#33 DOUBLING DOWN ON INSECURITY IN THE ISRAELI-HAMAS HELL REALM

Gaza.

Am I the only one who sees the Israeli-Hamas conflict as psychotic?  Am I the only one who wasn’t surprised when it arrived at a whole new level of savagery?

If the Israelis in any way still wondered what Hamas thinks of them, now they know: Hamas’ hatred burns so intensely it wants to chop them all up into pieces.

The average Israeli, apparently, and the government itself, had no notion of the Hamas attack that came on October 7^th—despite the occasional missile landing in their neighborhoods as a reminder of its feelings.  Hamas took 1,400 Israeli lives that day—the worst single day of slaughtering Jews since the Nazi concentration camps.  Hamas also kidnapped a couple hundred Israelis—including the elderly and children—taking them hostage.  The extreme right Netanyahu government, who’s primary claim has been its superior capacity to protect Israel, responded by dropping 6,000 bombs in five days on Gaza, one of the most densely populated urbanscapes on Earth, possibly killing some of those hostages.  The Israeli government cut off food, water, fuel, and power to Gaza, then announced to a million of its inhabitants that they ought to flee, though they have nothing and nowhere to go.  The Israelis gave them a day, further convulsing an impossible, rapidly deteriorating situation.

Well, if you’ve been following this, you likely know these details.  Maybe the one blessing here has been that the Israeli government—for whatever reasons—hasn’t yet invaded Gaza, at least giving some time to its inhabitants to try and get out of there.  Unfortunately, the Israelis have Gaza hemmed in like a penal colony, and no one wants the Palestinians coming out of it.

But honestly, I’m not sure there’s anything truly new or unexpected here.  It does get across what a swirling shitstorm this situation has become after 75 years of the Israeli state.  The ferocious, vociferous blame spewed in fighting over those details of who’s right and who’s wrong and who did what to whom is a vicious, tit-for-tat game that constitutes the samsaric prison that’s 21^st century Israel.  Yes, you can argue that the Israelis really have established a modern democracy with free expression, women’s rights, and all the other things you might hope for in an educated, sophisticated society.  This accomplishment stands apart in the Middle-East. To somehow equate this with what Hamas wants simply ignores their evil, the argument goes, falsely equating both sides.

Hamas, theo- and auto-cratic, brooking no dissent from its populace, and certainly nothing like women’s rights and free expression, lives for only one thing: destroying Israel.  But one man’s “terrorist” is another man’s “freedom fighter.”  To the degree they do have support among the Palestinian populace, it’s there due to their willingness to fight and die for Palestine, to implacably claw back from Israel every last shred of its power over them.

And that’s the thing.  As long as the Israeli boot remains on the Palestinian neck, where it got placed 75 years ago, this impossible circumstance will remain.  If there had ever been any kind of hope that it would not play out this way, the Israelis had to give the Palestinians something resembling democratic equality in the country they both had to live in.  Probably their best hope would be “an uneasy peace,” but wouldn’t that be an improvement on what did come to pass?  Instead, they shoved the Palestinians into refugee camps, who seem to this day in many ways like refugees in their own land.

That’s 75 years of intergenerational trauma for the Palestinians, while the intergenerational trauma for the Jewish people goes back 3,000 years, punctuated in modernity by the advent of Hitler and the Holocaust.  Before then, the Jews in Germany weren’t so different from the Palestinians in the sense they lived as second-class citizens in their country.  Establishing Israel finally gave them a state they themselves could control.  When Hamas burst out of Gaza to massacre Israelis, it did it to hammer down on this very button in the Israeli psyche.

It must have known how the Israelis would respond to this.  Likely the game at this point is who can make the other look more barbaric and bleed the most.  It seems obvious that Hamas is trying to seduce the Israelis into Gaza street ambushes and a drawn out conflict on their terms, perhaps with the hope of sparking further conflicts on the West Bank, etc., and on the borders, pulling in other belligerent actors, spreading and inflaming the chaos.  It’s the outcome of an attitude that only sees the path of escalating aggression.  The Palestinians went from guys throwing Molotov cocktails in the street to suicide bombers blowing up malls to finally approaching warfare with sophisticated weapons, careful training, and strategic preparation.  That’s how they’re starting to counter Israeli military superiority.  What about this was truly so surprising?

The United States, on the other hand, gives three billion of your tax dollars a year to arm the Israelis in the best weaponry.  They’ve constructed a highly controlled police state, at least for the Palestinians, and at the behest of Netenyahu, ultra-orthodox Jews, and other rightwing extremists, they’ve undermined the “two state solution” and moved settlers into Palestinian territory, essentially viewing Palestinian protests as of no matter.  This is our country, and we alone decide what happens here comprises their consistent message.  If you oppose us, we’ll up the game of state- sanctioned violence.

The security state.

Benjamin Netenyahu has spent the last year trying to overturn the judiciary’s ability to check his power.  That would in fact be the first toppling of Israeli democracy right there.  The Palestinians can’t truly do it, but the Israelis can do it to themselves.  It’s a downward slope thereafter for the shining qualities of Israeli society like free speech and individual rights.

Thus the extreme rightwing element of both sides—narrow, intolerant, violent, and always reductive of the humanity of the other people—controls the politics, and sees no other way forward than their ever intensifying hatred for one another.  Whether or not you consider one superior to the other, they remain in an agonistically knotted, unavoidable interdependence.

I heard a journalist interview a Palestinian doctor last week on NPR.  He was part of an organization (I may not have the name exact) called something like “Palestinians for Peace.”  The journalist asked him if, after the Israeli bombing of Gaza and its cutting off of power and supplies, forcing overwhelmed hospitals to the edge of collapse, he still believed in a peaceful solution to the problem—clearly implying that he couldn’t remain for peace with his people attacked this way.  He replied that in an earlier conflict in Gaza, he’d been treating someone wounded on the street, and an Israeli sniper had shot him.  (Would you call that “barbarous”?)  But that hadn’t stopped his commitment to peace; in fact, to me it sounded like it strengthened his determination.

Here’s a thought: how about putting that guy in charge?

How he’s choosing to live in this impossible situation is literally the only way that makes any sense.  It’s heroism in the best sense of the word.  I would describe it in Buddhist terms as having bodhichitta (“awakened heart,” “awakened mind”).  He has a compassionate heart that genuinely sees beyond the savage divisiveness, and he has the guts to stick to his principles.  That’s exactly what’s missing here in the karmic nightmare of endlessly escalating vengeance.  There’s no fucking way out of that!  It’s a hell realm logic that can only fuel further hellishness.  It’s been the same from Israel’s inception, and it’s only worsened.  The true enemy here consists of taking sides and seeing it purely as my side is good and yours is evil.  This very view keeps the situation trapped in a cycle which provides no true exit.

It may be that the well here is long since poisoned.  No one can put aside their effusive animosity, even if they tried.  By accounts, before the Israeli state arose, enclaves of Jews and Muslims lived together peaceably in Palestine, ostensibly under the same God.  Now all they can do is blindly reinforce the karmic chains that bind them.  Everyone has a long, bitter memory for the harms they’ve sustained.  When they look, that’s what they see, rather than the potential for goodness that exists in each other.  They want instead security from the other at any cost, and just how secure have they become?

Destruction and the human element.