Honesty and Good Will

First, I want to say that in this war between Israel and Hamas, the battles are fought with actual weapons that can kill people and social media messages that distort and frame the debate for whichever side you’re on. I keep trying to encourage people to stay away from social media in this regard, especially because, as far as I can tell, it hasn’t advanced anyone’s cause unless that cause is to enflame and create harm.

Second, I want to say that the killing of innocent children, women and men is an abhorrent, gut-wrenching, painful and cruel outcome of war. I don’t glory in the death of innocent Palestinians. I personally don’t know a single Jew who does.

I also know that Hamas, whose chartered purpose is to totally eradicate Jewish life “from the river to the sea,” embeds its fighters and arsenal among civilians in schools, mosques, hospitals and homes. If they did not do that, the death toll of innocents would be significantly lower. But these evil cowards choose to fight this way and their weak-willed supporters justify their tactics. It’s grotesque. Jews don’t give out candy after airstrikes or WhatsApp their parents to show them bloodied hands from killing children.

Third, when this is all over:

• I hope Hamas is totally eradicated and the Palestinians of Gaza can finally choose peace.  

• I hope Israel sacks Netanyahu and his cabinet and reins in Settler violence in the West Bank, prosecuting those murderous fiends for their evil deeds attacking innocent Palestinians.  “What saved Judaism and the Jewish people was learning, prayer and good deeds.”  Not messianic hoodlums running rampant, deluded into thinking they are lords of the land.

• I hope all people of good will understand that Israelis and Palestinians both deserve a state within safe boundaries so that two people who claim a land as their own can finally live in peace.

Honesty and good will are in short supply. We need more of each — desperately and now.

***

When I was a student in Madison, the Israeli Labor politician Lova Eliav came to campus.  Born in Moscow in 1921, Eliav emigrated as a Zionist to British Mandate Palestine with his family in 1924.  Like many European Jews, Eliav’s family correctly concluded that European antisemitism and murderous violence against Jews would never be defeated without flight and a return to the historic homeland of the Jewish people.

Eliav with the poet Bialik 1933 (Wikipedia)

Like many of his generation, Eliav was a socialist, an intellectual and a lifelong peace activist.  He joined the Haganah, the Jewish army in Palestine at age 15 and then the British Army in 1940 to fight the Nazis in Europe.  He graduated from Hebrew University with degrees in sociology and history and then built his career as a teacher, writer, and activist.  

Eliav was in Madison to promote a book and encourage American Jews to embrace the two-state solution as the only hope for resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  

Eliav 2004 (Wikipedia)

As a student leader on campus, my job was to shuttle Eliav around to various radio interviews.  At Wisconsin Public Radio, he graciously sat in the studio articulating his vision for peace and coexistence while also fielding various phone calls from supportive and angry listeners.  This was nearly forty years ago and as you can imagine, the arguments then were not very different from what they are today.  The times were irradiated by the divisions over Israel’s controversial and divisive Lebanon War.  It almost seems quaint looking back over that war.  Israel’s defense minister Ariel Sharon had been forced to resign over his lack of action taken to prevent the Lebanese Christian massacre of Palestinians at Sabra and Shatila – forced to resign by the Kahan Commission – empanelled by Israeli Supreme Court justices and a general – Yitzhak Kahan, Aharon Barak and Yona Efrat.  

Absorb that for a moment.  

A commission was formed by the government of Israel to charge its military leaders – most significantly Ariel Sharon –  with not doing enough to intervene and protect innocent life from the bloodlust of Lebanese militias bent on massacring Palestinians.  

A Hamas Commission to charge Hamas leaders with the celebrated rape, beheading, and burning of Israeli children, women and elderly on October 7, 2023?  Not likely.

To consider this possibility is a joke.  It’s an insult to basic human intelligence.  The blind, unreflective mobs that are flooding cities across the world with their twisted Jew hatred and vile, racist rhetoric are masses of little Hitlers, licking their self-satisfied, uber-hip chops at the prospect of the eradication of the Jew from the world.  Scroll the cesspool of social media for images of cool guys rolling joints at last week’s NYU rallies and talking about bringing back “Hitler ovens.”  It’s only a matter of time before Supreme starts selling “Free Palestine from the Jew” sneakers.

