It is a mystery to me how any person who has ever experienced the death of a loved one could wish the same on another person. It is a universal experience. As my father, who died 12 years ago, once observed, “if you are fortunate to live long enough, you will experience same pain over and over – many times. And it never gets easier.”
I have been thinking about this a lot over the past few days, as we prepare to bury my mother-in-law, who died earlier this week. She was an extraordinarily warm, caring person, who embraced me into her family. We shared a love of Broadway musicals and puns, and I knew her as the perfect embodiment of an uncommon decency. I feel her loss keenly.
But that is nothing compared to the pain felt by my spouse and her siblings. For them, a curtain has fallen on a part of their lives, and the pain they feel is almost beyond imagining. Almost: in the couple of days that I have spent with my in-laws as we prepared for the funeral, a door to the profound grief that I felt for the death of my mother and for my father has opened up.
My father once said that you never get over the loss of a loved one, you just become accustomed to the pain. And that is true, yet the pain becomes acute again at times like this. Since my spouse texted me that her mother had died, I have been reliving the moment 18 years ago when I held my mother’s hand at the Jewish General Hospital and she took her last breath. My cousin put her hand on my shoulder, whispered “she’s gone,” and the universe dropped out from under me.
We experience the pain and the loss of others empathically. The death of my mother-in-law could never affect me the way it does her children and grandchildren yet, my spouse’s grief refracted through my own experience of pain becomes my own. “I am learning new things about the depths of grief,” she texted me shortly after her mother died and, having learned that lesson myself, I instantly understood, indeed felt, her agony.
Yet, there are so many people who can excuse and explain away the deaths of others, and the heartrending grief that each of these deaths leave behind several times over on the basis of ideology, philosophy, and “principle.” I think of the 40,000 Palestinians slain in Gaza – and yes, the 1,100 Israelis killed on 7 October 2023, and all that I can feel is the overwhelming pain multiplies and amplified by the thousands upon thousands. How many children are mourning their parents, how many parents weep over the graves of their children? And how many people around the world have felt that grief at a sympathetic remove?
War produces trauma at orders of magnitude that extend far beyond the moments of destruction or the geographical limits of the killing fields and battlefields. To justify, excuse, or explain it away is to wish soul-destroying grief on thousands upon thousands of people; that many of us do, on specious grounds of “self-defense,” revenge,” or in the service of ideology is merely confirmation of a loss of our humanity. We no longer feel the grief of our fellow humans, but rather hoard our empathy for our own family, tribe, and nation.
It is through grief, both immediate and at a remove, that we most fully experience our humanity, by acknowledging the fragility and impermanence of all life, including our own, and the universality of death. We have repeated John Donne’s lines so often that, I am afraid, in this age of nations and tribal hate, it they have become little more than a cliché to be stitched into a sampler and ignored:
Each man’s death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.
When we lay my mother-in-law in the earth, surrounded by her husband, her children, grandchildren, her siblings, her extended family, and dozens, if not hundreds of people who were touched by her kindness and uncommon decency, I will reflect that “I am involved in mankind.” I will mourn for her and for every mother, father, child, sibling, partner, and friend who has died… And I will mourn the humanity of all of those among us who cannot feel that collective grief.
30 June 2024
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One thing my progressive, pro-Palestinian friends often miss is that, even though we might be on “the right side of history” (though history does not have “sides,” so I hate that expression), we are certainly out of step with American public sentiment. A recent Pew study found that while only a plurality (38 percent) of Americans believe that Israeli actions in Gaza are acceptable (34 percent unacceptable, 26 percent unsure), a clear majority (58 percent) believe that the State of Israel’s reasons for continuing the War on Gaza are valid.
This is quite apart from whatever sympathy Americans might have for the Palestinians, the plight of Gaza, and the cause of Palestinian autonomy and human rights. A majority of Americans (57 percent) expressed sympathy for both sides in the war. That sympathy is for the Palestinian and Israeli people, and not for their governments. “A pox on both your houses” pretty much describes how Americans feel about Hamas and the government of the State of Israel.
Aside from a significant variation by age group (while under-30s have a much more positive view of the Palestinian people than Israelis, they tend to have a slightly better impression of the Israeli government than Hamas), it does seem that Americans are collectively better disposed to the State of Israel than to Palestinians. And the 1.7 percent of the US population that happens to be Jewish cannot account for that.
