Yes.
To call it anything else is to deny the painfully, devastatingly obvious.
Have I, as a citizen of the United States, been complicit in this genocide?
Yes.
To deny it is to pretend that the obligations of citizenship do not apply to me.
Were there provocations? Were they inhumane?
Yes. As true in October, 2023 as in May, 1948.
Do we need to talk about European colonialism, Muslim atavism and xenophobia?
If we’re being honest, yes.
How can a child of the Enlightenment, a citizen of the United States, countenance even the idea of an ethnic state?
Intellectually, not at all. Diplomatically, the wisdom of the principle of live and let live is unavoidable. We should accommodate any religion or ideology which doesn’t demand that we bend the knee to its claims of supremacy. (This absolutely includes Christianity, which has a long history of lethal meddling in other people’s legitimate affairs.)
Can we understand why, 80 years after the Shoah, Israelis feel embattled, feel justified in committing any atrocity which they believe will keep their enemies at bay?
Yes, absolutely.
Can we understand why, 77 years after the Nakba, Palestinians feel abandoned by the rest of the world—as alone as the Jew who once wrote on a Matthausen concentration camp wall, “Wenn es einen Gott gibt, dann soll er mich um Verzeihung bitten!” (“If there is a God, then he ought to beg me for forgiveness!”)?
Yes, absolutely.
Is there any hope of forbearance, of reconciliation here?
None that I can see.
Is this because I’ve become morally and spiritually numb?
Probably. Does this speak well of me?
No.
Can I, will I do better?
Time will tell….
Help me out WT. Forbearance and/or reconciliation between and/or among which parties or peoples?
I want to assume – given context – you are speaking of yourself here wrt both the nationalistic Israelis and the militant Palestinians (Hamas?)….
But, assumptions, and all that.
It could also be that my reading comprehension simply fails.
All of them—all the parties and peoples involved. What makes that assessment seem unjust at the moment is that it’s an assessment not of capabilities, but of intent. Notwithstanding the posturing of Hamas, the Palestinians of today are effectively defenseless, which means that the burden of forbearance falls at present on the Israelis and their international collaborators. That the Israelis don’t see it that way is obvious, that they believe there are historical justifications for their refusal is equally obvious. None of that can grant them absolution for committing the same sorts of crimes against Palestinians as the Nazis once committed against the Jews of Europe.
Palestinians at present lack the wherewithal to commit atrocities on the scale of those committed by the IDF, but one has only to look back on events such as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem’s flirtations with Hitler in the 1930s to understand that Arab Palestinians were never going to accept the presence of a Jewish state on land they considered theirs, despite what the colonial administrators of the British Mandate had decreed was Zionism’s due.
After World War II it also became abundantly clear that Palestinians didn’t see it as their responsibility to atone for Germany’s sins against the Jewish population of Europe. In that context, the context of European colonialism, their hatred of Zionists and the mandated Jewish state was understandable—not only understandable, but predictable. Had the Arab Legion prevailed in 1948, It’s by no means certain that the fate of Jewish refugees from Palestine would have been any less horrifying than what was done to Arab Palestinian refugees in Sabra and Shatila in 1982.
This is presumptive reasoning on my part, I admit. I’m neither a partisan with respect to this conflict, nor a proper historian, and it’s certainly not my place to judge people trapped in more desperate circumstances than I’m ever likely to face. What I do know is that hatred breeds hatred, that there’s plenty of hatred to go around in the history of this conflict, that justifications are easy enough to come by for anyone who wants to act out that hatred, and that reconciliation is only possible in the absence of hatred.
The only other thing I can think of to say here is that despite my best intentions, there’s often a gap between what I think I understand and what I hope for. Sometimes, as in this case, that gap appears to be unbridgeable, but no one will be more grateful than I’ll be if future events prove me wrong about the fate of Palestine.