Eighteen months ago, the award-winning Israeli writer David Grossman, who has served as a kind of stricken conscience of the Jewish state, asked in The New York Times, “Who will we be—Israelis and Palestinians—when this long, cruel war comes to an end?” Since then, Hamas has yielded neither on its foundational purpose of “obliterating” Israel, nor on the torture-captivity of the remaining Israeli hostages, nor on its demonic strategy of keeping the whole population of Gaza wrapped in what amounts to a suicide vest. Since then, the war crimes and crimes against humanity by the Israel Defense Forces have accumulated beyond counting. Gaza has been reduced to a physical abyss, while Israel’s far-right government has plunged the state itself into a moral abyss.
Yet Grossman’s question, called to my attention by Rabbi Ron Kronish, might be asked not just by Israelis and Palestinians, but by the many witnesses in whom the war has prompted not just pity and repugnance, but a personal crisis of conscience. The question I must ask is: Who will I be, when this long, cruel war comes to an end?
Why should I ask that? Well, I am an American. I have long been proud of my country’s firm support of Israel, a nation I have often visited, valued for its democratic aspiration, however conflicted, and long ago came to love. But Israel itself has ceased to be exemplary, and the United States has effectively reduced itself to being only one thing for Israel: its lethal arsenal. Yet what, one might ask, has that to do with me, a lifelong critic of war? Alas, despite such instinctive self-exoneration, I can find no safe remove either from Israel’s existential dilemma or from Gaza’s suffering.
After the two-month-long cease-fire of last spring collapsed when Hamas refused further hostage releases and Israel refused to commit to end the war, a brutal IDF escalation unfolded—not just warplanes and tanks, but the weaponizing of humanitarian aid. Mass starvation and famine followed in Gaza, an unprecedented horror. That the Israeli government, seemingly indifferent to the fate of its own captive hostages, was determined to brutalize the entire Gazan population could no longer be denied. So it was that David Grossman declared this summer “with immense pain and a broken heart,” that his nation is committing “genocide.” In using that fraught word in an August interview with the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, he salted his extensive explanation with the also fraught words “we” and “us,” claiming no distance for himself from the charge he leveled. So of course his heart is broken.
What if antisemitism and Islamophobia are two sides of one coin, always in each other’s company?
“We” and “us” applies in my context, too. Through both Democratic and Republican administrations across the decades, my America has proclaimed its purpose as protecting the security of Israel while validating its betrayal by successive Israeli governments. My America has advocated justice for Palestine while underwriting its permanent postponement. My America’s long record of mere lip service to the two-state solution has now been capped by a Washington-sponsored real estate fantasy for Gaza—whether such a “Riviera” comes about or not—that legitimates a massive ethnic cleansing that is under way right now.
Like many Americans, I object to all of this. Am I still somehow complicit? A fundamental principle of justice forbids so-called collective guilt. Grossman’s indictment of his nation does not prevent him from honoring his many Israeli comrades who “fought the Occupation for 70 years,” but that does not amount to a general absolution. Collective guilt is one thing, but there is also corporate responsibility. I write, for example, as a Catholic with no personal culpability for the Church’s historical role as an instigator and perpetuator of antisemitism, but I acknowledge nevertheless an obligation of communal accountability that requires both my repentance and my work for the Church’s reform.
As with my Church, so with my nation—my America. That is why America’s betrayals of both Israel and Palestine belong, in Grossman’s word, to “us.” And so therefore does his question: Who will we be, when this long, cruel war comes to an end?
EVENTS SET IN MOTION by the Hamas massacre of Israelis on October 7, 2023, laid bare what seemed to be the immutability of the age-old antagonism between Jews and Muslims, as if they are congenital adversaries; as if antisemitism and Islamophobia are not only opposite bigotries, but eternal enmities. The vagaries of history, though, suggest a different conclusion.
In the last two years, across Europe and America, wartime events pressed for an absolutist choosing of sides, as if defending the innocent civilians of Gaza or Palestinian aspirations made it impossible to identify with Israeli trauma or to support the secure existence of the Jewish state. Israel or Palestine: choose! Contempt for Jews or contempt for Muslims: choose! In nations bracketing the North Atlantic, the either/or drama was played out in streets, on tent-strewn college campuses, inside literary and cultural organizations, at fraught dinner tables, and, finally, with astronomical stakes for democracy, at polling places in the elections of 2024, especially in the United States.
But what if antisemitism and Islamophobia, instead of existential opposites, are two sides of one coin, always in each other’s company? The two prejudices are not antitheses, as usually understood, but related aspects of one tradition of denigration. Indeed, having called the bigotries, and the logics undergirding them, “strange secret sharers,” the Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said, in his 1978 book Orientalism, argued that Islamophobia is nothing less than antisemitism’s “Islamic branch.” Hatred of Jews and hatred of Muslims put Jews and Muslims on the same side of one of history’s great divides. That their strange interconnection has long been secret made it a surprise when Islamophobia and antisemitism simultaneously showed up with fresh power in the 21st century, yet that dual arrival is not coincidence but evidence.