My dad, who was born in 1924 when Lova Eliav (then a three year old refugee) “colonized” Palestine – where archaeologists can carbon date to the times of King David and King Solomon (and where the Muslim Waqf authorities of areas underneath the Temple Mount/Al-Aqsa not only won’t let researchers explore there but have intentionally destroyed archaeological evidence because god forbid (!) such evidence proves Jewish roots there); where the Jewish First and Second Temple stood; where rabbinic Judaism was born with the creation of the Mishnah; where Jewish communities have lived in Jerusalem, Hebron, Sefat, Tiberias, Gaza (!) Jaffa, Beersheva for more than 3000 years – once told me a great story about his days as a Jewish twentysomething in diasporic, post-WW2 Madison – from the perspective of a Jew who had fought a war against Nazis. 

“When we went out, we always wore ties,” dad said.  This was the set-up.  “And on weekends the antisemites used to love to start fights with us.  So we had a plan.  When they screamed “kike” at us, we’d calmly get out of the car, yank on their tie, get them off balance, and punch their lights out.  The way to deal with an antisemite is to punch him in the face.  Show him who you are.”  

This aligns with what I know from an experience I had in 1969 at County Stadium ballgame in Milwaukee with my dad, my cousin Mike and my Uncle Bill (a UW boxer in the 1950s).  Some drunk loudmouths in front of us wouldn’t shut up.  My dad asked for quiet and respect.  The drunks called us kikes.  And my Uncle Bill punched the guy’s lights out.  One punch.  To paraphrase the late poet Phil Levine, it was Biblical.  As we left the stadium I asked my dad what a “kike” was.  “It’s a Jew son. It’s who we are.”

Thanks to the NRA and our stupid gun laws, however, punching someone in the nose can likely get you shot. So best not to engage, I guess.

In any case, today, the ones who hate us, the ones who want to see us dead, they don’t call us kikes anymore. They call us Zionists.  They call us Zionist to deny our right to self-determination.  They call us Zionists because we claim our history in our ancient land — a land from which Christianity followed Judaism and Islam then after that. A land billions can claim as a spiritual home. A land from which the Biblical Jew emerged first, followed by Jesus and then Mohammad. Why is this so difficult to grasp?

Zionist, from Zion, one of the Bible’s words for a hill in Jerusalem, is now deployed by antisemites to deny our right to exist as a nation.  Jewish kids who huddle and hide in a library in New York City?  Death threats  to synagogues, JCCs, Hillel houses on college campuses?  Synagogue in Berlin, firebombed.  Jews flying into an airport in Southern Russia, attacked.  According to the ADL, antisemitic attacks against Jews are up nearly 400% since October 7 when most of the Israelis massacred that day by Hamas’s “holy martyrs” were Israelis who overwhelmingly voted for governments that advocated for a two state solution.  Hamas’s “holy martyrs” murdered, raped, beheaded and took hostages Israelis who worked with Palestinians in Gaza to get children and families to hospitals and to get permits to work in Israel.  

This is not resistance in any of these scenarios.  This is ancient and persistent bloodlust antisemitism against Jews.  There is no better example of moral cowardice to not be able to admit that.   And if you don’t believe me, read the Hamas Charter.  

And if you don’t believe me, look at the garbage these vile antisemites publicly proclaim.  Here is Within Our Lifetime, the website of one of the principle organizations behind recent rallies in New York City.  “From the river to the sea” is what the Nazis used to call an area that was Judenrein.  That’s the goal here, folks.  These aren’t rational or decent people.  They are fomenting hatred and violence. They seek the death of Jews.

Let’s look at their platform or what they quaintly refer to as their “points of unity.”

1. Right of Return

We uphold the right of all Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland in all of historic Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. This requires that we stand against the entirety of the zionist settler-colonial project and for the national liberation of all of Palestine so that those in exile can return to live in freedom and dignity. 

2. Anti-Zionism

We are anti-zionists. Zionism is a settler-colonial white supremacist ideology built on the genocide and dispossession of the Palestinian people. We therefore reject all collaboration and dialogue with zionist organizations through a strict policy of anti-normalization. The liberation of Palestine requires the abolition of zionism.

3. Right to Resist

We defend the right of Palestinians as colonized people to resist the zionist occupation by any means necessary. Just as we believe the liberation of Palestine will be achieved through the initiative and strategy of all forms of Palestinian resistance, we uphold the right of all oppressed nationality people (sic) in the United States and around the world to engage in all forms of struggle in pursuit of freedom.

4. Internationalism

We have a responsibility as those living within the United States to resist the violence of the U.S. empire at home and abroad. As Internationalists, we believe that all people have the right to self-determination, and we stand in solidarity with all national liberation struggles across the globe resisting U.S. imperialism.

