Is there any hope here?
Marty Levine
August 19, 2024
Two recent articles published in the Guardian have shaken my hope that there is a solution to the human tragedy of Israel/Palestine that can bring peace, safety, and dignity to all of its people. At this moment of extreme violence, I continue to hope that the people of this land, Israeli Jews and Palestinians, would realize that both peoples had connections to the same land; that both peoples were not going away; and that that only a difficult set of compromises and the overcoming decades of violence and hatred could keep them from an endless loop of violence. Perhaps that sounds like delusional thinking, but it was my hope.
Over the many years that I worked in and for my Jewish community, I developed a visceral tie to the land that both people claim. I hoped that Jewish Israelis would move beyond their fears and the narcotic of military power to see a future that breaks the current state of endless war and risks a path that is based on neither people’s victory. To bring that to be, there must be leadership willing to stand up and challenge the status quo and a population willing to move beyond their fears. There needs to be voices that envision a different future rejecting the current “truth” of chosenness and power, and willing to embrace partners on the other side of the battle lines who may be willing to do the same.
My hope for this idealistic future becoming a reality was fanned when I encountered Standing Together, “Top of Form
a progressive grassroots movement mobilizing Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel against the occupation and for peace, equality, and social justice. We know that the majority have far more in common than that which sets us apart and only a tiny minority benefits from the status quo. The future that we want — peace and independence for Israelis and Palestinians, full equality for everyone in this land, and true social, economic, and environmental justice — is possible. To achieve this future, we must stand together as a united front: Jewish and Palestinian, secular and religious, Mizrahi and Ashkenazi, rural and urban, and people of all genders and sexual orientations. As the largest Jewish-Arab grassroots movement in Israel, we are committed to creating an alternative to our existing reality and building the political strength to make this transformation possible.“
I was encouraged to lean toward the optimistic side by the work of another Israeli organization, B’Tzelem, that has been ready and willing to document the atrocities of the occupation and had the audacity, as an Israeli NPO, to label their nation as an apartheid state.
But then I read the words of Yair Golan as he was interviewed by Bethan McKernan for the Guardian just days ago. Golan is the current leader of Israel’s new leftist party, the Democrats, which has the legacy of the Labor Party which was the party of Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben Gurion. He is also a retired general who had served as the Israel Defense Force’s vice Chief of Staff. His voice represents liberal or progressive politics and should be for the same kind of vision that Standing Together’s credo expresses.
And his interview begins with words that seem to be on that page
The right today in Israel is people who think we can annex millions of Palestinians, and Israel should adopt some sort of policy of revenge, that we can live by our swords and not attempt to reconcile with the Palestinians or any other hostile entity in the region. I think 180 degrees the opposite.
But he the article dives deeper into the future that Golan desires
Golan’s message as leader of the new Democrats slate was clear: while they are the only Zionist party in Israel that recognizes the importance of ending the occupation of the Palestinian territories, to win votes, security is the top priority.
Gaza, he said, is a complicated war, in which Israel did not have many options. … Hamas must be eliminated from the Strip, and that stronger action should be taken in Israel’s north against the powerful Lebanese militia Hezbollah. He says he understands the risk of regional war that this would entail: all five of his adult children are serving as reservists.
“Our vision is a two-state solution, but right now we are a nation in trauma. People lost their sense of security; people do not trust the IDF to protect them.”
“We need to be proactive militarily, but at the same time we need to combine it with political vision. I have no intention to say it’s easy … It’s a process that will take years.”
These are words that express no empathy for those who stand in the way of that proactive military strategy. They are words that if spoken by the leaders of any Palestinian leader would be condemned. They are not words that tell me that anything in Israel has changed. These are not words of compromise or concern for the shared humanity of Israeli Jews and Palestinians
Professor Omer Bartov, Brown University’s Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, in a long piece he published in the Guardian, looked at what has happened to Israeli society over their decades of being the occupiers, an explanation that places General Golan’s words in a context that said to me, “there is little hope”.