Israeli Jews and Palestinian Muslims can be seen as having been trapped as fight-to-the-death enemies in a lockbox corner. Within that death zone of violence, they each have agency (the nihilism of Hamas, the corrupt ineptitude of the Palestinian Authority; Israel’s draconian occupation of the West Bank, its ethnic cleansing of Gaza), but they are also at the mercy of ancient historical forces they do not control. The corner walls of that deadly entrapment are antisemitism and white colonial racism—what Said called “Orientalism.” Those walls, forming the bloody cockpit from which there has been no escaping, were constructed not by its two antagonists, but by an unnamed third party to the conflict: Who?
The answer is quite simply: “the West.” Western civilization itself. Following on its progenitor culture, “Christendom,” the West, obsessively centered on Jerusalem, put in place the mental, physical, and emotional structures of what amounts, in a phrase of the psychohistorian Robert Jay Lifton, to an “atrocity-producing situation.” From that situation, the atrocities of the contemporary conflict flow.
An inherited contempt for Jews and Judaism is not only Western civilization’s paradigmatic prejudice. It also establishes the bipolar shape of the culture’s essential imagination—like a flawed gene in its DNA. As is well known by now, this history-shaping genetic mutation occurred when the followers of Jesus misremembered him as if he were not a Jew, and as if “the Jews,” and not the Romans who killed him, were his mortal enemy. That foundational antagonism efficiently ushered the Church to its self-understanding as in radical opposition to the Synagogue, which put in place the positive-negative structure of Christian theology: New Testament versus Old Testament; grace versus law; faith versus works; mercy versus greed—ultimately, good versus evil, with evil belonging exclusively to Jews. The theological denigration included the doctrine that, as a proof of Christian claims, Jews—henceforth the “wandering people”—were never again to be at home in the Holy Land, a proposition with implications that obviously carry weight to this day. At the start of the first millennium, the mindset of Western civilization—the bug in the software—was set.
The hinge episode of this history is the most illuminating case in point: the centuries-long Holy War known as the Crusades, which were kicked off early in the second millennium by the cry of Pope Urban II: Deus Vult! God wills it! The first anti-Jewish pogroms in Europe were carried out in the Rhineland in 1096 by Crusaders setting out against Islam’s blasphemous occupation of Jerusalem. But an assault on “the infidel far away” went hand-in-mailed-fist with an initiating rampage against “the infidel near at hand”—Jews. The slaughter of thousands of those nearby Jews in the heart of Europe was followed then by the mass murders in the Holy Land of Muslims and Jews alike. Both targeted acts of Crusader violence were rooted in a perverted Christian theology that worshiped a killer God and defined Jesus as his Warlord, wielding the cross as a sword. But here is the larger point, repeating the bipolar dynamic that established the Church: What is called “Europe” came fully into its positive identity over against the negative foil of Islam. If the Gospels were the embryo, the Crusades—simultaneously anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim—were the incubator of the West.
The morphing of religious anti-Judaism into racist antisemitism at the dawn of modernity underwrote the invention of white Christian supremacy, which reified an anti-Islamic loathing. In the 15th century, so-called blood purity laws, moving bigotry from the realm of religion to the realm of biology, were enforced against Jews and “Saracens” alike. When Jews were famously expelled from Iberia, so were Muslims. That the date of that expulsion was 1492, when cross-marked caravels also set out to conquer the world, tells the additional story. By then, the prejudice, set to shape “white” attitudes toward people “of color” everywhere, was inbred among Europeans, even as its double-edged character went unrecognized for what it is until today.
AND NOW THE THIRD MILLENNIUM. That George W. Bush instinctively labeled his post-9/11 “war on terror” as “this crusade” showed how the tradition still formed a hidden current in Western culture. Recall the ease with which Islam promptly replaced the recently disappeared Soviet Union as America’s existential “other” under the banner of “Islamofascism.” America’s unleashed fear of an Islam it did not remotely understand (Sunnis? Shiites? What?) prompted interventions in the Middle East that far outstripped previous U.S. misadventures like those targeting Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran or Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt. That unprecedented Islamophobic dynamic, soon reinforced by President Trump’s explicit “Muslim ban,” drove like a runaway engine through America’s 20-year-long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And that this upsurge in hatred of faraway Islam was accompanied by stunning new manifestations of antisemitism at home was a simple replay of Rhineland assaults on the “infidel near at hand.”
