Five months into the War on Gaza, I can only imagine what is going through the minds of Israeli military planners. Five months ago, the State of Israel began a devastating bombing campaign against Gaza, followed by a ground offensive, deploying overwhelming superiority in manpower, materiel, and technology on the ground, in the air, and at sea to “punish” and “eradicate” Hamas. And here we are, with those goals nowhere in sight. If they have even a modicum of self-awareness – and the fact is that professional soldiers tend to be realists – the State of Israel’s generals and admirals must be feeling a crushing sense of failure.
This is hardly unprecedented. With very few exceptions, the hard historical lesson is that wars are almost always longer, bloodier, and harder-fought than political leaders expect. We would do well to recall that the belligerents in the 1914-1918 war expected “the boys to be home by Christmas” when hostilities began at the end of July 1914. Even three months later, as it ground into static trench warfare in French Flanders, the New York Times was reporting that diplomats shared a “belief that the war will be far shorter than the present situation indicates.”
With its vast technological and manpower advantage, the United States was certain that it would make quick work of South Vietnam’s National Liberation Front and even deal a blow to the Communists in North Vietnam. In July 1965, three and a half months after the first large-scale deployment of US troops to Vietnam, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara proudly noted that his “overall evaluation is that… if the military and political moves are properly integrated and executed with continuing vigor and visible determination [the US] stands a good chance of achieving an acceptable outcome within a reasonable time in Vietnam.”
For the usually cool, methodical, unexcitable Secretary of Defense, that was an enthusiastic forecast. Yet, by the end of the year, he was reporting to President Johnson that “the odds are about even that, even with the recommended deployments, we will be faced in early 1967 with a military standoff at a much higher level, with pacification still stalled, and with any prospect of military success marred by the chances of an active Chinese intervention.” McNamara’s optimism collapsed even further until, by the end of 1967, he actively advocated for an American withdrawal. The president, still committed to victory, did not reply, and quietly showed the Secretary the door.
Can we forget President George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, then cruising off the coast of San Diego in May 2003? “Operation Iraqi Freedom was carried out with a combination of precision and speed and boldness the enemy did not expect and the world had not seen before,” the president said. But the war continued for another five years and helped birth the Islamic State; American troops were finally withdrawn from Afghanistan (where the “War on Terror” began in 2001) in 2021.
War has a logic of its own, which inevitably humbles the brains of all military planners. Plans are always static – timetables, arrows, topologies, and roadways on a two-dimensional map – and they can never fully account for the chaotic dynamics of realities like climate, international reactions and, above all, resistance. Every strategic deployment and tactical movement changes the map, as Vladimir Putin learned when his “Special Military Operation” bogged down two years ago… When Benjamin Netanyahu’s punitive strike ran into the reality of Gaza’s rubble-strewn streets and the unwillingness of much of the world – including the governments of many of the State of Israel’s erstwhile allies – to just stand by and watch the slaughter.
Make no mistake: it would be possible for the State of Israel to “eradicate” Hamas simply by exterminating the entire population of the Occupied Territories, and the IDF definitely has the means, and many Israelis certainly have the inclination, to make that happen. Yet, when the State of Israel’s Heritage minister Amihai Eliyahu said the quiet part out loud last November and mused about the possibility of a nuclear strike on Gaza, Netanyahu shut him down.
There are probably few depths to which the Israeli prime minister would descend, of course, but even his hands are tied – albeit loosely – by the prospect of global condemnation, and the inevitable desertion by even his closest allies for such a heinous act. As it stands now, the State of Israel can play the grey area in its legal defense before the International Court of Justice on a charge of genocide: “is it really the intentional destruction of collective Palestinian life,” it can still argue, “or merely the regrettable, albeit vast collateral damage of a fierce military operation?” The nuclear holocaust (yes, I used the word “holocaust”) of Gaza would leave no doubt… and no defense.
