Israel, Palestine, And Paths That Do Not Exist
I’ve spent the last month drafting and redrafting, ad infinitum, a whole thing about the horror and the complexity of this situation and of our collective response to it.
I was going to tell you about how strange and disorienting it is to be a progressive Jewish person these days, at once too Jewish for the from-the-river-to-the-sea revolutionaries and not Jewish enough for the flatten-Gaza hawks.
I was going to tell you how fortunate (and how wrong) you are to believe that of course no one really wants to kill all the Jews anymore; how “from the river to the sea” is shorthand for the destruction of Israel as a whole; how there exist many Jews for whom the Holocaust never really ended, for whom the genocide is only temporarily on hold thanks entirely to the existence of Israel, and for whom a threat to Israel is therefore an existential threat to all Jews everywhere.
I was going to point out the irony of progressive spaces effectively cleansing themselves of Jewish voices while insisting that antisemitism is a thing of the past and no longer worth worrying about, and of pro-Israel hawks reacting with shock and outrage at violent resistance while creating and supporting the conditions that make violent resistance inevitable.
I was going to wax eloquent about how the abused-to-abuser pipeline works just as well for peoples as it does for people; how the great tragedy of Israel is that its leadership remains unable to imagine a use for power other than how power has been used against it, seeking always to merely invert rather than subvert systems of domination; how the people of Palestine now stand at the precipice of the same tragedy.
I was going to stress the importance of doing the complicated dance of supporting the worthwhile goals of a movement (freedom for Palestinians, safety for Jews) while critiquing the problematic ideology and the animus that often surrounds those goals (hatred for Jews, contempt for Palestinians), of condemning multiple wrongdoings without drawing a moral equivalence between them, of making room for grief even (or especially) where the pain is necessary or inevitable.
I was going to remind you that it doesn’t make a difference to your connection to the land whether it’s your 3-greats-grandmother that’s buried in it or your 7-greats-grandmother, and that indigeneity isn’t zero sum, and that a people can be both the perpetrators and the victims of colonialism in ways that make a difference.
I was going to tell you that it’s as tempting as it is meaningless to try to assign blame for any given atrocity in this endless cycle of violence, and that the only meaning to be found in this moment is in fulfilling the shared responsibility for breaking that cycle.
I’m not going to do any of that.
The only thing that really matters about how we got here is that Palestine will pay any cost for freedom, and Israel will pay any cost for safety. These are the core traumas that shape their respective concerns, priorities, and behaviors.
No one is going to leave, and we serve no one by pretending that that’s a possible outcome. The only way to get a Palestinian-free Levant is to kill all of the Palestinians; the only way to get an Israeli-free Levant is to kill all of the Israelis. At that point, the only question is who can final solution the other first.
These, then, are the paths that do not exist: there is no path to Palestinian freedom that doesn’t include Jewish safety; there is no path to Jewish safety that doesn’t include Palestinian freedom.
When you call for Palestinian freedom but not for Jewish safety, you are calling for Jewish eradication; when you call for Jewish safety but not for Palestinian freedom, you are calling for Palestinian eradication.
Now, I’m not saying that there’s never a place for violence in resistance or in self-defense. But violence is like chemotherapy — it is a poison, and it always makes things worse and then only sometimes makes things better. We mustn’t use it except when we must, and hardly even then.
For my money, no state whose existence (its formation and/or its continuation) depends on the wholesale eradication or subjugation of an entire people has any business existing in the world. That “Israel has a right to exist” is a frequent refrain, but ultimately, no state has a right to exist. A state, as the locus of the coercive power of our collective violence, must always be justifying itself — not to other states but to its citizens, to the people over whom it has power, to the collective project of humanity. No winner of — no entrant in — any race to a final solution can then turn around and make a meaningful bid for such justification.
At the end of the day, the only beneficiaries of extremism are the extremists. The Hamas terror attacks only made the Israeli hawks more hawkish; the brutal and inexcusable Israeli reprisals only made it easier for Hamas to recruit.
So when I call for a free Palestine, I’m also calling for a Palestine free of the anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish sentiment that carries in itself the shape of a threat to Jewish safety. When I stand with Israel, I’m also demanding an Israel that has stopped acting out of fear and collective trauma, an Israel that doesn’t commit atrocities in my name or trample on the freedom or dignity of its cousins.
We owe it to ourselves to grow until our mouths can fit more than just the slogans and the convenient sound bites. Whatever side of this conflict you find yourself gravitating to, I implore you to include appropriate critique in your support. Call for a free Palestine, sure, but also condemn antisemitism (which is experiencing a dramatic and global surge). Call for a secure Israel, sure, but also condemn its brutal reprisals (which serve only to undermine its safety in the long term). Because antisemitism justifies Israeli doubling-down and endangers the people of Palestine, and anti-Palestinian sentiment justifies Hamas doubling-down and endangers the people of Israel.
I don’t know what the resolution of this conflict will or should look like. I’m not trying to peddle some vague “can’t we all just get along” platitudes. But what I do know is that if there is some sort of victory to be found in this conflict, it won’t be of the Israelis over the Palestinians or of the Palestinians over the Israelis.
Any victory here must be a victory over the conflict itself. The only path that exists to that victory must begin with a recognition that Palestinian freedom and Jewish safety are inextricable from each other. When we call for the one, we must also call for the other — today, they are one and the same.