The Hamas attack on 7 October came as a tremendous shock to Israeli society, one from which it has not begun to recover. It was the first time Israel had lost control of part of its territory for an extended period of time, with the IDF unable to prevent the massacre of more than 1,200 people – many killed in the cruelest ways imaginable – and the taking of well over 200 hostages, including scores of children. The sense of abandonment by the state and of ongoing insecurity – with tens of thousands of Israeli citizens still displaced from their homes along the Gaza Strip and by the Lebanese border – is profound.
Today, across vast swaths of the Israeli public, including those who oppose the government, two sentiments reign supreme.
The first is a combination of rage and fear, a desire to re-establish security at any cost, and a complete distrust of political solutions, negotiations and reconciliation.
The second reigning sentiment – or rather lack of sentiment – is the flipside of the first. It is the utter inability of Israeli society today to feel any empathy for the population of Gaza. The majority, it seems, do not even want to know what is happening in Gaza, and this desire is reflected in TV coverage. Israeli television news these days usually begin with reports on the funerals of soldiers, invariably described as heroes, fallen in the fighting in Gaza, followed by estimates of how many Hamas fighters were “liquidated”. References to Palestinian civilian deaths are rare and normally presented as part of enemy propaganda or as a cause for unwelcome international pressure. In the face of so much death, this deafening silence now seems like its own form of vengefulness.
Of course, the Israeli public long ago became inured to the brutal occupation that has characterized the country for 57 out of the 76 years of its existence. But the scale of what is being perpetrated in Gaza right now by the IDF is as unprecedented as the complete indifference of most Israelis to what is being done in their name. In 1982, hundreds of thousands of Israelis protested against the massacre of the Palestinian population in the refugee camps Sabra and Shatila in western Beirut by Maronite Christian militias, facilitated by the IDF. Today, this kind of response is inconceivable. The way people’s eyes glaze over whenever one mentions the suffering of Palestinian civilians, and the deaths of thousands of children and women and elderly people, is deeply unsettling.
Bartov’s reflection reminded me of my worries about the impact of being the occupier on the young men and women I saw at checkpoints in Israel. These were young men and women in uniform and with automatic weapons on their backs who were being asked to enforce the terms of occupation imposed by the government. Bar Tov is telling us that it has numbed the public and taught them to see Palestinians as the enemy needing to be destroyed at the risk of their own death.
Here is how he summed up what he saw on his recent visit back home
By the time I travelled to Israel, I had become convinced that at least since the attack by the IDF on Rafah on 6 May 2024, it was no longer possible to deny that Israel was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions. It was not just that this attack against the last concentration of Gazans – most of them displaced already several times by the IDF, which now once again pushed them to a so-called safe zone – demonstrated a total disregard of any humanitarian standards. It also clearly indicated that the ultimate goal of this entire undertaking from the very beginning had been to make the entire Gaza Strip uninhabitable, and to debilitate its population to such a degree that it would either die out or seek all possible options to flee the territory. In other words, the rhetoric spouted by Israeli leaders since 7 October was now being translated into reality – namely, as the 1948 UN Genocide Convention puts it, that Israel was acting “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part”, the Palestinian population in Gaza, “as such, by killing, causing serious harm, or inflicting conditions of life meant to bring about the group’s destruction”.
Two voices, one a “progressive” political leader and one a renowned Holocaust scholar telling us how dire the situation is in Israel/Palestine. One reflects how fearful those with political power, Jewish Israelis, are of the Palestinian people without it. They believe that only by force, brutal force can they find safety and live the life they think they deserve. The other, a scholar who knows how genocide arises, sees a nation whose Jewish population has been taught to hate their Palestinian neighbors. And how, from that hate comes their willingness to dispossess and murder the ”other.”
This is not a recipe that can end up well.
I wish I could see more hope in this situation.
Maybe others who read this can help me see a brighter side.