So, the State of Israel fights a war that it simply cannot win and could never have won. Far from “eradicating” Hamas, a militant group founded in an ideology of martyrdom, whose charter categorically rejects the legitimacy of the State of Israel, the war can only serve to consolidate and empower it.† Over the last five months, the IDF has provided all the evidence that Hamas’s propagandists need to drive home the point that there can be no coexistence between Palestinians and Israelis. And the death and suffering under Israeli bombs, bombardments, and fusillades has been driving recruits to Hamas’s colors, not only in Gaza, but elsewhere in Palestine. The Israeli war is only sabotaging its own stated goals.
The only reason for the State of Israel to continue the killing and destruction, then, is to shore-up Netanyahu’s grip on power and for spite; and there is little evidence that the Israeli prime minister has the slightest inclination to go gentle into the good night of political obscurity, nor do Israelis possess a want of spite.‡ Barring external intervention, this war will continue as long as the State of Israel’s impossible effort to “eradicate” Hamas consolidates Hamas and justifies its resistance. It is an ouroboros infinitely devouring lives.
We very well might be here next October marking a dismal anniversary, and mourning many more than 31,000 Palestinian lives, unless something happens – from the outside. The only way that the perpetual motion slaughter-machine will end is by external intervention. Hamas does not possess the means to overcome the State of Israel on the battlefield, nor can the IDF conceivably eradicate an enemy whose ranks are replenished and whose resistance stiffens with each death. Echoing McNamara’s assessment, as each week passes, the IDF will be faced “with a military standoff at a much higher level.”
If there is any hope for the weeks and months to come for an end to an endless war, it is for the world to say “no,” and for the State of Israel’s main sponsors to cut their client off. At the moment, that seems unlikely, as pious words, handwringing, and farcically inadequate air-drops of supplies seem to be the order of the day.
And the war goes on.
9 March 2024
***
There was something surreal, bordering on the absurd, reading the text of last night’s State of the Union Address. Make no mistake: while I am no fan of President Joe Biden, I do prefer him to the prospect of another Trump presidency. But, through the lens of the War on Gaza, it is hard for me to not shake my head in bafflement. Here, after all, is man who proudly proclaimed that he is “a lifelong supporter of Israel, my entire career. No one has a stronger record with Israel than I do. I challenge any of you here,” but who then tried to strike a balance of… I don’t know, moderation, in his vision for Gaza.
President Biden declared that he has “been working non-stop to establish an immediate ceasefire that would last for six weeks to get all the prisoners released… and build toward an enduring — a more — something more enduring.” Just what that something is, he did not, could not, or was perhaps unwilling to say. The President left me wondering if the extent of his great humanitarian vision, then, is to pause the killing for a few weeks and then to allow the Israelis to resume butchering slightly better-fed women and children in Gaza until the next brief pause, and it all starts up again well into an enduring future.
Standing before the assembled houses of the US Congress, Americans, and the world, President Biden declared that the “United States has been leading international efforts to get more humanitarian assistance into Gaza” before officially announcing the construction of “a temporary pier in the Mediterranean on the coast of Gaza that can receive large shipments carrying food, water, medicine, and temporary shelters.” I passed coffee through my nose.
The president’s humanitarian vision consists of what, exactly? Building a port? I have lived in port cities my whole life, and I am pretty sure that one does not just build even a “temporary pier” overnight. It took almost a year to build the famous Mulberry Harbours for the D-Day invasion in 1944 at enormous cost. How long, and at what expense does President Biden believe it will take to build his temporary pier in Gaza? Does he imagine that the humanitarian crisis of which he is so concerned will hold off until that moment?
This is not reality, nor is it any kind of humanitarian solution; it is brazen deflection. Rather than stopping the war by ending US military largesse to the State of Israel, rather than declining to exercise the US veto in the UN Security Council, rather that putting his foot down and saying “no more killing,” President Biden offers an air-dropped pittance and a fantasy prefab port. All this does is let the State of Israel continue its pointless, endless war while the President dithers with erector set projects.
