Radicalization doesn't help anyone. By Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

14 - 17 minutes

Matthew Yglesias

11 Oct 2023

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I’ve been reluctant to write about what’s happening in Israel and Gaza, despite feeling, as many do, absolutely gutted over it. It’s easy to mock the idea of being “triggered,” but the wide circulation of antisemitic sentiments really has had an emotional impact on me that goes beyond any rational assessment of threat. I also find it distressing to see representatives of a state that claims to act and speak for my interests threatening barbarities of its own. Even before war broke out, I’d been avoiding this topic because my job here is to say things that are novel and interesting and in some way move the discussion forward. But when it comes to Israel and Palestine, I don’t feel like I have much to add.

Noah Smith published a post over the weekend arguing for a three-state solution rather than two. You should read it. It’s the kind of thing that I wish I could’ve written because it’s insightful and novel. But I couldn’t bring myself to say anything of the sort because it’s also really just a way of pointing out that the conflict would be easy to solve if the parties involved didn't care about the things that they do, in fact, care about.

The horrifying tactics embraced by Hamas have become, I think, a kind of discourse flytrap in which people are battling, both within and amongst themselves, over how exactly to characterize them or the right tone of condemnation when the real sticking point is the question of war aims. If Hamas were fighting for the liberation of Gaza — for it to be a real sovereign entity with control over its borders and trade and airspace — then we could have a conversation about tactics and war crimes in the context of that fight.

But the actual context is that Hamas isn’t fighting for Gaza or the West Bank; they are fighting against the idea of Israel. Everything about the aesthetics and presentation of this meme that circulated a couple of years ago is absurd, but the content has a clear thesis that perfectly explains why the Israeli government faces essentially zero domestic pressure to adopt a more accommodating line vis-à-vis the Palestinians.

The Israeli viewpoint is that a sovereign Palestine would be an armed base from which to attack and terrorize Israeli civilians while seeking the destruction of the country.

One might think people who are concerned with the rights and well-being of the actual people living in Gaza or Ramallah or Bethlehem would be sensitive to this and clarify that an end to occupation does not mean an ongoing threat to the physical security of people in Sderot and Haifa and Tel Aviv. But that is often not what they do, in part because a lot of the people posting or protesting about this are not genuinely concerned with the welfare of Palestinians and in part because many Palestinians themselves have chosen expressions of conceptual maximalism as their preferred form of solidarity.

Thirteen years ago, I visited the West Bank with some other progressive American journalists. Chris Hayes wrote a moving piece about what we saw in Hebron, where the actions of a tiny number of fanatical settlers turned the whole city upside-down. In defense of their own perverse actions, the settlers cite the massacre of an earlier group of Jews living in the area. The general thrust of the trip was to learn about this local history, to witness some of the daily humiliations of the occupation, and to see with our own eyes the reality of an apartheid road network. It genuinely made a very strong impression on me, as intended.

But an encounter with a group of young Palestinian activists also made a strong impression on me, in a way that I do not think was intended.

I don’t remember exactly what prompted me to ask this question — I think our time in Palestine corresponded with Mexican President Felipe Calderón’s visit to the White House — but in Ramallah we met with several charismatic young Palestinian activists. They spoke eloquently about the corruption of the Fatah collaborationist regime in the West Bank and about the religious fanatics of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. They talked about the perils of living under occupation and their aspiration for a better life and a just settlement. They also spoke about the Nakba and the injustice of human displacement and dispossession.

So I asked them about Mexico.

To the best of my knowledge, the Mexican-American War is characterized in mainstream American history as an aggressive and unjustified land grab. Abraham Lincoln, our greatest president, was against it. Ulysses Grant, who served in the war, condemns it as unjust in his memoirs. And in addition to being an act of naked aggression, the war tore American society apart. To the extent that Americans learn anything about it, it’s largely through the lens of slavery and the Civil War and how it exacerbated our domestic tensions and culminated in massive bloodshed. They Might Be Giants have a funny, laudatory song about James K. Polk, but the fact is that he is not a lauded figure in American history. As the aphorism goes, “poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States of America.”

But we are not giving the land back. And Mexico is not asking for the land back because they are trying to maintain a pragmatic relationship with the United States of America.

It’s not fair at all, but it is what it is. And when I asked these activists about Mexico and the decision of President Calderón and others to let bygones be bygones, they said it was terrible and that Mexico should stand up for itself and fight for what’s right.

It’s tempting to hear the activists’ awful advice for Mexico — advice that would genuinely make the lives of both Mexicans and Americans worse — and decide that the whole situation is hopeless because the Palestinians, as Abba Eban said, “never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”

But the situation is complex, with many overlapping historical crimes and competing fanaticisms. On the same trip we also met with settlers, and not the close to the Green Line, “we’d surely be annexed by Israel in a land swap” kind of settlers. These guys were thrilled that Hamas took over Gaza because it discredited the Israeli peace camp. Their greatest fear in life was that something like the Taba Proposal or the Saudi Initiative would gain momentum and the Israeli government would face a lot of domestic pressure to uproot them. They understood that the bulk of the Israeli population is very committed to its physical security and prosperity but only loosely committed to various ideological projects and would be open to selling the settlers out in exchange for a good deal.

We met an Israeli Palestinian leader who was, likewise, thrilled the peace process had broken down because, in his view, Israeli’s non-Jewish population would be even more marginalized and othered in a world where the Palestinian problem was “solved.”

