Israel, Palestine, and Theater

If you are of a certain leftist ilk in this country, you are pro-Palestinian to a fault. I mean that in the literal sense – to a fault. In other words, your support for the Palestinian cause is of such crystal purity that it insulates you from certain truths.

One of those truths is that Gaza, which is ostensibly part of the Palestinian Authority, has been run by a group known as “Hamas” since 2007. Another one of those truths is that Hamas is not some benign and ragtag group of grassroots resistors, but a well-organized, well-funded, internationally supported paramilitary group whose primary remit is to exterminate Jews. It receives support and funding chiefly from Iran – an oppressive, authoritarian theocracy – and Qatar, which is wealthy and Westernized, but still little more than a feudal emirate whose existence is fueled by reserves of natural gas and oil.

In other words, neither Iran nor Qatar are what your, e.g., local DSA chapter would normally aspire to impose upon this country. Hamas, too, is an expressly religious movement, seeking to impose an Islamic republic on the entire territory of what had been the post-Ottoman, post-1922 Palestinian mandate, whilst driving the Jews into the sea.

Again, I’m not sure why some doctor’s kid costuming as “proletarian” with a Carhartt toque prefers an Islamic state, but that’s really for them to explain.

The history of Israel and Palestine is too complex to be well-served by self-righteous, reductive sloganeering. So, when I see local Buffalo leftists pat themselves on the back for their placement of a bedsheet bearing the term “hashtag ceasefire now” over the 33, it underscores for me the lightweight, unserious nature of their understanding of the problems and their simplistic and frankly genocidal solution to them.

Palestinians have a right to exist. Jews have a right to exist. These two things do not need to be mutually exclusive.

Hamas is not Palestine. Palestine is not Hamas. Gaza, however, is run by Hamas and has been since 2007. Israel does not occupy Gaza. Hamas, to put it simply, are not the good guys. If your reaction to bad guys doing bad things is to attack their victims, what kind of pacifism, human rights, civil dignity, or democracy do you exactly believe in? You’re just making excuses for authoritarian oppression and violence against innocent civilians.

On October 7th, an Iranian proxy Islamist military organization that seeks to eradicate not just Israel, but Jews, attacked, kidnapped, and slaughtered Jewish people in their homes, in a Kibbutz, and at a festival.

If you’re some kind of leftist pacifist who hates oppression and state violence, the events of October 7th deserve your attention, at least – if not your full-throated condemnation. But I don’t see a lot of that, at all.

It bears mentioning that Israel’s policy of annexation and settlement in its West Bank territories has been oppressive, racist, and shameful. That does not excuse a massacre of civilians any more than American policy in the Middle East justified 9/11. The West Bank Palestinian entity is not run by Hamas, but by a different, more moderate Palestinian political entity, Fatah. But let’s be honest about what Israel is. There is a reason why it exists. There are very specific ways in which it became populated by Jewish people over time. I am of the belief that there is enough room in the world for 22 Arab states to permit one Jewish state to exist.

American leftists will tell you they’re not antisemites, they’re just anti-Zionists. OK, well tell me where Jews should go, then? Jews all over the world throughout modern history have lived in places that have, at best, tolerated them. At worst, they were slaughtered or expelled. Because Jews always existed in these places as a tolerated-at-best minority of the population, when bad times came, they were instantly scapegoated and mistreated. The word is pogrom and they weren’t unique to pre-1945 Germany.

I mean, Google it.

How is it that your sympathy for the plight of Palestinians is a moral justification for a genocidal pogrom by yet another bunch of Jew-haters? Do you agree with Hamas that Jews should be driven into the sea? That the state of Israel should cease to exist? That a random post-Ottoman, post-colonial area of Asia with straight-line borders must never be sullied by International Jewry because Arabs lived there after the Jews were expelled and enslaved under Roman occupation?

So, sure, hashtag ceasefire, but if you condemn inhumanity and violence perpetrated by Israeli forces, but remain silent or make excuses when Hamas bombs a bus in Hebron or hurls missiles indiscriminately at Israeli cities, or carries out a pogrom in Southern Israel, you’re not a pacifist or an earnest supporter of freedom fighters. You’re an apologist for one particular slaughter of one particular population, and whether coincidental or not, it’s the same population that has been subjected to hatred, expulsion, and genocide for a millenium.

So, yes, free Palestine indeed, from its current and former terrorist overlords who think that maybe this time they can drive the Jews out and create a Palestine that is as functional as Syria, as uncorrupted as Lebanon, as free as Jordan, and as democratic as Egypt.

After Syria’s independence from France, Jews were slaughtered, their synagogues burned, and Jews who weren’t murdered, fled. What was left of Syria’s Jewish population has suffered from mob violence, and the Assad dictatorship has, at times, encouraged and discouraged it. But rest assured, Syria has done a great job of cleansing Jews from its territory. It is estimated that a population of 40,000 Jews in 1948 is now down to a robust population of four.

Jews have fared only slightly better in Syrian client state, Lebanon. Most Lebanese Jews fled the civil war of the mid-70s, especially as Syrian influence grew. Hezbollah – an Islamist, Iranian-backed theocratic authoritarian movement was big on taking Lebanese Jews hostage and murdering them. The handful of Jews left in Beirut exist underground, unfree to practice their religion.

In Egypt, a population of about 75,000 Jews in 1948 has shrunk to fewer than 10 today. Most Jews were expelled and dispossessed in the mid-50s, if not imprisoned or sent to concentration camps. In 1956, Egypt declared that all Jews are Zionists and enemies of the state, and one can imagine how well that went for Jewish Egyptians. In a scene reminiscent of events of just twenty years earlier, Jews were rounded up by police, told to take one suitcase and some cash, forced to sign over their possessions to the Egyptian state, and told to fuck off out of Egypt. During the 1967 war, further terrorization of the Egyptian Jewish community was overseen by Leopold Gleim, the head of the Gestapo in Poland and head of the Egyptian secret police under the name Ali al-Nahar.

After the Palestinians rejected the UN’s proposed 1947 partition of Palestine, Israel was formed, and all of the countries of the Arab League – including Jordan – waged war on Israel. By the end of the war, Jordan occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Jordan immediately set about expelling Jews who lived in Jerusalem’s old city. In 1954, Jordan offered citizenship to non-Jews living in its occupied territories, and during its 19 years of occupation, Jewish homes and places of worship were destroyed. All but one of the 35 Jewish houses of worship in the Old City of Jerusalem were destroyed. Jordan’s occupation was ended following the Six-Day War in 1967. As of 2006, no Jews were known to live in Jordan.

There are 2.1 million Arabs living in Israel as Israeli citizens of Palestinian heritage, a mixture of Muslims and Christians. So, it’s possible for Jews and Arabs to live side-by-side in the same country, much less adjacent ones.

If you stand for civil rights and human dignity, I think those principles stand in stark contrast to Hamas.