Nobody wants to hear about peace and justice. We should talk about it anyway.
It's hard to be heard when the anger is at its peak.
I think there’s a lot of wisdom in this Dan Drezner piece about how to talk to Israel as it prepares to invade Gaza following Hamas’ murderous attack. I just think it’s incomplete.
Drezner’s contention is that Israel doesn’t want to hear about international law and restraint right now, for understandable reasons, and that anybody who puts too much pressure on that is likely to go effectively unheard.
Furthermore, any public allied pressure on that government not to respond runs the risk of backfiring. Comparisons to 9/11 have been thick in the past week, but the key parallel is that I have no memory of anything any ally saying in the wake of 9/11 that would have tamped down the U.S. public demand for a military response. If anything, such public pronouncements would have likely hardened the hearts of Americans. The same is true with Israelis right now.
He thinks President Biden is doing a good job, essentially keeping these criticisms mostly behind closed doors and only cautiously mentioning them publicly:
The Biden administration can and should exercise whatever influence it can over Israel's response. The optimal way that influence can be properly exercised, however, is behind closed doors, which prevents painting anyone into a corner. If and only if Israel refuses to listen should the Biden administration go more public.
As it turns out, this closely tracks what the Biden administration is actually doing. After more quiet behind-the-scenes warnings, Biden administration officials have started to be a bit more vocal about their preferences. On 60 Minutes, Biden supported taking out Hamas, but he also said, “Look, what happened in Gaza, in my view, is Hamas and the extreme elements of Hamas don’t represent all the Palestinian people. And I think that it would be a mistake for Israel to occupy Gaza again.” Hopefully Israeli policymakers read that statement (and other signals) in the way it was intended.
He concludes by urging public intellectuals and government leaders to “demonstrate some empathy for those who, right now, do not want to listen to outside voices because they are in so much pain. Only when that pain subsides will anyone be able to influence them publicly.”
And that makes a lot of sense. But again, it’s insufficient.
Why? Because when Israel’s — understandable, righteous, absolutely deserved — outrage about the Hamas attacks subsides, it might be too late to save all the innocent Gazans, (including many, many children) who will bear the brunt of the forthcoming invasion.
It is understandable that Israel’s leaders don’t want to hear about peace and restraint right now. It is entirely possible — as Drezner points out — that they will be completely unable to hear anybody who counsels restraint. And yet: There must be people who counsel restraint in this moment anyway.
Restraint is easy to talk about when it isn’t needed, and easy to dispense with when not. But it cannot be the case that the only moment to call for a less-bloody response to an attack is after the bloody response has been accomplished.
I don’t know the answer here. What I’ve come to believe over the last few decades is that no matter how righteous the outrage, how justified the vengeance, we still need a few folks who stand firmly and insist that widening the circle of horror is not justice, but an expansion of injustice. We need folks who search for a path to peace even when that peace seems impossible to deliver. They’re prophets. Without them, we just surrender to endless cycles of violence, then sit with the regret and “lessons learned” afterward.
And for the victims of that violence, the “lessons learned” come too late.
Yes, those calls will probably go unheard. They almost always have been. It seems that this will be another time. Yes we must, as Drezner says, show empathy toward people in pain. That does not mean standing by silently in the face of even more horror, waiting for the right time to be heard.
One more thing…
After the Hamas attacks, a number of commentators expressed anger that a number students at American universities seemed to countenance Hamas’ attacks on civilians, or at least justify them. (I did an overview of these controversies at The Week.) But those commentator complaints have drawn their own backlash. A Substack column by Hamilton Nolan is an example of the genre:
Many people who hold prestigious and well-paid media jobs, and who control an influential megaphone at a time when that is of incredible importance, squander their time and ours with wheedling complaints about bullshit. Bret Stephens spends his column grinding familiar axes about campus protests and local DSA rallies; Pamela Paul complains about how stuff is being debated on campus at Stanford; Ross Douthat takes this opportunity to unleash some zingers against “woke-speak” among student groups about decolonization; even Michelle Goldberg, who is supposed to represent the left, focuses her column on… campus protests and local DSA rallies and how the angry kids on the left are not protesting in the proper way. These are the voices that dominate the opinion section of the most influential news organization in the English-speaking world. You will never find a more pathetic failure to rise to the occasion than this collection of navel-gazing cranks, the journalistic equivalent of suburbanites complaining about the annoying smell of smoke ruining their weekend dinner party as the city burns down around them.
I’m not going to mount a defense of all of these columns. I’ll just note that Nolan, in my view, mischaracterizes Goldberg’s complaint. Here’s a piece of her column:
By now, you’ve probably seen examples. There was the giddy message put out by the national committee of Students for Justice in Palestine, which proclaimed, “Today, we witness a historic win for the Palestinian resistance: across land, air and sea.” New York’s chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America promoted a rally where speakers applauded the attacks, and the Connecticut D.S.A. enthused, “Yesterday, the Palestinian resistance launched an unprecedented anticolonial struggle.” The president of N.Y.U.’s student bar association wrote in its newsletter, “I will not condemn Palestinian resistance,” leading to the withdrawal of a job offer. Over the otherwise benign slogan “I stand with Palestine,” Black Lives Matter Chicago posted a photo of a figure in a paraglider like those Hamas used to descend on a desert rave and turn it into a killing field.
“I think what surprised me most was the indifference to human suffering,” said Joshua Leifer, a contributing editor at the left-wing magazine Jewish Currents and a member of the editorial board at the progressive publication Dissent.
Goldberg isn’t complaining that these lefty groups are protesting “the wrong way.” She’s arguing that these groups are justifying the Hamas slaughter.
And she’s right. Nolan is wrong.
There’s this tendency among people of all ideological stripes — but I notice it more on the left lately — that when somebody from your tribe says or does something indefensible, the response to criticism of that indefensible thing is not to defend it but to say the critics are focusing on the wrong stuff. It’s a cop-out.
So let me say it clearly: It’s actually bad when people root on or make excuses for murders, and it’s OK to say this loudly and a lot. Maybe even excessively!