Hamas justified its October 7 attack by the fact that Palestinians have their backs against the wall because of Israeli aggression and Arab states’ capitulation, and that the operation was needed to break the stalemate.
This may be true, but it does not justify Hamas targeting Israeli civilians or purposely enabling Israel’s massive slaughter of Palestinian people.
Some pro-Palestinian activists seem to think that Israeli civilians are legitimate targets because they live in an illegitimate settler state. They are wrong: the crimes of the nation-state do not make all people within its borders equally guilty.
I, like many Jews, agree that Israel has a dubious claim to legitimacy because of its long history of dispossessing Palestinian people from their land and their homes, a history that includes mass murders and the repeated use of force against the Palestinian people.
This charge can be made against many, if not all nations, including the United States. Nation-state building has always been done in a way that empowered some people at the expense of others.
It is certainly high time to make a reckoning with that past and begin to contemplate reparative steps to right wrongs. We see this happening in the United States, with the removal of Confederate statutes and some tentative reparative policies to redress wrongs against Native Americans and African Americans. For Palestinians, reparations minimally mean the recognition of their right to national self-determination and maximally the creation of a democratic, secular state for both Israelis and Palestinians.
Of course, the United States is now torn apart over this reckoning with its past.
Israel, too, is wracked with conflict over its Palestinian policies. The government is now run by Zionist extremists who have seized on the October 7 Hamas attack to unleash the Israeli army in a campaign to destroy Palestine’s last toeholds on the Gaza and the West Bank. But Israeli citizens do not uniformly support Netanyahu’s blood thirst. The majority of Israelis opposed Netanyahu’s attacks on democratic rights over the last year. It seems likely that most Israelis still support a two-state solution and that many are looking for ways to stop Israel’s military campaign that indiscriminately targets Palestinians. And some Israelis and many Jews outside Israel advocate a radical restructuring of their country, i.e. ending the apartheid-like idea of a Jewish state.
To be clear: Hamas’ decision to attack Israeli civilians was wrong because it did not distinguish between the state and the civilian population. Similarly, Hamas failed to distinguish the difference between the legitimate demand for Palestinian self-determination and the current needs of the Palestinian people. Hamas clearly placed its demand for Palestinians to regain all the territory taken from them since 1967 above the safety of the Palestinian people who have borne the brunt of Israel’s invasion. Indeed, Hamas celebrates this fact, and its leaders say they look forward to a “permanent state of war” with Israel. Clearly, Hamas has no more regard for the well-being of Palestinian civilians than it does for Israelis.
Even worse, it is unclear who has the legitimate right to speak for the Palestinian people. Because of Hamas’ action, the Palestinian Authority has been sidelined. The Palestinian government led by Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh, has been rendered toothless. Even Hamas itself is not a unified organization, and some Hamas factions recently sought a peaceful solution with Israel. Hamas’ decision to trigger this war was made by a small and isolated political group, reportedly without any consultation with important allies, including Iran and Hezbollah.
A poll by Arab Barometer among Palestinians just days before the October 7 attack reveals the civilian population’s deep alienation from all political parties, but especially Hamas, which only 29% of the respondents said they trusted. And the large majority (72%) of Palestinians in this poll said they wished for a peaceful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Clearly, the decision to go to war was made without the consent of the people who are now paying the cost of it. And Netanyahu’s repeated claim that all Palestinians are legitimate military targets because of their support for Hamas is clearly a barefaced lie.
We are now seeing the dangerous conflation of the state and civil society in another way: Almost all Democrat and Republican leaders are on the same page that any criticism of the Israeli government is antisemitic. This is nonsense. The Israeli state is certainly guilty of horrendous crimes in its current invasion of Gaza. And, as I have already said, the history of Israel’s displacement of Palestinians must be reckoned with. Many Jews, me included, consider calling out the state of Israel for its crimes now and in the past to be of great importance to claim our own Jewishness from a Zionist vision we do not share. (See this letter by Jewish writers and artists). This distinction goes back generations in Jewish history. My family fought against Zionism in Russia when the idea of it was first catching on in the late nineteenth century. At that time, the critique of Zionism was that it undermined the demand for equal rights for Jews in whatever nation they were in. Until the Holocaust, Yiddishkeit stood in open opposition to Zionism, and the Zionists openly disdained Yiddishkeit by seeking to resuscitate Hebrew as a civic language for the first time in millennia.
For many Jews, anti-Zionism is a core part of our Jewish identities. To call us antisemitic is more than absurd. It is……you guessed it, antisemitic. It is no surprise that rightwing Republicans are antisemitic. They have always been so, even when they proclaim their love for Israel. It is more surprising to hear this antisemitism from the mouths of so many Democrats, including Biden, and to see the large majority of Congressional Democrats vote to condemn Ilhan Omar for her support for Palestine. These Democrats need to come to their senses and realize that by making an uncritical stand of support for Israel they are conciliating the most dangerous fascist forces in the world.
In conclusion, we live in a time when more and more people feel that the nation-state within which they live is not legitimate because it is not serving their needs. If we are to rebuild societies ways that are consistent with the beloved community, we will have to be clear about this distinction between nation-states and civil populations. Let’s begin with the politics of the moment: let us embrace people—in this case Jews and Palestinians–and ask hard questions about nation-states.
The long view 