Hey, tribe.
So last night, I was messaging with a Facebook friend who thinks what Israel is doing in Gaza is unjustifiable.
I was happy to talk with him because he’s a person of essential goodwill and he knows the region’s history well.
Me: “So what do you think Israel should do instead?”
Him: “Make a bold, unilateral bid for a permanent, peaceful resolution.”
Me: “Israel’s total withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 was a bold, unilateral bid for peace. Look how well that went. Look what Hamas did in response. And now you’re saying — after the October 7th massacre — that it’s on Israel to make another one? Come on.”
Him: “Hamas can be squeezed. There are a lot of pieces on the chess board. The fact is that Netanyahu doesn’t want peace or a two-state settlement. Neither does Hamas. Those are the pieces that need to be removed from the center of the board.”
Me: “Israel can’t leave the terror tunnels there. They will let Hamas pop up beneath Israeli kindergartens before long. And if Israel doesn’t take Hamas out, they're not going to go away. They are willing to kill themselves and their own children to keep Israel from existing. There is no negotiation with that.”
Him: “The isolation that Israel is bringing on itself at this point is going to hurt.”
Me: “In the history of humankind, Jews have never had the world’s goodwill. Fortunately we are well-trained in doing without it.”
Him: “That’s suicidal nonsense. Oppressed people make alliances. Jews, Black folks, Indians, Palestinians… that’s how you survive and advance.”
Me: “Yes, oppressed people form alliances. Jews are at the forefront of every social justice movement there is. It never seems to come back to us. Oh, well. We still get to be us. That’s worth everything.”
I want you to know that I did not mean that in a flippant way, but a literal one. I really believe that. I love being Jewish and I love other Jews more than I’ll ever be able to explain. Our identity and our community give me inexpressible joy, in spite of all we deal with.
This brings me to another accusation I’ve fielded lately. At least three times in the last day or two, someone has reproached me for being “a Jew first, a human being second.”
“You and I are as different on this as can be,” the most recent critic wrote to me. “I refuse to be partisan: I am a human before I am a Jew.”
This reminded me of the time Henry Kissinger, the US Secretary of State, warned Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir not to expect any special favors from him just because he was Jewish.
“You must remember,” he told her, “that I am an American first, the U.S. Secretary of State second, and a Jew third.”
“That’s okay, Henry,” she replied. “You forget that in Israel, we read from right to left.”
I thought of saying something to the same effect, but since he’s Israeli and I’m American, I ended up saying this instead:
“Good luck with that I'm-a-human-before-a-Jew stance. My humanity is inextricable from my Jewishness. And here's a little parting joke that's actually not a joke at all:
A partisan Jew and a non-partisan Jew walk into a bar.
The bartender says: ‘We don't serve Jews here.’”
Here’s where I confess I have a rather ungenerous opinion of Jews who stand with those who seek our destruction — Jews who take relentless issue with every single thing Israel says or does while giving Hamas a free pass.
I think of them as “pick me” Jews.
And I wonder if it’s some kind of inherited trauma response — some kind of second-generation Stockholm Syndrome. It’s as if they hold a latent, maybe even unconscious, belief that if they’re one of the “good ones,” they’ll be spared the fate of the rest of us.
But I’m here to tell you that if you’re Jewish, there’s not a single thing you can do or say that will make you safe from anti-Semitism.
The Nazis killed Jewish converts to Christianity. They killed utterly secular, non-observant, Christmas-tree-decorating Jewish citizens who were so assimilated into mainstream German society that they didn’t even consider themselves Jewish anymore. They killed Jews who identified as “Germans first.”
And on October 7th, Hamas overwhelmingly killed the Jews in Israel who were the most devoted to Palestinian justice and the dream of peaceful coexistence. Jews who fiercely protested the Israeli government. Jews who lived their lives in service to their Palestinian neighbors, driving Gazan children to medical appointments on a voluntary basis and making peace activism the center of their lives.
The most surreal aspect of this is that it wasn’t an accident. If you thought Hamas’ murder spree on 10/7 was just blind and random, and that later, they might feel at least a twinge of dismay when they realized they’d killed the people most devoted to fighting on their behalf, you would be sadly mistaken. In a recent podcast conversation between author Dan Senor and formidable scholar Dr. Einat Wilf, whom I mentioned yesterday, the latter stated that the precise opposite was true: that Hamas’ targets that day were chosen deliberately, to drive home the point that absolutely no overture Israelis could ever make would be acceptable to them.
Wilf recalls absorbing that point years ago, when she was first disabused of the idealistic beliefs she’d held as a passionate member of the Israeli left.
“From the perspective of whatever remained of the Israeli left after the Second Intifada, the thinking was that still, the reason that we don’t have peace… is that Israel didn’t try hard enough, Israel didn’t offer enough — essentially that it was Israeli actions that continued to be the obstacle to peace. Israel occupying the West Bank, Israel building settlements in the West Bank, Israel having a naval blockade on Gaza… Israel bears the bigger share of responsibility for why we don’t have peace.”
Dr. Wilf then described having to come to terms with “the dawning realization that the problem with Israel was never fundamentally what it did, but what it was — which was the sovereign state of the Jewish people. And that you could have a right-wing government, a left-wing government; you could offer peace the way that Barak did, or Olmert did, or you can have people who don’t offer it; you can have settlements or you can remove settlements, or you can be in Gaza or you can get out of Gaza… and all these things, as variables in an equation, all equal a big fat zero, because from the perspective of the Palestinians, the problem was never with what Israel did, but always, always what Israel was, which was daring — having the gall — to be the sovereign state of the Jewish people.”
“The people at the Nova music festival were there to celebrate a vision of peace… and this was an act deliberately taken by trained murderers and then followed by [Gazan] civilians against communities that let it be known, every day, through their actions, through their displays, that they seek nothing more than peace with the Palestinians, peace with Gaza; they have no territorial ambitions, they’re living within the sovereign state of Israel and its recognized pre-1967 ceasefire lines. The fact that they were so brutally and deliberately attacked left no room for excuses, for those who wanted to say, oh, it’s because they’re settlers… there was no room to maneuver. And I think that forced what remained of the decimated Israeli left to come to terms with the fact that they want it all.”
And so this brings me to the way I feel today.
I want Israel to behave well because it’s the Jewish nation and I want it to live up to my own most cherished Jewish values.
But I don’t believe anything Israel does will ever be enough for Hamas, and so I don’t think it should make any further concessions for the sake of peace until Hamas is eliminated.
And Hamas does need to be eliminated, for all the blood it spills on both sides — all the Palestinian blood and all the Jewish blood — while its leaders line their own pockets with billions and billions of aid dollars. The need to destroy Hamas’ military capacity entirely is all I know for sure within the context of this whole horrific war: the one single given, the only non-negotiable factor.
Okay, fam. I’m planning to bring you uplifting content tomorrow — to talk about the many truly phenomenal left-wing elected officials who are our true allies.
In the meantime, stay strong. I love you all. Chazak v’ematz.
Am Yisrael Chai.
My heart goes out to you. I don’t know how you do it. We are with you completely!
Yes, that was a great (but sobering) podcast.