This blog is on a light schedule today and tomorrow due to various New Years related program activities, but it's worth quickly responding to Jonathan Chait's post on Israel and Palestine. Chait makes a common claim, which is that all analysis of the Israel/Palestinian conflict has to begin from a place of intentionality. "Hamas has a problem with Israel because Hamas believes Israel has no right to exist," he writes. "Israel has a problem with Hamas because Hamas believes Israel has no right to exist. If Hamas lay down all its weapons, Israel would lift its blockade. If Israel lay down all its weapons, Hamas would kill as many Israelis as it could." There's truth to this. But it can also obscure more than it can reveal. One important disconnect in Israel/Palestine debate is that Israel's supporters tend to focus on what the Palestinians want while Palestine's supporters tend to focus on what the Israelis do. Israel's defenders, for instance, make a lot of Hamas's willingness to kill large numbers of civilians. Palestine's defenders make a lot of the fact that Israel actually kills large numbers of Palestinian civilians. To make it more concrete, in July, the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem reported that 123 Israeli minors had been killed by Palestinians since the second intifada began in 2000, compared with 951 Palestinian minors killed by Israeli security forces. Israel's supporters emphasize that the children were not killed purposefully, but were collateral damage of targeted operations. By contrast, Palestinian suicide bombers have targeted children directly. Israelis define their struggle in contrast to the intentions of Hamas. Palestinians define their struggle in terms of the actions of the Israelis. Without understanding this distinction, it's hard to understand the two sides of the conflict. Hamas survives because Palestinian society is radicalized against Israel. Palestinian society is radicalized against Israel because Israel's operations have devastated their society. Be assured that when Palestinians look at the 1,000 or so children killed by the Israeli armed forces, they do not comfort themselves with the fact that those deaths were accidental. And, indeed, a case can be made that collateral damage from air strikes in dense urban areas are not accidental. They are expected. Conversely, Chait is correct to say that the Israelis see little hope of negotiation with an enemy that denies their basic claim to existence. They feel rightly threatened by the presence of Hamas, the oppressive reality of terrorism, and the hatred of their Arab neighbors. Israel is far stronger than Palestine, but it judges itself in constant danger. There's no easy way to bridge the distance between these perspectives. As Aaron David Miller has written, "the prospects of reconciling the interests of an occupied nation with those of a threatened one [are] slim to none." The Israelis see themselves as threatened innocents, not oppressors. They point to the public statements of Hamas, and they are right. The Palestinians see themselves as an occupied people, not aggressors. They point to their death toll and the settlements, and they are right. There is nothing specifically incorrect in the argument Chait draws. But the intellectual clarity of the distinction is so far from the lived experience from the Palestinians as to be meaningless. He says Hamas would kill more children if they could. The Palestinians say the Israelis kill more children. Which is why Israel's attack on Gaza was so unwise. The Palestinians just watched the Israelis slaughter dozens of children, mothers, and other innocents. Protestations that they deserved it because Hamas threatens to kill Israeli innocents will not make sense to them. And so the battle will continue, with Israel's supporters comforting themselves by looking at Hamas's stated intentions and Hamas's supporters justifying themselves by pointing towards the fresh graves of their dead. I don't know how you reconcile the interests of a threatened nation with an occupied one. But you have to start by recognizing the lived experience on both sides, not just one.