How can he sleep at night?
8 March 2024
***
The NJ Transit conductor scowled. Apparently, I did not produce the electronic ticket in the phone app with sufficient alacrity. But rather than moving on to scan other passengers’ tickets, he just stood there, towering above me, his long, blond Duck Dynasty beard shaking with fury, spittle at the corner of his mouth, his eyes drilling into a spot on the top of my head. I could see hints of ink on the skin around his collar. I took off my noise-cancelling headphones, so I could hear him.
“… every day, you make me wait and waste my time,” he said in a low voice trembling with rage. That was hardly true, since I only take that particular train, the 1:23 pm Northeast Corridor line from Newark, twice a week, and it takes no more than seven seconds for me to take my phone from my pocket and bring up the ticket app. “I am sick of this.” I mumbled something, put my headphones back on, and looked away. I didn’t need this, and I was just going to opt out.
The ticket collector stood there for a few more seconds and probably said a few more words that I did not hear over the music, and then moved on. I wondered what had just happened. I had seen this conductor a few times before, but had never really taken much notice of him, and I could not imagine why, out of the thousands of passengers he sees every week, he had developed an idee fixe on me. But the handful of times that I had seen him, he always seemed to be hassling nonwhite and visibly immigrant passengers.
And then it made sense: He hadn’t been looking at my face as he vented his anger, but at a spot at the top of my head; he had been telling-off my yarmulke.
That realization gave me a chill. I wear a yarmulke, in part to be intentionally and visibly Jewish is an overwhelmingly Gentile world. In the years since I first saw an efflorescence of neo-Nazi and white nationalist graffiti in my neighborhood (then, in Northen New Jersey) eight years ago, I have felt it important publicly Jewish. After a string of antisemitic terrorists attacks in the US and around the world, I read of the attempt by a German terrorists to murder Jews at a synagogue in Halle, Germany on the morning of 9 October 2019 as I was preparing to attend Yom Kippur services. I had a yarmulke on and resolved not to take it off. I would visibly be a Jew in the street as well as at home.
I do this in part to make the point that Jews are real and part of American society just like everyone else, even if we make up less than 2 percent of the population. I do it so that other Jews will know that they are not alone; I do it to represent. I do it because I am not ashamed to be a Jew and to resist the suggestion that I should be. Like any minority, we can only claim our cultural and social citizenship if we are out and visible.
In the four-and-a-half years since, I have become conscious of my visibility and, occasionally, my vulnerability. There are times when I feel the stares. There was the time when my spouse saw a knot of people at a Boston restaurant looking furtive at me, pointing, and muttering among themselves; there was that time when I found a seat on a crowded inter-city bus and, when I took off my hat to reveal my yarmulke, my seatmate said “God, I hope you’re not one of those Jews.” Then there was the Uber driver who ranted on about the International Jewish Conspiracy and the ZOG, and the woman on the campus where I teach who screamed “shame on you” as I ran across the quad to class.
You are vulnerable if you are a visible minority in America – any visible minority. One of the privileges of Ashkenazi Jewish whiteness is the ability to remain invisible in the Gentile mass; yet, when we do make ourselves visible, we learn that our whiteness is provisional – still white, but maybe a little ecru – and we are vulnerable.
I reflected on that when I saw the police cruiser parked in outside of the local shul on the High Holy Days in a neighborhood north of Boston that was also the hometown of a notorious American neo-Nazi leader. It really hit home when a neo-Nazi terrorist crashed into a building in Winthrop, MA three years ago, only a few miles from where I was living at the time. He gunned down two African American bystanders who, it turned out were simply victims of opportunity. Police later reported that he had been on his way to one of Winthrop’s two synagogues at the time that he had had the accident that forced him to change his plans.
