Terry H. Schwadron
March 19, 2024
Six months after the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, the confusion over how to support Israel’s right to defend itself as the Israeli government and military seems hellbent on destruction and starvation of Gazan civilians remains insoluble outside of Band-aids like airdrops of food and supplies.
Oceans of ink and opinion flow on a debate that no one outside of Israelis and Hamas itself seems able to resolve. Ignore the debates over the right words — concentrate on the effects of all of it. Israelis are still held hostage, two million civilians in Gaza are displaced, no one on either side feels safe.
In the meantime, we see alternative attempts to address humanitarian concerns even as terrorist groups hold a hundred Israeli and others hostage. But none of the worst effects are ending, another ground invasion looms amid civilian tent cities, and we all — including American Jews –need to think it through again.
To unearth Hamas fighters, we’re on the brink of an Israeli ground invasion of Rafah, where 1.5 million civilians are starving in tents, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is making it clear that any declarations of opposition or “red lines” from Joe Biden are meaningless to his pending decision.
There is nothing stopping Israel from taking more care about civilians, and nothing stopping Hamas from releasing hostages, feeding and re-housing its people and pressing for world recognition as a separate state — nothing except a need to win in total. Along he way, the world twists itself to reject that it is singling out Israel, and U.S. policy, even the outcome of our elections, may be swayed by a desire among Americans, including Jews, to resist the agony thrust on Gazan civilians. Indeed, for those on the political Left, the questions of why the U.S. should continue to supply weapons to Israel is now fully open if the arms are to be used in campaigns against civilians.
The idea of abandoning Israel to the never-ending violence of its Arab and Muslim neighbors is impossible, but accepting Israel as an oppressor state is abhorrent. The fact of Sen. Chuck Schumer’s bellwether Senate floor speech last week is almost more important than whether he was promoting new elections in Israel or an appeal to look at the full picture that the world is seeing and apparently Israel is not. “We love Israel in our bones,” Schumer said, but “Palestinian civilians do not deserve to suffer for the sins of Hamas.” Politically, Israel can’t afford to lose Schumer’s support, even if it doesn’t care about yours and mine.
Bad Alternatives
Trying to reason with Hamas terrorists devoted to destruction of Israel and killing of Jews worldwide is impossible. They prefer to build tunnels and missile stores rather than lift their own people from poverty, they use resentment as a weapon.
Trusting that a formalized state led by such people will suddenly accept rational behavior feels foolhardy without permanent military presence.
Netanyahu, who blithely rejected Schumer’s speech as irrelevant, always has pit what he says he is doing about security of Israel from what he pursues in the real world in the name of occupation. Because of Gaza, the two have merged.
Over multiple administrations Netanyahu governments have moved consistently to be more rigid, more right-wing, more dependent on extremism to promote Jewish dominance in an increasingly pluralistic state.
It was Netanyahu and his coalition government that pulled Israeli defenses along the Gaza Strip to make it easier for Jewish settlers in the West Bank to grab yet more land from Palestinians and make violence routine. Indeed, it was Netanyahu who insisted for months before Oct. 7 to give money to Hamas through Qatar, just to keep Gazans from linking with West Bank allies 60 miles away.
It is Netanyahu who has yet to answer for why it took hours, even more than a day, to come to the aid of Israelis under Hamas attack in a country the size of New Jersey. It is the same Netanyahu who has been the subject of huge protests inside Israel for trying to suborn the courts to remain in office and who has allowed for deterioration of civil rights for Arab Israelis.
Even more than Hamas attacks, which should be universally condemned, it is Netanyahu decision-making that is forcing a reckoning, from inside Israel and from around the world.
From various reports from the region, it’s not even clear whether Israelis are being exposed to images of suffering among Gazan civilians that are everyday fare for us.
It feels as if American foreign policy is about to turn because of Netanyahu intransience more than by Hamas on one hand and rising Saudi aspirations for the region on the other.
Apart from Republican congressional desire to hold U.S. aid hostage to border politics, we face the prospect of conditions and limits on American aid to Israel even as Iran, Russia, China, and other trouble-making nations look to expand influence in the Middle East.
For reasons almost wholly divorced the strength of any spiritual relationship with Israel, there remain myriad global diplomacy issues.
It’s no wonder that Schumer — with Biden’s okay — is calling for new elections in Israel as well as new leadership among Palestinians.
The Jewish Questions
For American Jews, there is another level of emotional connection at play, or has been for 75 years. The idea of establishing a Jewish homeland as a refuge after the Holocaust was considered a hard-won dream, including buying land, reclaiming abandoned or non-arable land and, finally, taking land by force. The dream came with promises for a more open, secular legal state that allowed for plurality with Jews from anywhere in the world, with Arabs who chose to be part of a new state, with democratic ideals as well as government — a seeming liberal haven.
In return, there were promises from abroad for kinship as well as financial support.
In truth, of course, there was no guarantee that officials of a Jewish state would prove more enlightened about treatment of foes, even sworn enemies, than any other government entity. It’s a liberal myth we chose to accept.
Clearly, despite the best hopes of AIPAC and other official Jewish organizations, that vision has dissipated if not totally disappeared amid multiple wars with neighboring countries and rebuilt ties based on economic self-interest, on the insistence on pushing for land grabs in the West Bank, and on government coalitions that have grown consistently more right-wing, religious, and hostile to anyone not sharing an outlook based on real estate ownership.
Jews don’t agree. Within my own family — a first-generation group from the Holocaust — there are cousins who live in Israel, those who have visited, those who see no tie to Israel, and those who have become disheartened by the evident effects in Gaza.
Still, it all feels different from looking at the current violence in Haiti, for example, or the strategic need to support Ukrainian resistance to an invading Russia.
It’s not clear what exactly our expectations bring with our Jewish identity, though anti-Semitism is not limited to feelings about Israel and Gaza.
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