Israel Derangement Syndrome

Hawks lose the plot

Last week, the governor of New York said that she would obliterate Canada if they ever attacked Buffalo, where she’s from. “I’m sorry, my friends, there would be no Canada the next day, right?” Kathy Hochul said. “That is a natural reaction. You have a right to defend yourself and to make sure it never happens again. And that is Israel’s right.” The context was obvious: Israel’s ongoing war with Hamas, which has killed close to 30,000 Gazans. Hochul was applauded because she was speaking at a United Jewish Appeal-Federation event. The next day, when she realized the speech had reached social media, she apologized. “While I have been clear in my support of Israel’s right to self-defense, I have also repeatedly said and continue to believe that Palestinian civilian casualties should be avoided and that more humanitarian aid must go to the people of Gaza,” she said.

The common refrain among Israel defenders is that Hamas must release all the hostages they took on Oct. 7 before the bombardment can end. The implication of this is obvious enough: there should be no feasible limit on civilian death until these demands are met. The vast difference in the death tolls—1,200 killed by Hamas, more than 29,000 by the IDF—must be handwaved away. Once such an asymmetrical response is endorsed and championed, total warfare is on the table everywhere. Hence Hochul’s I’m-just-joking-but-not-really analogy to immolating Canadians. Spend enough time in New York, and you’ll hear this often. Imagine if New Jersey attacked us. Imagine if rockets came from Connecticut. Slaughtering every civilian possible is, apparently, the only rational response.

Writing on Israel and Palestine is like trying devise a theorem to prove God exists. Few exercises are more ineffectual, particularly for an American. Yet I keep doing it, as do many. I’m a Jew, so perhaps that will be my excuse. For others, the cause—Israel, the Palestinians—naturally maps onto whatever politics they hold already. Progressives see a settler-colonial state oppressing people of color. Conservatives see a democracy standing strong against terrorism. Republicans, absent a few libertarians, only love Israel now, out of a reverence for militarism or the evangelical desire to link Israel’s fate with Christendom. Democrats are tugged in all sorts of directions, the veteran hawks and the liberals uncomfortable with slaughter increasingly speaking differently on the war, or not speaking at all. The few leftists in Congress know where they stand. Some of them, like Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman, are threatened with electoral defeat. Rashida Tlaib, the lone Palestinian American congresswoman, is safe in her Detroit area district, heading up an “uncommitted” vote against Joe Biden in the upcoming and very noncompetitive Michigan Democratic primary.

But these are all American machinations. None of this has changed how Benjamin Netanyahu’s military eviscerates and immiserates Gaza. The human suffering is difficult to fathom. Gazans who haven’t been shot or bombed are now starving to death. Critical infrastructure—schools, hospitals, the electrical grid—barely exists. Netanyahu has said openly Palestinians will never have a country, so the last illusions of a two-state solution have been shattered. The Palestinians and leftists longing for a single state—Jews and Arabs together, from the river to the sea, sharing in the fruits of democracy—chase their own chimera. Israel is as impregnable as the United States; just as disastrous foreign policy decisions, from Vietnam to Iraq, did not permanently cripple American capitalism, Israel will not crumble as it reduces the Gaza strip to blood and rubble. If Hamas hoped to bait Israel, through the Oct. 7 attacks, to wantonly bomb Gaza and therefore isolate itself on the international stage, its operatives greatly underestimated Israel’s capacity for destruction.

Even Israel’s most ardent defenders, though, can’t quite explain what the endgame will be. As delusional as the neoconservatives were twenty years ago, they at least imagined how they might administer a colonized Iraq. Do Netanyahu’s advisors have an intricate plan for postwar Gaza? Do they want to start providing adequate food, shelter, and schooling for the Palestinians who remain? Will there be a Marshall plan for the strip? Netanyahu would chortle at such notions. Like Donald Trump, he has bound a nation’s fate to his own dark obsessions and neuroses. He wants to remain in power as long as possible and that means overseeing endless slaughter in the name of defending Jewry. He would not win another election if it were held today but that doesn’t actually matter; the next Israeli election isn’t scheduled until 2026 unless his government collapses. Perhaps it will. But moderates can’t govern for long in Israel. The far-right holds too much sway; muscular Zionism is the only future. Ethno-states and liberal democracies, in the long run, are not compatible—it’s why the Founders understood formally declaring the United States a European Christian country in the Constitution was a folly—and Israel might be eaten up by its own contradictions. But none of that means Israel is disappearing. Anti-Zionists are entitled to their arguments, but they must understand all they advocate for is theoretical—and it will remain that way. Zionism will vanish when Manhattan billionaires hand all of their real estate holdings to the Lenape.

There are no answers. Not today, not tomorrow. Hamas cannot administer a proper nation-state. Israel prefers ethnic cleansing to a Palestinian nation-state. The West Bank remains brutally occupied. The choice in the American presidential election is between a sitting president who indulges in Israel’s whims while lightly chastising their leadership in private and a former president who would turn over his foreign policy portfolio, again, to Jared Kushner. Netanyahu’s military strategy might be fully predicated, at this point, on Trump getting elected again. For Netanyahu, Biden is a bit of a nag. Trump, though, will tell him everything he wants to hear and urge his Republicans in Congress, along with the hawk Democrats, to pump more cash into his military. Netanyahu can keep killing Gazans through November. Who’s going to stop him?