The point is, as I noted, that Americans are predominantly more “pro-Israel” than “pro-Palestine” and that those of us who are more “pro-Palestine,” and even “anti-Israel” are the minority. That means that, far from going against the “will of the people,” the US government’s support of the State of Israel – and even its waffling inconsistency – is mostly entirely consistent with it. President Biden might lose in November PARTLY because of his support for the State of Israel (assuming that the under-30 vote is significant) but supporting Palestinian autonomy and opposing the State of Israel is probably not going to be a significant part of any potential victory.
The bottom line is that we (I presume to include myself on the pro-Palestine side, even though many people believe that I am a “Zionist stooge”) are a minority. A vocal minority, perhaps – and that is good – but unsignificant to the overall political calculus. This even more so because a good many of us will vote for Biden in November, anyway, regardless of his position on the State of Israel and Palestine. (As we should, since the alternative will hardly be better in that respect, and far worse in most other respects; more on that, soon.)
US support for the State of Israel is thus not a political issue in the way that US politics is conducted. But it is a moral issue and, from a moral perspective, we (there I go, presuming again) are absolutely on the right side, as I understand morals and ethics. It is, perhaps, worth remembering that the abolitionist movement prior to the US Civil War was in a similar position. Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and all the rest, occupied what was then regarded as the radical, in fact lunatic, fringe of American politics. Even up to the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments of the US Constitution, most Americans, even in the North, were unconvinced about the abolition of slavery and, above all, the granting of full civil rights to freedmen.
So, it is worth remembering that being “on the right side of history” (as much as I hate the term) does not necessarily mean that we are representative of the American people, or that the Biden Administration is deaf to their will.
28 June 2024
***
It is perhaps essential that we bring to mind the massacres of Sabra and Shatila in 1982 as the State of Israel prepares to invade Lebanon again. “We do not want war, but we are preparing for every scenario,” Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said yesterday, noting that the State of Israel could send “Lebanon back to the Stone Age… but we don’t want to do it.”
That is nonsense, of course. The State of Israel most certainly wants to invade and devastate Lebanon on the flimsy pretext of “self-defense” against Hezbollah. The point is not to protect Israelis and defend Israeli territory against attack. While the low-intensity conflict between the State of Israel and Hezbollah across the Lebanese border has escalated since 7 October 2023, Israeli attacks on Lebanon have exceeded Hezbollah attacks by a factor of five-to-one (6,142 vs 1,258).
While 18 IDF soldiers and 10 Israeli civilians have been killed along the Lebanese border since 7 October 2023, the State of Israel has killed some 300 Hezbollah militiamen and 100 Lebanese civilians. Moreover, armed with the Iron Dome anti-missile system, jet fighters, tanks, Jericho missiles, and the very best weapons that the United States can supply, the IDF outguns and outnumbers Hezbollah by several orders of magnitude.
Even if Hezbollah can cause some damage and kill and maim Israelis, the State of Israel does not face an existential threat from across the Litani River – it never has. It did not in 1982, when the IDF invaded to intervene in the Lebanese Civil War, either. At that time, Israeli Prime Minister (and former terrorist) Menachem Begin claimed that the State of Israel had to establish a “security zone” in South Lebanon and intervened in support of the so-called Free State of Lebanon, a pseudo-state set up by Christian separatists.
The State of Israel’s invasion was, of course, a flagrant violation of international law and Lebanese sovereignty but, more than anything, it resembled the intervention by Serbia on behalf of Bosnian Serb militias in Bosnia a decade later. With the same result. Indeed, the massacre of more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica by Ratko Mladić’s separatist Bosnian Serb Army in 1995, while the Serbian Army stood by appears, in retrospect, to have been an almost intentional replay of Sabra and Shatila.
We did not use the term “ethnic cleansing” in 1982 – it was coined in the Bosnian War – but that was certainly the intention of the forces allied with the Christian Phalange who descended on the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps that September and slaughtered thousands of refugees over a two-day killing spree. The IDF – the “most moral army in the world” – stood by and watched, as the Serbian regulars would do at Srebrenica, and Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon and General Rafael Eitan provided material support and secured a perimeter to prevent victims from escaping.
