Nailing My Flag To The Mast

Children Of Israel Are Never Alone

Hey, beloved tribe.

After a week away in a national park, where I had space to go inside and find clarity, I came back with a conviction:

As much as I’ve loved speaking here to other Jews (which I intend to keep doing with no less passion!), it’s not enough, and I began feeling the need to say on record to all what I say to my Jewish friends in private spaces. It seriously felt like coming out of a closet of sorts when I posted that I am not morally opposed to Israel permanently annexing the Gaza Strip and displacing the Gazans to other countries, likely by incentivizing those countries (economically) to take them.

Something incredible happened when I posted that, along with guidelines for the public conversation I was agreeing to have. Almost across the board, people adhered to those guidelines. And in a tsunami of 485 comments (and counting)? MAYBE 1% flaunted those guidelines. As in literally 3 or 4 out of nearly 500.

The rest created a talmudic discussion of epic proportions. A huge number of people agreed with me. A huge number of people disagreed with me. Almost no one insisted on revoking my decent human being credentials. In fact, the only one who veered into a hot personal call-out was me, in response to a single person I wildly admire, and even that led to an extraordinary exchange, both public and private, that I want to write about next week, and maybe even in a long-form essay for publication elsewhere.

For now, I’m just going to share that post and the one I wrote by way of follow-up today. I welcome the thoughts of everyone here as well. I ask everyone to adhere to the same guidelines as I laid down on Facebook.

My post of earlier this week:

A day or two ago, I scandalized a lot of people by saying that I would not be morally opposed to Israel taking back the Gaza Strip.

If you disagree with me, I would truly be grateful to know how you think about the following moral calculus. Please tell me if you think I have a blind spot.

Hamas has our hostages. There is nothing forceful we can do to bring them back. Hamas would be delighted if every last child in Gaza starved to death in front of international cameras. That would be their ultimate gratification. And that would be the ultimate tragedy for the Jewish nation: to become a people willing to starve children.

We also cannot keep incentivizing them to take our hostages. We can't keep trading a thousand Palestinian prisoners for a single Jew, as Israel did with Gilad Shalit. We can't keep incentivizing and rewarding them for October 7th at all.

We also cannot leave our hostages there. That would be breaking Israel's most sacred pact with her people, and it would deter any mother's willingness to let their child serve in the IDF.

While I would never prescribe policy to Israel, as I am not Israeli, if I'm honest about my private thoughts, I can't see a better or even a viable alternative to Israel's **eventual** reclamation of the Gaza Strip.

I support the Israelis who want the hostages back now at any cost and believe that ending the war will bring that about. I hope they're right about that. It's clear to me that Israel can't sustain any more war at this moment. The IDF is demoralized, exhausted and in a most alarming individual trend, suicidal. Israel doesn't trust Netanyahu, and rightly so. His right wing cabinet are grotesque people. His leadership has been fatally compromised.

But eventually, for whatever one person's private belief is worth, I think nothing makes more sense than for Israel to reclaim the Strip. Maybe over 10 years. Incentivizing other countries to take 200,000 a year. You can call it ethnic cleansing; you can call me evil. But an enemy like Hamas does not always permit us the luxury of moral purity and I can live with the displacement of a people that has spent the two decades following Israel's withdrawal constructing a $2.6B, 400-mile terror complex beneath every millimeter of the 25-mile Strip. At the expense of civilian infrastructure. At the expense of nation-building. While terrorizing their own people with grotesque barbarism. While burning alive the children of the people most ardently opposed to Netanyahu, the people most passionately committed to Palestinian advocacy. If that doesn't merit forfeiture of the land, what does?

I'm sorry: I really don't think Israel can afford to appease a Western left that passes confident sanctimonious judgments from a sheltered academic perch while having no real grasp of the complexity of these issues. A Western left that absolutely does not give one single fuck about Jewish lives.

To me, this is just common sense. I was talking about myself as much as anyone else in my post about progressive dogma. It's almost impossibly hard to break from a lifetime of progressive dogma myself, when I still identify as a progressive in nearly every other arena. But I believe that progressive ideals very very tragically aren't going to serve us with an enemy as sociopathic, Palestinian-exploiting and death-loving as Hamas.

I am open to discussing this, even publicly, with anyone who's willing to conduct the conversation within the following guidelines:

1. No anti-Zionism as an overarching principle. If you want to dismantle Israel as a Jewish state, you obviously have every perfect right to your perspective, but I am not going to engage with you or host you here.

2. No racist generalizations such as "There are no innocent Palestinians".

3. No Trump supporters. If you're a Trump supporter, you really shouldn't be on my page, no matter how much we both love Israel. We all have boundaries and those are mine. Please don't waste time on this thread berating me about my Never Trump stance. I'll need to delete and block.

4. No incivility or personal attacks or relentless self-aggrandizing moral posturing, because that will degrade the conversation and devolve into a useless clusterfuck.

My post of today:

After a week of provocative posts and exhausting (and yet deeply valuable) mostly-Jewish arguments, I want to reiterate my positions so they can't be misunderstood.

I am absolutely not okay with mass starvation as a military strategy.

I am absolutely against Netanyahu and the likes of Smotrich and Ben-Gvir continuing to helm a country that doesn't trust them. Much of the country rightly feels they have no moral standing to lead and I agree with them.

I am absolutely in favor of a long reprieve from this war. I am absolutely in favor of recovering our hostages at any cost.

But in the long-term. Morally speaking, not strategically speaking. I am bucking the progressive notion that Israel annexing the Strip permanently, and displacing all the Gazans there to other countries, would be a cardinal moral atrocity.

I don't see it that way and I will stand by that statement until or unless I'm convinced otherwise. I feel the opposite way: that expecting and coercing Israel to live with this sociopathic barbarity on her border is a moral atrocity. That signing on for an eternal surveillance, blockade, wall, checkpoints, etc. at the ongoing eternal expense of Palestinian and Jewish lives and souls would be a moral atrocity. I see the displacement and geographic dispersal of a culture too far gone in its suicidal and genocidal indoctrination as the least terrible option in a range of terrible options.

As a social aside, here's something the western progressive left should understand:

On one side, we have you -- who are absolutely no better than we are by any measure, I guarantee it -- telling us we're morally reprehensible.

On the other side, we have Hamas telling us they're coming for our children.

Guess which message is more compelling to us? That is never going to change.

You can drive Jews away from your political bloc by continuing to scorch us with your all-confident blinkered sanctimony and outright scapegoating and hatred, or you can listen to us and accept -- as you do with every other minority -- that we know more about our existential reality than you do.

If you want to read the interminable discussion that followed each, my Facebook posts are public. We don’t even need to be Facebook friends for you to view them.

And again, I’d welcome your thoughts here as well.

For now, I wish you a restful and restorative Sabbath. I’ll be back early next week. As always, I’m sending heartfelt love and strength in the meantime.

Shabbat Shalom.

Am Yisrael Chai.