That Pete Hegseth bears a tattoo of the Crusader’s cross on his chest and the tattooed phrase “Deus Vult” on his right bicep keeps the malign tradition current. Indeed, Hegseth is a tribune of the new white Christian nationalism which seeks to resurrect the dogmatic militance that, in its first iteration, brought about the final ruin of Christendom in the post-Reformation religious wars. Not incidentally, those wars of the 17th and 18th centuries sparked, in resistance, the invention of liberal democracy, which is now stunningly at risk. The perfect symbols of all that threatens that precious American polity in the Trump era are the perverse tattoos on the pale flesh of one now commissioned as America’s “secretary of war.”
America’s betrayals of both Israel and Palestine belong, in David Grossman’s word, to “us.”
There is a knee-jerk tendency to blame the United States for many of the world’s ills, but in the Middle East the blame is deserved. Across two decades after 9/11, Jewish and Muslim extremists on both sides of the Israel-Palestine divide were set loose and licensed by America’s example, epitomized at the start by Bush’s “with us or against us” rhetoric.
The bloody mayhem of America’s global war on terror was an atrocity-producing situation of the first order. It empowered a new generation of fanatics throughout the Middle East, but especially so among both Israel’s right-wing fringe and Hamas jihadists, the two groups that came to dominate the struggle. Their conflict in Gaza cannot be understood (or ultimately resolved) until the war’s unnamed third party, decidedly including my America, is more fully reckoned with.
The early Zionist dream was that the Jewish state would be a “normal nation” like other nations, a phrase first used by Theodore Herzl. It is not to take away from the monumental miscalculation the IDF made in slavishly following the Hamas playbook after the October massacres to say that, with Israel’s ready recourse to extreme violence, that is what it had become—a fully normal nation, in the worst sense. A nation, indeed, like the crusading United States. But with a difference. Count up what the U.S. war on terror caused: Iraq and Afghanistan ravaged; Syria dismembered; Yemen yoked to the terror; nearly a million dead across the region; multitudes of refugees set running; subsequent migrant crises igniting widespread social and political firestorms throughout the nations of the North Atlantic; and on and on. It’s true that, during the course of America’s Middle East wars, the Pentagon, having learned from Vietnam, was mostly able to control what news was read, and what images were seen, while the bloody experience of Gazans—lifeless infants cradled in the arms of shrieking relatives—was fed by social media onto the screens of a billion smartphones. Allowing for that, and even counting the short-lived American embarrassment of the Kabul airport disaster in 2021, Washington suffered little postwar opprobrium, with little effect on its international standing.
That is why President Biden, in his warning to Israel delivered in Tel Aviv in the immediate aftermath of October 7th, could blithely use the word “mistakes” in regretting U.S. responses to 9/11, when he should have used the word “crimes.” (Think “enhanced interrogation,” “black sites,” “extraordinary rendition”—ample precedents for Trump.)
THE ABSOLVING WORD “MISTAKE” is not showing up much in assessments of what Israel has been doing in Gaza. As the entirely appropriate condemnations of the IDF killing and starving of innocent Palestinians mounted, something else began to happen, something rooted less in the new phenomenon of social media than in Israel’s ancient and special vulnerability. That was what prevented the Jewish state from ever being a fully “normal” nation in a world still inflected with an irrational, unconscious bigotry forever aimed at Jews. A proper criticism of a normal nation’s yielding in time of extreme threat to its weakness for unfettered violence bled into something far more lethal than what could be called “normal” rhetorical denunciation. All Jews everywhere were suddenly liable to be held directly responsible for the actions of the Netanyahu government, and Israel itself was now the pariah nation. The oldest hatred in its newest guise. Conversely, people protesting the slaughter in Gaza get described as Jew-haters. Either way, Israel is coming into its own as “the Jew among nations.”
It does not go without saying that the cruelties of this long war flow inexorably from the unresolved world-historical traumas that still burden both peoples. Yet the Hebrew word Shoah and the Arabic word Nakba can each be translated in English with the word “catastrophe,” from the Greek meaning “turning point.” In writing about tragedy, Aristotle used that word to define the cathartic moment when the hidden action of the drama (Oedipus sees that he himself is the killer of the king) is laid bare, an epiphany that prompts in turn the action’s resolution (the plague is lifted from Thebes).
Jews and Muslims are victims of victims, an endless death cycle that grips Israelis and Palestinians alike. Across the arc of a tragic history, without abstracting from the present suffering in Gaza, they can be thought of as a pair of twins born into one legacy of contempt. But if so, they are twins who were separated at birth and therefore—secret sharers—they do not know each other. Who will they be, when this long, cruel war comes to an end? Is it beyond imagining that on this catastrophe the historic turn will be achieved; that recognizing what binds them, they might meet in catharsis as siblings at last, and find an as yet unforeseen way to live together?
As for “us,” the complicit witnesses—the people of “the West,” of Christendom, of America—will we, even without the prompt of a David Grossman, be able finally to acknowledge our part in building and sustaining the structure of injustice on which this tragedy stands? Will we fully embrace the long-overdue work of dismantling that structure? Who will we be, when this long, cruel war comes to an end?