does the implication that Israel should just overlook a bloody breach of its borders. These stories, which are coming out of many universities, remind me of the lone voices on the left who, after 9/11, announced that the people who died at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon deserved it: University of Colorado ethnic studies professor Ward Churchill compared the dead who worked for financial firms to Nazi war criminals.
You don’t have to “stand with” anyone or anything in order to be morally and intellectually engaged with this calamity. Some of the most corrosive effects of social media on our political culture include the mandate to know what you think instantly and speak out about it in print. Who made these rules? Who decided that someone who does not condemn an action must support it?
Sure, there are some of us who are well-informed, passionate, and activist on behalf of Israel and the various political entities that claim to represent the Palestinian people. They can speak out effectively. Read them, listen to them, enter the thread and ask them questions.
As for the rest of us? Invariably, taking a stand means avoiding nuance, complexity, and contradiction in favor of conforming to a position that is more ideological than anything else. It’s really ok to have empathy for people who are injured, dead, grieving, or in danger, and not have a self-righteous and invariably under-informed position.
Mourn all the dead, and say a prayer for all who mourn.
Whatever you do, if you are a teacher, don’t subject your students to mindless, performative lessons that incite antisemitism. Does it need to be said that outrage never saved a single life, promoting ones own politics as pedagogy is just wrong, and targeting students as Jews is antisemitic? Apparently so. New York Times opinion writer Pamela Paul reports that at Stanford:
A lecturer in one class that day asked Jewish students to raise their hands, then took one of the Jewish student’s belongings and told him to stand apart from everyone else, saying that was what the Israelis did to the Palestinians, a student who was in the class told me. In a later section, another student in the class told me, he turned to an Israeli student and asked how many Jews died in the Holocaust. When that student said six million, the teacher replied, many more millions died in colonization, which is what he said Israel was doing to the Palestinians. He then asked everyone to say where they were from and depending on the answer, he told them whether they were colonized or colonizer. When a student said, “Israeli,” he called the student a colonizer. (The lecturer did not respond to an email request for comment.)
Regrettably, Paul did not cite a second source for these events, but the Forward did, adding that the instructor has been dismissed. My question: why do none of these universities, with all the DEI apparatus they have built up over the years, do real trainings about how not to target students by race, religion, or ethnicity?
Be careful about what language you use. Referring to either terrorists or military combatants as “animals,” “barbaric,” or any other term that implies inhumanity and unreason not only opens the door to racism, but steps right across the threshold. Similarly, phrases like “Zionism equals racism/fascism” are not only incorrect, but also cruel, ahistorical and dehumanizing.
Whatever you do, if at all possible, don’t speak to others in anger. Words matter, particularly when they separate human beings, whole societies, and cultures into categories that are, and are not, deserving of life and respect.
How are you holding yourself in this moment? Are your friends and family safe? What are your dilemmas and strategies? How are you staying connected, even in conflict? Please:
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Short takes:
At Popular Information, Judd Legum reports that “Last week, Jonathan Stickland — president of the far-right Defend Texas Liberty PAC and a former state representative — met with notorious white supremacist Nick Fuentes and other right-wing extremists. The meeting, first reported by the Texas Tribune, lasted `for several hours’ at the headquarters of Pale Horse Strategies, a political consulting group owned by Stickland.” Republican House Speaker Dade Phelan has condemned this meeting with Fuentes, among other things a Holocaust denier, during a time that Israel is under attack. Seems uncontroversial, right? Think again: this is Texas, this is Trump’s GOP, and most of the politicians who received donations from Defend Texas Liberty PAC plan to keep the money. (October 12, 2023)
Democrats are the party of unions, while the GOP is the party of working people who aren’t allowed to be in a union because the Republican party has made it difficult to illegal. In that spirit, Senator John Fetterman (D-PA) and Representative Susan Wild (D, PA-07) walked the picket line with their constituents in Bucks County, PA yesterday. “Fetterman’s move to join the striking UAW workers in Macungie comes after visiting picket lines in Langhorne in Bucks County earlier this month and in Wayne, Michigan when the strike began last month,” writes Kim Lyons of City & State Pennsylvania. “Wild, who represents the Lehigh Valley area in Congress, showed her support for the striking UAW Local 677 workers Tuesday as well.” In case you were wondering, Fetterman was wearing a hoodie and shorts; Wild was sporting jeans and a windbreaker. (October 10, 2023)
Last week, a court-ordered redistricting in Alabama means that a second district in that state is the Democrats’ to lose. As Dave Wasserman writes at The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter, “Under the new lines, the revamped 2nd District takes in all of Montgomery and hooks south into Mobile, for a seat that's 50.9% Black by total population and 49.8% Black by voting age population. It would have voted Biden +12 in 2020, versus Trump +29 under the current GOP-drawn lines.” Contenders for the seat are lining up, including Mayor Steven Reed and State Senator Kirk Hatcher of Montgomery, as well as Mobile’s State Senator Vivian Figures and State Representaitve Napoleon Bracy. State Senator Merika Coleman and State Representative Juandalynn Givan of Birmingham, neither of whom currently live in the district, may be lining up moving trucks. (October 5, 2023)
Claire thank you so much
This was a breath of fresh air and much needed honesty and intellectual integrity
Good piece--thank you for the sanity.