Once again, the Holy Land is the epicenter of bloodshed and war.
Hamas has launched their biggest attack in years. They surged out of the Gaza Strip in force, carrying out attacks across southern Israel. Israeli military and security forces were caught off guard and overwhelmed, and Hamas had free rein until the IDF was able to regroup.
But what makes this eruption of conflict stand out was the extreme nature of the violence. Hamas fighters committed horrific atrocities—only “committed” isn’t a strong enough word. They reveled in them.
In addition to attacking military bases and police stations, they attacked a music festival, spraying the attendees with gunfire. The dead include Israeli citizens as well as foreign tourists. There are reliable reports that they went door-to-door in Israeli villages, killing indiscriminately, kidnapping some to hold as hostages. The death toll is still rising, but is already over a thousand. There are unconfirmed reports of even worse evils, but it’s uncertain if these are accurate or merely the atrocity propaganda that’s all too common in wartime.
Wherever you start out, you can find deep-rooted causes for why each side acts as it does.
In response, Israel is doling out massive punishment to the Palestinians. They’ve imposed a total blockade of food, water, electricity and fuel on Gaza. They’ve bombed it from the air, flattening residential buildings and decimating a crowded open-air market. They’re poised to launch a costly ground assault.
I need to state my conflicts of interest. As I’ve stated in the past, I have Jewish ancestry. That said, I’m an atheist and a secular humanist, and I don’t identify as Jewish in any religious sense. I’ve never been to Israel and I don’t know anyone directly affected by the attacks. The extent of my connection to Judaism is that anyone who wished harm on all Jewish people would undoubtedly include me in that.
The endless chain of “yes, buts”
Usually, empathy is the way out of conflicts like this. By making an effort to set aside your privilege and viewing the world through the eyes of an oppressed people, you can see what fairness demands.
What makes this conflict such a Gordian knot is that empathy doesn’t seem to help. Wherever you start out, you can find deep-rooted causes for why each side acts as it does. Rather than a path out of the maze, it’s an ouroboros with no beginning or end.
Start with the obvious point, emphasized by most world leaders: Hamas’ savage and indiscriminate killings of civilians are a war crime and deserve to be treated as such. There can be no excuse for targeting innocent people who did nothing to them and who had no part in the decisions of Israel’s leadership. Whatever the justice of the Palestinian cause, this slaughter does nothing to advance it. On the contrary, it makes them pariahs in the eyes of the world.
All that is indisputable. But now, pull back and widen the circle of empathy a bit, and in come the “yes, buts”:
Yes, but: Israel has forced the Palestinians to live under intolerable conditions. The Gaza Strip is effectively a giant prison camp, hemmed in by fences and barbed wire, with Israel holding a chokehold on vital supplies. Unemployment and poverty are rampant. The isolation of the Palestinians is backed up by apartheid laws that make it extremely difficult for them to travel or participate in Israeli society. Whenever any of them lash out, Palestinians suffer collective punishment from Israeli bombardments.
How could living under such conditions not drive a people to despair and nihilistic rage? What other outcome did Israel have any right to expect?
Yes, but: Hamas is a violent, autocratic Islamist group that takes Jewish genocide as an explicit goal. They’ve never recognized Israel as a state, nor acknowledged its right to exist. On the contrary, they believe Muslims have a sacred right and mandate to conquer all the land where Israel currently exists. Can you blame Israel for confining Gazan Palestinians and treating them harshly, when their leadership’s stated goals are the destruction of Israel and extermination of the Jewish people?
Yes, but: Israel has its own religious fanatics whose views are no less extreme. They believe Jewish occupation of the entire land is their God-given right, and any non-Jews living there should be ethnically cleansed. The Israeli government has furthered these aims by supporting radical Jewish settlers, who’ve taken over so much Palestinian territory that a two-state solution may already be impossible.
Yes, but: To a people who’ve survived as much trauma as the Jews, it’s expected they’d long for a homeland of their own. The Jewish people have hung on for centuries, isolated and defenseless, in the midst of often violently hostile societies. They’ve always been treated as aliens, as outsiders, as the other, or as plotting evildoers. They’ve been confined to ghettoes, deprived of rights, and hounded from one country to the next. They’ve suffered pogroms, blood libel, and other bigoted violence. This long chain of oppressions culminated with the Holocaust, the most horrific act of state-organized evil in human history. How could these centuries of persecution not have left their mark on the Jewish psyche?
The history of the Middle East is like a red-hot chain stretching back into the mists of the past.
That’s especially true since Israel, from the moment of its birth, was surrounded by other states that were hostile and that immediately attacked them. Of course they’re going to conclude that outsiders will never protect them and they have to take charge of their own security. Of course they’re going to go to any lengths necessary to secure their homeland. What other outcome did the world have any right to expect?
Yes, but: The land that became Israel wasn’t a blank slate. When the Zionist movement selected it for settlement, there were already people living there. Those are the Palestinians, and they were pushed off their own land, made second-class citizens, and in the end, subjugated and imprisoned by a colonizing power.
Is there any group of people, either now or ever in history, who’d accept this treatment and give in peacefully? What other outcome did the world have any right to expect?
Yes, but: The land of Israel is the original and sacred home of the Jewish people. They lived there for untold generations, until they were subjugated and expelled by a cruel empire, condemning them to wander the world for a two-millennium diaspora. They have a historic claim on this land, and they have a moral right to have it returned to them, even if that means…
And so on and so on, forever.
The history of the Middle East is like a red-hot chain stretching back into the mists of the past. Each link is forged of an atrocity that one side committed against the other. The pain and rage arising from that then lays the groundwork for the next link to be welded on.
No one has a path to victory
Can that chain be broken? There’s no telling. The most depressing part about this new eruption of violence is that it’s laid bare the fact that an ending is almost impossible to imagine.
Hamas has no path to victory. They can kill unarmed civilians and commit acts of terror, but that’s all. They’re no match for the Israeli army. Israel can inflict pain on the Palestinians whenever it wants, as much as it wants. Whatever damage they manage to inflict on Israel, they’re bound to suffer even worse retribution.
Israel, meanwhile, has a tiger by the tail. They have millions of desperate, angry people penned up within their borders, with no plausible long-term solution for what to do with them. By oppressing the Palestinians so long and so harshly, they’ve nurtured a burning hatred toward themselves—to which their only response is still further oppression. It’s not clear if they could ever ease up on the Palestinians without risking an even bigger backdraft of violence.
READ: War, again
And thus, bloodshed leads to bloodshed, reprisal fuels reprisal, and hatred on one side nurtures hatred on the other, in a never-ending spiral of futility. I wrote about another clash between Israel and Hamas in 2009, and the story was almost identical. Nothing has changed in the years since.
On top of this, both sides are fueled by sacred values that their faith will never permit them to compromise. Both Israeli settlers and Hamas jihadists believe, in mirror-image fashion, that God is on their side and that it’s God’s will for them to possess this particular stretch of land. So long as these clashing fundamentalisms hold sway, peace is impossible. This so-called holy land may well be the last and the worst outpost of bloodshed on earth.