Congressional Republicans shamed themselves (yet more) by inviting a mass murderer, Netanyahu, to address the chamber, giving him rapturous applause. “Rapturous” is the right word because Republicans’ Israel infatuation stems from its fantasized role in some Biblical end-time apocalypse. How does this square with the anti-semitism of “very fine people” (said Trump) chanting “Jews will not replace us?”
Netanyahu’s speech insisted that his Gaza operation actually entailed “one of the lowest ratios of combatants to non-combatants’ casualties in the history of urban warfare.” A greater grotesque of reality could not have come from Trump himself.
One of my book groups chose The Wall Between: What Jews and Palestinians Don’t Want to Know About Each Other, by Wilkinson and Khouri. Published in 2023 — before October 7. Which of course greatly intensified the problem they address.
This tedious book says the same things over and over. But never mind.
Its gist is that each side has a narrative the other blows off. Israelis see their nation’s story as rooted in the Holocaust; it’s their answer for the persecution their people have suffered for centuries and they reckon still threatens them. Palestinians see themselves as unjustly made to pay the price for that; and while the Jewish nightmare was long ago, theirs continues.
Each story has loads of argumentation. While the Jews claim ancient ancestral rights to the land (having ethnically cleansed it as God directed), Palestinians say the whole zionist project failed to take into account that the land had already been occupied, by them, for centuries. Jews say the 1948 UN settlement gave each group a piece of it, but the Arabs refused to accept that, wanting it all, and went to war. Palestinians counter that the UN deal was lopsided and unfair. And their own equivalent to the Holocaust was the Nakba, their 1948 nightmare of brutal dispossession.
While Jews see Israel as their protective redoubt against antisemitism, Palestinians are fed up hearing that word, seeing it as a stick to beat them with and enabling Israel to deflect responsibility for its injustices. The whole antisemitism thing is a big part of the book. The authors do feel it’s way overdone, used manipulatively to delegitimize criticism of Israel’s policies and actions.
Jew hatred does persist, but it’s hard to imagine today any organized persecution like that of the Nazis. While since 1948 the whole ethos in the civilized West has been basically pro-Israel. Only lately has that consensus come under real strain. Though October 7 gave the Palestinian cause a big black eye, Israel has since earned an even bigger one.
What the authors basically urge is both sides putting aside their prejudices against each other, with all the historical baggage, to try instead for justice going forward. Pie-in-the-sky, raised even higher into the stratosphere after October 7.
Netanyahu and company have long insisted they have no “partner for peace.” And have done everything possible to ensure it’s so. Because they don’t want peace; unwilling to give Palestinians even a crumb to attain it. Instead they imagine — what? That millions of Palestinians will just vanish?
At least the Nazis had the logic of a “final solution.” Israel’s leadership has none. Fantasizing instead that endless conflict is somehow better for Jews than a just resolution and (dare I even say it) coexistence with Palestinians. And it seems Israel’s Jewish population now largely shares this meshugass; public support for any kind of real settlement has evaporated.
They’ve killed 40,000 people — 2% of Gazans. Leaving the other 98% immiserated, living in an anarchic hellhole of destruction, with vastly intensified hatred toward Israel. Giving Palestinians no possible path to a rational solution, inevitably driving extremism and irrationalism among them. Making further October Sevenths more, not less, likely.
Israel has a right to self-defense. This is self-destruction. Not only a crime against humanity, but a crime against sanity.