One thing I’ve noticed about myself in recent years: If something big and ugly happens, I tend to hold my fire writing or saying much about it publicly for a few days. This isn’t always possible — I’ve made my living, to one extent or another, writing opinion for most of the last two decades. But sometimes the demand for my take isn’t there, and sometimes it seems wise not to join the rush to comment.
There’s plenty of noise. I don’t need to add to it unless I feel like I have something useful to say.
Which explains why I’ve been silent over the last week since Hamas brutally attacked, murdered and kidnapped Israeli civilians. And why I’ve still been holding my takes as it appears that Israel is going to deliver its own violence upon innocent civilians.
I’m still not sure I have much useful to say. I’ve spent a lot of time not writing about Israel and Palestine over the years because A) I don’t feel like it’s a topic that I know as deeply as I should to say anything publicly and B) it’s a topic that is going to probably burn you even if you’re writing knowledgeably. Why get burned for a half-ass take?
My brief comment: They’re calling this “Israel’s 9/11.” Which I find terrifying — not just because it conveys the horror of the initial attack, though there’s that, but also because America reacted to the first 9/11 by starting a two-decade war in one country, invading another that had nothing to do with the attack, killed or caused to be killed many tens of thousands of people (many of them, again, innocents), and sanctioned immoral activities like torture.
And the folks who did all that stuff — on our behalf — felt every bit as justified as Israelis feel today. I get it. I visited Ground Zero a few weeks after the attacks. I smelled it. I felt the rage then. I felt it again this week during the Hamas attack. But America didn’t make the world better after 9/11. It made a lot of people more miserable and dead while weakening its own position in the world. I’m not sure if anything good actually came from that.
It’s striking this week how little people seem to have learned from that recent history.
Anyway, that’s more than I wanted to say. Here’s three pieces I’ve read this week that I found particularly compelling.
There Is a Jewish Hope for Palestinian Liberation. It Must Survive. Peter Beinart is one of the few people who did learn something from the first 9/11. He is one of the thinkers who urged America’s war on Iraq after the Twin Towers fell. And he is somebody who admitted error — one of the few — and has tried to find a better way forward. His new NYT essay (it’s a gift link, so don’t worry about paywall) is remarkable for how it insists on the humanity of both the Israelis and the Palestinians and looks for a better way forward, even if that path seems rather hopeless and abandoned at the moment.
Hamas, whose authoritarian, theocratic ideology could not be farther from the A.N.C.’s, has committed an unspeakable horror that may damage the Palestinian cause for decades to come. Yet when Palestinians resist their oppression in ethical ways — by calling for boycotts, sanctions and the application of international law — the United States and its allies work to ensure that those efforts fail, which convinces many Palestinians that ethical resistance doesn’t work, which empowers Hamas.
The savagery Hamas committed on Oct. 7 has made reversing this monstrous cycle much harder. It could take a generation. It will require a shared commitment to ending Palestinian oppression in ways that respect the infinite value of every human life. It will require Palestinians to forcefully oppose attacks on Jewish civilians, and Jews to support Palestinians when they resist oppression in humane ways — even though Palestinians and Jews who take such steps will risk making themselves pariahs among their own people.
Have We Learned Nothing? David Klion takes the 9/11 comparison and expresses his angst better than I can.
But I also can’t remember a time since 9/11 when emotion and bloodlust overwhelmed reason as thoroughly as they do now, including among liberal elites in media and politics. The lasting impact of the 9/11 attacks was a kind of collective psychosis that overcame most Americans, and perhaps especially those in the DC–NYC corridor charged with crafting and enforcing conventional wisdom, who had witnessed the attacks up close. After 9/11, Christian zealots who longed for a crusade against the Muslim world and secular intellectuals who longed to overthrow Arab dictatorships and remake them in America’s image were free to say so in public without apology, and to see their ideas put into bloody practice. More sober voices, meanwhile, struggled with how to calibrate their words. It wasn’t that American elites were unaware that the United States had committed injustices around the world, or that 9/11 could plausibly be construed as blowback; it was that 9/11 had given them permission not to care. US support for Israeli apartheid, Saudi theocracy, and Pakistani covert operations across the Khyber Pass might all have been hard to defend, but it was distasteful to bring any of that up while Lower Manhattan smoldered and the faces of the missing were posted on every corner. No one could rationally assert the premise of American innocence, but rationality was beside the point. These were the conditions in which it was possible to sell the public, including leading liberal outlets, on a destructive imperial adventure in Iraq that virtually everyone now acknowledges was premised on false intelligence and wildly hubristic ambitions.
Your Moral Equation Must Have Human Beings on Both Sides A few words from Jonathan Chait about our retreats into tribalism.
Again, I have no interest in joining the game of measuring which evil is greater. Do you want to believe the position of Shapiro and Baker is less evil than that of the left because Israel’s response is retaliatory and has not yet taken shape? Go ahead. Do you want to believe it is a greater evil because it represents a mainstream faction within American politics and Hamas apologism remains factionalized on the far left? That is also fine. I personally consider defenses of terrorism more barbaric than cold indifference about collateral damage, but I can accept opposing beliefs about which evil is the greater evil. I insist only that they are both evil.
Whatever calculation you make must begin with the premise that the deaths of innocent people are evil. I simply don’t know what the answer is. What I do know is that any ideology that is not bounded by a recognition of universal humanity is too dangerous to be let loose upon the world.
God help us all.