Say a word criticizing Israel and my friend Adam flies into an apoplectic rage growling about anti-Semitism. He had conflated Israel with the Jewish people and he has completely and utterly dehumanized the Palestinian people in his mind. It’s very sad… and I expect he isn’t the only American Jew who finds himself trapped in the echo chamber of tribalism where nuance and empathy are lost. He’s also been blaming anti-Semitism on the left and won’t listen to reason about how anti-Semitism helps define the right and is unacceptable to the left.
Yesterday, Michelle Goldberg grappled with the problem of the Israeli extremism that Americans refuse to confront. Israelis are actually talking about shipping the Gazans off to Congo. I wonder why no-one brought up Uganda. “Two far-right members of Israel’s cabinet,” she wrote, “the national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and the finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, caused an international uproar this week with their calls to depopulate Gaza. ‘If in Gaza there will be 100,000 or 200,000 Arabs and not two million the entire conversation on ‘the day after’ will look different,’ said Smotrich, who called for most Gazan civilians to be resettled in other countries. The war, said Ben-Gvir, presents an ‘opportunity to concentrate on encouraging the migration of the residents of Gaza,’ facilitating Israeli settlement in the region.” These are both horrible people— as is their boss, Benjamin Netanyahu. It’s good that Goldberg is exposing them.
The Biden Administration put its foot down. We’ll see how long it stays down. Everyone knows what “from the river to the sea” means to Palestinian extremists; far fewer know about the settler insistance that Israel’s rightful boundaries go from the Euphrates River to the Nile, big chunks of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Syria and all of Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, a pinch of Turkey and of course all of the the West Bank and Gaza. I've studied ancient history my whole life. There was never a Greater Israel with these boundaries, nor anything even close.
After Hamas’s sadistic attack on Israel on Oct. 7, Israel was justified in retaliating; any country would have. But there is a difference between the war Israel’s liberal supporters want to pretend that the country is fighting in Gaza, and the war Israel is actually waging.
Pro-Israel Democrats want to back a war to remove Hamas from Gaza. But increasingly, it looks as if America is underwriting a war to remove Gazans from Gaza. Experts in international law can debate whether the forced displacement of Palestinians from Gaza can be classified as genocidal, as South Africa is claiming at the International Court of Justice, or as some lesser type of war crime. But whatever you want to call attempts to “thin out” Gaza’s population— as the Hebrew newspaper Israel Hayom described an alleged Netanyahu proposal— the United States is implicated in them.
By acting as if Ben-Gvir and Smotrich can be hived off from the government in which they serve, U.S. policymakers are fostering denial about the character of Netanyahu’s rule. Joe Biden often speaks of his 1973 meeting with Golda Meir, then the prime minister, and like many American Zionists, his view of Israel sometimes seems stuck in that era.
If you grew up in a liberal Zionist household, as I did, you’ve probably heard this (possibly apocryphal) Meir quote: “When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons.” There’s much to criticize in this sentiment— its self-regard, the way it positions Israel as the victim even when it’s doing the killing; still, it at least suggests a tortured ambivalence about meting out violence. But this attitude, which Israelis sometimes call “shooting and crying,” is now as obsolete as Meir’s Zionist socialism, at least among Israel’s leaders.
Among both American and European politicians, said my friend Daniel Levy, a former Israeli negotiator with the Palestinians who now heads the U.S./Middle East Project, there’s a “willful refusal to take seriously just how extreme this government is— whether before Oct. 7 or subsequently.” I’m tempted to say that Ben-Gvir and Smotrich said the quiet part out loud, but in truth they just said the loud part louder.
The facets of all genocides:
god told you so.
dehumanize the "others"
implement hate as official policy
get support from your puppets
kill them all
In this case, the facet not listed is: first steal their land and livelihoods; second: treat them like we've treated our own natives... for 70-odd years; third: buy or cajole the world into going along.
150 years ago, our own natives reacted exactly as has hamas. attack and kill everyone you can find. Whites, unable to comprehend that subhumans might actually have legitimate feelings, slaughtered them right back.
Eventually both sides got tired of dying and killing.
None of any of this excuses the killing. But maybe you might understand the dynamics.
Eventually our natives…