Lebanon, like Gaza, is the State of Israel’s historical killing ground. Lebanese and Palestinian life is cheap to Israelis and, in the minds of the ultra-nationalists whose whims and bloody desires now drive Israeli policy, Lebanon is, by right, merely a part of “Greater Israel,” temporarily occupied by Lebanese Muslims.
I remember Sabra and Shatila, and I call to mind the phrase “ethnic cleansing” that was not yet in our lexicon of horror 42 years ago… But it is today.
27 June 2024
***
Any conversation that I have about the War on Gaza with my more Zionist-inclined friends inevitably comes around to the claim that it is a defensive war. “Doesn’t Israel have a right to self-defense?” they invariably ask – it’s a rhetorical question because they have no doubt that it does – as if that settles the question. I always have to pause and think about it, since “self-defense” has been commonly regarded as an inalienable natural right of all people since antiquity. Or at least all “free people,” since neither the Romans nor Americans in the antebellum South believed that enslaved people were entitled to such a right.
This right is immutably inscribed in American law, to the extent that the mere suspicion of peril, a frisson of discomfort, is enough to justify the “Stand Your Ground” statutes in 38 states. There is, in the doctrine of self-defense, no obligation to retreat when faced with a potential threat. In theory, one can intentionally place oneself in danger, and subsequently exercise deadly force to defend against the danger one intentionally put oneself in.
That, I believe, is the kind of thinking behind the claims that the slaughter in Gaza is entirely justified on the grounds of “self-defense.” My more Zionist-inclined friends insist that the State of Israel might have created the conditions that made an attack on Israelis inevitable by intentionally antagonizing Palestinians in Gaza for decades, by stealing their land and treating them as subhuman but, when Gazans struck back, Netanyahu was fully and righteously empowered to respond with overwhelming violence.
It might, however, come as a shock to these friends that the “right of self-defense” has some notable legal and moral limitations. One cannot, for example, legally exercise one’s “right of self-defense” against the police or civil authority, no matter how menacing they might be. And, in most of the world – though perhaps not in those 38 “stand your ground” states – the force deployed in self-defense must be proportional to the force of the attack; the use of deadly force against an assailant armed with a foam pool noodle is not legitimate self-defense (except, of course, in those 38 states).
Conventionally, moreover, the exercise of the right to self-defense is morally and legally limited to the moment of danger. One cannot use deadly force to thwart an assailant, then go to their home, rape their spouse, murder their children, and burn down their house, and legitimately claim self-defense.
If we are going to argue that the “right to self-defense” inheres in states as well as people, then we must at least nod at the legal framework in which such rights exist. Without law, there are no “rights,” and the limitations on self-defense are clearly enumerated in international law. Under the “Caroline Test,” national self-defense can be justified by instant and overwhelming necessity, but any actions must be limited by that necessity, and kept clearly within it. The “right of self-defense” does not and cannot legitimize acts of further aggression and wars of conquest once the necessity has passed.
That necessity passed once the State of Israel repelled the Hamas forces that invaded on 7 October 2024. The “right to self-defense” did not, and does not, justify mounting a war of extermination against Hamas (and incidentally, the people of Gaza) because Israelis are sick of the persistent threat, and there is always a danger that they might try something like that again. Nor does it legitimize revenge for the 1,100 victims of 7 October. There is literally no way that, after almost nine months of bloodshed that has killed tens of thousands, and tens of thousands more, this horrific war can be justified on the grounds of “instant and overwhelming necessity.”
Not that the State of Israel gives a fig for international law, despite owing its very existence to international law, nor less for morality, despite claiming to have “the world’s most moral army.” It, and its Zionist proxies, conceives of the world as the state of nature, a bellum omnes contra omnium where there are no rules, scruples, or morals; in the Israeli mind only might is right. So, their sanctimonious appeals to the “right to self-defense” are cynical, self-serving, and hypocritical.
I only wish that my more Zionist-inclined friends who, after all, are not necessarily depraved reprobates, and who mostly believe in rights and the rule of law (which is why they appeal to the “right of self-defense” in the first place), might recognize this. It is a deep disappointment that they do not.
24 June 2024
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