Adolf Hitler sought the elimination of the Jews “within his lifetime,” as it were.  He came close but never again will anyone come that close.  Not in my lifetime. You want to call me hysterical for bringing up Hitler after witnessing the single greatest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust? Don’t kid yourself. Hamas knew that ripping open the collective trauma of the Shoah would enrage the Israelis, bring death and bombardment upon innocents in Gaza, enflame the Arab street and turn public opinion against Jews. Victimhood is a twisted, two way street.

And hey, when it comes to “from the river to the sea,” let me be very clear about something.  The Greater Israel movement, which is the ideological underpinning of what ultimately became the Likud party in modern Israel and a later iteration of Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionism, also advocated a “river to the sea” Israel and this ideology is, sadly and perversely, still alive and well among racist, hoodlum Hilltop Settlers marauding and killing innocent Palestinians today in the West Bank.  

I don’t know why it’s so hard to admit racism when you see it.  I don’t know why it’s so hard to condemn rape, murder and beheadings when they occur.  Since Cornell University is in the news because of the death threats being made to Jewish students there, I had an occasion to see Cornell professor Russell Rickford declare that it was “exhilarating” and “energizing” to see what Hamas did on October 7.  It’s revolting behavior from one tasked with educating students.

Those who favor a two-state solution understand that there is no maximal solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  Two states for two peoples is an imperfect solution for those who want to have it all.  But as we can see clearly, those who want it all will have to carry out acts of genocide to get it all.  That’s what “river to the sea” means whether Palestinians or Jews are chanting that.

You owe it to yourself to read the Dennis Ross oped in the Times.  Ross, a former U.S. envoy to the Middle East who was in the front row of negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians for 35 years, shares a number of important observations, perhaps none more important than this: 

Israel is not alone in believing it must defeat Hamas. Over the past two weeks, when I talked to Arab officials throughout the region whom I have long known, every single one told me that Hamas must be destroyed in Gaza. They made clear that if Hamas is perceived as winning, it will validate the group’s ideology of rejection, give leverage and momentum to Iran and its collaborators and put their own governments on the defensive.

But they said this in private. Their public postures have been quite different. Only a few Arab states openly condemned the Hamas massacre of more than 1,400 people in Israel. Why? Because Arab leaders understood that as Israel retaliated and Palestinian casualties and suffering grew, their own citizens would be outraged and they needed to be seen as standing up for the Palestinians, at least rhetorically.

The lack of courage among leaders is responsible for the massive loss of innocent life ON BOTH SIDES.  The Times this morning also published a summary of what the Israeli press has been writing about for months – that Bibi Netanyahu ignored warnings of an impending attack from Hamas, largely due to an arrogant overconfidence in technology, catering to the Settler wing of his cabinet and insisting on a divisive judicial reform.  The soul searching in Israel is more profound than any other time in the last fifty years.  Hopefully, when this war ends, there will be accountability.

As for Palestinian leadership and its allies, it remains to be seen.  They seem unable to transcend their victimhood.  It’s beyond tragic.  It is bringing death upon their own people as well as Jews.

***

Back to my encounter with Lova Eliav on the radio in Madison.  In thinking about victimhood in this horrific war, especially the utter fruitlessness of claiming one’s victim status over another’s, my mind keeps returning to a particular encounter Eliav had with a Jewish caller who insisted on valorizing the Jewish Zealots of Masada in 73 CE, who, in refusing to surrender to the Romans, committed a mass suicide (a fate which included the murder of their own women and children before taking their own lives.)

Masada (Wikipedia)

“Suicide?!” Eliav exploded.  The Zealots were not heroes.  They were murderous maniacs.  The real heroes among Jews in the Roman period were Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakai and the other sages who built synagogues and houses of study outside of Jerusalem rather than fight the empire to the death.  This is what saved Judaism and the Jewish people.  Learning, prayer, good deeds.”

The path of violence only bears bitter fruit.  It was true forty years ago and it’s true today.

I hope Hamas is totally eradicated and the Palestinians of Gaza can finally choose peace.  

I hope Israel sacks Netanyahu and his cabinet and reins in Settler violence in the West Bank, prosecuting those murderous fiends for their evil deeds attacking innocent Palestinians.  “What saved Judaism and the Jewish people was learning, prayer and good deeds.”  Not messianic hoodlums running rampant, deluded into thinking they are lords of the land.

If I can call out Jewish racism, why can’t Palestinians do they same? How hard is it to be honest?

I hope all people of good will understand that Israelis and Palestinians both deserve a state within safe boundaries so that two people who claim a land as their own can finally live in peace.

Honesty and good will are in short supply. We need more of each — desperately and now.