My encounter with the NJ Transit ticket-taker brought all of that sense of vulnerability crashing home, but another thought immediately entered my mind: “waitaminit! Why does Duck Dynasty Thor over here think it’s okay to express his antisemitism?” Of course he does, but the reasons are much more complex than the official theory would have you think.
The official theory these days, one promoted by the State of Israel, the ADL, Zionist-dominated Jewish community organizations, and the far-right Christian nationalists is that antisemitism has “surged globally since the attack by Hamas gunmen on southern Israel on Oct. 7 and subsequent war on the Islamist group launched by Israel in the Gaza Strip.” And the people whom Zionists, the ADL, and their allies in the far right are most eager to blame for this are anti-Zionists, pro-Palestinians, BDS, and all of the those left-wing intellectuals in the universities.
After all, who can forget Rep. Elise Stefanik, who successfully buried her embrace of the antisemitic “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory by pretending to care about antisemitism in congressional hearings last fall? I can only speculate on who Rep. Stefanik’s financial sponsors are, but I would not be surprised to learn that they are same as the ADL’s.
And why should they be? White and Christian Nationalists have long been enthusiastic allies of Zionism. After all, they regard Zionist ethnonationalism as a justification for white and Christian ethnonationalism – if the Jews deserve their own religiously-exclusive ethnostate, then it follows that white Christians do, as well. Moreover, American white Christian nationalists and Maximalist Zionists, like the ones who dominate Israeli policy, have complimentary goals: All Jews should get out of America and go to their own homeland!
The Zionist alchemy that somehow transformed the definition of antisemitism from an atavistic hatred of Jews into criticism of the State of Israel and its policies and actions has only nurtured this alliance. Running for the Massachusetts State Republican Committee, Lori Kauffmann tweeted last month that the expulsion of Jews from America was (among other things) one of her policy goals.
Had she won (and, thankfully, she did not), I have little doubt that Kauffmann would have eagerly supported her party’s position on the State of Israel. One might dismiss this as the incoherent ramblings of a barely-sentient attention-seeker in a post-rational age, except that this was not the first time she had made such comments and, as the Winthrop terrorist demonstrated, they are not uncommon in that part of the United States.
Indeed, Kauffmann is oddly candid about how she feels about Jews, qua Jews. Despite the fact that she sought a position in a political party whose platform explicitly supports the State of Israel, when confronted with her antisemitism in social media, she wore it as a badge of honor.
The antisemitism that threatens Jews in the Diaspora is not found on placards bearing the slogan “From the River to the Sea,” college students wearing keffiyehs at campus protests, “leftist” college professors (like me, I guess) who teach their students about the Nakba and the State of Israel’s repeated and brazen violations of international law. It is not expressed when someone flips the bird to the Israeli flag (which, after all, is not the Jewish flag) or calls an Israeli political leader a “baby killer.” It is the antisemitism that lurks deep in the American cultural id; that portrays Jews as an untrustworthy “other” in our popular culture, promotes myths of Jewish greed and international banking conspiracies.
It is the antisemitism that has inspired mass shootings, the desecration of synagogues and cemeteries, beatings, smirking winks, and even the murder that inspired the founding of the ADL more than a century ago. This is an antisemitism that is so deeply rooted in the American psyche that it has never gone away, and it has nothing to do with Zionism and the State of Israel. But the cynical appropriation of antisemitism by the Zionist movement and its allies mystifies all of that; it might serve, at least for now, as a scorched earth defense of the State of Israel, but it put all Jews, qua Jews, in peril.
5 March 2024
***
† “There shall be no recognition of the legitimacy of the Zionist entity. Whatever has befallen the land of Palestine in terms of occupation, settlement building, Judaization or changes to its features or falsification of facts is illegitimate. Rights never lapse.” https://web.archive.org/web/20170510123932/http://hamas.ps/en/post/678/
‡ I will leave it to the ICJ to determine if the purpose is genocide.