We met East Jerusalem Palestinians, the people who’ve been most royally screwed by Israeli policy. Israel has formally annexed the place where they live and made it clear that even in the face of a super-reasonable Palestinian leadership, they would have no intention of surrendering that land. And at the same time, Israel has not granted citizenship to the Palestinians who live there. They are stateless and voiceless in political matters, with their interests relentlessly cast aside, and their situation violates every tenet of international law that I can imagine. Those folks’ favorite people in Israeli politics are the far-rightists who want to annex the West Bank and essentially put everyone in the same boat with them, because that would set the stage for a civil rights struggle.

On the flip side, I think a lot of westerners don’t appreciate that nearly half of Israel’s Jewish population is descended from Middle Eastern Jews who were expelled from their home countries after Israel’s founding. There is absolutely truth to the idea that Israel is a legacy of European colonialism, but that is not the lived experience of Mizrahi Jews.

One of the weirdest things about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is how much attention it gets.

You can, of course, rationalize this in a number of ways. It seems the Hamas attack was designed in a proximate sense to scuttle diplomatic efforts to normalize relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. And for a long time in official American diplomacy, Palestine has mattered because Israel and Saudi Arabia are both allies of the United States, we would like them to get along, and the Palestinian issue is a sticking point. Or you can say the Israel-Palestine issue matters because the United States gives a lot of concrete military assistance to Israel.

But those ideas are really circular. Why do the Saudis care?

For that matter, why do we bother to give aid? The bar for being pro-Israel is a little bit weirdly high. If terrorists killed a bunch of people in New Zealand, most people would say that’s awful, but the United States wouldn’t be expected to provide a multi-billion dollar aid package. Israel is a rich country that’s not objectively in need of foreign assistance in any normal way, and though the day-to-day living conditions in the occupied territories are bad, that is unfortunately true of many places in the world. Huge humanitarian tragedies linked to war and ethnic separatism have been playing out over the past few years in Ethiopia without it making a dent in the discourse.

The Palestinian cause is unique because it is a kind of cause célèbre in the Islamic world in a way that the plight of the Uighurs is not.

And even more so because it plays a critical role in intra-left factional politics in the United States. No sane person thinks that what the UK says or does about this issue is particularly important, but Jeremy Corbyn’s thoughts on the matter were absolutely central to various battles around his leadership of the Labour Party. The Democratic Socialists of America, while supposedly trying to build a working class mass movement in the United States, like to stake out edgy leftist stances on Israel. The “Squad” of leftist House Democrats is more clearly distinguished by its positions on Israel than by anything else, even though Israel-Palestine isn’t at all featured in Justice Democrats’ account of what they are up to. Conversely, the key actor on the moderate side of factional Democratic primary battles has been Democratic Majority for Israel.

None of this makes any real logical sense, and I fear that in practice, it mostly serves to give Palestinians a mistaken impression of where their cause stands in the world. One thing Mexico is very clear on is that nobody would stand in solidarity with them if they tried to take back Arizona. Germany, infamously, tried to dangle this possibility back in 1917 to distract the United States during World War I, but the Mexicans were too smart to get yanked around like that.

I don’t have any real ideas for fixing anything in this part of the world, except to say that to the extent possible, I think the United States should try to care less about the Middle East. Cultivating our domestic oil and gas supplies while investing in electrification, renewables, geothermal, and nuclear power seems like the way to go. I do not think that the attention lavished on this problem by outsiders has done much to help anyone, and America’s efforts to involve ourselves in the region have mostly just led to secondary and tertiary problems.

All that said, I do think the Palestinian problem is an excellent illustration of the difference between emotive political expression and constructive political expression.

There is a kind of person for whom expressions of solidarity with the Palestinian cause is an important source of personal identity.

Whatever one makes of that kind of thing, it’s important to understand that it’s not helping actual living Palestinians with any of their problems in any concrete way.

Israel has the overwhelming preponderance of force in this area. It should nonetheless be possible to convince them to give the Palestinians a sovereign state to live in and to set the stage for a vast improvement in Palestinian living conditions. But the concrete upside to Israel of doing this, though real, is pretty limited, and the downside risk to Israel of a sovereign Palestine become a base for armed attacks against Israeli civilians is substantial.

Anything you say or do that makes Israelis feel like they won’t be accepted as a member of the community of nations no matter what puts Palestine further from freedom. And anything you say or do that makes Palestinians feel like compromising on borders and refugees would be selling out puts Palestine further from freedom.

I think it would be obnoxious of me to write the kind of “you should compromise more” posts that I do about American domestic politics about a foreign country’s national liberation movement. But the fact is that all these solidarity tweets and old maps don’t do any Palestinians any good. No one posting them is going to fight the IDF to redress any historical wrongs, even if they are sincerely convinced about the merits of the historical case. I think there is some thought that keeping maximalism on the table is good from a strategic bargaining standpoint or does something useful with regard to the Overton Window, but I don’t think that’s true. You could much more easily win an argument about Gaza if it were really an argument about Gaza and not about the entire land.

For my part, I both agree with what Garance Franke-Ruta is saying here and also want to resist the impulse she’s describing.

Residents of the West Bank don’t deserve to have their land and water plundered because pro-Palestinian protestors in Australia did antisemitic chants. People on social media like to proclaim various events to be radicalizing, but although that’s often true descriptively, it’s a bad idea to radicalize in either direction. I, personally, have been having a lot of trouble keeping an even keel emotionally over the past few days. But to perhaps a larger extent than in the past, I do think I’ve mostly succeeded in keeping a measured tone in my public writing and social media commentary. So while I completely understand the impulse to say things that feel good in the moment, I really am trying to strive to say things that are constructive — ultimately, the path to a resolution will have to involve more concrete discussion of practical specifics among those with the most at stake.